"What's the rest of it?" I asked.
"The M.E. thinks the assailant or assailants propped Short Boy Jerry up to prolong the beating. The bruises on the throat show a single hand hel
d him up straight while he was getting it in the stomach. The brain was already hemorrhaging when the rib went into the heart . . ."
"What's that numeral at the bottom of the page?" I asked.
"The blows in the ribs were from a fist maybe six inches across."
"You got a sheet on a gangbanger that big?" I said.
"That doesn't mean there's not one."
"Start looking for a black mechanic named Mookie Zerrang," I said.
"Who?" he said.
"He looks like a stack of gorilla shit with gold teeth in it. Feel flattered. He gets ten large a whack in Miami. I'm surprised he'd be seen in a neighborhood like this. No kidding, they say the guy's got rigid standards," Clete said, fixing his eyes earnestly on Cramer's face.
That evening I let Batist go home early and cleaned the bait shop and the tables on the dock by myself. The air was cool, the sky purple and dense with birds, the dying sun as bright as an acetylene flame on the horizon. I could see flights of ducks in V formations come in low over the swamp, then circle away and drop beyond the tips of the cypress into the darkness on the other side.
I plugged in Jerry Joe's jukebox and watched the colored lights drift through the plastic casing like smoke from marker grenades. There were two recordings of "La Jolie Blon" in the half-moon rack, one by Harry Choates and the other by Iry LeJeune. I had never thought about it before, but both men's lives seemed to be always associated with that haunting, beautiful song, one that was so pure in its sense of loss you didn't have to understand French to comprehend what the singer felt. "La Jolie Blon" wasn't about a lost love. It was about the end of an era.
Iry LeJeune was killed on the highway, changing a tire, and Harry Choates died in alcoholic madness in the Austin city jail, either after beating his head bloody against the bars or being beaten unmercifully by his jailers.
Maybe their tragic denouements had nothing to do with a song that had the power to break the heart. Maybe such a conclusion was a product of my own alcoholic mentality. But I had to grieve just a moment on their passing, just as I did for Jerry Joe, and maybe for all of us who tried to hold on to a time that was quickly passing away.
Jerry the Glide had believed in Wurlitzer jukeboxes and had secretly worshipped the man who had helped burn Dresden. What a surrogate, I thought, then wondered what mine was.
A car came down the road in the dusk, then slowed, as though the driver might want to stop, perhaps for a beer on the way home. I turned off the outside flood lamps, then the string of lights over the dock, then the lights inside the shop, and the car went past the boat ramp and down the road and around the curve. I leaned with my forearm against the jukebox's casing and started to punch a selection. But you can't recover the past with a recording that's forty years old, nor revise all the moments when you might have made life a little better for the dead.
I could feel the blood beating in my wrists. I jerked the plug from the wall, sliced the cord in half with my pocketknife, and wheeled the jukebox to the back and left it in a square of moonlight, face to the wall.
CHAPTER 25
Early Sunday morning I parked my pickup in the alley behind Sabelle Crown's bar in Lafayette. The alley was littered with bottles and beer cans, and a man and woman were arguing on the landing above the back entrance to the bar. The woman wore an embroidered Japanese robe that exposed her thick calves, and her chestnut hair was unbrushed and her face without makeup. The man glanced down at me uncertainly, then turned back to the woman.
"You t'ink you wort' more, go check the mirror, you," he said. He walked down the wood stairs and on down the alley, stepping over a rain puddle, without looking at me. The woman went back inside.
I climbed the stairs to the third story, where Sabelle lived by herself at the end of a dark hallway that smelled of insecticide and mold.
"It's seven in the morning. You on a drunk or something?" she said when she opened the door. She wore only a T-shirt without a bra and a pair of blue jeans that barely buttoned under her navel.
"You still have working girls here, Sabelle?" I said.
"We're all working girls, honey. Y'all just haven't caught on." She left the door open for me and walked barefoot across the linoleum and took a coffee pot off her two-burner stove.
"I want you to put me with your father."
"Like meet with him, you're saying?"
"However you want to do it."
"So you can have him executed?"
"I believe Buford LaRose is setting him up to be killed."
She set the coffee pot back on the stove without pouring from it.