Read DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox for Free Online

on a homicide warrant.
          "So now she's
trying to work your crank?" he said.
          "Do you have to
put it that way? . . . Yeah, okay, maybe she is."
          "What for? . . .
Did you know your hair's sweating?"
          "It's
the Tabasco. Clete, would you ease up, please?"
          "Look, Dave,
this is the basic lesson here—don't get mixed up with rich people. One way or
another, they'll hurt you. The same goes for this civil rights stuff. It's a
dead issue, leave it alone."
          "Do you want to
go out and talk to Jimmy Ray Dixon or not?" I said.
          "You've never
met him?"
          "No."
          "Jimmy Ray is a
special kind of guy. You meet him once and you never quite forget the
experience."
          I waited for him to
finish but he didn't.
          "What do I
know?" he said, flipped his breadstick into the straw basket, and began
putting on his raincoat. "There's nothing wrong with the guy a tube of
roach paste couldn't cure."
     
     
    W e drove through the Garden District, past Tulane and Loyola
universities and Audubon Park and rows of columned antebellum homes whose yards
were filled with trees and flowers. The mist swirled out of the canopy of oak
limbs above St. Charles, and the neon tubing scrolled on corner restaurants and
the empty outdoor cafes looked like colored smoke in the rain.
          "Was he in
Vietnam?" I asked.
          "Yeah. So were
you and I. You ever see his sheet?" Clete said.
          I shook my head.
          "He was a pimp
in Chicago. He went down for assault and battery and carrying a concealed
weapon. He even brags on it. Now you hear him talking on the radio about how he
got reborn. The guy's a shit-head, Dave."
          Jimmy Ray Dixon owned
a shopping center, named for his assassinated brother, out by Chalmette. He
also owned apartment buildings, a nightclub in the Quarter, and a five-bedroom
suburban home. But he did business in a small unpainted 1890s cottage hung with
flower baskets in the Carrollton district, down by the Mississippi levee, at
the end of St. Charles where the streetcar turned around. It was a neighborhood
of palm trees and green neutral grounds, small restaurants, university
students, art galleries and bookstores. It was a part of New Orleans unmarked by
spray cans and broken glass in the gutters. In five minutes you had the sense
Jimmy Ray had chosen the role of the thumb in your eye.
          "You're here to
ask me about the cracker that killed my brother?
    You're kidding, right?"
          He chewed and snapped
his gum. He wore a long-sleeve blue-striped shirt, which hid the apparatus that
attached the metal hook to the stump of his left wrist. His teeth were
gold-filled, his head mahogany-colored, round and light-reflective as a waxed
bowling ball. He never invited us to sit down, and seemed to make a point of
swiveling his chair around to talk to his employees, all of whom were black, in
the middle of a question.
          "Some people
think he might be an innocent man," I said.       
          "You one of
them?" He grinned.       
          "Your humor's
lost on me, sir."
          "It took almost
thirty years to put him in Angola. He should have got the needle. Now the white
folks is worried about injustice."
          "A kid in my
platoon waited two days at a stream crossing to take out a VC who killed his
friend. He used a blooker to do it. Splattered him all over the trees," I
said.
          "Something I
ain't picking up on?"
          "You have to
dedicate yourself to hating somebody before you can lay in wait for him. I just
never made Aaron Crown for that kind of
    guy," I said.
          "Let me tell you
what I think of Vietnam and memory lane, Jack.
    I got this"—he tapped his hook on his desk
blotter—"clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy six klicks out of
Pinkville. You want to tell war stories, the DAV's downtown. You want to spring
that cracker,