Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “We’re looking for the guy who hurt you but on different charges,” I said, laying my raincoat and hat on a chair.

  “Maybe you’re here to rub salt in a wound, too,” he said.

  “You burned my house down, partner. But I’m like you, I’m a drunk. I can’t carry resentments. Did you ever go back to meetings?”

  His eyes left mine. Even though he was a hard-bodied man, he looked small in the bed, his spoon clutched in a childlike fashion. “I never had that big a drinking problem. It was just when I was married,” he said.

  “The man who attacked you didn’t have the right to do what he did,” I said.

  He frowned and ran his tongue over the swelling in his bottom lip. “Just leave me alone,” he said.

  “One day you’re going to have to do a Fifth Step on the injury you caused me and my family. My father built that house in the Depression with his own hands. My second wife was murdered in it. Her blood was in the wood,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Maybe you are,” I said. I put my business card on his nightstand. “I think you have a lot of information about the dealings of some bad people, Herbert. Why take their bounce?”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he replied.

  I drummed my fingers on top of the chair where my raincoat rested and looked out the window at an oak tree whipping in the wind, its leaves shredding high in the air. Then I picked up my raincoat and left, just as the nurse entered with the letter I had typed at the nurse’s station.

  “This was left for you, Mr. Vidrine,” I heard her say behind me.

  I waited five minutes, then reentered Vidrine’s room. “I forgot my hat,” I said, picking it up from the chair.

  The letter I had written lay unfolded on top of his bed tray. He was staring into space, his expression disjointed, like a man at a bus stop who has watched the bus’s doors close in his face and the bus drive away without him.

  The letter I had typed at the nurse’s station read as follows:

  Herbert,

  Sorry you got your ass stomped by that queer bait we had trouble with at the cafe in Jeanerette. But if you can’t deal with a fat shit like that, I don’t need you on the job. Take this as your official notice of termination. Also be advised you are forfeiting all fees due on uncompleted work.

  Will Guillot

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  “Yeah, there is. You want to know about Sunbelt Construction?”

  “Yeah, what’s up with these guys?”

  “They got connections with gangsters in New Orleans.”

  “That’s not real specific.”

  “Maybe they’re selling dope. I’m not sure. But Will Guillot is going to take over the company. He’s got something on the old man.”

  “Castille LeJeune?”

  “Yeah, him. The war hero.”

  “What does Guillot have on him?”

  “I don’t know. I asked him once and all he said was, ‘I finally got the goods on both him and that cunt.’ I asked him which cunt he meant. He told me it wasn’t my business.”

  “Ever hear the name of Junior Crudup?”

  “No,” he said.

  It had stopped raining outside. The sky was gray, the sun buried in a cloud like a wet flame, the hospital lawn blown with camellia petals. “That’s all you got for me, Herbert? It’s not too much,” I said.

  “I’m an electrician. People don’t confess their sins to me.”

  “See you around,” I said.

  “One time I told Will Fox Run was a beautiful place. He said, ‘Don’t let it fool you. All these places got a nigger in the woodpile.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant, though.” He tilted his head inquisitively, waiting for me to speak, as if somehow we were old friends.

  So Vidrine repeated a racist remark that confirms what you already knew,” Helen said in her office an hour later. “Maybe a convict was killed on the LeJeune plantation fifty years ago. Or maybe not. We didn’t find a body, bwana.”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “How could Will Guillot be blackmailing Castille LeJeune about the death of Junior Crudup? Guillot has something else on him.”

  “I’m glad we cleared that up. Now get out of here,” she replied.

  I couldn’t blame Helen for her feelings. The real issues were the murders of the daiquiri-store operator and Fat Sammy Figorelli, and in both instances we had no viable suspects. In the meantime I had gotten myself abducted, gotten deeply involved in a murder case from a half century ago, and had helped bring Max Coll to our community.

  As a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, the axiom “keep it simple” was supposed to guide my daily life.

  What a joke.

