Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  But Clete learned the husband hated to drive an automobile and regularly hired taxicabs to take him around New Orleans. Clete searched through hundreds of taxi logs until he found an entry for a pickup at the husband’s residence on the day he went fishing. The destination was the husband’s new downtown office building. Clete also questioned a security guard at the office building and was told the wife had been installing new shelves in the basement very early on the Saturday morning her husband had disappeared.

  Clete obtained a blueprint of the building and got a search warrant and discovered that behind the shelves a brick wall had been recently mortared across an alcove that was meant to serve as a storage space.

  He and three uniformed patrolmen sledgehammered a hole in the bricks and were suddenly struck by an odor that caused one of them to vomit in his hands. The doyenne had not only walled up her husband in his own office building, she had hosted a dance, with a hired orchestra, right above the alcove that evening. The coroner said the husband was alive for the whole show.

  Clete busted an infamous gay millionaire on Bayou St. John who fed his abusive mother to a pet alligator, helped wiretap a Louisiana insurance commissioner who went to prison for bribery, and eventually caught up with the United States congressman who had been instrumental in shipping Clete off to Neighborhood Outreach.

  During Mardi Gras someone had flung a beer bottle from a French Quarter hotel window into the passing parade and had seriously hurt one of New Orleans’s most famous trumpet players. Clete went down a third-floor corridor, knocking on doors, trying to approximate the probable location of the room from which the bottle had been thrown.

  Then he reached the door of a large suite, marched off the distance to the end of the corridor, comparing it with the distance he had measured between the suspect window and the edge of the building outside. When he and the hotel detective were refused entrance to the suite, Clete kicked the doors open and saw the congressman amid a group of naked revelers, their Mardi Gras masks pushed up on their heads, spitting whiskey and soda on one another.

  This time Clete made a call to a police reporter at the Times-Picayune right after busting the whole room.

  “You think Perry LaSalle may be a sex predator?” Bootsie said that afternoon.

  “I didn’t say that. But Perry always gives you the feeling he’s Prometheus on the bayou. Jesuit seminarian, friend of the migrants, professional good guy at a Catholic Worker mission. Except he represents Legion Guidry and has a way of involving himself with working-class girls who all think they’re going to be his main squeeze.”

  We were in our bedroom and Bootsie was putting on eyeliner in the dresser mirror. She had just had her bath and was wearing a pink slip. Through the window I could see Alafair pouring fresh water in Tripod’s bowl on top of his hutch.

  “Dave?” Bootsie said.

  “Yes?”

  “You need to get your grits off the stove.”

  “I need to talk to Perry.”

  “About what?” she said, no longer able to suppress her irritation.

  “I think he’s being blackmailed by Legion Guidry. How’s that for starters?”

  “Are we going out to dinner?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I replied.

  “Thanks for confirming that,” she said, her eyes out of focus in the mirror.

  A few minutes later we walked out on the gallery. The yard was already in shadow, and on the wind I could smell an odor like cornsilk in a field at the end of the day. It should have been a fine evening, but I knew the white worm eating inside of me was about to ruin it.

  “I’ve got to go to a meeting,” I said.

  “This isn’t Wednesday night,” she replied.

  “I’ll drive to Lafayette,” I said.

  She turned and walked back into the bedroom and began changing out of her dress into a pair of blue jeans and a work shirt.

  When I came home late that night, she had made a bed on the couch and was asleep with her face turned toward the wall.

  The next morning I drove to Perry LaSalle’s office on Main Street. “He’s not in right now. He went out to Mr. Sookie’s camp,” Perry’s secretary said.

  “Sookie? Sookie Motrie?” I said.

  “Why, yes, sir,” she replied, then saw the look on my face and dropped her eyes.

  I drove deep down into Vermilion Parish, where the wetlands of southern Louisiana bleed into the Gulf of Mexico, passing through rice and cattle acreage, then crossing canals and bayous into long stretches of green marshland, where cranes and blue herons stood in the rain ditches, as motionless as lawn ornaments. I turned onto a winding road that led back through gum trees and a brackish swamp, past a paintless, wood-frame church house whose roof had been crushed by a fallen persimmon tree.

