Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “You mean John or Allen Lomax, the folk music collectors?”

  “No, this guy lives in Franklin. You ought to know him. He only owns about half the goddamn state.”

  “Who are we talking about?” I said, my impatience growing.

  “Castille LeJeune. Strunk says LeJeune came to Angola with a man from a record company and got Crudup pulled off the levee gang. He doesn’t know what happened to him after that…. You still there?”

  “Castille LeJeune saved the life of a black convict? I’m having a hard time putting this together.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s supposed to be a sonofabitch.”

  “Remind me not to waste my time on bullshit like this again,” the administrative assistant said.

  That night my old enemy was back. According to his friends, Audie Murphy fashioned a bedroom out of his garage in the hills overlooking Los Angeles and slept separately from his wife, a loaded army-issue .45 under his pillow. After World War II he had become convinced that, before he could sleep a full night again, he would have to spend five days in peacetime for every day he had spent on the firing line. For him that meant twenty years of sleeplessness.

  I couldn’t offer my limited experience in Vietnam as the raison d’etre for my insomnia. I drank before I went there and I drank more when I came back. Now I did not drink at all and my nocturnal hours were still filled with the same visitors and feelings; they simply took on different shapes and faces.

  The night seemed alive with sound—the clatter of red squirrels on the roof, a dredge boat out on the bayou, a brief rain shower that swept across the trees in the yard. When I finally fell asleep I dreamed of my dead wife Bootsie and Father Jimmie Dolan and the three girls who had died in a burning automobile and of a Negro convict who had been ground up in a system that loathed courage in a black man.

  What were the dreams really about? An imperfect world, I suspect, one over which death and injustice often seemed to hold dominion. But what kind of fool would surrender his sleep over a condition he could not change?

  Sleeping with a .45 did not bring Audie Murphy peace of mind, nor did gambling away millions in Las Vegas. I had slept with firearms, too, and invested substantial sums of money in the parimutuel industry at racetracks all over the country, but I was no more successful in my attempt at redress with the world than he was. That said, I did have an answer for insomnia, one that was surefire and one that Murphy evidently did not try. But just the thought of its coming back into my life made sweat pop on my forehead.

  When I went to the office in the morning a faxed message was waiting for me from the Department of Public Safety and Corrections in Baton Rouge. Since there was no record of Junior Crudup’s discharge from Angola or his death while on the farm, it was the department’s contention he had served his full sentence and gone out “max time,” which meant he would have been released without parole stipulations or supervision sometime in 1958.

  It was pure blather.

  I called Father Jimmie Dolan at his rectory in New Orleans and was told he was working in the garden. Fat Sammy had said Father Jimmie was a global-size pain in the ass. The archdiocese must have felt the same. He had been assigned to an ancient, downtown church in a dirty, dilapidated neighborhood off Canal, where Mass was still said in Latin, women in the pews covered their heads, and communicants knelt at the altar rail when they received the Eucharist, as though the 1960s reforms of Vatican II had never taken place.

  Last year, when I remarked to Father Jimmie on the obvious bad judgment if not punitive intention on the part of the diocese in placing a minister such as himself in a parish with an anachronistic mindset, he replied, “Some people can’t accept change. So the church lets a few wall themselves up in a mausoleum and pretend the past is still alive. Know anybody else who has that kind of problem?”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “They’re not bad guys,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

  My mind came back to the present and I heard Father Jimmie scrape the phone receiver off a hard surface.

  “Fat Sammy Figorelli says you punched out the owner of a health salon,” I said.

  “Not exactly.”

  “How ‘not exactly’?”

  “The guy we’re talking about runs a massage parlor and escort service. He forced a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl from our parish to give a blowjob to one of his customers. Is this why you called?”

  “The Department of Corrections says Junior Crudup’s last sentence was up in 1958. They say he wasn’t paroled and he didn’t die inside the prison, so he must have gone out max time in ’58.”

