Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 21

AFTER I was discharged from the army, a friend from my outfit and I drove across the country for a fishing vacation in Montana. On July 4 we stopped at a small town in western Kansas that Norman Rockwell could have painted. The streets were brick, lined with Chinese elm trees, and the limestone courthouse on the square rose out of the hardware and feed and farm equipment stores like a medieval castle against a hard blue porcelain sky. Next to our motel was a stucco 3.2 beer tavern that looked like a wedding cake, shaded by an enormous willow that crowned over the eaves. At the end of the street you could see an ocean of green wheat that rippled in the wind as far as the eye could see. The rain that fell that afternoon on the hot sidewalks was the sweetest smell I ever experienced.

What's the point?

For years I thought of this place as an island untouched by the war in Indochina and disconnected from the cities burning at home. When I was a patrolman in uniform in the New Orleans welfare projects, I used to remember the hot, clean airy smell of the rain falling on those sidewalks in 1965.

Then an ex-Kansas cop we picked up drunk on an interstate fugitive warrant told me the town that existed in my fond recollection was the site of Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood, the story of two pathological killers who murdered a whole family for thirty-nine dollars and a radio.

You learn soon or you learn late: There are no islands.

It was Monday morning and no one was in custody for the double homicide in St. Martin Parish.

"I'm afraid they're not buying your theory about a black hit man," the sheriff said.

"Why not?"

"There's no evidence the man was black."

"He had a mouthful of gold teeth, just like the guy who did the scriptwriter."

"So what? Maybe Aaron Crown has gold fillings, too."

"I doubt if Aaron ever bought a toothbrush, much less saw a dentist."

"You believe somebody was trying to stop Felton from exposing our governor-elect as a moral troglodyte. Maybe you're right. But for a lot of people it's a big reach."

"Crown didn't do this, Sheriff."

"Look, the St. Martin M.E. says both victims had been smoking heroin before they got it. Felton's condo had a half kee of China white in it. St. Martin thinks maybe the killings are drug related. Robbery's a possible motive, too."

"Robbery?"

"The killer took the girl's purse and Felton's wallet. Felton was flashing a lot of money around earlier in the evening…" He stopped and returned my stare. "I haven't convinced you?"

"Where are you trying to go with this, skipper?"

"Nowhere. I don't have to. It's out of our jurisdiction. End of discussion, Dave."

I opened the morning mail in my office, escorted a deranged woman from the men's room, picked up a parole violator in the state betting parlor out by the highway, helped recover a stolen farm tractor, spent my lunch hour and two additional hours waiting to testify at the courthouse, only to learn the defendant had been granted a continuance, and got back to the office with a headache and the feeling I had devoted most of the day to snipping hangnails in a season of plague.

The state police now had primary responsibility for protecting Buford, and Aaron Crown and my problems with the LaRose family were becoming less and less a subject of interest to anybody else.

But one person, besides Clete, had tried to help me, I thought.

The tattooed carnival worker named Arana.

I inserted the cassette Helen and I had made of his deathbed statement in a tape player and listened to it again in its entirety. But only one brief part of it pointed a finger: "The bugarron ride a saddle with flowers cut in it. I seen him at the ranch. You messing everything up for them. They gonna kill you, man…"

"Who's this guy?" my voice asked.

And the man called Arana responded, "He ain't got no name. He got a red horse and a silver saddle. He like Indian boys."

I clicked off the tape player and lay the cassette on my desk blotter and looked at it. Puzzle through that, I thought.

Then, just as chance and accident are wont to have their way, I glanced out the window and saw a man blowing his horn at other drivers, forcing his way across two lanes to park in an area designated for the handicapped. His face was as stiff as plaster when he walked across the grass to the front entrance, oblivious to the sprinkler that cut a dark swath across his slacks.

A moment later Wally called me on my extension.

"Dave, we got a real zomboid out here in the waiting room says he wants to see you," he said.

"Yeah, I know. Send him back."

"Who is he?"

"Dock Green."

"That pimp from New Orleans suppose to got clap of the brain?"

"The one and only."

"Dave, we don't got enough local sick ones? You got to import these guys in here?"

Dock Green wore a beige turtleneck polo shirt tucked tightly into his belt so that the movements of his neck and head seemed even more stark and elliptical, like moving images in a filmstrip that's been abbreviated. He sat down in front of my desk without being asked, his eyes focusing past me out the window, then back on my face again. The skin between his lip and the corner of his nose twitched.

"I got to use your phone," he said, and picked up the receiver and started punching numbers.

"That's a private… Don't worry about it, go ahead," I said.

"I'll pick you up at six sharp… No, out front, Persephone he said into the receiver. "No, I ain't wanted there, I don't like it there, I ain't coming in there… Good-bye."

He hung up and blew his breath up into his face. "I got a charge to file," he said.

"What might that be, Dock?"

"I can see you're on top of things. There's another side to Jerry the Glide."

"Yeah?"

"He went out to my construction site with some of his asswipes and busted up my foreman. He held him down on the ground by his ears and spit in his face."

