Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “He’s an old-time mechanic. Supposedly, he hung it up after he accidentally shot a child by the St. Thomas Project.”

  “Eventually we’ve got to run him out of town. You know that, huh?”

  “Easier said than done,” I replied.

  The sheriff got up from his chair and gazed out the window at the old crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery. “Who beat you up, Dave?” he said.

  At noon I signed out of the office to interview a woman in St. Mary Parish, down the bayou, who claimed to have awakened in the middle of the night to find a man standing over her. She said the man had worn leather gloves and a rubber mask made in the image of Alfred E. Neuman, the grinning idiot on the cover of Mad magazine. The man had tried to suffocate her by pressing his hands down on her mouth and nose, then had fled when the woman’s dog attacked him.

  Unfortunately for her, she was uneducated and poor, a cleaning woman at a motel behind a truck stop, and had filed reports of attempted rape twice in the past. The city police had blown off her claims, and I was about to do the same when she said, “He smelled sweet inside his mask, like there was mint on his breath. He was trembling all over.” Then her work-worn face creased with shame. “He touched me in private places.”

  It wasn’t the kind of detail that people imagined or manufactured. But if the intruder at her home had any connection to the death of either Linda Zeroski or Amanda Boudreau, I couldn’t find it. I handed her my business card.

  “You coming back to hep me?” she said, looking up at me from a kitchen chair.

  “I work in Iberia Parish. I don’t have any authority here,” I said.

  “Then why you got me to tell you all them personal t’ings?” she asked.

  I had no answer. I left my card on her kitchen table.

  An hour later I asked a cop at the entrance of the casino on the Indian reservation where I could find the man named Legion, then walked inside, into the smell of refrigerated cigarette smoke and rug cleaner, through banks of slot and video-poker machines, past crap and blackjack tables and a fast-food bar and an artificial pond with a painted backdrop that was meant to look like a cypress swamp, a stone alligator half submerged in the water, its mouth yawning open among the coins that had been thrown at it. The man named Legion was at the bar in a darkened cocktail lounge, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror that was trimmed with red and purple neon. His eyes looked at me indifferently in the mirror when I sat down on the stool next to him and hung my cane from the edge of the bar. A waitress in a short black skirt and . shnet stockings set a napkin down in front of me and smiled.

  “What will you have?” she asked.

  “A Dr Pepper on ice with some cherries in it. Mr. Legion here knows me. He comes around to my house sometimes. Put it on his tab,” I said.

  At first she thought she was listening to a private joke between Legion and me, then she glanced at his face and her smile went away and she made my drink without looking up from the drainboard.

  I hooked my coat behind the butt of the .45 automatic I carried in a clip-on holster.

  “T’es un pédéraste, Legion?” I asked.

  His eyes locked on mine in the mirror. Then he brought his cigarette up to his mouth and exhaled smoke through his nose and tipped the ash into his coffee saucer, his eyes following the woman behind the bar now.

  “You don’t talk French?” I said.

  “Not wit’ just anybody.”

  “I’ll ask you in English. You a homosexual, Legion?”

  “I know what you doin’. It ain’t gonna work, no,” he replied.

  “Because that’s the impression you left me with. Maybe raping those black women convinced you there’s not a girl buried down inside you.”

  He rotated the burning tip of his cigarette in his coffee saucer until the fire was dead. Then he fastened a button on his shirt pocket and straightened his tie and looked at his reflection in the mirror.

  “Go back to the kitchen and see if they got my dinner ready,” he said to the barmaid.

  I turned on my stool so I was looking at his profile.

  “I’m a superstitious man, so I went to see a traiture about you,” I lied. “My traiture friend says you got a gris-gris on you. Those women you forced yourself on, Mr. Julian, his poor wife who burned up in the fire, a man you murdered outside a bar in Morgan City? Their spirits all follow you around, Legion, everywhere you go.”

  The skin wrinkled under his right eye. He turned his head slowly and stared into my face.

  “What man in Morgan City?”

