Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 17

Years ago Pinhook Road in Lafayette had been a tree-lined two-lane road that led out of town over the Vermilion River into miles of sugarcane acreage. Just before the steel drawbridge that spanned the river was an antebellum home with arbors of pecan trees in the yard. The river was yellow and high in the spring, and the banks were green and heavily wooded. Feral hogs foraged among the trees. The only businesses along the river were a drive-in restaurant called the Skunk, where college and high school kids hung out, and the American Legion Club on the far side of the bridge, where you could eat blue-point crabs and drink pitcher beer on a screened porch that hung on stilts above the water.

But progress and the developers had their way. The oaks were sawed down, the root systems ground into pulp by road graders, the banks of the river covered with cement for parking lots. Overlooking all this new urban environment was the Hotel Acadiana, where builders and developers and union officials from all over the state had come to pay a three-hundred-dollar-a-plate homage to their new governor.

"Do you hear little piggy feet running toward the trough?" Helen Soileau said. We were standing like posts by one side of the banquet room entrance. A jazz combo was playing inside. Helen kept stoking her own mood.

"What a bunch… Did you see Karyn in the bar? I think she's half in the bag," she said.

"I don't think she's entirely comfortable with her new constituency."

"Not in the daylight, anyway… Check out who just came in the door."

Persephone Green wore a black see-through evening dress and a sapphire and diamond necklace around her throat. Her shoulders were as white and smooth as moonstone.

"How do you know Dock Green's wife?" I said.

"I was in uniform with NOPD when she shot a prowler at her home in the Garden District. She shot him five times."

Persephone Green paused by the banquet room door, her black sequined bag dangling from her wrist by a spidery cord.

"You get around," she said to me. Her hair was pulled straight back and threaded with a string of tiny diamonds.

"Looking after the common good, that sort of thing," I said.

"We'll all sleep more secure, I'm sure." Her gaze roved indolently over Helen's face. "You have a reason for staring at me, madam?"

"No, ma'am."

"I know you?"

"I was the first officer at the scene when you popped that black guy by your swimming pool. I pulled his head out of the water," Helen said.

"Oh yes, how could I forget? You're the charm school graduate who made some accusations."

"Not really. I probably have poor night vision. I was the only one who saw a powder burn by the guy's eyebrow," Helen said.

"That's right, you made quite a little squeaking noise, didn't you?"

"The scene investigator probably had better eyesight. He's the one took early retirement the same year and bought a liquor store out in Metairie," Helen said.

"My, what a clever sack of potatoes."

Persephone Green walked on inside the banquet room. The back of her evening dress was an open V that extended to the lower tip of her vertebrae.

"I'm going up on the roof," Helen said.

"Don't let her bother you."

"Tomorrow I'm off this shit. The old man doesn't like it, he can have my shield."

I watched her walk through the crowd toward the service elevator, her back flexed, her arms pumped, her expression one that dissipated smiles and caused people to glance away from her face.

I walked through the meeting rooms and the restaurant and bar area. Karyn LaRose was dancing by the bandstand with Jerry Joe Plumb. Her evening dress looked like frozen pink champagne poured on her body. She pulled away from him and came up to me, her face flushed and hot, her breath heavy with the smell of cherries and bourbon.

"Dance with me," she said.

"Can't do it on the job."

"Yes you will." She slipped her hand into mine and held it tightly between us. She tilted her chin up; a private thought, like a self-indulgent memory, seemed to light her eyes.

"It looks like you're enjoying yourself," I said.

"I know of only one moment that feels as good as winning," she said. She smiled at the corners of her mouth.

"Better have some coffee, Karyn."

"You're a pill. But you're going to end up in Baton Rouge just the same, honey bunny."

"Adios," I said, and pulled loose from her and went out the side door and into the parking lot.

It was warm and muggy outside, and the moon was yellow and veiled inside a rain ring. There were Lafayette city cops in the parking lot and state police with rifles on the roof. I walked all the way around the hotel and talked with a state policeman and a black security guard at the back door, then checked the opposite side of a hedge that bordered the parking lot, and, finally, for want of anything else to do, walked down toward the river.

