Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  He felt the blow all the way to the bone. He started to cry out but clenched his teeth so she would not hear and recognize his voice. Then he lost his balance and fell against her, accidentally hitting her breast with his elbow.

  He looked down at her, propped up on his arms now, wanting to apologize, conscious of his own stink, the foulness in his breath, the sweat that crawled like ants inside his cap. Then he saw the level of loathing and disgust in her eyes, just a moment before she gathered all the spittle in her mouth and spat it into his face.

  He rose to his feet, stunned, her spittle soaking through the thread in his cap, touching his skin like a badge of disgrace. He hooked his thumb under his cap and pulled it above his eyes, then whirled away from her and the shocked recognition he saw in her expression.

  Suddenly he was staring at Jimmy Dean, who had just walked back through the trees from the coulee, where he had tied up the boy with the boy’s T-shirt and belt.

  “You done it now,” Jimmy Dean said.

  “No, she ain’t seen nothing,” Tee Bobby said, pulling his cap back over his face.

  “We’ll talk about that in a minute. But right now it’s show time,” Jimmy Dean said, and unzipped his pants, the tails of his scarf fluttering on his neck. “You up for it or not?”

  “I ain’t signed on for this.”

  “She dissed you ’cause you black.”

  “Don’t do it, Jimmy Dean.”

  “You’re hopeless, man. Go back to the car ’cause that’s where you left your brains at.”

  Tee Bobby walked away, out of the shade into the sunlight and the dust devils spinning out of the canefield. The wind tasted like salt, like stagnant water and diesel fumes from the state highway and a dead animal in the bottom of a dry coulee. He heard Amanda cry out, then Jimmy Dean’s labored breathing inside the trees, followed by a grinding noise that built in Jimmy Dean’s throat and burst suddenly from his mouth as though he had passed a kidney stone.

  It was quiet inside the gum trees now, but Tee Bobby stood in front of his gas-guzzler, looking at Rosebud in the backseat, both of his palms pressed against his ears, knowing it was not over, that the worst moment still waited for him.

  The shotgun’s report was muffled, not as loud as he thought it would be, but maybe that was because he had pressed his hands so tightly against his ears. Or maybe something had gone wrong and the gun had misfired, he told himself.

  He turned and saw Jimmy Dean walk out of the trees, the shotgun smoking, blood splattered on his shirt.

  “She fought. She kicked the barrel. I only had one round. Get the shells,” he said.

  “What?” Tee Bobby said.

  “Snap out of it. She’s still alive. Get the fucking shells.”

  Tee Bobby opened the passenger door and removed the box of twelve-gauge double-oughts from the gunnysack, his hands trembling, and started to give it to Jimmy Dean. But Jimmy Dean was already walking back toward the gum trees, and Tee Bobby, for reasons he would never be able to explain to himself, followed him, without even being commanded. Jimmy Dean stooped and picked up the spent casing he had ejected from his gun, then fished two shells from the box in Tee Bobby’s hands and thumbed them into the gun’s magazine.

  “Stand back, ’less you want to get splattered,” Jimmy Dean said.

  Amanda’s eyes glanced at Tee Bobby for only a second, but the expression of loss and sadness and betrayal in them would live in his dreams the rest of his life.

  He whirled around and ran directly into his sister, who was staring wide-eyed at the scene taking place in the trees. When the shotgun discharged, Rosebud pulled at her clothes and beat at the air with her fists, as though she were being attacked, then ran out into the cane field, keening like a wounded bird.

  CHAPTER 28

  That afternoon Tee Bobby stood in wrist and leg chains on the levee at Henderson Swamp with me and Helen while two scuba divers went over the side of a state powerboat and began hunting in the darkness twelve feet down. The sky was black, the wind driving hard across the tops of the willow and cypress trees, the air clean smelling and unseasonably cool, peppered with rain off the Gulf. Tee Bobby’s face was wan, his jaw slack. “You call my gran’mama?” he asked.

  “That’s not my job, Tee Bobby,” I replied.

