Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 33

at sunrise Clete Purcel and I sat in my truck on the side street next to Persephone and Dock Green's home in the Garden District. The morning was cold, and clouds of mist almost completely blanketed the two-story antebellum house and the white brick wall that surrounded the backyard. Clete ate from a box of jelly-filled doughnuts and drank out of a large Styrofoam cup of coffee.

"I can't believe I got up this early just to pull No Duh's butt out of the fire," he said. When I didn't reply, he said, "If you think you're going to jam up Persephone Green, you're wrong. Didi Gee was her old man, and she's twice as smart as he was and just as ruthless."

"She'll go down just like he did."

"The Big C killed Didi. We never touched him."

"It doesn't matter how you get to the boneyard."

"What, we got an exemption?" he said, then got out of the truck and strolled across the street to the garden wall. The palms that extended above the bricks were dark green inside the mist. I heard a loud splash, then saw Clete lean down and squint through the thick grillwork on the gate. He walked back to the truck, picked up another doughnut and his coffee off the floor and sat down in the seat. He shook an image out of his thoughts.

"What is it?" I said.

"It's forty-five degrees and she's swimming in the nude. She's got quite a stroke…" He drank out of his coffee cup and looked at the iron gate in the wall. He pursed his mouth, obviously not yet free from an image that hovered behind his eyes. "Damn, I'm not kidding you, Streak, you ought to see the gagongas on that broad."

"Look out front," I said.

A gray stretch limo with a rental U-Haul truck behind it pulled to the curb. Dock Green got out of the back of the limo and strode up the front walk.

"Show time," Clete said. He removed my Japanese field glasses from the glove box and focused them on the limo's chauffeur, who was wiping the water off the front windows. "Hey, it's Whitey Zeroski," Clete said. "Remember, the wetbrain used to own a little pizza joint in the Channel? He ran for city council and put megaphones and vote for whitey signs all over his car and drove into colored town on Saturday night. He couldn't figure out why he got all his windows broken."

A moment later we heard Dock and Persephone Green's voices on the other side of the garden wall.

"It don't have to shake out like this," he said.

"You milked through the fence too many times, hon. I hope they were worth it," she replied.

"It's over. You got my word… Come out of the water and talk. We can go have breakfast somewhere."

"Bye, Dock."

"We're a team, Seph. Ain't nothing going to separate us. Believe it when I say it."

"I hate to tell you this but you're a disappearing memory. I've got to practice my backstroke now… Keep your eyes somewhere else, Dock… You don't own the geography anymore."

We heard her body weight push off from the side of the pool and her arms dipping rhythmically into the water.

"Let's 'front both of them," Clete said, and started to get out of the truck.

"No, that'll just get No Duh into it deeper."

"Where's your head, Dave? That guy wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. The object is to flush Mookie Zerrang out in the open and then take him off at the neck."

"We have to wait, Cletus."

I saw the frustration and anger in his face. I put my hand on his shoulder. It was as hard as a cured ham. When he didn't speak, I took my hand away.

"I appreciate your coming with me," I said.

"Oh hell yeah, this is great stuff. You know why I was a New Orleans cop? Because we could break all the rules and get away with it. This town's problems aren't going to end until we run all these fuckers back under the sewer grates where they belong."

"I think Persephone got to you, partner," I said.

"You're right. I should have been a criminal. It's a simpler life."

For a half hour Dock and two workmen carried out his office furniture, his computer, his files, and a huge glass bottle, the kind mounted on water coolers, filled with an amber-tinted liquid and the embalmed body of a bobcat. The bobcat's paws were pressed against the glass, as though it were drowning.

Then the three of them drove away without the limo. Clete and I got out of the truck and walked to the gate. Through the grillwork and the banana fronds I could see steam rising off the turquoise surface of the pool and hear her feet kicking steadily with her long stroke.

"It's Dave Robicheaux. How about opening up, Persephone?" I said.

"Dream on," she replied from inside the steam.

"You stole a test for Karyn LaRose and got expelled from college. Why let her take you down again?"

