Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I removed the handful of mug shots from my shirt pocket and placed them on the table. “Ever see any of these guys?” I asked.

  She separated the photos one from the other with her index finger. Then she tapped on the face of a man with grainy skin, recessed eyes, and teeth that were too big for his mouth. “That’s one I won’t forget,” she said.

  “His name is Billy Joe Pitts. He’s a sheriff’s deputy.”

  “He pulled me over to the side of the highway north of Alexandria. We’d been circulating a union petition among some cannery workers. He made some rather nasty remarks.”

  “He threatened you?”

  “His remarks were sexual in nature. That night our car was vandalized.”

  “Did you ever hear of a woman named Ida Durbin?”

  “No, I don’t recall that name. Who is she?”

  “Someone I believe the Chalons family would like to forget,” I said.

  She paused a moment. “You’re not really here about our troubles, are you?”

  I felt my face tighten. “Billy Joe Pitts is part of an ongoing assault-and-battery investigation. I think he takes his orders from the Chalonses.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “You’ve been very helpful.” But I had lost her attention and I believe her trust as well.

  She looked at her watch. “I have to make some deliveries now. We run a folk craft workshop and sell the birdhouses they make. A tough way to raise a dollar, huh?”

  Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

  Just before I drove off the property onto the state road, I saw a group of black people leave the rehabilitated farmhouse that served as Sister Molly’s administrative center. They were laughing, clapping one another on the shoulder about a joke of some kind. A dome-headed black man recognized me through the windshield and raised a hand in greeting. It was Andre Bergeron, the handyman who did chores for the Chalons family. I waved out the window in response and headed back to New Iberia.

  AFTER WORK, I fixed supper for Jimmie and me at the house. I was beginning to regret I had told him of Ida Durbin’s fate. He blamed himself and kept trying to recall details of their last day together, as though some clue could be extracted from an idle remark she made over forty years ago. He told me he was meeting a musicologist that night at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.

  “I know I’ve heard Ida’s voice on a record. I’m sure of it, Dave,” he said.

  I did the dishes and didn’t try to contend with Jimmie’s obsession. After he was gone, I showered and took a walk downtown in the twilight. From the drawbridge looking south I could see the gardens behind the Shadows, a plantation home built in 1831, and the receding corridor of oak and cypress trees along the banks of the Teche, a tidal stream that had been navigated by Spaniards in bladed helmets, French missionaries, displaced Acadians, pirates, Confederate and Yankee gun crews, and plantation revelers who toasted their own prosperity on paddle wheelers that floated through the night like candlelit wedding cakes.

  Jean Lafitte had auctioned off West Indian slaves a few hundred yards from where I stood. As a lesson in terror, Union soldiers under the command of General Nathaniel Banks had raped women, burned crops, and looted the homes of the rich up and down the bayou when they marched through New Iberia in April 1863. People still found minié balls in the heartwood of felled oak trees and pieces of broken china in chicken yards, green depressions carpeted with mushrooms in a woods where soldiers with no names were hurriedly buried.

  As the heat went out of the day, the summer light seemed to ascend higher into the sky, so that the bayou itself became a long amber ribbon between the green darkness of the trees, the surface creasing in the wind, somehow disconnected from the present, the alluvial soil along the banks filled with the bones of Indians, Europeans, and Reconstruction-empowered Africans, all of whom had thought their dominion over the land was forever.

  But in my reverie about the nature of history and collective vanity I had forgotten a more prosaic detail from my day at the office. Either Jimmie or I had accidentally turned off the message machine on my telephone, and when I returned home the phone was ringing without stop.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “I wasn’t going to call, but principle is principle, I think.”

  “Honoria?” I said.

  “Yes. Who did you think it was?” she said.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “I was supposed to call you back after work,” I said.

  “To put it more accurately, you asked for my phone number. We were going to have a drink.”

  Not exactly, but it wasn’t a time to argue. “I got buried today. I’m terribly sorry,” I said.

