Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “That fellow Flannigan was in here.”

  “Merchie Flannigan?”

  “He was pacing up and down for an hour, like he was about to piss his pants. When he got ready to go I axed him if he wanted to leave a message.” Wally shifted in his chair, arching his eyebrows.

  “Would you just spit it out?” I said.

  “He said tell Dave not to be running his pipeline under the wrong man’s fence. The district attorney and some Chamber of Commerce people was in the waiting room. So was Helen.”

  A woman passed us and looked back at me briefly. “Okay, Wally, I appreciate it,” I said, and started to walk away.

  “Hey, Dave?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I never liked that guy. He’s a bum. Put a cork in his mout’.”

  I walked back to the cage. “What are you telling me?” I said.

  Wally picked up a pencil and went back to his paperwork. “Nothing. I didn’t mean to mix in nobody’s bidness,” he replied.

  I went into my office and stood at the window, tapping my fingers on the sill. I had no doubt Merchie wanted trouble. Otherwise he would not have brought his complaint into the place where I worked. Well, sometimes the best way to deal with the lion is to spit in the lion’s mouth, I told myself. At 5:00 P.M. I drove to Merchie and Theo’s home on the edge of town.

  Even though I had passed the house a thousand times, I still could not get over the juxtaposition of imitation thirteenth-century battlements with a boiler works across the highway. But perhaps the conjuncture of nouveau riche vulgarity with pecan orchards and horse barns and the softly lit ambiance of Bayou Teche was the perfect stageset for a man like Merchie Flannigan. Strip away the guise of the reformed street hood and self-made egalitarian success story, and there was little difference between Merchie and his father-in-law, Castille LeJeune. They didn’t go after their enemies head-on; they poisoned the environment where they worked.

  I saw Theo look out the living room window as I parked my truck.

  “What’s wrong, Dave?” she said, opening the front door.

  “Merchie was looking for me at the department. He seems to think I’m causing a problem in his marriage,” I said.

  “Come in.”

  “Where is he?”

  “At my father’s. Wait, don’t leave like this.”

  “Straighten him out on this, Theo,” I said.

  Her face slipped by the driver’s window as I turned around and headed back out the driveway.

  A half hour later, I pulled up to the front of Fox Run, Castille LeJeune’s home outside of Franklin. I rang the front doorbell, but no one answered. The wind was balmy out of the south, smelling of brine and schooled-up speckled trout at Cote Blanche Bay, the setting so tranquil that my anger at Merchie, which I had fed all the way down the road, made me feel like a spiritually unclean visitor inside a church. The house itself was deep in shadow, the oak trees creaking overhead, but the surrounding fields and horse pasture were still lit by the last rays of the sun, and in the distance I thought I saw Merchie walk from behind a row of abandoned cabins to a promontory that overlooked the bayou.

  I went around the fenced pond that Theo feared for reasons she did not share and walked past a row of shotgun cabins that were probably built in the 1890s for the black people who planted and harvested the LeJeune family’s sugarcane and drove it to the grinding mill in mule-drawn wagons without a member of the LeJeune family ever putting a hand on it. The cabin doors were gone, the tin roofs buckled loose from the joists, the plank floors blown with grit and scoured by the hooves of livestock. The privies were still standing, the eaves clotted with the nests of yellow jackets and mud-dobbers; the wood seats, once streaked with urine, now dry and smooth as old bone; the grass around the walls a bright green.

  I wondered if Junior Crudup had once slept in these cabins or used these privies, coming in hot and dirty from the fields, perhaps in leg irons, his evening meal a jelly glass of Kool-Aid and a tin plate of greens, fried ham fat, corn bread and molasses. I wondered how many lyrics in his songs had their inception right here, among these desiccated shacks that perhaps told more of a people’s history than anyone wished to remember.

