Last Car to Elysian Fields dr-13

by James Lee Burke

  "Did you see the driver?"

  "No."

  "What did the pickup truck look like?"

  "Just a truck. It was going down toward the bridge there."

  "Why'd you come across the road this morning?"

  "They got free coffee at the hospital," he replied.

  My knees ached when I stood up. I took two dollars from my wallet and gave it to him. "There's a donut shop back toward town. Why don't you get yourself something to eat?" I said. I started to walk away from him.

  "I seen something go flying out the truck window. Under the streetlight. Down toward the drawbridge. I don't know if that's any help to you or not," he said.

  A few minutes later the coroner arrived. Later, the paramedics unzipped a black body bag and placed the remains of Leon Hebert inside it and lifted it onto a gurney. Mack Bertrand fiddled with his pipe and put it between his teeth, upside down. He was a family man, a Little League coach and regular churchgoer and usually not given to a public expression of sentiment.

  "You asked why the victim grabbed the shooter's shoe," he said. "He was asking for mercy."

  I waited for him to continue. But he didn't.

  "Go on, Mack," Helen said.

  "That's all. He had a sucking chest wound and couldn't speak. It was probably like drowning while somebody watched. So he tried to beg with his hand. He must have been a bad judge of character."

  "How's that?" I asked.

  "Whoever did this poor bastard wanted him to go out as hard as possible," Mack said.

  Helen and I and a uniformed deputy searched along the edges of the road by the drawbridge, looking for the object the hobo said he had seen thrown from the fleeing pickup truck. But we found nothing of consequence. Helen dropped me at my house and I shaved and showered and drove to the office. At 9:15 a.m. I called the office of Dr. Parks. The receptionist said he would not be in. I called his home.

  "What do you want, Mr. Robicheaux?" he said.

  "How did you know it was "

  "Caller ID. What's the problem now?"

  "I'd like to come out to your house a few minutes."

  "You're not welcome at my house."

  "Sorry to hear you say that," I replied.

  I drove up Loreauville Road, through horse-farm country and fields bursting with mature sugarcane, under a hard blue sky you could have scratched with a nail. The air was cool and sweet smelling, like cinnamon burned on a woodstove, and through the cypress and oak trees that lined the Teche the sunlight glittered like goldleaf on the water's surface.

  But when I turned into Dr. Parks's driveway I seemed to enter a separate reality. His house was covered with shadow, the air cold, the birdbaths and empty fishpond and flagstone walkways moss stained and smelling of night-damp. The back end of a battered beige pickup truck stuck out of a shed in the rear of the house. Next to it was a stack of hay bales with a plastic bull's-eye pinned to them and a dozen arrows embedded in the straw. I had to ring the bell twice before he answered the door.

  He was unshaved, the whites of his eyes shiny with a yellow cast, as though he had jaundice, a sour odor emanating from his clothes.

  "Say it," he said.

  "May I come in?" I asked.

  "Suit yourself," he said, and walked deeper into the house.

  We entered a large, cheerless room with an unlit gas log fireplace and dark paneling on the walls and windows covered by thick velvet curtains. Track lights on the ceiling were focused on a huge gun case that was filled with both modern and antique firearms.

  "That's quite a collection," I said.

  "Get to it, Detective," he said.

  "Somebody waxed Leon Hebert last night. Somebody who really had it in for him."

  "That breaks me up."

  "You own a .38 or a nine-Mike?"

  "A what?"

  "A nine-millimeter."

  "Yeah, a half dozen of them."

  "You drive your pickup truck last night?"

  "No."

  "Where were you last night?"

  "Home, with Mrs. Parks. And that's the last question I'm answering without my attorney being present."

  We were standing no more than one foot apart. I could see the fatigue in his face, the sag in his skin, the manic shine of grief and anger in his eyes.

  "My second wife died at the hands of violent men, Dr. Parks. The sonsofbitches who did it are all dead and I'm glad. But their deaths never brought me peace," I said.

  "Is that your evangelical moment for the day?"

  "I recommend you not leave town."

