James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

"Yes, sir?" he said to the captain.

"Water it and piss it, Crown," the captain said. He limped on his cane to the shade of a gum tree and lit his pipe, turned his face into the breeze off the river.

"I understand you're having some trouble," I said.

"You ain't heered me say it."

He walked back to the watercooler belted with bungee cord to the wall of the pickup bed. He filled a paper cup from the cooler and drank it, his gaze fixed on the field, the dust devils swirling in the wind.

"Is it the BGLA?" I asked.

"I don't keep up with colored men's organizations."

"I don't know if you're innocent or guilty, Aaron. But up there at Point Lookout, the prison cemetery is full of men who had your kind of attitude."

"That levee yonder's got dead men in it, too. It's the way it is." He wadded up the paper cup by his side, kneaded it in his hand, a piece of cartilage working against his jawbone.

"I'm going to talk to a civil rights lawyer I know in Baton Rouge. He's a black man, though. Is that going to be a problem?"

"I don't give a shit what he is. I done tole you, I got no complaint, long as I ain't got to cell with one of them."

"They'll eat you alive, partner."

He stepped toward me, his wrists seeming to strain against invisible wires at his sides.

"A man's got his own rules. I ain't ask for nothing except out… Goddamn it, you tell my daughter she ain't to worry," he said, his eyes rimming with water. The top of his denim shirt was splayed tightly against his chest. He breathed through his mouth, his fists gathered into impotent rocks, his face dilated with the words his throat couldn't form.

I got back home at dark, then I had to go out again, this time with Helen Soileau to a clapboard nightclub on a back road to investigate a missing person's report.

"Sorry to drag you out, Dave, but the grandmother has been yelling at me over the phone all day," Helen said. "I made a couple of calls, and it looks like she's telling the truth. The girl's not the kind to take off and not tell anybody."

A black waitress had left the club with a white man the night before; she never returned home, nor did she report to work the next day. The grandmother worked as a cook in the club's kitchen and lived in a small frame house a hundred yards down the road. She was a plump, gray-haired woman with a strange skin disease that had eaten white and pink discolorations in her hands, and she was virtually hysterical with anger and grief.

"We'll find her. I promise you," Helen said as we stood in the woman's dirt yard, looking up at her on her tiny, lighted gallery.

"Then why ain't you looking right now? How come it takes all day to get y'all out here?" she said.

"Tell me what the man looked like one more time," I said.

"Got a brand-new Lincoln car. Got a pink face shaped like an egg. Got hair that ain't blond or red, somewhere in between, and he comb it straight back."

"Why did she go off with him?" I asked.

'"Cause she's seventeen years old and don't listen. 'Cause she got this on her hands, just like me, and reg'lar mens don't pay her no mind. That answer your question?"

Helen drove us back down the dirt road through the fields to the state highway. The night was humid, layered with smoke from stubble fires, and the stars looked blurred with mist in the sky. We passed the LaRose company store, then the plantation itself. All three floors of the house were lighted, the columned porch decorated with pumpkins and scarecrows fashioned from cane stalks and straw hats. In a back pasture, behind a railed fence, horses were running in the moonlight, as though spooked by an impending storm or the rattle of dry poppy husks in the wind.

"What's on your mind?" Helen asked.

"The description of the white man sounds like Mingo Bloomberg."

"I thought he was in City Prison in New Orleans."

"He is. Or at least he was."

"What would he be doing back around here?"

"Who knows why these guys do anything, Helen? I'll get on it in the morning."

I looked back over my shoulder at the LaRose house, the glitter of a chandelier through velvet curtains, a flood-lighted gazebo hooded with Confederate jasmine and orange trumpet vine.

"Forget those people. They wouldn't spit on either one of us unless we had something they wanted. Hey, you listening to me, Streak?" Helen said, and hit me hard on the arm with the back of her hand.

I got up early the next morning, left a message on Clete Purcel's answering machine, then drove back to the grandmother's house by the nightclub. The girl, whose name was Barbara Lavey, had still not returned home. I sat in my truck by the front of the grandmother's house and looked at the notes in my notebook. For some reason I drew a circle around the girl's name. I had a feeling I would see it on a case file for a long time.

The grandmother had gone back inside and I had forgotten her. Suddenly she was at the passenger door window. Her glasses fell down on her nose when she leaned inside.

"I'm sorry I was unpolite yestiday. I know you working on it. Here's somet'ing for you and the lady," she said. She placed a brown paper bag swollen with pecans in my hand.

The sun was still low in the eastern sky when I approached the LaRose plantation. I saw Buford, naked to the waist, in a railed lot by the barn, with a half dozen dark-skinned men who were dressed in straw hats coned on the brims and neckerchiefs and cowboy boots and jeans molded to their buttocks and thighs.

I knew I should keep going, not put my hand again into whatever it was that drove Karyn and Buford's ambitions, not fuel their anger, not give them a handle on an Internal Affairs investigation, but I was never good at taking my own counsel and I could feel the lie she had told turning in my chest like a worm.

I turned into the drive, passed a row of blue-green poplars on the side of the house, and parked by the back lot. A balmy wind, smelling of rain, was blowing hard across the cane acreage, and a dozen roan horses with brands burned deep into the hair were running in the lot, turning against one another, rattling against the railed fence, their manes twisted with fire in the red sunrise.

When I stepped out of the truck, Buford was smiling at me. His skin-tight white polo pants were flecked with mud and tucked inside his polished riding boots. His eyes looked serene, his face pleasant and cool with the freshness of the morning.

I almost extended my hand.

He looked at the sunrise over my shoulder.

'"Red sky at dawn, sailor be forewarned,'" he said. But he was smiling when he said it.

"I shouldn't be here, but I needed to tell you to your face the charges your wife made are fabricated. That's as kind as I can say it."

"Oh, that stuff. She's dropping it, Dave. Let's put that behind us."

"Excuse me?"

"It's over. Come take a look at my horses."

I looked at him incredulously.

"She slandered someone's name," I said.

He blew out his breath. "You and my wife were intimate. She probably still bears you a degree of resentment. The god Eros was never a rational influence, Dave. At the same time she doesn't want to see my campaign compromised because you've developed this crazy notion about Aaron Crown being railroaded. So she let both her imagination and her impetuosity cause her to do something foolish. We're sorry for whatever harm we've done you."

I cupped my hand on a fence rail, felt the hardness of the wood in my palm, tried to see my thoughts in my head before I spoke.

"I get the notion I'm in a therapy session," I said.

"If you were, you'd get a bill."

The back door of the house opened, and a slender, white-haired man with a pixie face, one wrinkled with the parchment lines of a chronic cigarette smoker, stepped out into the wind and waved at Buford. He wore a navy blue sports jacket with brass buttons and a champagne-colored silk scarf. I knew the face but I couldn't remember from where.