  One of the scuba divers broke the surface of the water, a dollop of mud on his cheek, the pistol-grip shotgun raised above his head.

  “Call my gran’mama and tell her I ain’t gonna be back home for a while, will you? Not till I get my bail re-set, work out some kind of deal wit’ Barbara Shanahan,” Tee Bobby said.

  I stared at him. “Bail re-set?” I said.

  “Yeah, friend of the court, right? Jimmy Dean gonna be the one to ride the needle. He gonna stay in custody, too. Cain’t hurt us no more. I’m gonna see if I can get in one of them diversion programs, too, you know, like you talked about,” Tee Bobby said.

  The diver who had recovered the shotgun waded up on the bank and handed it to me. He had heard what Tee Bobby said.

  “Is that guy for real?” he asked.

  Later, back at the department, while the thunder banged outside and pieces of newspaper whirled high in the air and a freight train groaned down the tracks that were now shiny with rain, I called Ladice and told her what had happened to Tee Bobby and where she could visit him that evening. I thought I would feel guilt about having deceived her, but in truth I didn’t feel anything. Tee Bobby’s story had left me numb, and had convinced me once again the worst deeds human beings commit are precipitated by a happenstance meeting of individuals and events, who and which, if they were rearranged only slightly, would never leave a bump in our history.

  I took off early that afternoon and drove home in a strange green light that seemed to rise from the darkness of the trees and fields into the sky. Just as it began to rain, I took Bootsie and Alafair for supper at the Patio in Loreauville and did not mention the events of the day.

  It’s never over. Tuesday morning, while rain flooded the streets, Perry LaSalle parked his Gazelle in a no-parking zone and sprinted up the walk into the courthouse. He didn’t bother to knock when he came into my office, either.

  “You entrapped Tee Bobby,” he said.

  “It’s good of you to drop by, Perry. I’ll get the sheriff in here and maybe a newspaper reporter or two, so everyone can have the benefit of your observations,” I said.

  “Be cute all you want. You didn’t Mirandize my client and you denied him access to his attorney,”

  “Wrong and wrong. He was already Mirandized and I told him to call you up before we brought him in. In front of witnesses, including his grandmother.”

  I saw the certainty go out of his eyes.

  “It doesn’t matter. You tricked a frightened kid,” he said.

  “Listen to what Tee Bobby has to say on the videotape. Then come back and tell me how your stomach feels. By the way, he says he came to you for financial help the day of the murder and you blew him off. He says you also told him Legion was his grandfather.”

  “So I’m responsible for Amanda Boudreau’s death?”

  “No, you’re not a noun, just an adverb, Perry. Maybe that’s reassuring to you,” I said.

  “You really know how to say it,” he replied.

  “Adios,” I said.

  I picked some papers off my desk and read them until he was gone.

  But later my own sardonic remark began to bother me. Perhaps “adverb” was too soft a term, I thought. Perry was a master at convincing others he was a victim, never the perpetrator. I got out the case file I had assembled on Legion Guidry and looked back at the notes I had made concerning the 1966 shooting by Legion of a New York freelance writer named William O’Reilly. The Morgan City newspaper had said that O’Reilly had drawn a pistol in a bar and been shot when Legion tried to disarm him. However, Ladice Hulin claimed a black man in the kitchen saw Legion take the gun from under the bar and literally execute O’Reilly in the parking lot, the gun muzzle
so close that flame rose from O’Reilly’s coat. I called the reference librarian at the Iberia Parish Library on Main and asked if she could find any bibliographic or biographical information on William O’Reilly. A half hour later she called me back.

  “I couldn’t find much you don’t already know. He published two pulp-fiction novels. You want their titles?” she said.

  “Yeah, that’d be fine. Do you have the publisher’s name?”

  “Pocket Books,” she said.

  “Anything else?” I said.

  “The obituary gives the names of some of the survivors.”

  “You found the obituary? You mean in the Morgan City paper?” I said.

  “No, in Brooklyn. That’s where he was originally from. You want me to fax it over to you?” she said.

  God bless all reference librarians everywhere, I thought.

