Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Father Jimmie nodded and left the room. I told Gunner to take a seat in front of my desk. He breathed through his mouth, as though he were inside a walk-in freezer.

  “I’m doing this for Father Dolan,” he said.

  “You’re doing it to save your ass,” I said.

  His eyes didn’t look at me but his face hardened.

  “You went to confession?” I said.

  “They call it reconciliation now. But, yeah, I went,” he said.

  “So who put the contract on Father Jimmie?”

  “I got a phone call. From a guy named Ray. He don’t have another name. He just said I was supposed to take care of Father Dolan. When I got a delivery to make, Ray is the guy who calls me. I told Ray I didn’t do stuff like that. He says I do it or I find a new source of income. So I called up a guy. He rolls queers in the Quarter and at some sleaze joints on Airline. For a hundred bucks he does other kinds of work, too.”

  “Do you have any idea what you did to a decent and fine man?”

  “You want the guy’s name?”

  “No, I want Ray’s last name and I want the guy Ray works for.”

  “Man, you don’t understand. Father Dolan’s got enemies all over New Orleans. He’s trying to shut down drive-by daiquiri windows and trash incinerators and these guys who been dumping sludge out in the river parishes. He told the Times-Picayune these right-to-life people were committing a sin by putting these women’s pictures and names on the Internet.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “These anti-abortion nutcases. They take pictures of women going into abortion clinics, then put the pictures and the women’s names and addresses on the Internet. Father Dolan spoke up about it, a Catholic priest. How many enemies does one guy need?”

  “Our time is about up, Gunner,” I said.

  “The queer-bait from the Quarter was supposed to scare Father Dolan, not go apeshit with a pipe. Hey, are you listening? It’s on the street I snitched off Sammy Fig. You must have given up my name to Fat Sammy.”

  “Sammy says he never heard of you. You shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

  “I knew it.” His face turned gray. He wiped his mouth and looked at the trusty gardener clipping a hedge outside the window. “Why you staring at me like that?” he said.

  “I think you’re using the seal of the confessional to keep Father Dolan from testifying against you.”

  “Maybe that was true at first. But I’m still sorry for what I done. He’s a good guy. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

  I glanced at my watch. “We’re done here. So long, Gunner,” I said.

  He rose from his chair and walked to the door, then stopped, his shoulders slightly stooped, his impish features waiting in anticipation, as though an act of mercy might still be extended to him.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Call Sammy Fig. Tell him I didn’t rat him out.”

  “What’s Ray’s last name?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Adios,” I said.

  I went back to reading my morning mail. When I looked up again, he was gone. A moment later Father Jimmie stuck his head in the door, his disappointment obvious.

  “You couldn’t help Phil out?” he asked.

  The next day I called the warden’s office at Angola Penitentiary and asked an administrative assistant to do a records search under the name of Clarence “Junior” Crudup.

  “When was he here?” the assistant asked.

  “In the forties or fifties.”

  “Our records don’t go back that far. You’ll have to go through Baton Rouge for that.”

  “This guy went in but didn’t come out.”

  “Say again?”

  “He was never released. No one knows what happened to him.”

  “Try Point Lookout.”

  “The cemetery?”

  “Nobody gets lost in here. They either go out through the front gate or they get planted in the gum trees.”

  “How about under the levee?”

  He hung up on me.

  At noon I walked past the whitewashed and crumbling brick crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery to Main Street and ate lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria, then returned to the office just as the sun went behind a bank of thunderheads and the wind came up hard in the south and began blowing the trees along the train tracks. There were two telephone messages from Theodosha Flannigan in my mailbox. I dropped them both in the dispatcher’s wastebasket.

  At 4:00 P.M., in the middle of a downpour, I saw her black Lexus pull to the curb in front of the courthouse. She popped open an umbrella and raced for the front of the building, water splashing on her calves and the bottom of her pink skirt.

  I went out into the corridor to meet her, feigning a confidence that masked my desire to avoid seeing her again.

  “Did you get my invitation?” she said, her face and hair bright with rain.

  “Yes, thanks for sending it,” I replied.

  “I called earlier. A couple of times.”

  Two deputies at the water cooler were looking at us, their eyes traveling the length of her figure.

  “Come on in the office, Theo. It’s been a little busy today,” I said.

  I closed the door behind us. “If you can’t come Saturday, I understand. I need to talk to you about something else, though,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve got a problem. It comes in bottles. Not just booze. Six months ago I started using again. My psychiatrist gave me the keys to the candy store,” she said.

  Her voice was wired, the whites of her eyes threaded with tiny veins. She let out a breath in a ragged sigh. Her breath smelled like whiskey and mint leaves, and not from the previous night. “Can I sit down?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. Please,” I said, and looked over my shoulder at Helen Soileau passing in the corridor.

  “Dave, I have little men with drills and saws working in my head all day. Sometimes in the middle of the night, too,” Theodosha said.

  “There’s a meeting tonight at Solomon House, across from old New Iberia High,” I said.

  “I’ve been in treatment twice. I was in analysis for seven years. I get a year of sobriety, then things start happening in my head again. My most recent psychiatrist shot himself last week. In Lafayette, in Girard Park, while his kids were playing on the swings. I keep thinking I had something to do with it.”

