Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “You didn’t know?” I said.

  “Legion did that to Barbara?” he said.

  “Yes, he did.”

  He didn’t reply and I thought the line had gone dead.

  “Perry?”

  “I apologize for saying what I did about Purcel. Is Barbara all right? I can’t believe Legion did that. That rotten son of a bitch,” he said.

  On Saturday morning I called Clete’s apartment, but there was no answer and his machine was turned off. I tried again Sunday morning, with the same result. That afternoon I hitched my outboard and trailer to the pickup and headed toward Bayou Benoit and stopped at Clete’s apartment on the way. He was lying in a recliner by the pool like a beached whale, his body glowing with lotion and sunburn, a bottle of vodka and a tall glass filled with crushed ice and cherries by his elbow. “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “Me? Just messing around. You know how it is,” he said.

  “You look very content. Relaxed. Free of tension.”

  “Must be the weather,” he said, smiling behind his sunglasses.

  “How’s Zerelda?”

  “She said to tell you hello,” he said.

  “I think you’re about to run over a land mine.”

  “I had a feeling you might say that.” He slipped his sunglasses up on his head and gazed at my truck and boat in the parking lot. “We going fishing?”

  A half hour later I cut the engine on the outboard and we floated into a quiet stretch of cypress-dotted water on Bayou Benoit, our wake sliding through the tree trunks into the shore. There were stormheads in the south, but the sky was brassy overhead, the wind hot and smelling of salt and dead vegetation inside the trees. I clipped a rubber worm on my line and made a long, looping cast into a cove that was rimmed with floating algae.

  On the ride out to the landing Clete had tried to sustain his insouciant facade, refusing to be serious, his eyes crinkling whenever I showed concern about his reckless and self-destructive behavior. But now, in the dappled light of the trees, the thunder banging in the south, I could see shadows steal across his eyes when he thought I wasn’t looking.

  “I’m right, you and Zerelda are an item again?” I said.

  “Yeah, you could call it that.”

  “But you don’t feel too good about it?”

  “Everything’s copacetic there. That kid, Marvin Oates, was around yesterday, but Zerelda told him to take a hike.”

  “What?” I said.

  “She finally got tired of wet-nursing him. She spent a whole day looking for him in the Iberville Project, then he showed up at the motor court drunk. So yesterday she told him he should spend more time on his criminal justice studies or find some friends more his age.”

  “You’ve got something on your mind, Cletus.”

  “This character Legion Guidry,” he said. Unconsciously he wiped his palms on his pants when he said the name. “When I dragged him off that counter stool, I could smell an odor on him. It was awful. It was like shit and burnt matches. I had to wash it off my hands.”

  I reeled in my artificial worm and cast it against a hollow cypress trunk and let it sink through the algae to the bottom of the cove. He waited for me to say something, but I didn’t.

  “What, I sound like I’ve finally become a wetbrain?” he said.

  I started to tell him about my experience breaking into Legion’s house, but instead I opened the ice chest and took out two fried-oyster po’-boy sandwiches and handed one to him.

  “This is guaranteed to help you lose weight and make you younger at the same time,” I said.

  “I smelled it, Dave. I swear. I wasn’t drunk or hungover. This guy really bothers me,” he said, his face conflicted with thoughts he couldn’t resolve.

  CHAPTER 26

  Monday morning the sky was black, veined with lightning over the Gulf. Right after I checked into the department I went to see Barbara Shanahan in the prosecutor’s office. She was dressed in a gray suit and white blouse, her face defensive and vaguely angry. “If you’re here to talk about something of a personal nature, I’d rather we do that after business hours,” she said.

  “I’m here about Amanda Boudreau.”

  “Oh,” she said, her face coloring slightly.

  “I want to pick up both Tee Bobby Hulin and Jimmy Dean Styles,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “I think we can find out once and for all what happened to Amanda. But we have to keep Perry LaSalle away from Tee Bobby.”

  She was standing behind her desk. She pushed a couple of pieces of paper around on her desk blotter with the ends of her fingers.

