Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “I guess that’s fair to say,” I replied.

  I expected a rejoinder, but in the silence I realized she had called for another reason.

  “The homeless man, the ex-soldier you told me about, he’s down at the bait shop,” she said.

  “What’s he want?”

  “He said he thought you usually came home for lunch. He wanted to talk to you.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “Reading the newspaper. Is he dangerous, Dave?”

  “I’m not sure. Is Batist there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll call the shop, then ring you back,” I said.

  The phone at the bait shop was busy. Five minutes later Batist picked up the receiver.

  “That homeless fellow in the shop? He’s a couple of quarts down. Everything okay there?” I said.

  “All our boats is full of water. That’s about it,” he replied.

  “Give me a call if you need to.”

  “Ain’t no problem here, Dave,” he said.

  After I hung up I called Bootsie back, then began replacing the case folders I had removed from my file cabinet. A piece of lined yellow paper on which I had scribbled several notations with a felt pen became unstuck from the outside of a manila folder and floated to the floor.

  The notations had to do with the telephone call I had received from Marie Guilbeau, the cleaning lady in St. Mary Parish who had been molested by an intruder at her house and had felt obliged to tell me she had flirted the same day with a guest at the motel where she worked.

  It took about ten minutes to create what it is called a photo lineup, in this case six mug shots that I pulled from the department’s files. Actually, her identifying the man at the motel would do little to make a case against the intruder, but the report she had filed had been treated casually by the authorities in St. Mary Parish and by me as well, and perhaps now was an opportunity to make it right. I called Marie Guilbeau’s home and was told by a niece that her aunt was at the motel on the four-lane where she worked.

  But I didn’t drive directly to the motel. First I called Batist at the bait shop.

  “Is that fellow still there?” I asked.

  “It’s raining too hard for him to go nowhere. I’ll give him a ride to town later on,” Batist replied.

  “Tell him to stay there. I’ll be along in a few minutes,” I said.

  When I got to the bait shop, the swamp looked colorless and stricken in the rain, except for the canopy of cypresses, which was a dull green against an infinite gray sky. Most of the concrete boat ramp was under water and a flock of mallards and pintails had taken shelter under the dock. I opened an umbrella over my head and ran for the bait shop.

  The man who claimed to have been a medic from my outfit was looking out the window at the rain dancing on the bayou. He was dressed in clean denims, his short sleeves turned up in cuffs, steel-toed oil-field boots laced on his feet.

  “Take a ride with me down to St. Mary Parish, Doc,” I said.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “Nothing in particular. You got anything else to do?” I said.

  “Nope,” he said.

  We walked up the dock together, under the umbrella, while lightning banged and flashed around us and thunder peeled across the sky like incoming mail from a distant war.

  The motel out on the four-lane was a run-down two-story building that had once belonged to a chain but was now operated by the owner of the truck stop next door. I parked the cruiser by a walkway and asked my friend, the ex-soldier, to wait for me. I found Marie Guilbeau in a laundry room, stuffing sheets into a washing machine. Her dark hair was pinned on the back of her head, her maid’s uniform stretched tight against the thickness of her body when she bent over the machine. “I’d like for you to look at a man for me, Ms. Guilbeau,” I said.

  “The one who was staying at the motel?” she said, her face stark.

  “Let’s find out,” I replied. “Take a walk with me to the cruiser.”

  She hesitated, then set down her laundry and followed me through an alcove to the outside walkway. I stepped out into the rain and held my umbrella over the passenger’s door and tapped on the glass.

  “Hey, Doc, I want you to meet someone,” I said, making a rotating motion with my finger.

  He rolled down the window and looked at me.

  “This is a friend of mine, Ms. Guilbeau,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She folded her hands and lowered her eyes and said nothing in reply.

  The ex-soldier glanced at me, unsure of what was happening.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute, Doc,” I said, then stepped back into the alcove with Marie Guilbeau.

  “You know that fellow?” I asked.

  “Yeah, why you bringing him here?”

  “He’s the man who made an inappropriate remark to you?”

  “No. He’s a homeless person. He walks all over New Iberia. Carrying his t’ings on his back. I seen him there,” she replied.

  “Okay, take a look at these pictures,” I said, and removed a piece of mounting board from a manila envelope. Six mug shots were slipped into viewing slots in two rows of threes, one on top of the other.

  It didn’t take her five seconds to place her finger on one photo in particular.

  “That’s the one,” she said. “He was nice at first. Then he got the wrong idea and said somet’ing fresh. Like he t’ought I was a prostitute.” Maybe it was simply the light, but the memory of the incident seemed to climb in her face like a bruise.

  “You’re sure this is the guy?” I asked.

  “That’s the guy. You better believe that’s the guy,” she said, tapping the picture again, her eyes angry now. “What’s his name?”

  “Marvin Oates. He sells Bibles,” I said.

  “I’m gonna remember his name. I’m gonna remember his name a long time. It was him broke in my house, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I t’ink you do,” she replied.

