Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"I know you?"

"You do now. Ms. LaRose says she'd prefer you wasn't on her place."

"She'll prefer it less if Aaron's her next visitor . . . Have a nice day."

I walked down the wood floor between the stalls toward the opened end of the building.

"Don't be back in the stable without a warrant, sir," the trooper said behind me.

I climbed through the rails in the horse lot and walked under the trees in the backyard toward the porte cochere. Karyn LaRose came out the side screen door, a drink in her hand, with Persephone Green behind her. Karyn turned around and lifted her fingers in the air.

"Let me talk to Dave a minute, Seph," she said.

There was a pinched, black light in Persephone Green's face as she glared at me. But she did as she was asked and closed the door and disappeared behind the glass.

"I'm going to drain the blood out of your veins for what you did to me," Karyn said.

"What I did to you?"

"In front of your wife, in the hotel. You rotten motherfucker."

"Your problem is with yourself, Karyn. You just don't know it."

"Save the cheap psychology for your A.A. meetings. Your life's going to be miserable. I promise."

"Dock Green says there're dead people under the tree in your side yard."

"That's marvelous detective work. They were lynched and buried there over a century ago."

"How about the kid in the unmarked grave by the water?"

Her skin under her makeup turned as pale and dry as paper.

CHAPTER 22

The next morning I walked up to Jerry Joe Plumb on his plot of tree-dotted land in the middle of the historical district on East Main. He was watching two cement mixers pour the foundation for his home on the bayou, one half-topped engineering boot propped on a felled tree. He wore khakis and his leather flyer's jacket, and the sunlight through the oaks looked like yellow blades of grass on his face.

"Dock Green says you knocked around his construction foreman," I said.

"It got a little out of hand."

"You held him down and spit in his face?"

"I apologized."

"I bet he appreciated that."

"I went on a tab for three hundred large to back Buford's campaign. You know what the vig is on three hundred large? Now Dock's wheeling and dealing with Buford while I got building suppliers looking at me with knives and forks."

"Then quit protecting Buford."

"You got it wrong . . . But. . . Never mind, come in my trailer and I'll show you something."

Inside, he spread a roll of architect's plans across a drafting table and weighted down the ends, then combed his hair while he looked admiringly at the sketch of the finished house. "See, it's turn-of-the-century. It'll fit right in. The brick's purple and comes out of a hundred-year-old house I found over in Mississippi," he said.

The building was three stories high, a medieval fortress rather than a house, with balconies and widow's walks and windbreaks that were redundant inside a city, and I thought of Jerry Joe's description of the LaRose home out west of the Pecos, where he had fled at age seventeen.

"You're going to let Buford burn you because of the old man, what was his name, Jude?" I said.