Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 11

Monday morning Karyn LaRose walked through the department's waiting room and paused in front of the dispatcher's office. She didn't need to speak. Wally took one look at her and, without thinking, rose to his feet (and later could not explain to himself or anyone else why he did).

"Yes, ma'am?" he said.

She wore a snug, tailored white suit, white hose, and a wide-brim straw hat with a yellow band.

"Can Dave see me?" she asked.

"Sure, Ms. LaRose. You bet. I'll call him and tell him you're on your way."

He leaned out his door and watched her all the way down the hall.

When I opened the door for her I could feel a flush of color, like windburn, in my throat. Two deputies passing in the hall glanced at us, then one said something to the other and looked back over his shoulder again.

"You look flustered," she said.

"How you doin', Karyn?" I said.

She sat down in front of my desk. Her hat and face were slatted with sunlight.

"Clay said I have to do this. I mean apologize… here… in your office. To the sheriff, too. Otherwise, he says I'll have no serenity," she said. She smiled. Her platinum hair was tucked inside her hat. She looked absolutely beautiful.

"Why are you hanging around with Clay Mason?" I said.

"He was a guest of the university. He's a brilliant man. He's a very good poet, too."

"I heard he blew his wife's head off at a party in Mexico."

"It was an accident," she said.

I let my eyes drop to my watch.

"I'm sorry that I wronged you, Dave. I don't know what else to say." She took a breath. "Why do you have to treat me with fear and guilt? Is it because of the moment there in the hotel room? Did you think I wanted to seduce you with my husband sleeping a few feet away, for God's sakes?"

"There's only one issue here, Karyn. Buford's not the man people think he is. He's taking money from Jerry Joe Plumb. The guy who delivered it to y'all's house was Mingo Bloomberg."

"Who?"

"He kills people. Right now he's in custody for leaving a black girl to drown in a submerged automobile in Henderson Swamp."

"I never heard of him. I doubt if Buford has, either."

"Jerry Joe's mobbed-up. Why do mobbed-up guys want your husband in Baton Rouge?"

"I can't understand you. What are you trying to do to us? Buford's opponents are the same people who supported David Duke."

"So what? Y'all have made a scapegoat out of Aaron Crown."

"Dave, you've let yourself become the advocate of a misanthropic degenerate who molested his daughter and murdered the bravest civil rights leader in Louisiana."

"How do you know he molested Sabelle?"

"I'm sorry, I'm not going to discuss a man like that."

I looked out the window, fiddled with a paper clip on my blotter.

"You're committed to lost and hopeless causes," she said. "I don't think it's because you're an idealist, either. It's pride. You get to be the iconoclast among the Philistines."

"I used to buy into psychobabble myself, Karyn. It's a lot of fun."

"I guess there's not much point in any of this, is there?" she said. Her skirt was tight against her body when she gathered up her purse and rose from her chair. "I wish it had been different, Dave. I wish the grog hadn't gotten you. I wish I'd been able to help. I can't say for sure I loved you, but I loved being with you. Be good to yourself, kiddo."

With that, she went out the door. I could hear my ears ring in the silence.

Just before lunch the sheriff came into my office.

"This morning I've had a call from the mayor's office, one from the chamber of commerce, and one from the New Iberia Historical Preservation Society," he said. "Did you know Jerry Joe Plumb just bought an acre lot right down from the Shadows?"

"No."

"He also bought a bunch of rural property south of the city limits. How well do you get along with him?"

"All right."

"Find out what he's up to. I don't want any more phone calls."

"Where is he?"

"Watching a bulldozer level the house that's on the lot by the Shadows."

I drove down East Main under the arched live oaks that spanned the street, toward the Shadows, a red brick and white-columned antebellum home built in 1831 on Bayou Teche. The acre Jerry Joe had purchased was located between two Victorian homes and went all the way back to the bayou and was shaded by oaks that were over one hundred years old. I drove through the piked gate and parked next to a salvage truck and an earth grader, where a group of workmen were eating lunch. Down by the bayou was a huge pile of splintered cypress boards, twisted pipe, crushed plaster powdering in the wind, and a flattened gazebo with the passion vine still clinging to the lattice work.