  I turned the cruiser around in the parking lot and headed back toward New Iberia. The broken frond from a palm tree spun crazily out of the sky and bounced off my windshield.

  As we drove under the oaks at the city limits sign outside New Iberia, I glanced across the seat at the ex-soldier. His face looked reflective, philosophical, a pocket of air in one cheek. “You never told me what you wanted to talk about,” I said.

  “Getting a job. I can do lots of different things. Run a forklift, clerk, fry-cook, swamp out your bait shop,” he said.

  “I suspect we can work out something.”

  “I sold the rest of the downers I been taking. I probably should have thrown them away, but I needed the money.”

  “The V.A. has no record on you. How do you explain that?”

  “Some of my records were burnt up in a fire. That’s what the V.A. says, anyway.”

  “You’re a man of mystery, Doc.”

  “No, I ain’t. If I live right, I get time off from the stuff that’s in my head. For some people that’s as good as it gets,” he said.

  He cracked a piece of peppermint in his jaw and smiled for the first time since I had seen him in New Iberia.

  He had no place to stay. I drove home and gave him the room in the back of the bait shop. It contained a bunk, a table with a lamp, a chest of drawers, and a shower inside a tin stall, and I put fresh linen on the bunk and soap and a towel in the shower. When I left the bait shop, he was sound asleep, with all his clothes on, a sheet drawn up to his chin.

  I walked up the dock to the house, the wind almost ripping the umbrella from my hand.

  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

  CHAPTER 29

  In the morning the rain had slackened when I arrived at work. I walked down to the sheriff’s office and knocked on the door. He looked up from some papers on his desk, his face darkening. He had on a pinstripe coat and a silver cowboy shirt unbuttoned at the collar. His Stetson hung on a rack, spotted with raindrops. “Real good of you to check in,” he said.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “You decked Perry LaSalle?”

  “He swung on me.”

  “Thanks for letting me know that. He’s called twice. I also just got off the phone with Joe Zeroski. I want this stuff cleaned up. I’m sick of my department being dragged into a soap opera.”

  “What stuff?” I said.

  “LaSalle says Legion Guidry intends to do serious harm to Barbara Shanahan and your friend Purcel. At least as far as I could make out. In the meantime, Joe Zeroski says Marvin Oates is bothering his niece again. What the hell is going on there?”

  “Zerelda Calucci deep-sixed Marvin. I think he’s a dangerous man, skipper. Maybe more dangerous than Legion Guidry.”

  “Marvin Oates?”

  “I think he broke into a woman’s house in St. Mary Parish and molested her. I think he should be our primary suspect in the murder of Linda Zeroski.”

  I told the sheriff the story of Marie Guilbeau. He leaned back and tapped the heels of his hands on the arms of his chair. He was thinking about the case now and I could see his irritation with me slipping out of his eyes.

  “I don’t buy it. Oates is simpleminded. He doesn’t have any history of violence,” he said.

  “None we know about. I want to get a warrant and take his place apart.”

  “Do it,” the sheriff said. “Are you going to talk to Perry LaSalle?”

  “What did Legion say exactly?” I asked.

  “I never got it straight. LaSalle doesn’t sound rational. He says this guy Guidry isn’t human. What’s he talking about?”

  Helen Soileau went to work on the warrant while I called Perry at his office. Outside the window I could see a round blue place in the sky and birds trapped inside it. Perry’s secretary said he had not come to the office yet. I called his number on Poinciana Island.

  “Legion threatened Clete and Barbara?” I said.

  “Yeah, on the phone, late last night. He threatened me, too. He thinks I’m writing a book about him,” he replied. I could hear him breathing into the receiver.

  “You told Barbara?”

  “Yeah, she said she has a pistol and she’s looking forward to parking one in his buckwheats.”

  “Did you warn Clete?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I just didn’t.”

  Because he’s of no value to you, I thought.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Nothing. You told the sheriff Legion wasn’t human. What did you mean?”

  His voice make an audible click in the phone.

  “He can speak in what sounds like an ancient or dead language. He did it last night,” he said.

  “It’s probably just bad French,” I said, and quietly hung up.

  I looked at the phone, my ears popping, and wondered how Perry enjoyed being lied to for a change, particularly when he was frightened to death.

  I called Clete twice and got his answering machine. I left messages both times. By late that afternoon Helen and I had a warrant to search Marvin Oates’s shotgun house on St. Peter Street. Marvin was not at home, but we called the landlord and got him to open the house. It had stopped raining and the sky overhead was blue and ribbed with pink clouds, but out over the Gulf another storm was building and the thunder reverberated dully through Marvin’s tin roof as we dumped out all his drawers, pulled his clothes off hangers, flipped his mattress upside down, raked all the cookware out of his kitchen cabinets, and generally wreaked havoc on the inside of his house. But we found nothing that was of any value to us.