  “Where’s Merchie in all this?”

  “He makes excuses for me. He doesn’t complain. I couldn’t ask for more. You know, he’s not entirely normal himself.” She took a handkerchief from her purse and blotted the moisture from her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. Merchie’s bothered because you think he’s dumping oil waste around poor people’s homes. He looks up to you. Can’t you come out to Fox Run Saturday?”

  “I’m kind of jammed up these days.”

  “How long were you drunk?”

  “Fifteen years, more or less.”

  “You didn’t want to drink when your wife died?”

  “No,” I said, my eyes leaving hers.

  “I don’t know how anybody stays sober. I feel dirty all over.”

  “Why?”

  “Who cares? Some people are born messed up,” she said. “I’m sorry for coming in here like this. I’m going to find a dark, hermetically sealed, air-conditioned lounge and dissolve myself inside a vodka collins.”

  “Some people just ride out the hangover. Today can be the first inning in a new ballgame.”

  “Good try,” she said, rising from her chair.

  I thought she was about to leave. Instead, she fixed her gaze on me, waiting. Her hair had the black-purplish sheen of silk, the tips damp and curled around her throat.

  “Is there something else?” I asked.

  “What about Saturday?” Her face softened as she waited for an answer.

  Chapter 4

  That evening, at twilight, a Buick carryi
ng three teenage girls roared around a curve on Loreauville Road, passed a truck, caromed off a roadside mailbox, then righted itself and slowed behind a school bus as someone in the backseat flung a box of fast-food trash and plastic cups and straws out the window. The truck driver, a religious man who kept a holy medal suspended from a tiny chain on his rearview mirror, would say later he thought the girls had settled down and would probably follow the church bus at a reasonable speed into Loreauville, five miles up Bayou Teche.

  Instead, the driver crossed the double-yellow stripe again, into on-coming traffic, then tried to cut in front of the church bus when she realized safe harbor would never again be hers.

  Helen Soileau, four uniformed deputies, two ambulances, and a firetruck were already at the accident scene when I arrived. The girls were still inside the Buick. The telephone pole they had hit was cut in half at the base and the downed wires were hanging in an oak tree. The Buick had slid on its roof farther down the embankment, splintering a white fence before coming to rest by the side of a fish pond, where the gas tank had exploded and burned with heat so intense the water in the pond boiled.

  “You run the tag yet?” I said.

  “It’s registered to a physician in Loreauville. The baby-sitter says he and his wife are playing golf. I left a message at the country club,” Helen said.

  She wore her shield on a black cord around her neck. The wind shifted, blowing across the barns and pastures of the horse farm where the Buick had burned. But the odor the wind carried was not of horses and alfalfa. Helen held a wadded-up piece of Kleenex to her nose, snuffing, as though she had a cold. Two firemen used the jaws-of-life to pry apart the window on the driver’s side of the Buick, then began pulling the remains of the driver out on the grass.

  “The bus driver says the Buick was swinging all over the road?” I asked.

  “Yep, they were having a grand time of it. Life on the bayou in 2002,” Helen said.

  The water oaks along the Teche had already lost their leaves and their branches looked skeletal against the flattened, red glow of the sun on the western horizon. A spruce green Lincoln with two people in the front seat approached us from the direction of Loreauville, slowing in the dusk, pulling onto the shoulder. The driver got out, looking over the top of his automobile at the scene taking place by the fish pond, his face stenciled with a sadness that no cop, at least no decent one, ever wishes to deal with.

  I reached through the open window of Helen’s cruiser and picked up a pair of polyethylene gloves and a vinyl garbage bag.

  “Where you going?” she said.

  “Litter patrol,” I replied.

  I walked back along the road for two hundred yards or so, past a line of cedar trees that bordered another horse farm, then crossed the road to the opposite embankment where a spray of freshly thrown trash bloomed in the grass. I picked up chicken bones, half-eaten dinner rolls, soiled paper napkins, a splattered container of mashed potatoes and gravy, three blue plastic cups, three lids and straws, and broken pieces of a plastic wrap that had been used to seal the lids on the cups.

  There were still grains of ice in the cups, along with the unmistakable smell of sugar, lemon juice, and rum. I found a paper sack and placed the cups and lids in it, then deposited the sack in the garbage bag. When I got back to the accident scene, Helen was talking to the father and mother of the girl who had driven the Buick. The father’s face was dilated with rage as he pointed his finger at the drivers of both the truck and the church bus, both of whom had said his daughter was speeding and crossing the double-yellow stripe.

  “Maybe you boxed her off, too. Why would she go off the lefthand embankment unless you wouldn’t let her back in line? Answer me that, goddamnit,” he said.

  An ambulance containing the bodies of the three girls was working its way around the other emergency vehicles, its flashers beating silently against the dusk.

  I dropped the evidence bag in Helen’s cruiser and drove home, passing a rural black slum at the four corners, where several cars and pickup trucks were lined up at the service window of a drive-by daiquiri store.

