Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  We locked the truck, with the twelve-gauge inside, and walked past the clay tennis courts, all of them deserted, the wind screens rattling in the breeze, just as Castille LeJeune whacked a ball off a tee and sent it downrange in a high, beautiful arc. The people at the tables or teeing up from wire buckets filled with golf balls showed no recognition of our presence. LeJeune positioned himself, swung his driver back, and once again lifted the ball surgically off the tee, high into the darkness, a testimony to his health, the power in his wrists and shoulders, and the maturity and skill he brought to his game.

  Clete used a toothpick to spear a peeled shrimp from a large bowl of crushed ice on the bar, dipping it in hot sauce, inserting it in his mouth. His badge holder was stuck in his belt, mine in the breast pocket of my sports coat. But still no one looked at us.

  “Give me a Jack straight up with a beer back,” he said to the bartender.

  “Right away, suh,” the bartender replied.

  “That’s a joke,” Clete said.

  LeJeune’s friends were not people who had to contend with the world. They may not have owned it, nor would they take any part of it through the grave, but while they were alive they could lay rental claims on a very large portion of it.

  “Mr. LeJeune, we’d like for you to come with us to the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.

  “Why should I do that, Mr. Robicheaux?” he replied, addressing the ball on his tee, his feet spread, his thighs flexed tightly.

  “We need you to answer some questions about the murder of Dr. Samuel Bernstine and the fact Will Guillot has been blackmailing you about your molestation of your daughter when she was a child,” I said.

  In the silence I could hear leaves scraping across the surface of the tennis court. LeJeune seemed to gaze at an isolated thought in the center of his mind, then he sighted downrange and smacked the ball in a straight line, like a rifle shot, so that it did not strike earth again until it was almost to the oak trees smoking in the electric lights.

  “You need to talk to my attorney, Mr. Robicheaux, not to me,” he said.

  “Did you hear what I said? We’re investigating a homicide, the second one that happens to be connected with your name. We don’t call attorneys to make appointments,” I said.

  He turned and dropped his driver in an upended leather golf bag. He wore a silk scarf around his neck, as an aviator might, the ends tucked inside a sweater with small brown buttons on it. In the corner of my eye I saw two security guards walking from the club’s main building and a man at the bar punching in numbers on a cell phone.

  LeJeune began chatting with a woman seated at a table as though I were not there. Then I started to lose it.

  “You had Junior Crudup beaten to death,” I said. “You turned your daughter’s childhood into a sexual nightmare. You sell liquor to drunk drivers and probably dope and porn in New Orleans. You think you’re going to walk away from all this?”

  “Mr. Robicheaux, I don’t know if you’re a vindictive man, or simply well-meaning and incompetent. The truth is probably somewhere in between. But you need to leave, sir, to let this thing go and give yourself some peace,” he replied.

  His detachment and his pose as a chivalric and charitable patriarch were magnificent. As Clete had always said, some people have no handles on them. Castille LeJeune was obviously one of them, and I felt like a fool.

  Then Clete, who all night had been the advocate of reason and restraint, stepped forward, his thick arm and shoulder knocking against mine. “You were a fighter pilot in the Crotch?” he said.

  “In the what?” LeJeune said.

  “I was in the Corps, too. Sunny ’Nam, class of ’69, smokin’ grass and stompin’ ass with Mother Green’s Mean Machine. See?” He removed his utility cap and pointed to the globe and anchor emblem inked on the cloth. “We used to have a Bed Check Charley, but he was a guy who’d start lobbing blooker rounds in on us at about oh-two-hundred so nobody could get any sleep. Do you have any autographed photos? No shit, it’d mean a lot.”

  “Sir, I don’t ask this for myself, but there’re ladies present. Let’s don’t have this kind of scene here,” LeJeune said.

