Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “That’s what I thought you said. Check you out later. Say, I like your tie,” Frankie said.

  “Later” turned out to be a passage of five minutes, when Marvin finished eating and went into the men’s room. Frankie Dogs came through the door right behind him and drove Marvin’s face into the tile wall above the urinal, then wheeled him around and buried his fist in Marvin’s stomach.

  A middle-aged man was exiting the toilet stall, belting his trousers.

  “Out of the way! We got an emergency here!” Frankie said, shoving the man aside and plunging Marvin’s head into the toilet bowl.

  Then Frankie repeatedly flushed the toilet, pressing Marvin’s face deeper into the vortex swirling about his ears. When the manager burst through the door, Frankie pulled Marvin out of the bowl by his collar, a curtain of water cascading onto the floor. Marvin lay half unconscious against the wall, a long strand of wet toilet paper hanging from one ear.

  “You people need to clean this place up. It ain’t sanitary,” Frankie said to the manager, gesturing at the paper towels someone had left scattered on the washbasin.

  That evening I drove to Baron’s, our local health club, and worked out on the machines, lightly at first, then increasing the weight incrementally as the pain and the stiffness from the beating Legion had given me gradually dissipated in my muscles and bones. Then I went into the aerobics room, which was empty now, and did a series of leg-lifts and pushups and curls with thirty-pound dumbbells. I could feel the blood swell in my arms, my palms ring with the tremolo of the dumbbells when I clanged them down on the steel rack. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but at least I didn’t feel as though I had been rope-drug down a staircase. I sat in a folding chair, a towel draped over my head, and touched the floor with my hands, constricting the muscles in my stomach at the same time. When I glanced up, I saw Jimmy Dean Styles enter at the far end of the room and begin pounding the heavy bag with a pair of dull red slip-on gloves, smacking the bag so hard, sweat showered from his head.

  He used the classic stance of Sugar Ray Robinson, his weight forward, raised on the balls of his feet, his chin tucked into his shoulder, his left jab aimed eye-level at an opponent, his right hook a blur of light. A row of stitches was ridged across one cheek, like a centipede embedded in the skin. With his sheep’s nose and close-set eyes, a ragged line of beard along his jawbones, his profile could have been lifted from a mural depicting an Etruscan gladiator.

  But Jimmy Dean Styles was not one who performed or forfeited his own well-being for the entertainment of the upper classes.

  A college girl and her boyfriend had just entered the room. The girl was rich, a well-known loud presence at the club, vacuous, obtuse, spoiled, protected by her family’s wealth, totally unaware of the tolerance that other people extended to her. Her blond hair was moist with sweat, tied up on her head, her white shorts rolled up high on her tanned thighs. She plugged a tape into the stereo and began an aerobic dance routine, kicking at the air, chewing gum, the stereo’s speakers loud enough to rattle glass.

  “Like, I don’t want to create no problem here, but I don’t need my eardrums blown out,” Styles shouted, lowering his gloves to his sides.

  But she kept up her routine, her hands on hips now, her breasts bouncing, her mouth counting one-two, one-two, her eyes shifting to Jimmy Dean Styles for a moment, then looking straight ahead again, one-two, one-two, her attention now concentrated on her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror.

  “Say, maybe you ain’t heard me, but there ain’t no aerobic class in here right now. That means I didn’t come in here for no Excedrin headache,” Styles tried to yell above the music.

  She paused and blotted her face with a towel, then wiped her arms and the top of her chest and threw the towel on the carpet. I thought she was going to pull the tape from the stereo, but instead she did a cartwheel all the way across the room, exhaled a self-congratulatory deep breath, then filled a paper cone with water at the cooler and brushed strands of hair off her forehead in the mirror.

  Styles dialed down the volume of the music and picked up a second pair of heavy-bag gloves from a chair and tossed them to the girl’s boyfriend.

  “Here, I’ll show you how to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” he said.

  “I don’t box,” the boy replied, his eyes looking away from Styles. There was a flush in his cheeks, like the color of a window-ripened peach. The softness in his arms, his narrow chest, the insularity he tried to wrap himself in, had probably made him the target of bullies all his life. “I mean, I probably would be just wasting your time,” he added, wondering which excuse would be acceptable.

