DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (9 page)

     
As he walked down the
ramp toward me, the wind-burned face, the cleft chin, the Roman profile, become
more familiar, like images rising from the pages of
People
or
Newsweek
magazine or any number of television programs that featured film
celebrities.

     
His forearms and
wrists were thick and corded with veins, the handshake disarmingly gentle.

     
"My name's
Lonnie Felton, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

     
"You're a movie
director."

     
"That's
right."

     
"How you do,
sir?"

     
"I wonder if we
could go inside and talk a few minutes."

     
"I'm afraid I
have another job to go to when I finish this one."

Sabelle stood by the fender of the Lincoln, brushing her hair,
putting on makeup from her purse.

     
"Some people are
giving Aaron Crown a rough time up at the pen," he said.

     
"It's a bad
place. It was designed as one."

     
"You know what
the BGLA is?"

     
"The Black
Guerrilla Liberation Army?"

     
"Crown's an
innocent man. I think Ely Dixon was assassinated by a couple of Mississippi
Klansmen. Maybe one of them was a Mississippi highway patrolman."

     
"You ought to
tell this to the FBI."

     
"I got
this
from
the FBI. I have testimony from two ex-field-agents."

     
"It seems the
big word in this kind of instance is always 'ex,' Mr. Felton," I said.

     
He coughed out a
laugh. "You're a hard-nose sonofabitch, aren't you?" he said.

     
I stood erect in the
boat where I'd been bailing, poured the water out of the can into the bayou,
idly flicked the last drops onto the boat's bow.

     
"I don't
particularly care what you think of me, sir, but I'd appreciate your not using
profanity around my home," I said.

     
He looked off into
the distance, suppressing a smile, watching a blue heron lift from an inlet and
disappear into the fog.

     
"We had a writer
murdered in the Quarter," he said. "The guy was a little weird, but
he didn't deserve to get killed. That's not an unreasonable position for me to
take, is it?"

     
"I'll be at the
sheriff's department by eight. If you want to give us some information, you're
welcome to come in."

     
"Sabelle told me
you were an intelligent man. Who do you think broke the big stories of our
time? My Lai, Watergate, CIA dope
smuggling, Reagan's gun deals
in Nicaragua? It was always the media, not the government, not the cops. Why
not lose the 'plain folks' attitude?"

     
I stepped out of the
boat into the shallows and felt the coldness through my rubber boots. I set the
bailing can down on the ramp, wrapped the bow chain in my palm and snugged the
boat's keel against the waving moss at the base of the concrete pad, and
cleared an obstruction from my throat.

     
He slipped his
glasses off his face, dropped them loosely in the pocket of his baggy shirt,
smiling all the while.

     
"Thanks for
coming by," I said.

     
I walked up the ramp,
then climbed the set of side stairs onto the dock. I saw him walk toward his
car and shake his head at Sabelle.

     
A moment later she
came quickly down the dock toward me. She wore old jeans, a flannel shirt, pink
tennis shoes, and walked splayfooted like a teenage girl.

     
"I look like
hell. He came by my place at five this morning," she said.

     
"You look good,
Sabelle. You always do," I said.

     
"They've moved
Daddy into a cellhouse full of blacks."

     
"That doesn't
sound right. He can request isolation."

     
"He'll die
before he'll let anybody think he's scared. In the meantime they steal his cigarettes,
spit in his food, throw pig shit in his hair, and nobody does anything about
it." Her eyes began to film.

     
"I'll call this
gunbull I know."

     
"They're going
to kill him, Dave. I know it. It's a matter of time."

     
Out on the road, Lonnie
Felton waited behind the steering wheel of his Lincoln.

     
"Don't let this
guy Felton use you," I said.

     
"Use
me?
Who else cares about us?" Even with makeup, her face looked stark, as
shiny as ceramic, in the lacy veil of sunlight through the cypress trees. She
turned and walked back up the dock, her pink underwear winking through a small
thread-worn hole in the rump of her jeans.

T
he sheriff was turned sideways in his swivel chair, his bifocals
mounted on his nose, twisting strips of pink and white crepe paper
into the shape of camellias. On his windowsill was a row of potted
plants, which he watered daily from a hand-painted teakettle. He looked like an
aging greengrocer more than a law officer, and in fact had run a dry cleaning
business before his election to office, but he had been humble enough to listen
to advice, and over the years we had all come to respect his judgment and
integrity.

     
Only one door in his
life had remained closed to us, his time with the First Marine Division at the
Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, until last year, when he suffered a
heart attack and told me from a bed in Iberia General, his breath as stale as
withered flowers, of bugles echoing off frozen hills and wounds that looked
like roses frozen in snow.

     
I sat down across
from him. His desk blotter was covered with crepe paper camellias.

     
"I volunteered
to help decorate the stage for my granddaughter's school play. You any good at
this?" he said.

     
"No, not really.
A movie director, a fellow named Lonnie Felton, was out at my place with
Sabelle Crown this morning. They say some blacks are trying to re-create the
Garden of Gethsemane for Aaron Crown. I called Angola, but I didn't get any
help."