  But Helen herself had said the real problem lay in the fact we were dealing with Dagwood and Blondie. Amateurs hide in plain sight. They also do not feel guilty about the misdeeds they commit. They attend church, Kiwanis meetings, belong to the Better Business Bureau, support every self-righteous moral cause imaginable, and float like helium balloons right over whole armies of cops looking for miscreants in off-track betting parlors, triple-X motels, and crack houses.

  The word criminal is more an emotional than legal term. Go to any U.S. post office and view the faces on the wanted posters. Like Dick Tracy caricatures, they stare out of the black-and-white photographs often taken in late-night booking rooms—unshaved, pig snouted, rodent eyed, hare lipped, reassuring us that human evil is always recognizable and that consequently we will never be its victim.

  But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to have knowledge of.

  Five or six years ago Helen and I had to fly to Deer Lodge, Montana, and question a kid whose execution was scheduled in three days. We were not prepared for what we saw when he was brought into the interview room in a short-sleeve, orange jumpsuit and leg and waist chains. His first name was Kerry, and the softness in his name was like both his features and his North Carolinian accent. He had no cigarette odor, no tattoos, no needle tracks. His auburn hair was shampooed, clipped on the ends, and kept falling across his glasses, so that he constantly twitched his head to shake a loose strand out of his vision.

  While we questioned him about a murder in Iberia Parish, his large glasses wobbled with reflected light and a strange, almost self-effacing smile never left his mouth. If he bore anger or resentment toward anyone, I could not detect it.

  He had been sentenced to death for tying a rancher and his wife to chairs in their kitchen and butchering them alive. While on Death Row he helped organize a riot that resulted in the convict takeover of the entire maximum-security area. Kerry also was a chief participant in the fate of five snitches who were pulled out of protection cells, tortured, and lynched with wire loops from the second tier of a lockdown section.

  He said he knew nothing of the homicide in Iberia Parish.

  “Your fingerprints at the murder scene indicate otherwise. Maybe the victim had it coming. Why not get your interpretation of events on the books?” I said.

  He flipped his head to clear a strand of hair from his glasses and smiled at a joke that only he seemed to understand.

  We gave it up. But before we left the interview room I had to ask him another question. “What do you think lies on the other side, Kerry?” I said.

  He had a slight cold and couldn’t wipe his nose because his hands were manacled at the waist, so he huffed air out of his nostrils before he answered. “You just move on to another plane of existence,” he said.

  The afternoon of his injection he had to be awakened from a sound sleep. Minutes later the death warrant was read and he was videotaped by a member of the medical examiner’s office on the way to the execution chamber. He grinned at the camera and said, “Hi, Mom,” and jiggled all over with laughter.

  Chapter 22

  I went to bed early that night and lis
tened to the rain hitting the tin roof of my rented house. The fog was white in the trees, a lighted tugboat out on the Teche, its gunnels hung with rubber tires, glistening inside the rain. I slept the sleep of the dead.

  The time on my alarm clock was 4:16 A.M. when I heard the unmistakable sound of Clete’s automobile engine dying in my driveway. A moment later he tapped softly on the front door. He was wearing gloves and a beat-up leather bomber jacket. The jacket was unzipped, and I could see his nylon shoulder holster and his blue-black, pearl-handled .38 revolver inside it.

  “Where have you been?” I said.

  “At a fish camp on Lake Fausse Pointe. Get dressed. I know where Max Coll is,” he said.

  “No more cowboy stuff, Clete.”

  “Me?” he said.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  Clete stepped inside the living room and started to explain, looking back over his shoulder at the street, then got vexed at being conciliatory. “You want in on this or not?” he said.

  I left a note on the kitchen counter for Father Jimmie, then Clete and I headed out in the predawn wetness for New Orleans, a thermos of coffee and a box of beignets on the seat between us. The old homes along East Main were still dark, the live oaks dripping on the sidewalks. I was still not quite awake.