Where would Aaron Crown be, I asked myself.

Not in a town or city, I thought. Even before he had been a hunted man, Aaron was one of those who sought out woods and bogs not only as a refuge of shadow and invisibility but as a place where no concrete slab would separate the whirrings in his chest from the power that he instinctively knew lay inside rotted logs and layers of moldy leaves and caves that were as dark as a womb.

Maybe in the Atchafalaya Basin, I thought, holed up in a shack on stilts, smearing his skin with mud to protect it from mosquitoes, eating nutria or coon or gar or whatever bird he could knock from a tree with a club, his ankles lesioned with sores from the leg chains he had run in.

If he tried to get Buford tonight, in all probability it would have to be from a distance, I thought. He could come down the Vermilion, hide his boat under a dock, perhaps circle the hotel, and hunch down in the shrubbery behind the parking lot. With luck Buford would appear under a canvas walkway, or between parked automobiles, and Aaron would wind the leather sling as tightly as a tourniquet around his left forearm, sight the scope's crosshairs on the man who had not only sent him to prison but had used and discarded his daughter as a white overseer would a field woman, then grind his back teeth with an almost sexual pleasure while he squeezed off the round and watched the world try to deal with Aaron Crown's handiwork.

But he had to get inside the perimeter to do it.

I used the pay phone in a restaurant on the riverbank to call Bootsie. While I listened to my own voice on the answering machine, I gazed out the window at the parking lot and the four-lane flow of headlights on Pinhook. A catering truck turned into the hotel, a rug cleaning van driven by a woman, a white stretch limo filled with revelers, a half dozen taxi cabs.

I hung up the phone and went back outside. It was almost 9 p.m. Where was Bootsie?

I went back inside the hotel and rode the service elevator up to the roof. The wind was warm and smelled of rain, and there were yellow slicks of moonlight, like patches of oil paint, floating on the river's surface.

Down below, at the service entrance, the caterers were carrying in stainless steel containers of food, and a blonde woman in a baggy gray dress was pulling a hamper loaded with rug cleaning equipment from her van. A drunk man in a hat and a raincoat wandered through the parked cars, then decided to work his way into the hedge at the back of the lot, simultaneously unzipping his fly. The state policeman at the service door walked out into the lot and paused under a light, his hands on his hips, then stepped close in to the hedge, raised on his toes, and tried to see the man in the raincoat. The state policeman disappeared into the shadows.

"What is it?" Helen said.

"A state trooper went after a drunk in the hedge. I don't see either one of them now… Get on the portable, will you?"

"What y'all got down there?" she said into her radio.

"Ain't got nothing," the voice of a black man said.

"Who is this?"

"The security guard."

"Put an officer on."

"They ain't one."

"What's going on with the guy in the hedge?"

"What guy?"

"The drunk the state trooper went after. Look, find an officer and give him the radio."

"I done tried to tell you, they ain't nothing going on. Except somebody down here don't have no bidness working in a hotel."

"What are you talking about?" Helen said.

"Somebody down here got B.O. could make your nose fall off, that's what I'm talking about. That clear enough?" There was a pause. The security guard was still transmitting but he was speaking to someone else now: "I told you, you got to have some ID… You ain't suppose to be inside here… Hey, don't you be coming at me like that…"

The portable radio struck the floor.

Helen and I ran for the service elevator.

By the time we got down to the first floor a Lafayette city cop and a state policeman were running down the hallway ahead of us toward the service entrance. Through the glass I could see the catering truck and the rug cleaning van in the parking lot.

"There ain't anybody here," the city cop said, looking at the empty hallway, then outside. He wore sideburns and his hat was too large for his head. He sniffed the air and made a face. "Man, what's that smell? It's like somebody rubbed shit on the walls."

The hallway made a left angle toward the kitchen. Halfway down it were two ventilated wood doors that were closed on a loud humming sound inside. A clothes hamper loaded with squeegee mops and a rug-cleaning machine and bottles of chemicals rested at an angle against the wall. I opened one of the doors and saw, next to the boilers, a thin black man, with a mustache, in the uniform of a security guard, sitting against a pile of crumpled cardboard cartons, his knees drawn up before him, his hands gripping his loins, his face dilated with shock.