  “This office won’t be party to any form of procedural illegality,” she said.

  “You want the truth about what happened to that girl or not?” I asked.

  “You heard what I said.”

  “Yeah, I did. It sounds a little self-serving, too.” I saw the anger sharpen in her face and I changed my tone. “You need to be in the vicinity when Tee Bobby and Styles are interviewed.”

  “All right,” she replied. She stared out the window. The wind was blowing hard, bending the trees along the railway tracks, bouncing garbage cans through the streets. “You pissed off at me about Clete?”

  “He went to jail for you and you eighty-sixed him,” I said.

  “He was talking about ‘clipping’ Legion Guidry. You think I want to see him in Angola over me? Why don’t you give me a little goddamn credit?” she said.

  “Clete is hurt more easily and deeply than people think,” I said.

  “Actually, I like you, Dave. You probably don’t believe that, but I do. Why are you so cruel?”

  Her eyes were moist, the whites a light pink, as though they had been touched by iodine.

  Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

  I went back to my office and called the number of the Boom Boom Room. “Is Jimmy Sty there?” I said.

  “He’ll be here in a half hour. Who want to know?” a man’s voice said.

  “It’s okay. Tell him I’ll see him tonight,” I said.

  “Who see him tonight?” the voice asked.

  “He’ll know,” I said, and hung up.

  Then I called Ladice Hulin’s number on Poinciana Island.

  “It’s Dave Robicheaux, Ladice. Is Tee Bobby home?” I said.

  “He’s still sleeping,” she replied.

  “I’ll talk with him later. Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “Somet’ing going on?” she said.

  “I’ll get back to you,” I said, and eased the receiver down.

  I went down the corridor to the office of Kevin Dartez, the department plainclothes who worked Narcotics exclusively and bore a legendary grudge against pimps and dope dealers for the death of his sister.

  When I opened his office door, he was tilted back in his chair, talking on the phone while he squeezed a hand exerciser in his palm.

  “Maybe if you pulled your head out of your cheeks and did your job, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said into the receiver, then quietly hung up. He had narrow bones in his face and jet-black hair that he oiled and combed straight back. His needle-nose cowboy boots and pencil-line mustache and wide red tie, a tiny pair of silver handcuffs pinned in the center, made me think of an early-twentieth-century lawman or perhaps a Los Vegas cardplayer of the kind you didn’t cross.

  “You doin’ okay, Dave?” he asked.

  “I want to flip Tee Bobby Hulin and I could use your help,” I said.

  “I’m a little jammed up right now,” he replied.

  “I skated on an assault beef against Jimmy Dean Styles in St. Martin Parish. I’d like you to bring him in and tell him you need some information for an Internal Affairs investigation. In other words, the department would still like to hang me out to dry.”

  “Jimmy Sty again, huh? He’s not one of my fans. Maybe you ought to use somebody he trusts,” Dartez said.

  “You’re straight up, Kev. Street people respe
ct you.”

  “You wouldn’t try to twist my dials, would you?”

  “Not a chance.” I opened a notebook to a page on which I had written down several tentative questions for Kevin Dartez to ask Styles and set the notebook on Dartez’s desk. “It really doesn’t matter what you specifically say to Styles. Just get him to talk about me and make sure it’s on tape. Also bring up Helen Soileau.”

  “Why Helen?” Dartez asked.

  “Styles called her a dyke to her face. I don’t think he’s quite forgotten the reaction he got,” I said.

  Dartez squeezed the hand exerciser in his palm. “When you want him in here?” he asked.

  “How about as soon as possible?” I replied.

  A few minutes later Helen Soileau and I got into a cruiser and drove toward Poinciana Island. “A bad storm building,” she said, looking over the steering wheel at the blackness in the sky, the cane thrashing in the fields. When I didn’t reply, she looked across the seat at me. “You listening?”

  “I took Tee Bobby’s grandmother over the hurdles,” I said.

  “She raised him. Maybe she should sit in her own shit for a change.”

  “That’s rough,” I said.

