Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  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 wet-brain 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 scarftied 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, I 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.”

  CHAPTER

  34

  Batist had been released from the hospital that day, and after work I shopped for him at the grocery in town and then drove out to his house.

  He was sitting in a soft, stuffed chair on the gallery, wearing a flannel shirt over the bandages that were taped on his shoulders. His daughter, a large, square woman who looked more Indian than black, was in the side yard, hammering the dust out of a quilt with an old tennis racquet.

  I told Batist the story about the Zerrang family, the fourteen-year-old boy who was cooked alive in the electric chair, the drunks who burned his home.

  Batist’s face was impassive while I spoke. His broad hands were motionless on his thighs, the knuckles like carved wood.

&
nbsp; “My daddy got killed by lightning working for twenty cents an hour,” he said. “The white man owned the farm knowed mules draw lightning, but he sat on his gallery while it was storming all over the sky and tole my daddy to keep his plow turned in the field, not to come out till he’d cut the last row. That’s what he done to my daddy. But I ain’t growed up to hate other people for it, no.”

  “You need anything else, partner?”

  “That nigger’s out yonder in the swamp. Fat Daddy’s wife had a dream about him. He was wading through the water, with a big fold-out knife in his hand, the kind you dress deer with.”

  “Don’t believe in that stuff, Batist.”

  “Nigger like that come out of hell, Dave. Don’t say he cain’t go in your dreams.”

  I walked back out to my truck, trying not to think about his words, or the fact that Fat Daddy’s wife had somehow seen in her dream the type of wide-bladed, foldout game dressing knife that Mookie Zerrang had used to murder Lonnie Felton and his girlfriend at Henderson Swamp.

  * * *

  Early the next morning I called an old friend of mine named Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in New Orleans. Then I called Buford at his house.

  “Meet me in City Park,” I said.

  “Considering our track record, that seems inappropriate, Dave,” he said.

  “Persephone Green is destroying your life. Is that appropriate?”

  A half hour later I was sitting at a picnic table when I saw him get out of his car by the old brick fire station in the park and walk through the oak trees toward me. He wore a windbreaker over an L.S.U. T-shirt and white pleated slacks without a belt His curly hair was damp and freshly combed and he had shaved so closely that his cheeks glowed with color. He sat down at the plank table and folded his hands. I pushed a Styrofoam cup of coffee toward him and opened the top of a take-out container.

  “Sausage and eggs from Victor’s,” I said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and wrapped a piece of French bread around a sausage patty and dipped it in my coffee. Then I put it back in my plate without eating it. “Persephone Green is the bag lady for the Giacano family and Jimmy Ray Dixon and every other New Orleans lowlife who put money into your campaign. The payback is the chain of state hospitals for drunks and addicts,” I said.

  “The contracts are all going to legitimate corporations, Dave. I don’t know all their stockholders. Why should I?”

  “Stockholders? Dock tried to squeeze out Short Boy Jerry. When Jerry Joe wouldn’t squeeze, they had him beaten to death. Is that what stockholders do?”

  “Is this why you got me out here?”

  “No. I couldn’t figure why you kept this sixties character, Clay Mason, around. Then 1 remembered you’d published some papers on psychopharmacology, you know, curing drunks with drugs and all that jazz.”

  “You belong to A.A. You know only one point of view. It’s not your fault. But there’re other roads to recovery.”

  “That’s why you’re on the spike yourself?”

  I saw the hurt in his face, the stricture in his throat.

  “I talked to a friend in the DEA this morning,” I said. “His people think Mason’s got money in your hospital chain. They also think he’s involved with some crystal meth labs down in Mexico. That’s mean shit, Buford. Bikers dig it for gangbangs, stomping people’s ass, stuff like that.”

  “Do you get a pleasure out of this? Why do you have this obsession with me and my wife? Can’t you leave us in peace?”

  “Maybe I’ve been in the same place you are.”

  “You’re going to save me? . . .” He shook his head, then his eyes grew close together and filmed over. He sat very still for a long time, like a man who imagined himself riding a bicycle along the rim of a precipice. “It’s Karyn they own.”

  His face darkened with anger. He stared at the bayou, as though the reflected sunlight he saw there could transport him out of the moment he had just created for himself.

  “How?” I asked. “The cheating back in college? Persephone has been blackmailing her over something that happened twenty years ago?”

  “You know how many educational and honor societies she belongs to? She’d be disgraced. The irony is she didn’t need to cheat. She was a good student on her own.”

  But not number one, I thought.

  He studied my eyes and seemed to see the thought buried there.

  “If you tell anybody this, I’ll sue you for libel. Then I’ll personally kick your ass,” he said.

  “I’m not your problem.”

  His face was puffed, naked, the eyes like brown marbles in a pan of water.