  Early the next morning, when the streets were still empty and the light was gray and streaked with mist in the backyards along the bayou, Fat Sammy Figorelli parked his Cadillac in front of my house, puffed on a cigarette while studying the live oaks and antebellum homes that lined East Main, then walked up on my gallery and began knocking so hard the walls shook.

  “You mad at my door?” I said.

  “I need to straighten you out about a certain issue,” he said.

  I stepped outside, barefoot, still unshaved, dressed only in a T-shirt and khakis. He wore a rust-colored shirt and brown knit necktie and knife-creased slacks. He stood a half-head taller than I, his porcine face shiny with cologne.

  “A little early, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I get up at four every morning. I think sleep sucks,” he said.

  “I see. Then you wake up other people. Makes sense.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Why are you here, Sammy?”

  “I got this punk Gunner Ardoin calling me up, telling me he didn’t rat me out, that he’s got a little girl, that he can’t afford to lose work ’cause he’s in the hospital.”

  “Why tell me about it?” I asked.

  “Thanks to you and that animal Purcel, my name is getting drug into all this.”

  “Into what?”

  “Stories about a priest getting bashed. I don’t want to hear my name coming up no more in regard to Father Jimmie Dolan. This guy is a world-class pain in the ass and I got nothing to do with him. What kind of priest punches out the owner of a health salon, anyway?”

  “I hadn’t heard that one.”

  “He probably left it out of his homily.”

  “I’ll try to remember all this. Thanks for dropping by,” I said.

  Sammy looked at me for a long time, his nostrils swelling with air, his small mouth a tight seam, as though he had been talking futilely to either a deaf or stupid man. A delivery truck smelling of donuts or freshly baked bread passed on the street. Fat Sammy watched the truck turn the corner by a huge, redbrick, tree-shaded antebellum home called the Shadows and disappear down a side street.

  “This is a nice town,” he said.

  I realized that whatever was really bothering him was probably not within his ability to explain. He watched a blue jay lighting on a bird feeder that hung from an oak limb in the yard. Then, like every mainstream American gangster I had ever known, almost all of whom struggle to hold onto some vestige of respectability, he unknowingly opened a tiny window into a childlike area of his soul.

  “I talked with them German film people who’s doing a documentary. They say you told them I used to be on a first-name basis with a Miami guy who helped kill President Kennedy. It’s true, you told them people that?” he said.

  “You know the same stories I do, Sammy. They just sound better coming from you. You were born for the screen, partner,” I said.

  He seemed to think about my explanation, but showed no indication of wanting to leave my gallery.

  “You care to come inside and have some coffee?” I said.

  “Got any donuts?” he said.

  I opened the door for him and watched his enormous bulk move past me into my house. I could smell an odor like testosterone ironed into his clothes.

  That morning I drove to the high school that the three dead girls had attended up the bayou in the little town of Loreauville. The registrar gave me a copy of the yearbook from the previous year and I found the three girls’ photographs among members of the junior class. All three had been either class officers, prom queens, members of the drama club and speech team, or participants in Madrigals. They had been scheduled to graduate in the spring.

  But one of the girls had a different kind of distinction. The driver, Lori Parks, had been on probation for possession of Ecstasy and had been driving with a restricted license for a previous DWI. By late
afternoon the forensic chemist at our crime lab had matched a latent print from one of the plastic cups I had picked up two hundred yards from the crash site. The latent belonged to Lori Parks.

  There is no open-container law in the State of Louisiana. It is supposedly illegal to drink and drive in the state, but a vendor can sell mixed drinks at drive-by windows to people in automobiles, provided the container is sealed. Wrapping a piece of plastic around the lid of a daiquiri cup satisfies the statute, and the passengers in the automobile are allowed to open the cups and consume any amount of alcohol they wish as long as they do not give alcohol to the driver.

  If the driver is drinking and sees a state trooper or sheriff’s deputy hit his flasher, he only needs to hand his cup to a passenger and instantly he comes into compliance with the law.

  The only person legally liable for any violation of the statutes governing the drive-by window sale of mixed drinks is the clerk who actually makes the sale, never the owner. Sometimes the clerk, who is usually paid no more than minimum wage, is fined or jailed or both for selling to underage customers. But the daiquiri windows remain open seven days and nights a week, positioned on each end of town, thriving on weekends and on all paydays.

  Just before I started to drive out to the daiquiri store at the four corners on Loreauville Road, the phone rang on my desk. It was the administrative assistant in the warden’s office at Angola Penitentiary, the same man who had hung up on me when I had mentioned the possibility of Junior Crudup being buried under the levee along the Mississippi River.

  “I did some digging around,” he said.

  I laughed into the receiver.

  “You think this is funny?” he said.

  “No, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “Ever know an old gunhack by the name of Buttermilk Strunk?”

  “Cain’t-See to Cain’t-See Double-Time Strunk?” I said.

  “That’s the man. He was working levee gangs from Camp A in1951. He says Crudup was a big stripe back then and on the shit list of a couple other gunbulls who wanted to make a Christian out of him, get my meaning?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “They worked him over pretty bad. Strunk says that’s about the time a man came to the penitentiary and made recordings of some of the convicts. According to Strunk, this man probably saved Crudup’s life.”