Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  This is the shuck: “My lady over there ain’t a reg’lar, know what I’m sayin’? Kind of like a schoolgirl just out on the town.” Here he smiles. “She need somebody take her ‘round the world, know what I’m sayin’? I need sixty dollars to cover the room, we’ll all walk down to it, I ain’t goin’ nowhere on you. Then you want to give her a present or something, that’s between y’all.”

  The difference in the scenario this time was the john had his own room as well as agenda.

  His name was Dwayne Parsons, an Academy Award nominee and two-time Emmy winner for his documentary scripts. But Dwayne Parsons had another creative passion, too, one that was unknown to the hooker and the Murphy artist and a second black man who was about to appear soon—a video camera set up on a tripod in his closet, the lens pointed through a crack in the door at the waterbed in his leased efficiency apartment a block off Bourbon.

  Parsons and the woman were undressed, on top of black satin sheets, when the hard, insistent knock came at the door. The man’s head jerked up from the pillow, his face at first startled, then simply disconcerted and annoyed.

  “They’ll go away,” he said.

  He tried to hold her arms, hold her in place on top of him, but she slid her body off his.

  “It’s my boyfriend. He don’t let me alone. He’s gonna break down the do’,” she said. She began to gather her clothes in front of her breasts and stomach.

  “Hey, I look like a total schmuck to you?” Parsons said. “Don’t open that door . . . Did you hear me . . . Listen, you fucking nigger, you’re not hustling me.”

  She slid back the deadbolt on the door, and suddenly the back and conked and side-shaved head of a gargantuan black man were in the lens. Whoever he was, he was not the man Brandy Grissum had expected. She swallowed as though she had a razor blade in her throat.

  But Dwayne Parsons was still not with the script.

  “You want to rob me, motherfucker, just take the money off the dresser. You get the gun at the Screen Actors Guild?” he said.

  The black man with the gun did not speak. But the terror in the woman’s face left no doubt about the decision she saw taking place in his.

  “I ain’t seen you befo’, bitch. You trying to work independent?” he said.

  “No . . . I mean yes, I don’t know nobody here. I ain’t from New Orleans.” She pressed her clothes against her breasts and genitalia. Her mouth was trembling.

  One block away, a brass street band was playing on Bourbon. The man thought some more, then jerked the barrel of his automatic toward the door. She slipped her skirt and blouse on, wadded up her undergarments and shoes and purse and almost flew out the door.

  Dwayne Parsons’s face had drained. He started to get up from the bed.

  “No, no, my man,” the black man said, approaching him, blocking off the camera’s view of Parsons’s face. “Hey, it comes to everybody. You got it on with the sister. It could be worse. I said don’t move, man. It’s all gonna come out the same way. They ain’t no need for suffering.”

  He picked up a pillow, pressed it down in front of him, his upper arm swelling to the diameter and hardness of a fireplug while Dwayne Parsons’s body flopped like a fish’s. The man with the gun stepped back quickly and fired two shots into the pillow—pop, pop—and then went past the camera’s lens, one grizzled Cro-Magnon jaw and gold tooth flashing by like a shark’s profile in a zoo tank.

  In the distance the street band thundered out “Fire House Blues.” Dwayne Parsons’s body, the head still covered by the pillow, looked like a broken white worm in the middle of the sheet.

  * * *

  The LaRose plantation was far out in the parish, almost to St. Martinville. The main house had been built in 1857 and was the dusty color of oyster shells, its wide, columned front porch scrolled by live oak trees that grew to the third floor. A row of shacks in back that had once been slave quarters was now stacked with baled hay, and the old brick smithy had been converted into a riding stable, the arched windows sealed by the original iron shutters, which leaked orange rust as though from a wound.

  Bootsie and I drove past the LaRose company store, with its oxidized, cracked front windows and tin-roofed gallery, where barrels of pecans sat by the double screen doors through which thousands of indebted tenants had passed until the civil rights era of the 1960s brought an end to five-dollar-a-day farm labor; then we turned into a white-fenced driveway that led to the rear of the home and the lawn party that was already in progress against a backdrop of live oaks and Spanish moss and an autumnal rose-stippled sky that seemed to reassure us all that the Indian summer of our lives would never end.

  While the buffet was being laid out on a row of picnic tables, Buford organized a touch football game and prevailed even upon the most reluctant guests to put down their drinks and join one team or another. Some were from the university in Lafayette but most were people well known in the deceptively lighthearted and carnivallike atmosphere of Louisiana politics. Unlike their counterparts from the piney woods parishes to the north, they were bright, educated, openly hedonistic, always convivial, more concerned about violations of protocol than ideology.