     
"Don't look for
any. We made him the stink on shit."

     
"I beg your
pardon?"

     
"A lot of us,
not everybody, but a lot of us, treated people of color pretty badly. Aaron
represents everything that's vile in the white race. So he's doing our
time."

     
"You think these
movie guys are right, he's innocent?"

     
"I didn't say
that. Look, human beings do bad things sometimes, particularly in groups. Then
we start to forget about it. But there's always one guy hanging around to
remind us of what we did or what we used to be. That's Aaron. He's the toilet
that won't flush . . . Did I say something funny?"

     
"No, sir."

     
"Good, because
what I've got on my mind isn't funny. Karyn LaRose and her attorney were in
here earlier this morning." He set his elbows on his desk blotter, flipped
an unfinished paper flower to the side. "Guess what she had to tell me
about your visit last night at her house?"

     
"I won't even
try to."

     
"They're not
calling it rape, if that makes you feel any better." He opened his desk
drawer and read silently from a clipboard. "The words are 'lascivious
intention,''attempted sexual battery,' and 'indecent liberties.' What do you
have to say?" His gaze moved away from my face, then came back and stayed
there.

     
"Nothing. It's a
lie."

     
"I wish the
court would just accept my word on the perps. I wish I didn't have to offer any
evidence. Boy, that'd be great."

     
I told him what had
happened, felt the heat climbing into my voice, wiped the film of perspiration
off my palms onto my slacks.

     
His eyes lingered on
the scratch Karyn had put on my cheek.

     
"I think it's a
lie, too," he said. He dropped the clipboard inside the drawer and closed
it. "But I have to conduct an internal investigation just the same."

     
"I go on the
desk?"

     
"No. I'm not
going to have my department manipulated for someone's political interests, and
that's what this is about. You're getting too close to something in this Aaron
Crown business. But you stay away from her."

     
I still had my
morning mail in my hand. On the top was a pink memo slip with a message from
Bootsie, asking me to meet her for lunch.

     
"How public is
this going to get?" I asked.

     
"My feeling is
she doesn't intend it to be public. Aside from the fact I know you, that was
the main reason I didn't believe her. Her whole account is calculated to be
vague. Her charges don't require her to offer physical evidence—vaginal smears,
pubic hair, that kind of stuff. This is meant as a warning from the LaRose
family. If I have to, I'll carry this back to them on a dung fork, podna."

     
He folded his hands
on the desk, his face suffused with the ruddy glow of his hypertension.

     
Way to go, skipper, I
thought.

M
ost
people in prison deserve to be there. Old-time recidivists who are down on a bad
beef will usually admit they're guilty of other crimes, perhaps much worse ones
than the crimes they're down for.

     
There're exceptions,
but not many. So their burden is of their own creation. But it is never an easy
one, no matter how modern the facility or how vituperative the rhetoric about
country club jails.

     
You're a
nineteen-year-old fish, uneducated, frightened, with an IQ of around 100. At
the reception center you rebuff a trusty wolf who works in records and wants to
introduce you to jailhouse romance, so the trusty makes sure you go up the road
with a bad jacket (the word is out, you snitched off a solid con and caused him
to lose his good-time).

     
You just hit main pop
and you're already jammed up, worried about the shank in the chow line, the
Molotov cocktail shattered inside your cell, the whispered threat in the
soybean field about the experience awaiting you in the shower that night.

     
So you make a
conscious choice to survive and find a benefactor, "an old man," and
become a full-time punk, one step above the yard bitches. You mule blues,
prune-o, and Afghan skunk for the big stripes; inside a metal toolshed that
aches with heat, you participate in the savaging of another fish, who for just
a moment reminds you of someone you used to know.

     
Then a day comes when
you think you can get free. You're mainline now, two years down with a jacket
full of goodtime. You hear morning birdsong that you didn't notice before; you
allow your mind to linger on the outside, the face of a girl in a small town, a
job in a piney woods timber mill that smells of rosin and hot oil on a ripsaw,
an ordinary day not governed by fear.

     
That's when you tell
your benefactor thanks for all his help. He'll understand. Your next time up
before the board, you've got a real chance of entering the world again. Why
blow it now?

     
That night you walk
into the shower by yourself. A man who had never even glanced at you before, a
big stripe, hare-lipped, flat-nosed, his naked torso rife with a raw smell like
a freshly uprooted cypress, clenches your skull in his fingers, draws you into
his breath, squeezes until the cracking sound stops and you hear the words that
he utters with a lover's trembling fondness an inch from your mouth:
I'm
gonna take your eyes out with a spoon.

I
t was late afternoon when the gunbull drove me in his pickup down
to the Mississippi levee, where Aaron Crown, his face as heated as a baked
apple under a snap-brim cap, was harrowing an open field, the tractor's engine
running full bore, grinding the sun-hardened rows into loam, twisting the
tractor's wheel back through the haze of cinnamon-colored dust, reslicing the
already churned soil as though his work were an excuse to avenge himself and
his kind upon the earth.