"Y'all couldn't move it instead?" I said.

"The termites was too heavy to get on the truck. That's a pure fact," a man in a yellow hard hat with a jaw full of bread and Vienna sausage said. He and his friends laughed.

"Where's Jerry Joe? I'll tell him how effective you are at doing PR with the sheriff's department."

It was a short drive to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge. As soon as I stepped through the door I heard Clifton Chenier's "Hey Tite Fille" on the jukebox and saw Jerry Joe out on the polished wood floor, dancing with a waitress. His elbows were tucked close to his ribs, his fingers pointed at angles like a 1940s jitterbugger, his oxblood loafers glinting. His whole body seemed animated with rhythm. His shoulders titled and vibrated; he jiggled and bopped and created an incredible sense of energy and movement without ever stepping out of a twelve-inch radius, and all the while his face beamed at the waitress with genuine pleasure and affection.

I ordered a 7-Up at the bar and waited for him to sit down. When he finished dancing he squeezed the waitress's hand, walked past me, his eyes fixed on the black bar man, and said, "Bring my friend the same order I got."

"Don't do that, Jerry Joe," I said to his back.

He pulled out a chair at a table covered with a red-and-white-checkered cloth. "You got it whether you want it or not… Catfish filet with etoufee on the top. This is food you expect only in the afterlife," he said. He twisted another chair out. "What's the haps?"

"Some people want to know why you just bulldozed down a house that George Washington Cable once lived in."

"Who?"

"A famous writer."

"Because it had an asbestos roof, because the floors were like walking on wet cardboard, because there were vampire bats in the drainpipes."

"Why not work with people, Jerry Joe, explain that to them, instead of giving them heart failure?"

"Because the problem is not what I'm tearing down, it's what they think I'm going to build. Like maybe a pink elephant in the middle of the historical district." He put a stuffed mushroom in his mouth. "What? Oh, I get it. They got reason to have those kind of concerns?"

"I didn't say that."

"What are we talking about, then? I got it. It's not the house, it's me."

"No one can accuse you of being a Rotarian."

"I told you, my sheet's an embarrassment. I'm on a level with unlicensed church bingo."

"You and some others guys hit a fur truck. You also stuffed a building contractor into a cement mixer."

"He was taking scabs through our picket. Besides, I pulled him back out."

"Why are you buying property south of town?"

He patted his palm on top of his forearm, glanced toward the sound of someone dropping coins inside the jukebox. "Maybe I want out. Maybe I'm tired of New Orleans, being in the life, all that jazz. So maybe I got a chance and I'm taking it."

"I'm not with you."

"Buford LaRose is good for business… Turn on your brain for a minute, Dave… What if these peckerwoods get in Baton Rouge? New Orleans will be a worst toilet than it already is."

"A Mexican guy tried to take me out. Your man Mingo says it was a hit. Why do mobbed-up people in New Orleans care about a cop in Iberia Parish?"

Jerry Joe scratched the red tattoo of a parachute on his forearm.

"Number one, Mingo's not my man. Number two, times are changing, Dave. Dope's gonna be out one day. The smart money is looking for a new home… Listen, to that… ' La Jolie Blon'… Boy, I love that song. My mom taught me to dance to it."

"Where'd the hit come from?"

"I don't know. That's the honest-to-God truth. Just leave this civil rights garbage alone and watch yourself with Karyn LaRose."

"How did you-"

"You want to ask me where she's got a certain birthmark?" He pressed his hands flat on the tablecloth and looked at them. "Try a little humility, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but some broads ain't any different from men. They like to screw down and marry up. She ever talk about marriage to you?"

He raised his eyes and started to grin. Then his face became embarrassed and he grimaced and looked around the room. The coiled white scar at the corner of his eye was bunched in a knot.

"You want a breadstick?" he asked.