  "One question?" he said.

  "Go ahead."

  "Did Hebert see it coming? Because I hope that motherfucker suffered just the way my daughter did before he caught the bus."

  I left his house without answering his question. There are times as a law officer when you wish you did not have to look into the soul of another, even a grieving victim's.

  That afternoon a seventeen-year-old black kid by the name of Pete Delahoussaye came into my office. Pete was over six feet and walked like he was made from coat hanger wire, but he had a fast ball that came down the chute like a B.B. and LSU and the University of Texas had both offered him athletic scholarships. Seven days a week, at 5:00 A.M." Pete and his widowed mother delivered the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate from one end of town to the other.

  He stood in front of my desk, a paper sack hanging from his left hand.

  "What's happening', Pete?" I said.

  "Found something early this morning. Thought maybe I should bring it in," he said.

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah," he said, sticking his hand in the bag. "I was passing Iberia General, going toward Jeanerette, when something come sailing out of a pickup."

  "Whoa," I said, rising from my chair, just as he lifted a-blue-black, pearl-handled revolver from the paper sack. I could see the leaded ends of bullets inside the cylinder. I stepped away from the muzzle and took the gun from him.

  "How much have you handled this, partner?" I asked.

  "A little bit," he replied, his eyes leaving mine.

  "Did anyone else handle it?"

  "No, suh."

  "Did you see the person inside the truck?"

  "No, suh, I ain't."

  "What kind of pickup was it?"

  "Just a beat-up old truck. Brown, I think. I would have brought the gun in this morning, but I had to go to school."

  "You did fine."

  "Mr. Dave?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I didn't know about the man getting killed at the daiquiri drive-by till this afternoon. My mother thinks I'm in trouble."

  "You're not. You're a good guy, Pete. Mind if we fingerprint you?"

  "So you won't get my prints mixed up with somebody else's?"

  "You got it."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it."

  I watched him walk down the hall, grinning, his day back in place. Keep playing baseball, kid, and don't ever grow up, I thought.

  Mack Bertrand, our forensic chemist, called me from the lab the next afternoon. "We've got a ballistics match on the .38," he said.

  "How about latents?" I asked.

  "They all belong to Pete Delahoussaye," he said.

  "None on the rounds in the cylinder?" I asked.

  "Absolutely clean. I think that gun was oiled and wiped down before it was fired."

  "What did you get off the plastic cup?"

  "Smudges that had dried dirt on top of them. I'm sure they were there long before our shooter arrived."

  "Anything else?"

  "The victim had shoe polish and grains of leather under the nails of his right hand. But we knew that at the crime scene. Except for the discarded weapon, I'd say our perp was a professional."

  "Thanks, Mack. By the way, what would you say the value of the gun is?"

  "It's a single-action army Colt, fairly rare. A lot of collectors have them. Maybe fifteen hundred dollars."

  I walked down to Helen's office and opened the do
or. She was just getting off the phone. "I'd like to get a warrant on Dr. Parks's house," I said.

  "Looking for what?" she asked.

  "Mack Bertrand says there were leather scrapings under the victim's nails."

  "Think Parks is our man?"

  "He had both motivation and opportunity."

  Her eyes searched my face. "That isn't what I asked," she said.

  "I went out to his house yesterday. He didn't attempt to hide his hatred of the victim. He even wanted to know if Hebert suffered. Later I wondered if it was an act."

  "Like he's trying to brass it out?"

  "Maybe. What doesn't make sense is the shooter throwing the gun out his truck window right by the drawbridge. Unless he wanted us to find it."

  "Why do perps do anything?" She glanced down at the legal pad by her telephone. "We ran the serial number on the gun. It's registered to a William Raymond Guillot. He lives in Franklin."

  "Guillot?" In my mind's eye I saw a tall, gray-headed, crew-cropped man by a slat fence, lighting a string of firecrackers, pitching it into the air, while behind him a half-dozen thoroughbreds thundered back and forth across a pasture.

  "You know him?" Helen said.

  "If it's the same guy, I saw him with Merchie Flannigan at Castille Lejeune's place."