  “He was a writer. From somewhere up North. You shot him outside a bar.”

  “You found that in an old newspaper. It don’t mean anyt’ing.”

  “You shot him twice. His coat caught fire from the muzzle flash. The second time you shot him on the ground.”

  His mouth parted and his eyes narrowed and stayed fixed on mine.

  From my shirt pocket I removed a dime I had drilled a hole through early that morning, then strung on a piece of looped red string. I pushed the dime across the bar toward his coffee cup.

  “The traiture said you should carry this on your ankle, Legion.”

  “Like a nigger woman, huh?” he said, and pitched the dime into the bottles behind the bar.

  The barmaid came out of the kitchen with a tray. She took a plate of rice and gravy and stewed chicken and string beans off the tray and set it in front of Legion with a napkin and knife and fork.

  “Anything wrong here, Legion?” she asked.

  “Not wit’ me,” he replied, and tucked his napkin into his shirt and picked up his silverware.

  “Why would you kill a writer from up North?” I said.

  He leaned over his plate and opened his mouth to shovel in a fork piled with food. His face suddenly slanted sideways.

  Then I would have sworn his voice and accent actually changed, that it seemed to rumble and echo out of a cavern that was far larger in circumference and depth than his size.

  “You’d better leave me the fuck alone,” it said.

  I felt my scalp recede against my skull. I got up from my stool, my face suddenly cold and moist in the air-conditioning.

  I wiped my forehead on my coat sleeve and picked up my cane. When I did, the man called Legion looked ordinary again, a workingman bent over his dinner, his lips smacking his food.

  But my heart was still racing. As I stared at his back, I was determined that whatever fear he had engendered in me would not be one I walked out of the room with.

  “This time I’ll give you something to remember. Just so you’ll know what it’s going to be like every time we meet,” I said, and pulled his plate sideways and spit in it.

  Clete came into the bait shop on Wednesday afternoon, his hair and eyebrows freshly trimmed, wearing new slacks and a starched shirt and a gold neck chain and religious medal I’d never seen before. “Want to wet a line?” I asked.

  “No, not really. Just thought I’d drop by.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I took Barbara Shanahan to a luncheon on Monday,” he said.

  “A luncheon?”

  “Yeah, at the country club. It was full of lawyers. Last night we went to a lawn party on Spanish Lake. The governor was there.”

  “No kidding? Who else?”

  “Perry LaSalle.”

  “Was he at the luncheon, too?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Clete was sitting on one of the counter stools now, drumming his nails on the Formica. He looked up at me. “You saying Barbara’s using me to jerk LaSalle around?”

  The phone rang and I didn’t have to answer his question. After I hung up, I turned around and Clete was staring out the screened window at the bream popping the surface among the lily pads on the far side of the bayou. Three long lines, like strands of wire, were stretched across his forehead.

  “What’s wrong, podna?” I asked.

  “Last night I told Barbara I liked her a lot. I also told her maybe she
was carrying a torch for a guy I don’t have much respect for, but if that was her choice, I could boogie on down the road.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “She got mad.”

  “Her loss. Blow it off.”

  “That’s not all of it. She lives in this apartment on the bayou. I’m downstairs, on my way to the parking lot, and here she comes down the staircase. She apologizes. The moon’s up, the azaleas and the bougainvillea and wisteria are blooming. She’s standing there in her hose, her shoes off, her face like a little girl’s. She takes me by the arm and leads back up the stairs again. Dave, stuff like this doesn’t happen to guys like me with women like that. I kissed her in the living room and rockets went off in my head.”

  “Uh, maybe you don’t need to tell me anymore, Cletus.”

  “There’s a knock at the door.”

  “LaSalle?”

  “No, some peckerwood who sells magazines and Bibles. His name is Marvin something or another.”