  But it wasn’t the ruined building that caught my eye. A glass-covered sign in the yard, unblemished except for road dust and a single crack down the center, read, “Twelve Disciples Assembly—Services at 7 p.m. Wednesday and 10 a.m. Sunday. Welcome.”

  I stopped the cruiser and backed up, then turned onto the church property. A dirt lane led back to an empty house, now packed to the eaves with bales of hay. A sawhorse with an old Detour sign on it lay sideways in the middle of the lane. Road maintenance equipment and a tree shredder used by parish work crews were parked in a three-sided tin shed, surrounded by water oaks and slash pine. Just past the shed was a railed hog lot that gave onto a thick woods and a dead lake. The hogs in the lot were indescribably filthy, their bristles matted with feces, their snouts glazed with what looked like chicken guts.

  I tried to remember the lyrics of the song Marvin Oates was always quoting from but they escaped me. Maybe Bootsie was right, I told myself. Maybe I was so deep in my own head that I saw a dark portent in virtually everyone who had been vaguely connected with the lives of Amanda Boudreau and Linda Zeroski, even to the extent that I had actually begun to think Perry LaSalle, who had represented Linda in court, might bear examination.

  I continued on down the paved road and turned onto a grassy knoll and drove through an arbor of oak and pecan and persimmon trees to an old duck-hunting camp that Sookie Motrie had acquired by appointing himself the executor of an elderly lady’s estate.

  He was a slight man who kept an equestrian posture and dressed like a horseman, in two-tone cowboy boots and tweed jackets with suede shoulders, to compensate for his lack of physical stature and a chin that receded abruptly into his throat. He wore a mustache and deliberately kept his hair long, combing it back over the collar in a rustic fashion, which gave him an unconventional and cavalier appearance and distracted others from the avarice in his eyes.

  He had recently moved his houseboat from Pecan Island to his camp, chainsawing down twenty-five yards of cypresses along the bank to create an instant berth for his boat. Rather than haul his garbage away, he piled it in the center of the knoll and burned it, creating a black sculpture of melted and scorched aluminum wrap, Styrofoam, tin cans, and plastic.

  Perry LaSalle stood under shade trees by his parked Gazelle, watching Sookie Motrie, stripped to the waist, bust skeet with a double-barreled Parker twelve-gauge over the water. The popping of the shotgun was almost lost in the wind, and neither man heard me walk up behind them. Sookie triggered the skeet trap with his foot, raised the shotgun to his shoulder, and blew the skeet into a pink mist against the sky.

  Then he turned and saw me, the way an animal might when it is alone with its prey and wishes no intrusion into its domain.

  “Hello, Dave!” he called, breaking open the breech of his gun, never letting his eyes leave mine, as though he were genuinely glad to see me.

  “How do you do, sir?” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb y’all. I just need a minute or two of Perry’s time.”

  “We’re gonna have lunch. I got any kind of food you want,” Sookie said.

  “Thanks just the same,” I said.

  “You want to shoot?” he said, offering me the shotgun.

&
nbsp; I shook my head.

  “Well, I’m gonna let you gentlemen talk. It’s probably over my head, anyway. Right, Dave?” he said, and winked, inferring an insult that had not been made, casting himself in the role of victim while he kept others off balance. He slipped his shotgun into a sheepskin-lined case and propped it against the back rail of his houseboat, then opened a green bottle of Heineken in the galley and drank it on the deck, his skin healthy and tan in the salt breeze that blew off the Gulf.

  “What are you doing with a shitpot like that?” I asked Perry.

  “What’s your objection to Sookie?”

  “He fronts points for the casinos,” I said.

  “He’s a lobbyist. That’s his job.”

  “They victimize ignorant and compulsive and poor people.”

  “Maybe they provide a few jobs, too,” he said.