  “Better put ’em on, my man,” Styles said, then threw a left-right combination that stopped a half-inch from the boy’s nose.

  “Okay, you showed me. Thanks.”

  “Here, I’ll do it again. You ready? Tell me if you’re not ready. Don’t blink. I told you not to blink,” Styles said.

  “I’m no good at this,” the boy said.

  Styles’s fists flashed, zipping by the boy’s eyes and chin, causing him to flinch and cower, the old stain of fear and shame and failure creeping into his face.

  Styles smiled, pulled the glove from his right hand.

  “Hey, didn’t mean nothing by it. Right coaching, you could kick some ass. Ax your lady over there. She know a killer when she see one,” he said. He put his finger in his mouth and then placed a glob of spit inside the boy’s ear.

  Ten minutes later I was alone in the steam room when Styles came in, naked, a towel tied around his neck. He sat down on the ledge, his buttocks splaying on the moist tiles. “You don’t like white people much, do you?” I said.

  He felt the hard row of stitches in his cheek and untied the towel from his neck and spread it across his thighs and phallus.

  “A couple of cops rousted me outside my crib. Tore the carpet out of my car. I heard them say your name. Like maybe you tole them I was dealing,” Styles said.

  “They gave you those stitches?” I asked.

  “I ain’t done you nothing, man. Why you always on my case?”

  “You make life hard for people of your own race.”

  He studied the drops of water running down the wall. His skin was gold, dripping in the clouds of steam. He bit down softly on the corner of his lip.

  “You ax if I like white people. My grandfather use to say just a few white folks was bad. No matter how bad he got treated, he always say that. They chained him to a tree and burned him to death wit’ a blowtorch. Now, I’m gonna do my steam,” he said.

  “You were out at Poinciana Island, asking about Tee Bobby’s sister. Why are you so interested in the welfare of an autistic girl?”

  “’Cause Tee Bobby’s grandmother and Rosebud got nobody to care for them. That don’t fit in your head, that’s your motherfucking problem, man.”

  He glared into my face, his nostrils flaring with a visceral hatred of me or the authority I represented or perhaps a lifetime of dealing with the worst members of the white race.

  “You don’t got nothing more clever to say?” he asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  “That’s good, man.” He cupped his palm on his sex and massaged his shoulders against the hot tiles, his eyes closed, his face oily in the heat.

  “Your grandfather was the victim of Klansmen and misanthropes. But you’re not. You use the suffering of others to justify your own evil. It’s the mark of a coward,” I said.

  He leaned forward, his forearms propped on his thighs, closing and opening his hands, as though considering a reckless course of action. He stood up, the towel dropping from his loins. His body was networked with rivulets of sweat. He scratched a place below his stitches, his eyes taking my measure.

  “I seen you earlier in the dressing room. Eating some pills out of a li’l vial. Them ain’t M&M’s. You was taking the rush, man. You call me a coward? You used other cops to do this to my face, kick my feet out from under me while
my wrists was cuffed behind my back. You got a problem, man, but it ain’t me.”

  He went out of the door, past the big window on the steam room, his flip-flops slapping, a smile at the corner of his mouth. I showered and changed into my street clothes and stuffed my gym shorts and soiled T-shirt and socks into my workout bag. Bootsie’s diet pills, which I had taken from our medicine cabinet, lay in the bottom of the bag. I thought of Jimmy Dean Styles, the sneer on his face, the calculated insult of his words, and I felt my bowels slide in and out, a pang of anger rip through my chest as bright and sharp as a piece of scissored tin. I dropped two of the diet pills in my mouth and cupped a handful of water from the faucet and swallowed. The rush went through my system with the warm and soft glow of an old-fashioned, like the caress of a destructive ex-girlfriend reentering your life.

  Outside, the wind was blowing hard, the palms whipping on the neutral ground, the sky bursting with trees of lightning. Garbage cans and newspapers bounced through the streets, the air smelling of dust and distant rain. Jimmy Dean Styles was putting up the top on a red convertible. A short, heavyset white woman, with bleached hair that looked as if it had been electrified in a microwave, stood behind Styles and watched him clamp down the convertible’s top, patiently holding a yogurt cone wrapped in a napkin. I couldn’t place her at first, then I remembered seeing her with Linda Zeroski, hanging on the same corner where Linda had been picked up the night she died.

