DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (7 page)

     
Then I grabbed the
tattooed wrist that held the machete and pressed the bottom of the pot down on
his forearm.

     
He flung the machete
from his hand as though the injury had come from it rather than the coffee pot.
I thought I was home free. I wasn't.

     
He hit me harder than
I'd ever been struck by a fist in my life, the kind of blow that fills your
nose with needles, drives the eye deep into the socket.

     
I got to my feet and
tried to follow him out on the dock. One side of my face was already numb and
throbbing, as though someone had held dry ice against it. The man in the white
straw hat had leaped off
the dock onto the concrete ramp and
mounted the bow of his boat with one knee and was pushing it out into the
current, his body haloed with humidity and electric light.

     
Batist came out of
the tin shed in the willows where we stored our outboard motors, looked up at
me, then at the fleeing man.

     
"Batist,
no!" I said.

     
Batist and I both
stood motionless while the man jerked the engine into a roar with one flick of
the forearm, then furrowed a long yellow trough around the bend into the
darkness.

     
I used the phone at
the house to call the department again, then walked back down to the dock. The
moon was veiled over the swamp; lightning forked out of a black sky in the
south.

     
"How come you
ain't want me to stop him, Dave?" Batist said.

     
"He's deranged.
I think it's PCP," I said. But he didn't understand. "It's called
angel dust. People get high on it and bust up brick walls with their bare
hands."

     
"He knowed who
you was, Dave. He didn't have no interest in coming in till he seen you . . .
This started wit' that old man from the penitentiary."

     
"What are you
talking about?"

     
"That guard, the
one you call Cap'n, the one probably been killing niggers up at that prison
farm for fifty years. I tole you not to have his kind in our shop. You let his
grief get on your front porch, it don't stop there, no. It's gonna come in your
house. But you don't never listen."

     
He pulled his folded
cap out of his back pocket, popped it open, and fitted it on his head. He
walked down the dock to his truck without saying good night. The tin roof on
the bait shop creaked and pinged against the joists in the wind gusting out of
the south.

CHAPTER
 
5

M
onday morning the
sky was blue,
the breeze warm
off the Gulf when I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana campus in
Lafayette to talk with Buford LaRose. Classes had just let out for the noon
hour, and the pale green quadrangle and colonnaded brick walkways were filled
with students on their way to lunch. But Buford LaRose was not in his office in
the English department, nor in the glassed-in campus restaurant that was built
above a cypress lake behind old Burke Hall.

     
I called his office
at the Oil Center, where he kept a part-time therapy practice, and was told by
the receptionist I could find him at Red Lerille's Health and Racquet Club off
Johnson Street.

     
"Are you sure?
We were supposed to go to lunch," I said.

     
"Dr. LaRose
always goes to the gym on Mondays," she answered.

Red's was a city-block-long complex of heated swimming pools,
racquet ball and clay tennis courts, boxing and basketball gyms, indoor and
outdoor running tracks, and cavernous air-conditioned rooms filled with
hundreds of dumbbells and weight benches and exercise machines.

     
I looked for Buford a
half hour before I glanced through the narrow glass window in the door of the
men's steam room and saw him reading a soggy newspaper, naked, on the yellow
tile stoop.

     
I borrowed a lock
from the pro shop, undressed, and walked into the steam room and sat beside
him.

     
His face jerked when
he looked up from his paper. Then he smiled, almost fondly.

     
"You have a
funny way of keeping appointments," I said.

     
"You didn't get
my message?"

     
"No."

     
"I waited for
you. I didn't think you were coming," he said.

     
"That's
peculiar. I was on time."

     
"Not by my
watch," he said, and smiled again.

     
"I wanted to
tell you again I was sorry for my remarks at your party."

     
"You went to a
lot of trouble to do something that's unnecessary."

     
The thermostat kicked
on and filled the air with fresh clouds of steam. I could feel the heat in the
tiles climb through my thighs and back. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with
my hand.

     
"Your jaw's
bruised," he said.

     
"We had a
visitor at the bait shop this weekend. NOPD thinks he's a Mexican carnival
worker who got loose from a detox center."

     
He nodded, gazed
without interest at the tile wall in front of us, pushed down on the stoop with
the heels of his hands and worked the muscles in his back, his brown, hard body
leaking sweat at every pore. I watched the side of his face, the handsome
profile, the intelligent eyes that seemed never to cloud with passion.

     
"You have Ph.D.
degrees in both English and psychology, Buford?" I said.

     
"I received
double credits in some areas, so it's not such a big deal."

     
"It's
impressive."

     
"Why are you
here, Dave?"

     
"I have a
feeling I may have stuck my arm in the garbage grinder. You know how it is, you
stick one finger in, then you're up to your elbow in the pipe."

     
"We're back to
our same subject, I see," he said.

