Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

I got this"—he tapped his hook on his desk blotter—"clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy six klicks out of Pinkville. You want to tell war stories, the DAV's downtown. You want to spring that cracker, that's your bidness. Just don't come around here to do it. You with me on this?"

Clete looked at me, then lit a cigarette.

"Hey, don't smoke in here, man," Jimmy Ray said.

"Adios" Clete said to me and went out the door and closed it behind him.

"Have any of these documentary movie people been to see you?" I asked.

"Yeah, I told them the right man's in jail. I told them that was his rifle lying out under the tree. I told them Crown was in the KKK. They turned the camera off while I was still talking." He glanced at the dial on his watch, which was turned around on the bottom of his wrist. "I don't mean you no rudeness, but I got a bidness to run."

"Thanks for your help."

"I ain't give you no help. Hey, man, me and my brother Ely wasn't nothing alike. He believed in y'all. Thought a great day was coming. You know what make us all equal?" He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, splayed it open with his thumb, and picked a fifty-dollar bill out of it with his metal hook. "Right here, man," he said, wagging the bill on the desk blotter.

Late the next day, after we ate supper, I helped Bootsie wash and put away the dishes. The sun had burned into a red ember inside a bank of maroon-colored clouds above the treeline that bordered my neighbor's cane field, and through the screen I could smell rain and ozone in the south. Alafair called from the bait shop, where she was helping Batist close up.

"Dave, there's a man in a boat who keeps coming back by the dock," she said.

"What's he doing?"

"It's like he's trying to see through the windows."

"Is Batist there?"

"Yes."

"Put him on, would you?"

When Batist came on the line, I said, "Who's the man in the boat?"

"A guy puts earrings."

As was Batist's way, he translated French literally into English, in this case using the word put for wear.

"Is he bothering y'all?" I said.

"He ain't gonna bother me. I'm fixing to lock up."

"What's the problem, then?"

"They ain't one, long as he's gone when I go out the do'."

"I'll be down."

The air was heavy and wet-smelling and crisscrossed with birds when I walked down the slope toward the dock, the sky over the swamp the color of scorched tin. Batist and Alafair had collapsed the Cinzano umbrellas set in the center of the spool tables and turned on the string of overhead lights. The surface of the bayou was ruffling in the wind, and against the cypress and willows on the far side I could see a man sitting in an outboard, dressed in a dark blue shirt and a white straw hat.

I walked to the end of the dock and leaned against the railing.

"Can I help you with something?" I asked.

He didn't reply. His face was shadowed, but I could see the glint of his gold earrings in the light from the dock. I went inside the bait shop.

"Turn on the flood lamps, Alf," I said.

When she hit the toggle switch, the light bloomed across the water with the brilliance of a pistol flare. That's when I saw his eyes.

"Go on up to the house, Alafair," I said.