  “You know better. Why do you always have to act like a douche bag, Perry?”

  “You want to tell me why you’re out here?” he asked, feigning patience. But his eyes wouldn’t hold and they started to slip off mine.

  “You’re in with them, aren’t you?” I said.

  “With whom?”

  “The casinos, the people in Vegas and Chicago who run them. Both Barbara and Zerelda tried to tell me that. I just wasn’t listening.”

  “I think you’re losing it, Dave.”

  “Legion Guidry blackmailed your grandfather. Now he’s turning dials on you. How’s it feel to do scut work for a rapist?”

  He looked at me for a long time, the skin trembling under one eye. Then he turned and walked down the grassy bank to the stern of Sookie’s houseboat and lifted the shotgun from the deck railing. He walked back up the incline toward me, unzipping the case, his eyes fastened on my face. He let the case slip to the ground and cracked open the breech.

  “Make another remark about my family,” he said.

  “Go screw yourself,” I said.

  He took two shotgun shells from his shirt pocket and plopped them into the chambers, then snapped the breech shut.

  “Hey, Perry, what’s going on?” Sookie called from the stern of his boat.

  “Nothing is going on,” Perry replied. “Dave just has to make a choice about what he wants to do. Right, Dave? You want to shoot? Here, it’s ready to rock. Or do you just want to flap your mouth? Go ahead, take it.”

  He pressed the shotgun into my hands, his eyes blazing now. “You want to shoot me, Dave? Do you want to roll all your personal misery and unhappiness and failure into a tight little ball and set a match to it and blow somebody else away? Because I’m on the edge of reaching down your throat and tearing out your vocal cords. I can’t tell you how much I’d love to do that.”

  I opened the breech on the shotgun and tossed the shells into the grass, then threw the shotgun spinning in a long arc, past the bow of Sookie’s houseboat, the sun glinting on the blue steel and polished wood. It splashed into water that was at least twenty feet deep and sank out of sight.

  “You ought to go out to L.A. and get a card in the Screen Actors Guild, Perry. No, I take that back. You’ve got a great acting career right here. Enjoy your lunch with Sookie,” I said.

  “Are you crazy? That’s my Parker. Are you guys crazy?” I heard Sookie shouting as I walked back up the knoll to the cruiser.

  But any pleasure I might have taken from sticking it to Perry LaSalle and Sookie Motrie was short-lived. When I arrived home that afternoon, Alafair was waiting for me in the driveway, pacing up and down, the bone ridging in one jaw, her hair tied up on her head, her fists on her hips. “How you doin’?” I said.

  “Guess.”

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Not much. My father is acting like an asshole because he thinks he’s the only person in the world with a problem. Outside of that, everything’s fine.”

  “Bootsie told you about my breaking off our dinner plans last night?”

  “She didn’t have to. I heard you. If you want to drink, Dave, just go do it. Stop laying your grief on your family.”

  “Maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about, Alafair.”

  “Bootsie told me what that man, what’s his name, Legion, did to you. You want to kill him? I wish you would. Then we’d know who’s really important to you.”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “Go kill this man. Then we’d know once and for all his death means much more to you than taking care of your own family. We’re a little sick of it, Dave. Just thought you should know,” she said, her voice starting to break, her eyes glistening now.

  I tried to clear an obstruction out of my throat. A battered car passed on the road, the windows down, a denim-shirted man behind the wheel, the backseat filled with children and fishing rods. The driver and the children were all laughing at something.

  “I’m sorry, kiddo,” I said.

  “You should be,” she said.

  That night I lay in the dark, sleepless, the trees outside swelling with wind, the canopy in the swamp trembling with a ghostly white light from the lightning in the south. I had never felt more alone in my life. Once again, I burned, in almost a sexual fashion, to wrap my fingers around the grips and inside the steel guard of a heavy, high-caliber pistol, to smell the acrid odor of cordite, to tear loose from all the restraints that bound my life and squeezed the breath from my lungs. And I knew what I had to do.