  “He was probably killed and buried on the farm. But I doubt if we’ll ever know.”

  “There’s more. An oldtime gunbull says a man by the name of Castille LeJeune got Junior off the levee gang around 1951. But that’s where the trail ends.”

  “Castille LeJeune, in Franklin? That’s Theodosha Flannigan’s father. She’s married to Merchie Flannigan.”

  “How’d you know that?” I said.

  “She used to live in New Orleans. She was one of our parishioners. Can we have a talk with Mr. LeJeune?”

  “I don’t like to get too close to Theodosha.”

  There was a beat, then he said, “Oh, I see.”

  Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

  That afternoon I went to each drive-by daiquiri store in New Iberia. Each of the stores used the same type of blue plastic cups that I had picked up near the accident scene, the same type lids, the same type sealing wrap. I showed each of the clerks working the window the yearbook photographs of the three girls killed on Loreauville Road. Each clerk looked at them blankly and shook his head. At the first three stores I believed the denials given me by the clerks. At the fourth my experience was different.

  The store was a boxlike, plywood structure, painted white, located inside an oak grove just outside the city limits. I parked my cruiser in the trees and waited in the shade while the clerk, a kid probably not much over legal age himself, serviced three drive-by customers. Then I walked to the window, which had a flap on it propped up by a stick. I opened my badge on him.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Josh Comeaux.”

  “You work here every evening, Josh?”

  “Yes, sir. Unless I have a basketball game. Then Mr. Hebert lets me off,” he answered.

  I flipped the high school yearbook open to a marked page and showed him pictures of two of the dead girls.

  “You know either one of these girls?” I asked.

  “No, sir, I can’t say I do,” he said. He wore khakis and a starched, print shirt, the short sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his upper arms. His hair was black, combed back with gel, boxed on the neck, his skin tanned.

  “Can’t or won’t?” I said, and smiled at him.

  “Sir?” he said, confused.

  I turned to another marked page in the yearbook and showed him a picture of Lori Parks.

  “How about this girl?” I said.

  He shook his head, his eyes flat. “No, sir. Don’t know her. I guess I’m not much help on this. These girls do something wrong?”

  “You seem out of breath. You all right?” I said.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and tried to smile.

  “What time did you serve her?” I asked.

  “Serve who?”

  “Lori Parks,” I said, tapping the picture of the driver.

  “I haven’t said I did that. I haven’t said no such thing. No, sir.”

  “The autopsy on this girl indicates she was alive when the gasoline tank on her car exploded. She was seventeen years old. I think you’re in a world of shit, partner.”

  He swallowed and looked at the smoke hanging in the trees from a barbecue joint. He opened his mouth to speak, but a middle-aged, balding man who wore a cowboy vest and a string tie and hillbilly sideburns that looked like grease pencil cupped his hand on the boy’s shoulder and glared at m
e through the service window.

  “You saying we served somebody under age?” he asked.

  “I know you did,” I said.

  “Every young person who comes by this window has to show ID. That’s the rule. No exceptions,” he said.

  “You the owner?” I said.

  He ignored my question and addressed his clerk. “You serve anybody who looked like a minor yesterday?”

  “No, sir, not me. I checked everybody,” the clerk said.

  “That’s what I thought,” the man in the vest said. “We’re closed.”

  “How did you know the problem sale was yesterday?” I asked.

  He pulled out the support stick from under the window flap and let it slam shut in my face.

  While I had spent the afternoon questioning the employees of New Iberia’s drive-by daiquiri stores, an unusual man was completing his journey on the Sunset Limited from Miami into New Orleans. He had small ears that were tight against his scalp, narrow shoulders, white skin, lips that were the color of raw liver, and emerald green eyes that possessed the rare quality of seeming infinitely interested in what other people were saying. He sat in the lounge car, wearing a seersucker suit and pink dress shirt with a plum-colored tie and ruby stick pin, sipping from a glass of soda and ice and lime slices while the countryside rolled by. An elderly Catholic nun in a black habit sat down next to him and opened a book and began reading from it. She soon became conscious that the man was watching her.

