Free DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke Page A

stood in the woman's dirt yard, looking
up at her on her tiny, lighted gallery.
          "Then why ain't
you looking right now? How come it takes all day to get y'all out here?"
she said.
          "Tell me what
the man looked like one more time," I said.
          "Got a brand-new
Lincoln car. Got a pink face shaped like an egg. Got hair that ain't blond or
red, somewhere in between, and he comb it straight back."
          "Why did she go
off with him?" I asked.
          '"Cause she's
seventeen years old and don't listen. 'Cause she got this on her hands, just
like me, and reg'lar mens don't pay her no mind. That answer your
question?"
          Helen drove us back
down the dirt road through the fields to the state highway. The night was
humid, layered with smoke from stubble fires, and the stars looked blurred with
mist in the sky. We passed the LaRose company store, then the plantation
itself. All three floors of the house were lighted, the columned porch
decorated with pumpkins and scarecrows fashioned from cane stalks and straw
hats. In a back pasture, behind a railed fence, horses were running in the
moonlight, as though spooked by an impending storm or the rattle of dry poppy
husks in the wind.
          "What's on your
mind?" Helen asked.
          "The description
of the white man sounds like Mingo Bloomberg."
          "I thought he
was in City Prison in New Orleans."
          "He is. Or at
least he was."
          "What would he
be doing back around here?"
          "Who knows why
these guys do anything, Helen? I'll get on it in the morning."
          I looked back over my
shoulder at the LaRose house, the glitter of a chandelier through velvet
curtains, a flood-lighted gazebo hooded with Confederate jasmine and orange
trumpet vine.
          "Forget those
people. They wouldn't spit on either one of us unless we had something they
wanted. Hey, you listening to me, Streak?" Helen said, and hit me hard on
the arm with the back of her hand.
     
     
    I got up early the next morning, left a message on Clete Purcel's
answering machine, then drove back to the grandmother's house by the nightclub.
The girl, whose name was Barbara Lavey, had still not returned home. I sat in
my truck by the front of the grandmother's house and looked at
the notes in my notebook. For some reason I drew a circle around the girl's
name. I had a feeling I would see it on a case file for a long time.
          The grandmother had
gone back inside and I had forgotten her. Suddenly she was at the passenger
door window. Her glasses fell down on her nose when she leaned inside.
          "I'm sorry I was
unpolite yestiday. I know you working on it. Here's somet'ing for you and the
lady," she said. She placed a brown paper bag swollen with pecans in my
hand.
     
     
    T he sun was still low in the eastern sky when I approached the
LaRose plantation. I saw Buford, naked to the waist, in a railed lot by the
barn, with a half dozen dark-skinned men who were dressed in straw hats coned
on the brims and neckerchiefs and cowboy boots and jeans molded to their
buttocks and thighs.
          I knew I should keep
going, not put my hand again into whatever it was that drove Karyn and Buford's
ambitions, not fuel their anger, not give them a handle on an Internal Affairs
investigation, but I was never good at taking my own counsel and I could feel
the lie she had told turning in my chest like a worm.
          I turned into the
drive, passed a row of blue-green poplars on the side of the house, and parked
by the back lot. A balmy wind, smelling of rain, was blowing hard across the
cane acreage, and a dozen roan horses with brands burned deep into the hair
were running in the lot, turning against one another, rattling against the
railed fence, their manes twisted with fire in the red sunrise.
          When I stepped out of
the truck, Buford was smiling at me. His skin-tight white polo pants were
flecked with mud and