Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Clete locked one hand on the back of Bobby Joe’s neck and drove his head down on the toilet bowl, smashing his mouth against the rim, plunging his head into the water, scouring the bottom of the bowl with his face. It should have been enough but he was beyond controlling it now or even trying. He slammed the toilet seat down on Bobby Joe’s neck and head, then grabbed the top of the shower stall and mounted the toilet, crushing the seat down on Bobby Joe’s head, tap dancing on it like an elephant on hallucinogens while Bobby Joe’s legs thrashed on the linoleum.

  Outside he heard children playing and through the top of the window he saw a little girl chasing after a Frisbee that sailed above her head, and like a man descending from an electrical storm high up on a mountain he stepped back down on the floor and pulled Bobby Joe from the toilet bowl, dripping with water and blood.

  He tossed a towel in Bobby Joe’s face and leaned back against the wall, out of breath, his fists still knotting. “I’m going to make regular checks on the kid next door,” he said. “If I find out you’ve been near him, you’ll wish you were a bar of soap back in ’Gola. The same goes if you dime me. Maybe you think you got a bad deal here today, but pervs don’t get slack. You hearing me on this?”

  “You fat fuck,” Bobby Joe said, pressing the towel to the blood that ran off his chin, looking at it in disbelief, his words muffled, his mouth still trembling. “You like family values? That kid’s mother used to be an army whore over by Folk Polk. I’m gonna find out your name. If I ever offend with a kid again, I’m gonna say it each time I poke him. How’s that, asshole?”

  When Clete got back to the motor court, he stayed under the shower until the hot water tank went empty, burned his clothes in a barbecue pit, drank a quart of whiskey-laced eggnog, and still could not feel clean.

  Chapter 19

  Father Jimmie Dolan had done six months federal time for demonstrating at the School of the Americas and probably considered himself jailwise. But in reality, like all people who are intrinsically decent, he was incapable of the cynicism that passes for prison-acquired wisdom.

  On Thursday morning he was in Franklin, in black suit and Roman collar, collecting signatures on his petition to ban the sale of mixed drinks from drive-by windows. During three hours of approaching people in front of strip malls and grocery stores, he had amassed a total of six signatures, one from a retarded man, and two from people who signed their names with an X.

  He bought a take-out lunch from a McDonald’s and ate it in his car under the trees in a small park, then fell asleep. The day was unseasonably warm, the live oaks flickering with wind, but he dreamed of snowmelt in the Cumberland Mountains, the bright air of early spring, tea-colored streams that leached out of limestone cliffs, dogwood blooming purple and white on a hillside. When he awoke, children were running by the front of his car, kicking a soccer ball in the leaves, the spangled sunlight racing across their bodies, but somehow there was a continuity between the beauty of the Appalachian spring in Jimmie’s dream and the joy of the children at play.

  He got out of his car and began walking toward the public rest room. He had no reason to pay attention to a nervous, agitated plainclothes detective by the name of Dale Louviere, who was parked in a Ford by the swing sets, the same detective who had investigated the killing of Dr. Parks by Will Guillot and called it an open-and-shut case of self-defense.

  Nor did Father Jimmie pay attention to a man known as Cash Money Mouton standing by the lavatory inside the rest room.

  Cash Money’s last name was French but he was actually a pecker-wood product of north Louisiana. He used to sell fire and accident and term life insurance from door to door in black and poor-white neighborhoods, and was infamous for both his sweaty enthusiasm and his carnival sales rhetoric. He would pull clutches of papers and brochures from a vinyl briefcase, his face bursting with sincerity, tapping his seated listener, usually the man of the house, on the kneecap, saying, “You run your lawnmower over your foot and chop your toes off, I’ll give you twelve-hunnerd dollars, cash money, boy. You stick your hand in your skill saw, I’ll pay you five-hunnerd dollars, that’s cash money, for every finger you cut off. Splash muriatic acid in your eyes and go blind, I’m talking five-thousand bananas, cash money, boy.”

  Then Cash Money Mouton’s uncle became police chief and Cash Money began a new career.

