Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"Then that's your fucking problem."

"When you get back to the Big Sleazy, stay there, Mingo," I said, and closed the car door.

"I got a permit for the piece you took off me. I want it back," he said through the open window.

I waited for Helen to get behind the wheel, drumming my fingers on the cruiser's roof, trying to conceal the disjointed expression in my

face.

If you seriously commit yourself to alcohol, I mean full-bore, the way you take up a new religion, and join that great host of revelers who sing and lock arms as they bid farewell to all innocence in their lives, you quickly learn the rules of behavior in this exclusive fellowship whose dues are the most expensive in the world. You drink down. That means you cannot drink in well-lighted places with ordinary people because the psychological insanity in your face makes you a pariah among them. So you find other drunks whose condition is as bad as your own, or preferably even worse.

But time passes and you run out of geography and people who are in some cosmetic way less than yourself and bars where the only admission fee is the price of a 6 a.m. short-dog.

That's when you come to places like Sabelle Crown's at the Underpass in Lafayette.

The Underpass area had once been home to a dingy brick hotel and row of low-rent bars run by a notorious family of Syrian criminals. Now the old bars and brick hotel had been bulldozed into rubble, and all that remained of the city's last skidrow refuge was Sabelle's, a dark, two-story clapboard building that loomed above the Underpass like a solitary tooth.

It had no mirrors, and the only light inside came from the jukebox and the beer signs over the bar. It was a place where the paper Christmas decorations stayed up year-round and you never had to see your reflection or make an unfavorable comparison between yourself and others. Not unless you counted Sabelle, who had been a twenty-dollar whore in New Orleans before she disappeared up north for several years. She was middle-aged now, with flecks of gray in her auburn hair, but she looked good in her blue jeans and V-necked beige sweater, and her face retained a kind of hard beauty that gave fantasies to men who drank late and still believed the darkness of a bar could resurrect opportunities from their youth.

She opened a bottle of 7-Up and set it in front of me with a glass of ice.

"You doin' all right, Streak?" she said.

"Not bad. How about you, Sabelle?"

"I hope you're not here for anything stronger than Seven-Up."

I smiled and didn't reply. The surface of the bar stuck to my wrists. "Why would a New Orleans gumball named Mingo Bloomberg have an interest in your father?" I said.

"You got me."

"I went over everything I could find on Aaron's case this afternoon. I think he could have beat it if he'd had a good lawyer," I said.

She studied my face curiously. The beer sign on the wall made tiny red lights, like sparks, in her hair.

"The big problem was Aaron told some other people he did it," I said.

She put out her cigarette in the ashtray, then set a shot glass and a bottle of cream sherry by my elbow and walked down the duckboards and around the end of the bar and sat down next to me, her legs hooked in the stool's rungs.

"You still married?" she said.

"Sure."

She didn't finish her thought. She poured sherry into her shot glass and drank it. "Daddy went to the third grade. He hauled manure for a living. Rich people on East Main made him go around to their back doors."

I continued to look into her face.

"Look, when this black civil rights guy got killed with Daddy's rifle, he started making up stories. People talked about him. He got to be a big man for a while," she said.

"He lied about a murder?"

"How'd you like to be known as white trash in a town like New Iberia?"

"Big trade-off," I said.

"What isn't?"

She gestured to the bartender, pointed to a shoebox under the cash register. He handed it to her and walked away. She lifted off the top.