Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “I used to dream I was on a Jolly Green that was going down. But that was in the hospital in Saigon. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a dream.”

  “I can’t shake it,” I said.

  He got up from the bed and began dressing. “Turn on the heat, will you? It feels like it’s thirty below in here,” he said.

  We ate at the McDonald’s on East Main. Outside, the sky was blue, the leaves of the live oak in the adjacent lot flickering in the sunlight. “Can’t tempt you into a duck-hunting trip?” I said.

  He wiped his mouth with a crumpled napkin and dropped it onto his plate. “That perv I told you about, Bobby Joe Fontenot, the one in the trailer court? I couldn’t stop thinking about what he said to me.”

  “Said what?”

  “That if he reoffended, he was going to use my name every time he stuck it to a little kid. So I called the perv’s P.O. Guess what? The P.O. is on vacation. So I told the guy handling his case file about the little boy in the trailer next door. He did everything except yawn in my ear.”

  “Call Social Services,” I said.

  “I already did. I think that kid is shark meat.”

  He gathered up the trash from both our meals and stuffed them angrily into a bin.

  “Take it easy, Cletus,” I said.

  “Screw the ducks. Time to spit in the punch bowl,” he said.

  The mother of the little boy in the trailer court was named Katie Goltz. She sat with us in her tiny living room, still not connecting the reasons we were there, even though Clete mentioned he had been chasing down a bail skip who was the fall partner of Bobby Joe Fontenot, a convicted sex predator living next door.

  She wore no lipstick, old jeans, Indian moccasins, and a colorless pullover. Her hair was cut short, and had probably been brown before it was peroxided and waved on one side to resemble a 1940s leading lady’s.

  “Where’s your son?” Clete said.

  “At the strip mall,” she replied.

  Clete nodded. “He went with some friends?” he asked.

  “Bobby Joe took him. To buy him a comic book for helping clean his trailer,” she said.

  Clete leaned forward in his chair. “Ma’am, we have a Meagan’s Law in Louisiana. You must have been notified about Bobby Joe Fontenot’s record,” he said.

  “People change,” she said.

  “You listen to me. That guy is a degenerate. You keep your son away from him,” Clete said.

  She focused her eyes on a neutral space, her hands folded in her lap. Her arms were muscular, as though she had grown up doing physical work, her complexion clear. Behind her, framed on the wall, was a black-and-white photograph of her and a man who looked like a power lifter. His hair was shaved on the sides, curly in back, his face impish, like a cartoon drawing of a monkey’s.

  I stood up and looked closer at the picture. It was inscribed “To Katie Gee, the girl who made my own screen role a real pleasure, Your pal, Phil.”

  “That’s Gunner Ardoin,” I said.

  “‘Gunner’ is his nickname. Phil is his real name. You know him?” she said.

  “He was involved with the beating of a priest in New Orleans. You made a film with him?” I said.

  She frowned, unable to process all that she just heard. “I made just one film. My screen name is Katie Gee. The producer said ‘Gee’ looks better than ‘Goltz’ on the credits. Phil was my costar. What was that about a priest?” she said.

  “You were in one of Fat Sammy Figorelli’s porn films?” Clete said.

  “They’re art films. They’re shown in art theaters. Listen, nobody has hurt my little boy. I wouldn’t let that happen. I have to go to the washateria now,” she said.

  There seemed nothing left to say. Her mindset, formed out of either desperation, ignorance, or just plain stupidity and selfishness, was armor-plated, and in all probability no amount of attrition in her life or her son’s would ever change it.

  Bobby Joe Fontenot pulled up outside, wearing a foam-rubber collar, his face marbled with bruises. When the little boy got out of his car, Bobby Joe cocked his index finger at him, as though he were pointing a gun, and said, “Come over and watch some TV tonight. I got some Popsicles.”

  Clete and I got up to go, our mission by and large a failure. Her son rushed past us into his bedroom, a new comic book rolled tightly in his hand. Clete twisted the handle on the front door, then stopped and turned around. “It’s not coincidence you let that geek be alone with your kid. There’s a financial motive here, isn’t there?” he said.

