Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “This man had an odor. At first I thought I was imagining it. But I wasn’t. It was vile,” he said.

  His eyes searched my face for an explanation. But I had none to give him. The pool was a brilliant, clear green against the glow of the underwater lights, the surface chained with rain rings. I walked out into the darkness, into the parking lot, and started my truck.

  Who else would go fishing in an electric storm or ignore the danger represented by a man like Legion Guidry? I asked myself. But that was Clete’s nature, defiant of all authority and rules, uneducable, grinning his way through the cannon smoke, convinced he could live through anything. Evidently, James Jones and Ernest Hemingway bore each other a high degree of enmity. Ironically, they both described the evolution of the combat soldier in a similar fashion. Each author said the most dangerous stage in a soldier’s life is the second one, immediately after he has survived his initial experience in combat, because he feels anointed by a divine hand and convinces himself he would not have been spared in one battle only to die in another.

  Clete had never evolved out of that second stage in a combat soldier’s career. His great strength lay in his courage and his uncanny knowledge of his enemy. But his weakness was in direct proportion to his strength, and it lay in his inability to foresee or appreciate the consequence of his actions, or, more simply said, the fact that a cable-strung wrecking ball is designed to swing both ways.

  I drove back up the Loreauville Road and crossed the drawbridge in the center of town and turned onto Burke Street, then walked up the steps to Barbara Shanahan’s apartment overlooking the Teche. A lamp was on in the living room, but no one answered the bell. I hammered on the door, but there was no movement inside. I stuck a note in the doorjamb, asking her to call the house when she returned.

  I drove to the motor court where Joe Zeroski and Zerelda Calucci were staying. Zerelda was not in her cottage, but Joe was, dressed in pajama bottoms, a T-shirt, and slippers, holding the door open for me, the rain blowing in his face.

  “Just the guy I wanted to see,” he said.

  “Me?” I said.

  “Yeah, this whole town ought to be napalmed. I called the sheriff at his house. He told me to talk to him during business hours. Hey, crazoids don’t keep business hours. That includes Blimpo.”

  “Blimpo is Clete?”

  “No, Nancy Reagan. Who do you think I mean?”

  “You’re going too fast for me, Joe.” I closed the door behind me. His television set was on, a glass of milk and a sandwich on a table by an overstuffed chair.

  “Purcel took my niece fishing. He didn’t say where, either, which means he wants to boink her without me being around. In the meantime Marvin Dipshit is knocking on her door, with roses in his hand and this puke-pot look on his face,” he said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Two hours ago.”

  “Where is Oates now?” I asked.

  “I’m supposed to know that? No wonder you people got a crime wave. Get out of here,” he said.

  “Joe, I think Marvin may have murdered your daughter,” I said.

  “Say that again.”

  “Marvin Oates may have molested a woman in St. Mary Parish. He keeps showing up in places he has no business at.”

  “When’d you start looking at this guy?” Joe said.

  “He’s been an unofficial suspect for some time.”

  “Unofficial? You got a way with words.”

  “I’m here now, Joe, because I’m concerned about both Clete and Zerelda. If you can help me in any way, I’ll be in your debt.”

  An angry thought went out of his eyes.

  “I don’t know where they’re at. But I’ll make some calls,” he said.

  “No cowboy stuff. Oates is a suspect. That’s all,” I said.

  “You figure him for the hit on Frankie?” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “How could a watermelon picker like that take out Frankie Dogs? A guy who wears boots that look like they come off a Puerto Rican faggot. You ever seen anybody besides an elf or a fruit wear red and green boots?”

  “When did you see him in these boots?”

  “Tonight. Why?”

  I went back home. I tried to imagine where Clete might have gone, but I was at a loss. I called his apartment again and got the answering machine, but this time I just hung up. “Clete always lands on his feet,” Bootsie said.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I replied.

  “You can’t live his life, Dave,” she said.

