James Burke: Cadillac Jukebox

"What was that about?" I asked him in the truck.

"I told you, I'm tired of being patient with lowlifes. You know what our finest hour was? The day we popped that drug dealer and his bodyguard in the back of their Caddy. The seats looked like somebody had thrown a cow through a tree shredder. Admit it, it was a grand afternoon."

"Bad way to think, Cletus."

"One day you're going to figure out you're no different from me, Dave."

"Yeah?"

"Then you're going to shoot yourself."

He tried to hold the seriousness in his face, but I saw his eyes start to smile.

"You'll never change, Streak," he said, his expression full of play again.

I turned the ignition, then looked through the front window and saw Whitey Zeroski, the limo driver, walking toward us. He wore a gray chauffeur's uniform, with brass buttons and a gray cap that sat low, military style, over his white eyebrows.

"What are you guys doing here?" he said through my window, his eyes focusing on the doughnut Clete was about to put in his mouth.

"You want a doughnut, Whitey?" Clete said.

"I don't mind… Thanks, Purcel… I'm stuck here… Dock says I should hang around in case his wife wants to meet him up at Copeland's for breakfast."

"Dock better do a reality check," Clete said.

"That fight, you mean? It goes on all the time. Dock might give up lots of things, but his wife ain't gonna be one of them."

"Oh yeah?" Clete said.

"Dock's nuts, but he ain't so nuts he forgot his wife's got the brains in the family."

"It's the stuff of great love affairs," Clete said.

"Who built the big casino downtown?" Whitey said. "Mobbed-up guys with real smarts from Chicago and Vegas, right? Where do they build it? Between Louis Armstrong Park and the Iberville welfare project, the two most dangerous areas in downtown New Orleans. If you win at the table, you just walk outside and hand your money over to the muggers. How's that for fucking smarts? You think the lesson is lost on the local schmucks?"

Clete and I looked at each other.

Twenty minutes later we were on I-10, speeding past Lake Pontchartrain. Fog puffed out of the trees on the north shore of the lake, and the rain was falling on the lake's surface inside the fog.

"She's the funnel for the wiseguys and Jimmy Ray Dixon into LaRose's administration, isn't she?" Clete said.

"That's the way I'd read it."

"I don't think I'm going to survive having a wetbrain like Whitey Zeroski explain that to me," he said.

Early the next morning I went to Sabelle Crown's bar at the Underpass in Lafayette. The black bartender told me I'd find her at the city golf course on the northside.

"The golf course?" I said.

"That's where she go when she want to be alone," he said.

He was right. I found her sitting on a bench under a solitary oak tree by the first fairway, a scarf tied around her head, flipping bread crusts from a bag at the pigeons. The sky was gray, and leaves were blowing out of the trees in the distance.

"Your old man tried to drop a car frame on top of Jimmy Ray Dixon," I said.

"The things you learn," she said.

"Who got you started in the life, Sabelle?"

"You know, I have a total blackout about all that stuff."

"You left New Iberia for New Orleans, then disappeared up north."

"This is kind of a private place for me, Dave. Buford LaRose tried to have Daddy killed out on the Atchafalaya River. Haven't you done enough?"

"Were you in Chicago?" I asked.

She brushed the bread crumbs off her hands and walked to her parked automobile, the back of her scarf lifting in the wind.

After I returned to the office, I got a telephone call from the sheriff.

"I'm in Vermilion Parish. Drop what you're doing and come over for a history lesson," he said.

"What's up?"

"You said this character Mookie Zerrang was a leg breaker on the Mississippi coast and a button man in Miami?"

"That's the word."

"Think closer to home."

I signed out of the office and met the sheriff on a dirt road that fed into a steel-and-wood bridge over the Vermilion River ten miles south of Lafayette. He was leaning against his cruiser, eating from a roll of red boudin wrapped in wax paper. The sky had cleared, and the sunlight on the water looked like hammered gold leaf. The sheriff wiped his mouth with his wrist.

"Man, I love this stuff," he said. "My doctor says my arteries probably look like the sewer lines under Paris. I wonder what he means by that."

"What are we doing here, skipper?" I said.

"That name, 'Zerrang,' it kept bouncing around in my head. Then I remembered the story of that Negro kid back during World War II. You remember the one? Same name."

"No."

"Yeah, you do. He was electrocuted. He was fourteen years old and probably retarded. He was too small for the chair, or the equipment didn't work right, I forget which. But evidently what happened to him was awful."

His face became solemn. He lay the waxpaper and piece of boudin on the cruiser's hood and slipped his hands in his pockets and gazed at the river.

"I was a witness at only one execution. The guy who got it was depraved and it never bothered me. But whenever I think of that Zerrang kid back in '43,1 wonder if the human race should be on the planet… Take a walk with me," he said.

We crossed an irrigation ditch on a board plank and entered a stand of hackberry and persimmon trees on the riverbank. Up ahead, through the foliage, I could see three spacious breezy homes on big green lots. But here, inside the tangle of trees and air vines and blackberry bushes, was Louisiana's more humble past-a cypress shack that was only a pile of boards now, some of them charred, a privy that had collapsed into the hole under it, a brick chimney that had toppled like broken teeth into the weeds.

"This is where the boy's family lived, at least until a bunch of drunks set their shack on fire. The boy had one brother, and the brother had a son named Mookie. What do you think of that?" he said.

"Where'd you get all this, Sheriff?" I asked.

"From my dad, just this morning. He's ninety-two years old now. However, his memory is remarkable. Sometimes it gives him no rest." The sheriff turned over a blackened board with the toe of his half-topped boot.

"Did your father grow up around here?"

The sheriff rubbed the calluses of one palm on the backs of his knuckles.

"Sir?" I said.

"He was one of the drunks who burned them out. We can't blame Mookie Zerrang on the greaseballs in Miami. He's of our own making, Dave."

batist had been released from the hospital that day, and after work I shopped for him at the grocery in town and then drove out to his house.

He was sitting in a soft, stuffed chair on the gallery, wearing a flannel shirt over the bandages that were taped on his shoulders. His daughter, a large, square woman who looked more Indian than black, was in the side yard, hammering the dust out of a quilt with an old tennis racquet.

I told Batist the story about the Zerrang family, the fourteen-year-old boy who was cooked alive in the electric chair, the drunks who burned his home.

Batist's face was impassive while I spoke. His broad hands were motionless on his thighs, the knuckles like carved wood.

"My daddy got killed by lightning working for twenty cents an hour," he said. "The white man owned the farm knowed mules draw lightning, but he sat on his gallery while it was storming all over the sky and tole my daddy to keep his plow turned in the field, not to come out till he'd cut the last row. That's what he done to my daddy. But I ain't growed up to hate other people for it, no."

"You need anything else, partner?"

"That nigger's out yonder in the swamp. Fat Daddy's wife had a dream about him. He was wading through the water, with a big fold-out knife in his hand, the kind you dress deer with."