  “No, Amanda Boudreau staring into the barrel of a shotgun is rough. There’s a big difference between vics and perps, Streak. The victim is the victim. I wouldn’t get the two confused.”

  Helen always kept the lines simple.

  We crossed the freshwater bay onto the island. Waves were capping in the bay and hitting hard against the pilings under the bridge, slapping the shoreline and sliding up into the elephant ears along the shore. We rolled down the windows in the cruiser, and the light was cool and green inside the tunnel of trees as we drove toward Ladice’s house. A tree limb cracked like a rifle shot overhead and spun crazily into the road ahead of us. Helen swerved around it.

  “I never liked this place,” she said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Helen looked out the window at a black man trying to catch a horse that was running through a field of pepper plants while lightning forked the sky above the treeline.

  “If the LaSalles’ ancestors had won the Civil War, I think the rest of us would be picking cotton for a living,” she said.

  We parked in Ladice’s yard and knocked on the door. Leaves were puffing out of the trees and blowing across the gallery and flattening against the screens. Inside, I could see Tee Bobby watching television in an overstuffed chair, his chest caved in, his mouth open, his chin peppered with stubble. His grandmother came out of the kitchen and stood in silhouette behind his chair.

  “What you want?” she asked.

  “Need to take Tee Bobby into town and clarify a few things,” I said.

  “What t’ings?” she asked.

  “We’re looking at somebody else in the murder of Amanda Boudreau. Maybe it’s time Tee Bobby did himself a good deed and starting cooperating with us,” I said.

  Tee Bobby got up from his overstuffed chair and walked to the door, his long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned on his stomach, an unwashed odor wafting through the screen.

  “You looking at who?” he said.

  “This isn’t a good place to talk. Call Mr. Perry and ask him what he wants you to do,” I said, my face blank.

  “I ain’t got to ax permission from Perry LaSalle to do nothing. I’ll be back in a li’l while, Gran’mama. Right? Y’all gonna drive me back?” Tee Bobby said.

  “Right as rain,” Helen said.

  That’s the way you do it sometimes. Then you try to forget your own capacity for deceit.

  On the way back to the department Tee Bobby lazed against the backseat and watched the country go by, his eyes half shut. He woke with a start and looked around as though unsure of his whereabouts. Then he grinned for no reason and stared vacuously into space. “You all right back there?” Helen said, looking into the rearview mirror.

  “Sure,” he said. “It was the lie detector test got y’all looking at somebody else?”

  “Lots of things, Tee Bobby,” she said.

  “’Cause I ain’t raped or shot nobody,” he said.

  I turned in the seat and searched his face.

  “Why you staring at me like that?” he asked.

  “I get a little perplexed about your choice of words.”

  “What you talkin’ ’bout, man? These are the only words I got.” His brow furrowed, as though his own statement held a meaning he had not yet sorted through. “I need to stop and use the bat’room somewhere. I ought to wash up, too. Maybe get some candy bars.”

  “We’ll get you some from the machine at the office,” Helen said.

  Tee Bobby stared silently out the window for the rest of the way into town, his face twitching as last night’s dope and booze wore off and he realized the day waited for him like a hungry tiger.

  We parked the cruiser and walked him straight into an interview room and closed the door behind us. Around the corner, in the convivial atmosphere of his office, Kevin Dartez was talking to Jimmy Dean Styles. Styles was sitting in a chair, his knees slightly spread, squeezing his scrotum, enjoying his role as participant in the process. Dartez had started the tape recorder on his desk and was reviewing his notebook as Styles talked, nodding respectfully, sometimes making a small penciled notation.

  “So without provocation, Dave Robicheaux, of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, attacked you in your place of business, known as the Carousel?” Dartez said.

  “You got it, man,” Styles said. Through the venetian blinds he watched a black woman in an orange jumpsuit being led in handcuffs down the corridor. He grinned and touched at some mucus in the corner of his mouth and pulled a Kleenex from a box on Dartez’s desk and wiped his fingers.