"Excuse me?"

"Try this as a fantasy, Seph. You and all your friends are on an airliner with Karyn and Buford LaRose. Karyn and Buford are at the controls. The plane is on fire. There are only two parachutes on board… Who's going to end up with the parachutes?"

I could hear her treading water in the stillness, then rising from the pool at the far end.

She appeared at the gate in a white robe and sandals, a towel wrapped around her hair. She unlocked the gate and pulled it back on its hinges, then turned and walked to an iron table without speaking, the long, tapered lines of her body molded against the cloth of her robe.

She combed her hair back with her towel, her face regal, at an angle to us, seemingly indifferent to our presence.

"What's on your mind?" she said. Her voice was throaty, her cheeks pale and slightly sunken, her mouth the same shade as the red morning glories that cascaded down the wall behind her.

Clete kept staring at her.

"Has he been fed?" she asked.

"You got to pardon me. I was thinking you look like Cher, the movie actress. You even have a tattoo," he said.

"My, you have busy eyes," she said.

"Yeah, I was noticing the hole over there by the compost pile. Is that where y'all buried No Duh Dolowitz?" he said.

"The little man with the grease mustache? That's what this is about?" she asked.

"He shouldn't have come here, Persephone. He thought he was doing something for me. It was a mistake," I said.

"I see. I'm going to have him hurt?"

"You're a tough lady," I said.

"I have no interest in your friends, Dave. You don't mind if I call you 'Dave,' do you, since you call me by my first name without asking?"

"Mookie Zerrang is a bad button man, Seph. He doesn't do it for money. That means you've got no dials on him."

"Did you ever have this kind of conversation with my father, or do you speak down to me just because I'm a woman?"

"In honesty, I guess I did."

"What Streak means is, he beat the shit out of Didi Gee with a canvas money bag filled with lug nuts. He did this because your old man had his half-brother shot. You might say y'all have a tight family history," Clete said.

Clete's mouth was hooked downward at the corners, his face heated, the scar tissue through his eyebrow and across his nose flexed tight against the skull. She tried to meet his gaze, then looked away at the tongues of vapor rising from her swimming pool.

"What was that about?" I asked him in the truck.

"I told you, I'm tired of being patient with lowlifes. You know what our finest hour was? The day we popped that drug dealer and his bodyguard in the back of their Caddy. The seats looked like somebody had thrown a cow through a tree shredder. Admit it, it was a grand afternoon."

"Bad way to think, Cletus."

"One day you're going to figure out you're no different from me, Dave."

"Yeah?"

"Then you're going to shoot yourself."

He tried to hold the seriousness in his face, but I saw his eyes start to smile.

"You'll never change, Streak," he said, his expression full of play again.

I turned the ignition, then looked through the front window and saw Whitey Zeroski, the limo driver, walking toward us. He wore a gray chauffeur's uniform, with brass buttons and a gray cap that sat low, military style, over his white eyebrows.

"What are you guys doing here?" he said through my window, his eyes focusing on the doughnut Clete was about to put in his mouth.

"You want a doughnut, Whitey?" Clete said.

"I don't mind… Thanks, Purcel… I'm stuck here… Dock says I should hang around in case his wife wants to meet him up at Copeland's for breakfast."

"Dock better do a reality check," Clete said.

"That fight, you mean? It goes on all the time. Dock might give up lots of things, but his wife ain't gonna be one of them."

"Oh yeah?" Clete said.

"Dock's nuts, but he ain't so nuts he forgot his wife's got the brains in the family."

"It's the stuff of great love affairs," Clete said.

"Who built the big casino downtown?" Whitey said. "Mobbed-up guys with real smarts from Chicago and Vegas, right? Where do they build it? Between Louis Armstrong Park and the Iberville welfare project, the two most dangerous areas in downtown New Orleans. If you win at the table, you just walk outside and hand your money over to the muggers. How's that for fucking smarts? You think the lesson is lost on the local schmucks?"

Clete and I looked at each other.