  She didn’t speak, and I could feel my hand tightening on the receiver, my discomfort growing. I had meant to call her back, but not to have a drink. Instead, my whole agenda with Honoria had been about Sister Molly Boyle, whom I had been able to contact on my own. The consequence was I had forgotten about Honoria. The truth was I had tried to use her.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “Down the street, at Clementine’s.”

  “Can I treat you to a dessert?”

  “Whatever you like, Dave. It’s a strange evening, isn’t it? The sky is purple and full of birds. When I think of the color purple, I always think of the passion of Christ or the robe of Agamemnon.”

  Don’t get mixed up with this one, I thought.

  But I was just buying her a dessert, obeying the tenets of basic charity, wasn’t I? Why turn a harmless act into self-flagellation? I told myself.

  And in that spirit I strolled down to Clementine’s and through the door into a bar and supper club where the glad-at-heart gathered and had drinks and étouffée and steaks two inches thick on a candlelit terrace overlooking the Teche, and where, in the cold smell of crushed ice stained with whiskey and bruised cherries, a half century could disappear with the ease of raising a glass to your mouth.

  Chapter 8

  YOU CAN’T DRINK at all?” Honoria said.

  “I could but I choose not to,” I replied, and felt instantly stupid at my own rhetoric.

  “I thought if you went through the Twelve Steps, you were cured. It must be awful to know that about yourself.”

  “To know what?”

  “That you’re afraid of your own metabolism.”

  There was a black shine in both her hair and eyes, and she wore a white cotton dress with eyelets in the bodice that exposed the deep tan in her skin. When she ordered her third vodka collins I made a show of noticing the clock above the bar and told her I should be going. But you didn’t get off the hook that easily with Honoria Chalons. She gave the waiter a credit card to pay the check before I could, then asked him to put her drink in a Styrofoam cup. “Do me a favor?” she said to me.

  I waited for her to go on.

  “My car won’t start. I think it’ll have to be towed. Can you give me a lift?” she said.

  We walked back down East Main to my house and got in my pickup truck. She tripped once on a pitch in the sidewalk and I felt her body come hard against me. “I still haven’t eaten dinner. Want to stop somewhere?” she said.

  “I have work to do,” I said.

  “It’s a grand evening. I don’t want to waste it at home. The House of Chalons is a dark place. Few people know how dark it really is,” she said.

  I looked at her profile in the shadowy light of a streetlamp, and wondered if she was being deliberately grandiose. But she was not. Her eyes were fixed on the rooftops of the Victorian and antebellum homes along the street and the birds circling over the chimneys, as though they held the answer to a question she had never resolved.

  “Why are you staring at me?” she said.

  “I wonder why you live at home.”

  “To care for my father. He’s quite ill. I don’t think he’ll live long.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “He’ll handle it. He always does. God, I need a bath. Every time I
come back to Louisiana, I can’t seem to scrub the dirt and humidity out of my skin.”

  In the shadows her cheeks were pooled with color, her eyes glazed with an alcoholic shine. She looked up into my face, almost like a little girl, perhaps faintly embarrassed at the visceral nature of her language. “Take me home?” she said.

  We drove down Old Spanish Trail and on through Jeanerette. The moon was low on the horizon, veiled with brown dust from the sugar cane fields, her house lit inside the massive live oaks that surrounded it. I drove through the gate and stopped in front of the porch. My truck windows were down and for a moment I thought I smelled cigar smoke.

  The decorum of the era in which Honoria and I were raised would have required me to walk her to the door, or at least offer to do so. But I had already decided Honoria needed to get on with her life, and she didn’t need me to help her with it. I was about to say good night, without getting out of the truck, when she placed her hand on my cheek, then tilted her head sideways and pressed her mouth to mine, using her tongue, threading her fingers tightly through the back of my hair.