  CHAPTER 24

  Later the same night I drove past a deserted sugar mill in the rain and parked my truck on a dead-end paved street in a rural part of St. Mary Parish. I jumped across a ditch running with brown water and cut through a hedge to the stoop of a small house with a tin roof set up on cinder blocks. I slipped a screwdriver around the edge of the door and prized the door away from the jamb, stressing the hinges back against the screws until a piece of wood splintered inside and fell on the linoleum and the lock popped free. I froze in the darkness, expecting to hear movement inside the house, but there was no sound except the rain tinking on the roof and a locomotive rumbling on railway tracks out by the highway. I pushed back the door and walked through the kitchen and into the bedroom of Legion Guidry.

  He was sleeping on his back, in a brass bed, the breeze from an oscillating fan ruffling his hair, dimpling the sheet that covered his body. Even though the air outside was cool and sweet smelling from the rain, the air in the bedroom was close and thick with the odor of moldy clothes, unwashed hair, re-breathed whiskey fumes, and a salty, gray smell that had dried into the sheets and mattress.

  A blue-black .38 revolver lay on the nightstand. I picked it up quietly and went into the bathroom, then came back out and sat in a chair by the side of the bed. Legion’s jaws were unshaved, but even in sleep his hair was combed and the flesh on his face kept its shape and didn’t sag against the bone. I placed the muzzle of my .45 against his jawbone.

  “I suspect you know what this is, Legion. I suspect you know what it can do to the inside of your head, too,” I said.

  A slight crease formed across his forehead, but otherwise he showed no recognition of my presence. His eyelids remained closed, his bare chest rising and falling with no irregularity, his hands folded passively on top of the sheet.

  “Did you hear me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  But he used the word “yes,” not “yeah,” as would be the custom of a Cajun man with no education, and I would have sworn there was no accent in his pronunciation.

  “Don’t bother looking for your .38,” I said, and opened my left hand and sprinkled the six rounds from the cylinder of his revolver on his chest. “I put your piece in the toilet bowl. I notice you don’t flush after you take a dump.”

  He opened his eyes but kept them on the ceiling and did not look at me.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” he asked.

  My skin shrunk against my face. His voice sounded like a guttural echo rising through a chunk of sewer pipe, the Cajun accent completely gone.

 
I started to speak, then felt the words seize in my throat. I pushed the .45 harder into his jaw and caught my breath and tried again. But he cut me off.

  “Ask me my name,” he said.

  “Your name?” I said dumbly.

  “Yes, my name,” he said.

  “All right,” I heard myself say, as though I had stepped inside a scenario that someone other than I had written. “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Legion,” he replied.

  “Really?” I said, my eyes blinking, my heart racing. “I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.”

  But my rhetoric was bravado and I felt my palm sweating on the grips of the .45. I cleared my throat and widened my eyes, like a man trying to stretch sleep out of his face. “Here it is, Legion,” I said. “I’m a recovering drunk. That means I can’t hold resentments against people, even a piece of human flotsam like you, no matter what they’ve done to me. This may seem like I’m pulling a mind-fuck on you, but what I’m telling you is straight up. You’re going down, as deep in the shitter as I can put you, but it’ll be by the numbers.”

  I blew air out of my nostrils and wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist.

  “Afraid?” he said.

  “Not of you.”

  “Yes, you are. Inside you’re a very frightened man. That’s why you’re a drunk.”

  “Watch and see,” I said.

  I removed the muzzle of the .45 from his jawbone and started to release the magazine. There was a small red circle where the steel had been pressed against his skin.

  Suddenly he sat up and dropped his legs over the side of the mattress and pulled the sheet off his body. He was naked, his thighs and torso ridged with hair, like soft strips of monkey fur, his phallus in a state of erection.

  “I can still put a hollow-point between your eyes,” I said.

  But he didn’t try to rise from the mattress. He tilted his head back and his mouth parted. A long, moist hiss emanated from his throat. His breath covered my face like a soiled, wet handkerchief.