Twenty minutes later we were on I-10, speeding past Lake Pontchartrain. Fog puffed out of the trees on the north shore of the lake, and the rain was falling on the lake's surface inside the fog.

"She's the funnel for the wiseguys and Jimmy Ray Dixon into LaRose's administration, isn't she?" Clete said.

"That's the way I'd read it."

"I don't think I'm going to survive having a wetbrain like Whitey Zeroski explain that to me," he said.

Early the next morning I went to Sabelle Crown's bar at the Underpass in Lafayette. The black bartender told me I'd find her at the city golf course on the northside.

"The golf course?" I said.

"That's where she go when she want to be alone," he said.

He was right. I found her sitting on a bench under a solitary oak tree by the first fairway, a scarf tied around her head, flipping bread crusts from a bag at the pigeons. The sky was gray, and leaves were blowing out of the trees in the distance.

"Your old man tried to drop a car frame on top of Jimmy Ray Dixon," I said.

"The things you learn," she said.

"Who got you started in the life, Sabelle?"

"You know, I have a total blackout about all that stuff."

"You left New Iberia for New Orleans, then disappeared up north."

"This is kind of a private place for me, Dave. Buford LaRose tried to have Daddy killed out on the Atchafalaya River. Haven't you done enough?"

"Were you in Chicago?" I asked.

She brushed the bread crumbs off her hands and walked to her parked automobile, the back of her scarf lifting in the wind.

After I returned to the office, I got a telephone call from the sheriff.

"I'm in Vermilion Parish. Drop what you're doing and come over for a history lesson," he said.

"What's up?"

"You said this character Mookie Zerrang was a leg breaker on the Mississippi coast and a button man in Miami?"

"That's the word."

"Think closer to home."

I signed out of the office and met the sheriff on a dirt road that fed into a steel-and-wood bridge over the Vermilion River ten miles south of Lafayette. He was leaning against his cruiser, eating from a roll of red boudin wrapped in wax paper. The sky had cleared, and the sunlight on the water looked like hammered gold leaf. The sheriff wiped his mouth with his wrist.

"Man, I love this stuff," he said. "My doctor says my arteries probably look like the sewer lines under Paris. I wonder what he means by that."

"What are we doing here, skipper?" I said.

"That name, 'Zerrang,' it kept bouncing around in my head. Then I remembered the story of that Negro kid back during World War II. You remember the one? Same name."

"No."

"Yeah, you do. He was electrocuted. He was fourteen years old and probably retarded. He was too small for the chair, or the equipment didn't work right, I forget which. But evidently what happened to him was awful."

His face became solemn. He lay the waxpaper and piece of boudin on the cruiser's hood and slipped his hands in his pockets and gazed at the river.

"I was a witness at only one execution. The guy who got it was depraved and it never bothered me. But whenever I think of that Zerrang kid back in '43,1 wonder if the human race should be on the planet… Take a walk with me," he said.

We crossed an irrigation ditch on a board plank and entered a stand of hackberry and persimmon trees on the riverbank. Up ahead, through the foliage, I could see three spacious breezy homes on big green lots. But here, inside the tangle of trees and air vines and blackberry bushes, was Louisiana's more humble past-a cypress shack that was only a pile of boards now, some of them charred, a privy that had collapsed into the hole under it, a brick chimney that had toppled like broken teeth into the weeds.

"This is where the boy's family lived, at least until a bunch of drunks set their shack on fire. The boy had one brother, and the brother had a son named Mookie. What do you think of that?" he said.

"Where'd you get all this, Sheriff?" I asked.

"From my dad, just this morning. He's ninety-two years old now. However, his memory is remarkable. Sometimes it gives him no rest." The sheriff turned over a blackened board with the toe of his half-topped boot.

"Did your father grow up around here?"

The sheriff rubbed the calluses of one palm on the backs of his knuckles.

"Sir?" I said.

"He was one of the drunks who burned them out. We can't blame Mookie Zerrang on the greaseballs in Miami. He's of our own making, Dave."