Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “Clete—”

  “Nobody messes with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Every lowlife in New Orleans always understood that, big mon. This dick-head doesn’t get slack because he’s a cop.”

  Some people at the next table stared at us.

  “I have no evidence Pitts was the guy,” I said.

  “You know he was the guy.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Trust me, I’ll get the ‘maybe’ out of the equation. Quit worrying. He’ll probably thank me for it,” he said. He took a bite out of his po’boy sandwich. “These fried oysters are supposed to be aphrodisiacs, did you know that?”

  Talking with Clete Purcel about personal restraint or reasonable behavior was like a meteorologist telling an electrical storm it shouldn’t come to town. But I couldn’t be mad at Clete. He was the first person to whom I always took my problems, and in truth his violence, recklessness, and vigilantism were simply the other side of my own personality. I felt his gaze wander over my face and the stitches I had tried to comb my hair over.

  “Will you stop that?” I said.

  “What’s your brother say about all this?” he said.

  “Haven’t talked with him about it.”

  He looked at me.

  “He’s got his own problems,” I said.

  “Jimmie the Gent is a stand-up guy. Why not treat him like one?” Clete said.

  Years ago my brother had taken a bullet for me and lost an eye. I didn’t feel like cluttering up his life with any more grief or the detritus of 1958. I started to tell Clete that when my cell phone rang. The caller number was Helen Soileau’s.

  “We got a floater out by the St. Martin line,” she said. “It may be the wife of that DEQ official who’s in Seagoville. We’ve got personal effects, but I don’t think we’ll get a visual ID.”

  “That bad?”

  “The guy who did this isn’t human.”

  “None of them are,” I replied.

  “Better see the vic,” she said.

  Chapter 5

  THE CRIME SCENE was only ten minutes from the bar-and-grill on the bayou. But the images there belonged in a medieval painting of a netherworld that should have existed only in the imagination. On a dead-end dirt road lined with garbage was a black pond spiked by gum trees. The sky was tormented by birds, the sun a gush of red on the horizon. The victim lay on her back, her torso half in the water. I felt my stomach constrict when Helen shined her flashlight on the woman’s face.

  “Get this. The sonofabitch hung her purse in a tree,” she said. “Money, car keys, driver’s license, credit cards, everything was in there.”

  “Her husband was with the Department of Environmental Quality?”

  “Yeah, he was taking juice from a couple of petrochemical guys. So maybe this isn’t the Baton Rouge serial killer.”

  The coroner, Koko Hebert, had just arrived. He was a gelatinous, cynical man, a sweaty, foul-smelling chain smoker, given to baggy clothes, tropical shirts, and a trademark Panama hat. I always suspected a Rotarian lay hidden inside his enormous girth and wheezing breath and jaded manner, but, if so, he hid it well. He leaned over with a penlight and stared down at the body. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Got any speculations?” Helen said.

  “Yeah, her face looks like a flower pot after a truck ran over it,” he said.

  Helen gave me a look. “Are those ligations around her throat?” she asked.

  He made a pained face, as though he were weighing a great decision. “Could be. But those knots could be the nodules associated with bubonic plague. Been a couple of outbreaks in East Texas. Squirrels and pack rats can carry it sometimes. You didn’t touch anything here, did you?” he said. He held Helen’s eyes somberly, then his mouth broke at the corners and his breath wheezed like air escaping from a ruptured tire. “Ligations, shit. The guy who did this had a boner on he couldn’t knock down with a baseball bat.”

  “The signature on the Baton Rouge serial killings is death by strangulation,” Helen said.

  But the coroner ignored her and motioned for two paramedics to bag up the body.

  “Did you hear me?” she said.

  He stared into space, his eyes askance, a manufactured look of pensiveness on his face. “Our killer is not into methodology,” he said.

  “Say again?” Helen said.

  “Our killer is a horny prick who loves beating the shit out of people. He doesn’t care how he does it. Are we all better now?” Koko said.

