Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Bootsie’s body was warm with sleep under the sheet, the breeze from the window fan ruffling her hair on the pillow. I kissed the back of her neck and began making breakfast, then noticed an unopened envelope from Reed College under the toaster, the same envelope I had seen two days earlier on the couch. It was addressed to Alafair, and the fact that she had not opened it told me what the contents were. Ever since she and I had gone on a backpacking trip up the Columbia River Gorge, she had longed to return to the Oregon coast and to major in English and creative writing at Reed. She had applied for a scholarship, then had realized that even with a grant we would still have to pay several thousand more in fees than we would if she chose to commute to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

  I sliced open the envelope and read the letter of congratulations awarding her most of her tuition for her first year. I went into the living room and wrote out a two-thousand-dollar check to be applied against her registration and dormitory fees for her first semester, placed a stamp on the return envelope, and walked out to the road and stuck it in the mailbox, then flipped up the red flag for the postman.

  When I came back inside, Alafair was seated at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She had put on makeup and a powder-blue dress and earrings. Through the back screen door I could see Tripod eating out of a bowl on the steps, his ringed tail damp with dew.

  “Where you headed?” I asked.

  “Over to UL. I’m going to enroll, get things started,” she replied.

  “Hear anything from Reed?”

  “Not exactly. I’ve decided against it, anyway. I can learn as much here as I can out there.”

  “You look pretty, Alafair. When I grow up, I’m going to marry you,” I said.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said.

  “You’re going to Reed.”

  “No, it was a bad idea. I wasn’t using my head.”

  “It’s a done deal, kid. Your scholarship came through. I sent them a check for your fees.”

  Her eyes were a dark brown, her hair like black water on her cheeks. She was quiet a long time.

  “You did that?” she asked.

  “Sure. What did you think I’d do, Alf?”

  “I love you, Dave.”

  The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record.

  I went to the office, then signed out at ten o’clock and drove south toward Poinciana Island, crossing the freshwater bay that separated the island from the rest of the parish. At the far end of the bridge the security guard came out of the little wooden booth he used as an office and flagged me down. He wore a gray uniform and a holstered revolver, an American flag sewn to his shirtsleeve. His face was young and sincere under his cap. He held a clipboard in one hand and bent down toward my window. “You’re here to see somebody, sir?” he said.

  “My name’s Dave Robicheaux. I’m a police officer. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be driving a sheriff’s cruiser,” I replied, and took off my sunglasses and grinned at him.

  “You’re Mr. Robicheaux?” He glanced down at his clipboard. He cleared his throat and looked away nervously. “Mr. Robicheaux, I ain’t supposed to let you on the island.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mr. Perry just says there’s some folks ain’t supposed to come on the island.”

  “You did your job. But now you need to get on the phone and call Mr. Perry and tell him I just drove across your bridge on official business. Our conversation on this is over, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and drove onto the island, out of the sun’s white glare into the damp coolness of trees and shade-blooming four-o’clocks and the thick stands of water-beaded elephant ears that grew along the water’s edge.

  I followed the winding road to the log-and-brick house where Ladice Hulin lived, directly across from the scorched stucco shell of Julian LaSalle’s home. She came to the door on her cane, wearing a print dress, her thick gray hair pinned up on her head with a costume-jewelry comb, her gold chain and religious medal bright on her throat.

  “I knowed you was coming,” she said through the screen.

  “How?”

  “’Cause I cain’t hide the troot no more,” she said, and stepped out on the gallery. “I’d ax you in, but Rosebud’s sleeping. She come in last night, moaning and crying and hiding in the closet. She’s got terrible t’ings locked up in her head. Some of this is on me, Mr. Dave.”

  She sat down in her wicker chair and gazed across the road at the peacocks that wandered lumpily through the shade trees arching over the ruins of Julian LaSalle’s home.

  “How is it on you, Miss Ladice?” I asked.

  “Lies I tole,” she replied.

  “People always thought your daughter was fathered by Mr. Julian. But I think the father was actually Legion Guidry. He raped you, didn’t he? I suspect on a repeated basis.”

  “People didn’t call it rape back then. The overseer just took any black woman he wanted. Go to the sheriff, go to the city po-lice, they’d listen while you talked, not saying nothing, maybe writing on a piece of paper, then when you was gone they’d call up the man who had raped you and tell him everything you’d said.”

  “When did Tee Bobby learn his grandfather is Legion Guidry?” I asked.

  I saw her knuckles tighten on the handle of her cane. She studied the scene across the road, the peacocks picking in Julian LaSalle’s yard, a scattering of poppies, like drops of blood, around a rusted metal roadside cross put there by a friend of Mrs. LaSalle’s.

  “I always tole Tee Bobby his granddaddy was Mr. Julian,” she replied. “I t’ought it was better he didn’t know the blood of a man like Legion was in his veins. But this spring Tee Bobby wanted money to go out to California and make a record. He went to see Perry LaSalle.”

  “To blackmail him?”