  Father Jimmie stood at the urinal and relieved himself. He could feel the man at the lavatory staring at the side of his face. He started to look at him, then thought better of it and kept his eyes straight ahead. But when he tried to get to the lavatory the man known as Cash Money stood in his way.

  “Excuse me,” Father Jimmie said.

  But Cash Money did not move. He wore sideburns, a Tabasco tie, an American flag in his coat lapel. He smelled of deodorant, hair tonic, and fear. There was almost an iridescent shine on his skin.

  “Is there some difficulty here that I don’t quite grasp?” Father Jimmie asked.

  “Repeat that?” Cash Money said.

  “Could I be of some assistance to you?”

  “That’s it,” Cash Money said.

  He stepped into the rest room doorway and waved at the man in the Ford automobile. Father Jimmie rinsed his hands, shook them off, and tried to walk around him.

  “You’re not going anywhere, buddy boy,” Cash Money said.

  “Push me again and we’re both going to regret the next couple of minutes,” Father Jimmie said.

  But Cash Money was looking over his shoulder now and not at Father Jimmie. “He just threatened me,” he said to the man approaching the rest room.

  “What else did he do?” the plainclothes detective named Dale Louviere said. Even in the open air a gray fog of nicotine and ash seemed to enclose his body. Clusters of veins, like tiny pieces of green string, pulsed in his temples.

  “He said he wanted to help me. He was fooling with his fly when he said it,” Cash Money said.

  “You’re a liar,” Father Jimmie said.

  “We saw you watching those kids, Father,” Louviere said.

  “How would you like to have your teeth knocked down your throat?” Father Jimmie said.

  “Hook him up,” Louviere said.

  “I ain’t putting my hands on him,” Cash Money said. His eyes jumped sideways when Father Jimmie looked him directly in the face.

  At the police station Father Jimmie was charged with sexual solicitation and threatening a police officer and locked in an empty holding cell that was in full view of anyone, male or female, in the booking area. He made a pillow out of his coat, pulled off his collar, and lay down on a wood bench. He stared up at the graffiti and scratched drawings of genitalia that covered almost all the painted surfaces in the cell, and remembered the admonition of the blues singer Lazy Lester: “Don’t ever write yo’ name on the jailhouse wall.”

  He could see Louviere punching in numbers on a phone, calling up first the local newspaper, then a television station in Lafayette and one in Baton Rouge, the Associated Press in New Orleans, and finally the diocese.

  Louviere walked to the cell door. “Want your phone call now?” he asked.

  “I’d like to ask you a question first,” Father Jimmie replied.

  Louviere unlocked the door and pulled it open. “If you’re wondering whether I’m a Catholic, yeah, I am. And it’s perverts like you who give the church a bad name,” he said.

  “Call yourself whatever you wish, but you’re not a Catholic. The real issue is whose pad are you on. Who’s paying you to do this to other people, sir? What price have you gotten for your soul?” Father Jimmie said.

  I was at the office when Father Jimmie called.

  “How much is your bond?” I said.

  “I haven’t been arraigned yet,” he replied.

  “Why’d you have to take your petition into St. Mary Parish?”

  “What’s wrong with St. Mary Parish?”

  “It’s a fiefdom. They think it’s the year 1300 down there.”

/>   I heard him laugh. “A fiefdom? With serfs in iron collars and that sort of thing? That’s an interesting observation. I see,” he said.

  No, you don’t, Jimmie, I thought. But martyrs and saints fly low with the angels, colliding with telephone poles and the sides of buildings, and consider harm’s way their natural environment. Who was I to contend with them?

  Max Coll didn’t like gambling; he loved it and all the adrenaline rush and glittering ambiance that went with it, as passionately as a man could love a woman or a religion. All men had a vice, his father used to say. It was recognition of our moral frailty that allowed us to retain our humanity, he said. The man who wasn’t tempted by drink or women or betting the ponies could easily set himself on a level above Christ, and hence become guilty of the most pernicious of the seven deadly sins, namely arrogance and pride.

