Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “How about I buy you a drink?” I said.

  “Sir?”

  “It’s not a complicated question.” It sounded bad but I grinned when I said it.

  He shrugged. “I get off in a hour,” he said.

  I put several one-dollar bills on the bar. “Make sure it’s Beam or Jack,” I said.

  “You got it,” he said, scooping up the bills.

  Then I drove back home and went into the kitchen, where Father Jimmie was reading the newspaper. He lowered the paper, then looked curiously at my face. “It can’t be that bad, can it?” he said.

  So I told him how bad it was, or at least how bad I thought it was; but I was to learn my education about my own obtrusiveness was ongoing. After I finished he sat for a long time without speaking, his gaze turned inward, unable to conceal his disappointment at either me or his own missionary failure, or the world as it really is. I suspect I wanted absolution, like a child going to confession on a Saturday afternoon, leaving behind his imaginary sins, bounding down the street as though a stricken world has just been made whole again. But that wasn’t to be.

  Father Jimmie had a look of sadness in his eyes that I cannot adequately describe. “You don’t know what you’ve done,” he said.

  “Maybe I have at least a fair idea,” I replied.

  “Max met with me outside Franklin. He expressed what I think was genuine remorse for the evil he’s done in his life. I gave him absolution. But you hung the bait in his face and energized him. My God, man, we’re talking about his soul.”

  I felt light-headed, as though I were coming down with the flu. When I tried to speak I couldn’t clear the obstruction in my throat. Father Jimmie filled a glass with water but did not hand it to me.

  “Listen, Coll changed his direction because he didn’t want to kill a woman,” I said.

  “It makes no difference.”

  “It does. I never thought about Theo being involved. Even though Clete kept warning me, I never thought about Theo.”

  Father Jimmie realized I had already moved on from my own irresponsibility and was now concentrating on another matter, one that showed a degree of obsession beyond his grasp. He set down the glass and turned on me. I saw his right hand close. His next words were spoken through his teeth: “Don’t deceive yourself. You’re a violent and driven man, Dave, just like Max Coll.”

  His eyelids were stitched to his brows, his throat bladed with anger and rebuke.

  That evening the sky was as dark as I had ever seen it. Lightning rippled like quicksilver across the thunderheads in the south, and the sugarcane in the fields along the road to St. Martinville thrashed and flickered in the wind and rain, the oak canopy blowing leaves that stuck like leeches on my windshield. I went to Mass in the old French church on the square in St. Martinville, then when the church was empty put five dollars in the poor box and removed an unlit votive candle in a red glass receptacle and took it with me down to the cemetery on the bayou.

  It was a foolish thing to do, I suspect, but I had long ago come to view the world as an unreasonable place, not to be contended with, better left to pragmatists and the mercantile who view the imagination and the unseen as their enemy. I parked under the streetlight, opened an umbrella, and walked between the crypts toward Bootsie’s tomb. A generic compact car passed behind me, turned at the corner, and disappeared down a side street.

  The bayou was high, dented with rain rings, yellow in the lights from the drawbridge. I placed the votive candle next to the marble tablet on Bootsie’s tomb, wedged the umbrella so that it sheltered the candle from the rain and wind, then lit the wick.

  The same compact car came out of the square and crossed the drawbridge, but I paid little attention to it. An event I had never seen in my life was taking place in front of me. Two huge brown pelicans drifted out from under the bridge, floating south on the tidal current, their wings folded tightly against the wind, their long yellow bills tucked down on their chests. I had never seen pelicans this far inland and had no explanation for their presence. Then I did something that made me wonder about my level of sanity.

  I rose from the steel bench I was sitting on, pointing at the two birds, and said, “Take a look, Boots. These guys were almost extinct a few years ago. They’re beautiful.”

  Then I sat down and folded my arms on my chest, the rain clicking on my coat.

  That’s when I saw the compact in plain relief against the streetlight at the corner. It was pulled into a careless position at the curb, steam rising from the hood, the driver moving around in silhouette, as though he were having trouble with his safety belt.

  Dave! a voice said, as audibly as a voice speaking to you on the edge of sleep, as defined as a stick snapping inside the eardrum.

  I rose from the bench just as the streetlight glinted on the lens of a telescopic sight and the muzzle flash of a rifle splintered from the passenger window of the compact car. The bullet whanged off the steel bench and blew pieces off a statue of Jesus’s mother.

  I ducked down between the crypts and pulled my .45 from my belt holster and sighted with two hands on the compact. But there were houses on the far side of the street and I couldn’t fire. I started running toward the compact, the .45 held at an upward angle, zigzagging between the crypts, my eyes locked on the driver, who was fighting to straighten the car’s wheels so he would not hit the curb.

  He pulled around a parked pickup truck and floored the compact down the street. In seconds he would be beyond any safe angle of fire that I would have. I left the sidewalk and ran toward the corner of the cemetery, jumped on top of a crypt, and went over the chainlink fence into the street. The compact was twenty-five to thirty yards away, headed down the bayou in the direction of the church, the license plated patinaed with mud. I stood in the center of the street, both arms extended, and aimed low on the trunk.