  Helen’s face blanched. She started to speak, but I placed my hand on her shoulder. Her muscles felt like a bag of rocks. We watched Koko Hebert walk toward an ambulance, its emergency flashers blinking. It was hot and breathless inside the trees, and the air smelled of stagnant water and leaves that had turned black in damp shade.

  “Blow him off. He’s an unhappy fat man who tries to make other people as miserable as he is,” I said.

  She slapped a mosquito on her cheek and looked at the smear of blood on her hand. The paramedics lifted the body heavily out of the water, their latex-gloved hands sinking deep into the tissue. “Wrap it up for me, Pops?” Helen said.

  “Sure. You okay?” I said.

  “I will be after a hot bath and four inches of Jack Daniel’s. It’s God’s compensation for giving me this fucking job,” she said, then grimaced at her own remark.

  “Drink two inches of it for me,” I said.

  She hit me on the arm with the flat of her fist and walked to her cruiser, her eyes sliding off the face of the coroner.

  It was dark by the time the crime scene investigators finished their work. A wind came up and blew the mosquitoes out of the trees, and I could see heat lightning in the clouds over the Gulf and smell distant rain. I thought about four inches of Jack on ice, with a sprig of mint bruised inside the glass. I rubbed my mouth and swallowed dryly. Then I said good night to the other personnel at the scene and got back in my truck.

  Just in time to see a television news van rumble down the road and stop squarely in front of me, its headlights burning into my eyes. The first figure out of the van was none other than Valentine Chalons, the one certifiable celebrity in the Chalons family, the same people who owned cotton, sugar cane, oil, and timber interests all over Louisiana and East Texas, including the parish where my former college friend, Troy Bordelon, had lived.

  Valentine could have descended from Vikings rather than the chivalric Norman French ancestry his family claimed for themselves. He was tall, athletic-looking, and blue-eyed, with a bladed face and hair that had turned silver on the tips in his late thirties. Unlike the rest of the Chalons family, his views were ostensibly populist or libertarian, although I sensed that inside his populism was the soul of a snob.

  He had studied journalism at the University of Missouri, then had worked as a stringer and feature writer for the Associated Press before taking a news anchor position with a television station in New Orleans. But Valentine Chalons’s stops on the ladder of success were always temporary, and nobody doubted that he considered ambition a virtue rather than a vice.

  Before the 9/11 attacks, he actually interviewed Osama bin Laden high up in the mountains on the Pakistan border. After hiking three days through burning moonscape and razor-edged rocks, Valentine and an interpreter finally trudged up a path to a cave opening, where the man who would help orchestrate the murder of almost three thousand people stood waiting for him, his robes swirling in the wind. According to what had become a folk legend among newsmen, the first words out of Val’s mouth were: “Why don’t you build a decent driveway, Jack?”

  Now he owned a television station in Lafayette and one in Shreveport and was an editorial contributor on a national cable network. But regardless of his acquisitions, Val remained a hands-on journalist and took great pleasure in covering a story himself as well as immersing himself in the fray.

  “You’re too late, podna,” I said.

  “That’s what you think. I got a shot inside the ambulance at th
e intersection,” he replied. He motioned to his cameramen, who flooded the pond and the trees with light. One of them accidentally snapped the yellow crime scene tape that was wrapped around a pine trunk.

  “You guys step back,” I said.

  “Sorry,” the offending cameraman said.

  But Val didn’t miss a beat. He extended his microphone in front of my face. “Does the victim have a name yet?” he said.

  “No,” I replied.

  But he slogged on, undeterred, and repeated the question, using the name of the missing DEQ official’s wife.

  “Cut the bullshit, Val. You want information, talk to the sheriff,” I said.

  He lowered the mike. “How you been?” he said.

  “Great.” I slipped my hands into my back pockets and took a step closer to him, maybe because his aggressive manner had given me license I wouldn’t have had otherwise. “Did you know a guy by the name of Troy Bordelon?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”

  “A dead guy who worked for your family.”