  “No, he t’ought he deserved the money. He t’ought Perry LaSalle was gonna be proud Tee Bobby was gonna make a record. He t’ought they was in the same family.” She shook her head. “It was me who put that lie in his life, that made him the po’ li’l innocent boy he is.”

  “Perry told him Legion is his grandfather?”

  “When Tee Bobby come back to the house, he t’rew t’ings against the wall. He put Rosebud in his car and said he was gonna meet Jimmy Dean Styles and fix it so he could take Rosebud out to California, away from Lou’sana and the t’ings white people done to our family.”

  “I see. That was the day Amanda Boudreau died?”

  “That was the day. Oh, Lord, this all started ’cause I t’ought I could seduce Mr. Julian and go to college. Tee Bobby and that white girl got to pay for my sin,” she said.

  “You didn’t choose the world you were born into. Why don’t you give yourself a break?” I said.

  She started to get up, then her arm shook on her cane and she fell back heavily into her chair, dust ballooning out from her dress, her face riven with disbelief at what age and time and circumstance and the unrequited longings of her heart had done to her life.

  . . .

  I went back to the department and called Perry LaSalle at his office. His head secretary, who was an older woman, robin-breasted and blue-haired and educated at Millsaps College, told me he wasn’t in. “Is this Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, expecting her to tell me where he was. But she didn’t.

  “Do you expect him soon?” I asked.

  “I’m not quite sure,” she replied.

  “Is he in court today?” I asked.

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Does it seem peculiar when a lawyer doesn’t tell his secretary where he is or when he will be back in his office?” I said.

  “I’ll make a note of your observation, Mr. Robicheaux, and pass it on to Mr. Perry. By the way, has anyone ever told you how charming your manner can be?” she said, and hung up.

  After lunch the forensic chemist with whom I had left the ex-soldier’s paper coffee cup
dropped by my office. He was an ascetic, lean man by the name of Mack Bertrand who wore seersucker slacks and bow ties and white shirts and bore a pleasant fragrance of pipe tobacco. He was a good crime scene investigator and seldom, if ever, made mistakes.

  “Those latents off the paper cup?” he said.

  “Yeah, what did you come up with?” I said expectantly.

  “Zero,” he replied.

  “You mean my man has no criminal record?”

  “No record at all,” he said.

  “Wait a minute, the guy who drank out of this cup was in the service. In Vietnam. Probably in a hospital as well. The V.A. must have something on him.”

  “The cup was handled by three unknown persons. I assume it came from a takeout cafe or convenience store. We didn’t get a match on any of the latents I sent through the pod. I don’t know how else to put it. Sorry.”

  He closed the door and walked away, his pipe stem crimped upside down in his mouth. I went after him and caught him at the end of the corridor.

  “Run it through again, Mack. It’s a glitch,” I said.

  “I already did. Simmer down. Take a couple of aspirin. Go fishing more often,” he said. He started to grin, then gave it up and walked outside.

  I called Perry LaSalle’s office again.

  “Has Perry come back?” I asked.

  “He’s in a conference right now. Would you like for me to leave him another message?” his secretary said.

  “Don’t bother. I’ll catch him another time,” I said.

  Then I signed out a cruiser and drove directly to Perry’s office before he could get away from me. I sat on a sofa under his glass-encased Confederate battle flag and read a magazine for a half hour, then heard footsteps coming down the carpeted stairs and looked up into the faces of Sookie Motrie and two well-known operators of dockside casinos in New Orleans and Lake Charles.

  The two gamblers looked like a Mutt and Jeff team. One was big, lantern-jawed, stolid, with coarse skin and knuckles the size of quarters, whereas his friend was sawed-off, porcine, with a stomach that hung down like a curtain of wet cement, his voice loud, his Jersey accent like a sliver of glass in the ear.

  “That’s the man who t’rew my shotgun in the water,” Sookie said, and pointed at me. “Honest to God, t’rew it in the water. Like a drunk person.”

  I rested my magazine across my knee and stared back at the three of them.

  “Word of caution about Sookie,” I said. “About ten years ago he had to be pried out of a car wreck with the jaws of life. Three surgeons at Iberia General worked on him all night and saved his life. When he got the bill, he refused to pay it. A lawyer called him up and tried to appeal to his conscience. Sookie told him, ‘I ain’t worth ten thousand dollars and I ain’t paying it.’ It was the only time anyone around here remembered Sookie telling the truth about anything.”

  “You’re a police officer?” the shorter gambler said.

  “Sookie told you that?” I said, and laughed, then raised my magazine and began reading it again.

  But as I watched the three of them walk outside, all of them gazing with the innocuous interest of tourists at the trees and antebellum homes along the street, I knew that being clever with the emissaries of greed and profit was a poor form of Valium for the political reality of the state where I was born, namely, that absolutely everything around us was for sale.

  I went up the stairs to Perry’s office.

  “You trying to bring casinos into Iberia Parish?” I said.

  “No, people here have voted it down,” Perry answered from behind his desk.

  “Then why are those two characters in town?”

  “If it’s any of your business, there are people in Lafayette who believe gaming revenues shouldn’t go only to the parishes on the Texas border,” he replied.