  “Could I help you with something?” she asked.

  “You’re reading The Catholic Imagination by Father Andrew Greeley. A fine book it is,” the man said.

  “I just started it. But, yes, it seems to be. Are you from Ireland?”

  He considered his reply. “Umm, not anymore,” he said. “Are you going to New Orleans, Sister?”

  “Yes, I live there. But my parents came from Waterford, in the south of Ireland.”

  But he didn’t seem to take note of her parents’ origins. His eyes were so green, his stare so invasive, she found herself averting his gaze.

  “Would you be knowing a Father James Dolan in New Orleans?” the man asked.

  “Why, yes, he’s a friend of mine.”

  “I understand he’s a lovely man. Works in a parish where they still say a traditional Mass, does he?”

  “Yes, but he’s—”

  “He’s what?”

  “He’s not a traditional man. Excuse me, but you’re staring at me.”

  “I am? Oh, I beg your pardon, Sister. But you remind me of a mother superior who ran the orphanage where I once lived. What a darlin’ sack of potatoes she was. She used to make me fold my hands like I was about to pray, then whack the shite out of me with a ruler. She was good at pulling hair and giving us the Indian burn, too. Have you done the same to a few tykes?”

  He drank from his glass of ice and soda and lime, an innocuous light in his eyes. “Not running off, are you? You forgot your book. Here, I’ll bring it to you,” he said.

  But she rushed through the vestibule into the next car, the big wood beads of her fifteen-decade rosary clattering on her hip, the whoosh of the doors like wind howling in a tunnel.

  On Saturday afternoon Father Jimmie and I went together to the Flannigan lawn party at Fox Run, down Bayou Teche, in St. Mary Parish. The home had been constructed during the early Victorian era to resemble a steamboat, with porches shaped like the fantail and captain’s bridge on a ship and cupolas and balconies on the upper stories that gave a spectacular view of the grounds, the antebellum homes on the opposite side of the bayou, and the sugarcane fields that seemed to recede over the rim of the earth.

  Live oaks draped with moss arched over the roof of the house, and palm trees grew in their shade to the second-story windows. A visitor to the lawn party could ride either western or English saddle around a white-fenced track by the horse stables, or play tennis on either a grass or red-clay court. The buffet tables groaned with food that had been prepared at Galatoire’s and Antoine’s in New Orleans. The drink table was a drunkard’s dream.

  The guests included the state insurance commissioner, who was under a federal grand jury indictment and would later become the third state insurance commissioner in a row to go to prison; petro-chemical executives from Oklahoma and Texas whose wives’ voices rose above all others; two New York book editors and a film director from Home Box Office; an ex-player from the National Football League who rented himself out as a professional celebrity; career military officers and their wives who had retired to the Sunbelt; the former governor’s mistress whose evening gown looked like pink champagne poured on her skin; and state legislators who had once been barbers and plumbers and who genuinely believed they shared a common bond with their host and his friends.

  Father Jimmie had worn his Roman collar, and the consequence was that he and I stood like an island in the middle of the lawn party while people swirled around us, deferential and polite, touching us affectionately if need be but avoiding the eye contact that would take them away from all the rewards a gathering at Castille LeJeune’s could offer.

  After a half hour I wished I had not come. I went inside the house to use the bathroom, but someone was already inside. A black drink waiter in the kitchen directed me to another bathroom, deeper in the house, one I had to find by cutting through a small library and den filled with fine guns and Korean War–era memorabilia.

  A steel airplane propeller was mounted on the wall, and under it was a framed color photograph of Castille LeJeune and a famous American baseball player, both of them dressed in Marine Corps tropicals, standing in front of two vintage Grumman Hellcat fighter planes parked on a runway flanged by Quonset huts and palm trees. In another photo LeJeune stood at attention in his dress uniform while President Harry Truman pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on his coat.