  “Coincidence?” she said.

  “You’ve got more than a neighborly relationship with that asshole next door. He knows you were working the trade around Folk Polk,” Clete said, tapping the air with one finger. “Fontenot’s in porn films, too, isn’t he?”

  “I’m not saying any more. I have to go to the washateria and fix lunch and do all kinds of things I don’t get no help with. Why don’t y’all just leave now? I didn’t do anything to cause this, and you can’t say I did,” she said.

  She stared at us indignantly, her arms folded across her breasts, as though the irrefutability of her logic should have been obvious to anyone.

  Clete and I crossed the Teche on the drawbridge behind the trailer court and headed toward New Iberia on the back road, past the row of oak-shaded antebellum homes that belonged on a movie set. Then he mashed on the gas, one hand on top of the steering wheel, the sugarcane fields racing past us, a crazy light in his eyes.

  “What are you thinking about, Clete?”

  “Nothing. I’ll drop you off,” he said.

  “Clete?”

  “Everything is copacetic. Just hang loose. I’ll check in with you later,” he said. He whistled an aimless tune under his breath.

  Chapter 21

  At 10:15 Monday morning I received a call from Clotile Arceneaux. “Did you hear from the FBI yet?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “You will. They just left here. They want to put a net over Max Coll real bad,” she said.

  “A guy crossing state lines to commit a homicide? I guess they would.”

  “No, you’ve got it wrong. It’s face-saving time. Because he’s IRA, he’s on a terrorist watch list. In fact, he’s been on one for three years. Except he’s been going back and forth across the Canadian border like a yo-yo, making a lot of people look like shit.”

  “That’s their problem,” I said.

  “You’re not hearing me. The Feds believe Coll is…” She paused and I heard her shuffling papers around. “They say he’s a nonpathological compulsive-obsessive with paranoid and antisocial tendencies.”

  “Antisocial tendencies? This is the kind of crap that comes out of Quantico. Don’t buy into it.”

  “Will you shut up? They’re saying Coll kills people because he feels he has a right to. He’s not a psychopath or a schizophrenic or anything like that. He’s just a very angry man. Have I got your attention?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He had a wife and son in Belfast nobody in law enforcement knew about. They used a different name so Coll’s enemies wouldn’t find them. But about five years ago a Protestant death squad of some kind put a bomb under their car and killed both of them. They were on their way to Mass.”

  The subject wasn’t funny anymore.

  “Is there a tap on my home phone?” I asked.

  “We’re in the George W. Bush era. I’d keep that in mind,” she said.

  Fifteen minutes later Helen came into my office, a clutch of fax sheets in her hand. “Did you hear anything about an explosion on the drawbridge in Jeanerette?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  She sat on the corner of my desk and studied the fax sheets in her hand. “This is from the St. Mary’s sheriff’s office. See what you think,” she said. Her jawbone flexed against her cheek.

  I took the sheets from her hand and read them, trying not to show any expression. The details of the investigator’s report wer
e incredible. In the early A.M. someone had evidently slim-jimmed a wrecker that was parked in a filling station located a half block from the trailer court by the Jeanerette drawbridge. After hot-wiring the ignition, the perpetrator drove the wrecker down to the trailer court, hooked up the winch to a trailer owned by one Bobby Joe Fontenot, and ripped it off its cinder blocks, tearing loose all the plumbing, electrical, phone and cable connections.

  According to witnesses, the owner tried to exit the trailer but discovered the door had been sealed shut with a bonding adhesive used to repair the bodies of wrecked automobiles. The perpetrator skidded the trailer out of the court onto the surfaced road, bouncing it across a drainage ditch, smashing mailboxes and parked cars. When the trailer toppled on its side, witnesses thought they saw the owner trying to climb out of an exposed window. But the driver of the wrecker accelerated, knocking Fontenot, the owner, back inside. The driver then dragged the trailer across the steel grid of the drawbridge, geysering rooster-tails of sparks in the darkness.

