Last Car to Elysian Fields dr-13

by James Lee Burke

  I saw a bass roll among the flooded trees, like a green-gold pillow of air violating the symmetry of the surface. I cast my Rapala above the place he had broken the water, hoping to retrieve it across his feeding area. Instead, the balsa wood lure clacked against the trunk of a willow and the treble hooks went deep into the bark.

  "I'll row us over there," Clete said.

  "Not on my account," I said. I jerked the monofilament with my hand and snapped it off. The sun disappeared on the horizon like a flame dying on a wet match.

  Way leads on to way.

  I tried to go to bed early that night but I couldn't sleep. Rain began to click on the trees, then on the tin roof of my house, and I dressed and drove up the bayou road in the rain to St. Martinville. On the edge of the black district I went into a brightly lit cafe and ordered a cup of coffee and a small bowl of gumbo at the counter. A door with a beaded curtain was cut in one wall, and in the adjoining room a man was playing an accordion, while another man, with thimbles on his fingers, accompanied him on an aluminum rub board that had been molded to fit the contours of his chest.

  The people in the other room were all light-skinned people of color, often called Creoles, although originally the term Creole had denoted a person of French or Spanish ancestry who had been born in the New World. The people in the next room were blue-collar mulattos whose race was hard to determine. They drifted back and forth across the color line, married into both white and black families, still spoke French among themselves, and tended to be conscious of manners and family traditions.

  Seated in one corner by himself was Frank Dellacroce, a shot and a glass of beer by his hand, his legs crossed, his silk shirt unbuttoned in order to expose his chest hair and the gold chain and medallion that rested on it. He tossed back the whiskey and flexed his mouth as though he had just performed a manly act. Then he tilted back his head, the small of his back against the seat of the chair, and seemed to resume his concentration on the music. The song the accordionist was playing was "Jolie Blon," the most haunting and unforgettable lament I have ever heard. Then I realized that the object of Frank Dellacroce's attention had nothing to do with music, or a song about unrequited love and the loss of the Cajun way of life: Frank Dellacroce's attention was fixed on the shapely form of a young Creole woman dancing by herself.

  Her name was Sugar Bee Quibodeaux. Her eyes were turquoise, her hair the color of mahogany, fastened in back with a silver comb, her gold skin dusted with sun freckles. She also had the mind of a seven year old. She had conceived her first child when she was twelve and at age fifteen was taken to a state hospital by her grandparents and sterilized. Sometimes a local cop or a kind neighbor or business person tried to protect her from herself, but ultimately no one could restrain Sugar Bee's love of boys and men and the excitement and joy her own body gave her.

  I finished eating and paid my check at the register. Through the beaded curtain I could see Sugar Bee sitting at Frank Dellacroce's table, a bottle of beer and a glass in front of her. She was leaning forward, listening to something he was saying. He leaned forward, too, his hand deep under the table Then the two of them stood up and she picked up her purse, one with white sequins and tassels on it, and hung it by a string from her shoulder. They walked through the beaded curtain toward the front door.

  "That's far enough, Frank," I said.

  He turned around, half smiling. "You following me?" he said.

  "Nope."

  "Then we got no problem here. Right?"

  "Yeah'Ithinkwedo,"Isaid.

  "No, no, man," he said, wagging his finger. "I ain't done nothing wrong."

  "That's a matter of definition, Frank," I said.

  "We talking about a racial issue here?"

  "You're going back to your motel, Frank. You're going back alone. Got the drift?"

  "I checked you out, Robicheaux. You're an AA. rum-dum people around here feel sorry for. But that don't mean you get to beat up on guys like me 'cause I'm Italian or from New Orleans or whatever the fuck it is about me that bothers you."

  I looked at my watch. "Your coach is about to turn into a pumpkin," I said.

  He stepped toward me. "This is a free country. You don't like what me and the lady are doing, I say suck my dick. Now, you get out of my face and out of my space 'cause I really fucking don't like you, man."

  "At this point I'm placing you under arrest. Put your hands behind you and turn around, please," I said.

  "Arrest? For what?" he said, his face incredulous.