"Spit in his face?"

"There's an echo in here?"

I wrote a note on my scratch pad, reminding myself to pick up a half gallon of milk on the way home.

"We'll get right on this, Dock."

"That's it?"

"Yep."

"You didn't ask me where."

"Why don't you let me have that?"

He gave me directions. I fingered the tape cassette containing the deathbed statement of the Mexican carnival worker.

"Let's take a ride and see what Jerry Joe has to say for himself," I said.

"Right now?"

"You bet."

The concentration in his eyes made me think of sweat bees pressed against glass.

We drove in a cruiser through the corridor of live oaks on East Main to the site on Bayou Teche where Jerry Joe was building his new home. The equipment was shut down, the construction crew gone.

"I guess we stuck out," I said, and turned across the drawbridge and headed out of town toward the LaRose plantation.

"This ain't the way."

"It's a nice day for a drive."

I saw the recognition come together in Dock's face.

"You're trying to piss on my shoes. You know my wife's out at Karyn LaRose's," he said.

"I've got to check something out, Dock. It doesn't have anything to do with you."

"Fuck that and fuck you. I don't like them people. I ain't going on their property."

I pulled off on the shoulder of the road by the LaRoses' drive. Dust was billowing out of the fields in back, and the house looked pillared and white and massive against the gray sky.

"Why not?" I asked.

"I got to do business with hypocrites, it don't mean we got to use the same toilet. Hey, you don't think they got shit stripes in their underwear? They got dead people in the ground here."

"You're talking about the cemetery in back?"

"I ain't got to see a headstone to smell a grave. There's one by that tree over there. There's another one down by the water. A kid's in it."

"You know about a murder?"

But he didn't get to answer. A shudder went through him and he sank back into the seat and began to speak unintelligibly, his lips wrinkling back on his teeth as though all of his motors were misfiring, obscenity and spittle rolling off his tongue.

I put the transmission in gear and turned into the drive.

"You going to make it, Dock?" I said.

His breath was as dense as sewer gas. He pressed his palm wetly against his mouth.

"Hang loose, babe," I said, and walked through the drive and the porte cochere into the backyard, where a state trooper in sunglasses was eating a bowl of ice cream in a canvas lawn chair.

I opened my badge.

"I'd like to check the stables," I said.

"What for?"

I averted my gaze, stuck my badge holder in my back pocket.

"It's just a funny feeling I have about Crown," I answered.

"Help yourself."

I climbed through the rails of the horse lot and entered the open end of the old brick smithy that had been converted into a stable. The iron shutters on the arched windows were closed, and motes of dust floated in the pale bands of light as thickly as lint in a textile mill. The air was warm and sour-sweet with the smells of leather, blankets stiff with horse sweat, chickens that wandered in from outside, the dampness under the plank floors, fresh hay scattered in the stalls, a wheelbarrow stacked with manure, a barrel of dried molasses-and-grain balls.

I went inside the tack room at the far end of the building. Buford's saddles were hung on collapsible two-by-fours that extended outward on screwhooks from the wall. The English saddles were plain, utilitarian, the leather unmarked by the maker's knife. But on the western saddles, with pommels as wide as bulls' snouts, the cantles and flaps and skirts were carved with roses and birds and snakes, and in the back of each cantle was a mother-of-pearl inlay of an opened camellia.

But the man named Arana had said the bugarron rode a silver saddle, and there was none here.

"What you looking for in the tack room, Detective Robicheaux?" the trooper said behind me. He leaned against the doorjamb, his arms folded, his expression masked behind his shades. He wore a campaign hat tilted over his eyes, like a D.I.'s, with the leather strap on the back of his head.

"You never can tell what you might trip across."

"Somehow that don't ring right."

"I know you?"

"You do now. Ms. LaRose says she'd prefer you wasn't on her place."

"She'll prefer it less if Aaron's her next visitor… Have a nice day."

I walked down the wood floor between the stalls toward the opened end of the building.

"Don't be back in the stable without a warrant, sir," the trooper said behind me.

I climbed through the rails in the horse lot and walked under the trees in the backyard toward the porte cochere. Karyn LaRose came out the side screen door, a drink in her hand, with Persephone Green behind her. Karyn turned around and lifted her fingers in the air.

"Let me talk to Dave a minute, Seph," she said.

There was a pinched, black light in Persephone Green's face as she glared at me. But she did as she was asked and closed the door and disappeared behind the glass.

"I'm going to drain the blood out of your veins for what you did to me," Karyn said.

"What I did to you?"

"In front of your wife, in the hotel. You rotten motherfucker."

"Your problem is with yourself, Karyn. You just don't know it."

"Save the cheap psychology for your A.A. meetings. Your life's going to be miserable. I promise."

"Dock Green says there're dead people under the tree in your side yard."

"That's marvelous detective work. They were lynched and buried there over a century ago."

"How about the kid in the unmarked grave by the water?"

Her skin under her makeup turned as pale and dry as paper.