  “Gaming? That’s a great word. You don’t have any bottom, Perry. I was out to Ladice Hulin’s place this morning. The same day Amanda Boudreau was murdered, you told Tee Bobby that Legion Guidry was his grandfather. He came home in a rage, put his sister in the car, then went to find Jimmy Dean Styles. But you knew all this from the jump. You’re going to let Tee Bobby take the needle rather than see your family’s dirty bedsheets hung on the wash line.”

  He sat very still in the deep softness of his black leather chair. He wore a cream-colored suit and a sky-blue shirt, opened casually at the collar. His mouth was puckered, as though he had sucked the moisture out of it, the folds of flesh in his throat pronounced, his hands cupped slightly on his desk blotter, the heated intensity of his eyes focused no more than six inches in front of him.

  When he spoke, his vocal cords were a phlegmy knot.

  “For one reason or another, you seem to have a need to demean me whenever we meet,” he said. “Obviously I can’t discuss the case of a client with you, but since you’ve chosen to attack me personally on this gambling stuff, maybe I can offer you an explanation that will allow you to think better of me. Most of the hot-sauce companies use foreign imports now. We don’t. We’ve never laid off an employee or evicted a tenant. That’s our choice. But it’s an expensive one.”

  He looked up at me, his hands folded now, his posture and demeanor suggestive of the cleric he had once studied to be.

  “I don’t have it all figured out yet, Perry. But I think the story is a lot dirtier than you’re letting on,” I said.

  He clicked the edges of a pad of Post-its across his thumb. Then he pitched the pad in the air and let it bounce on his desk. “You’d better go take care of your own and not worry so much about me,” he said.

  “You want to take the corn bread out of your mouth?”

  “Your friend, the Elephant Man, Purcel, is it? He pulled Legion Guidry off a counter stool in Franklin this morning and threw him through a glass window. A seventy-four-year-old man. You two make quite a pair, Dave,” he said.

  I went back to the office and called the jail in St. Mary Parish and was told by a sheriff’s deputy that Clete Purcel was in custody for disturbing the peace and destroying private property and would appear in court that afternoon. “No assault charges?” I asked.

  “The guy he tossed through a window didn’t want to press charges,” the deputy replied.

  “Did the guy give an explanation?”

  “He said it was a private argument. It wasn’t no big deal,” said the deputy.

  No big deal. Right.

  After work I drove to Clete’s apartment. From the parking lot I saw him up on his balcony, above the swimming pool, in a Hawaiian shirt and faded jeans that bagged in the seat, grilling a steak, a can of beer balanced on the railing.

  “How’s it hangin’, noble mon?” he called, grinning through the smoke.

  I didn’t reply. I went up the stairs two at a time and through his front door and across his living room toward the sliding glass doors that gave onto the balcony. He drank from his beer, his green eyes looking at me over the top of the can.

  “There’s a problem?” he said.

  “You threw Legion Guidry through a window?”

  “He’s lucky I didn’t feed it to him.”

  “He’s going to come after you.”

  “Good. I’ll finish what I started this morning. You know what he did to Barbara in the western store?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He told me about the scene in the store, Legion Guidry blowing his breath in Barbara’s face while he crushed the bones in her hand.

  “He’s setting you up, Clete. That’s why he didn’t file against you,” I said.

  He forked his steak off the grill and slapped it on a plate. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Get some bread and a Dr Pepper out of the icebox,” he said.

  “What’s eating you?”

  “Nothing. The world. My weight problem. What difference does it make?”

  “Clete?”

  “Barbara’s shitcanning me. She says we’re not a match. She says I deserve more than she can give me. I can
’t believe it. That’s the same line I used when I broke it off with Big Tit Judy Lavelle.”

  “When did she tell you this?”

  “A little while ago.”

  “After you got out of jail for defending her?”

  “It’s not her fault. My ex said I always smelled like dope and whores. The only person who won’t accept what I am is me.”

  He went into the kitchen with his steak and took a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet and poured three fingers in a glass. He glanced at me, then opened the icebox and tossed me a can of Dr Pepper.

  “Get that look off your face. Everything is under control,” he said.

  “You going to get drunk?” I asked.

  “Who knows? The evening is young.”

  I blew out my breath. “You’re going to try to make up with Zerelda Calucci, aren’t you?”

  He drank his whiskey in one long swallow, his eyes watering slightly from the hit his stomach took.

  “Wow, the old giant killer never lets you down,” he said.

  . . .

  That night I helped Batist in the bait shop, but I couldn’t let go of Perry LaSalle’s smug complacency. I picked up the phone and called him at his home on Poinciana Island. “Just a footnote to our conversation this afternoon,” I said. “Legion Guidry physically abused Barbara Shanahan in public. He called her a bitch and almost broke her hand. This is the woman you supposedly care about. In the meantime, you denigrate Clete Purcel for going after the guy who hurt her. In this case the guy is your client.”

  “I didn’t know this.”

  My hand was squeezed tight around the phone receiver, another heated response already forming in my throat. But suddenly I was robbed of my anger.