James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

"What are you doing, Alf?" I said.

"I got the key to the jukebox out of the cash register. Is that all right?"

"Yeah, that's fine."

She had wheeled Jerry Joe Plumb's jukebox away from the wall, where I had pushed it front end first, and unlocked the door and stacked the 45 rpm records on top of a soft towel on the counter.

"I'm playing each one of them on my portable and recording them on tape. I've already recorded fifteen of them," she said. "You like all these, don't you?"

I nodded, my eyes gazing out the window at the lighted gallery of the house. "That's great, Alf," I said.

"Who's the buttwipe who cut the electric cord on the box?"

"Beg your pardon?"

"The buttwipe who sliced off the cord. What kind of person would do that?"

"How about it on the language?"

"Big deal," she said. She slid a record off her machine and replaced it with another, her face pointed downward so that her hair hid her expression.

"Why are you so angry?" I asked.

"You and Bootsie, Dave. Why don't y'all stop it?"

I sat down on a stool next to her.

"I made some mistakes," I said.

"Then unmake them. You're my father. You're supposed to fix things. Not break the jukebox 'cause you're mad at it."

I crimped my lips and tried to find the right words. If there were any, I didn't know them.

"Everything's messed up in our house. I hate it," she said, her eyes shining, then brimming with tears.

"Let's see what we can do about it, then," I said, and walked up the slope, through the trees, across the gallery and into the stillness of the house.

Bootsie was at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee. She wore a pair of straw sandals and white slacks and a stonewashed denim shirt. The surfaces of her face looked as cool and shiny as alabaster.

"The job's not worth it anymore. It's time to hang it up," I said.

"Is that what you want?"

"I can always do some P.I. stuff with Clete if we get jammed up."

"No."

"I thought you'd approve."

"I had to go to confession this afternoon," she said.

"What for?"

"I went to see Batist at the hospital. When I left I wanted to kill the man who did that to him. I wanted to see something even worse happen to Karyn and Buford. I told Father Pitre my feelings probably won't go away, either. He said it was all right, it's natural to feel what I do… But it's not going to be all right, not until those people are punished. Nobody can be allowed to get away with what they've done."

Her neck bloomed with color. I stood behind her chair and put my hands on her shoulders and kneaded my thumbs on her spine, then leaned over and pressed my cheek against her hair. I felt her reach up over my head and touch the back of my neck, arching her head against mine, rubbing her hair against my skin. Then she rose from her chair and pressed herself against me, no holding back now, her breasts and flat stomach and thighs tight against me, her mouth like a cold burn on my throat.

Through the screen I could hear Alafair playing " La Jolie Blon " on her record player.

No Duh Dolowitz was a Jersey transplant and old-time pete man who had been dented too many times in the head with a ball peen hammer, which didn't diminish his talents as a safecracker but for some reason did develop in him a tendency for bizarre humor, finally earning him the nickname among cops of the Mob's Merry Prankster. He backed up a truck to the home of a contractor in the Poconos and filled his wet bar and basement game room to the ceiling with bituminous coal, stole a human head from the Tulane medical school and put it in a government witness's bowling ball bag, and sabotaged the family-day promotion of a floating casino by smuggling a group of black trans-vestites on board to do the stage show.

Also, in terms of information about the underworld, he was the human equivalent of flypaper.

Sunday morning Clete and I found him in his brother-in-law's saloon and poolroom by the Industrial Canal in New Orleans. He wore a maroon shirt, white suspenders, knife-creased gray slacks, and a biscuit-colored derby hat. His face was tan and lean, his mustache as black as grease. He sat with us at a felt-covered card table, sipping black coffee from a demitasse with a tiny silver spoon in it. The poolroom had a stamped tin ceiling, a railed bar, wood floors, and big glass windows painted with green letters that gave a green cast to the inside of the room. It was still early, and the poolroom was closed.

"Give No Duh a beer and a shot. Put it on my tab," Clete called to the bartender, then said to Dolowitz, "You're looking very copacetic, No Duh."

"Shitcan the beer and the shot," Dolowitz said. "Why the squeeze?"

"We're looking for a guy named Mookie Zerrang," I said.

"A cannibal looks like King Kong?" he said.

"He hurt a friend of mine real bad. I think he killed Short Boy Jerry, too," I said.

His brown eyes looked without expression at a point on the far wall.

"I hear you're on the outs with the Giacanos," Clete said.

Dolowitz shook his head nonchalantly, his face composed.

"You and Stevie Gee got nailed on that pawnshop job. You made bond first and creeped Stevie's house," Clete said.

"He mentioned he boosted my mother's new car?" Dolowitz said.

"You've got bad markers all over town and you're four weeks back on the vig to Wee Willie Bimstine," Clete said.

"I'd tell you 'No duh,' Purcel, but I'm not interested in defending myself or having trouble with either one of yous. You want to play some nine ball? A dollar on the three, the six, and the nine."

"Dave can get you a few bucks from his department. I can get Wee Willie off your back. How about it?" Clete said.

"Zerrang's freelance," Dolowitz said. "Look, check my jacket. I burned a safe or two and did some creative favors for a few people. Zerrang blows heads. He's a sicko, too. He likes being cruel when he don't have to be."

"Three names I want you to think about, No Duh," I said. "Jimmy Ray Dixon, Dock Green, and his wife, Persephone."

He was motionless in his chair, the names registering in his eyes in ways you couldn't read. Then the skin at the side of his mouth ticked slightly. His eyes hardened and his upper lip filmed with moisture, as though the room had suddenly become close and warm.

"Here's the rest of it," Clete said. "You come up with the gen on these guys, I'll make you righteous with Wee Willie. But you shine us off and miss another week on the vig, you better get your skinny ass back up to the Jersey Shore, find a hole, and pull it in after you."

When we left him, his confidence had drained like water out of a sink and his face was filled with the conflict of a hunted animal.

Clete and I stood on the sidewalk under the dilapidated wood colonnade that shaded the front of the poolroom. It was cool in the shade, and the sunlight looked bright and hard on the neutral ground and the palm trees.

"I can't do this, Clete," I said.

"Don't screw it up, mon."

I tapped on the door glass for the bartender to open up.

"Do what you feel comfortable with, No Duh. Nobody's going to twist you," I said.

"Go play with your worms. Blimpo out there gets off on this. I hope in the next life both yous come back a guy like me, see how you like it," he replied.

as a police officer you accept the fact that, in all probability, you will become the instrument that delivers irreparable harm to a variety of individuals. Granted, they design their own destinies, are intractable in their attitudes, and live with the asp at their breasts; but the fact remains that it is you who will appear at some point in their lives, like the headsman with his broad ax on the medieval scaffold, and serve up a fate to them that has the same degree of mercy as that dealt out by your historical predecessor.