  I went out on the gallery and sat in a chair, with the light off, and watched the rain fall on the swamp. I thought about the biblical passage describing how God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on both the good and the wicked. A few miles away Jimmy Dean Styles and Tee Bobby Hulin were both housed in the parish prison, held without bond, in twenty-three-hour lockdown. I wondered if Tee Bobby had finally accepted his fate, if he looked out at the drenched sugarcane fields surrounding the stockade and saw his future there, either as a lifetime convict laborer on Angola Farm or as a hump of sod in the prison cemetery at Lookout Point, with no identification on his grave marker except a number.

  I even wondered if Jimmy Dean Styles still doubted his fate. I could not imagine a worse death than being confined in a cage, knowing the exact date, hour, minute, and second you will die at the hands of others. To me it was always miraculous that the condemned did not go insane before the day of their execution.

  But an old-time warden at Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi confided to me an observation of his own that I’ve never forgotten. He said that no matter how pathological or evil the condemned might be, they do not believe the state will carry out its sentence. An army of correctional officers, prison psychologists, physicians, hospital attendants, prison administrators, and chaplains is assigned to the care and well-being of those on death row. They’re fed, given every form of medical care, nursed back to health if they try to kill themselves, and sometimes punished, as children would be, for possessing a stinger or a jar of prune-o.

  Would these same representatives of the state strap down a defenseless individual and fill his veins with lethal chemicals or create an electrical arc from his skull to the soles of his feet? My friend the warden believed the contradictions were such that no sane person could quite assimilate them.

  On the far side of the swamp a bolt of lightning leaped from the earth and quivered whitely in a pool of clouds at the top of the sky. I felt the day’s events wash through me in a wave of fatigue. Then the phone rang in the living room and I went inside to answer it.

  It was Mr. Lemand, the manager of Clete’s apartment complex.

  “I’m sorry to call so late,” he said.

  “It’s all right. Can I help you?” I said.

  “A lady named Mrs. LeBlanc lives next door to Mr. Purcel. After you left, her toilet became clogged and I had to go up and fix it. Since I knew you were concerned about Mr. Purcel, I asked if she had seen him. She said he’d told her he had rented a camp at Bayou Benoit.”

  “Do you know where exactly?”

  “No, I asked her that.”

  “Thanks very much, Mr. Lemand,” I said.

  “I’m afraid that’s not all. She said a man had been looking into Mr. Purcel’s window. She was disturbed at first, then she recognized the man as a Bible salesman she knew. He told her he was delivering a Bible to Mr. Purcel but hadn’t been able to find him. So she told him where Mr. Purcel was.”

  “What you’ve told me is very helpful, Mr. Lemand,” I said.

  “Unfortunately, there’s more. When she looked out her window, she saw a red pickup truck follow the Bible salesman out of the parking lot. Then she noticed the man driving the truck didn’t turn on his lights until he was out on the road. She had seen this man earlier. He had a pair of binoculars. She’s quite concerned she put either Mr. Purcel or the salesman in harm’s way.”

  “She and you have done all the right things, Mr. Lema
nd. Tell her not to worry,” I said.

  “I think that will be a great relief to her,” he said.

  I hung up the receiver and tried to think. My own thoughts made my head hurt. Linda Zeroski had been murdered on Bayou Benoit. The nightclub where Baby Huey Lagneaux worked was on Bayou Benoit, as was Legion Guidry’s camp. Of all the places Clete could choose for a tryst, it would have to be there.

  I went into the bedroom and removed my army-issue .45 automatic from the dresser drawer. I dropped an extra magazine, loaded with hollow-points, and a sap and a pair of handcuffs in the pockets of my raincoat and told Bootsie I did not know when I would be back home, then walked down the slope to my truck and started the engine.

  I didn’t realize, until I was over a mile down the road, that I had a passenger with me.

  CHAPTER 30

  I looked into the rearview mirror and saw the face of the ex-soldier staring at me through the back window. I swerved to the side of the road and got out. He climbed out of the camper shell, bare-chested, a crucifix and a G.I. can opener hung around his neck. “What are you doing in there?” I asked.

