DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox Read Free Page B

the
far side of our cruiser, opened the back door and sat him down behind the
wire-mesh screen. I leaned one arm on the roof and looked down into his face.
An oiled, coppery strand of hair fell down across his eyes.
          "You did the
right thing with this guy Crown. You do the right thing, you get taken care of.
Something wrong with that?" he said.
          "Yeah. I'm not
getting taken care of."
          "Then that's
your fucking problem."
          "When you get
back to the Big Sleazy, stay there, Mingo," I said, and closed the car
door.
          "I got a permit
for the piece you took off me. I want it back," he said through the open
window.
          I waited for Helen to
get behind the wheel, drumming my fingers on the cruiser's roof, trying to
conceal the disjointed expression in my face.
     
     
    I f you seriously commit yourself to alcohol, I mean full-bore, the
way you take up a new religion, and join that great host of revelers who sing
and lock arms as they bid farewell to all innocence in their lives, you quickly
learn the rules of behavior in this exclusive fellowship whose dues are the
most expensive in the world. You drink down. That means you cannot drink in
well-lighted places with ordinary people because the psychological insanity in
your face makes you a pariah among them. So you find other drunks whose
condition is as bad as your own, or preferably even worse.
          But time passes and
you run out of geography and people who are in some cosmetic way less than
yourself and bars where the only admission fee is the price of a 6 a.m. short-dog.
          That's when you come
to places like Sabelle Crown's at the Underpass in Lafayette.
          The Underpass area
had once been home to a dingy brick hotel and row of low-rent bars run by a
notorious family of Syrian criminals. Now the old bars and brick hotel had been
bulldozed into rubble, and all that remained of the city's last skidrow refuge
was Sabelle's, a dark, two-story clapboard building that loomed above the
Underpass like a solitary tooth.
          It had no mirrors,
and the only light inside came from the jukebox and the beer signs over the
bar. It was a place where the paper Christmas decorations stayed up year-round
and you never had to see your reflection or make an unfavorable comparison
between yourself and others. Not unless you counted Sabelle, who had been a twenty-dollar
whore in New Orleans before she disappeared up north for several years. She was
middle-aged now, with flecks of gray in her auburn hair, but she looked good in
her blue jeans and V-necked beige sweater, and her face retained a kind of hard
beauty that gave fantasies to men who drank late and still believed the
darkness of a bar could resurrect opportunities from their youth.
          She opened a bottle
of 7-Up and set it in front of me with a glass of ice.
          "You doin' all
right, Streak?" she said.
          "Not bad. How
about you, Sabelle?"
          "I hope you're
not here for anything stronger than Seven-Up."
          I smiled and didn't
reply. The surface of the bar stuck to my wrists. "Why would a New Orleans
gumball named Mingo Bloomberg have an interest in your father?" I said.
          "You got
me."
          "I went over
everything I could find on Aaron's case this afternoon. I think he could have
beat it if he'd had a good lawyer," I said.
          She studied my face
curiously. The beer sign on the wall made tiny red lights, like sparks, in her
hair.
          "The big problem
was Aaron told some other people he did it," I said.
          She put out her
cigarette in the ashtray, then set a shot glass and a bottle of cream sherry by
my elbow and walked down the duckboards and around the end of the bar and sat
down next to me, her legs hooked in the stool's rungs.
          "You still
married?" she said.
          "Sure."
          She didn't finish her
thought. She poured sherry into her shot