James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

When I entered her she hooked her legs in mine and laced the fingers of one hand in my hair and placed the other hand hard in the small of my back. I could feel her breath against the side of my face, the perspiration on her stomach and inside her thighs, then her tongue on my neck, the wetness of her mouth near my ear. I wanted to hold it, to give more satisfaction than I received, but that terrible moment of male pleasure and solitary indulgence had its way.

"Boots-" I said hoarsely.

"It's all right, Dave. Go ahead," she whispered.

She ran both palms down my lower back and pushed me deeper inside, then something broke like a dam and melted in my loins and I closed my eyes and saw a sailfish rise from a cresting wave, its mouth torn with a hook, its skin blue and hard, its gills strung with pink foam. Then it disappeared into the wave again, and the groundswells were suddenly flat and empty, dented with rain, sliding across the fire coral down below.

It should have been a perfect afternoon. But on my way out Bootsie asked, almost as an afterthought, "Was there any other reason you didn't want to go to the LaRoses?"

"No, of course not."

I tried to avert my eyes, but it was too late. I saw the recognition in her face, like a sharp and unexpected slap.

"It was a long time ago, Boots. Before we were married."

She nodded, her thoughts concealed. Then she said, her voice flat, "We're all modern people these days. Like you say, Streak, no problem."

She walked down to the pond at the back of our property by herself, with a bag of bread crusts, to feed the ducks.

At sunrise the next day, while I was helping Batist open up the bait shop before I went to work, the old-time gunbull called me long-distance from Angola.

"You remember I told you about them movie people come see me? There's one ain't gonna be around no more," he said.

"What happened, Cap?"

"My nephew's a uniform at NOPD in the First District. They thought it was just a white man interested in the wrong piece of jelly roll. That's till they found the camera," he said.

After I hung up the phone I filled minnow buckets for two fishermen, put a rental outboard in the water, and pulled the tarp on guy wires over the spool tables on the dock in case it rained. Batist was sprinkling hickory chips on the coals in the barbecue pit, which we had fashioned from a split oil drum to cook chickens and links of sausage for our midday customers.

"That was that old man from up at the prison farm?" he asked.

"I'm afraid so."

"I ain't going to say it but once, no. It don't matter what that kind of man bring into your life, it ain't no good."

"I'm a police officer, podna. I can't always be selective about the people I talk to."

He cut his head and walked away.

I left a message for the nephew at NOPD and drove to the office just as it started to mist. He returned my call two hours later, then turned over the telephone to a Homicide detective. This is how I've reconstructed the story that was told to me.

Vice had identified the hooker as Brandy Grissum, a black twenty-five-year-old heroin addict who had done a one-bit in the St. John the Baptist jail for sale and possession.

She worked with three or four pimps and Murphy artists out of the Quarter. The pimps were there for the long-term regular trade. The Murphy artists took down the tourists, particularly those who were drunk, married, respectable, in town on conventions, scared of cops and their employers.

It was an easy scam. Brandy would walk into a bar, well dressed, perhaps wearing a suit, sit at the end of the counter, or by herself in a booth, glance once into the John's face, her eyes shy, her hands folded demurely in front of her, then wait quietly while her partner cut the deal.

This is the shuck: "My lady over there ain't a reg'lar, know what I'm sayin'? Kind of like a schoolgirl just out on the town." Here he smiles. "She need somebody take her 'round the world, know what I'm sayin'? I need sixty dollars to cover the room, we'll all walk down to it, I ain't goin' nowhere on you. Then you want to give her a present or something, that's between y'all."

The difference in the scenario this time was the John had his own room as well as agenda.

His name was Dwayne Parsons, an Academy Award nominee and two-time Emmy winner for his documentary scripts. But Dwayne Parsons had another creative passion, too, one that was unknown to the hooker and the Murphy artist and a second black man who was about to appear soon-a video camera set up on a tripod in his closet, the lens pointed through a crack in the door at the waterbed in his leased efficiency apartment a block off Bourbon.

Parsons and the woman were undressed, on top of black satin sheets, when the hard, insistent knock came at the door. The man's head jerked up from the pillow, his face at first startled, then simply disconcerted and annoyed.

"They'll go away," he said.

He tried to hold her arms, hold her in place on top of him, but she slid her body off his.

"It's my boyfriend. He don't let me alone. He's gonna break down the do'," she said. She began to gather her clothes in front of her breasts and stomach.

"Hey, I look like a total schmuck to you?" Parsons said. "Don't open that door… Did you hear me… Listen, you fucking nigger, you're not hustling me."

She slid back the deadbolt on the door, and suddenly the back and conked and side-shaved head of a gargantuan black man were in the lens. Whoever he was, he was not the man Brandy Grissum had expected. She swallowed as though she had a razor blade in her throat.

But Dwayne Parsons was still not with the script.

"You want to rob me, motherfucker, just take the money off the dresser. You get the gun at the Screen Actors Guild?" he said.

The black man with the gun did not speak. But the terror in the woman's face left no doubt about the decision she saw taking place in his.

"I ain't seen you befo', bitch. You trying to work independent?" he said.

"No… I mean yes, I don't know nobody here. I ain't from New Orleans." She pressed her clothes against her breasts and genitalia. Her mouth was trembling.

One block away, a brass street band was playing on Bourbon. The man thought some more, then jerked the barrel of his automatic toward the door. She slipped her skirt and blouse on, wadded up her undergarments and shoes and purse and almost flew out the door.

Dwayne Parson's face had drained. He started to get up from the bed.

"No, no, my man," the black man said, approaching him, blocking off the camera's view of Parson's face. "Hey, it comes to everybody. You got it on with the sister. It could be worse. I said don't move, man. It's all gonna come out the same way. They ain't no need for suffering."

He picked up a pillow, pressed it down in front of him, his upper arm swelling to the diameter and hardness of a fireplug while Dwayne Parson's body flopped like a fish's. The man with the gun stepped back quickly and fired two shots into the pillow- pop, pop - and then went past the camera's lens, one grizzled Cro-Magnon jaw and gold tooth flashing by like a shark's profile in a zoo tank.

In the distance the street band thundered out "Fire House Blues." Dwayne Parson's body, the head still covered by the pillow, looked like a broken white worm in the middle of the sheet.

The LaRose plantation was far out in the parish, almost to St. Martinville. The main house had been built in 1857 and was the dusty color of oyster shells, its wide, columned front porch scrolled by live oak trees that grew to the third floor. A row of shacks in back that had once been slaves quarters was now stacked with baled hay, and the old brick smithy had been converted into a riding stable, the arched windows sealed by the original iron shutters, which leaked orange rust as though from a wound.