  Max had always remembered his father’s words. Drink robbed a man of his intelligence and his organs; women gave a man satiation for only a little while, and memory of it immediately rekindled lust for and dependence on more of the same.

  But gambling gave a man control, allowed him to choose his battleground and make use of his knowledge about both people and mathematics. The losses were only monetary ones, and since gambling was never about money, what difference did the loss make, particularly for a single fellow whose occupation was a bloody affair that should allow for a sybaritic excursion once in a while?

  He was discriminating in the games he played. The slots, video poker, and electronic keno were created for natural-born losers. Jai alai was fun and fast, but what reasonable person would bet on players who all came from the same part of Spain and were related to one another? With the ponies you could dope out the morning line, study the track conditions and the animals in the paddock, and have a fair chance at the windows. Craps was for showboats, roulette for Côte d’Azur faggots, and dog tracks everywhere strictly for the dogs.

  Not to say he didn’t bet ball games, boxing matches, and national elections. In fact, Max once bet a window washer on the thirty-first floor of a Chicago hotel that he could climb out on the sill and clean the window faster than the professional washer. He not only won the wager, he enjoyed the experience so much he washed four more windows out of goodwill.

  But the game that got Max in trouble was blackjack, the one game that gave the casino player a running chance at beating the house. Max’s memory bank was almost like a computer’s, and even when going up against a houseman dealing out of a five-deck shoe, Max’s ability to count cards and to successfully stay put or risk another hit was uncanny.

  Max’s weakness at the blackjack table was his inability to put principles ahead of personalities. He didn’t resent losing to a machine or to corrupt jai alai players wanting to keep their family members out of the tomato patch. Max did not like to lose to individuals, particularly stolid and dispassionate people who were paid by the hour and could not wait to get off work. To count cards until his brain was bleeding, then have a joyless clod turn up a blackjack on him out of sheer luck made the scalp recede on his skull.

  He would retaliate by playing multiple hands, progressively increasing his bets, doubling up on splits, until he was broke, exhausted, and depressed, staring out the window at the ragged edges of dawn in Vegas or Reno or Atlantic City, wondering if he could get the casino manager to open a credit line for him.

  Max depressed was Max out of control. He would telephone sports books all over the country and lay down fifty thousand dollars in bets without blinking an eye. Then he would dress in a pair of pressed pink pajamas and lie spread-eagled on his back in the center of his hotel bed, the world spinning around him, his heartbeat decreasing, a strange serenity washing through him, as though he had descended to the bottom of a vortex and was no longer at its mercy or required to control it.

  Usually his sports-book binges were harmless and his wins canceled out his losses. But contrary to all his wisdom he went in heavy on an insider tip at the jai alai fronton in Dania and took a bath for a hundred large he couldn’t pay. Not only was the sports book in Miami unsympathetic with Max’s financial situation, they sold his debt to shylocks who informed him the vig was four thousand a week, none of which applied to the principle.

  Or he could take out a Catholic priest.

  So he had come to Louisiana on a gray, rain-swept, cold day, trudging through flooded streets floating with garbage, himself no different in aspect than a poor sod on his way to work in the peat bogs. But there had been an upside to it all. He’d found out he didn’t have it in him to shoot a priest, which meant perhaps part of his soul was still intact. Secondly, he had discovered a new identity and gambling ambiance.

  Wearing Father Dolan’s black suit and rabat and collar, he had entered a bingo parlor on an Indian reservation in south-central Louisiana and had suddenly found himself a celebrity. People smiled at him, shook his hand, offered him their chairs at the tables, patted him affectionately, brought him beer and sandwiches from the cafe. He began to feel like a mascot being trundled from hand to hand by five hundred people. In fact, he was pinched and pulled and squeezed so many times and places he couldn’t concentrate on his bingo board and finally gave it up.

  Then he was asked to stand on the stage and call out the bingo numbers. Why not? he thought. It was a grand evening. The weather had turned balmy again; palm trees strung with colored lights were rustling in the breeze outside the windows; the faces of the people around him were warm and filled with goodwill. Maybe his clerical role was a bit cosmetic, but it was still a fine way to be.

