Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

He blew out his breath. "You and my wife were intimate. She probably still bears you a degree of resentment. The god Eros was never a rational influence, Dave. At the same time she doesn't want to see my campaign compromised because you've developed this crazy notion about Aaron Crown being railroaded. So she let both her imagination and her impetuosity cause her to do something foolish. We're sorry for whatever harm we've done you."

I cupped my hand on a fence rail, felt the hardness of the wood in my palm, tried to see my thoughts in my head before I spoke.

"I get the notion I'm in a therapy session," I said.

"If you were, you'd get a bill."

The back door of the house opened, and a slender, white-haired man with a pixie face, one wrinkled with the parchment lines of a chronic cigarette smoker, stepped out into the wind and waved at Buford. He wore a navy blue sports jacket with brass buttons and a champagne-colored silk scarf. I knew the face but I couldn't remember from where.

"I'll be just a minute, Clay," Buford called. Then to me, "Would you like to join us for breakfast?"

"No, thanks."

"How about a handshake, then?"

Two of the wranglers were yelling at each other in Spanish as the horses swirled around them in the lot. One had worked a hackamore over a mare's head and the other was trying to fling a blanket and saddle on her back.

"No? Stay and watch me get my butt thrown, then," Buford said.

"You were born for it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The political life. You've got ice water in your veins," I said.

"You see that dead oak yonder? Two men were lynched there by my ancestors. When I went after Aaron Crown, I hoped maybe I could atone a little for what happened under that tree."

"It makes a great story."

"You're a classic passive-aggressive, Dave, no offense meant. You feign the role of liberal and humanist, but Bubba and Joe Bob own your heart."

"So long, Buford," I said, and walked back to my truck. The wind splayed and flattened the poplar trees against Buford's house. When I looked back over my shoulder, he was mounted on the mare's back, one hand twisted in the mane, the hackamore sawed back in the other, his olive-tan torso anointed with the sun's cool light, sculpted with the promise of perfection that only Greek gods know.

Later, Clete Purcel returned my call and told me Mingo Bloomberg had been sprung from City Prison three days ago by attorneys who worked for Jerry Joe Plumb, also known as Short Boy Jerry, Jerry Ace, and Jerry the Glide.

But even as I held the receiver in my hand, I couldn't concentrate on Clete's words about Mingo's relationship to a peculiar player in the New Orleans underworld. The dispatcher had just walked through my open door and handed me a memo slip with the simple message written on it: Call the Cap up at the zoo re: Crown. He says urgent.

It took twenty minutes to get him on the phone.

"You w

as right. I should have listened to you. A bunch of the black boys caught him in the tool shack this morning," the captain said.

He'd had to walk from the field and he breathed hard into the telephone.

"Is he dead?" I asked.

"You got it turned around. He killed two of them sonsofbitches with his bare hands and liked to got a third with a cane knife. That old man's a real shitstorm, ain't he?"

CHAPTER 7

bootsie alafair and I were eating supper in the kitchen that evening when the phone rang on the counter. Bootsie got up to answer it. Outside, the clouds in the west were purple and strung with curtains of rain.

Then I heard her say, "Before I give the phone to Dave, could you put Karyn on? I left her a couple of messages, but she probably didn't have time to call. . . I see . . . When will she be back? . . . Could you ask her to call me, Buford? I've really wanted to talk with her . . . Oh, you know, those things she said about Dave to the sheriff. . . Hang on now, here's Dave."

She handed me the phone.

"Buford?" I said.