  They were fun to be with; they were giddy with alcohol and the exertion of the game, their laughter tinkling through the trees each time the ball was snapped and there was a thumping of feet across the sod and a loud pat of hands on the rump.

  Then a white-jacketed black man dinged a metal triangle and everyone filed happily back toward the serving tables.

  “Run out, Dave! Let me throw you a serious one!” Buford hollered, the football poised in his palm. He wore tennis shoes, pleated white slacks, the arms of his plum-colored sweater tied around his neck.

  “That’s enough for me,” I said.

  “Don’t give me that ‘old man’ act,” he said and cocked his arm to fire a bullet, then smiled and lofted an easy, arching pass that dropped into my hands as though he had plopped it into a basket.

  He caught up to me and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Wow, you feel like a bag of rocks. How much iron do you pump?” he said.

  “Just enough to keep from falling apart.”

  He slipped the football out of my hands, flipped it toward the stable. He watched it bounce and roll away in the dusk, as though he were looking at an unformed thought in the center of his mind.

  “Dave, I think we’re going to win next month,” he said.

  “That’s good.”

  “You think you could live in Baton Rouge?”

  “I’ve never thought about it.”

  Someone turned on the Japanese lanterns in the trees. The air smelled of pecan husks and smoke from a barbecue pit dug in the earth. Buford paused.

  “How’d you like to be head of the state police?” he asked.

  “I was never much of an administrator, Buford.”

  “I had a feeling you’d say something like that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Dave, why do you think we’ve always had the worst state government in the union? It’s because good people don’t want to serve in it. Is the irony lost on you?”

  “I appreciate the offer.”

  “You want to think it over?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “That’s the way,” he said, and then was gone among his other guests, his handsome face glowing with the perfection of the evening and the portent it seemed to represent.

  Karyn walked among the tree trunks toward me, a paper plate filled with roast duck and venison and dirty rice in one hand, a Corona bottle and cone-shaped glass with a lime slice inserted on the rim gripped awkwardly in the other. My eyes searched the crowd for Bootsie.

  “I took the liberty,” Karyn said, and set the plate and glass and beer bottle down on a table for me.

  “Thank you. Where’d Boots go?”

  “I think she’s in the house.”

  She sat backward on the plank bench, her legs crossed. She had tied her hair up with a red bandanna and ha
d tucked her embroidered denim shirt tightly into her blue jeans. Her face was warm, still flushed from the touch football game. I moved the Corona bottle and glass toward her.

  “You don’t drink at all anymore?” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “You want a Coke?”

  “I’m fine, Karyn.”

  “Did Buford talk to you about the state police job?”

  “He sure did.”

  “Gee, Dave, you’re a regular blabbermouth, aren’t you?”

  I took a bite of the dressing, then rolled a strip of duck meat inside a piece of French bread and ate it.

  Her eyes dilated. “Did he offend you?” she said.

  “Here’s the lay of the land, Karyn. A hit man for the New Orleans mob, a genuine sociopath by the name of Mingo Bloomberg, told me I did the right thing by not getting involved with Aaron Crown. He said I’d get taken care of. Now I’m offered a job.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe what?”

  “You. Your fucking presumption and self-righteousness.”

  “What I told you is what happened. You can make of it what you want.”

  She walked away through the shadows, across the leaves and molded pecan husks to where her husband was talking to a group of people. I saw them move off together, her hands gesturing while she spoke, then his face turning toward me.

  A moment later he was standing next to me, his wrists hanging loosely at his sides.

  “I’m at a loss, Dave. I have a hard time believing what you told Karyn,” he said.

  I laid my fork in my plate, wadded up my paper napkin and dropped it on the table.

  “Maybe I’d better go,” I said.

  “You’ve seriously upset her. I don’t think it’s enough just to say you’ll go.”

  “Then I apologize.”

  “I know about your and Karyn’s history. Is that the cause of our problem here? Because I don’t bear a resentment about it.”

  I could feel a heat source inside me, like someone cracking open the door on a woodstove.

  “Listen, partner, a guy like Mingo Bloomberg isn’t an abstraction. Neither is a documentary screenwriter who just got whacked in the Quarter,” I said.

  His expression was bemused, almost doleful, as though he were looking down at an impaired person.

  “Good night to you, Dave. I believe you mean no harm,” he said, and walked back among his guests.

  I stared at the red sun above the sugarcane fields, my face burning with embarrassment.

  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 bread-sticks 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 was 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 bread-stick 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 shithead, Dave.”

  Jimmy Ray Dixon owned a sho
pping 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?”