  She bit down on the corner of her lip. "I think the ante just got raised on us," she said.

  "Say again?"

  "I checked out Hebert's liquor license with the state board. He didn't own the daiquiri shop. It's part of a corporation called Sunbelt Construction. Guess who's listed as the CEO?"

  Before I could answer, she said, "You got it, bwana. Castille Lejeune. Hope you enjoy charging howitzers with a popgun."

  CHAPTER 7

  Max Coll could not believe his bad luck. Not only had he blown the job on the priest in the confessional, his efforts at researching the priest's schedule for another run at the situation had been blessed with an electric storm from hell. By late Wednesday afternoon the streets of New Orleans were flooded and lightning had crashed into an oak tree on St. Charles, dropping most of the canopy into the center of the avenue. The consequence was a traffic jam from Canal all the way uptown to Carroll ton Avenue. Max could not even get a taxi from the edge of the Quarter to Father Dolan's church and had to walk ten blocks in a driving rain, a scoped and silenced .223 carbine banging against his rib cage.

  He looked like a drowned rat when he entered the church. Water poured out of his shoes and each time he coughed he experienced a sensation like a saw blade splitting his sternum. He began sneezing and couldn't stop. He honked his nose into a wad of paper towels until he was light-headed, then was almost run down by a beggar woman pushing her way out of the vestibule with a shopping cart.

  Why had he taken this job? It was jinxed from the start. New Orleans wasn't a city. It was an outdoor mental asylum located on top of a giant sponge.

  Get a hold of yourself, he thought. Take care of business, do a proper job of it, and never come back here again. It was almost 6:00 P.M. and the sky outside was absolutely black. The priest had finished his afternoon stint in the confessional and was no doubt having his supper, Max told himself. If the priest was true to his schedule, he would be saying his evening prayers in a front pew soon, his wide back presenting itself in lovely fashion to Max's crosshairs up in the choir. It was all going to be neat and tidy, nothing personal involved, no unnecessary pain. We all got to earn our keep, Father, he said to himself.

  Max waited until the vestibule was empty, then darted up the side stairs into the choir area. Ah, that was easy enough, he thought, looking down on the half dozen or so old people praying in the pews. Through a side window he saw lightning leap above the adjacent rooftops, illuminating the fire escape and the alleyway down below. Max did not like lightning. It brought back memories and catechism lessons he saw no point in reliving. He blew his nose softly, unbuttoned his raincoat, and unsnapped the carbine from the sling under his armpit. When he sat down in a chair among a pile of hymnals in the corner he unconsciously glanced upward at the celestial paintings on the ceiling, then quickly shifted his attention back to the nave of the church before he got lost in troubling thoughts that would be of no help in concluding the business at hand.

  He surveyed the marble pillars, the tapestry-draped banisters on the balconies, the apse over the altar, the hand-carved pulpit. The place looked like it had been transported from the Middle Ages and dropped from a hundred-thousand feet into the middle of a slum, he thought. Even the parishioners could have been street beggars out of the fifteenth century. All the place needed was Quasimodo swinging on the bells. What was the matter with these people? Hadn't they heard of modern times? And how about this Father Dolan, threatening him with physical violence over the telephone? Now, that was a sad state of affairs, an Irish-American priest berating a man who had worked in the service of the IRA. Pitiful, Max thought.

  "What are you doing, Mister?" a little boy's voice said.

  Oh shite, he thought.

  "Are you here for choir practice?" the child said. He was not over nine or ten and wore long pants and a white shirt with a tie. His hair was wet and freshly combed, his nails pink and trimmed.

  Max closed his raincoat, covering his carbine. "Choir practice? Not exactly," he said.

  "Then what are you doing?"

  "Examining the roof for rain leaks. I work for the bishop."

  "How come you're all wet?"

  "I told you. Now get lost."

  "I'm here with my mother for Father Jimmie's choir practice. I don't have to do what you say."

  "Now, you listen, you malignant pygmy " Max said.

  "Screw you," the little boy said.