  I squeezed off three rounds, the recoil knocking my forearms upward, the muzzle throwing sparks into the darkness, the spent shells tinkling on the pavement. I don’t know what I hit inside the compact, but I heard the hard slap of all three hollow-point rounds bite into metal.

  The compact swerved around a corner and disappeared down a tree-lined side street that looked like an illustration clipped from a 1940 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

  I went back to my truck and used my cell phone to punch in a 911 on the compact, then walked to Bootsie’s tomb, my ears still ringing from the explosions of the .45. The umbrella had not been disturbed by the wind and the candle was burning brightly inside its red receptacle, but the pelicans had flown or drifted southward on the current.

  I heard your voice, I said.

  But there was no reply.

  I don’t care who else knows it, either. That was your voice, Boots, I said.

  Then I said a prayer for her and one for me and headed back for the truck, wishing the pelicans had not gone.

  Don’t worry, they’ll be back. One of these days when you least expect it, you’ll see them on Bayou Teche, she said.

  I turned around, my jaw hanging, the clouds blooming with electricity that made no sound.

  Chapter 26

  I rose before dawn Sunday morning and ate a breakfast of Grape-Nuts and coffee and hot milk in the kitchen. When I opened the front door to leave I saw an envelope on the porch with a footprint stenciled across it and realized it must have fallen out of the door-jamb the previous night and been stepped on by either me or Father Jimmie.

  The letter inside was handwritten and read:

  Dear Mr. Robicheaux,

  I must talk to you. I don’t know why all this is happening. We moved here to live in a decent environment and look what everyone has done to us. I also do not understand this new development. Nobody will answer my questions. I think all of you people suck. Call me at home. Do it right now.

  Sincerely,

  Donna Parks

  In my memory I saw a stump of a woman, with dyed red hair and perfume that was like a chemical assault on the sen
ses, a ring of fat under her chin. She was the mother of Lori Parks, the teenage girl who had died with two others inside their burning automobile on Loreauville Road. I did not look forward to seeing Mrs. Parks again.

  I put away her note and drove to Franklin. The parking compound for Sunbelt Construction was located behind a house trailer that served as a company office. In the lot were trucks of every kind, front-end loaders, bulldozers, and grading machines but no compact car that resembled the shooter’s.

  I drove back to New Iberia and parked in Merchie and Theodosha Flannigan’s driveway. Their faux medieval home was shrouded in fog puffing off the bayou, their horses nickering and blowing inside the pecan orchard. The morning newspaper was still inside the metal cylinder at the foot of the drive, but woodsmoke was rising from a living room fireplace. There was no compact car anywhere in sight, but I did not expect to see one. In fact, I did not know why I had come to the Flannigans’ home. Perhaps it was to prove somehow that Theo was not involved with a criminal enterprise, that she was a victim herself and not capable of setting me up to be kidnapped and tortured by the Dellacroce brothers. Maybe I just wanted to believe the world was a more innocent place than it is.

  I got out of the truck and rested my hands on the top rail of the white fence that bordered the pecan orchard and watched the Flannigans’ thoroughbreds moving about in the fog. I could hear their hooves thudding on the soft earth, smell the fecund odor of the bayou, like the smell of humus and fish roe, and the pecan husks and blackened leaves that had been trodden into pulp in the trees, and I wondered how it was that a place this beautiful would not be enough for anyone, why each morning would not come to the owner like a blessing extended by a divine hand.

  Theodosha opened the front door and walked down the drive in her bathrobe and slippers, her hair black and shiny in the grayness of the morning. “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  “How bad would you be willing to screw an old friend?” I said.

  “It’s pretty early in the morning for your craziness, Dave.”

  “Your novels were nominated twice for Edgars but they didn’t win. If your script-writing career was on track, I think you’d be out in the Hollywood Hills, not on the bayou. Maybe Fat Sammy Figorelli’s skin films were a shortcut to being back on the big screen.”

  “You’re sickening,” she said.

  “Somebody shot at me last night.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “Did you set me up with the Dellacroces?”

  She walked past me and pulled the morning paper from the metal delivery receptacle, then started back up the drive toward her house. “Too bad it’s Sunday,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “The state mental hygiene unit in Lafayette is closed. But if I were you, I’d jump right on it first thing in the morning,” she said, opening the paper, not bothering to even glance at me as she spoke.

  When I got back home, Father Jimmie was gone, his closet empty. He had left a recording for me on my message machine, its brevity like a shard of glass: “So long, Dave. Thanks for your hospitality. I hope everything works out for you.”

  There was also a voice message from Donna Parks: “Why don’t you answer my goddamn letter, you callous fuck?”

  It was going to be a long day.

  I tried to eat lunch but had no appetite. As I washed my dishes and put away my uneaten food, I looked through a window and saw Helen Soileau pull into the driveway. She got out of the cruiser and walked to the gallery, wearing faded jeans, boots, and a mackinaw, her jaw set. I opened the door before she could knock.

  “I was out of town, so I just got the report on the car sniper,” she said, walking past me into the warmth of the living room. “Go over it for me.”

  I went over each detail with her and also told her I had been to Franklin that morning to look for the compact car I had put three rounds in.

