Cadillac Jukebox Page 18

  But in the last five years he seemed to have changed his professional focus and begun writing about the science of psychopharmacology and its use in the cure of alcoholics.

  I returned the magazines and journals to the reference desk and was about to leave. But it wasn’t quite yet noon, and telling myself I had nothing else to do, I asked the librarian for the student yearbooks from the early 1970s, the approximate span when Karyn LaRose attended U.S.L.

  She hadn’t been born into Buford LaRose’s world. Her father had been a hard-working and likable man who supplied gumballs and novelties, such as plastic monster teeth and vampire fingernails, for dimestore vending machines. The family lived in a small frame house on the old St. Martinville road, and the paintless and desiccated garage that fronted the property was rimmed along the base with a rainbow of color from the gumballs that had rotted inside and leaked through the floor. If you asked Karyn what her father did for a living, she always replied that he was in the retail supply business.

  Most of us who attended U.S.L. came from blue-collar, French-speaking families or could not afford to attend L.S.U. or Tulane. Most of us commuted from outlying parishes, and as a result the campus was empty and quiet and devoid of most social life on the weekends.

  But not for Karyn. She made the best of her situation, and her name and photograph appeared again and again in the yearbooks that covered her four years at U.S.L. She made the women’s tennis team and belonged to a sorority and the honor society; she was a maid of honor to the homecoming queen one year, and homecoming queen the next. In her photographs her face looked modest and radiant, like that of a person who saw only goodness and promise in the world.

  I was almost ready to close the last yearbook and return the stack to the reference desk when I looked again at a group photograph taken in front of Karyn’s sorority house, then scanned the names in the cutline.

  The coed on the end of the row, standing next to Karyn, was Persephone Giacano. Both of them were smiling, their shoulders and the backs of their wrists touching.

  I began to look for Persephone’s name in other yearbooks. I didn’t find it. It was as though she had appeared for one group photograph in front of the sorority house, then disappeared from campus life.

  The administration building was still open. I used the librarian’s phone and called the registrar’s office.

  “We have a Privacy Act, you know?” the woman who answered said.

  “I just want to know which years she was here,” I said.

  “You’re a police officer?”

  “That’s correct.”

  I heard her tapping on some computer keys.

  “Nineteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-three,” she said.

  “She dropped out or she transferred to another school?” I asked.

  She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “If I were you, I’d look through some of the campus newspapers for that period. Who knows what you might find?”

  It took a while. The story was brief, no more than four column inches with a thin caption on page three of a late spring 1973 issue of the Vermilion, written in the laconic style of an administrative press handout that does not want to dwell overly long on a university scandal.

  A half dozen students had been expelled for stealing tests from the science building. The article stated the tests had been taken from a file cabinet, but the theft had been discovered before the examinations had been given, and the professors whose exams would have been compromised had all been notified.

  At the very bottom of the article was the line, A seventh U.S.L. student, Persephone Giacano, voluntarily withdrew from the university before charges were filed against her.

  I called the registrar’s office again, and the same woman answered.

  “Can I look at an old transcript?” I asked. “You send those out upon request, anyway, don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you come over here and introduce yourself? You sound like such an interesting person,” she answered.

  I walked across the lawn and through the brick archways to the registrar’s office and stood at the counter until an elderly, robin-breasted lady with blue hair waited on me. I opened my badge.

  “My, you’re exactly what you say you are,” she said.

  “Does everyone get this treatment?”

  “We save it for just a special few.”

  I wrote Karyn’s maiden name on a scratch pad and slid it across the counter to the woman. She looked at it a long time. The front office area was empty.

  “It’s important in ways that are probably better left unsaid,” I said.

  “Why don’t you walk back here?” she answered.

  I stood behind her chair while she tapped on the computer’s keyboard. Then I saw Karyn’s transcript pop up on the blue screen. “She was here four years and graduated in 1974. See,” the woman said, and slowly rolled Karyn’s academic credits down the screen, shifting in her chair so I could have a clear view.

  Karyn had been a liberal arts major and had made almost straight A’s in the humanities. But when an accounting class, or a zoology or algebra class rolled across the screen, the grades dropped to C’s, or W’s for “Withdrew.”

  “Could you drop it back to the spring of 1973?” I asked.

  The woman in the chair hesitated, then tapped the “page up” button. She waited only a few seconds before shutting down the screen. But it was long enough.

  Karyn had made A’s in biology and chemistry the same semester that Persephone Giacano had been forced to leave the university.

  Karyn was nobody’s fall partner.

  * * *

  I parked my truck in the alley behind Sabelle Crown’s bar and entered it through the back door. The only light came from the neon beer signs on the wall and the television set that was tuned to the L.S.U.-Georgia Tech game. The air was thick with a smell like unwashed hair and old shoes and sweat and synthetic wine.

  Sabelle was mopping out her tiny office in back.

  “I need Lonnie Felton’s address,” I said.

  She stuck her mop in the pail and took a business card out of her desk drawer.

  “He rented a condo over the river. Good life, huh?” she said. She resumed her work, her back to me, the exposed muscles in her waist rolling with each motion of her arms.

