James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

She looked at her bobber floating between the pilings.

"So I found her. She wasn't lost, though. She was in a houseboat, right across the bay there, with a couple of men. I never told Aaron what she had been doing. But I think he knew."

"You believe he's innocent?"

"Probably not. It's just one of those strange deals, Alf. The guy loved his daughter, which means he has emotions and affections like the rest of us. That's something we don't like to think about when we assign a person the role of assassin and community geek."

She thought the word geek was funny and snorted through her nose.

It started to sprinkle, and we hung raincoats over our heads like cloistered monks and pulled sac-a-lait out of the pilings until mid-morning, then layered them with crushed ice in the cooler and headed for home just as a squall churned out of the south like smoke twisting inside a bottle.

We gutted and half-mooned the fish at the gills and scaled them with spoons under the canvas tarp on the dock. Batist, the black man who worked for me, came out of the bait shop with an unlit cigar stuck in his jaw. He let the screen slam behind him. He was bald and wore bell-bottomed blue jeans and a white T-shirt that looked like rotted cheesecloth on his barrel chest.

"There's a guard from the prison farm inside," he said.

"What's he want?" I said.

"I ain't axed. Whatever it is, it don't have nothing to do with spending money. Dave, we got to have these kind in our shop?"

Oh boy, I thought.

I went inside and saw the old-time gunbull from the lockdown unit I had visited at Angola just yesterday. He was seated at a back table by the lunch meat cooler, his back stiff, his profile carved out of teak.

He wore a fresh khaki shirt and trousers, a hand-tooled belt, a white straw hat slanted over his forehead. His walking cane, whose point was sheathed in a six-inch steel tube, the kind road gang hacks used to carry, was hooked by the handle over the back of his chair. He had purchased a fifty-cent can of soda to drink with the brown paper bag of ginger snaps he had brought with him.

"How's it goin', Cap?" I said.

"Need your opinion on something," he replied. His accent was north Louisiana hill country, the vowels phlegmy and round and deep in the throat, like speech lifted out of the nineteenth century.

His hands, which were dotted with liver spots, shook slightly with palsy. His career reached back into an era when Angola convicts were beaten with the black Betty, stretched out on anthills, locked down in sweatboxes on Camp A, sometimes even murdered by guards on a whim and buried in the Mississippi levee. In the years I had know him I had never seen him smile or heard him mention any form of personal life outside the penitentiary.

"Some movie people is offered me five thousand dollars for a interview about Crown. What do you reckon I ought to do?" he said.

"Take it. What's the harm?"

He bit the edge off a ginger snap.

"I got the feeling they want me to say he don't belong up there on the farm, that maybe the wrong man's in prison."

"I see."

"Something's wrong, ain't it?"

"Sir?"

"White man kills a black man down South, them Hollywood people don't come looking to get the white man off."

"I don't have an answer for you, Cap. Just tell them what you think and forget about it." I looked at the electric clock on the wall above the counter.

"What I think is the sonofabitch's about half-human." My eyes met his. "He's got a stink on him don't wash off. If he ain't killed the NAACP nigger, he done it to somebody else."

He chewed a ginger snap dryly in his jaw, then swallowed it with a small sip of soda, the leathery skin of his face cobwebbed with lines in the gloom.

Word travels fast among the denizens of the nether regions.

On Tuesday morning Helen Soileau came into my office at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and said we had to pick up and hold a New Orleans hoodlum named Mingo Bloomberg, who was wanted as a material witness in the killing of a police officer in the French Quarter.

"You know him?" she asked. She wore a starched white shirt and blue slacks and her badge on her gunbelt. She was a blonde, muscular woman whose posture and bold stare always seemed to anticipate, even relish, challenge or insult.

"He's a button man for the Giacano family," I said.

"We don't have that."

"Bad communications with NOPD, then. Mingo's specialty is disappearing his victims. He's big on fish chum."

"That's terrific. Expidee Chatlin is baby-sitting him for us."

We checked out a cruiser and drove into the south part of the parish on back roads that were lined with sugarcane wagons on their way to the mill. Then we followed a levee through a partially cleared field to a tin-roofed fish camp set back in a grove of persimmon and pecan trees. A cruiser was parked in front of the screened-in gallery, the front doors opened, the radio turned off.

Expidee Chatlin had spent most of his law-enforcement career as a crossing guard or escorting drunks from the jail to guilty-court. He had narrow shoulders and wide hips, a tube of fat around his waist, and a thin mustache that looked like grease pencil. He and another uniformed deputy were eating sandwiches with Mingo Bloomberg at a plank table on the gallery.

"What do you think you're doing, Expidee?" Helen asked.

"Waiting on y'all. What's it look like?" he replied.

"How's it hanging, Robicheaux?" Mingo Bloomberg said.

"No haps, Mingo."

He emptied his beer can and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He was a handsome man and wore beltless gray slacks and loafers and a long-sleeve shirt printed with flowers. His hair was copper-colored and combed straight back on his scalp, his eyes ice blue, as invasive as a dirty finger when they locked on yours.

He opened his lighter and began to flick the flint dryly, as though we were not there.

"Get out of that chair and lean against the wall," Helen said.

He lowered the lighter, his mouth screwed into a smile around his cigarette. She pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, threw it over her shoulder, and aimed her nine millimeter into the middle of his face.

"Say something wise, you fuck. Go ahead. I want you to," she said.

I pulled him to his feet, pushed him against the wall, and kicked his ankles apart. When I shook him down I tapped a hard, square object in his left pocket. I removed a.25 caliber automatic, dropped the magazine, pulled the slide back on the empty chamber, then tossed the pistol into Expidee's lap.

"Nobody told me. I thought the guy was suppose to be a witness or something," he said.

Helen cuffed Mingo's wrists behind him and shoved him toward the screen door.

"Hey, Robicheaux, you and the lady take your grits off the stove," he said.

"It's up to you, Mingo," I said.

We were out front now, under a gray sky, in the wind, in leaves that toppled out of the trees on the edge of the clearing. Mingo rolled his eyes. "Up to me? You ought to put a cash register on top of y'all's cruiser," he said.

"You want to explain that?" I said.

He looked at Helen, then back at me.

"Give us a minute," I said to her.

I walked him to the far side of our cruiser, opened the back door and sat him down behind the wire-mesh screen. I leaned one arm on the roof and looked down into his face. An oiled, coppery strand of hair fell down across his eyes.

"You did the right thing with this guy Crown. You do the right thing, you get taken care of. Something wrong with that?" he said.

"Yeah. I'm not getting taken care of."

"Then that's your fucking problem."

"When you get back to the Big Sleazy, stay there, Mingo," I said, and closed the car door.

"I got a permit for the piece you took off me. I want it back," he said through the open window.