  "Disturbing the peace, creating a public nuisance, using profanity in public, that sort of thing. I'll think of some more charges on the way down to the jail," I said.

  "This ain't even your jurisdiction," he said.

  But I wasn't listening now. I turned him toward the wall and hooked him up, then pushed him out the door into the parking lot. It had stopped raining, and the air was cold and wet, and fog was rolling out of the trees across the road. Sugar Bee and several other patrons of the cafe and bar had walked outside and were watching us.

  "You armed, Frank?" I said.

  "Want to search my crotch? Be my guest," he replied.

  I fitted my hand under his arm and moved him toward the hood of my truck. That's when he hawked phlegm out of his throat and spat it in my face.

  I felt it in my eyelashes, on my mouth, in my hair, like a skein of obscene thread clinging to my person. I picked him up by his belt and slammed him into the fender of the truck, then drove his head down on the hood. But Frank Dellacroce was not one to give up easily;

  though his wrists were cuffed behind him, he brought one hand up and clenched it into my scrotum.

  I smashed his head into the hood again, then got my handcuff key out of my pocket and unhooked him. I spun him around and drove my fist into his mouth, throwing all my weight into the blow, snapping his head back as though it were on a spring. I saw his lip burst against his teeth, and I hooked him in the eye with a left, caught him on the jaw and in the throat and on the nose as he went down.

  He was whipped, but I couldn't stop. I picked him up by his shirt and hit him again, rolled him off a car fender and drove my fist repeatedly into his kidneys. He collapsed in a mud puddle and tried to drag himself away from me. But I knelt beside him and twisted his shirt in my left hand and drew back my fist to hit him again. He tried to speak, his ruined face pleading. I heard people screaming and felt Sugar Bee slapping at my head with a shoe, her voice keening in the damp air.

  A light on a pole burned overhead. I stared at the circle of faces around me, like a drunkard coming out of a blackout. Their eyes were filled with fear and pity, as though they were watching a wild animal tear his prey apart inside a cage. But there was one man in the crowd who did not belong there. He was white and had narrow shoulders and wore a seersucker suit with a pink tie. His ears were small, convoluted, hardly more than stubs on the sides of his head. His face and expression made me think of the bleached hide on a baseball.

  As I looked up into his eyes I had no doubt in the world who he was, no more than you can doubt the presence of death when it suddenly steps into your path. I got to my feet and helped Frank Dellacroce up, then propped him against the grill of an ancient gas guzzler, no more than five feet from the man in the seersucker suit.

  "Frank, meet a guy you've probably been looking for all your life," I said.

  Then I walked off balance to my truck and drove away.

  CHAPTER 10

  Early the next morning I soaked my hands until the swelling had gone out of my fingers, then I put Mercurochrome on the cuts in my knuckles and tried to cover them unobtrusively with flesh-colored Band-Aids. I picked up the morning paper off the gallery and went through it page by page, just as I had done for years when I was coming off a drunk, wondering what kind of carnage I may have left in an alley or on a rain-swept highway.

  But this morning the paper seemed filled with cartoons and sports and wire-service and local feature stories that had nothing to do w
ith events in front of a cafe-and-bar on the St. Martin Parish line. Snuggs, my newly adopted cat, followed me back inside and I opened a can of food for him and put it in his bowl and sat with him on the back porch while he ate. The wind was cool and damp and sweet smelling through the trees, but each time I closed my eyes I saw the terrified, blood-streaked face of Frank Dellacroce and wondered who lived inside my skin.

  Father Jimmie was still asleep, so I drove over to Clete's cottage at the motor court and took him for breakfast at the McDonald's on Main Street. Then I cleared my throat and told him about the previous night at least most of it.

  "Wait a minute," he said, raising his hands from his food. "You had your piece and your cuffs with you?"

  "Right," I said.

  "Why?" he said.

  I shrugged.

  "Maybe because you were looking for trouble when you left home?" he said.

  I looked at an oak tree out on the street, one that was strung with moss and lighted by the pinkness of the early sun. "I saw Max Coll there," I said.