  Then at 10:00 P.M. he went into the bar and ordered a cup of coffee and sat down to watch the nightly news.

  The lead story was the arrest of one Father James Dolan, charged with sexual solicitation in a public rest room that was located close by a children’s playground.

  The arresting officer, Dale Louviere, was interviewed on camera. “We had this area under surveillance because of previous complaints,” he said.

  “Regarding the children?” the reporter asked.

  “Yes, that’s exactly correct,” Louviere replied.

  “Regarding this particular suspect?” the reporter asked.

  “I’m not at liberty to say that. We’re currently involved in a deep background investigation,” Louviere replied.

  If I ever saw a bull carrying around its own china shop, Max thought. Oh well, it was the good father’s cross to bear, not Max’s. Maybe Father Dolan would have a little more empathy for professional criminals now that he’d gotten himself jammed up by coppers on a pad, Max told himself.

  He finished his coffee and went back to the bingo game. But the fun was gone and the clothes on his body suddenly felt foreign on his skin, superheated, sticky, smelling of the priest.

  He found himself biting his knuckle, oblivious to the stares around him. What was it that bothered him? The priest was a hardhead, determined to see himself buggered with a posthole digger. Max had nothing to do with it, no obligations to him.

  Wrong, he thought, lowering his eyes, staring into his lap.

  He had set out to murder an innocent, decent man, something he had prided himself on never having done. In addition, the priest had bested him at every turn; that thought didn’t go down well, either. In fact, all of Max’s thoughts were like thongs on a flagrum whipping down on his head.

  It was depressing.

  He walked outside into the wind and the sweep of stars overhead and the glow of Christmas lights strung around palm trees and started up his rental Honda. He removed a .45 automatic wrapped in an oily cloth from under the seat and set it beside him. As he drove down the two-lane road toward the interstate, he rested his right hand on the .45 and felt his heart rate decrease and his breath grow quiet in his chest.

  Then he looked up through the windshield at the stars and for the first time in years found himself addressing an ancient deity with whom he had once had a relationship.

  Sir, if you’re going to drop problems of cons
cience on a man like me at this time in his career, he prayed, would you mind doing so in a gentler manner so I don’t have to feel I’m being crunched inside the iron maiden? I would very much appreciate it. Thank you. Amen.

  It rained the next morning and Jimmie Dolan was still in jail, waiting to be arraigned at 11:00 A.M. I had just sat down at my desk when I saw an unmarked vehicle of the kind used by N.O.P.D. pull to the curb and Clotile Arceneaux, wearing Levis, a knit sweater, and blue-jean jacket, get out and run through the rain to the courthouse entrance, her hand raised in front of her brow.

  She came into my office, out of breath, her denim jacket streaked with rainwater. She sat down without being invited and said, “Wow! You’re a hard man to catch!”

  “I don’t follow you,” I said.

  “I left three messages yesterday afternoon,” she said.

  “I was in Franklin. Father Dolan is in jail,” I replied.

  “Yeah, I know all about it. Guy really walks into wrecking balls, doesn’t he? Look, what have you got on the death of Sammy Figorelli?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “He was killed with a .22. He probably knew the shooter. That’s about it,” I said.

  I could see her anger at losing months of work rekindling itself in her face. She bit a thumbnail and looked at the rain hitting on the window, then looked back at me. “I came here for another reason as well. In fact, I’m off work today,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “You already have breakfast?” she said.

  “No,” I lied.

  “It’s on me,” she said.

  “Your accent seems to come and go.”

  “See, I knew you were a smart man.” She smiled, her mouth pressed into a small flower.

  We got a take-out order at Victor’s Cafeteria on Main and drove across the bayou to a giant crab-boil pavilion next to an exhibition hall where, believe it or not, Harry James, Buddy Rich, Willie Smith, and Duke Ellington’s arranger, Juan Tizol, performed during the 1950s. The camellias along the bayou were in bloom and looked like red paper flowers inside the grayness of the day, and a tug was moving a huge iron barge loaded with dredged mud through the drawbridge up by Burke Street.