Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  A door opened and I felt the planks under my feet become depressed by the weight of the men entering the room. “How you feel?” one of them said.

  “You’re kidnapping a police officer,” I said.

  “I asked you how you felt.”

  “All right. I feel all right,” I replied.

  “Hear that? He’s all right,” the second man said. “Frank Dellacroce is not all right. Somebody blew most of his head off.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  “It wasn’t him,” the second man said. “That’s good to hear, ’cause people say you kicked the shit out of him the night he was killed. While he was in handcuffs.”

  “You got it wrong,” I replied.

  “He says we got it wrong. That’s good, ’cause what we hear about you ain’t so good. We hear you got a hard-on ’cause you can’t drink, that you like to beat up people, that you got some kind of problem with Italians in general,” the same voice said.

  “I haven’t seen you. I don’t know who you are. I think what we have here is a misunderstanding. I’m ready to let it go at that,” I said.

  “He’s ready to let it go. I like that. We’re talking about a generous man here,” the same voice said. “You want a beer?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  I turned my face toward the voice. “Why pull a federal beef down on yourselves? Use your head,” I said.

  “Oh, we’ll use our head, all right. You bet your life,” the same man said.

  I heard a tab being torn loose from a pressurized can, then smelled beer and heard foam splattering on the floor. I could hear someone drinking from the can, swallowing thirstily. He pressed the can against my mouth, clicking it against my teeth, then forcing the aluminum rim between my lips.

  “Don’t do that,” the first voice said.

  “He wants it. He just don’t know it yet,” the second man said.

  Someone, I think the second man, pulled loose my belt, then inserted his fingers between my trousers and stomach and poured the remnants of the can into my underwear. “You already pissed your pants while you were asleep, so I’m just cleaning you up,” he said.

  I felt the beer run down my thighs and calves. The wind blew through the windows and puffed the room and tin roof with air that smelled of brine and ozone and thunderheads out on the Gulf. Try to think clearly, I told myself. If they simply wanted to kill you, you would already be dead. They’re not using their first names with one another and your eyes are taped because eventually they’re going to release you. Don’t change their agenda, I thought.

  “Where’s this guy Max Coll?” the first man said.

  “If you find out, I’d like to know. He creeped my house,” I replied.

  “He creeped a cop’s house?” the same man said.

  “He’s not your ordinary button man,” I said.

  “What’s he look like?”

  “I never saw him,” I lied.

  “He’s a Mick, though, right?” the same voice said.

  “We know he’s in the area. We think he popped Frank Dellacroce. But we don’t have much information on him.”

  Suddenly a steel instrument bit into my left thumb and mashed the tissue and veins into the joint. I tried to clench my jaws on the scream that came out of my throat.

  “That’s what happens when you try to jerk us around,” the second man said. He was behind me now, his breath touching the back of my ear. “Guess where these pliers are going next?”

  “No more of that,” the first man said.

  “He killed Frank,” the second man said.

  “Maybe. But we wait on the man and see what he wants. Get out of the way,” the first voice said.

  I smelled his presence in front of me, like hair with sweat dried in it and clothes with soap still in the fabric. Then his huge hand molded a chemical-soaked towel over my face and I felt myself floating to the bottom of a dank well where laughing faces stared down at me from a circle of blue overhead.

  I lay sideways on a floor through most of the afternoon, my eyes still taped, my knees and ankles now wrapped tightly with tape as well. In my mind’s eye I tried to see the faces of all the people who had been important in my life. I thought of my mother and father, illiterate Cajuns who had done the best they could with what little they owned and who struggled through the Depression and the war years to create a decent home for themselves and their only son. I thought of the two Catholic nuns who had been my first-and second-grade teachers and the time when I accidently walked into a room where they were jitter-bugging to a phonograph, their beads and habits flying. The other clergy I had known in my early years had disappeared from memory, but those two remained with me, as though framed inside a secular holy card.