  “The motor on your refrigerator kept me awake. I got in your camper to sleep,” he said.

  “Bad night for it, Doc,” I said.

  “I’ll walk back. No big deal,” he replied.

  He reached inside the shell and retrieved a pillow and his shirt. His face was beaded with raindrops.

  “Hop in front. Let’s take a ride upcountry,” I said.

  He thought about it a moment, his mouth screwed into a button, his eyes clear of both dope and madness, his expression almost childlike. “I don’t mind,” he said.

  We drove up Bayou Teche, through Loreauville and waving fields of sugarcane that flickered with lightning. We turned off the state road and passed scattered farmhouses and clumps of trees inside cattle acreage and a bait shop and a filling station that were dark inside. Then I saw the nightclub where Baby Huey bartended, the neon beer signs glowing in the rain, the empty parking lot lit by floodlamps.

  I left the ex-soldier in the truck and went inside. The front and back doors of the club were open to air it out. Baby Huey was at the end of the bar, on the phone, his back to me. His hair was wet, his pink shirt spotted with raindrops. When he hung up and saw me standing behind him, he looked back at the phone, as though reviewing the conversation he’d just had.

  “You want to tell me something?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily,” he replied.

  “You wouldn’t have been talking to Joe Zeroski, would you?” I said.

  “You never can tell.” He picked up a clean white cloth and began wiping the bar, although there was no water or drink residue on it.

  “Lose the routine, Huey. I’m looking for Joe Zeroski’s niece and a friend of mine named Clete Purcel. I think you are, too. You lie to me, you’re going to be sharing accommodations with Tee Bobby Hulin.”

  He bit his lip and bunched the bar cloth in his huge hand.

  “Use your head, partner. We’re on the same side,” I said.

  “Mr. Joe called earlier. He thought his niece and her boyfriend had probably rented a camp somewhere. He axed me if I knowed who rented camps herebouts. I called a friend of mine runs the bait shop back up the road. He said a guy wit’ a Cadillac convertible like the one Mr. Joe described was in there this afternoon. My friend said this guy and the woman wit’ him was staying in a camp just the other side of the levee. So I drove on down there.”

  “So?” I said.

  “You ain’t gonna want to hear this.”

  “I don’t mean to offend you, Huey, but you’re starting to seriously piss me off,” I said.

  “The guy who lives next door to the cabin where your friend was at? He’s been inside twice. He ain’t the kind of guy got a real good relationship with the law or dials 911 a lot, know what I mean? He said a big white guy in swim trunks and a Marine Corps cap was cleaning fish on the porch in back when a guy dressed like a cowboy drove into the yard. He said the guy in swim trunks was talking loud and shaking his fish knife at the cowboy, but my friend couldn’t see it too good ’cause the house was in the way.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Baby Huey raised his eyebrows. “A few minutes later the woman drove away wit’ the cowboy. The woman was driving, and the big guy in swim trunks wasn’t nowhere around.”

  “What do you mean he wasn’t anywhere around?”

  Baby Huey’s eyes went away from me, then came back again.

  “My friend thought he might have been in the trunk of the car. A red pickup was parked down the road from the camp. It followed the Cadillac over the levee. My friend thought it look just like the pickup Legion drive,” he said.

  “Your friend didn’t bother to tell anyone this until you asked him?” I said.

  “That’s the way it go sometimes,” Baby Huey replied.

  I pushed a napkin and my ballpoint pen across the bar to Huey.

  “Write down your friend’s name so I can thank him personally,” I said.

  I used the pay phone in the corner and called Helen Soileau at her house. She dropped the receiver when she answered, then scraped it up again. I described all the events that had occurred since I had seen her late that afternoon.

  “Marvin was wearing red and green cowboy boots? Same color as the cowboy in the bar where Frankie Dogs got hit?” she said.

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  “Why did Legion pick today to go after Clete?”

  “He thinks Clete is with Barbara. Barbara stood up to him in the western store. He wants to get them both at one time,” I said.

