Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"It's a waste of time. Buford beat us to it."

"It was a long shot," Helen said. "You've got to consider the source, too, Dave. Dock Green's nuts."

"No, he's not. He's just different."

"That's a new word for it."

I didn't say anything. We walked up the slope and through the trees toward the house. The air was filled with gold shafts of light inside the trees, and you could smell the water in the coulee and the fecund odor of wet fern and the exposed root systems that trailed in the current like torn cobweb.

"Can I get out of line a minute?" Helen said.

I looked at her and waited. She kept walking up the incline, her face straight ahead, her shoulders slightly bent, her masculine arms taut-looking with muscle.

"The homicides you're worried about took place out of our jurisdiction. The Indian guy who tried to mess you over with the machete is dead. We don't have a crime connected with the LaRoses to investigate in Iberia Parish, Dave," she said.

"They're both dirty."

"So is the planet," she said.

We took a shorter route back and exited the woods by a cleared field and passed the brick stables and an adjacent railed lot where a solitary bay gelding stood like a piece of stained redwood in a column of dust-laden sunlight. The brand on his flank was shaped in the form of a rose, burned deep into the hair like calcified ringworm.

"They sure leave their mark on everything, don't they?" I said.

"What should they use, spray cans? Give it a break," Helen said.

"I'll tell them we're leaving now," I said.

"Don't do it, Dave."

"I'll see you in the car, Helen."

She continued on through the field toward the driveway. I walked through the backyard toward the porte cochere, then glanced through a screen of bamboo into the glassed-in rear of the house where Karyn had been doing her aerobic exercises. We stared into each other's face with a look of mutual and surprised intimacy that went beyond the moment, beyond my ability to define or guard against, that went back into a deliberately forgotten image of two people looking nakedly upon each other's faces during intercourse.

I had caught her unawares in front of a small marble-topped bar with a champagne glass and a silver ice bucket containing a green bottle of Cold Duck on it. But Karyn was not one to be undone by an unexpected encounter with an adversary. With her eyes fastened on my face, a pout on her mouth like an adolescent girl, she unhooked her halter and let it drop from her breasts and unbuttoned her shorts and pushed them and her panties down over her thighs and knees and stepped out of them. Then she pulled the pins from her platinum hair and shook it out on her shoulders and put the glass of Cold Duck to her mouth, her eyes fixed on mine, as empty as death.

CHAPTER 26

Jimmy Ray Dixon was one of those in-your-face people who insult and demean others with such confidence that you always assume they have nothing to hide themselves.

It's a good ruse. Just like offering a lie when no one has challenged your integrity. For example, lying about how you lost a hand in Vietnam.

After Jimmy Ray and his entourage had left the dock, I'd called a friend at the Veterans Administration in New Orleans.

The following day, when I got back to the department from the LaRose plantation, my friend called and read me everything he had pulled out of the computer on Jimmy Ray Dixon.

He didn't lose a hand clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy outside Pinkville. A gang of Chinese thieves, his business partners in selling

stolen PX liquor on the Saigon black market, cut it off.

A cross-referenced CID report also indicated Jimmy Ray may have been involved in smuggling heroin home in GI coffins.

So he lied about his war record, I thought. But who wouldn't, with a file like that?

That was not what had bothered me.

At the dock Jimmy Ray had said somebody had shot into his home and had killed his brother.

His home.