James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

"I used to buy into psychobabble myself, Karyn. It's a lot of fun."

"I guess there's not much point in any of this, is there?" she said. Her skirt was tight against her body when she gathered up her purse and rose from her chair. "I wish it had been different, Dave. I wish the grog hadn't gotten you. I wish I'd been able to help. I can't say for sure I loved you, but I loved being with you. Be good to yourself, kiddo."

With that, she went out the door. I could hear my ears ring in the silence.

Just before lunch the sheriff came into my office.

"This morning I've had a call from the mayor's office, one from the chamber of commerce, and one from the New Iberia Historical Preservation Society," he said. "Did you know Jerry Joe Plumb just bought an acre lot right down from the Shadows?"

"No."

"He also bought a bunch of rural property south of the city limits. How well do you get along with him?"

"All right."

"Find out what he's up to. I don't want any more phone calls."

"Where is he?"

"Watching a bulldozer level the house that's on the lot by the Shadows."

I drove down East Main under the arched live oaks that spanned the street, toward the Shadows, a red brick and white-columned antebellum home built in 1831 on Bayou Teche. The acre Jerry Joe had purchased was located between two Victorian homes and went all the way back to the bayou and was shaded by oaks that were over one hundred years old. I drove through the piked gate and parked next to a salvage truck and an earth grader, where a group of workmen were eating lunch. Down by the bayou was a huge pile of splintered cypress boards, twisted pipe, crushed plaster powdering in the wind, and a flattened gazebo with the passion vine still clinging to the lattice work.

"Y'all couldn't move it instead?" I said.

"The termites was too heavy to get on the truck. That's a pure fact," a man in a yellow hard hat with a jaw full of bread and Vienna sausage said. He and his friends laughed.

"Where's Jerry Joe? I'll tell him how effective you are at doing PR with the sheriff's department."

It was a short drive to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge. As soon as I stepped through the door I heard Clifton Chenier's "Hey Tite Fille" on the jukebox and saw Jerry Joe out on the polished wood floor, dancing with a waitress. His elbows were tucked close to his ribs, his fingers pointed at angles like a 1940s jitterbugger, his oxblood loafers glinting. His whole body seemed animated with rhythm. His shoulders titled and vibrated; he jiggled and bopped and created an incredible sense of energy and movement without ever stepping out of a twelve-inch radius, and all the while his face beamed at the waitress with genuine pleasure and affection.

I ordered a 7-Up at the bar and waited for him to sit down. When he finished dancing he squeezed the waitress's hand, walked past me, his eyes fixed on the black bar man, and said, "Bring my friend the same order I got."

"Don't do that, Jerry Joe," I said to his back.

He pulled out a chair at a table covered with a red-and-white-checkered cloth. "You got it whether you want it or not… Catfish filet with etoufee on the top. This is food you expect only in the afterlife," he said. He twisted another chair out. "What's the haps?"

"Some people want to know why you just bulldozed down a house that George Washington Cable once lived in."

"Who?"

"A famous writer."

"Because it had an asbestos roof, because the floors were like walking on wet cardboard, because there were vampire bats in the drainpipes."

"Why not work with people, Jerry Joe, explain that to them, instead of giving them heart failure?"

"Because the problem is not what I'm tearing down, it's what they think I'm going to build. Like maybe a pink elephant in the middle of the historical district." He put a stuffed mushroom in his mouth. "What? Oh, I get it. They got reason to have those kind of concerns?"

"I didn't say that."

"What are we talking about, then? I got it. It's not the house, it's me."

"No one can accuse you of being a Rotarian."

"I told you, my sheet's an embarrassment. I'm on a level with unlicensed church bingo."

"You and some others guys hit a fur truck. You also stuffed a building contractor into a cement mixer."

"He was taking scabs through our picket. Besides, I pulled him back out."

"Why are you buying property south of town?"

He patted his palm on top of his forearm, glanced toward the sound of someone dropping coins inside the jukebox. "Maybe I want out. Maybe I'm tired of New Orleans, being in the life, all that jazz. So maybe I got a chance and I'm taking it."

"I'm not with you."

"Buford LaRose is good for business… Turn on your brain for a minute, Dave… What if these peckerwoods get in Baton Rouge? New Orleans will be a worst toilet than it already is."

"A Mexican guy tried to take me out. Your man Mingo says it was a hit. Why do mobbed-up people in New Orleans care about a cop in Iberia Parish?"

Jerry Joe scratched the red tattoo of a parachute on his forearm.

"Number one, Mingo's not my man. Number two, times are changing, Dave. Dope's gonna be out one day. The smart money is looking for a new home… Listen, to that… ' La Jolie Blon'… Boy, I love that song. My mom taught me to dance to it."

"Where'd the hit come from?"

"I don't know. That's the honest-to-God truth. Just leave this civil rights garbage alone and watch yourself with Karyn LaRose."

"How did you-"

"You want to ask me where she's got a certain birthmark?" He pressed his hands flat on the tablecloth and looked at them. "Try a little humility, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but some broads ain't any different from men. They like to screw down and marry up. She ever talk about marriage to you?"

He raised his eyes and started to grin. Then his face became embarrassed and he grimaced and looked around the room. The coiled white scar at the corner of his eye was bunched in a knot.

"You want a breadstick?" he asked.

Our jailer, Kelso Andrepont, was a three-hundred-pound bisexual black man who pushed his way through life with the calm, inert certitude of a glacier sliding downhill. The furrows in his neck gave off an oily shine and were dotted with moles that looked like raisins pasted on his skin, and his glasses magnified his eyes into luminous orbs the size of oysters.

He stared up at me from his cluttered desk.

"So why are we holding the guy here if he's got a negligent homicide beef in St. Martin Parish?"

"We're treating the case as an abduction. The abduction happened inside Iberia Parish," I said. "We're working with St. Martin on the other charge."

"Yeah, shit rolls downhill, too. And I'm always downhill from you, Robicheaux."

"I'm sorry to hear you take that attitude."

"This guy was born for Camp J. He don't belong here. I got enough racial problems as it is."

"How about starting over, Kelso?"

"He complains he's being discriminated against, get this, because he's Jewish and we're making him eat pork. So he throws his tray in a trusty's face. Then he says he wants isolation because maybe there's a black guy coming in here to whack him out.

"I go, 'What black guy?'

"He goes, 'How the fuck should I know? Maybe the guy I just threw the food at.'

"I go, 'Your brain's been doing too many push-ups, Bloomberg. You ought to give it a rest.'

"He goes, 'I come in here on my own and a dyke blindsides me with a baton and charges me with assault. No wonder you got a jail ninety percent cannibal. No one else would live in a shithole like this.'"

"You've got him in isolation now?" I asked.

"A guy who uses words like cannibal to a black man? No, I got him out there in the yard, teaching aerobics to the brothers. This job would drive me to suicide if it wasn't for guys like you, Robicheaux."