  The fax came through our machine a few minutes later. Listed among the family survivors of William O’Reilly was the name of a sister, Mrs. Harriet Stetson. I dialed Brooklyn information and was prepared to hang up when the automatic response gave me a phone number. I called the number and left two messages on the machine, then went to lunch. When I came back to the office, the phone on my desk was ringing.

  “I’m Harriet Stetson. You wanted to talk about my brother?” an elderly voice said.

  I didn’t know where to begin. I repeated who I was and told her I did not believe her brother had drawn a weapon in a Morgan City bar. I told her I thought that he had been followed outside and murdered in the parking lot and that the witnesses to his death had lied.

  She was silent a long time.

  “I can’t tell you how much this call means to me, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said. “My brother had his problems with alcohol, but he was a gentle man. He was a volunteer at the Catholic Worker mission in the Bowery. He would never carry a firearm.”

  “The Dorothy Day mission?” I asked.

  “It was founded by Dorothy Day. But it’s called the St. Joseph House, on East First Street. How did you know?”

  My head was pounding now.

  “Why was your brother down here? What was he working on?” I asked.

  “A book about a famous family there. They lived on an island. They owned canneries, I think. Why?” she replied.

  I signed out a cruiser and went looking for Perry LaSalle. I ran up the walk to his office on Main Street, a newspaper over my head, and closed the door hurriedly against the rain. When I wiped the water out of my eyes, I saw the secretary sitting very stiffly behind her typewriter, an angry bead in her eyes, her face averted from the man in khaki clothes who sat on a divan, his hat next to him, crown down, the smoke from an unfiltered cigarette curling through his fingers. Legion Guidry’s gaze shifted from the secretary to me. I looked away from him.

  “Is Perry here, Miss Eula?” I asked.

  Her full name was Eula Landry. Her hair was dyed almost blue, and her robin-breasted posture and Millsaps College manner were almost like part of the decor in Perry’s office. Except it was obvious that her glacial detachment from the ebb and flow of the world was being sorely tested.

  “No, he’s not,” she replied.

  “Can I ask where he is?”

  “I don’t know,” she said irritably.

  She got up from her chair and walked primly into a small kitchen in back and poured herself a cup of coffee. I followed her inside. Her back was to me, but I could see her cup trembling on the saucer.

  “What’s going on, Miss Eula?” I asked.

  “I’m not supposed to tell that man out there where Mr. Perry is. His name is Legion. He frightens me.”

  “I’ll get him out of here,” I said.

  “No, he’ll know I told you.”

  “Where’s Perry?” I asked.

  “At Victor’s Cafeteria. With Barbara Shanahan.” Then her eyes went past me and widened with apprehension.

  Legion stood in the kitchen doorway, listening.

  “You tell Robicheaux where Perry LaSalle’s at, but not me?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You sorry, all right,” he said, then walked back in the waiting area and stood in the middle of the room, biting a hangnail on his thumb.

  He picked up his hat and put it on his head, then slipped his raincoat over his shoulders. Miss Eula poured her coffee down the sink and began rinsing her cup and saucer under the faucet, her face burning. I heard glass breaking in the waiting area.

  Legion had picked up a globular paperweight, one with a winter landscape and drifting snow inside it, and smashed the glass case on the wall and removed the Confederate battle flag that had been carried by Perry’s ancestor at Manassas Junction and Gettysburg and Antietam.

  Legion bunched up the sun-faded and bullet-rent cloth in his hand and blew his nose in it, then wiped his nostrils and upper lip carefully and threw the flag to the floor. When he left, he closed the door behind him and lit a cigarette on the gallery before running through the rain for his truck.

  I got in the cruiser and drove up the street to Victor’s and went inside. Perry LaSalle and Barbara Shanahan were having coffee and pie at a table against the side wall. A half-dozen city cops, both male and female, were drinking coffee a short distance away. Perry set down his fork and looked up at me.

  “I’m not interested in whatever it is you have to say,” he said.

