Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 4

IT was raining hard and the traffic was heavy in New Orleans when I parked off St. Charles and ran for the colonnade in front of the Pearl. The window was steamed from the warmth inside, but I could see Clete Purcel at the counter, a basket of breadsticks and a whiskey glass and a schooner of beer in front of him, reading the front page of the Times-Picayune.

"Hey, big mon," he said, folding his paper, grinning broadly when I came through the door. His face was round and Irish, scarred across the nose and through one eyebrow. His seersucker suit and blue porkpie hat looked absurd on his massive body. Under his coat I could see his nylon shoulder holster and blue-black.38 revolver. "Mitch, give Dave a dozen," he said to the waiter behind the counter, then turned back to me. "Hang on a second." He knocked back the whiskey glass and chased it with beer, blew out his breath, and widened his eyes. He took off his hat and mopped his forehead on his coat sleeve.

"You must have had a rocky morning," I said.

"I helped repossess a car because the guy didn't pay the vig on his bond. His wife went nuts, said he wouldn't be able to get to work, his kids were crying in the front yard. It really gives you a sense of purpose. Tonight I got to pick up a skip in the Iberville Project. I've got another one hiding out in the Desire. You want to hear some more?"

The waiter set a round, metal tray of raw oysters in front of me. The shells were cold and slick with ice. I squeezed a lemon on each oyster and dotted it with Tabasco. Outside, the green-painted iron streetcar clanged on its tracks around the corner of Canal and headed up the avenue toward Lee Circle.

"Anyway, run all this Mingo Bloomberg stuff by me again," Clete said.

I told him the story from the beginning. At least most of it.

"What stake would Bloomberg have in a guy like Aaron Crown?" I said.

He scratched his cheek with four fingers. "I don't get it, either. Mingo's a made-guy. He's been mobbed-up since he went in the reformatory. The greaseballs don't have an interest in pecker-woods, and they think the blacks are cannibals. I don't know,

Streak."

"What's your take on the murdered scriptwriter?"

"Maybe wrong place, wrong time."

"Why'd the shooter let the girl slide?" I said.

"Maybe he didn't want to snuff a sister."

"Come on, Clete."

"He knew she couldn't turn tricks in the Quarter without permission of the Giacano family. Which means she producing a weekly minimum for guys you don't mess with."

"Which means the guy's a pro," I said.

He raised his eyebrows and lit a cigarette. "That might be, noble mon, but it all sounds like a pile of shit you don't need," he said. When I didn't answer, he said, "So why are you putting your hand in it?"

"I don't like being the subject of Mingo Bloomberg's conversation."

His green eyes wandered over my face.

"Buford LaRose made you mad by offering you a job?" he asked.

"I didn't say that."

"I get the feeling there's something you're not telling me. What was that about his wife?" His eyes continued to search my face, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"Will you stop that?"

"I'm getting strange signals here, big mon. Are we talking about memories of past boom-boom?"

I put an oyster in my mouth and tried to keep my face empty. But it was no use. Even his worst detractors admitted that Clete Purcel was one of the best investigative cops NOPD ever had, until his career went sour with pills and booze and he had to flee to Central America on a homicide warrant.

"So now she's trying to work your crank?" he said.

"Do you have to put it that way?… Yeah, okay, maybe she is."

"What for?… Did you know your hair's sweating?"

"It's the Tabasco. Clete, would you ease up, please?"

"Look, Dave, this is the basic lesson here-don't get mixed up with rich people. One way or another, they'll hurt you. The same goes for this civil rights stuff. It's a dead issue, leave it alone."

"Do you want to go out and talk to Jimmy Ray Dixon or not?" I said.

"You've never met him?"

"No."

"Jimmy Ray is a special kind of guy. You meet him once and you never quite forget the experience."

I waited for him to finish but he didn't.

"What do I know?" he said, flipped his breadstick into the straw basket, and began putting on his raincoat. "There's nothing wrong with the guy a tube of roach paste couldn't cure."