  I thought about the members of my platoon, deep in Indian country, blade faced, stinking of funk and rotted socks and mosquito repellant, their skin twitching as they worked their way down a night trail strung with toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds. I thought about my dead wives, Annie and Bootsie, who were always my steadfast friends as well as spouse and lover, and I thought about Alafair, my adopted daughter, studying at Reed College in Portland, and wondered if I would ever see her again.

  I thought about the country in which I had grown up and which I had served as a soldier and police officer. It was the best country on earth, the most noble, egalitarian, democratic experiment in human history. It was a grand and wonderful place to live, well worth the fighting for, as Ernest Hemingway would say. Thomas Jefferson knew that, and so did Woody Guthrie, Dorothy Day, Joe Hill, Molly Brown, and the IWW.

  To hell with the likes of my warders, who I was sure were Tito and Caesar Dellacroce. Let them do their worst, I told myself. And to hell with all the politicians on the take and the princes of industry who lionized Third World bedbugs in order to carry out their agenda of inculcating fear in the electorate at home. America was still America, the country everyone in the world wanted to emulate, where rock ’n’ roll and the Beat lyrics of Jack Kerouac would outlive all the venal interests that threatened her.

  Dying wasn’t so bad, not if you faced it bravely, with a clear conscience and your principles still intact. But maybe it wouldn’t come to that, I told myself. The tape was still on my eyes, my tormentors ostensibly still unidentifiable.

  At least that is what I told myself.

  Then I heard movement in a room beyond the door of the room in which I lay, and the muffled voices of at least three men talking, and I felt my sense of personal resolve begin to drain like water from the bottom of a gunnysack.

  The door opened and two sets of hands lifted me into a chair. The room was silent, the tin roof creaking from the cooling of the day. Someone wrapped tape both around my waist and the back of the chair.

  “I don’t know where Max Coll is. What purpose would I have in concealing his whereabouts?” I said, although no one had spoken to me.

  “See, he knows what we want. He don’t even wait to be asked the question. That shows us he’s a smart guy who can look into the minds of other people. That shows us he’s smart and we’re dumb,” said the voice of the man who had applied a pair of pliers to my thumb.

  “How you want this to play out, ’cause we got a flight to catch?” said the voice of the other man, who I now believed to be Tito Dellacroce, also known as the Heap. But he was speaking to someone else, and not to his brother, either.

  Whoever he asked the question of did not respond. Instead, I heard the soft sound of a clothing zipper sliding on its track, followed by a pause, just before a warm stream of urine splashed in my face and ran down inside the tape that bound my eyes. I twisted my head from side to side, but the person urinating on me painted my mouth, hair, and neck and drenched my shirt before he zipped up his fly again.

  “We’re naming this place Yellow Springs, Louisiana, in your honor, Robicheaux,” said the voice of the man with the pliers.

  They left the room and closed the door behind them. I
leaned forward and spit, then sucked saliva out of my jaws and spit again. I heard a car door slam and the car drive away. Two men reentered the room and one of them grabbed a corner of the tape and ripped it loose from my eyes and the back of my head.

  “You’re shit out of luck,” said the man with the tape hanging from his fingers. He was short, with a pointed face, and small, energized, deep-set eyes, his hair scalped above his ears like bowl-cut animal fur.

  Next to him was his brother, Tito the Heap. His hair was braided in dreadlocks that hung to his shoulders, which sloped away from his thick neck like the sides on a tent. One jawbone kept flexing like a roll of pennies.

  The room was bare, except for a table on which a tool box and a camcorder rested. The walls and floor were constructed of rough planks, and through the screen window I could see a woods strung with air vines and dotted with palmettos and beyond the tree trunks a bay and the red sun low on the horizon. In the distance somebody was firing a shotgun, perhaps popping skeet over the water.

  “Are you listening, asshole? The man says the whack goes down an inch at a time. You get to be in your own movie,” said the short man, whom I recognized from his mug shot as Caesar Dellacroce.