"What happened to you, partner?" I said.

"The woman done it," he answered.

"The woman?"

"I mean, she was dressed like a woman. She come at me. I ain't wanted to do it, but I hit her with my baton. It didn't even slow her up. That's when she grabbed me. Down here. She twisted real hard. She kept saying, 'Tell me where LaRose at or I tear it out.'" He swallowed and widened his eyes.

"We'll get the paramedics. You're going to be all right," I said. I heard Helen go back out the door.

"I ain't never had nothing like this happen," he said. His face flinched when he tried to change the position of his legs. "It was when I seen her socks. That's what started it, see. I wouldn't have paid her no mind."

"Her socks?" I said.

"The catering guys went in the kitchen with all the food. I thought it was one of them stinking up the place. Then I looked at the woman's feet 'cause she was tracking the rug. She had on brogans and socks with blood on them. I axed her to show me some ID. She say it's in the van, then y'all called me on the radio."

"Where'd this person go?" I said.

"I don't know. Back outside, maybe. She was kicking around in these cartons, looking for something. I think she dropped it when I hit her. It was metal-looking. Maybe a knife."

Helen came back through the door.

"Check this. It was out in the lot," she said, and held up a fright wig by one ropy blond strand.

"You did fine," I said to the security guard. "Maybe you saved the governor's life tonight."

"Yeah? I done that?"

"You bet," I said. Then I saw a piece of black electrician's tape and a glint of metal under a flattened carton. I knelt on one knee and lifted up the carton and inserted my ballpoint pen through the trigger guard of a revolver whose broken wood grips were taped to the steel frame.

"It looks like a thirty-two," Helen said.

"It sure does."

"What, that means something?" she asked.

"I've seen it before. In a shoebox full of military decorations at Sabelle Crown's bar," I said.

An hour later, a half mile away, somebody reported a grate pried off a storm drain. A Lafayette city cop used his flashlight and crawled down through a huge slime-encrusted pipe that led under the streets to a bluff above the Vermilion River. The bottom of the pipe was trenched with the heavy imprints of a man's brogans or work boots. The prints angled off the end of the pipe through the brush and meandered along the mudbank, below the bluff and an apartment building where people watched the late news behind their sliding glass doors, oblivious to the passage of a man who could have stepped out of a cave at the dawn of time.

He found a powerboat locked with a chain to a dock, tore the chain and the steel bolt out of the post, then discovered a hundred yards downstream he had no gas. He climbed up the bank with a can, flung the dress in the brush, and followed a coulee to a lighted boulevard, climbed through a corrugated pipe, and walked into a filling station, wearing only his trousers and brogans, his hairy, mud-streaked torso glowing with an odor that made the attendant blanch.

Aaron opened his calloused palm on a bone-handle pocketknife.

"How much you give me for this?" he asked.

"I don't need one," the attendant replied, and tried to smile. He was young, his black hair combed straight back; he wore a tie that attached to the collar of his white shirt with a cardboard hook.

"I'll take six dollars for it. You can sell it for ten."

"No, sir, I really don't need no knife."

"I just want five dollars gas and a bag of them pork rinds. That's an honest deal."

The attendant's eyes searched the empty pavilion outside. The rain was slanting across the fluorescent lights above the gas pumps.

"You're trying to make me steal from the man I work for," he said.

"I ain't got a shirt on my back. I ain't got food to eat. I come in out of the rain and ask for hep and you call me a thief. I won't take that shit."

"I'll call my boss and ax him. Maybe you can talk to him."

The attendant lifted the telephone receiver off the hook under the counter. But Aaron's huge hand closed on his and squeezed, then squeezed harder, splaying the fingers, mashing the knuckles like bits of bone against the plastic, his eyes bulging with energy and power an inch from the attendant's face, his grip compressing the attendant's hand into a ball of pain until a cry broke from the attendant's throat and his free hand flipped at the power switch to an unleaded pump.

Aaron left the pocketknife on top of the counter.

