Cadillac Jukebox

The flooded cypress and willow trees were gray-green smudges in the early morning mist at Henderson Swamp. My adopted daughter Alafair sat on the bow of the outboard as I swung it between two floating islands of hyacinths and gave it the gas into the bay. The air was moist and cool and smelled of schooled-up sac-a-lait, or crappie, and gas flares burning in the dampness. When Alafair turned her face into the wind, her long Indian-black hair whipped behind her in a rope. She was 14 now, but looked older, and oftentimes grown men turned and stared at her when she walked by, before their own self-consciousness corrected them.

We traversed a long, flat bay filled with stumps and abandoned oil platforms, then Alafair pointed at a row of wood pilings that glistened blackly in the mist. I cut the engine and let the boat float forward on its wake, while Alafair slipped the anchor, a one-foot chunk of railroad track, over the gunwale until it bit into the silt and the bow swung around against the rope. The water in the minnow bucket was cold and dancing with shiners when I dipped my hand in to bait our lines.

“Can you smell the sac-a-lait? There’re must be thousands in here,” she said.

“You bet.”

“This is the best place in the whole bay, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know of a better one,” I said, and handed her a sandwich after she had cast her bobber among the pilings.

It had been almost nine years since I had pulled her from the submerged and flooded wreckage of a plane that had been carrying Salvadoran war refugees. Sometimes in my sleep I would relive that moment when I found her struggling for breath inside the inverted cabin, her face fumed upward like a guppy’s into the wobbling and diminishing bubble of air above her head, her legs scissoring frantically above her mother’s drowned form.

But time has it way with all of us, and today I didn’t brood upon water as the conduit into the world of the dead. The spirits of villagers, their mouths wide with the concussion of airbursts, no longer whispered to me from under the brown currents of the Mekong, either, nor did the specter of my murdered wife Annie, who used to call me up long-distance from her home under the sea and speak to me through the rain.

Now water was simply a wide, alluvial flood plain in the Atchafalaya Basin of south Louisiana that smelled of humus and wood smoke, where mallards rose in squadrons above the willows and trailed in long black lines across a sun that was as yellow as egg yolk.

“You really went to see that man Aaron Crown at Angola, Dave?” Alafair asked.

“Sure did.”

“My teacher said he’s a racist. He assassinated a black man in New Orleans.”

“Aaron Crown’s an ignorant and physically ugly man. He’s the kind of person people like to hate. I’m not sure he’s a killer, though, Alf.”

“Why not?”

“I wish I knew.”

Which was not only an inadequate but a disturbing answer.

Why? Because Aaron Crown didn’t fit the profile. If he was a racist, he didn’t burn with it, as most of them did. He wasn’t political, either, at least not to my knowledge. So what was the motivation. I asked myself. In homicide cases, it’s almost always money, sex or power. Which applied in the case of Aaron Crown?

“Whatcha thinking about, Dave?” Alafair asked.

“When I was a young cop in New Orleans, I was home on vacation and Aaron Crown came to the house and said his daughter was lost out here in a boat. Nobody would go after her because she was 14 and had a reputation for running off and smoking dope and doing other kinds of things, you with me?”

She looked at her bobber floating between the pilings.

“So I found her. She wasn’t lost, though. She was in a houseboat, right across the bay there, with a couple of men. I never told Aaron what she had been doing. But I think he knew.”

“You believe he’s innocent?”

“Probably not. It’s just one of those strange deals, Alf. The guy loved his daughter, which means he has emotions and affections like the rest of us. That’s something we don’t like to think about when we assign a person the role of assassin and community geek.”

She thought the word geek was funny and snorted through her nose.

It started to sprinkle, and we hung raincoats over our heads like cloistered monks and pulled sac-a-lait out of the pilings until midmorning, then layered them with crushed ice in the cooler and headed for home just as a squall churned out of the south like smoke twisting inside a bottle.

We gutted and half-mooned the fish at the gills and scaled them with spoons under the canvas tarp on the dock. Batist, the black man who worked for me, came out of the bait shop with an unlit cigar stuck in his jaw. He let the screen slam behind him. He was bald and wore bell-bottomed blue jeans and a white T-shirt that looked like rotted cheesecloth on his barrel chest.

“There’s a guard from the prison farm inside,” he said.

“What’s he want?” I said.

“I ain’t axed. Whatever it is, it don’t have nothing to do with spending money. Dave, we got to have these kind in our shop?”

Oh boy, I thought.