  “A dead guy?”

  “He gave me a deathbed statement about the disappearance of a prostitute named Ida Durbin. I think she was killed.” I held my eyes on his.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “A couple of rogue cops paid me a visit. Their names are J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts. These guys seemed worried about what Troy might have told me. Their names ring a bell?”

  “Nope.” He looked idly at one of his cameramen who was filming the pond and the drag marks where the paramedics had pulled the body out of the water.

  “And you never heard of Troy Bordelon?” I said.

  “I just told you.”

  “You’re a knowledgeable man, so I thought I’d ask,” I said.

  He inserted a piece of gum into his mouth and chewed it, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “You kill me, Dave. Come out to the plantation. We’ve got a cook from France now. I want him to fix a dinner especially for you.”

  “I’m off butter and cream,” I said.

  He laughed to himself and shook his head. “It was worth every minute of the drive out here. Have a good one.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked away, a self-amused grin on his face.

  Let it go, I told myself. But I couldn’t take his imperious, fraternity-boy manner. I caught up with him at the passenger window of his van. “Ida Durbin worked in a hot pillow joint on Post Office Street in Galveston in 1958. Would your old man know anything about those places?” I said.

  “You’re asking this about my father?” he said.

  “Want me to repeat the question?” I said.

  He touched at his nose and snapped his gum in his jaws. For a moment I thought he might step outside the vehicle. But he didn’t. “Dave, I’d love to get you your own show. The ratings would go through the roof. Let me make a couple of calls to New York. I’m not putting you on. I could swing it,” he said.

  Then the van pulled away, bouncing through the dips in the road, the high beams spearing through the underbrush and trees.

  You just blew it, bubba, I said under my breath.

  ICOULDN’T FIND Clete for three days. The owner of the motor court where he lived said Clete had thrown a suitcase in his Cadillac early Friday morning, driven away with a wave of the hand, and had not returned.

  But at dawn the following Monday, Clete called the house on his cell phone.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “Across the bayou. In City Park. I can see your backyard from here.”

  “Why the mystery?”

  “My situation is a little warm right now. Anybody been around?”

  “What have you done, Clete?”

  “It’s under control. Haul your butt over here, Streak. Over-and-out.”

  I drove down Main and across the drawbridge into the park. The sky was gray, the trees shrouded with mist, the surface of the bayou chained with rain rings. Clete was sitting on a table under a picnic shelter, his restored Cadillac parked back in the trees. But if he was trying to hide his Caddy from notice, he had taken on an impossible task. It was a beautiful automobile, with big fins, Frenched headlights, wire wheels and whitewalls, an immaculate cream-colored top, and a waxed finish that was the shade of a flamingo’s wing—all of it the gift of a pornographic actor and drug mule by the name of Gunner Ardoin, who credited Clete with turning his life around.

  I sat beside him under the shelter and unscrewed the cap on a thermos of coffee and hot milk I had brought from home.

  “You went after Billy Joe Pitts, didn’t you?” I said.

  “I found out he hangs around the casino in Lake Charles on the weekends. But that’s not all he does over there. He’s part owner of a motel that operates as a cathouse for high rollers.”

  Clete sipped his coffee, the steam rising into his face. He wore a rumpled suit with a white shirt and no tie, and a yellow straw cowboy hat that was bright with dew. The back of his neck was thick and red and pocked with scars below his hairline. I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “He made me at the casino and got me busted. I spent Saturday night in the Calcasieu Parish Jail. I’d still be in there if Nig and Willie hadn’t called in some IOUs for me. I was in a cell with a meth freak who tried to talk to his wife in the women’s section by yelling into the toilet bowl.”

  Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater were two New Orleans bondsmen Clete worked for, but I didn’t want to hear about them or Clete’s night in the can. When Clete’s stories digressed, he was usually trying to hide a disaster of some kind inside an incessant stream of minutiae. “What did you do when you got out, Clete?”