Our jailer, Kelso Andrepont, was a three-hundred-pound bisexual black man who pushed his way through life with the calm, inert certitude of a glacier sliding downhill. The furrows in his neck gave off an oily shine and were dotted with moles that looked like raisins pasted on his skin, and his glasses magnified his eyes into luminous orbs the size of oysters.

He stared up at me from his cluttered desk.

"So why are we holding the guy here if he's got a negligent homicide beef in St. Martin Parish?"

"We're treating the case as an abduction. The abduction happened inside Iberia Parish," I said. "We're working with St. Martin on the other charge."

"Yeah, shit rolls downhill, too. And I'm always downhill from you, Robicheaux."

"I'm sorry to hear you take that attitude."

"This guy was born for Camp J. He don't belong here. I got enough racial problems as it is."

"How about starting over, Kelso?"

"He complains he's being discriminated against, get this, because he's Jewish and we're making him eat pork. So he throws his tray in a trusty's face. Then he says he wants isolation because maybe there's a black guy coming in here to whack him out.

"I go, 'What black guy?'

"He goes, 'How the fuck should I know? Maybe the guy I just threw the food at.'

"I go, 'Your brain's been doing too many push-ups, Bloomberg. You ought to give it a rest.'

"He goes, 'I come in here on my own and a dyke blindsides me with a baton and charges me with assault. No wonder you got a jail ninety percent cannibal. No one else would live in a shithole like this.'"

"You've got him in isolation now?" I asked.

"A guy who uses words like cannibal to a black man? No, I got him out there in the yard, teaching aerobics to the brothers. This job would drive me to suicide if it wasn't for guys like you, Robicheaux."

Five minutes later I checked my weapon with a guard who sat inside a steel-mesh cage, and a second guard unlocked a cell at the end of a sunlit corridor that rang with all the sounds of a jailhouse- clanging doors and mop buckets, a dozen radios tuned to a half dozen stations, shouted voices echoing along the ceilings. Mingo Bloomberg sat in his boxer undershorts on a bunk that was suspended from the wall with chains. His body was pink, hairless, without either fat or definition, as though it had been synthetically manufactured. The stitches above his ear looked like a fine strand of black barbed wire embedded in his scalp.

"Kelso says you're being a pain in the ass," I said.

He let a towel dangle between his legs and bounced it idly on top of his bare toes.

"Did your lawyer tell you our witnesses are going to stand up?" I said.

I expected anger, another run at manipulation. Instead, he was morose, his attention fixed on the sounds out in the corridor, as though they held meaning that he had never quite understood before.

"Did you hear me?" I said.

"I talked to my cousin last night. The wrong people think you got dials on me. There's a black guy, out of Miami, a freelance 'cause Miami 's an open city. He's supposed to look like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit. The word is, maybe he's the guy did this screenwriter in the Quarter. My cousin says the Miami guy's got the whack and is gonna piece it off to some boons inside the jail."

"You're the hit?"

He stared at the floor, put his little finger in his ear as though there were water in it.

"I never broke no rules. It feels funny," he said.

"Who's setting it up, Mingo?"

"How many guys could I put inside? You figure it out."

"You ever hear of a bugarron?" I asked.

"No… Don't ask me about crazy stuff I don't know anything about. I'm not up for it." His shoulders were rounded, his chest caved-in. "You've read a lot, haven't you, I mean books in college, stuff like that?"

"Some."

"I read something once, in the public library, up on St. Charles. It said… in your life you end up back where you started, maybe way back when you were little. The difference is you understand it the second time around. But it don't do you no good."

"Yes?"

"That never made sense to me before."

That night a guard escorted Mingo Bloomberg down to the shower in his flipflops and skivvies. The guard ate a sandwich and read a magazine on a wood bench outside the shower wall. The steam billowed out on the concrete, then the sound of the water became steady and uninterrupted on the shower floor. The guard put down his magazine and peered around the opening in the wall. He looked at Mingo's face and the rivulets of water running down it, dropped the sandwich, and ran back down the corridor to get the count man from the cage.