I went inside and saw the old-time gunbull from the lock-down unit I had visited at Angola just yesterday. He was seated at a back table by the lunch meat cooler, his back stiff, his profile carved out of teak. He wore a fresh khaki shirt and trousers, a hand-tooled belt, a white straw hat slanted over his forehead. His walking cane, whose point was sheathed in a six-inch steel tube, the kind road-gang hacks used to carry, was hooked by the handle over the back of his chair. He had purchased a 50-cent can of soda to drink with the brown paper bag of ginger snaps he had brought with him.

“How’s it goin’, Cap?” I said.

“Need your opinion on something,” he replied. His accent was north Louisiana hill country, the vowels phlegmy and round and deep in the throat, like speech lifted out of the 19th century.

His hands, which were dotted with liver spots, shook slightly with palsy. His career reached back into an era when Angola convicts were beaten with the black Betty, stretched out on ant hills, locked down in sweatboxes on Camp A, sometimes even murdered by guards on a whim and buried in the Mississippi levee. In the years I had know him I had never seen him smile or heard him mention any form of personal life outside the penitentiary.

“Some movie people is offered me five thousand dollars for a interview about Crown. What do you reckon I ought to do?” he said. “Take it. What’s the harm?”

He bit the edge off a ginger snap.

“I got the feeling they want me to say he don’t belong up there on the farm, that maybe the wrong man’s in prison.”

“I see.”

“Something’s wrong, ain’t it?”

“Sir?”

“White man kills a black man down South, them Hollywood people don’t come looking to get the white man off.”

“I don’t have an answer for you, Cap. Just tell them what you think and forget about it.” I looked at the electric clock on the wall above the counter.

“What I think is [he’s] about half human.” My eyes met his. “He’s got a stink on him don’t wash off. If he ain’t killed the NAACP [man], he done it to somebody else.”

He chewed a ginger snap dryly in his jaw, then swallowed it with a small sip of soda, the leathery skin of his face cobwebbed with lines in the gloom.

Word travels fast among the denizens of the nether regions.

On Tuesday morning Helen Soileau came into my office at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and said we had to pick up and hold a New Orleans hoodlum named Mingo Bloomberg who was wanted as a material witness in the killing of a police officer in the French Quarter.

“You know him?” she asked. She wore a starched white shirt and blue slacks and her badge on her gun belt. She was a blond, muscular woman whose posture and bold stare always seemed to anticipate, even relish, challenge or insult.

“He’s a button man for the Giacano family,” I said.

“We don’t have that.”

“Bad communications with NOPD, then. Mingo’s specialty is disappearing his victims. He’s big on fish chum.”

“That’s terrific. Expidee Chatlin is baby-sitting him for us.”

We checked out a cruiser and drove into the south part of the parish on back roads that were lined with sugar cane wagons on their way to the mill. Then we followed a levee through a partially cleared field to a tin-roofed fish camp set back in a grove of persimmon and pecan trees. A cruiser was parked in front of the screened-in gallery, the front doors opened, the radio turned off.

Expidee Chatlin had spent most of his law-enforcement career as a cross-guard or escorting drunks from the jail to guilty-court. He had narrow shoulders and wide hips, a tube of fat around his waist and a thin mustache that looked like grease pencil. He and another uniformed deputy were eating sandwiches with Mingo Bloomberg at a plank table on the gallery.

“What do you think you’re doing, Expidee?” Helen asked.

“Waiting on y’all. What’s it look like?” he replied.

“How’s it hanging, Robicheaux?” Mingo Bloomberg said

“No haps, Mingo.”

He emptied his beer can and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He was a handsome man and wore beltless gray stacks and loafers and a long-sleeve shirt printed with flowers. His hair was copper-colored and combed straight back on his scalp, his eyes ice-blue, as invasive as a dirty finger when they locked on yours.

He opened his lighter and began to flick the flint dryly, as though we were not there.

“Get out of that chair and lean against the wall,” Helen said.

He lowered the lighter, his mouth screwed into a smile around his cigarette. She pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, threw it over her shoulder and aimed her 9-millimeter into the middle of his face.

“Say something wise. Go ahead. 1 want you to,” she said.

I pulled him to his feet, pushed him against the wall and kicked his ankles apart. When I shook him down I tapped a hard, square object in his left pocket. I removed a .25-caliber automatic, dropped the magazine, pulled the slide back on the empty chamber, then tossed the pistol into Expidee’s lap.

“Nobody told me. I thought the guy was suppose to be a witness or something,” he said.

Helen cuffed Mingo’s wrists behind him and shoved him toward the screen door.

“Hey, Robicheaux, you and the lady take your grits off the stove,” he said.

“It’s up to you, Mingo,” I said.