  “Run it by me again,” I said.

  “Janet Gish is trying to get off the nose candy without a program, so she spends most of the night at Harrah’s. She says a guy with a Mick accent was in the casino until early Saturday morning, then he left just before seven. He came back at eight-thirty, ate a plate of steak and eggs, played some more blackjack, and drove off in a Honda.”

  “Why was she paying so much attention to a guy with an accent?” I asked.

  “One, I’d already described Coll to her, and, two, she still hooks a little on the side and thought he’d be an easy trick. Here’s the rest of it. He had on black dress pants, like a priest might wear.”

  It was raining and still dark when we crossed the high bridge over the Atchafalaya at Morgan City. Down below I could see shrimp boats in their berths, the red-tiled roofs of the town, and the great, cypress-dotted expanse of the wetlands in the south, all of which were being eaten away by saltwater intrusion at a rate of hundreds of square miles a year.

  “Doesn’t your heater work?” I said.

  “It’s full blast, mon.”

  Clete’s cell phone rang. He answered it, listened, then said thanks to someone and clicked it shut again. “That’s Janet. The guy who looks like Coll is still there. By the way, she’s got a porn lead for us, too,” he said.

  We crossed the wide sweep of the Mississippi just as the first cold band of light, like the blunt edge of a sword, appeared on the eastern horizon. Then we were rolling down I-10 past the northern shore of Lake Pontchartain, into the heart of the city, the welfare projects, the cemeteries where the dead were entombed in white brick, the homeless and the hopelessly addicted gathered around fires next to the cement pillars that supported the elevated highway.

  At the head of Canal Street stood the casino, the royal palms at the entrance beaded with rainwater in the graying of the dawn. The gamblers inside were not a group that took note of changes in either weather or clocks. The rain might beat against the windows and lightning flicker on the streets outside, but the blacks and Hispanics and blue-collar whites who crowded the tables or fed the endless banks of slot machines were committed to their own form of solipsism, one in which the amounts that were lost or gained were far less important than the gamblers’ desire to stay in the game, to be a part of the action, at the table or in front of the machine, until they were physically and emotionally sated in a way no sexual or narcotic experience can equal.

  Janet Gish was at the bar, a scotch and milk in front of her. Her hair was currently orange, stiff with spray, the tops of both breasts tattooed with a blood red star, her skin rough grained, freckled, layered with makeup. But in spite of all the cosmetics and chemicals she used on herself, she had one natural gift that was unimpaired by the life she lived. Her eyes were like a doll’s, with weighted lids that clicked open suddenly, so that she always seemed surprised, somehow still vulnerable.

  She turned on the stool, drew in on her cigarette, and looked at us without expression. “Lend me twenty bucks, Streak?” she said.

  I took out my wallet and found fifteen. She took it and slipped it under her glass. “I got to get out of this shit. I just dropped three hundred in a half hour. How about lunch at Galatoire’s? God, I hate this place,” she said, although I had no idea which place she meant.

  “On the clock today. You know how it is,” I said.

  She was obviously stoned or drunk or both, staying off coke with booze and baccarat, paying the rent with fifty-dollar tricks, starting her daily routine at 4 P.M. with eyewash, thirty-minute hot showers, and white speed on the half shell. Anyone who thinks prostitution is a victimless crime needs his head drilled with a brace and bit.

  “Where’s our Irish friend?” I asked.

  “Just went out the door. Like voom,” she replied.

  Clete’s face reddened with exasperation. “Why didn’t you call?” he said.

  “It’s been a long night. I don’t need criticism right now. I just don’t need that kind of unjustified negativity in my morning,” she said, a thin wire quivering in her throat.

  “Right,” he said, glancing up and down the bar.

  “Because if that’s why you two are here, I’ll just go back to the tables,” she said. She gestured at the bartender. “This milk is curdled. Give me a tequila sunrise.”

  “We appreciate everything you’ve done for us, Janet. How long has our man been gone?” I said.