  A liquid blue flame enveloped one of the butane tanks on the rear of the trailer. The explosion that ensued blew burning paper, fabric, and particleboard all over the bayou. The owner, who by this time had broken out a window and cleaned the glass from the frame with a hammer, barely escaped with his life.

  The perpetrator abandoned the wrecker and burning trailer, which was tightly wedged between the steel side beams on the bridge, and disappeared into the darkness on the far side of the bayou. A moment later an ancient Cadillac convertible was seen speeding down the road toward New Iberia, the engine misfiring, leaking oil smoke, the driver wearing a small, short-brim hat perched on the front of his head.

  “Wow, that’s something, isn’t it?” I said, handing the fax sheets back to Helen.

  “Any idea who could pull a stunt like that?” she said.

  “There’re a lot of old gas guzzlers like that around,” I replied, my eyes drifting around the room.

  “Right,” she said.

  “No mention of the Cadillac’s color?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “It’s not in our jurisdiction, anyway. Let St. Mary Parish do some work for a change.”

  “You get Clete Purcel in here right now,” she said.

  But Clete did not answer his phone, and when I drove by the motor court, the manager told me he had not seen Clete’s car in the last day or two. I called Clete’s office in New Orleans. The temporary secretary he sometimes used was an ex-nun by the name of Alice Werenhaus who put the fear of God in some of Clete’s clients.

  “You are Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.

  “I was when I got up this morning,” I replied, then quickly regretted my mistake in attempting humor with Alice Werenhaus.

  “Oh, it is you, isn’t it? I should have immediately recognized the quick wit at work in your rhetoric,” she said. “Mr. Purcel left a message for you. Would you like me to read it to you?”

  “Yes, that would be very nice, Ms. Werenhaus,” I replied.

  “It says, ‘Give Alice a pay phone number and a time. Fart, Barf, and Itch probably have you tapped.’ ”

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I suspect that’s why he’d like to talk with you, Mr. Robicheaux. To explain everything to you. I’m sure by this time you’re rather used to that,” she said.

  I walked downtown and got the number off a public telephone and called it back to Alice Werenhaus. “I’ll be at this number at one P.M.,” I said.

  I expected another rejoinder at my expense. But she surprised me. “Mr. Robicheaux, be careful. Watch after Mr. Purcel, too. Under all his bluster he’s a vulnerable man,” she said.

  At 1:04 P.M. the payphone across from Victor’s Cafeteria on Main Street rang. I picked it up and didn’t wait for Clete to speak. “Have you lost your mind?” I said.

  “About what?” he said.

  “You stole a tow truck out of a filling station. You almost burned Bobby Joe Fontenot to death in his trailer. The drawbridge in Jeanerette is still closed with the melted wreckage you left on top of it. Boat traffic is backed up ten miles.”

  “Oh, yeah, that,” he replied. “Things got a little out of hand. Look, big mon—”

  “No, you look, Clete. Helen wants to feed you into an airplane propeller.”

  “She’s emotional sometimes. I talked with Clotile Arceneaux. She says your phone is tapped.”

  “I already got that. Listen to me—”

  “You think the Feds are tapping a cop’s phone because they’re worried about an Irish button man whacking out a couple of greaseballs? These guys still haven’t found Jimmy Hoffa. It’s Merchie Flannigan and his wife they’re worried about.”

  “You’re making no sense.”

  “That broad’s been giving you a hand job. I did some checking on Merchie’s company. He’s in line for some big drilling contracts in Iraq after Shrub turns it into an American colony. That means his father-in-law, what’s-his-face, Castille LeJeune, is probably mixed up in it, too. The Feds are after Coll because he’s about to pop somebody with a lot of juice, not because they’re worried about Coll trying to kill a Catholic priest or smoking the Dellacroce brothers.”

  It was pointless to argue with Clete. He was the best investigative cop I ever knew, his blue-collar instincts for deception and hypocrisy and flimflam always on target. But his antipathy toward Federal law enforcement agencies, particularly the FBI, was unrelenting, and at best he considered them bumbling and inept and at worst lazy and arrogant.