  Except five strips of pipe tape hanging loose from an empty niche in the back of the dresser, tape that was strong enough to hold a handgun in place against the wood.

  “I bet that’s where he hid the nine-millimeter he used to kill Frankie Dogs,” I said.

  “It’s still hard for me to make that guy for anything except a meltdown, Dave,” Helen said.

  “I knew an old-time moonshiner who once told me the man who kills you will be at your throat before you ever know it,” I said.

  “Yeah? I don’t get it,” she said.

  “What kind of guy could get close enough to cap Frankie Dogs?” I said.

  Before I went home that evening I drove to Clete’s apartment, but his blinds were closed and his car was gone. I slipped a note under his door, asking him to call me. When I got home, the sky was maroon-colored, full of birds, the thunderheads over the Gulf banked in a long black line just above the horizon. One of Alafair’s friends was spending the night and had blocked the driveway with her automobile, and I parked my truck by the boat ramp and walked up to the house. A few minutes later I looked through the front window and saw my friend, the ex-soldier, hosing down the truck, then scrubbing the camping shell in back with a long-handled push broom.

  I walked back down the slope.

  “There’s another storm coming. Maybe you should wait on washing the truck,” I said.

  “That’s okay. I just want to get the mud off. Then later I can just run the hose over it,” he said.

  “How you getting along?” I asked.

  “I had a little trouble sleeping. The sound of your refrigeration equipment comes through the walls. When I put the pillow over my head, I don’t hear it so much.”

  “You want to join us for supper?”

  “That’s all right, Loot. I went into town with Batist and bought some groceries,” he said.

  I turned to walk back to the house.

  “There was an old guy here in a red pickup truck,” he said. “He asked if somebody in a purple Cadillac convertible had been around. A guy named Purcel.”

  “What’d this guy look like?” I asked.

  “Tall, with deep lines in his face. I told him I didn’t know anybody named Purcel.” The ex-soldier scratched his cheek and looked quizzically into space.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “He told me to go inside and ask the nigger. That’s the word he used, just like everybody did. I told him he should watch what he called other people. He didn’t like it.”

  “His name is Legion Guidry, Doc. He’s one of those we don’t let get behind us.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I wish I knew, partner,” I said.

  After supper I walked out on the gallery and tried to read the newspaper, but I couldn’t concentrate. The sky began to darken, and a flock of egrets rose out of the swamp and scattered like white rose petals over the top of my house, then the wind kicked up again and I heard rain clicking in the trees. I folded the newspaper and went back inside. Bootsie was reading a novel by Steve Yarbrough under a floor lamp. She closed her book, using her thumb to mark her place, her eyes veiled. “Do you think your friend, the war vet out there, is a hundred percent?” she said.

  “Probably not. But he’s harmless,” I replied.

  “How do you know?”

  “Good people don’t change. Sometimes bad ones do. But good people don’t.”

  “You’re incurably romantic, Dave.”

  “Think so?”

  She laughed loudly, then went back to her book. I walked into the kitchen, hoping she did not detect my real mood. Because the truth was my skin was crawling with anxiety, the same kind I’d experienced during my flirtation with amphetamines. But this time the cause wasn’t the
white worm; it was an abiding sense that my loyal friend Clete Purcel was skating on the edge of another calamity.

  “Where you going?” Bootsie said.

  “To Clete’s. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.

  “You worried about him?”

  “I’ve left him several messages. Clete always calls me as soon as he gets the message.”

  “Maybe he’s in New Orleans.”

  “Legion Guidry was at the bait shop today. He wanted to know if Clete had been around.”

  Her book fell off her knee. Her reading glasses were full of light when she looked at me.

  I drove to his apartment on the Loreauville Road. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, and the apartment manager, an elderly Jewish man who had been a teenager in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was stacking the poolside furniture under a sheltered walkway. “Have you seen Clete Purcel, Mr. Lemand?” I asked.

  “Early this morning. He was putting his fishing things in the back of his car. A young woman was with him,” he replied.

  “Did he say when he might be back?”

  “No, he didn’t. I’m sorry,” Mr. Lemand said. He was a bald, wizened man, with brown eyes and delicate hands. He always wore a tie and a starched shirt and was never seen at a dinner table without his coat on. “You’re the second person who asked me about Mr. Purcel today.”

  “Oh?”

  “A man in a red truck was here. He sat for a long time in the parking lot, under the trees, smoking cigarettes. Maybe because of your line of work you know this man,” Mr. Lemand said.

  “How do you mean?”

  He inverted a plastic chair and placed it on a table.

  “In my childhood I saw eyes like his. That was in Germany, in times quite different from our own. He wanted to know if Mr. Purcel was with Ms. Shanahan. You know, Ms. Shanahan, who works in the district attorney’s office? I didn’t tell him.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Do you think he’ll come back, this man in the truck?”

  “Call me if he does. Here, I’ll put my home number on the back of my business card,” I said, and handed it to him.