Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 32

as a police officer you accept the fact that, in all probability, you will become the instrument that delivers irreparable harm to a variety of individuals. Granted, they design their own destinies, are intractable in their attitudes, and live with the asp at their breasts; but the fact remains that it is you who will appear at some point in their lives, like the headsman with his broad ax on the medieval scaffold, and serve up a fate to them that has the same degree of mercy as that dealt out by your historical predecessor.

An image or two: A soft-nosed.45 round that skids off a brick wall and topples before it finds its mark; a baton swung too high that crushes the windpipe; or salting the shaft on a killer of children, a guy you could never nail legitimately, a guy who asks to see you on his last night, but instead of finding peace you watch him vomit his food into a stainless steel chemical toilet and weep uncontrollably on the side of his bunk while a warden reads his death warrant and two opaque-faced screws unlock the death cage.

So the job becomes easier if you think of them in either clinical or jailhouse language that effectively separates them from the rest of us: sociopaths, pukes, colostomy bags, lowlifes, miscreants, buckets of shit, street mutts, recidivists, greaseballs, meltdowns, maggots, gorillas in the mist. Any term will do as long as it indicates that the adversary is pathologically different from yourself.

Then your own single-minded view of the human family is disturbed by a chance occurrence that leads you back into the province of the theologian.

Early Monday morning three land surveyors in a state boat set up a transit instrument on a sandspit in the flooded woods across from the bait shop and began turning angles with it, measuring the bayou frontage with a surveyor's chain, and driving flagged laths at odd intervals into the mudbank.

"You mind telling me what y'all are doing?" I said from the end of the dock.

The transit operator, in folded-down hip waders and rain hat, swiped mosquitoes out of his face and replied, "The state don't have a recent plat."

"Who cares?"

"You got a problem with it, talk to my boss in Lafayette. You think we're putting a highway through your house?"

I thought about it. "Yeah, it's a possibility," I said.

I called his supervisor, a state civil engineer, and got nowhere. Then I called the sheriff's department, told Wally I'd be in late, and drove to Lafayette.

I was on Pinhook Road, down in the old section, which was still tree lined and unmarked by strip malls, when I saw Karyn LaRose three cars ahead of me, driving a waxed yellow Celica convertible. One lane was closed and the traffic was heavy at the red light, but no one honked, no one tried to cut off another driver.

Except Karyn.

She pulled onto the shoulder, drove around a construction barrier, a cloud of dust drifting off her wheels through the windows of the other cars, and then cut back into the line just before the intersection.

She changed the angle on her rearview mirror and looked at her reflection, tilted up her chin, removed something from the corner of her mouth with her fingernail, oblivious to everyone around her. The oak limbs above her flickered with a cool gold-green light. She threw back her hair and put on her sunglasses and tapped her ring impatiently on the steering wheel, as though she were sitting reluctantly on a stage before an audience that had not quite earned her presence.

An elderly black woman, bent in the spine like a knotted turnip, with glasses as thick as quartz, was laboring down a sidestreet with a cane, working her way toward the bus stop, waving a handkerchief frantically at the bus that had just passed, her purse jiggling from her wrist. She wore a print cotton dress and untied, scuffed brown shoes that exposed the pale, calloused smoothness of her lower foot each time she took a step.

Karyn stared at her from behind her sunglasses, then turned out of the traffic and got out of her convertible and listened without speaking while the old woman gestured at the air and vented her frustration with the Lafayette bus system. Then Karyn knelt on one knee and tied the woman's shoes and held her cocked elbow while the old woman got into the passenger seat of the convertible, and a moment later the two of them drove through the caution light and down the boulevard like old friends.

I'm sure she never saw me. Nor was her act of kindness a performance for passers-by, as it was already obvious she didn't care what they thought of her. I only knew it was easier for me to think of Karyn LaRose in one-dimensional terms, and endowing her with redeeming qualities was a complexity I didn't need.

Twenty minutes later the state engineer told me an environmental assessment was being made of the swamp area around my dock and bait shop.

"What's that mean?" I said.

"Lyndon Johnson didn't like some of his old neighbors and had their property turned into a park… That's a joke, Mr. Robicheaux… Sir, I'd appreciate your not looking at me like that."

Helen Soileau happened to glance up from the watercooler when I came through the back door of the department from the parking lot. She straightened her back and tucked her shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs and grinned.

"What's funny?" I said.

"I've got a great story for you about Aaron."

"He's not my idea of George Burns, Helen. Let me get my mail first."

I picked up my messages and my mail from my pigeonhole and stopped by the cold drink machine for a Dr Pepper. On the top of the stack was an envelope addressed to me in pencil, postmarked in Lafayette, with no zip code. I had no doubt who had sent it.

I sat down in a chair by the cold drink machine and opened the envelope with one finger, like peeling away a bandage on a wound. The letter was printed on a paper towel.