  “Get it over with,” I said.

  “I think if you knew what was coming, you wouldn’t say that,” Caesar said.

  I looked into space, my eyes slightly out of focus with fatigue and hopelessness and now resignation.

  “I’m talking to you,” Caesar said. He popped my cheek with his hand.

  “I figure I’m done, so what I’m about to tell you is the truth. I didn’t smoke Frank Dellacroce, but I wish I had. He was a punk and a bully and somebody should have put the electrodes on him and blown out his grits a long time ago. When you get finished with me, Clete Purcel is going to turn over every rock in New Orleans and Fort Lauderdale until he finds you, then make you wish your mother had flushed you down the toilet with the afterbirth.”

  Caesar stared at me, his mouth parted slightly, his jaws slack. “Say that again?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

  “You believe this guy?” Caesar said to his brother. But he was clearly distracted now, not quite in charge anymore.

  “We wasted too much time on this,” Tito said reflectively. His eyes, like his brother’s, were inset deeply in the skull, his nostrils flaring when he breathed, as though the plates of muscle on his chest and shoulders were squeezing the air from his lungs. “Here’s what it is, ace. You rolled the dice with the wrong guy and lost. We ain’t responsible for this. So take your medicine like a man. I’ll make it short and sweet as possible. You want to say anything?”

  “No,” I replied, and fixed my gaze out the window on a watery, red sunset barely showing behind the thin trunks of trees that had already turned dark with the gloaming of the day. Tito Dellacroce pushed a sponge into my mouth with the heel of his hand, then began winding tape around my head.

  “Hang on,” Caesar said, staring out the same window but at a different angle.

  “What?” Tito said.

  “There’s a priest out there,” Caesar said.

  “Where?”

  “Walking down off the levee. He’s carrying a briefcase. Look for yourself. He’s got a bandage around his throat,” Caesar said.

  Tito went to the window, then pulled a curtain across it. “You ever seen a priest around here?” he asked.

  “Yeah, lots of priests hung out at Frank’s old fuck pad.”

  “His fuck pad was up the road. Our father used to take us fishing here. It ain’t a fuck pad,” Tito said.

  “Enough, already. It’s a priest carrying a pro-life petition around or something. It ain’t a big deal,” Caesar said.

  “Get outside.”

  “Do it yourself. The mosquitoes out there eat cows for lunch.” Caesar peeked through the side of the curtain. “See, he’s gone.”

  Just as he dropped the curtain back in place someone in heavy shoes walked up on the porch and banged hard on the door. Tito and Caesar looked at each other. Then the visitor on the porch banged even harder, shaking the entire cabin. “I’ll get rid of him. Stay with asshole,” Caesar said.

  He removed a .25 caliber automatic from his side pocket, snicked a round into the chamber, set the safety, and replaced the gun in his pocket. He opened the door and stepped into the front room. Tito Dellacroce stood behind me, one huge hand resting on my shoulder, the lower portion of his stomach touching the back of the chair. I could hear him breathing and smell the food he had eaten for supper on his skin. Caesar had left the door between the rooms ajar so Tito could listen.

  “What can I do for you, Father?” I heard Caesar say.

  The reply was muffled, a wheezing sound, like a man speaking through a rusty clot in his windpipe.

  “What’s that?” Caesar said.

  The priest tried again, his voice barely a whisper.

  “You’re signing up people for a retreat?” Caesar said. “No, we belong to a church in Florida. We’re just doing some fishing. Here’s five bucks for your missions or whatever. No, I don’t need no holy card.”

  The priest spoke again.

  “We ain’t got a bathroom. Just a privy out back no white person would want to slap his keester on. Try the filling station up on the state road. Okay, vaya con dios. That’s Latin for ‘see you around,’ right?”

  A moment later Caesar came back through the door that separated the two rooms of the cabin.

  “So?” Tito said.