  “And you say Detective Helen Soileau hit you with a baton?”

  “That’s the way it went down. That bitch got shit in her blood.”

  “That’s a serious allegation against Detective Soileau. You’re sure that’s the way it happened? You made an idle remark and she swung a baton in your face? This could do a lot of damage to her career, Jimmy. You want to be sure what you’re telling me is correct.”

  “I ain’t gonna say it again. Put it down in your report or leave it out. It don’t matter to me. But you got an out-of-control bull dyke on your hands.”

  Dartez nodded agreeably and wrote in his notebook.

  “Doesn’t Tee Bobby Hulin play at the Carousel sometimes?” he asked.

  “I try to throw him some work. But Tee Bobby hard to hep, know what I mean?” Styles said.

  “Look, this is not related, but you know what nobody around here can understand?” Dartez said. “Why’s a kid with so much talent get in all this trouble? How come he never made it in Los Angeles or New York? I don’t know anything about music, but—”

  “I don’t want to speak bad of a guy that’s on third base, okay? But Tee Bobby’s a hype and a ragnose. Ain’t nobody can talk to him. He got a thing for white cooze, too. Which mean he don’t respect himself.” Styles glanced at his watch. “Say, man, I ain’t s’pposed to be gone from my bar too long. My bartender get a li’l generous pouring to the ladies, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Got you,” Dartez said, dropping his eyes to his notebook again. “Okay, so you didn’t in any way put your hand on the person of Detective Robicheaux? You committed no form of assault or what could be interpreted as such, no threatening gesture?”

  “No, man, I tole you, he’s a sick, violent motherfucker been beating up people around here for years. He done it, just like some crazy person been wanting to hurt somebody a long time. Hey, you ax me if I’m bothered about that cunt, what’s her name, Helen Soileau? Anything happen to her, man, she deserve. Now, that good enough? ’Cause I got a bidness to run.”

  “Thanks a lot, Jimmy. I need to go to the rest room a minute. Stay cool and I’ll be back to check a couple of fine points with you, then you’ll be on your way,” Dartez said.

  He popped
the cassette tape out of the recorder and walked around the corner to the interview room and tapped on the door. When I opened it a crack, he wagged the cassette in the air and winked.

  Tee Bobby sat at the interview table, leaning forward on his forearms, his hands balling and unballing, a twitch at the corner of one eye. He peeled a candy bar we had bought him from the machine by the courthouse entrance and began eating it, his eyes busy with thoughts that he did not share. “You want another cup of coffee?” Helen asked.

  “I got to use the bat’room,” he said.

  “You just went,” she said.

  “I ain’t feeling too good. You said I was s’pposed to identify somebody.”

  “Be patient, Tee Bobby. Come on, I’ll walk you down to the rest room,” Helen said.

  While they were gone, I went to my mailbox, picked up the cassette tape that Kevin Dartez had placed there, and walked down to my office, where Mack Bertrand, from the crime lab, waited for me.

  Dartez’s interview with Styles was not a long one. We listened to it in a few minutes, and it was easy to isolate the material that I thought would be most helpful to Helen and me.

  “Can you excerpt those few lines and get them on another tape without too much trouble?” I said.

  “No problem,” he said, his pipe inverted in his teeth.

  “I’ll go back to the interview room. When you’ve got it, just bang on the door, okay?”

  “Call me up later in the day and tell me how all this came out,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Whenever I run into Amanda Boudreau’s parents I feel guilty. Our twins are going to graduate next year. Every day of our lives is a pleasure. The Boudreaus did all the things good parents are supposed to do, but their daughter is dead and they’ll probably wake up miserable every morning for the rest of their lives. Just because some bastard wanted to get his rocks off.”

  “Thanks for your help, Mack. I’ll call you later,” I said.

  I went into the rest room and washed my hands and face and blew out my breath in the mirror. I could feel the adrenaline pumping in my veins now, in the same way a hunter feels it when a large animal, one with a heart and nerve endings and mental processes not unlike his own, suddenly comes into focus inside a telescopic sight.