  “I can dig it,” Clete said, putting his cap back on, his eyes cocked up in his head as though he were meditating upon a metaphysical consideration. “The problem is some greaseballs kidnapped and tortured a police officer and pissed all over his face while he was blindfolded. So how about taking the corn bread out of your mouth? It’s getting to be a real drag.”

  “I apologize for any offense I may have given you,” LeJeune said. “Tell me something, that badge you have hanging from your belt? I have the feeling you’re not a police officer.”

  I could see the heat climbing into Clete’s face. “Dave, hook up this prick. Work out the legal stuff later,” he said.

  The situation was deteriorating rapidly now. Two security guards had just walked into the pavilion and were standing behind us, awkward, unsure what they should do next. I turned so they could see my badge. “It’s all right. Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.

  They tried to be polite, their eyes avoiding mine. I felt sorry for them. They made little more than minimum wage, paid for their own uniforms, and possessed no legal powers. They waited for Castille LeJeune to tell them what to do.

  But I raised my finger before he could speak. “We’re leaving,” I said.

  “Screw that,” Clete said.

  Two cruisers from the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s office had pulled into the parking lot and three uniformed deputies, one black, two white, were walking toward us, their faces filled with purpose. I slipped my hand around the thickness of Clete’s arm and tightened my grip. “We’re done here,” I said.

  But it was too late. The three deputies went straight for Clete, with the collective instinct of pack hounds who had just gotten a sniff of a feral hog. At first he didn’t resist. When they walked him toward a cruiser, he was seemingly in control of himself again, grinning, full of fun, back in his familiar role of irreverent trickster, ready to let it all play out.

  Maybe I should have stayed out of it. But I didn’t.

  “Let’s slow it down a little bit,” I said to the black deputy, a towering man with lieutenant’s bars on his collar.

  “Best let us do our job, Robicheaux,” he replied.

  “What’s the beef?” I said.

  “Impersonating a police officer,” he replied.

  “That’s bogus. He never claimed to be a police officer.”

  “Work it out at the jail. We just deliver the freight,” he said.

  It should have all ended there, a routine roust to appease a rich man, a discussion down at the sheriff’s department, maybe a few hours in a holding cell, at worst an appearance in morning court where the charge would be kicked.

  But one of the white deputies, an angry man with corded veins in his neck who had been fired in another parish for abusing a prisoner, had pushed Clete into a search position against the hood of the cruiser and was running his hands down Clete’s left leg.

  “Ease up, my man,” Clete said.

  “Close your mouth,” the deputy said.

  “That’s a slapjack in my right hand pocket. I’m not carrying,” Clete said, twisting around.

  “I told you to shut up,” the deputy said, and slapped Clete’s utility cap off his head.

  Clete ripped his elbow into the deputy’s face, breaking his nose, then caught him in the jaw with a right hook that lifted him off the ground and knocked him the full length of the cruiser.

  “Ouch,” he said, trying to shake the pain out of his hand, trying to step back from his own misdeed.

  Then they were on him.

  Chapter 25

  It rained at sunrise and kept raining through the morning. Clete was in jail and Father Jimmie had not returned to the house. Because it was Saturday Helen was at home. I called her and told her how it had gone south at Castille LeJeune’s golf and tennis club.


  “What did you plan to accomplish over there?” she said.

  “Not sure.”

  “I am. You wanted to provoke a confrontation and blow pieces of Castille LeJeune all over the golf tee.”

  “That’s a little strong.”

  I thought she was going to give it to me but she didn’t. “As far as you know, Guillot didn’t try to call LeJeune after you went to Guillot’s house?” she said.

  “When we went to LeJeune’s house, the man cleaning up said nobody had called except his wife. She wanted him to pick up a loaf of bread.”

  “Maybe LeJeune is not the guy we should be after.”

  “He’s the guy.”

  “I think I’m going to do something more rewarding today, like have a conversation with a pile of bricks,” she said.

  “Did you just hear something on the line?”

  “Hear what?”