  I picked up my coffee and the sausage patty I’d wrapped in a piece of French bread and walked to my truck. The sunlight looked like yellow smoke through the trees. Buford still sat at the plank table, his forehead on his palm, oblivious to the camellias that were in full bloom along the banks of Bayou Teche.

  * * *

  I didn’t tell Buford all the content of my conversation with my friend Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in New Orleans. Minos and his colleagues were about to raid the ranch of Clay Mason seven hundred miles below the Texas border, in the state of Jalisco.

  And Helen Soileau and I were invited.

  CHAPTER

  35

  We flew into Guadalajara at noon with Minos and two other DEA agents. Minos was a tall, lean, cynical, good-natured man with blond close-cropped hair that was starting to whiten. When he had played forward for L.S.U. years ago, sports-writers had nicknamed him “Dr. Dunkenstein” for the ferocious rim-jarring slam dunks that were his trademark. As we taxied toward the hangar, he pulled back the curtain on the charter plane’s window and looked at the hills in the distance, then at a parked van with three wide backseats and, leaning against it, an unshaved man in blue jeans and a maroon football jersey with a holstered pistol and a gold shield clipped onto his belt.

  “There’s our ride,” he said.

  Helen stared out the window.

  “I don’t believe it. It’s that smart-ass, what’s-his-name, Heriberto, the one looks like his hair was cut with garden clippers,” she said.

  “You know that guy?” Minos asked.

  “He’s a Mexican drug agent. A priest up in the mountains told us he’s dirty,” I said.

  “They all are. One of our guys got sold out here and tortured to death,” Minos said. “This guy’s fairly harmless.”

  “Great character reference,” Helen said.

  We drove out of the city and through the small village of Zapopan. In the center of the village square was a gazebo, surrounded by rain trees, where a band was playing and children were firing out of milk bottles rockets that popped high in the sky. On one side of the square was a grayish pink eighteenth-century cathedral whose stone steps had been worn smooth and cupped down the center by the knees of thousands of penitents who worked themselves painfully up the steps on their birthdays, simultaneously saying a rosary.

  “That’s a famous church. The statue of the Virgin of Zapopan’s in there. There been a lot of miracles here, man,” Heriberto said.

  “This is the place,” I said to Helen.

  “What place?” she said.

  “Mingo Bloomberg told me the guy named Arana was from a village in Jalisco that had a famous religious statue in it,” I said.

  Heriberto steered around a parked bus, on top of which sat two soldiers in camouflage fatigues and steel pots. A third soldier was urinating in the street. The street sign on the corner said EMILIANO ZAPATA.

  “The guy the rurales shot by the mines? Yeah, he should have gone to church a lot more. But was Indio, you know. One day they’re in church, the next day they’re drunk, chasing puta, causing a lot of shit with the government. See, man, their real problem is they ain’t big on work,” he said.

  Helen leaned forward from the seat behind us. “How about shutting the fuck up?” she said.

  “Gringuita, I ain’t got nothing agai
nst these people. But in the south they been killing our soldiers. You want to see what happens?” Heriberto said, lifting a shoe box of photographs from under the seat.

  The photos were black and white, creased and hand-soiled around the edges, as though they had been passed around for viewing many times. In one photo three dead rebels lay by the side of a road, their bandannas still tied over the lower half of their faces. They had on U.S. Army web gear and bandoliers and looked like they had been killed while running. Several other photos showed another scene from different angles; a half dozen male corpses had been strung up by their feet from an adobe colonnade, their fingers inches above the dirt, their faces featureless with dried blood.

  “The old guy we gonna see this afternoon? He encourages these guys, gives them money for guns, gets them killed. The guy comes from your country, Gringuita,” Heriberto said.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t say any more,” I said.

  He opened his fingers in the air, as though he were releasing an invisible bird from them, and drove out of the village toward the mountains and a place that could have been sawed out of the revolutionary year of 1910.

  * * *

  We drove on a high switchback rock road through dead trees and a boulder-strewn landscape and rain that covered the windows like running plastic, then crested a ridge that was blackened by a forest fire, dancing with lightning, and dropped down out of the storm into sunlight again and a long cultivated valley with green hills in the distance and a volcano that was beveled across the top as though it had been sheared by tin snips. The road followed a river with wide, red clay alluvial banks that were scissored with the tracks of livestock, then we were inside another village, this one with cobblestone streets, buff-colored colonnades, a stone watering trough in front of the cervecería, a tiny open-air market where bees combs and uncured meat were sold off wood carts that were boxed with screens to keep out the blowflies.

  The streets and walkways under the colonnades were filled with soldiers. They were all young and carried World War II M-l rifles and M-16’s. Some of the M-16’s had a knob welded onto the bolt, which meant they were early Vietnam-era issue, notorious among grunts for the bolt that often jammed and had to be driven into the chamber with the heel of the hand.