  “Why’d you say Theodosha Flannigan was giving me a hand job?” I asked.

  “She and her husband are business partners. She set you up to either get drunk or clipped, she didn’t care which. Rich broads look after their money first and think about the size of your Johnson second. You think she’s going to let a guy like you screw up her family’s finances?”

  “You really know how to say it, Cletus.”

  “You want to be a dildo for this broad, that’s your choice. She’s dirty, Streak, just like her husband and her old man.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “I told you before, I’m going to make cripples out of the shitheads who hurt you. Get this. I saw a guy in Franklin who looks just like your description of Max Coll.”

  “Stay away from him, Clete.”

  “Lose a resource like that? By the way, what’s the name of that electrician who burned down your house?”

  I started to give him the name, then refused.

  “That’s all right. I already had a talk with him. He might be contacting your department, but don’t believe anything he says.”

  Later, I went into Helen’s office. She was on the phone, nodding, while someone on the other end talked, her eyes on mine. “All right, we’ll take care of it…. I agree with you. Absolutely…. This isn’t the Wild West. You got it,” she said, and hung up.

  Her face looked scorched.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “The Lafayette sheriff. An electrical contractor by the name of Herbert Vidrine was pulled out of his house at around six-thirty this morning and worked over in his backyard,” she said.

  She looked down at the yellow legal pad on her desk, widening her eyes, as though she could not quite assimilate what she had just heard and written down. “By ‘pulled out,’ I mean just that. His attacker was wearing work gloves of some kind and grabbed Vidrine by the mouth like he was picking up a bowling ball,” she said. “He swung him around in a circle and threw him into the side of a garbage truck. Vidrine is in Our Lady of Lourdes now. A neighbor got the tag number of the attacker’s car. A lavender Cadillac convertible. Guess who it belongs to?”

  “I just talked to Clete on the phone. He’s not coming in,” I said.

  “The electrical contractor is too scared to file charges. But Clete’s not going to use Iberia Parish as his safe house while he goes around kicking people’s asses.”

  I nodded.

  The heat went out of he
r face. “What’s the score on this electrical contractor?” she said.

  “He’s the guy who installed bad wiring in my house. He works for Will Guillot.”

  “I’m fed up with the stuff, Dave. Clean it up or you and Clete can start making your own plans,” she said.

  I took the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette and hit a rainstorm just outside of town. By the time I got to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital the streets were flooding. I ran past a row of blooming camellia bushes into the side entrance of the hospital and asked at the nurse’s station on the second floor for directions to Herbert Vidrine’s room.

  “Three rooms past the elevator, on your left,” the nurse said.

  I thanked her and started down the hall. Then I stopped and went back to the station. I opened my badge holder. “How’s Mr. Vidrine doing?” I asked.

  “A concussion and a broken arm. But he’s doing all right,” the nurse replied. She was young and had clean features and brown hair that was clipped on her neck.

  “Has anyone else been in to see him?”

  “Not since I’ve been here. I came on at eight A.M.,” she said.

  “Could I use your typewriter?” I said.

  I had taken a fiction-writing course when I was an English education major at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. I hoped my old prof, Lyle Williams, would be proud of the letter I was now composing. I typed rather than signed a name at the bottom, folded and put the letter in an envelope the nurse gave me, then printed Herbert Vidrine’s name on the outside.

  “Would you wait ten minutes, then deliver this to Mr. Vidrine’s room?” I said.

  “I don’t know if I should get involved in this,” she replied.

  I placed the envelope on her desk. “You’d be helping out the good guys,” I said.

  Vidrine was sitting up in bed when I entered his room, one arm in a cast, easing a teaspoon of Jell-O past a severely swollen bottom lip.

  “How are you, Herbert?” I said.

  He put his spoon back in a bowl that rested on his bed tray. “You’re Iberia Parish. What are you doing here?” he said.