  “Aaron was here, wasn’t he?” I said.

  “What makes you think that?” she answered, her voice flat.

  “He was carrying the thirty-two I saw in that shoebox full of medals you keep behind the bar.”

  She stopped mopping and straightened up. Her head was tilted to one side.

  “You didn’t know that?” I said.

  She went out to the bar and returned with the shoebox, slipped the rubber band off the top, and poured the collection of rings and watches and pocketknives and military decorations onto the desk.

  Her gaze was turned inward, as though she were reviewing a film-strip. I could hear her breathing through her nose in the silence. Her fingernails were curled into the heels of her hands.

  “I guess I majored in being anybody’s fuck,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be.”

  She took a roll of breath mints out of her blue jeans and put one in her mouth with her thumb. “Lonnie was here. In the middle of the night,” she said. “He interviewed Daddy right out there at the bar. I went out to get food. When I came back, only Lonnie was here.”

  “Felton knew your father had the gun?”

  “You tell me,” she said. The skin of her face was shiny and tight against the bone, her eyes swimming with an old knowledge about the nature of susceptibility and betrayal.

  * * *

  I found Lonnie Felton by the swimming pool, in the courtyard of the white brick condominium he had rented above the Vermilion River. The surface of the water was glazed with a slick of suntan lotion and the sunlight that filtered through the moss in the trees overhead. Lonnie Felton lay on a bright yellow double-size plastic lounge chair, with a re
dheaded girl of eighteen or nineteen beside him. They both wore dark glasses and wet swimsuits, and their bodies looked hard and brown and prickled with cold. Lonnie Felton took a sip from a collins glass and smiled at me, his eyes hidden behind his glasses, his lips spreading back from his teeth. His girlfriend snuggled closer to his side, her knees and elbows drawn up tightly against him.

  “You know what aiding and abetting is?’ I asked.

  “You bet.”

  “I can hang it on you.”

  He smiled again. His lips were flat and thin against his teeth, his sex sculpted against his swim-suit. “The Napoleonic Code supersedes the First Amendment?” he said.

  “I think Mookie Zerrang was at my bait shop yesterday. He wanted to know where you lived.”

  “Who?”

  “The black guy who murdered your scriptwriter.”

  “Oh yeah. Well, keep me informed, will you?”

  “It’s cold, Lonnie. I want to go inside,” the girl next to him said. She teased the elastic band on his trunks with the tips of her fingers.

  “I’ve got to admire your Kool-Aid. I’d be worried if a guy like that was looking for me,” I said.

  “Let me lay it out for you. Dwayne Parsons, that’s the great writer we’re talking about here, was an over-the-hill degenerate who factored himself into the deal because he filmed some friends doing some nasty things between the sheets. What I’m saying here is, he had a sick karma and it caught up with him. Look, if this black guy comes here to do me, you know what I’m going to tell him? ‘Thanks for not coming sooner. Thanks for letting me have the life I’ve lived.’ I don’t argue with my fate, Jack. It’s that simple.”

  “I have a feeling he won’t be listening.”

  A cascade of tiny yellow and scarlet leaves tumbled out of the trees into the swimming pool. The redheaded girl rubbed her face against Lonnie Felton’s chest and lay her forearm across his loins.

  “You don’t like us very much, do you?” he said.

  “Us?”

  “What you probably call movie people.”

  “Have a good day, Mr. Felton. Don’t let them get behind you.”

  “What?”

  “Go to more movies. Watch a rerun of Platoon sometime.”

  I drove along the river and caught the four-lane into Broussard, then took the old highway toward Cade and Spanish Lake into New Iberia. The highway was littered with crushed stalks of sugarcane that had fallen off the wagons on their way to the mill, and dust devils spun out of the bare and harrowed fields and in the distance I could see egrets rise like a scattering of white rose petals above a windbreak of poplar trees.

  I had lied to Lonnie Felton. It was doubtful that I could make an aiding and abetting charge against him stick. But that might turn out to be the best luck he could have ever had, I thought.

  I turned on the radio and listened to the L.S.U.-Georgia Tech game the rest of the way home.

  * * *

  Bootsie was washing dishes when I walked into the kitchen. She wore a pair of straw sandals and white slacks and a purple shirt with green and red flowers printed on it. The tips of her hair were gold in the light through the screen.

  “What’s going on, boss man?” she said, without turning around.

  I put my hand on her back.

  “There’s an all-you-can-eat crawfish buffet in Lafayette for six-ninety-five,” I said.

  “I already started something.”

  “I used all the wrong words the last couple of days,” I said.

  She rinsed a plate and set it in the rack. She gazed at a solitary mockingbird that stood on the redwood table.

  “There’re some things a woman has a hard time accepting. It doesn’t matter what caused them to happen,” she said.

  She picked up another plate and rinsed it. I felt her weight lean forward, away from the touch of my hand.

  “You want to go to afternoon Mass?” I said.

  “I don’t think I have time to change,” she answered.