  “So nothing. The guy had a tracheotomy or something. He sounded like all his gas was coming out the wrong end,” Caesar said.

  “Check.”

  “On what?”

  “On where he is. I got to draw a picture on your forehead?”

  “You worry too much,” Caesar said irritably, and jerked the window curtain aside again. Then he froze. “I told him not to go back there.”

  “Go back where?” Tito said.

  “To our privy. I told him not to do that.”

  “Give me your piece. Get away from the window,” Tito said.

  The wind gusted off the water, stressing the tin roof against the joists. Then someone stepped onto the back porch. Tito jerked the .25 caliber automatic from his brother’s hand and clicked the safety off with his thumb. “Is that you, Father? ’Cause if it is this is getting to be a headache we don’t need—”

  The door burst open and, framed against the light, dressed in a black suit and Roman collar and black rabat, was a compact, well-groomed man with a 1911 U.S. Army model .45 automatic in each hand.

  “Oh, it’s a darling pair we have here. Suck on this,” he said. He began firing with both guns, shooting Tito in the mouth and through the throat, hitting his brother Caesar Dellacroce in the sternum and thigh.

  Tito crashed into a wall and collapsed on his spine, his legs spread, his jaw torn loose from his head. Caesar tried to crawl away from the rounds that blew the sole of his shoe off his foot, tore through a buttock, and splattered blood off his shoulder in a horsetail on the floor.

  The room was littered with ejected shell casings when Max Coll finally stopped firing. He nudged Tito in the chest with his polished shoe, satisfying himself that Tito was dead, then leaned down and studied Caesar’s face. “Oops, looks like you’re still on board, little fellow,” he said, and fired a round into the side of Caesar’s head, stepping back to avoid the splatter.

  He stood erect and took my measure, his cheeks rosy, a cleft in his chin slick with sweat. He pulled the sponge from my mouth. “You all right, Mr. Robicheaux?” he asked.

  My heart was pounding, my ears almost deaf. “Cut me loose,” I said.

  “Can’t do that, sir. You’re a copper through and through. You’d figure out a way to have me in cuffs for sure. Give my best to Father Dolan. He’s a bit hard-headed, but under it all I think he’s a fine man of the cloth. His kind make me proud I’m a Catholic,” he said.

  And with that he was gone.

&n
bsp; Fifteen minutes later three cruisers from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department arrived at the fish camp, having been notified of my situation from a payphone by Max Coll.

  Chapter 15

  On Wednesday afternoon, after sleeping almost fifteen hours, I drove with Clete Purcel in his Caddy to City Park and sat under a barbecue pavilion in the rain on the banks of Bayou Teche.

  “A guy pissed in your face?” he said.

  “No, first he pissed in my face. Then he pissed all over me,” I replied.

  He lit a Lucky Strike and spit a piece of matter off his tongue. A moment later he flipped the cigarette into the bayou and watched it float away. “Don’t let me light one of these again,” he said.

  “I won’t.”

  “The Flannigan broad set you up,” he said.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “She got you out of your house and into a bar. What’s that, working the Steps one drink at a time?”

  “It was my idea to go over there.”

  “Why? You got some big obligation to keep other people from drinking if they want to?”

  I didn’t answer. I tried to avoid his eyes. “Are we talking about boom-boom out of times past?” he said.

  “Why don’t you give some thought to the way you talk to other people, Clete?”

  “Did you ever get it on with her or not?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” He nodded profoundly. “So after you made your expunch’s father look like a vindictive prick in front of his friends, you don’t think she would lure you to a slop chute in hopes you’d either get killed or drunk again? Perish the thought.”

  I stared at the rain dimpling the surface of Bayou Teche. “Theo isn’t connected with people like Tito and Caesar Dellacroce,” I said.

  “Merchie worked for the Teamsters in Baton Rouge. They’d force guys to buy a union book, then get them fired after a month so they could crank up their membership numbers. That’s how he got into the pipeline business.”