  “Hung around town, bought some books at Barnes and Noble, went swimming out at the lake. You ever been to Shell Beach?”

  “Clete—”

  “Toward evening I made a house call out at Pitts’s motel. He was lifting weights in a cottage out back. He was also getting a blow job. The girl was black, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old.” Clete tossed the remainder of his coffee into the grass and stared at the bayou.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “The girl went into the motel, probably to scrub her teeth with Liquid Drano. So I ducked into the cottage. I was just going to have a motivational talk with the guy. He was lying on a bench, pressing a bar with maybe a hundred and seventy-five pounds on it. I waited till the bar was down on his chest, then I came up behind him and grabbed it and held it there so he couldn’t lift it up again.

  “I go, ‘You busted up my podjo, motherfucker. That means you take the payback or give up the guy who sent you. Want a second to think it over?’

  “He goes, ‘Oh, it’s Louisiana Fats again. I thought you were getting your cheeks oiled at the jail.’ ”

  “I go, ‘Bad time to be a wiseass, Billy Joe,’ and roll the bar toward his throat.

  “I thought he’d give it up. He was popping with sweat, his face starting to get a little purple. Then he says, ‘Does Robicheaux make you squat down for your nose lube?’ ”

  Clete blew out his breath. “What was I supposed to do? The clock was running. The guy almost took your head off with a two-by-four. He made a teenage girl cop his swizzle stick. He’s a dirty cop. He should have had his spokes ripped out a long time ago. So I did it.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe hurt him a little when I picked up the bar and dropped it on him.”

  Clete looked sideways at me, then back at the bayou again. I could hear the rain ticking on the trees and the camellias that grew along the water’s edge. I was afraid to ask the next question. “Is he—”

  “I didn’t hang around. Last I saw, he was thrashing around on the floor, holding his throat. Red froth was kind of blowing out of his mouth,” Clete said. He looked at me again, waiting for me to speak, unable to hide the apprehension in his face.

  So I slipped back into my old role as Clete’s enabler and answered the question that was in his eyes
. “To my knowledge no one has contacted the department. Did you check in with Willie and Nig?” I said.

  “Are you kidding? The last thing they want is their hired skip chaser bringing an A and B beef down on their heads.”

  He lit a Lucky Strike with an old Zippo and flicked the cap shut. He inhaled on the cigarette, blowing the smoke out through his fingers, then ground it out in the dirt. I could almost see his heart beating against his shirt.

  “I’ll make some calls. It’s probably not as bad as you think,” I said.

  St. Augustine said we should never use the truth to injure. Who was I to argue with a patristic saint? Besides, what else can you do when your best friend regularly allows his soul to be shot out of a cannon on your behalf?

  I changed the subject and told him about my encounter with Valentine Chalons at the homicide scene Thursday night. At first Clete’s eyes remained focused inward on his own thoughts, then I saw his attention begin to shift from his own troubles to mine.

  “You say this guy Chalons blew it?” he said.

  “He told me he never heard of Troy Bordelon. But his news crew was at the hospital. I’m sure they were covering the knife attack on Troy.”

  “That doesn’t mean Chalons knew about it,” Clete said.

  “He’s a good newsman. Nothing slides by him.”

  “We’re back to this Ida Durbin broad again? And rich people in St. Mary Parish you can’t stand. There’s a pattern here, big mon,” Clete said.

  “Clete, sometimes you can make me wish one of us was stone drunk or down at the methadon clinic,” I said.

  “What can I say? You’ll never change. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody who knows you.”

  I wanted to punch him.

  IWENT TO the office and buried myself in our newly opened investigation into the death by strangulation and massive head trauma of Fontaine Belloc, the wife of the DEQ officer serving federal time at Seagoville, Texas. She had been raped before she died, and the semen in her body had come back a match with the Baton Rouge serial killer’s, pulling us into an investigation that was now drawing national attention and every kind of meddlesome intrusion imaginable.