  I had left work ready to bend Merchie’s day out of shape and now I had managed to link him in my mind with his father-in-law and the cruelties and racial injustices of Louisiana’s past. What was my motivation? Easy answer. I didn’t have to think about the fact I had deliberately put Frank Dellacroce in Max Coll’s gunsights.

  Merchie was standing on a grassy knoll, his back turned to me, and did not hear me walk up behind him. A solitary white crypt, closed in front by a black marble slab that was chiseled around the edges with strings of flowers and clusters of angels, rested at a slight angle in the softness of the ground. Merchie squatted down with an orchid he inserted in a green water vase. The name on the slab was Viola Hortense Flannigan, Merchie’s mother, the strange, neurotic, possessive woman who used to wash out his mouth with soap and whip his bare legs with a switch until he danced.

  Earlier I had been ready to tear him apart. Now I felt my anger lift like ash from a dead fire.

  “I apologize for intruding on you,” I said.

  “You’re not,” he said, rising from his crouched position, a bit like a man waking from sleep.

  “You were looking for me at the department?”

  He scratched the top of his arm idly and looked at the wind blowing in the grass. “I get hot under the collar sometimes. Things aren’t always right with me and Theo. So I take it out on the wrong people,” he said.

  “No harm done,” I said.

  He combed his hair and put his comb away, then watched a flock of black geese freckle the sun. “My mother always wanted to be a southern lady. She told people she grew up in the Garden District in New Orleans. The truth was her old man ran a produce stand in the Irish Channel. So I bought this little piece of land from my father-in-law and buried her in it.”

  I nodded, my eyes averted. In the distance I could see the railed fish pond that caused Theo such fear she had almost let two children drown rather than climb through a fence and approach the water.

  “What happened at that pond, Merchie?” I asked.

  He opened and closed his hands, the veins in his forearms filling with blood. “This place is a living curse. I’d like to set fire to it and plow its earth with salt. Outside of that, I don’t have much to say about it,” he said. Then he walked away, accidently kicking over the vase into which he had placed an orchid for his mother.

  Chapter 11

  Some people seem to be born under a bad sign.

  At 8:30 A.M. the following day an arson inspector called me at the office. In the early hours of the morning a fire had broken out in Dr. Parks’s game room and had quickly spread through the roof, destroying the back third of his house. “I know the guy just lost his daughter, but he’s hard to take. How about coming out here, Dave?” the inspector said.

  “What’s the deal?” I said.

  “Parks is convinced somebody tried to burn him out.”

  “My relationship with Dr. Parks isn’t a very good one.”

  “You could fool me. He seems to think you’re the only guy around here with a brain.”

  I drove up to Loreauville and crossed the drawbridge there and followed the state road to the shady knoll where Dr. Parks’s home sat among the trees like a man with an angry frown. A solitary firetruck was still there and two firemen were ripping blackened wood out of a back wall with axes. Dr. Parks approached me as though somehow I were the source of all the problems and missing solutions in his life. “I want an arson investigation initiated right now,” he said.

  “That’s a possibility, but so far there doesn’t seem to be enough evidence to warrant one.” I raised my hand as he started to interrupt. “No one is saying your suspicions don’t have merit. These guys just haven’t found an accelerant or a—”

  “It’s connected to my daughter’s deat
h.”

  “No, it’s not, sir.” I fixed my eyes on the blackened back of his house and the roof that had caved in on the kitchen and master bedroom. It was so quiet I could hear my watch ticking on my wrist.

  “Look here, Mr. Robicheaux, I asked that you come out because I know about some of the losses in your own life. I thought you would understand what’s going on here,” he said.

  I tried to ignore the personal nature of his statement. “These firemen are good guys. You can trust what they tell you. I think you’ve just had a lot of bad luck,” I said.

  “There’s no such thing as luck,” he replied.

  Just then an unshaved, mustached fireman in rubber pants and suspenders and a big hat walked from behind the house with a clutch of fried electrical wiring in his hand. “We got an ignition point,” he said.