  “Try this. I just talked to William O’Reilly’s sister in New York. Legion Guidry murdered her brother in 1966. O’Reilly was writing a book about your family. Legion’s not too smart, but he knew a book that revealed the LaSalles’ family secrets would end his career as a blackmailer. So he killed this poor fellow from New York outside a Morgan City bar.”

  “You have an obsession, Dave. It seems to be an obvious one to everyone except yourself,” Perry said.

  “Why don’t you join us and give this a rest for a while?” Barbara said, and placed her hand on the back of an empty chair.

  “You knew Legion murdered this man, Perry. And you knew why, too,” I said.

  “You’re mistaken,” Perry said.

  “After you left the Jesuit seminary, you were a volunteer at a Catholic Worker mission in the Bowery. It’s the same mission William O’Reilly used to work in. I think you were trying to do penance for your family’s sins. Why not just own up to it? It’s not the worst admission in the world.”

  Perry rose to his feet. “You want it in here or out in the street?” he said.

  “I’m the least of your problems. I just left your law office. Legion Guidry not only terrified your secretary, he literally blew his nose on your Confederate battle flag.”

  I turned and started to walk away from him. He grabbed my arm and whirled me around, swinging his fist at the same time. I caught the blow on my forearm and felt it graze the side of my head. I could have walked away, but I didn’t. Instead, I let the old enemy have its way and I hooked him in the jaw and knocked him through the chairs onto the floor.

  The entire cafeteria was suddenly quiet. Barbara Shanahan knelt beside Perry, who was trying to push himself up on one elbow, his eyes glazed.

  “I know where Clete gets it now. You’re unbelievable. You belong in front of a cave with a club in your hand,” Barbara said to me.

  “Don’t listen to her! Way to go, Robicheaux!” one of the city cops yelled. Then the other cops applauded.

  I went back to the department and soaked my hand in cold water, then ate two aspirin at my desk and pressed my fists against my temples, my face still burning with embarrassment, wondering when I would ever learn not to push people into corners, particularly a tormented man like Perry LaSalle, who had every characteristic of an untreated sexaholic, psychologically incapable of either personal honesty or emotional intimacy with another human being. Three deputies in a row opened my door and gave me a thumbs-up for decking Perry. I nodded appreciatively and ate another aspirin and tried to bury myself in my work.

  I pulled out my file drawer and
began going through some of the open cases I had been neglecting since the murders of Amanda Boudreau and Linda Zeroski. Many of these cases involved crimes committed by what I call members of the Pool, that army of petty miscreants whom nothing short of frontal lobotomies or massive electroshock will ever change. Some of the cases were a delight.

  For six months the department had been looking for a burglar we named the Easter Bunny, because witnesses who had seen him said he was an albino with pink eyes and silver hair. But it was not only his appearance that was unusual. His attitude and methods of operation were so outrageous we had no precedent for dealing with him.

  In one home he left a handwritten note on the refrigerator door that read:

  Dear Folks Who Own This House, I rob homes in this neighborhood only because most people who live hereabouts try to keep up decent standards. But after breaking into your house I think you should consider moving to a lower rent neighborhood. You don’t have cable TV, no beer or snacks in the icebox, and most of your furniture is not worth stealing.

  In other words, it really sucks when I spend a whole day casing a house only to discover the people who live in it take no pride in themselves. It is people like you who make life hard on guys like me.

  Sincerely,

  A guy who doesn’t need these kinds of problems

  He took a shower and shaved in one home, ordered delivery pizza in another, and sometimes answered the telephone and wrote down phone messages for the home owners.

  Two nights ago he robbed a city councilman’s house, a short distance from City Park. Evidently the councilman had locked his pet poodle in a pantry by mistake and the poodle was dying to go to the bathroom. The Easter Bunny leashed him up and took him for a walk along the bayou, then returned him to the house and filled his bowls with fresh water and dog food.

  The phone on my desk rang.

  “What are you doing, Streak?” Bootsie said.

  “Looking for the Easter Bunny,” I replied.

  “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny. I just heard you punched out Perry LaSalle in Victor’s Cafeteria.”