We were out front now, under a gray sky, in the wind, in leaves that toppled out of the trees on the edge of the clearing. Mingo rolled his eyes. “Up to me? You ought to put a cash register on top of y’all’s cruiser,” he said.

“You want to explain that?” I said.

He looked at Helen, then back at me.

“Give us a minute,” I said to her.

I walked him to the far side of our cruiser, opened the back door and sat him down behind the wire-mesh screen. I leaned one arm on the roof and looked down into his face. An oiled, coppery strand of hair fell down across his eyes.

“You did the right thing with this guy Crown. You do the right thing, you get taken care of. Something wrong with that?” he said.

“Yeah. I’m not getting taken care of.”

“Then that’s your problem.”

“When you get back to the Big Sleazy, stay there, Mingo,” I said, and closed the car door.

“I got a permit for the piece you took off me. I want it back,” he said through the open window.

I waited for Helen to get behind the wheel, drumming my fingers on the cruiser’s roof, trying to conceal the disjointed expression in my face.

If you seriously commit yourself to alcohol, I mean full-bore, the way you take up a new religion, and join that great host of revelers who sing and lock arms as they bid farewell to all innocence in their lives, you quickly learn the rules of behavior in this exclusive fellowship whose dues are the most expensive in the world. You drink down. That means you cannot drink in well-lighted places with ordinary people because the psychological insanity in your face makes you a pariah among them. So you find other drunks whose condition is as bad as your own, or preferably even worse.

But time passes and you run out of geography and people who are in some cosmetic way less than yourself and bars where the only admission fee is the price of a 6 a.m. short-dog.

That’s when you come to places like Sabelle Crown’s at the Underpass in Lafayette.

The Underpass area had once been home to a dingy brick hotel and a row of low-rent bars run by a notorious family of Syrian criminals. Now the old bars and brick hotel had been bulldozed into rubble, and all that remained of the city’s last skid row refuge was Sabelle’s, a dark, two-story clapboard building that loomed above the Underpass like a solitary tooth.

It had no mirrors and the only light inside came from the jukebox and the beer signs over the bar. It was a place where the paper Christmas decorations stayed up year-round and you never had to see your reflection or make an unfavorable comparison of yourself with others. Not unless you counted Sabelle, who had been a $20 whore in New Orleans before she disappeared up North for several years. She was middle-aged now, with flecks of gray in her auburn hair, but she looked good in her blue jeans and V-necked beige sweater, and her face retained a kind of hard beauty that gave fantasies to men who drank late and still believed the darkness of a bar could offer solace for the unfulfilled longings of their youth.

She opened a bottle of 7-Up and set it in front of me with a glass of ice.

“You doin’ all right, Streak?” she said.

“Not bad. How about you, Sabelle?”

“I hope you’re not here for anything stronger than 7-Up.”

I smiled and didn’t reply. The surface of the bar stuck to my wrists. “Why would a New Orleans gumball named Mingo Bloomberg have an interest in your father?” I said.

“You got me.”

“I went over everything I could find on Aaron’s case this afternoon. I think he could have beat it if he’d had a good lawyer,” I said.

She studied my face curiously. The beer sign on the wall made tiny red lights, like sparks, in her hair.

“The big problem was Aaron told some other people he did it,” I said.

She put out her cigarette in the ashtray, then set a shot glass and a bottle of cream sherry by my elbow and walked down the duckboards and around the end of the bar and sat down next to me, her legs hooked in the stool’s rungs.

“You still married?” she said.

“Sure.”

She didn’t finish her thought. She poured sherry into her shot glass and drank it. “Daddy went to the third grade. He hauled manure for a living. Rich people on East Main made him go around to their back doors.”

I continued to look into her face.

“Look, when this black civil rights guy got killed with Daddy’s rifle, he started making up stories. People talked about him. He got to be a big man for a while,” she said.

“He lied about a murder?”

“How’d you like to be known as white trash in a town like New Iberia?”

“Big trade-off,” I said.

“What isn’t?”

She gestured to the bartender, pointed to a shoe box under the cash register. He handed it to her and walked away. She lifted off the top.

“You were in the army. See what you recognize in there. I don’t know one medal from another,” she said.

It was heavy and filled with watches, rings, pocket knives and military decorations. Some of the latter were Purple Hearts; at least two were Silver Stars. It also contained a .32 revolver with electrician’s tape wrapped on the grips.

“If the medal’s got a felt-lined box, I give a three-drink credit,” she said.

“Thanks for your time,” I said.

“You want to find out about my father, talk to Buford LaRose. His book sent Daddy to prison.”

“I might do that.”

“When you see Buford, tell him . . . .” But she shook her head and didn’t finish. She pursed her lips slightly and kissed the air.