  Max coughed violently into his palm. His head was splitting, his nose running. "Here's five dollars. Go buy yourself a hot chocolate," he said.

  "Screw you twice," the little boy said.

  "How would you like your dork stuffed in a light socket?" Max said.

  "Make it ten bucks," the little boy said.

  "What?"

  The little boy peered over the balcony. "Here comes Father Dolan now. Ten bucks or I start screaming," he said.

  Max shoved the money in the boy's hands and watched him run down the stairs. The little bastard, he thought. I hope the vendor pours Liquid Drano in his hot chocolate.

  Then Max heard footsteps, many of them, clopping up the wooden stairs. Either this is not happening or I'm being fucked with a garden rake, he thought.

  He jerked open the window on the fire escape and climbed outside into rain that was now mixed with hail, closing the window halfway behind him. The icy pellets pounded his head, scalded his face, and slid down his coat collar inside his clothes. And if that wasn't enough, a bolt of lightning crashed into the alley, filling the air with the stench of sulphur and scorched electrical wiring. Jesus God, why was this being visited upon him? Then he looked down below and realized there were no steps below the fire escape, only rusted fastenings in the stone wall where a steel extension had once been in place. He was trapped like a rain-soaked parrot on a perch in an electrical storm, while inside the church Father Dolan's parishioners were dry and warm, passing out hymnals to one another.

  Well, maybe it was time to spread the discomfort around a little bit, forget neat and tidy and simply splatter the good father's porridge and be on his way, Max thought. Why not? Click off the safety, burn the whole magazine if need be, then haul ass right through the choir and on downstairs into the street. Father Dolan's singing parishioners would be too busy climbing under the furniture or shaking the crab cakes out of their drawers to worry about describing Max Coll to the authorities.

  He knelt down in a shooting position on the fire escape, squinted into the carbine's scope, and saw the priest's magnified face swim into the crosshairs. In fact, the magnification of the priest's head was so great Max could not make out detail but see only hair and skin and perhaps just a touch of beard stubble. The hail clattered and danced lik
e mothballs on the steel mesh of the fire escape, stinging the backs of Max's hands, drumming softly on his cap.

  The carbine was loaded with soft-nose rounds and two of them impacting inside the priest's face would undoubtedly blow the back of his head into the wall like pieces from a broken watermelon. Max ground his molars, breathed hard through his nose, and felt his finger tighten inside the trigger guard. Squeeze it off, he told himself. Do it, do it, do it.

  But he froze again, his hands trembling, just as they had trembled inside the confessional.

  He was disgusted with himself. As he started to get to his feet, the silencer on the muzzle of the carbine scraped against the window glass. Suddenly he was not only looking straight into the priest's face, the priest was actually charging toward him.

  There was no place to run. The priest jerked the window open, ripped the carbine from Max's hands, then gripped the stock with both hands and drove the steel-plated butt into Max's mouth. Max felt his lip burst like a grape against his teeth, then the guardrail behind him peeled from its fastenings. In the wink of an eye he was plunging backward through space, his arms outspread, preparing himself for the impact on the brick-paved alley below.

  Instead, he crashed into the middle of an opened Dumpster loaded to the gunnels with rotten produce and the leftovers from a parish shrimp boil. He stared upward from the garbage like a crucified man, right into the angry face of Father Dolan, who peered down at him from the edge of the broken fire escape. Max extracted himself from the softness of garbage that seemed to be sucking him into its maw and began pulling himself over the side of the Dumpster.

  "Don't forget this," he heard Father Dolan call.

  Max looked up in time to see his carbine plummeting through the rain and hail, just before it bounced off his uplifted face.

  On Thursday morning I took the four-lane into Franklin, then checked in with the St. Mary Parish Sheriff's Department and was given directions to the home of William Guillot. It was a lovely old Victorian house, located in a tree-covered, residential neighborhood, one of deep green lawns and hydrangeas and impatiens blooming in the shade and wide galleries hung with porch swings. But the gardener told me Guillot wasn't there and I could probably find him at the subdivision he was building not far from the four-lane.