James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

"I'll be just a minute, Clay," Buford called. Then to me, "Would you like to join us for breakfast?"

"No, thanks."

"How about a handshake, then?"

Two of the wranglers were yelling at each other in Spanish as the horses swirled around them in the lot. One had worked a hackamore over a mare's head and the other was trying to fling a blanket and saddle on her back.

"No? Stay and watch me get my butt thrown, then," Buford said.

"You were born for it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The political life. You've got ice water in your veins," I said.

"You see that dead oak yonder? Two men were lynched there by my ancestors. When I went after Aaron Crown, I hoped maybe I could atone a little for what happened under that tree."

"It makes a great story."

"You're a classic passive-aggressive, Dave, no offense meant. You feign the role of liberal and humanist, but Bubba and Joe Bob own your heart."

"So long, Buford," I said, and walked back to my truck. The wind splayed and flattened the poplar trees against Buford's house. When I looked back over my shoulder, he was mounted on the mare's back, one hand twisted in the mane, the hackamore sawed back in the other, his olive-tan torso anointed with the sun's cool light, sculpted with the promise of perfection that only Greek gods know.

Later, Clete Purcel returned my call and told me Mingo Bloomberg had been sprung from City Prison three days ago by attorneys who worked for Jerry Joe Plumb, also known as Short Boy Jerry, Jerry Ace, and Jerry the Glide.

But even as I held the receiver in my hand, I couldn't concentrate on Clete's words about Mingo's relationship to a peculiar player in the New Orleans underworld. The dispatcher had just walked through my open door and handed me a memo slip with the simple message written on it: Call the Cap up at the zoo re: Crown. He says urgent.

It took twenty minutes to get him on the phone.

"You was right. I should have listened to you. A bunch of the black boys caught him in the tool shack this morning," the captain said.

He'd had to walk from the field and he breathed hard into the telephone.

"Is he dead?" I asked.

"You got it turned around. He killed two of them sonsofbitches with his bare hands and liked to got a third with a cane knife. That old man's a real shitstorm, ain't he?"

bootsie alafair and I were eating supper in the kitchen that evening when the phone rang on the counter. Bootsie got up to answer it. Outside, the clouds in the west were purple and strung with curtains of rain.

Then I heard her say, "Before I give the phone to Dave, could you put Karyn on? I left her a couple of messages, but she probably didn't have time to call… I see… When will she be back?… Could you ask her to call me, Buford? I've really wanted to talk with her… Oh, you know, those things she said about Dave to the sheriff… Hang on now, here's Dave."

She handed me the phone.

"Buford?" I said.

"Yes." His voice sounded as though someone had just wrapped a strand of piano wire around his throat.

"You all right?" I said.

"Yes, I'm fine, thanks… You heard about Crown?" he said.

"A guard at the prison told me."

"Does this give you some idea of his potential?"

"I hear they were cruising for it."

"He broke one guy's neck. He drowned the other one in a barrel of tractor oil," he said.

"I couldn't place your friend this morning. He's Clay Mason, isn't he? What are you doing with him, partner?"

"None of your business."

"That guy was the P. T. Barnum of the acid culture."

"As usual, your conclusions are as wrong as your information."

He hung up the phone. I sat back down at the table.

"You really called Karyn LaRose?" I asked.

"Why? Do you object?" she said.

"No."

She put a piece of chicken in her mouth and looked at me while she chewed. My stare broke.

"I wish I hadn't gone out to see her, Boots."

"He's mixed up with that guru from the sixties?" she said.

"Who knows? The real problem is one nobody cares about."

She waited.

"Aaron Crown had no motivation to kill Ely Dixon. I'm more and more convinced the wrong man's in prison," I said.

"He was in the Klan, Dave."

"They kicked him out. He busted up a couple of them with a wood bench inside a Baptist church."

But why, I thought.

It was a question that only a few people in the Louisiana of the 1990s could answer.

His name was Billy Odom and he ran a junkyard on a stretch of state highway west of Lafayette. Surrounded by a floodplain of emerald green rice fields, the junkyard seemed an almost deliberate eyesore that Billy had lovingly constructed over the decades from rusted and crushed car bodies, mountains of bald tires, and outbuildings festooned with silver hubcaps.

Like Aaron Crown, he was a north Louisiana transplant, surrounded by papists, blacks who could speak French, and a historical momentum that he had not been able to shape or influence or dent in any fashion. His face was as round as a moonpie under his cork sun helmet, split with an incongruous smile that allowed him to hide his thoughts while he probed for the secret meaning that lay in the speech of others. A Confederate flag, almost black with dirt, was nailed among the yellowed calendars on the wall of the shed where he kept his office. He kept licking his lips, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes squinting as though he were staring through smoke.

"A fight in a church? I don't call it to mind," he said.

"You and Aaron were in the same klavern, weren't you?"

His eyes shifted off my face, studied the motes of dust spinning in a shaft of sunlight. He cocked his head philosophically but said nothing.

"Why'd y'all run him off?" I asked.

'"Cause the man don't have the sense God give an earthworm."

"Come on, Billy."

"He used to make whiskey and put fertilizer in the mash. That's where I think he got that stink at. His old woman left him for a one-legged blind man."

"You want to help him, Billy, or see him hung out to dry at Angola?"

His hands draped over his thighs. He studied the backs of them.

"It was 'cause of the girl. His daughter, what's her name, Sabelle, the one runs the bar down at the Underpass."

"I don't follow you."

"The meeting was at a church house. She wasn't but a girl then, waiting outside in the pickup truck. Two men was looking out the window at her. They didn't know Crown was sitting right behind them.

"One goes, 'I hear that's prime.'

"The other one goes, 'It ain't bad. But you best carry a ball of string to find your way back out.'

"That's when Crown put the wood to them. Then he tore into them with his boots. It taken four of us to hold him down."

"You kicked him out of the Klan for defending his daughter?" I said.

Billy Odom pried a pale splinter out of his grease-darkened desk and scratched lines in his skin with it.

"When they're young and cain't keep their panties on, the old man's in it somewhere," he said.

"What?"

"Everybody had suspicioned it. Then a woman from the welfare caught him at it and told the whole goddamn town. That's how come Crown moved down here."

"Aaron and his daughter?" I said.

The man who had seen the accident did not report it for almost three days, not until his wife was overcome with guilt herself and went to a priest and then with her husband to the St. Martin Parish sheriff's office.

Helen Soileau and I stood on the levee by a canal that rimmed Henderson Swamp and watched a diver in a wetsuit pull the steel hook and cable off the back of a wrecker, wade out into the water by a row of bridge pilings, sinking deeper into a balloon of silt, then disappear beneath the surface. The sky was blue overhead, the moss on the dead cypress lifting in the breeze, the sun dancing on the sandbars and the deep green of the willow islands. When a uniformed sheriff's deputy kicked the winch into gear and the cable clanged tight on the car's frame, a gray cloud of mud churned to the surface like a fat man's fist.