  "You did what?"

  "In the crowd. I've seen pictures of him. It had to be Coll. His head looks like a used Q-tip," I said.

  Clete's eyes studied my face. They seemed to contain a level of sorrow that I could not associate with the man I knew. "What are you doing to yourself, Streak?" he said.

  At 11:30 A.M. Helen leaned her head in my door. "Pick up line two. See how much this has to do with us. If it doesn't, don't let it get on our plate," she said.

  The man on the other end of the line was a St. Martin Parish plain-clothes named Dominic Romaine. He was a big, fat, sweaty man, known for his rumpled suits, horse-track neckties, and general irreverence toward everything. He had emphysema and his voice wheezed into the phone when he spoke.

  "That guy you beat the shit out of last night, Frank Dellacroce?" he said.

  "Uh, there's a bad connection, Romie. Say again."

  "Pull on your own joint, Robicheaux. I don't know why you busted this guy up, but it don't matter. In other words, you're not gonna be up on an IA beef."

  "Sorry, I'm just not reading you, partner."

  I heard him take a deep breath, the air in his lungs whistling like wind in a chimney. "After you got finished with Dellacroce, he drove to a cabin by Whiskey Bay. It's actually a fuck pad a bunch of grease-balls out of Houston use. Get this" he broke off and started laughing, then fought to catch his breath again "he was behind the wheel of his car, sucking on a bottle of tequila, while this mulatto broad was giving him a blowjob, when a guy comes out of the dark and parks a big one in the back of his head. I mean a big one, too, like a.44 mag. His brains were still running out his nose when we got there."

  Dominic Romaine started laughing again. I felt my vision go in and out of focus. Outside, an ambulance passed the courthouse, its siren screaming. "You still there?" he said.

  "Who was the shooter?"

  "No idea. No description, either. The mulatto handing out the blowjob is retarded or something. Dave, there's a question that needs to go into my report."

  "I didn't see Dellacroce after my encounter with him," I said.

  "Got any speculations on the shooter?"

  My head was pounding, my stomach churning. "Check with N.O.P.D. Dellacroce was a hit man and fulltime wise-ass. I think he was a grunt for Fat Sammy Figorelli."

  "It sounds like his passing will go down as a great tragedy. Hey, Dave? You know that song by Louie Prima? "I'll be standing on the corner plastered when they bring your coffin by'? I love that song. Hey, Dave?"

  "What?"

  "Next time you go looking for a punching bag, make sure it ain't in St. Martin Parish," he said.

  I barely got through the day. I tried to convince myself the man I had seen in the crowd the previous night was not Max Coll. I had seen only photos of him, taken through a zoom lens or in a late-night booking room. The man in the crowd could have been a tourist, or someone who had walked over from the convenience store next door, I told myself. And even had it been Max Coll, was I my brother's keeper, particularly if my "brother" was a dirtbag like Frank Dellacroce?

  But I knew in my heart my thought processes were self-serving and futile and that I had helped set up a man's death. I worked late at the office, past sunset, then turned out the light on my desk and drove home, just as it began to rain.

  I pulled into my drive, expecting to see Father Jimmie's car under the porte cochere. Instead, I saw Theodosha Flannigan's Lexus parked in the shadows and a light burning in the kitchen. The trees in the yard and the bamboo along the edge of the driveway were shrouded in mist, and yellow leaves floated in the rain puddles. The front door and the windows of the house were open, and I thought I could smell the odor of freshly baked bread. In fact, the entire scene, the dark cypress planks in the walls of the cottage, the rusted tin roof, the black-green overhang of the oaks and pecan trees, and the warm radiance emanating from the kitchen windows, all made me think of the house where I had lived many years ago with my father and mother.

  As soon as I stepped into the house I saw Snuggs resting on the arm of the couch, his eyes shut, his paws tucked under his chest, a red satin bow tied around his neck. I walked into the brightness of the kitchen and stared woodenly at Theodosha, who was lifting a loaf of buttered French bread out of the oven. Behind her, steam curled off a pot of gumbo. Her mouth parted slightly when she saw me, as though I had dragged her away from a troubling thought.

