Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 24

The sun was pale, almost white, like a sliver of ice hidden behind clouds above Lake Pontchartrain, when Clete Purcel met me at the New Orleans airport and drove us back down I-10 toward the city.

"You really want to go to the meat locker, Streak?" he asked.

"You know another place to start?"

"It was just a question."

Morgues deny all the colors the mind wishes to associate with death. The surfaces are cool to the touch, made of aluminum and stainless steel, made even more sterile in appearance by the dull reflection of the fluorescent lighting overhead. The trough and the drains where an autopsy was just conducted are spotless; the water that wells across and cleanses the trough's bottom could have issued from a spring.

But somehow, in the mind, you hear sounds behind all those gleaming lockers, like fluids dripping, a tendon constricting, a lip that tightens into a sneer across the teeth.

The assistant wore a full-length white lab coat that looked like a nineteenth-century duster. He paused with his hand on the locker door. He had a cold and kept brushing at his nose with the back of his wrist.

"The guy's hands are bagged. Otherwise, he's like they found him," he said.

"This place is an igloo in here. Let's see it, all right?" Clete said.

The assistant looked at Clete oddly and then pulled out the drawer. Clete glanced down at Jerry Joe, let out his breath, then lifted his eyes to mine.

"When it's this bad, it usually means a tire iron or maybe a curb button. The uniforms found him on the pavement, so it's hard to tell right now," the assistant said. "You knew the guy?"

"Yeah, he knew the guy," Clete answered.

"I was just wondering what he was doing in that neighborhood at night, that's all," the assistant said. "If a white guy's down there at night, it's usually for cooze or rock. We on the same side here?"

Most of Jerry Joe's teeth had been broken off. One of his eyes looked like a tea-stained egg. The other was no longer an eye. I lifted his left hand. It felt like a heavy piece of old fruit inside the plastic bag.

"Both of them are broken. I don't know anything about this guy, but my bet is, he went the whole fifteen before they clicked off his switch," the attendant said.

"Thank you, sir, for your time," I said, and turned and walked outside.

I talked with the scene investigator at the District from a filling station pay phone. He had a heavy New Orleans blue-collar accent, which is far closer to the speech of Brooklyn than to the Deep South; he told me he had to go to a meeting and couldn't talk to me right now.

"When can you talk?" I asked.

"When I get out of the meeting."

"When is that?"

"Leave your number."

We pulled back into the traffic. Clete's window was down and the wind whipped the hair on his head. He kept looking across the seat at me.

"Streak, you're making me tense," he said.

"You buy kids did this?" I asked.

"I think that's how it's going to go down."

"You didn't answer my question."

He took a swizzle stick off his dashboard and put it in his mouth. A neutral ground with palm trees on it streamed past his window. "I can't see Jerry Ace getting taken down by pukes. Not like this, anyway. Maybe if he got capped-"

"Why would he be down by the Desire?"

"He dug R amp;B. He was a paratrooper. He thought he had magic painted on him… Dave, don't try to make sense out of it. This city's in flames. You just can't see them."

Jerry Joe's blue Buick had already been towed to the pound. A uniformed cop opened the iron gate for us and walked with us past a row of impounded cars to the back of the lot. The Buick was parked against a brick wall, its trunk sprung, its dashboard ripped out, the glove box rifled, the leather door panels pried loose, the stereo speakers gouged with screwdrivers out of the headliner. A strip of torn yellow crime scene tape was tangled around one wheel, flapping in the wind.

"Another half hour and they would have had the engine off the mounts," Clete said.

"How do you read it?" I said.

"A gang of street rats got to it after he was dead."

"It looks like they had him made for a mule."

"The side panels? Yeah. Which means they didn't know who he was."

"But they wouldn't have hung around to strip the car if they'd killed him, would they?" I said.

"No, their consciences were clean. You hook them up, that's what they'll tell you. Just a harmless night out, looting a dead man's car. I think I'm going to move to East Los Angeles," he said.

We went to the District and caught the scene investigator at his desk. He was a blond, tall, blade-faced man named Cramer who wore a sky blue sports coat and white shirt and dark tie with a tiny gold pistol and chain fastened to it. The erectness of his posture in the chair distracted the eye from his paunch and concave chest and the patina of nicotine on his fingers.

"Do we have anybody in custody? No. Do we have any suspects? Yeah. Every gangbanger in that neighborhood," he said.