  “What?” Dr. Parks said.

  The fireman spread the wires across his palm and cracked open the insulation on them. “These were in the wall of your game room. See, they’re burned from the inside out,” he said.

  “That’s impossible. I just had that game room added on two years ago,” Dr. Parks said.

  “It’s not impossible if somebody installed oversized breakers in your breaker box,” the fireman said.

  “Who did the work on your house, Doctor?” I said.

  “Sunbelt Construction,” he said.

  I tried to walk away from him, as though I were preoccupied with the destruction at the back of his home. But he grabbed my arm roughly. “What do you know about Sunbelt Construction?” he asked.

  “It’s owned by Castille LeJeune,” I replied.

  “Who the hell is Castille LeJeune?”

  “His company owns the daiquiri store where your daughter and her friends bought their drinks on the day they died,” I said.

  Had I just set up another man, in this case Castille LeJeune? I asked myself on the way back to the department.

  No, I had simply told the truth.

  But that did not change the fact I had let Frank Dellacroce take the big exit at the hands of Max Coll.

  Later I went home for lunch and found Father Jimmie on a ladder, screwing a basketball hoop to the back of the porte cochere.

  “You do open-air reconciliations?” I said.

  “Yeah, hold the ladder for me. What’s the problem?” he replied, still concentrated on his work.

  “It’s not overdue library books,” I said.

  He looked down at me.

  “I think Max Coll capped a wiseguy out at Whiskey Bay. I probably could have prevented it,” I said.

  He climbed down from the ladder and replaced his tools in a metal box and clicked it shut. “Run that by me again,” he said.

  We walked toward the bayou while I told him what had happened—the abiding anger that had made me seek out a violent situation, the savage beating I had given Frank Dellacroce, my recognizing Coll among the crowd in front of the cafe, and, most serious of all, my releasing Dellacroce from custody when I knew, with a fair degree of certainty, I was turning him over to his executioner.

  Father Jimmie picked up a pine cone and tossed it into the middle of the bayou. “Dave, if you share responsibility for this man’s death, then so do I,” he said.

  “How?”

  “I was uncooperative with N.O.P.D. I could have worked with them and helped bust Coll. He would have been past history now.”

  I sat down on a stone bench by the edge of the bayou. Its surfaces felt cold and hard through my trousers. The wind gusted and red and yellow leaves tumbled out of the trees into the water. “You going to give me absolution?” I asked.

  “You were forgiven as soon as you were sorry for what you did. But you need to tell this to someone else or you’ll have no peace of mind.”

  “Sir?”

  “What’s the new sheriff’s name? The woman who used to be your partner? Let me know how it comes out,” he said.

  He walked back up the slope and removed a basketball from a cardboard box and swished it through the hoop. You got no free lunch from Father Jimmie Dolan.

  Helen listened quietly while I told her about the events of the night I beat Frank Dellacroce within an inch of his life. Her elbows rested on the ink blotter, her chin resting on her thumbs, her fingers knitted together. “This guy Coll is wanted in Florida on two murders?” she said.

  “For questioning, at the least.”

  “What do you think he’s doing around here?”

  “That’s open to debate,” I said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “He has an obsession with the priest who’s staying at my house. He’s obviously hunting down the people who are trying to take him out. His brains were probably in the blender too long. Take your choice.”

  She stood up from her chair and stared out the window, her fingers opening and closing against the heel of her palm. “So far there’s no evidence it was Coll who shot Dellacroce?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “And you never saw Coll in person?”

  “Only in photographs.”

  “I think you’re under a lot of strain. And that’s where we’re going to leave it for now.”

  She had given me a temporary free pass, a complicitous wink of the eye; all I had to do was acknowledge it. “My perceptions aren’t the issue here. Coll called me at my house. He told me he was in the crowd the night I busted up Dellacroce.”

  “Coll called you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This isn’t police work. It’s a soap opera. Are you drinking?”