  * * *

  That night I took Alafair and a friend of hers to a movie in New Iberia and for ice cream afterward. Later, I found things to do in the bait shop, even though the fishing season was almost over and few customers would be there in the morning. Through the black silhouette of trees up the slope, I could see the lighted gallery of our house, the darkened living room, Bootsie’s shadow moving on the drawn shades in our bedroom.

  I called my A.A. sponsor, an ex-roughneck and barroom owner named Tee Neg, who’d had seven years sobriety when he walked into a bait and liquor store owned by a black man and had asked for a bucketful of shiners, then on an impulse, with no forethought other than his ongoing resentment over the fingers he’d pinched off on a drill pipe, had changed his order to a quart of whiskey and stayed drunk for the next five years. His next A.A. meeting was at Angola Prison.

  I told him about what had happened between me and Bootsie. I knew what was coming.

  “You took a drink over it?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Hey, you ever get drunk while you was asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Then go to bed. I’ll talk to you in the morning, you.” He hung up.

  After all the lights in the house went out, I walked up the slope and went inside and lay down on the living room couch in the dark.

  Wally, the dispatcher, called at one in the morning.

  “The St. Martin Parish sheriff’s office is interviewing some hysterical kids at Henderson Swamp. I can’t make sense out of it. You want to go up there?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “It sounds like Aaron Crown. That’s where you think he’s hid out at, right?”

  “What sounds like Aaron Crown?”

  “The one tore up these two people. They say the walls of the houseboat is painted with blood. The guy held the girl while he done the man, then he done it to the girl.”

  “You’re not making sense, Wally.”

  “That’s what I said. The deputy called it in didn’t make no sense. So how about hauling your ass up there?”

  CHAPTER

  20

  Sometimes the least reliable source in reconstructing a violent crime is the eyewitness to it. The blood veins dilate in the brain, the emotions short-circuit, memory shuts down and dulls the images that wish to disfigure the face of the human family.

  Seven emergency vehicles were parked along the Henderson levee when I got there. The moon was up and the water and the moss in the cypress were stained the color of pewter. A wood gangplank led from the levee through a stand of flooded willows to a large, motorized houseboat whose decks burned with the floodlights from a sheriff’s boat moored next to it.

  The witnesses were an elderly man and his partially blind wife, who had been spending the weekend on their own houseboat, and a group of stoned high school kids who stunk of reefer and keg beer and were trembling at the prospect of what they had stepped into.

  Earlier, they had all seen the victims having drinks at a restaurant farther up the levee. Everyone agreed they were a handsome couple, tourists perhaps, pleasant and certainly polite, although the woman seemed a little young for the man; but he was charming, just the same, athletic-looking, friendly toward the kids, a decent sort, obviously in control of things (one of the stoned-out high school students said he “was kind of like a modern business-type guy, like you see on TV”); the man had wanted to rent fishing gear and hire a guide to take him out in the morning.

  The intruder came just before midnight, in a flat-bottomed aluminum outboard, the throttle turned low, the engine muttering softly along the main channel that rimmed the swamp, past the islands of dead hyacinths and the gray cypress that rose wedge-shaped out of the water at the entrance to the bays.

  But he knew his destination. In midchannel he angled his outboard toward the houseboat rented by the couple, then cut the gas and let his boat glide on its own wake through a screen of hanging willows and bump softly against the rubber tires that hu
ng from the houseboat’s gunnels.

  The people inside were still up, eating a late supper on a small table in the galley, a bottle of white wine and a fondue pan set between them. They either didn’t hear the intruder, or never had time to react, before he pulled himself by one hand over the rail, lighting on the balls of his feet, his body alive with a sinewy grace that belied his dimensions.

  Then he tore the locked hatch out of the jamb with such violence that one hinge came with it.

  At first the kids, who were gathered around the tailgate of a pickup truck on the levee, thought the intruder was a black man, then they realized when he burst into the lighted cabin that he wore dark gloves and a knitted ski mask.

  But they had no doubt about what took place next.

  When the man they had seen in the restaurant tried to rise from his chair in the galley, the intruder swung a wide-bladed fold-out game dressing knife into the side of his throat and raked it at a downward angle into his rib cage, then struck him about the neck and head again and again, gathering the young woman into one arm, never missing a stroke, whipping the wounded man down lower and lower from the chair to the floor, flinging ropes of blood across the windows.

  He paused, as though he was aware he had an audience, stared out of the holes in his mask toward the levee, then opened his mouth, which rang with gold, licked the neck of the screaming young woman he held pinioned against his body with one muscle-swollen arm, and drew the knife across her throat.

  I stood just inside the torn hatch with a St. Martin Parish homicide detective and the medical examiner. The two bodies lay curled on the floor, their foreheads almost touching.

  “You ever see a blood loss like that?” the plainclothes said. He was dressed in a brown suit and a fedora, with a plain blue necktie, and he had clipped the tie inside his shirt. He bit into a candy bar. “I got a sugar deficiency,” he said.

  Two paramedics began lifting the dead man into a body bag. His ponytail had been splayed by someone’s shoe and was stuck to the linoleum.

  “You okay, Dave?” the plainclothes said.