Dear Mr. Roboshow,

I thought you was honest but you have shit on me just like them others. Thank God I am old and have got to the end of my row and cant be hurt by yall no more. But that dont mean I will abide your pity either, no sir, it dont, I have seen the likes of yall all my life and know how you think so dont try to act like you are better than me. Also tell that prissy pissant Buford LaRose I will settel some old bidness then finish with him too.

You have permision to pass this letter on to people in the press.

Sinserely yours,

a loyal democrat who voted for John Kennedy,

Aaron Jefferson Crown

Helen was waiting for me inside my office.

"Crown went after Jimmy Ray Dixon. Can you believe it?" she said.

I looked again at the letter in my hand. "What's his beef with Jimmy Ray?"

"If Jimmy Ray knows, he's not saying. He seems to have become an instant law-and-order man, though."

She repeated the story to me as it had been told to her by NOPD. You didn't have to be imaginative to re-create the scene. The images were like those drawn from a surreal landscape, where a primitive and half-formed creature rose from a prehistoric pool of genetic soup into a world that did not wish to recognize its origins.

Jimmy Ray had been at his fish camp with three of his employees and their women out by Bayou Lafourche. The night was humid, the dirt yard illuminated by an electric mechanic's lamp hung in a dead pecan tree, and Jimmy Ray was on a creeper under his jacked-up truck, working with a wrench on a brake drum, yelling at a second man to get him a beer from inside the shack. When the man didn't do it fast enough, Jimmy Ray went inside to get the beer himself, and another man, bored for something to do, took his place on the creeper.

Aaron Crown had been crouched on a cypress limb by the bayou's edge, listening to the voices inside the lighted center of the yard, unable to see past a shed at who was speaking but undoubtedly sure that it was Jimmy Ray yelling orders at people from under the truck.

He released his grasp on the limb and dropped silently into the yard, dressed in a seersucker suit two sizes too small for him that he had probably taken from a washline or a Salvation Army Dumpster, and brand-new white leather basketball shoes with layers of mud as thick as waffles caked around the soles.

One of Jimmy Ray's employees was smoking a cigarette, staring at the mist rising from the swamp, perhaps yawning, when he smelled an odor from behind him, a smell that was like excrement and sour milk and smoke from a meat fire. He started to turn, then a soiled hand clamped around his mouth, the calluses as hard as dried fish scale against his lips, and he felt himself pulled against the outline of Crown's body, into each curve and contour, molded against the phallus and thighs and whipcord stomach, suspended helplessly inside the rage and sexual passion of a man he couldn't see, until the blood flow to his brain stopped as if his jugular had been pinched shut with pliers.

The man under the truck saw the mud-encrusted basketball shoes, the shapeless seersucker pants that hung on ankles scarred by leg manacles, and knew his last night on earth had begun even before Aaron began to rock the truck back and forth on the jack.

The man on the creeper almost made it completely into the open when the truck toppled sideways and fell diagonally across his thighs. After the first red-black rush of pain that arched his head back in the dirt, that seemed to seal his mouth and eyes and steal the air from his lungs, he felt himself gradually float upward from darkness to the top of a warm pool, where two powerful hands released themselves from his face and allowed light into his brain and breath into his body. Then he saw Aaron bending over him, his hands propped on his knees, staring at him curiously.

"Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either one," Aaron said.

He looked up at a sound from the shack, shadows across a window shade, a car loaded with revelers bouncing down a rutted road through the trees toward the clearing. His face was glazed with sweat, glowing in the humidity, his eyes straining into the darkness, caught between an unsatisfied bloodlust that was within his grasp and the knowledge that his inability to think clearly had always been the weapon his enemies had used against him.

Then, as silently as he had come, he slunk away in the shadows, like a thick-bodied crab moving sideways on mechanical extensions.

"How do you figure it?" Helen said.

"It doesn't make sense. What was it he said to the man under the truck?"

She read from her notepad: '"Damn if I can ever get the right nigger or white man, either one.'"

"I think Aaron has an agenda that none of us has even guessed at," I said.

"Yeah, war with the human race."

"That's not it," I answered.

"What is?"

It's the daughter, I thought.

I visited Batist in the hospital that afternoon, then picked up three pounds of frozen peeled crawfish and a carton of potato salad in town, so Bootsie would not have to cook, and drove down the dirt road toward the house. The bayou was half in shadow and the sunlight looked like gold thread in the trees. Dust drifted out on the bayou's surface and coated the wild elephant ears that grew in dark clumps in the shallows. My neighbor was stringing Christmas lights on his gallery while his rotating hose sprinkler clattered a jet of water among the myrtle bushes and tree trunks in his yard. It was the kind of perfect evening that seemed outside of time, so gentle and removed from the present that you would not be surprised if a news carrier on a bike with balloon tires threw a rolled paper onto your lawn with a headline announcing victory over Japan.

But its perfection dissipated as soon as I pulled into the drive and saw a frail priest in a black suit and Roman collar step out of his parked car and glare at me as though I had just risen from the Pit.