  But the photos that caught my eye were not those of Castille LeJeune’s career as a Marine Corps pilot. A picture taken at his wedding showed him and his young wife, in her bridal gown, standing on the steps of a church. She was tall, dark featured, and absolutely beautiful. She also looked like the twin of her daughter, Theodosha.

  When I went back outside the sun was setting beyond the trees on the bayou, the sugarcane fields purple in the dusk, the air cool and damp, thick with cigarette smoke and smelling of alcohol that had soaked into tablecloths or had been spilled by the guests on their clothes.

  In my absence Father Jimmie had cornered both Castille LeJeune and Merchie Flannigan and was talking heatedly with them, his coat separating on his chest when he raised his arms to make a point, one foot at a slight angle behind the other, in the classic position of a martial artist.

  “Let me finish if you would,” he said when Merchie Flannigan tried to speak. “You say you’re cleaning up the Crudups’ property? The place is floating in sludge.”

  “I’m sure Merchie is doing his best. Why don’t you help yourself to the food, Father?” Castille LeJeune said.

  He was a trim, nice-looking man, with a lean face and steel gray hair that he combed straight back. He wore a white sports coat and dark blue shirt and a gold and onyx Mason’s ring on his marriage finger.

  “No, thanks,” Father Jimmie said, wagging two fingers as though brushing Castille LeJeune’s words from the air. “So let me see if I understand correctly. In 1951 you took a friend to Angola Prison to record Junior Crudup, but you have no idea what happened to Junior later?”

  “I was doing a favor for my wife. She was fond of folk music. That was a long time ago,” LeJeune answered, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his gaze wandering among his guests.

  “But a retired guard, a man named Strunk, says you got Junior pulled off the levee gang.”

  “I don’t remember that. I wouldn’t have had that kind of influence,” LeJeune said.

  “Really?” Father Jimmie said. “You wouldn’t throw a fellow a slider, would you?”

  The insult to a man of his age and position seemed not to r
egister in LeJeune’s face. Instead, his eyes crinkled again. “Have a good time,” he said. He placed his hand warmly on Father Jimmie’s arm and walked away.

  “Let me get you a beer, Father,” Merchie Flannigan said.

  “Shame on you for what you’re doing to those black people in St. James Parish,” Father Jimmie said.

  Father Jimmie’s heart might have been in the right place, but it was embarrassing to listen to him berate Merchie Flannigan in front of others and I didn’t wait to hear Merchie’s reply. I walked out of the backyard and into the oak trees, then witnessed one of those moments when you realize that each human being’s story is much more complex than you could have ever guessed.

  Between the horse stables and the bayou was a white-railed, sloping green pasture containing a fish pond and a small dock. A gas lamp mounted on a brass pole burned above the dock, and I could see moths flying into the flame, then dropping like pieces of ash into the water. As I stood among the trees I saw Theodosha watching the same scene, one hand on the fence railing. The electric lights were on in the stables and I could see her face clearly in the illumination, her brow knitted, the muscles in her throat taut, her hand gripped tightly on the rail.

  I walked toward her but her attention had been distracted by the strange red reflection of the sun’s afterglow on the bayou. A little boy and girl, not older than four or five, climbed through the fence on the opposite side of the fish pond and ran giggling toward the dock. I had no way of knowing the depth of the pond, but a spring board was attached to the end of the dock, which meant the depth was certainly over a child’s head.

  Theo looked back from the sunset at the pond and saw the children almost the same time as I. She bit her lip and raised her hand as though to warn them off, but she remained outside the fence, frozen, as though an invisible shield prevented her from entering the pasture. The children thumped onto the dock and danced up and down, then bent over the edge of the dock and peered at the fish feeding on the moths dropping from the flame in the gas lamp.