  "I fixed you some supper. Hope you don't mind," she said.

  "Where's Father Jimmie?" I asked.

  "He went to Lafayette. He said he's probably going to stay over."

  "Is Merchie here?" I said.

  "I'm not sure where he is. He's just out being Merchie. Do you want me to go?"

  "No, I didn't mean that. I'm just a little disconnected today."

  She began setting the table as though I were not there. Her hair looked like it had just been cut and shampooed. She wore Mexican sandals and khakis with big pockets and a denim shirt embroidered with roses and stovepipe cactus. In fact, as I looked at her moving about the room, I realized what it was that drew men to her. She was one of those women whose intelligence and elan and indifference to public opinion allowed her to give symmetry and order to what would have been considered chaos in the life of a lesser person.

  "Theo, I'd feel a lot better if we could ask Merchie over," I said.

  "I knew you'd say something like that."

  She set a gumbo bowl on the table and stared at it emptily. She removed a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth and walked to within a foot of me. She started to touch me, then folded her arms in front of her, as though she had no place to put her hands. Her breath was cold and smelled of bourbon and orange slices.

  "I was going to a meeting today. I had no plans to drink. I swear. I drove twice around the block, then went into a bar and drank for two hours." She looked up at me desperately. "Dave, I'm seriously fucked up. Nothing I do works."

  She lowered her head and inverted her palms and clasped them around my wrists. She stood on my shoes with her sandals and her stomach touched my loins. I could smell the shampoo in her hair and the perfume behind her ears. She pulled my hands to her sides and held them there. I could feel a thickness growing in me, a dryness like confetti in my mouth. She slipped her arms around my waist and pressed her face sideways against my chest.

  "Dave, why didn't you ask me to marry you?" she said.

  "This is no good, Theo."

  "We had fun together. Why did you go away?"

  "I was a drunk. I would have made any woman unhappy."

  Her eyes were wet against my shirt. I patted her on the back and tried to step away from her. Then she turned up her face to be kissed.

  "I'll see you," I said.

  "What?"

  "I have to go back to the office," I lied. "I just came home to get something. I don't even remember what it was."

  Then I left my own house, feeling stupid and inadequate
, which was perhaps an honest assessment.

  When I returned to the house two hours later she was gone. The kitchen was immaculate, the food she had fixed carted away. I didn't fall asleep until after midnight. Then I woke at three in the morning and sat on the edge of the mattress, my skin filmed with sweat, my loins like concrete, the darkness creaking with sound. I put my loaded .45 under the pillow and when the sun came up the hardness of the steel frame was cupped in my palm.

  Later, I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and milk and sliced bananas on the kitchen table, then heard Snuggs at the back screen. I opened the door for him and he walked to his pet bowl under the kitchen sink and waited for me to fill it with the box of dry food I kept on top of the icebox. The red silk bow Theodosha had tied around his neck was coated with mud. I took a pair of scissors from the dresser in the hallway and snipped the bow loose from his fur. "It looks like Theo's concern for you was limited, Snuggs," I said.

  Somehow that thought made me feel more comfortable about leaving her and the meal she had prepared for me the previous night. I returned the scissors to the dresser drawer. But before I shut it I glanced down at the box where I kept all the sympathy cards that had been sent to me when Bootsie died. A corner of an envelope stuck out of the pile and the return address on it made me wince inside. On my visit to Theo and Merchie's house several weeks ago she had expressed her sympathies about Bootsie's death, but I'd had no memory of her sending a card and had concluded her sentiments were manufactured.

  But her card was in the pile and the statements on it were obviously heartfelt. I picked up Snuggs and set him on the countertop and patted his head. "How can one guy's thought processes be this screwed up?" I asked.

  Snuggs rubbed against me, brushing his stiffened tail past my nose, and made no comment.

  The phone on the counter rang. I started to pick it up, then hesitated and stared at it, my heart quickening, because I knew who it was, who it would have to be, if he was the obsessed and driven man I thought he was.

  "Hello?" I said.

  "Is the good father there?" the voice asked.