We drove through the Garden District, past Tulane and Loyola universities and Audubon Park and rows of columned antebellum homes whose yards were filled with trees and flowers. The mist swirled out of the canopy of oak limbs above St. Charles, and the neon tubing scrolled on corner restaurants and the empty outdoor cafes looked like colored smoke in the rain.

"Was he in Vietnam?" I asked.

"Yeah. So were you and I. You ever see his sheet?" Clete said.

I shook my head.

"He was a pimp in Chicago. He went down for assault and battery and carrying a concealed weapon. He even brags on it. Now you hear him talking on the radio about how he got reborn. The guy's a shit-head, Dave."

Jimmy Ray Dixon owned a shopping center, named for his assassinated brother, out by Chalmette. He also owned apartment buildings, a nightclub in the Quarter, and a five-bedroom suburban home. But he did business in a small unpainted 1890s cottage hung with flower baskets in the Carrollton district, down by the Mississippi levee, at the end of St. Charles where the streetcar turned around. It was a neighborhood of palm trees and green neutral grounds, small restaurants, university students, art galleries and bookstores. It was a part of New Orleans unmarked by spray cans and broken glass in the gutters. In five minutes you had the sense Jimmy Ray had chosen the role of the thumb in your eye.

"You're here to ask me about the cracker that killed my brother?

You're kidding, right?"

He chewed and snapped his gum. He wore a long-sleeve blue-striped shirt, which hid the apparatus that attached the metal hook to the stump of his left wrist. His teeth were gold-filled, his head mahogany-colored, round and light-reflective as a waxed bowling ball. He never invited us to sit down, and seemed to make a point of swiveling his chair around to talk to his employees, all of whom were black, in the middle of a question.

"Some people think he might be an innocent man," I said.

"You one of them?" He grinned.

"Your humor's lost on me, sir."

"It took almost thirty years to put him in Angola. He should have got the needle. Now the white folks is worried about injustice."

"A kid in my platoon waited two days at a stream crossing to take out a VC who killed his friend. He used a blooker to do it. Splattered him all over the trees," I said.

"Something I ain't picking up on?"

"You have to dedicate yourself to hating somebody before you can lay in wait for him. I just never made Aaron Crown for that kind of guy," I said.

"Let me tell you what I think of Vietnam and memory lane, Jack.

I got this"-he tapped his hook on his desk blotter-"clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy six klicks out of Pinkville. You want to tell war stories, the DAV's downtown. You want to spring that cracker, that's your bidness. Just don't come around here to do it. You with me on this?"

Clete looked at me, then lit a cigarette.

"Hey, don't smoke in here, man," Jimmy Ray said.

"Adios" Clete said to me and went out the door and closed it behind him.

"Have any of these documentary movie people been to see you?" I asked.

"Yeah, I told them the right man's in jail. I told them that was his rifle lying out under the tree. I told them Crown was in the KKK. They turned the camera off while I was still talking." He glanced at the dial on his watch, which was turned around on the bottom of his wrist. "I don't mean you no rudeness, but I got a bidness to run."

"Thanks for your help."

"I ain't give you no help. Hey, man, me and my brother Ely wasn't nothing alike. He believed in y'all. Thought a great day was coming. You know what make us all equal?" He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, splayed it open with his thumb, and picked a fifty-dollar bill out of it with his metal hook. "Right here, man," he said, wagging the bill on the desk blotter.

Late the next day, after we ate supper, I helped Bootsie wash and put away the dishes. The sun had burned into a red ember inside a bank of maroon-colored clouds above the treeline that bordered my neighbor's cane field, and through the screen I could smell rain and ozone in the south. Alafair called from the bait shop, where she was helping Batist close up.

"Dave, there's a man in a boat who keeps coming back by the dock," she said.

"What's he doing?"

"It's like he's trying to see through the windows."

"Is Batist there?"

"Yes."

"Put him on, would you?"

When Batist came on the line, I said, "Who's the man in the boat?"

"A guy puts earrings."

As was Batist's way, he translated French literally into English, in this case using the word put for wear.

"Is he bothering y'all?" I said.

"He ain't gonna bother me. I'm fixing to lock up."