  Styles took the cone from her hand and hugged her close and licked a huge swath out of the yogurt, then fed the cone to the woman as he would a pet, her neck snugged tightly in his bare armpit.

  “How you like it, my man? I’m talking about my car. You could use a ’sheen like this. Put a li’l boom-boom in yo’ bam-bam, know what I mean?” Styles said, laughing openly at me now.

  CHAPTER 14

  Frankie Dogs was a private man who shared little about himself with other people. He and his wife had not been able to have children, and after she died of colon cancer many years ago, his only family had become the Mob. Frankie was a made guy and stand-up soldier in the old tradition. He went down twice, a three-bit in Raiford and a hard nickel in Angola. At Raiford he was kept in the Flat Top, maximum security, and the other inmates called him “mister.” In Angola he was classified a big stripe and spent most of his sentence in twenty-three-hour lockdown. His neighbors were shank artists, snitches, gangbang yard bitches, and meltdowns who threw their feces through the bars at the guards. Bad screws could jam him up, take away his privileges, leave him unwashed and foul in his cell. But Frankie Dogs never ratted anybody out, never used a punk, took on all comers in the showers or anywhere else, and would let his enemies rub salt in his wounds rather than complain or ask for help from a corrections officer.

  Frankie grew up in the Irish Channel with Joe Zeroski and became a made guy the same week as Joe. But unlike Joe, who never gambled, Frankie loved racetracks in general and Miami’s Biscayne Dog Track in particular. That’s where he met Johnny (whose last name Frankie never used), silver-haired, handsome, profile like a Roman emperor’s, connected in Hollywood, always dressed in fifteen-hundred-dollar tailored suits, a boyish grin on his mouth that was so congenial no one would later believe he helped to murder the president of the United States.

  Johnny almost took out Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar. Frankie hand-waited on Johnny at his home in Ft. Lauderdale, played cards and swam with him in his pool, listened to Johnny talk about Benny Siegel and Meyer and how Albert died in the barbershop and who put the hit on him. Johnny not only had the keys to magic places in Phoenix and Beverly Hills and the Islands, he had the keys to history.

  He might have been a greaseball from the slums of New York, but he had reinvented himself as a man of grace and charm in a world of palm trees, tile-roofed stucco mansions, and champagne lawn parties. Each morning the tropical sunrise came to Johnny as an absolution, not of sin but of poverty.

  “What you brooding about, kid?” Johnny asked him one evening when they were playing cards and grilling steaks on the patio.

  “These political people ain’t no good for us,” Frankie replied.

  “It’s a racket, just like unions or construction or any of our regular businesses.”

  “These guys got no loyalty, Johnny. They send their messages through Cuban street mutts ’cause they’re ashamed to be seen with us. They’ll use you and throw you away.”

  Johnny cupped his hand on the back of Frankie Dogs’s neck, his eyes paternal, glistening with sentiment.

  “You worry too much, kid. But that’s why I like you. You don’t never let a man down,” he said.

  The next day Frankie slept late in the pool house. When he went inside for breakfast, he asked the Puerto Rican cook where Johnny was.

  “Is no here,” the cook replied.

  “I know that. That’s why I’m asking you. Why don’t you learn the English language?” Frankie said.

  The cook said Johnny had walked to the shopping center for a pack of cigarettes.

  “He ain’t supposed to do that. Why didn’t nobody wake me up? Which shopping center? Hey, I’m talking here,” Frankie said.

  “I don’t know nozzing,” the cook replied.

  One week later a sealed oil drum floated to the surface in Biscayne Bay. The drum was wrapped with chains and sash weights and should have remained buried forever in the silt bottom of the bay. But the people who had shot Johnny through the head and sawed off his legs and stuffed them with his torso inside the drum, pausing to jab an ice pick into his abdomen to break the stomach lining, had botched the job, allowing Johnny’s last meal on earth to form into gas and float his body parts back into the tropical sunrise.

  Frankie Dogs never forgave himself for sleeping in the day Johnny died.

