Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

"Yeah, you do. He was electrocuted. He was fourteen years old and probably retarded. He was too small for the chair, or the equipment didn't work right, I forget which. But evidently what happened to him was awful."

His face became solemn. He lay the waxpaper and piece of boudin on the cruiser's hood and slipped his hands in his pockets and gazed at the river.

"I was a witness at only one execution. The guy who got it was depraved and it never bothered me. But whenever I think of that Zerrang kid back in '43,1 wonder if the human race should be on the planet. . . Take a walk with me," he said.

We crossed an irrigation ditch on a board plank and entered a stand of hackberry and persimmon trees on the riverbank. Up ahead, through the foliage, I could see three spacious breezy homes on big green lots. But here, inside the tangle of trees and air vines and blackberry bushes, was Louisiana's more humble past—a cypress shack that was only a pile of boards now, some of them charred, a privy that had collapsed into the hole under it, a brick chimney that had toppled like broken teeth into the weeds.

"This is where the boy's family lived, at least until a bunch of drunks set their shack on fire. The boy had one brother, and the brother had a son named Mookie. What do you think of that?" he said.

"Where'd you get all this, Sheriff?" I asked.

"From my dad, just this morning. He's ninety-two years old now. However, his memory is remarkable. Sometimes it gives him no rest." The sheriff turned over a blackened board with the toe of his half-topped boot.

"Did your father grow up around here?"

The sheriff rubbed the calluses of one palm on the backs of his knuckles.

"Sir?" I said.

"He was one of the drunks who burned them out. We can't blame Mookie Zerrang on the greaseballs in Miami. He's of our own making, Dave."

CHAPTER 34

batist had been released from the hospital that day, and after work I shopped for him at the grocery in town and then drove out to his house.

He was sitting in a soft

, stuffed chair on the gallery, wearing a flannel shirt over the bandages that were taped on his shoulders. His daughter, a large, square woman who looked more Indian than black, was in the side yard, hammering the dust out of a quilt with an old tennis racquet.

I told Batist the story about the Zerrang family, the fourteen-year-old boy who was cooked alive in the electric chair, the drunks who burned his home.

Batist's face was impassive while I spoke. His broad hands were motionless on his thighs, the knuckles like carved wood.

"My daddy got killed by lightning working for twenty cents an hour," he said. "The white man owned the farm knowed mules draw lightning, but he sat on his gallery while it was storming all over the sky and tole my daddy to keep his plow turned in the field, not to come out till he'd cut the last row. That's what he done to my daddy. But I ain't growed up to hate other people for it, no."

"You need anything else, partner?"

"That nigger's out yonder in the swamp. Fat Daddy's wife had a dream about him. He was wading through the water, with a big fold-out knife in his hand, the kind you dress deer with."

"Don't believe in that stuff, Batist."

"Nigger like that come out of hell, Dave. Don't say he cain't go in your dreams."

I walked back out to my truck, trying not to think about his words, or the fact that Fat Daddy's wife had somehow seen in her dream the type of wide-bladed, foldout game dressing knife that Mookie Zerrang had used to murder Lonnie Felton and his girlfriend at Henderson Swamp.

Early the next morning I called an old friend of mine named Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in New Orleans. Then I called Buford at his house.

"Meet me in City Park," I said.

"Considering our track record, that seems inappropriate, Dave," he said.

"Persephone Green is destroying your life. Is that appropriate?"

A half hour later I was sitting at a picnic table when I saw him get out of his car by the old brick fire station in the park and walk through the oak trees toward me. He wore a windbreaker over a L.S.U. T-shirt and white pleated slacks without a belt. His curly hair was damp and freshly combed and he had shaved so closely that his cheeks glowed with color. He sat down at the plank table and folded his hands. I pushed a Styrofoam cup of coffee toward him and opened the top of a take-out container.

"Sausage and eggs from Victor's," I said.

"No, thanks."