"What's the problem, then?"

"They ain't one, long as he's gone when I go out the do'."

"I'll be down."

The air was heavy and wet-smelling and crisscrossed with birds when I walked down the slope toward the dock, the sky over the swamp the color of scorched tin. Batist and Alafair had collapsed the Cinzano umbrellas set in the center of the spool tables and turned on the string of overhead lights. The surface of the bayou was ruffling in the wind, and against the cypress and willows on the far side I could see a man sitting in an outboard, dressed in a dark blue shirt and a white straw hat.

I walked to the end of the dock and leaned against the railing.

"Can I help you with something?" I asked.

He didn't reply. His face was shadowed, but I could see the glint of his gold earrings in the light from the dock. I went inside the bait shop.

"Turn on the flood lamps, Alf," I said.

When she hit the toggle switch, the light bloomed across the water with the brilliance of a pistol flare. That's when I saw his eyes.

"Go on up to the house, Alafair," I said.

"You know him?" she said.

"No, but we're going to send him on his way just the same. Now, do what I ask you, okay?"

"I don't see why I-"

"Come on, Alf."

She lifted her face, her best pout in place, and went out the screen door and let it slam behind her.

Batist was heating a pot of coffee on the small butane stove behind the counter. He bent down and looked out the window at the bayou again, a cigar in the center of his mouth.

"What you want to do with that fella, Dave?" he said.

"See who he is."

I went outside again and propped my hands on the dock railing. The flood lamps mounted on the roof of the bait shop burned away the shadows from around the man in the boat. His hair was long, like a nineteenth-century Indian's, his cheeks unshaved, the skin dark and grained as though it had been rubbed with black pepper. His arms were wrapped with scarlet tattoos, but like none I had ever seen before. Unlike jailhouse art, the ink ran in strings down the arms, webbed in bright fantails, as though all of his veins had been superimposed on the skin's surface.

But it was the eyes that caught and impaled you. They were hunter's eyes, chemical green, rimmed with a quivering energy, as though he heard the sounds of hidden adversaries in the wind.

"What's your business here, podna?" I asked.

He seemed to think on it. One hand opened and closed on an oar.

"I ain't eat today," he said. The accent was vaguely Spanish, the tone flat, disconnected from the primitive set of the jaw.

Batist joined me at the rail with a cup of coffee in his hand.

"Come inside," I said.

Batist's eyes fixed on mine.

The man didn't start his engine. Instead, he used one oar to row across the bayou to the concrete ramp. He stepped into the water, ankle-deep, lifted the bow with one hand and pulled the boat up until it was snug on the ramp. Then he reached behind him and lifted out a stiff bedroll that was tied tightly with leather thongs.

His work boots were loud on the dock as he walked toward us, his Levi's high on his hips, notched under his rib cage with a wide leather belt and brass buckle.

"You oughtn't to ax him in, Dave. This is our place," Batist said.

"It's all right."

"No, it surely ain't."

The man let his eyes slide over our faces as he entered the bait shop. I followed him inside and for the first time smelled his odor, like charcoal and kerosene, unwashed hair, mud gone sour with stagnant water. He waited expectantly at the counter, his bedroll tucked under his arm. His back was as straight as a sword.

I fixed him two chili dogs on a paper plate and set them in front of him with a glass of water. He sat on the stool and ate with a spoon, gripping the handle with his fist, mopping the beans and sauce and ground meat with a slice of bread. Batist came inside and began loading the beer cooler behind the counter.

"Where you from?" I said.

" El Paso."

"Where'd you get the boat?"

He thought about it. "I found it two weeks back. It was sunk. I cleaned it up pretty good." He stopped eating and watched me.

"It's a nice boat," I said.

His face twitched and his eyes were empty again, the jawbones chewing.

"You got a rest room?" he asked.

"It's in the back, behind those empty pop cases."

"How much your razor blades?" he said to Batist.

"This ain't no drug sto'. What you after, man?" Batist said.

The man wiped his mouth with the flats of his fingers. The lines around his eyes were stretched flat.

Batist leaned on his arms, his biceps flexing like rolls of metal washers.