"My name's Aaron Crown. I killed two niggers in Angola kept messing with me. You tell anybody I robbed you, I'll be back," he said.

But the party at the Acadiana never slowed down. The very fact that Aaron had failed so miserably in attempting to penetrate the governor-elect's security, like an insect trying to fight its way out of a glass bell, was almost a metaphorical confirmation that a new era had begun, one in which a charismatic southern leader and his beautiful wife danced like college sweethearts to a Dixieland band and shared their own aura with such a generosity of spirit that even the most hard-bitten self-made contractor felt humbled and ennobled to be in their presence.

But I was worn out when I got back from the search for Aaron Crown and didn't care anymore about the fortunes of the LaRose family and just wanted to go to sleep. There was a message from Bootsie at the desk when I picked up my room key: The truck broke down by Spanish Lake and I had to wait for the wrecker. I'm borrowing my sister's car but will be there quite late.

I left a note for Bootsie with the room number on it and started toward the elevator.

"Mr. Robicheaux, you have another message," the clerk said.

I took the piece of paper from his hand and read it.

Streak, I got the gen on our man Mookie. We 're talking about your mainline subhuman here. I'll fill you in later. Let's ROA at the bar. Dangle easy, big mon-Clete.

"I'm a little confused. This is my friend's handwriting. He's here at the hotel?" I said.

The clerk took the slip of paper out of my hand and looked at it.

"Oh yes, he's here. He is certainly here, sir."

"Excuse me?"

"I think there was a problem about his invitation. He didn't seem to have it with him. Someone tried to put his hand on your friend's arm and walk him to the door."

"That must have made an interesting show."

"Oh it was, sir. Definitely." The clerk was laughing to himself now.

I went into the bar and restaurant, looked on the dance floor and in the banquet and meeting rooms. Normally tracking Clete Purcel's progress through a given area was like following the path of a wrecking ball, but I saw no sign of him and I rode the elevator up to the top floor, where I had been given a room at the end of the hall from Buford and Karyn's, unlocked the door, undressed, and lay down on the bed in the dark.

It was storming outside now, and through the wide glass window I could see the flow of traffic across the bridge and the rain falling out of the electric light into the water. At one time this area had been called Vermilionville, and in 1863 Louisiana 's boys in butternut had retreated up the Teche, exhausted, malnourished, their uniforms in rags, often barefoot, and had fought General Banks' federal troops, right here, on the banks of the river, to keep open the flow of supplies from Texas to the rest of the Confederacy.

As I fell onto the edges of sleep I saw sugarcane fields and houses burning and skies that were plum-colored with smoke and heard the popping of small-arms fire and the clatter of muskets and bayonets as a column of infantry ran down the dirt road toward an irrigation ditch, and I had no doubt which direction my sleep was about to take.

This time the sniper was not Victor Charles.

I was trapped in the middle of the dirt road, my feet unable to run. I saw a musket extend itself from a clump of violent green brush, saw the stiffness of its barrel rear in the sunlight, and in my mind, as though I had formed a contract between the condemned and the executioner, the sniper and I became one, joined irrevocably together as co-participants in my death, and just before the.58 caliber round exploded from the barrel I could feel him squeeze the musket in his hands, as though it was really I who cupped its wet hardness in my palms.

In my sleep I heard the door to the hotel room open, then close, heard someone set down a key on the nightstand and close the curtains, felt a woman's weight on the side of the bed and then her hand on my hip, and I knew Bootsie had arrived at the hotel safely.

I lay on my back, with the pillow across my face, and heard her undressing in the dark. She lay beside me, touched my stomach, then moved across my loins, her thighs spread, and put my sex between her legs. Then she leaned close to me, pushed the pillow from my face, and kissed my cheek and put her tongue inside my mouth and placed my sex inside her.

Her tongue tasted like candy, like cherries that had been soaked in bourbon. She raised herself on her arms, the tops of her swollen breasts half-mooned with tan.

I stared upward into the face of Karyn LaRose, who smiled lazily and said, "Tell me you don't like it, Dave. Tell me. See if you can tell me that… Tell me… tell me… tell me…"