"I think it was a hit," I said.

"You think a hit?" he said.

"Maybe Jerry Joe was going to dime some people, contractors lining up at the trough in Baton Rouge," I said.

"You used to be at the First District, right?"

"Right."

"Tell me when I say something that sounds wrong-a white guy down by the Desire at night isn't looking to be shark meat."

"Come on, Cramer. Kids aren't going to kill a guy and peel the car with the body lying on the street," I said.

"Maybe they didn't know they'd killed him. You think of that?"

"I think you're shit-canning the investigation," I said.

"I punched in at four this morning. A black kid took a shot at another kid in the Desire. He missed. He killed a three-month-old baby instead. Short Boy Jerry was a mutt. You asking me I got priorities? Fucking 'A' I do."

His phone rang. He picked it up, then hit the "hold" button.

"Y'all get a cup of coffee, give me ten minutes," he said.

Clete and I walked down the street and ate a hot dog at a counter where we had to stand, then went back to the District headquarters. Cramer scratched his forehead and looked at a yellow legal pad on his blotter.

"That was the M.E. called," he said. "Short Boy Jerry had gravel and grains of concrete in his scalp, but it was from a fall, not a blow. There were pieces of leather in the wounds around his eyes, probably from gloves the hitter was wearing or a blackjack. Death was caused by a broken rib getting shoved into the heart."

He lit a cigarette and put the paper match carefully in the ashtray with two fingers, his eyes veiled.

"What's the rest of it?" I asked.

"The M.E. thinks the assailant or assailants propped Short Boy Jerry up to prolong the beating. The bruises on the throat show a single hand held him up straight while he was getting it in the stomach. The brain was already hemorrhaging when the rib went into the heart…"

"What's that numeral at the bottom of the page?" I asked.

"The blows in the ribs were from a fist maybe six inches across."

"You got a sheet on a gangbanger that big?" I said.

"That doesn't mean there's not one."

"Start looking for a black mechanic named Mookie Zerrang," I said.

"Who?" he said.

"He looks like a stack of gorilla shit with gold teeth in it. Feel flattered. He gets ten large a whack in Miami. I'm surprised he'd be seen in a neighborhood like this. No kidding, they say the guy's got rigid standards," Clete said, fixing his eyes earnestly on Cramer's face.

That evening I let Batist go home early and cleaned the bait shop and the tables on the dock by myself. The air was cool, the sky purple and dense with birds, the dying sun as bright as an acetylene flame on the horizon. I could see flights of ducks in V formations come in low over the swamp, then circle away and drop beyond the tips of the cypress into the darkness on the other side.

I plugged in Jerry Joe's jukebox and watched the colored lights drift through the plastic casing like smoke from marker grenades. There were two recordings of " La Jolie Blon " in the half-moon rack, one by Harry Choates and the other by Iry LeJeune. I had never thought about it before, but both men's lives seemed to be always associated with that haunting, beautiful song, one that was so pure in its sense of loss you didn't have to understand French to comprehend what the singer felt. " La Jolie Blon " wasn't about a lost love. It was about the end of an era.

Iry LeJeune was killed on the highway, changing a tire, and Harry Choates died in alcoholic madness in the Austin city jail, either after beating his head bloody against the bars or being beaten unmercifully by his jailers.

Maybe their tragic denouements had nothing to do with a song that had the power to break the heart. Maybe such a conclusion was a product of my own alcoholic mentality. But I had to grieve just a moment on their passing, just as I did for Jerry Joe, and maybe for all of us who tried to hold on to a time that was quickly passing away.

Jerry the Glide had believed in Wurlitzer jukeboxes and had secretly worshipped the man who had helped burn Dresden. What a surrogate, I thought, then wondered what mine was.

A car came down the road in the dusk, then slowed, as though the driver might want to stop, perhaps for a beer on the way home. I turned off the outside flood lamps, then the string of lights over the dock, then the lights inside the shop, and the car went past the boat ramp and down the road and around the curve. I leaned with my forearm against the jukebox's casing and started to punch a selection. But you can't recover the past with a recording that's forty years old, nor revise all the moments when you might have made life a little better for the dead.

I could feel the blood beating in my wrists. I jerked the plug from the wall, sliced the cord in half with my pocketknife, and wheeled the jukebox to the back and left it in a square of moonlight, face to the wall.