"Don't be giving me no truck," he said.

I eased along the counter until the man's eyes left Batist and fixed on me.

"I'm a police officer. Do you need directions to get somewhere?" I said.

"I got a camp out there. That's where I come from. I can find it even in the dark," he said.

With one hand he clenched his bedroll, which seemed to have tent sticks inside it, and walked past the lunch meat coolers to the small rest room in back.

"Dave, let me ax you somet'ing. You got to bring a 'gator in your hog lot to learn 'gators eat pigs?" Batist said.

Ten minutes passed. I could hear the man splashing water behind the rest room door. Batist had gone back out on the dock and was chaining up the rental boats for the night. I walked past the cooler and tapped with one knuckle on the bolted door.

"We're closing up, podna. You have to come out," I said.

He jerked open the door, his face streaming water. His dark blue shirt was unbuttoned, and on his chest I could see the same scarlet network of lines that was tattooed on his arms. The pupils in his eyes looked broken, like India ink dropped on green silk.

"I'd appreciate your cleaning up the water and paper towels you've left on the floor. Then I'd like to have a talk with you," I said.

He didn't answer. I turned and walked back up front.

I went behind the counter and started to stock the candy shelves for tomorrow, then I stopped and called the dispatcher at the department.

"I think I've got a meltdown in the shop. He might have a stolen boat, too," I said.

"The governor in town?"

"Lose the routine, Wally."

"You hurt my feelings… You want a cruiser, Dave?"

I didn't have the chance to answer. The man in the white straw hat came from behind me, his hand inserted in the end of his bedroll. I looked at his face and dropped the phone and fell clattering against the shelves and butane stove as he flung the bedroll and the sheath loose from the machete and ripped it through the air, an inch from my chest.

The honed blade sliced through the telephone cord and sunk into the counter's hardwood edge. He leaned over and swung again, the blade whanging off the shelves, dissecting cartons of worms and dirt, exploding a jar of pickled sausage.

Batist's coffee pot was scorched black and boiling on the butane fire. The handle felt like a heated wire across my bare palm. I threw the coffee, the top, and the grinds in the man's face, saw the shock in his eyes, his mouth drop open, the pain rise out of his throat like a broken bubble.

Then I grabbed the tattooed wrist that held the machete and pressed the bottom of the pot down on his forearm.

He flung the machete from his hand as though the injury had come from it rather than the coffee pot. I thought I was home free. I wasn't.

He hit me harder than I'd ever been struck by a fist in my life, the kind of blow that fills your nose with needles, drives the eye deep into the socket.

I got to my feet and tried to follow him out on the dock. One side of my face was already numb and throbbing, as though someone had held dry ice against it. The man in the white straw hat had leaped off the dock onto the concrete ramp and mounted the bow of his boat with one knee and was pushing it out into the current, his body haloed with humidity and electric light.

Batist came out of the tin shed in the willows where we stored our outboard motors, looked up at me, then at the fleeing man.

"Batist, no!" I said.

Batist and I both stood motionless while the man jerked the engine into a roar with one flick of the forearm, then furrowed a long yellow trough around the bend into the darkness.

I used the phone at the house to call the department again, then walked back down to the dock. The moon was veiled over the swamp; lightning forked out of a black sky in the south.

"How come you ain't want me to stop him, Dave?" Batist said.

"He's deranged. I think it's PCP," I said. But he didn't understand. "It's called angel dust. People get high on it and bust up brick walls with their bare hands."

"He knowed who you was, Dave. He didn't have no interest in coming in till he seen you… This started wit' that old man from the penitentiary."

"What are you talking about?"

"That guard, the one you call Cap'n, the one probably been killing niggers up at that prison farm for fifty years. I tole you not to have his kind in our shop. You let his grief get on your front porch, it don't stop there, no. It's gonna come in your house. But you don't never listen."

He pulled his folded cap out of his back pocket, popped it open, and fitted it on his head. He walked down the dock to his truck without saying good night. The tin roof on the bait shop creaked and pinged against the joists in the wind gusting out of the south.