  He left Miami on the Sunset Limited, broke and depressed, and found his old friend Joe Zeroski waiting for him on the platform in New Orleans. Joe moved him into his house and gave him a job collecting the vig for the Giacano family’s Shylocks. Frankie found a stained form of redemption in devoting his life to Joe and Joe’s sad, drug-addicted, profligate daughter, Linda.

  But it was all going south again. If you were a button man, the only edge you had was the edge. You got high on it and wore your indifference like an unshaved man in a tailored suit. Your enemies looked into your eyes and knew that even if they blew out your lights you’d smoke them on the way down. But some guys out of Houston tried to cowboy Joe by the St. Thomas Project. Joe fired his .45 through the back window of his car and hit a kid on a bicycle.

  Bad luck for everybody. But that’s all it was, bad luck. It don’t mean you’re some kind of degenerate, Frankie told himself.

  In Frankie’s opinion everything about this New Iberia gig was wrong. Frankie’s motto was: When in doubt, take ’em all out. For openers he told Joe to pop that black kid, Tee Bobby Whatever. Throw a pimp off a roof and make his friends watch. And tell Zerelda to stop complicating things by rolling down her panties at every opportunity. First she’s pumping it with that animal Purcel, then she’s messing around with a door-to-door salesman packs his own lunch into restaurants. It was disgusting.

  Frankie shot nine-ball in a back-of-town bar in Lafayette, where the beer was cold, the fried-oyster po’boys good, the green-felt table level, the pockets leather, the competition first-class. It was like the saloons on Magazine he and Joe had shot pool in when they were kids.

  Lightning flickered on the banana trees outside the back window and he heard a few drops of rain ping against the tin roof like scattered birdshot. A man with silver hair came in and sat at the bar in front. He had a Roman nose and a broad forehead that caught the light. Frankie had to look at him twice to make sure it wasn’t Johnny back from the grave. Frankie speared the cue ball into the rack and ran the string all the way to the nine ball. When he looked at the bar again, the man with silver hair was gone.

  Besides the bartender, the only other person in the building was a guy playing a pinbal
l machine in a side room, back in the shadows, a guy with his slacks tucked into red and green hand-tooled cowboy boots that came almost to the knee, his face obscured by a peaked cowboy hat.

  Frankie had not heard the front door open or close, had felt no puff of wind or balloon of rain-scented air come into the room. Where had the man with silver hair gone?

  “Bring me another beer,” Frankie called to the bartender.

  “You got a beer.”

  “It’s flat. Bring me an oyster po’boy, too,” Frankie said.

  Ten minutes later Frankie glanced out the side window. The man with silver hair was standing by a black Caddy, the wind blowing his raincoat. Lightning pulsed across the heavens and the reflection illuminated the parking lot. The man by the Caddy seemed to smile at him.

  Frankie told himself he was coming down with something. His stomach was roiling; his bowels were on fire. He went into the rest room and entered the wooden stall and latched the stall door behind him. When he dropped his pants and sat down heavily on the toilet seat, he looked through a clear spot on the painted window glass and saw the silver-haired man enter the back of the tavern.

  The door to the rest room opened and Frankie felt the cool rush of air from the outside and heard the rain ticking on the banana trees. Then, for a reason he could not explain, he knew he was going to die.

  He had left his gun in his coat on the back of a chair by the pool table. But strangely he felt no fear. In fact, he even wondered if this wasn’t the moment that he had always sought, the one that came to you like an old friend showing up unexpectedly at a train station.

  “That you, Johnny? What’s going on?” Frankie said.

  His eyes dropped to a pair of green and red cowboy boots, just before four splintered swatches exploded out of the door into Frankie’s face.

  An hour later Helen Soileau and I joined a Lafayette Homicide detective and three uniformed cops at the back of the tavern where Frankie Dogs died and waited for the paramedics to load his elephantine weight onto a gurney that was spread with an unzippered black body bag. The Homicide detective, whose name was Lloyd Dronet, wore a rain-spotted tan suit and a tie with a palm tree and tropical sunset printed on it. He had picked up four nine-millimeter shell casings on the end of a pencil and dropped them into a Ziploc bag. A fifth shell casing lay inside the stall, glued to the floor by Frankie Dogs’s blood.