DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke

said.
          He'd had to walk from
the field and he breathed hard into the telephone.
          "Is he
dead?" I asked.
          "You got it
turned around. He killed two of them sonsofbitches with his bare hands and
liked to got a third with a cane knife. That old man's a real shitstorm, ain't
he?"
     
     
     
     
     
CHAPTER   7
     
     
    b ootsie alafair
and I were eating supper in the kitchen that evening when the phone
rang on the counter. Bootsie got up to answer it. Outside, the clouds in the
west were purple and strung with curtains of rain.
          Then I heard her say,
"Before I give the phone to Dave, could you put Karyn on? I left her a
couple of messages, but she probably didn't have time to call. . . I see . . .
When will she be back? . . . Could you ask her to call me, Buford? I've really
wanted to talk with her . . . Oh, you know, those things she said about Dave to
the sheriff. . . Hang on now, here's Dave."
          She handed me the
phone.
          "Buford?" I
said.
          "Yes." His
voice sounded as though someone had just wrapped a strand of piano wire around
his throat.
          "You all
right?" I said.
          "Yes, I'm fine,
thanks . . . You heard about Crown?" he said.
          "A guard at the
prison told me."
          "Does this give
you some idea of his potential?"
          "I hear they
were cruising for it."
          "He broke one
guy's neck. He drowned the other one in a barrel of tractor oil," he said.
          "I couldn't
place your friend this morning. He's Clay Mason, isn't he? What are you doing
with him, partner?"
          "None of your
business."
          "That guy was
the P. T. Barnum of the acid culture."
          "As usual, your
conclusions are as wrong as your information."
          He hung up the phone.
I sat back down at the table.
          "You really
called Karyn LaRose?" I asked.
          "Why? Do you
object?" she said.
          "No."
          She put a piece of
chicken in her mouth and looked at me while she chewed. My stare broke.
          "I wish I hadn't
gone out to see her, Boots."
          "He's mixed up
with that guru from the sixties?" she said.
          "Who knows? The
real problem is one nobody cares about."
    She waited.
          "Aaron Crown had
no motivation to kill Ely Dixon. I'm more and more convinced the wrong man's in
prison," I said.
          "He was in the
Klan, Dave."
          "They kicked him
out. He busted up a couple of them with a wood bench inside a Baptist
church."
          But why, I thought.
          It was a question
that only a few people in the Louisiana of the 1990s could answer.
     
     
    H is name was Billy Odom and he ran a junkyard on a stretch of state
highway west of Lafayette. Surrounded by a floodplain of emerald green rice
fields, the junkyard seemed an almost deliberate eyesore that Billy had
lovingly constructed over the decades from rusted and crushed car bodies, mountains
of bald tires, and outbuildings festooned with silver hubcaps.
          Like Aaron Crown, he
was a north Louisiana transplant, surrounded by papists, blacks who could speak
French, and a historical momentum that he had not been able to shape or influence
or dent in any fashion. His face was as round as a moonpie under his cork sun
helmet, split with an incongruous smile that allowed him to hide his thoughts
while he probed for the secret meaning that lay in the speech of others. A
Confederate flag, almost black with dirt, was nailed among the
yellowed calendars on the wall of the shed where he kept his office. He kept
licking his lips, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes squinting as though he
were staring through smoke.
          "A fight in a
church? I don't call it to mind," he said.
          "You and Aaron
were in the same klavern, weren't you?"
          His eyes shifted off
my face, studied the motes of dust spinning in a shaft of sunlight. He cocked
his head