  “I’m still asleep. I can’t think clearly. What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing right now. Look, when I went to see Perry LaSalle at Sookie Motrie’s duck hunting camp down by Pecan Island, I saw an abandoned church that reminded me of the lyrics in a song Marvin Oates is always quoting from. The church has a sign on it that says Twelve Disciples Assembly. Is that just a coincidence?”

  “Marvin used to stay with a preacher there when his mother was on a bender. I think the preacher was the only person who ever treated him decent.”

  “I’m going to head down there,” I said.

  “You sound a little strung out. Let it go till sunlight. There’s a good chance Baby Huey’s source is full of shit.”

  “No, the details are too specific,” I said.

  There was a pause on the line.

  “You’re not having the wrong kind of thoughts, are you?” she asked.

  “No, everything’s copacetic here,” I said.

  “Streak?”

  “I’m telling you the truth. I’m fine,” I said.

  But when I hung up, my hands were tingling with fatigue, my mouth dry, my hair damp with sweat, as though my old courtship with the malarial mosquito had taken new life in my blood. I turned around and almost collided with Baby Huey, who was mopping down a table five feet behind me.

  “What do you think you just heard?” I said.

  “I was listening to the jukebox. That’s Tee Bobby’s new song. Boy got a million-dollar voice. Ain’t been nobody like him since Guitar Slim,” he said.

  I was burning up inside my raincoat, and I took it off before I got back into the truck and put my sap, handcuffs, and extra magazine on the seat, beside my holstered .45. Then I turned the truck around and headed south, toward Pecan Island, down in Vermilion Parish. “I don’t have time to take you back home,” I said to the ex-soldier.

  “It’s all right. I’ve been taking a nap,” he said. He had put his shirt back on but had left it unbuttoned, and the crucifix on his chest shone in the dashboard light.

  “What’s your real name, Doc?” I said.

  “Sal Angelo.”

  “You sure about that?” I said.

  “Pretty sure,” he said.

  “You’re okay, Sal,” I said.

  He grinned sleepily, then rested his head on his pillow and closed
his eyes. I drove into Abbeville, past the old redbrick cathedral and the graveyard that was full of Confederate dead, then continued on south, into the wetlands and wind blowing across sawgrass and clumps of gum trees and swamp maples. My face felt hot to the touch, my jaws like emery paper. I thought I could hear the drone of mosquitoes, but none settled on my skin and I couldn’t see any on the windshield or dash-board, where they usually clustered when they got inside the truck. When I swallowed, my spit tasted like battery acid.

  My holstered .45 vibrated on the seat beside me. I touched it with my right hand, felt the coolness of the steel, the checkered hardness of the grips against my skin. It was the finest handgun I had ever owned, purchased for twenty-five dollars among a row of cribs in Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. I popped the strap loose with my thumb and slipped the heaviness of the frame into my hand and held it like an old friend against my thigh, although I could not explain the reason why I did so.

  It wasn’t far to the deserted church now. The rain had slackened and a crack of veiled moonlight shone among the clouds, like a dirty green vapor that had been sucked out of the Gulf during the storm. I rubbed the back of my wrist into my eye sockets and saw red rings recede into my brain, then I experienced a disturbing sense of clarity I had not felt all day, as though all my thought patterns for weeks, my prayers, my personal resolutions and soliloquies at AA meetings, were being made null and void because they were no longer useful to me.

  Sigmund Freud was once quoted as saying, “Ah, thank you for showing me all of mankind’s lofty ideals. Now let me introduce you to the basement.”

  I could feel myself descending into that subterranean place in the mind where the gargoyles frolic. The case against Marvin Oates for the murder of Linda Zeroski was tenuous and speculative, without even circumstantial evidence to support it, I told myself. Even if Marvin had harmed Clete and Zerelda and was in possession of the nine-millimeter that had killed Frankie Dogs, the right defense attorney could put him and his scarred back and his hush-puppy accent on the stand and have a jury of daytime soap-opera fans touching tears from their cheeks.