DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox Read Online Free Page B

going
to say it but once, no. It don't matter what that kind of man bring into your
life, it ain't no good."
          "I'm a police
officer, podna. I can't always be selective about the people I talk to."
          He cut his head and
walked away.
          I left a message for
the nephew at NOPD and drove to the office just as it started to mist. He
returned my call two hours later, then turned over the telephone to a Homicide
detective. This is how I've reconstructed the story that was told to me.
     
     
    V ice had identified the hooker as Brandy Grissum, a black
twenty-five-year-old heroin addict who had done a one-bit in the St. John the
Baptist jail for sale and possession.
          She worked with three
or four pimps and Murphy artists out of the Quarter. The pimps were there for
the long-term regular trade. The Murphy artists took down the tourists,
particularly those who were drunk, married, respectable, in town on
conventions, scared of cops and their employers.
          It was an easy scam.
Brandy would walk into a bar, well dressed, perhaps wearing a suit, sit at the
end of the counter, or by herself in a booth, glance once into the John's face,
her eyes shy, her hands folded demurely in front of her, then wait quietly
while her partner cut the deal.
          This is the shuck:
"My lady over there ain't a reg'lar, know what I'm sayin'? Kind of like a
schoolgirl just out on the town." Here he smiles. "She need somebody
take her 'round the world, know what I'm sayin'? I need sixty dollars to cover
the room, we'll all walk down to it, I ain't goin' nowhere on you. Then you
want to give her a present or something, that's between y'all."
          The difference in the
scenario this time was the John had his own room as well as agenda.
          His name was Dwayne
Parsons, an Academy Award nominee and two-time Emmy winner for his documentary
scripts. But Dwayne Parsons had another creative passion, too, one that was
unknown to the hooker and the Murphy artist and a second black man who was
about to appear soon—a video camera set up on a tripod in his closet, the lens
pointed through a crack in the door at the waterbed in his leased efficiency
apartment a block off Bourbon.
          Parsons and the woman
were undressed, on top of black satin sheets, when the hard, insistent knock
came at the door. The man's head jerked up from the pillow, his face at first
startled, then simply disconcerted and annoyed.
           "They'll go away," he said.
          He tried to hold her
arms, hold her in place on top of him, but she slid her body off his.
          "It's my
boyfriend. He don't let me alone. He's gonna break down the do'," she
said. She began to gather her clothes in front of her breasts and stomach.
          "Hey, I look
like a total schmuck to you?" Parsons said. "Don't open that door . .
. Did you hear me. . . Listen, you fucking nigger, you're not hustling
me."
          She slid back the
deadbolt on the door, and suddenly the back and conked and side-shaved head of
a gargantuan black man were in the lens. Whoever he was, he was not the man
Brandy Grissum had expected. She swallowed as though she had a razor blade in
her
    throat.
          But Dwayne Parsons
was still not with the script.
          "You want to rob
me, motherfucker, just take the money off the dresser. You get the gun at the
Screen Actors Guild?" he said.
          The black man with
the gun did not speak. But the terror in the woman's face left no doubt about
the decision she saw taking place
    in his.
          "I ain't seen
you befo', bitch. You trying to work independent?" he
    said.
          "No . . . I mean
yes, I don't know nobody here. I ain't from New Orleans." She pressed her
clothes against her breasts and genitalia. Her mouth was trembling.
          One block away, a
brass street band was playing on Bourbon. The man thought some more, then
jerked the barrel of his automatic toward the