  “A friend in New Orleans said I probably have a federal tap on my phone.”

  “Have a nice weekend, Dave.”

  Clete was in serious trouble and would not be able to bond out of jail until he was arraigned Monday morning. The impersonation beef was a gray area. A person does not have to specifically claim to be a police officer in order to be guilty of impersonating one. He simply has to give the impression of being one. But Clete had licensed P.I. status and ironically, as an employee of a bail bond service, possessed legal powers that no law officer did, namely, he could cross state lines and even break into residences without a warrant to arrest a bail skip who was a fugitive from a court proceeding.

  The assault-and-battery beef was another matter. With luck and some finesse, an expensive, politically connected lawyer could probably get the charge kicked down to resisting. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Clete’s reputation for violence, destruction of property, and general anarchy was scorched into the landscape all the way across southern Louisiana. His enemies had longed for the day he would load the gun for them. Now I had helped him do it.

  I went to Baron’s Health Club, worked out with free weights, then sat for a half hour in the steam room. When I came back outside it was still raining, harder than before, litter floating in the ditches that bordered the streets. I went to an afternoon A.A. meeting above the Methodist church by the railroad tracks and listened to a man talk about nightmares he still had from the Vietnam War. His face was seamed, unshaved, his body flaccid, his clothes mismatched. He had been eighty-sixed out of every bar in the parish and he had been put out of two V.A. alcoholic treatment programs. He began to talk about a massacre of innocent persons inside a free-fire zone.

  I couldn’t listen to it. I left the meeting and drove home. When I pulled into the driveway my yard was flooded halfway to the gallery and Theodosha Flannigan was waiting for me by the door, a rain-spotted scarf tied on her head, her face filled with consternation. Snuggs was turning in circles around her ankles.

  “I know all about last night,” she said.

  “Not a good day for it, Theo,” I said, unlocking the door.

  I went in the house without inviting her inside, but she followed me anyway, Snuggs racing past us toward the food bowl in the kitchen.

  “My father didn’t molest me. It was a black man. That’s why I was seeing Dr. Bernstine,” she said.

  “Don’t do this, Theo.”

  “When I was a little girl a black convict got in our house and hurt me. He was killed running down toward the bayou.”

  “Killed by whom?”

  “A prison guard. He worked at the labor camp. He and the other guards buried him in back. I saw the bones when the fish pond was dug. They were sticking out of the dirt in a front-end loader.”

  “You’ve been fed a lie.”

  “It’s the truth. I went over every detail of it with my father.”

  “Bernstine told you your father raped or molested you, didn’t he?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I know what happened.”

  “When you first told me about Bernstine’s death, you said you thought you had something to do with it.”

  “I was confused. I know the truth now.”

  I gave up. Through the kitchen window I could see steam rising off the bayou in the rain. Theodosha picked up Snuggs, set him on the counter, and rubbed her hand down his back. “Merchie is leaving me,” she said.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “We’re not good for each other. We never were. I’m too messed up and he’s too ambitious.”

  “I have some things to do today, Theo.”

  I could hear an oak branch slapping against the side of the house, water rushing out of a gutter into the drive.

  “We had fun together, didn’t we?” she said.

  “Yeah, sure,” I replied.

  “Know why we’re alike?”

  “No.”

  “We both live in the cities of the dead. We don’t belong with other people.”

  “That’s not true. Why did you use that term?” I said, my heart quickening.

  But she didn’t answer. She lifted up Snuggs and set him back down on the floor, then touched me on both cheeks and kissed me on the mouth. “So long, baby. I never told you this, but you’re the only man I ever slept with and dreamed about later,” she said.

  She went out the front door, letting the screen slam behind her, then ran for her car. I had to force myself not to go after her.