     
Other men walked back
and forth in the steam, swinging their arms, breathing deeply.

     
"How do you know
Aaron Crown's daughter?" I asked.

     
"Who says I
do?"

     
"She does."

     
"She grew up in
New Iberia. If she says she knows me, fine . . . Dave, you have no idea what
you're tampering with, how you may be used to undo everything you believe
in."

     
"Why don't you
explain it to me?"

     
"This is hardly
the place, sir."

     
We showered,
then went into an enclosed, empty area off to one side of the main locker room
to dress. He dried himself with a towel, put on a pair of black nylon bikini
underwear and flipflops, and began combing his hair in the mirror. The muscles
in his back and sides looked like tea-colored water rippling over stone.

     
"I've got some
serious trouble, Dave. These New York film people want to make a case for Aaron
Crown's innocence. They can blow my candidacy right into the toilet," he
said.

     
"You think they
have a vested interest?"

     
"Yeah, making
money . . . Wake up, buddy. The whole goddamn country is bashing liberals.
These guys ride the tide. A white man unjustly convicted of killing a black
civil rights leader? A story like that is made in heaven."

     
I put on my shirt and
tucked it in my slacks, then sat on the bench and slipped on my loafers.

     
"Nothing to
say?" Buford asked.

     
"Your
explanations are too simple. The name Mingo Bloomberg keeps surfacing in the
middle of my mind."

     
"This New Orleans
mobster?"

     
"That's the
one."

     
"I've got a
fund-raiser in Shreveport at six. Come on the plane with me," he said.

     
"What for?"

     
"Take leave from
your department. Work for me."

     
"Not
interested."

     
"Dave, I'm
running for governor while I teach school. I have no machine and little money.
The other side does. Now these sonsofbitches from New York come down here and
try to cripple the one chance we've had for decent government in decades. What
in God's name is wrong with you, man?"

M
aybe Buford was right, I thought as I drove down the old highway
through Broussard into New Iberia. I sometimes saw design where there was none,
and I had maintained a long and profound distrust of all forms of authority,
even the one I served, and the LaRose family had been vested with wealth and
power since antebellum days.

     
But maybe it was also
time to have another talk with Mingo Bloomberg, provided I could find him.

     
As irony would have
it, I found a message from Mingo's lawyer in my mailbox when I got back to the
department. Mingo would not be hard to find, after all. He was in New Orleans'
City Prison and wanted to see me.

L
ate Tuesday morning I was at the barred entrance to a long
corridor of individual cells where snitches and the violent and the
incorrigible were kept in twenty-three-hour lockdown. The turnkey opened
Mingo's cell, cuffed him to a waist chain, and led him down the corridor toward
me. While a second turnkey worked the levers to slide back the door on the
lockdown area, I could see handheld mirrors extended from bars all the way down
the series of cells, each reflecting a set of disembodied eyes.

     
Both turnkeys
escorted us into a bare-walled interview room that contained a scarred wood
table and three folding chairs. They were powerful, heavyset men with the
top-heavy torsos of weight lifters.

     
"Thanks," I
said.

     
But they remained
where they were.

     
"I want to be
alone with him. I'd appreciate your unhooking him, too," I said.

     
The turnkeys looked
at each other. Then the older one used his key on each of the cuffs and said,
"Suit yourself. Bang on the door when you're finished. We won't be
far."

     
After they went out,
I could still see them through the elongated, reinforced viewing glass in the
door.

     
"It looks like
they're coming down pretty hard on you, Mingo. I thought you'd be sprung by
now," I said.

     
"They say I'm a
flight risk."

     
He was clean-shaved,
his jailhouse denims pressed neatly, his copper hair combed back on his scalp
like a 1930s leading man's. But his
eyes looked wired, and a dry,
unwashed odor like sweat baked on the skin by a radiator rose from his body.

     
"I don't get it.
Your people don't protect cop killers," I said.

     
He propped one elbow
on the table and bit his thumbnail.

     
"It's the other
way around. At least that's what the prosecutor's office thinks. That's what
those clowns you used to work with at First District think," he said.

     
"You've lost
me."

     
"You remember
the narc who got capped in the Quarter last year? I was in the cage at First
District when the cops brought in the boon who did it. Somebody, and I said
somebody,
stomped the living shit out of him. They cracked his skull open on a cement
floor and crushed his, what do you call it, his thorax. At least that's what
people say. I don't know, because I didn't see it. But the dead boon's family
is making a big stink and suing the city of New Orleans for fifty million
dollars. Some cops might end up at Angola, too. You ever see a cop do time?
Think about the possibilities for his food before he puts a fork in it."

     
I kept my eyes flat,
waited a moment, removed my sunglasses from their case and clicked them in my
palm.

     
"What are you
trying to trade?" I asked.

     
"I want out of
here."