"Could I help you, Father?" I said.

"I want to know why you've been tormenting Mr. Dolowitz," he said. His face called to mind a knotted, red cauliflower.

I stooped down so I could see the man in the passenger seat. He kept his face straight ahead, his biscuit-colored derby hat like a bowl on his head.

"No Duh?" I said.

"I understand you're a practicing Catholic," the priest said.

"That's correct."

"Then why have you forced this man to commit a crime? He's terrified. What the hell's the matter with you?"

"There's a misunderstanding here, Father."

"Then why don't you clear things up for me, sir?"

I took his hand and shook it, even though he hadn't offered it. It was as light as balsa sticks in my palm and didn't match the choleric heat in his face. His name was Father Timothy Mulcahy, from the Irish Channel in New Orleans, and he was the pastor of a small church off Magazine whose only parishioners were those too poor or elderly to move out of the neighborhood.

"I didn't threaten this man, Father. I told him he could do what was right for himself," I said. Then I leaned down to the driver's window. "No Duh, you tell Father Mulcahy the truth or I'm going to mop up the yard with you."

"Ah, it's clear you're not a violent man," the priest said.

"No Duh, now is not the time-" I began.

"It was the other guy, that animal Purcel, Father. But Robicheaux was with him," No Duh said.

The priest cocked one eyebrow, then tilted his head, made a self-deprecating smile.

"Well, I'm sorry for my rashness," he said. "Nonetheless, Mr. Dolowitz shouldn't have been forced to break into someone's home," he said.

"Would you give us a few minutes?" I said.

He nodded and started to walk away, then touched my arm and took me partway with him.

"Be easy with him. This man's had a terrible experience," he said.

I went back to the priest's car and leaned on the window jamb. Dolowitz took off his hat and set it on his knees. His face looked small, waxlike, devoid of identity. He touched nervously at his mustache.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I creeped Dock Green's house. Somebody left the key in the lock. I stuck a piece of newspaper under the door and knocked the key out and caught it on the paper and pulled it under the door. They got me going back out. They didn't know I'd been inside. If they had, I wouldn't be alive," he said.

"Who got you?"

"Persephone Green and a button guy works for the Giacanos and some other pervert gets off hurting people." For the first time his eyes lifted into mine. They possessed a detachment that reminded me of that strange, unearthly look we used to call in Vietnam the thousand-yard stare.

"What they'd do to you, partner?"

The fingers of one hand tightened on the soft felt of his hat. "Buried me alive…," he said. "What, you surprised? You think only Dock's got this thing about graves and talking with dead people under the ground? Him and Persephone are two of a kind. She thought it was funny. She laughed while they put a garden hose in my mouth and covered me over with a front-end loader. It was just like being locked in black concrete, with no sound, with just a little string of dirty air going into my throat. They didn't dig me up till this morning. I went to the bathroom inside my clothes."

"I'm sorry, No Duh. But I didn't tell you to creep Dock's house."

"My other choice is I miss the vig again with Wee Willie Bimstine and get fed into an airplane propeller? Thanks for your charitable attitudes."

"I've got a room behind the bait shop. You can stay here till we square you with Wee Willie."

"You'd do that?"

"Sure."

"It's full of snakes out here. You want the gen on Dock? Persephone eighty-sixed him after she caught him porking his broads."

"That's old news, No Duh."

"I got in his desk. It's full of building plans for hospitals. Treatment places for drunks and addicts. There was canceled checks from Jimmy Ray Dixon. Go figure."

"Figure what?"

"Dock supplies broads for every gash-hound in the mob. That's the only reason they let a crazy person like him come around. But he don't cut no deal he don't piece off to the spaghetti heads. When'd the mob start working with coloreds? You think it's a mystery how the city got splashed in the bowl?"

"Who set up Jerry Joe Plumb, No Duh?"

"He did."

"Jerry Joe set himself up?"

"He was always talking about you, how your mothers use to work together, how he use to listen to all your phonograph records over at your house. At the same time he was wheeling and dealing with the Giacanos, washing money for them, pretending he could walk on both sides of the line… You don't get it, do you? You know what will get you killed in New Orleans? When they look in your eyes and know you ain't like them, when they know you ain't willing to do things most people won't even think about. That's when they'll cut you from your package to your throat and eat a sandwich while they're doing it."

I took my grocery sack of frozen crawfish and potato salad out of the truck and glanced at the priest, who stood at the end of my dock, watching a flight of ducks winnow across the tops of the cypress trees. His hair was snow white, his face windburned in the fading light. I wondered if his dreams were troubled by the confessional tales that men like Dolowitz brought from the dark province in which they lived, or if sleep came to him only after he granted himself absolution, too, and rinsed their sins from his memory, undoing the treachery that had made him the repository of their evil.

I walked up the drive, through the deepening shadows, into the back door of my house.