James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

He was clean-shaved, his jailhouse denims pressed neatly, his copper hair combed back on his scalp like a 1930s leading man's. But his eyes looked wired, and a dry, unwashed odor like sweat baked on the skin by a radiator rose from his body.

"I don't get it. Your people don't protect cop killers," I said.

He propped one elbow on the table and bit his thumbnail.

"It's the other way around. At least that's what the prosecutor's office thinks. That's what those clowns you used to work with at First District think," he said.

"You've lost me."

"You remember the narc who got capped in the Quarter last year? I was in the cage at First District when the cops brought in the boon who did it. Somebody, and I said somebody, stomped the living shit out of him. They cracked his skull open on a cement floor and crushed his, what do you call it, his thorax. At least that's what people say. I don't know, because I didn't see it. But the dead boon's family is making a big stink and suing the city of New Orleans for fifty million dollars. Some cops might end up at Angola, too. You ever see a cop do time? Think about the possibilities for his food before he puts a fork in it."

I kept my eyes flat, waited a moment, removed my sunglasses from their case and clicked them in my palm.

"What are you trying to trade?" I asked.

"I want out of here."

"I don't have that kind of juice."

"I want out of lockdown."

"Main pop may not be a good place for you, Mingo."

"You live on Mars? I'm safe in main pop. I got problems when I'm in lockdown and cops with blood on their shoes think I'm gonna rat 'em out."

"You're a material witness. There's no way you're going into the main population, Mingo."

The skin along his hairline was shiny with perspiration. He screwed a cigarette into his mouth but didn't light it. His blue eyes were filled with light when they stared into mine.

"You worked with those guys. You get word to them, I didn't see anything happen to the boon. I'll go down on a perjury beef if I have to," he said.

I let my eyes wander over his face. There were tiny black specks in the blueness of his eyes, like pieces of dead flies, like microscopic traces of events that never quite rinse out of the soul. "How many people have you pushed the button on?" I asked.

"What? Why you ask a question like that?"

"No reason, really."

He tried to reconcentrate his thoughts. "A Mexican guy was at your place, right? A guy with fried mush. It wasn't an accident he was there."

"Go on."

"He was muleing tar for the projects. They call him Arana, that means 'Spider' in Spanish. He's from a village in Mexico that's got a church with a famous statue in it. I know that because he was always talking about it."

"That sure narrows it down. Who sent him to my bait shop?"

"What do I get?"

"We can talk about federal custody."

"That's worse. People start thinking Witness Protection Program."

"That's all I've got."

He tore a match from a book and struck it, held the flame to his cigarette, never blinking in the smoke and heat that rose into his handsome face.

"There's stuff going on that's new, that's a big move for certain people. You stumbled into it with that peckerwood, the one who killed Jimmy Ray Dixon's brother."

"What stuff?"

He tipped his ashes in a small tin tray, his gaze focused on nothing. His cheeks were pooled with color, the fingers of his right hand laced with smoke from the cigarette.

"I don't think you've got a lot to trade, Mingo. Otherwise, you would have already done it."

"I laid it out for you. You don't want to pick up on it…" He worked the burning end of the cigarette loose in the ashtray and placed the unsmoked stub in the package. "You asked me a personal question a minute ago. Just for fun, it don't mean anything, understand, I'll give you a number. Eleven. None of them ever saw it coming. The guy with the fried head at your place probably wasn't a serious effort.

"I say 'probably.' I'm half-Jewish, half-Irish, I don't eat in Italian restaurants. I'm outside the window looking in a lot of the time. Hey, you're a bright guy, I know you can connect on this."

"Enjoy it, Mingo," I said, and hit on the door with the flat of my fist for the turnkey to open up.

Later that same day, just before I was to sign out of the office, the phone on my desk rang.

It was like hearing the voice of a person who you knew would not go away, who would always be hovering around you like a bad memory, waiting to pull you back into the past.

"How's life, Karyn?" I said.

"Buford will be in Baton Rouge till late tonight. You and I need to talk some things out."

"I don't think so."

"You want me to come to your office? Or out to your house? I will, if that's what it takes."

I left the office and drove south of New Iberia toward my home. I tried to concentrate on the traffic, the red sky in the west, the egrets perched on the backs of cattle in the fields, the cane wagons being towed to the sugar mill. I wasn't going to give power to Karyn LaRose, I told myself. I owed her nothing. I was sure of that.

I was still trying to convince myself of my freedom from the past when I made an illegal U-turn in the middle of the road and drove to the LaRose plantation.

She wore a yellow sundress, with her platinum hair braided up on her head, a Victorian sapphire broach on a gold chain around her neck.

"Why'd you park in back?" she said when she opened the door.

"I didn't give it much thought," I said.

"I bet."

"Let's hear what you have to say, Karyn. I need to get home."

She smiled with her eyes, turned and walked away without speaking. When I didn't immediately follow, she paused and looked back at me expectantly. I followed her through the kitchen, a den filled with books and glass gun cases and soft leather chairs, down a darkened cypress-floored hallway hung with oil paintings of Buford's ancestors, into a sitting room whose windows and French doors reached to the ceiling.

She pulled the velvet curtains on the front windows.

"It's a little dark, isn't it?" I said. I stood by the mantel, next to a bright window that gave onto a cleared cane field and a stricken oak tree that stood against the sky like a clutch of broken fingers.

"There's a horrid glare off the road this time of day," she said. She put ice and soda in two glasses at a small bar inset in one wall and uncorked a bottle of Scotch with a thick, red wax seal embossed on it.

"I don't care for anything, thanks," I said.

"There's no whiskey in yours."

"I said I don't want anything."

The phone rang in another room.

"Goddamn it," she said, set down her glass, and went into a bedroom.

I looked at my watch. I had already been there ten minutes and had accomplished nothing. On the mantel piece was a photograph of a U.S. Army Air Corps aviator who was sitting inside the splintered Plexiglas nose of a Flying Fortress. The photo must have been taken at high altitude, because the fur collar on his jacket was frozen with his sweat, like a huge glass necklace. His face was exhausted, and except for the area around his eyes where his goggles had been, his skin was black with the smoke of ack-ack bursts.

I could hear Karyn's voice rising in the next room: "I won't sit still for this again. You rent a car if you have to… I'm not listening to that same lie… You're not going to ruin this, Buford… You listen… No… No… No, you listen…"

Then she pushed the door shut.

When she came out of the room her eyes were electric with anger, the tops of her breasts rising against her sundress. She went to the bar and drank off her Scotch and soda and poured another one. I looked away from her face.

"Admiring the photo of Buford's father?" she said. "He was one of the bombardiers who incinerated Dresden. You see the dead oak tree out by the field? Some of Buford's other family members, gentlemen in the Knights of the White Camellia, hanged a Negro and a white carpetbagger there in 1867. If you live with Buford, you get to hear about this sort of thing every day of your life."