  “Anybody from St. Mary Parish contact you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yesterday somebody got past the alarm system at both Castille LeJeune’s and Will Guillot’s house. In the middle of the afternoon. A real pro. Know who it might be?”

  “Max Coll,” I said.

  “What was he looking for?”

  “Evidence they put a hit on him.”

  “I hate to even ask this question. How would you know this?”

  “He called here yesterday. I more or less told him there were two local guys behind the contract on him and they lived in Franklin.”

  She stood at the ceiling-high living room window and stared out at the street and at the rain dripping through the canopy of live oaks that arched over it, her fists propped on her hips. “Want to tell me your motivation for doing that?” she said.

  “I owed him one.”

  “We don’t owe criminals. We break their wheels and put them out of business. We don’t make individual judgments on the people we need to arrest.”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t see,” she replied, turning to look directly at me. “I’m pulling your shield, bwana.”

  I nodded, my expression flat. “It’s been that kind of day,” I said. I slipped my badge holder out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Coll thinks Theo Flannigan may have been the porn connection to Sammy Figorelli. Maybe she was the shooter in the daiquiri drive-by. In case you want to follow that up.”

  Helen flipped my badge holder back and forth in her hand while she listened, then she tucked it into her pocket. “Sometimes you break my heart,” she said.

  I had been suspended before, put on a desk, investigated by Internal Affairs, locked up on at least three occasions, and years ago fired by N.O.P.D. But this time was different. The suspension came not from a career administrator but from my old partner, a woman who had been excoriated as a lesbian and who had never allowed the taunts and odium heaped upon her to diminish either her integrity or the dignity and courage that obviously governed her life.

  The fact that it was she who had pulled my plug made me wonder if indeed I hadn’t gone way beyond the envelope and become one of those jaundiced and embittered law officers whose careers do not end but flame out in a curlicue of dirty smoke that forever obscures the clarity of their moral vision.

  But that kind of thinking is what we call in A.A. the paralysis of analysis. In terms of worth it shares commonalities with masturbation, asking a rage-a-holic for advice on spiritual serenity, or listening to your own thoughts while trapped by yourself between floors in a stalled elevator.

  I went into the kitchen and called Donna Parks at her home. There was no answer. I left a message on her machine and drove to Franklin to visit Clete Purcel in jail.

  A turnkey walked me down a corridor to an isolation cell, one with horizonal bars, flat cross-plates, and an iron food slit in the door, but with nothing inside except a stainless steel toilet and a metal bench bolted to the floor. Clete was sitting on the bench, still in his street clothes, his wrists locked to his hips with a waist chain, another chain locked between his ankles. His right eye was swollen into a puffed knot, his forehead and chin scraped raw. The cement floor outside the cell door was splattered with red beans, rice, two pieces of white bread, and coffee from a broken Styrofoam cup.

  “Who did that to his face?” I said.

  “He come in like that,” the turnkey said.

  “That’s a lie,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t put on his jumpsuit. He threw his tray at a deputy. You got issues with it, talk to the boss. I just clean up the mess,” the turnkey said, and walked away.

  I hung my hands through the bars. “How you doin’, Cletus?” I said.

  He stood up from the bench and shuffled toward me, his chains clinking on the cement. “I’m going to look up a couple of these guys when I get out of here,” he said.

  “Why do you have to provoke them?”

  “It’s fun.”

  “I’m suspended. I d
on’t have any clout to help you.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Fired up Max Coll and pointed him at LeJeune and Guillot. I figured my line was tapped and I might get the Feds in here.”

  “I keep telling you, it’s the broad.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  Then his eyes went away from mine and looked into space. “Nig and Wee Willie won’t go bail,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re pissed because of that dinner I charged on their card at Galatoire’s. Plus two of the girls skipped their court appearances and Nig’s putting it on me.”

  “What kind of bail are we talking about?” I asked.

  “A screw tried to do an anal search on me. He’s going to need some dental work. So I’ve got two separate A&B’s on a law officer.”

  I touched my forehead against the bars and closed my eyes. Clete kicked the door with the point of his shoe, rattling it in the jamb. “Listen up, Dave. We’re the good guys. The problem is nobody else knows it. But that’s their problem, not ours,” he said.

  I left the jail and parked my truck on an oyster-shell road down by Bayou Teche, just outside the Franklin city limits. Rain was falling on the trees around my truck, and across the bayou were a cow pasture, a collapsed red barn, and a solitary black man in a straw hat, sitting on an inverted bucket, cane-pole fishing under a live oak. I got out of the truck, tossed a pine cone into the current, and watched it float southward toward the Gulf.

  Clete had made a point, one which I don’t think was either vituperative or vain. Legal definitions had little to do with morality. It was legal to systemically poison the earth and sell arms to Third World lunatics. Politicians who themselves had avoided active service and never had listened to the sounds a flame thrower extracted from its victims, or zipped up body bags on the faces of their best friends, clamored for war and stood proudly in front of the flag while they sent others off to fight it.

  The polluters and the war advocates are always legal men, as the Prince of Darkness is always a gentleman.