  “Ten minutes,” she said.

  “You saw him drive away?” I asked.

  “No, he was walking. Right up Canal. Like he was in a hurry,” she said.

  “When he left Saturday morning for an hour or so, did he walk or drive?” I asked.

  She thought about it. “He walked down Canal. Just like this morning,” she replied.

  “Stay here, Cletus,” I said.

  “Oh, I got it. I just drive people around, then turn into an ashtray. I’m glad I’m your friend, Dave, because otherwise I don’t think you’d have any,” he said, screwing an unlit Lucky into his mouth.

  I didn’t try to explain. I hurried down Canal, past smoking sewer grates and gutters dark with rainwater, to the side street that led into the dilapidated downtown area where Father Jimmie Dolan’s church was located, like a fifteenth-century fortress inside which its inhabitants refused to accept a tidal wave of ecclesiastical change.

  The early-morning Latin Mass had already begun when I entered the vestibule and dipped my hand in the holy water fount. In a back pew, hard by a marble pillar, I saw the diminutive form of Max Coll, next to a group of elderly, head-covered women, all of whom had rosary beads threaded through their fingers. He wore black trousers and a puffy, tan down jacket that was zipped halfway up his chest.

  My cell phone was in my pocket, my .45 automatic in a clip-on holster attached to my belt. I started to punch in a 911 call on the phone, then thought better of it and instead genuflected at the end of the pew and knelt down next to Max Coll.

  “Walk out of here with me,” I whispered.

  He glanced at me and showed no sign of either recognition or alarm. “Bugger off,” he said.

  “No one needs to get hurt here,” I said.

  He ignored me and concentrated on the missal in his hands.

  “I know some evil men killed not only your natal family but your wife and son as well,” I said. “Both my mother and my second wife died at the hands of murderers. I can understand the feelings you’ve had to deal with over the years. I think many of the people you killed were bastards and deserved what they got. But it’s time to give it up. Take a walk with me, Max. You know it’s the right thing to do.”

  Other people were beginning to look at us. “You’re disturbing t
he Mass, Mr. Robicheaux. Now show some respect and shut your ’ole,” he replied.

  Parishioners who had come in late, one of them weighing at least three hundred pounds, began bottling up the open end of the pew. I was trapped with Max Coll. I thought I might have a chance at him during communion, but as soon as the communicants began filing toward the front of the church, Max helped an elderly woman into a wheelchair and pushed her to the altar.

  I stayed right behind them, received the Host myself, which he did not, and followed them back into the pew. Through the concluding prayers he kept his eyes straight ahead, one thumb hooked inside his half-zipped jacket. Just as the priest gave the final blessing to the congregation, Max turned to me and calmly whispered, “Got a Beretta nine-millimeter, fourteen rounds in the mag, all tucked nicely under my armpit. Try to take me and, House of the Lord or not, I’ll leave hair on the walls.”

  With that, he wheeled the elderly woman down the center of the aisle and through a crowd in the vestibule, like a mummy wrapped in black cloth being trundled along a cobbled street. He and two other men lifted her down the steps and fitted her chair into a waiting van, then suddenly Max Coll leaped into the traffic.

  I went after him, my shield held up above my head, a wall of water from a passing truck striking me full in the face, horns blowing, a taxi missing me by inches. Somewhere on the edge of my vision two vehicles crashed into each other. Max was now somewhere on the opposite side of the traffic, hidden behind a city bus or a Mayflower van or a refrigerator truck, all of which were moving through the intersection.

  I reached the opposite sidewalk and looked in both directions.

  No Max Coll.

  I saw the bus stop briefly on the next block, then it turned a corner and headed in the direction of Lee Circle. I started running, threading my way through pedestrians, truck drivers off-loading food for restaurants, winos sitting in doorways with their legs outstretched on the sidewalk. I turned the corner and saw the bus at the curb in the middle of the block, the door opened to allow a passenger to exit.