James Burke - Cadillac Jukebox

I took my grocery sack of frozen crawfish and potato salad out of the truck and glanced at the priest, who stood at the end of my dock, watching a flight of ducks winnow across the tops of the cypress trees. His hair was snow white, his face windburned in the fading light. I wondered if his dreams were troubled by the confessional tales that men like Dolowitz brought from the dark province in which they lived, or if sleep came to him only after he granted himself absolution, too, and rinsed their sins from his memory, undoing the treachery that had made him the repository of their evil.

I walked up the drive, through the deepening shadows, into the back door of my house.

at sunrise Clete Purcel and I sat in my truck on the side street next to Persephone and Dock Green's home in the Garden District. The morning was cold, and clouds of mist almost completely blanketed the two-story antebellum house and the white brick wall that surrounded the backyard. Clete ate from a box of jelly-filled doughnuts and drank out of a large Styrofoam cup of coffee.

"I can't believe I got up this early just to pull No Duh's butt out of the fire," he said. When I didn't reply, he said, "If you think you're going to jam up Persephone Green, you're wrong. Didi Gee was her old man, and she's twice as smart as he was and just as ruthless."

"She'll go down just like he did."

"The Big C killed Didi. We never touched him."

"It doesn't matter how you get to the boneyard."

"What, we got an exemption?" he said, then got out of the truck and strolled across the street to the garden wall. The palms that extended above the bricks were dark green inside the mist. I heard a loud splash, then saw Clete lean down and squint through the thick grillwork on the gate. He walked back to the truck, picked up another doughnut and his coffee off the floor and sat down in the seat. He shook an image out of his thoughts.

"What is it?" I said.

"It's forty-five degrees and she's swimming in the nude. She's got quite a stroke…" He drank out of his coffee cup and looked at the iron gate in the wall. He pursed his mouth, obviously not yet free from an image that hovered behind his eyes. "Damn, I'm not kidding you, Streak, you ought to see the gagongas on that broad."

"Look out front," I said.

A gray stretch limo with a rental U-Haul truck behind it pulled to the curb. Dock Green got out of the back of the limo and strode up the front walk.

"Show time," Clete said. He removed my Japanese field glasses from the glove box and focused them on the limo's chauffeur, who was wiping the water off the front windows. "Hey, it's Whitey Zeroski," Clete said. "Remember, the wetbrain used to own a little pizza joint in the Channel? He ran for city council and put megaphones and vote for whitey signs all over his car and drove into colored town on Saturday night. He couldn't figure out why he got all his windows broken."

A moment later we heard Dock and Persephone Green's voices on the other side of the garden wall.

"It don't have to shake out like this," he said.

"You milked through the fence too many times, hon. I hope they were worth it," she replied.

"It's over. You got my word… Come out of the water and talk. We can go have breakfast somewhere."

"Bye, Dock."

"We're a team, Seph. Ain't nothing going to separate us. Believe it when I say it."

"I hate to tell you this but you're a disappearing memory. I've got to practice my backstroke now… Keep your eyes somewhere else, Dock… You don't own the geography anymore."

We heard her body weight push off from the side of the pool and her arms dipping rhythmically into the water.

"Let's 'front both of them," Clete said, and started to get out of the truck.

"No, that'll just get No Duh into it deeper."

"Where's your head, Dave? That guy wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. The object is to flush Mookie Zerrang out in the open and then take him off at the neck."

"We have to wait, Cletus."

I saw the frustration and anger in his face. I put my hand on his shoulder. It was as hard as a cured ham. When he didn't speak, I took my hand away.

"I appreciate your coming with me," I said.

"Oh hell yeah, this is great stuff. You know why I was a New Orleans cop? Because we could break all the rules and get away with it. This town's problems aren't going to end until we run all these fuckers back under the sewer grates where they belong."

"I think Persephone got to you, partner," I said.

"You're right. I should have been a criminal. It's a simpler life."

For a half hour Dock and two workmen carried out his office furniture, his computer, his files, and a huge glass bottle, the kind mounted on water coolers, filled with an amber-tinted liquid and the embalmed body of a bobcat. The bobcat's paws were pressed against the glass, as though it were drowning.

Then the three of them drove away without the limo. Clete and I got out of the truck and walked to the gate. Through the grillwork and the banana fronds I could see steam rising off the turquoise surface of the pool and hear her feet kicking steadily with her long stroke.

"It's Dave Robicheaux. How about opening up, Persephone?" I said.

"Dream on," she replied from inside the steam.

"You stole a test for Karyn LaRose and got expelled from college. Why let her take you down again?"

"Excuse me?"

"Try this as a fantasy, Seph. You and all your friends are on an airliner with Karyn and Buford LaRose. Karyn and Buford are at the controls. The plane is on fire. There are only two parachutes on board… Who's going to end up with the parachutes?"

I could hear her treading water in the stillness, then rising from the pool at the far end.

She appeared at the gate in a white robe and sandals, a towel wrapped around her hair. She unlocked the gate and pulled it back on its hinges, then turned and walked to an iron table without speaking, the long, tapered lines of her body molded against the cloth of her robe.

She combed her hair back with her towel, her face regal, at an angle to us, seemingly indifferent to our presence.

"What's on your mind?" she said. Her voice was throaty, her cheeks pale and slightly sunken, her mouth the same shade as the red morning glories that cascaded down the wall behind her.

Clete kept staring at her.

"Has he been fed?" she asked.

"You got to pardon me. I was thinking you look like Cher, the movie actress. You even have a tattoo," he said.

"My, you have busy eyes," she said.

"Yeah, I was noticing the hole over there by the compost pile. Is that where y'all buried No Duh Dolowitz?" he said.

"The little man with the grease mustache? That's what this is about?" she asked.

"He shouldn't have come here, Persephone. He thought he was doing something for me. It was a mistake," I said.

"I see. I'm going to have him hurt?"

"You're a tough lady," I said.

"I have no interest in your friends, Dave. You don't mind if I call you 'Dave,' do you, since you call me by my first name without asking?"

"Mookie Zerrang is a bad button man, Seph. He doesn't do it for money. That means you've got no dials on him."

"Did you ever have this kind of conversation with my father, or do you speak down to me just because I'm a woman?"

"In honesty, I guess I did."

"What Streak means is, he beat the shit out of Didi Gee with a canvas money bag filled with lug nuts. He did this because your old man had his half-brother shot. You might say y'all have a tight family history," Clete said.

Clete's mouth was hooked downward at the corners, his face heated, the scar tissue through his eyebrow and across his nose flexed tight against the skull. She tried to meet his gaze, then looked away at the tongues of vapor rising from her swimming pool.