  “Marvin Oates?”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy. A real con man. He’s got this hush-puppy accent and pitiful look on his face, like the orphanage just slammed the door on his nose. But Barbara laps it up, fixing him a sandwich and pouring a glass of milk for him, asking him if he wants some ice cream and melted chocolate to go with it. It was sickening. She said she’d forgotten she’d told Marvin to drop by, which meant I was supposed to leave.”

  I picked up two freshwater rods that were propped in the corner, the Mepps spinners on the lines snugged into the cork handles. I tossed one to Clete.

  “Let’s entertain the bass,” I said.

  “There’s more,” he said. His green eyes flicked sideways at me. His face was pink and oily with perspiration under the light, his fresh haircut like a little boy’s.

  I sat down next to him and tried not to look at my watch. “So what’s the rest of it?” I asked, feigning as much interest as I could.

  “I was back at my motel, just about asleep, when a car pulls up in front of Zerelda Calucci’s cottage. Guess who?” he said. “Perry LaSalle again. Like everywhere I go I see Perry LaSalle. Like any broad around here I’m interested in has got a thing with Perry LaSalle. Except this time he’s getting his genitalia ripped out.

  “Zerelda calls him a douche bag and a brain-dead horse dick, then picks up a flowerpot off the walk and smashes it on the dashboard of his convertible.

  “I hear his car leave and I think, Ah, I can get some sleep. Ten minutes later Zerelda taps on my door. Man, she was drop-dead beautiful, with those big ta-tas and pale skin and black hair full of lights and fire alarm lipstick, and she’s holding this big, sweaty bottle of cold duck, and she says, ‘Hey, Irish. I’ve just had the worst fucking night of my life. Feel like hearing about it?’

  “And I’m telling myself, Go back to sleep, Clete. Barbara Shanahan waits for you in the morning. Wet dream of the Mafia or not, no Sicilian skivvy runs tonight.

  “Those thoughts lasted about two seconds. Guess which podjo of yours got fucked on the ceiling last night and fucked on the ceiling and floor and in the shower and every other surface of the room this morning?”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t, either. Except I’m having dinner with her this evening.”

  “With Joe Zeroski’s niece?” I said.

  “Yeah. I think I just took Perry LaSalle’s place. You and Bootsie want to join us?” He looked at me expectantly.

  “I think we’re supposed to go to the PTA tonight,” I replied.

  “Right. I forgot you were tight with the PTA,” he said. He stood up and put on his hat. “By the way, I found out where that guy Legion lives. I let him know the Bobbsey twins from Homicide are a factor in his life.”

  “You did what?”

  On Thursday morning the sheriff called me down to his office. “You know a fellow named Legion Guidry?” he asked.

  “I know a man named Legion. I’m not sure if that’s his first or last name, though. He used to be an overseer on Poinciana Island.”

  “I got a call from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish. A couple of his deputies work at the casino in their off hours. One of them says you went into the lounge and spit in this fellow’s food.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I guess I was having a bad day,” I said.

  The skin seemed to shrink on the sheriff’s face. “You’re telling me you actually did this?” he said.

  “This is a bad guy, Sheriff. A real bucket of shit left behind by the LaSalle family.”

  “You want a lawyer in here?”

  “What for?”

  “Two nights ago somebody slashed all four of this fellow’s truck tires. A filling-station operator saw a man in a rattletrap Cadillac convertible leaving the neighborhood.” The sheriff picked up a yellow legal pad that he had written some notes on. “The filling-station operator said the driver looked like an albino ape with a little hat perched on his head. Sound like anybody you know?”

  “No, I don’t know any albino apes,” I replied.

  “You think this is funny?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I think your real beef is with the LaSalle family, Dave. You blame the rich for all our racial and economic problems. You forget the other canneries have shipped their jobs to Latin America. The LaSalles still take care of all their employees, all the way to the grave, no matter what it costs them.”

  “This man Legion is a sexual predator. He was given free rein to sexually exploit black women on the LaSalle plantation. That doesn’t seem like a protective attitude to me.”

  “Then maybe they should have gotten jobs somewhere else.” He stared hard at me, a piece of cartilage knotted in his jaw. “You got something you want to add?”