  “No.”

  “Dave, you either get your act together or we seek other alternatives. None of them good.”

  “You want my shield?”

  “I won’t be a party to what you’re doing,” she said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Ripping yourself apart so you can get back on the bottle. You don’t think other people read you? Give yourself a wake-up call.” She wadded up a piece of paper and tossed it angrily at the wastebasket.

  That evening I went to an A.A. meeting in a tan-colored, tile-roofed Methodist church, not far from the railway tracks. From the second-story window I could see the palm trees in the churchyard, the old brick surfacing in the street, the green colonnade of an ancient firehouse, the oaks whose roots had wedged up the sidewalks, and the strange purple light the sun gave off in its setting.

  Across the railway tracks was another world, one that used to be New Iberia’s old redlight district, whose history went back to the War Between the States. But today the three-dollar black prostitutes and five-dollar white ones were gone and the cribs on Railroad and Hopkins shut down. Instead, white crack whores, called rock queens, and their black pimps worked the street corners. The dealers, with baseball caps reversed or black silk bandannas tied down skintight on their scalps, appeared in the yards of burned-out houses or in the parking lots of small grocery stores as soon as school let out. After sunset, unless it was raining, their presence multiplied exponentially.

  They offered the same street menu as dealers in New Orleans and Houston: weed, brown skag, rock, crystal meth, acid, reds, leapers, Ecstasy, and, for the purists, perhaps a taste of China white the customer could cook and inject with a clean needle in a shooting gallery only four blocks from downtown.

  Down the hall, on the second floor of the Methodist church, was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Most of the attenders there had been sentenced by the court. Few were people you would normally associate with criminality. Almost all of them, in another era, would have been considered run-of-the-mill blue-collar people whose lives had nothing to do with the trade on Hopkins and Railroad avenues.

  But on that particular evening I was not thinking about the ravages of the drug trade. Instead, I was wondering how long it would be before I walked into a saloon and ordered four inches of Black Jack or Beam’s Choice with a long-neck Dixie on the side.

  Then I looked across the room and saw a man who was geographically and
psychologically out of place. He saw me staring at him and raised one meaty paw in recognition. His eyes were like merry slits, his jowls glowing with a fresh shave, his sparse gold hair oiled and flattened into his pate. I crossed the space between us and sat in the chair next to him.

  “This is a closed meeting of A.A. What are you doing here?” I said.

  “I checked it out. It’s an open meet. Besides, I belong to Overeaters Anonymous, which means I probably got trans-addictive issues. That means I can go to any fucking meeting I choose,” Fat Sammy Figorelli replied.

  “That’s the worst bullshit I ever heard. Get out of here,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Is there a problem over there?” the group leader said.

  Sammy didn’t speak during the meeting. But afterward he helped stack chairs and wash coffee cups and put away all the A.A. literature in a locker. “I like this place,” he said.

  “You’re about to have some major trouble,” I said.

  “I’m gonna have trouble? You’re beautiful, Robicheaux. Take a walk with me,” he said.

  I followed him down the stairs, into the darkness outside and the odor of sewer gas and wet leaves burning. “If you’re using A.A. to—” I began.

  “You drunks think you’re the only people who got a problem. How would you like food to be your enemy? Anybody can stay off booze a hunnerd percent. Try staying off something just part way and see how you feel,” he said.

  “What’s your point?”

  “My sponsor says I got to own up to a couple of things or I’m gonna go on another chocolate binge, which don’t do my diabetes a lot of good. Max Coll not only cowboyed a couple of high-up guys in Miami, he stiffed the sports book they owned for a hundred large. The word is he’s gonna be hung by his colon on a meat hook. Last point, there’s a guy around here you don’t want to mess with.”

  He stopped and lit a cigarette. The cigarette looked tiny and innocuous in his huge hand. He watched a car full of black teenagers pass, their stereo thundering with rap music, his face clouding with disapproval.