James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

She drank three fingers of Scotch on ice, her throat swallowing methodically, her mouth wet and cold-looking on the edge of the glass.

"I'd better get going, Karyn. I shouldn't have bothered you," I said.

"Don't be disingenuous. I brought you here, Dave. Sometimes I wonder how I ever got mixed up with you."

"You're not mixed up with me."

"Your memory is selective."

"I'm sorry it happened, Karyn. I've tried to indicate that to you. It's you and your husband who keep trying to resurrect the past or bring me into your lives."

"You say 'it.' What do you mean by 'it'?"

"That night by the bayou. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say."

"You don't remember coming to my house two weeks later?"

"No."

"Dave?" Her eyes clouded, then looked into mine, as though she were searching for a lie. "You have no memory of that afternoon, or the next?"

I felt myself swallow. "No, I don't. I don't think I saw you again for a year," I said.

She shook her head, sat in a deep leather chair that looked out onto the dead tree.

"That's hard to believe. I never blamed you for the worry and anxiety and pain I had to go through later, because I didn't make you take precautions. But when you tell me-"

Unconsciously I touched my brow.

"I had blackouts back then, Karyn. I lost whole days. If you say something happened, then-"

"Blackouts?"

"I'd get loaded at night on Beam and try to sober up in the morning with vodka."

"How lovely. What if I told you I had an abortion?"

The skin of my face flexed against the bone. I could feel a weakness, a sinking in my chest, as though weevil worms were feeding at my heart.

"I didn't. I was just late. But no thanks to you, you bastard… Don't just look at me," she said.

"I'm going now."

"Oh no, you're not." She rose from the chair and stood in front of me. "My husband has some peculiar flaws, but he's still the best chance this state has and I'm not letting you destroy it."

"Somebody tried to open me up with a machete. I think it had to do with Aaron Crown. I think I don't want to ever see you again, Karyn."

"Is that right?" she said. The tops of her breasts were swollen and hard, veined with blue lines. I could smell whiskey on her breath, perfume from behind her ears, the heat she seemed to excrete from her sun-browned skin. She struck me full across the face with the flat of her hand.

I touched my cheek, felt a smear of blood where her fingernail had torn the skin.

"I apologize again for having come to your home," I said.

I walked stiffly through the house, through the kitchen to the backyard and my parked pickup truck. When I turned the ignition, I looked through the windshield and saw her watching me through the back screen, biting the corner of her lip as though her next option was just now presenting itself.

It rained all that night. At false dawn a white ground fog rolled out of the swamp, and the cypress trees on the far bank of the bayou looked as black and hard as carved stone. Deep inside the fog you could hear bass flopping back in the bays. When the sun broke above the horizon, like a red diamond splintering apart between the tree trunks, Batist and I were still bailing out the rental boats with coffee cans. Then we heard a car on the road, and when we looked up we saw a purple Lincoln Continental, with Sabelle Crown in the passenger's seat, stop and back up by our concrete boat ramp.

It wasn't hard to figure out which American industry the driver served. He seemed to consciously dress and look the part-elk hide halftop boots, pleated khakis, a baggy cotton shirt that was probably tailored on Rodeo Drive, tinted rimless glasses, his brown hair tied in a pony tail.

As he walked down the ramp toward me, the wind-burned face, the cleft chin, the Roman profile, become more familiar, like images rising from the pages of People or Newsweek magazine or any number of television programs that featured film celebrities.

His forearms and wrists were thick and corded with veins, the handshake disarmingly gentle.

"My name's Lonnie Felton, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

"You're a movie director."

"That's right."

"How you do, sir?"

"I wonder if we could go inside and talk a few minutes."

"I'm afraid I have another job to go to when I finish this one."

Sabelle stood by the fender of the Lincoln, brushing her hair, putting on makeup from her purse.

"Some people are giving Aaron Crown a rough time up at the pen," he said.

"It's a bad place. It was designed as one."

"You know what the BGLA is?"

"The Black Guerrilla Liberation Army?"

"Crown's an innocent man. I think Ely Dixon was assassinated by a couple of Mississippi Klansmen. Maybe one of them was a Mississippi highway patrolman."

"You ought to tell this to the FBI."

"I got this from the FBI. I have testimony from two ex-field-agents."

"It seems the big word in this kind of instance is always 'ex,' Mr. Felton," I said.

He coughed out a laugh. "You're a hard-nose sonofabitch, aren't you?" he said.

I stood erect in the boat where I'd been bailing, poured the water out of the can into the bayou, idly flicked the last drops onto the boat's bow.

"I don't particularly care what you think of me, sir, but I'd appreciate your not using profanity around my home," I said.

He looked off into the distance, suppressing a smile, watching a blue heron lift from an inlet and disappear into the fog.

"We had a writer murdered in the Quarter," he said. "The guy was a little weird, but he didn't deserve to get killed. That's not an unreasonable position for me to take, is it?"

"I'll be at the sheriff's department by eight. If you want to give us some information, you're welcome to come in."

"Sabelle told me you were an intelligent man. Who do you think broke the big stories of our time? My Lai, Watergate, CIA dope smuggling, Reagan's gun deals in Nicaragua? It was always the media, not the government, not the cops. Why not lose the 'plain folks' attitude?"

I stepped out of the boat into the shallows and felt the coldness through my rubber boots. I set the bailing can down on the ramp, wrapped the bow chain in my palm and snugged the boat's keel against the waving moss at the base of the concrete pad, and cleared an obstruction from my throat.

He slipped his glasses off his face, dropped them loosely in the pocket of his baggy shirt, smiling all the while.

"Thanks for coming by," I said.

I walked up the ramp, then climbed the set of side stairs onto the dock. I saw him walk toward his car and shake his head at Sabelle.

A moment later she came quickly down the dock toward me. She wore old jeans, a flannel shirt, pink tennis shoes, and walked splayfooted like a teenage girl.

"I look like hell. He came by my place at five this morning," she said.

"You look good, Sabelle. You always do," I said.

"They've moved Daddy into a cellhouse full of blacks."

"That doesn't sound right. He can request isolation."

"He'll die before he'll let anybody think he's scared. In the meantime they steal his cigarettes, spit in his food, throw pig shit in his hair, and nobody does anything about it." Her eyes began to film.

"I'll call this gunbull I know."

"They're going to kill him, Dave. I know it. It's a matter of time."

Out on the road, Lonnie Felton waited behind the steering wheel of his Lincoln.

"Don't let this guy Felton use you," I said.

"Use me? Who else cares about us?" Even with makeup, her face looked stark, as shiny as ceramic, in the lacy veil of sunlight through the cypress trees. She turned and walked back up the dock, her pink underwear winking through a small thread-worn hole in the rump of her jeans.