Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"Why don't you get a jukebox? I'll have one of my vendors come by and put one in. You don't need no red quarters. You keep a hundred percent," he said. "Hey, Dave, it's all gonna work out. It's a new day. I guarantee it. Don't get tied up with this Aaron Crown stuff."

"What?"

But he drank his beer, winked at me as he fitted on his Panama hat, then walked out to the Cadillac to wait for Clete.

CHAPTER 8

Monday morning, when I went into work, I walked past Karyn LaRose's blue Mazda convertible in the parking lot. She sat behind the wheel, in dark glasses with a white scarf tied around her hair. When I glanced in her direction, she picked up a magazine from the seat and began reading it, a pout on her mouth.

"There's a guy talks like a college professor waiting to see you, Dave," Wally, the dispatcher, said. His great weight caused a perpetual flush in his neck and cheeks, as though he had just labored up a flight of stairs, and whenever he laughed, usually at his own jokes, his breath wheezed deep in his chest.

I looked through the doorway of the waiting room, then pointed my finger at the back of a white-haired man.

"That gentleman there?" I asked Wally.

"Let's see, we got two winos out there, a bondsman, a woman says UFOs is sending electrical signals through her hair curlers, the black guy cleans the Johns, and the professor. Let me know which one you t'ink, Dave." His face beamed at his own humor.

Clay Mason, wearing a brown narrow-cut western coat with gold and green brocade on it, a snap-button turquoise shirt, striped vaquero pants, and yellow cowboy boots on his tiny feet, sat in a folding chair with a high-domed pearl Stetson on his crossed knee.

I was prepared to dislike him, to dismiss him as the Pied Piper of hallucinogens, an irresponsible anachronism who refused to die with the 1960s. But I was to learn that psychedelic harlequins don't survive by just being psychedelic harlequins.

"Could I help you, sir?" I asked.

"Yes, thank you. I just need a few minutes," he said, turning to look up at me, his thought processes broken. He started to rise, then faltered. I placed my hand under his elbow and was struck by his fragility, the lightness of his bones.

A moment later I closed my office door behind us. His hair was as fine as white cornsilk, his lined mouth and purple lips like those of an old woman. When he sat down in front of my desk his attention seemed to become preoccupied with two black trusties mowing the lawn.

"Yes, sir?" I said.

"I've interposed myself in your situation. I hope you won't take offense," he said.

"Are we talking about the LaRoses?" I tried to smile when I said it.

"She's contrite about her behavior, even though I think she needs her rear end paddled. In lieu of that, however, I'm passing on an apology for her." The accent was soft, deep in the throat, west Texas perhaps. Then I remembered the biographical sketches, the pioneer family background, the inherited oil fortune, the academic scandals that he carried with him like tattered black flags.

"Karyn lied, Dr. Mason. With forethought and malicious intent. You don't get absolution by sending a surrogate to confession."

"That's damn well put. Will you walk with me into the parking lot?"

"No."

"Your feelings are your feelings, sir. I wouldn't intrude upon them." His gaze went out the window. He flipped the back of his hand at the air. "It never really changes, does it?"

"Sir?"

"The black men in prison clothes. Still working off their indenture to the white race."

"One of those guys molested his niece. The other one cut his wife's face with a string knife."

"Then they're a rough pair and probably got what's coming to them," he said, and rose from his chair by holding on to the edge of my desk.

I walked him to the back door of the building. When I opened the door the air was cool, and dust and paper were blowing in the parking lot. Karyn looked at us through the windshield of her car, her features muted inside her scarf and dark glasses. Clay Mason waved his Stetson at the clouds, the leaves spinning in the wind.

"Listen to it rumble, by God. It's a magic land. There's a thunder of calvary in every electric storm," he said.

I asked a deputy to walk Clay Mason the rest of the way.

"Don't be too hard on the LaRoses," Mason said as the deputy took his arm. "They put me in mind of Eurydice and Orpheus trying to flee the kingdom of the dead. Believe me, son, they could use a little compassion."