Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

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 hung 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 pony tail had been splayed by someone's shoe and was stuck to the linoleum.

"You okay, Dave?" the plainclothes said.

"Sure."

"The perp cleaned out their I.D."

"His name was Lonnie Felton. I don't know who the girl was. He was a film director."

"You know him?"

I nodded and looked at the stare in Felton's eyes.

"I make Aaron Crown for this," the plainclothes said. "What do you think? How many we got around here could do something like this? . . . You listening, Dave?"

"What?" I said. The paramedic worked the zipper on the vinyl bag over Felton's face. "Oh, sorry . . . ," I said to the plainclothes. "The kids were right the first time. It's a black guy. Mookie Zerrang's his name. It's funny what you said, that's all."

"Come again?"

"About listening. I told Felton the guy who'd do him wouldn't be a good listener. It seemed like a clever thing to say at the time."

The plainclothes looked at me strangely, a smear of chocolate on his mouth.

CHAPTER 21

AFTER I was discharged from the army, a friend from my outfit and I drove across the country for a fishing vacation in Montana. On July 4 we stopped at a small town in western Kansas that Norman Rockwell could have painted. The streets were brick, lined with Chinese elm trees, and the limestone courthouse on the square rose

out of the hardware and feed and farm equipment stores like a medieval castle against a hard blue porcelain sky. Next to our motel was a stucco 3.2 beer tavern that looked like a wedding cake, shaded by an enormous willow that crowned over the eaves. At the end of the street you could see an ocean of green wheat that rippled in the wind as far as the eye could see. The rain that fell that afternoon on the hot sidewalks was the sweetest smell I ever experienced.