  I lay down on my bedspread, with my arm across my eyes, and listened to the rain on the roof. I drifted off to sleep and suddenly saw an image out of my past, one that had no catalyst other than perhaps the story told by the war veteran at the noon A.A. meeting. I saw the members of my platoon marching at night through a rain forest that had been denuded by napalm. Their faces and uniforms and steel pots, even the green sweat towels draped over their heads like monk’s cowls, were gray with ash. They cast no shadows and made no sound as they marched and their eyes were all possessed by the strange non-human look that soldiers call the thousand-yard stare.

  I sat straight up in my bed, my throat choking.

  The phone was ringing in the kitchen. I went to the counter and picked it up, the dream still more real than the world around me. “Hello?” I said.

  “Is Father Dolan there?”

  “Coll?”

  “Sorry to be a nuisance, Mr. Robicheaux. I just wanted to pass on something to Father Dolan.”

  My mind began to race. Castille LeJeune had remained untouchable and was about to skate. Will Guillot could probably not be charged with any crime more serious than breaking and entering, and the evidence against him was problematic and subject to easy dissection by a defense attorney.

  “I owe you one, Max. That means I don’t want to see you taken off the board by a couple of local scum wads,” I said.

  “Could you be speaking a little more plainly, sir?” he replied.

  My pulse was beating in my wrists, the veins dilating in my scalp. “I think the clip on you came down from a couple of homegrown characters in the porn and meth trade. Maybe you should stay out of Franklin, Louisiana, and spend more time at Biscayne Dog Track,” I said.

  “A couple of local fellows, you say? Now, that’s interesting, because I’d come to a very different conclusion. I thought the porn connection was the woman, the screenwriter, Ms. Flannigan. She’s the brains in the family, not her father. The colored people hereabouts say he may have had his way with her when she was a child. This fellow Guillot is trying to take over the business, so Ms. Flannigan does the daiquiri fellow, draws a lot of attention to her father’s selling grog to teenagers and drunk drivers, and uses Guillot’s gun to do it. Perfect way to screw both her daddy and her business rival.”

  “Why would Theo Flannigan be the porn connection?”

  “I’m ashamed to say I’m well acquainted with a number of lowlifes in the underworld who say Sammy Figorelli’s films were successful because they were written by a famous woman author. It’s not a big reach to figure out who that might be…. Hello? Are you ther
e?”

  “Yes,” I said weakly.

  “I’ve never harmed a woman, sir, so I let the matter go. But I’ll be reamed up the bung hole with a spiked telephone pole if you haven’t made me reconsider the LeJeune and Guillot fellows.”

  “Hold on, Coll.”

  “No, you’ve done me a favor. I’ve got to cancel my flight reservations and give it all a good think. Tell Father Dolan thanks for his help. A tip of the hat to yourself as well.”

  The line went dead. I replaced the receiver and wiped my face with a dish towel. I tried to sort through the conversation I had just had with Max Coll. My head was a basket of snakes, my mouth dry, my thoughts suddenly centered on a jigger of Beam poured into an iced mug of draft beer inside a Saturday-afternoon bar that was only two blocks up the street.

  Father Jimmie Dolan’s car pulled into the driveway, pushing a wave of water under the house. When he entered the front door he was smiling, his tan, wide-brim hat dripping. “Any calls for me?” he asked.

  I drove downtown to the restaurant that used to be Provost’s Pool Room. It was warm and cheerful and crowded inside, and I sat at the hand-carved mahogany bar and looked out the window at the wetness of the day and the traffic passing in the street. As a boy I used to come to the pool room on Saturday afternoons with my father, Big Aldous, in a era when the plank floors were strewn with football betting cards and green sawdust and the owner served free robin gumbo out of big pots that he set on an oilcloth-covered pool table. The stamped tin ceilings and mahogany bar and old brick walls still remained, but the building was an upscale restaurant now that catered to tourists who came to see a world that no longer existed.

  The bartender wore his hair slicked back and black pants and a white jacket and black tie. “You just gonna have coffee, sir?” he asked.