  I let my eyes slip off his face. “No, sir,” I said.

  The sheriff bit a piece of loose skin on the ball of his thumb, then rose from his chair and put on his suit coat and picked up his Stetson.

  “You and Helen Soileau check out shotguns,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We’re going out to have a talk with Joe Zeroski and his friends. Doesn’t Purcel live in that same motor court?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sounds like he made a good choice.”

  The motor court was out on East Main in a grove of live oak trees. The cottages were made of tan stucco and stayed in shade from morning to sunset, and each evening the smoke from meat fires drifted through the trees and bamboo onto Bayou Teche. Our caravan of six cruisers and a jail van slowed and turned into the motor court drive, passing a cottage at the entrance that had been converted into a barbershop, complete with a striped barber pole. At the end of the drive I saw Clete’s lavender Cadillac convertible parked across from Zerelda Calucci’s cottage.

  In a dry, brittle place inside my head I could hear a persistent humming sound, like an electrical short buzzing in the rain, the same sound I’d heard when I came home from Iberia General, wired to the eyes on painkillers.

  Helen parked the cruiser and looked at me. My walking cane and two sawed-down Remington pump twelve-gauge shotguns were propped on the seat between us.

  “You got something eating you?” she asked.

  “This is a dumb move. You don’t ’front Joe Zeroski.”

  “Maybe you should tell the skipper.”

  “I already did. Waste of time,” I said.

  “Try to enjoy it. Come on, Streak, time to rock ’n’ roll, lock and load,” she said, opening her door.

  I got out on the driveway with my cane in one hand and a shotgun propped over my shoulder with the other. The sheriff, three plainclothes, and at least ten uniformed sheriff’s deputies and a dozen city policemen were walking toward me. The wind had started to gust and leaves from the oaks spun in circles on the drive.

  “You got a second, Skipper?” I said.

  “What is it?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the cottages at the end of the row. A bullhorn hung from his right hand.


  “Let me talk with Joe.”

  “No.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Get with the program, Dave.”

  My gaze went through the crowd of police officers and focused on a man with ash-blond hair in jeans and a sports coat and a golf shirt and a white straw hat coned up on the sides who was getting out of a cruiser, his face filled with expectation, like a kid entering an amusement park.

  “What’s that guy doing here?” I asked.

  “Which guy?” the sheriff said.

  “Marvin Oates. He’s got a sheet. What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s a criminal justice student. We’re letting them ride with us. Dave, I think maybe you should go sit down, take it easy a while, maybe go up to the barbershop and get a haircut. We’ll pick you up on the way out,” the sheriff said.

  His words hung in the silence like the sound of a slap. He and everyone around him walked past me toward the end of the motor court as though I were not there. I could hear dead leaves blowing in a vortex around me.

  Helen looked over her shoulder, then walked back toward me. Her shirtsleeves were rolled in cuffs, her arms pumped. She squeezed my wrist.

  “He just found out his wife has cancer. He’s not himself, bwana,” she said.

  “This is a mistake.”

  “Forget I said anything.”

  She followed the others, her shotgun held in two hands, canted at an upward angle, her jeans tight on her rump, her handcuffs drawn through the back of her belt.

  A moment later the sheriff was on the bullhorn, his voice echoing off the trees and cottages. But I couldn’t hear his words. My ears were ringing now, my scalp cold in the wind. Joe Zeroski came out of his cottage, barechested, wearing sweatpants and a pair of snow-white tennis shoes, a piece of fried chicken in his hand, his face like that of a man who might have been working in front of a blast furnace.

  “What is this?” he said.

  “Tell all your people to get out here,” the sheriff said.

  “I don’t got to tell them. They go where I go. I asked you what this is. We got the Mickey Mouse show here?” Joe said.

  “You kidnapped a bunch of black men. They won’t file charges on you, but I know what you did. Here’s the search warrant if you care to look at it, Mr. Zeroski,” the sheriff said.