  I could taste vodka and sweet syrup and orange slices and the tartness of crushed cherries in her mouth. I could even taste the coldness of the ice that had been poured from her collins glass into the Styrofoam cup. She took a breath and got up on her knees, then bent down to kiss me again.

  “Whoa, kiddo,” I said.

  “Kiddo yourself,” she said. She got out of the truck and walked inside, her back stiff, the porch light bright on her white dress.

  I turned the truck around and started back toward the gate. Not more than three feet from my window, I saw the red glow of a cigar among a tangle of persimmon trees. I slowed the truck, the tires creaking on the gravel, and looked into the spectral face of Honoria’s father, Raphael Chalons.

  “My daughter is a vulnerable woman, sir. Be advised I do not abide the man who would take advantage of that fact,” he said.

  Good evening to you, too, sir, I thought, and drove on without replying. I also decided that on some occasions good deeds and the obligations of charity should be heaved over the gunnels.

  THE NEXT MORNING Jimmie was up before me, fixing breakfast for us, feeding Tripod and Snuggs, whistling a song.

  “You must have had a pretty good night,” I said.

  “This friend of mine, the professor at UL, he’s got this huge collection of country and bluegrass music. Remember we used to always say Ida sang just like Kitty Wells? That’s because Kitty Wells sang in B flat. See, my friend has put his whole record library in his computer and he came up with all these recordings that have somebody on them singing like Kitty Wells.”

  Jimmie had been cutting toast on the breadboard while he spoke. He turned around, his starched white shirt crinkling, his hair wet and combed, his face shiny with aftershave. “You know the best part? On a couple of those records somebody’s playing a mandolin just the way Ida did,” he said.

  I looked away so he could not see my eyes. “That’s good, Jimmie,” I said.

  “Yeah, Ida was smart. I always thought she got away from those guys. Why would they want to kill her, anyway? She was just a piney-woods country girl.”

  Because they’re sonsofbitches and they make examples of piney-woods girls, I thought.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “I’d better get to the office.”

  “Hey, we’re going to find ole Ida. You’ll see,” he said.

  “You bet,” I said, knowing that Jimmie, like all brave people, would continue to believe in the world, regardless of what it did to him.

  A LITTLE AFTER NINE, Wally, our overweight dispatcher and self-appointed departmental comic, buzzed my phone. “There’s a newsman down here wants to see you. Should I send him up?” he said.

  “Which newsman?”

  “The one on TV looks like an icicle.”

  “Valentine Chalons?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Why don’t you just say so?”

  “’Cause he looks like an icicle. Or I could call him the TV guy wit’ a broom up his ass trying to give me a bad time. By the way, that nun left a note for you.”

  I couldn’t begin to follow his words. “Wally—” I began.

  “That nun, the one who builds homes for poor people, she was here to see you. I buzzed your phone but you wasn’t at your desk. So she left a note. It’s in your mailbox. She went out when the TV guy was coming in. You want to see the TV guy or not?”

  Three minutes later Valentine Chalons opened my office door without knocking and closed it behind him, his eyes locked on mine. “I’ll make this simple. My sister is a grown woman and can associate with whomever she pleases. But I’ll be damned if you’ll use her to get at my father,” he said.

  “Sorry to see you interpret things that way, Val,” I said.

  “My father is a heart patient. He probably doesn’t have long to live. What are you trying to do to him?”

  “Your sister had a problem with her car. I gave her a ride home.”

  “You’re looking me in the face, telling me you have no issue with my father?”

  “If I do, it doesn’t involve your sister.”

  “How about Sister Molly? It’s just coincidence I saw her leaving here this morning?”

  “I don’t know what it is, because I didn’t see or talk with her.”

  “Our handyman told me he saw you at her office yesterday.”

  “Yeah, I did see her yesterday. But that’s none of your business.”

  “Let me set you straight about that hypocritical bitch. She’s a closet Marxist who uses the Church to stir up class hatred in ignorant and gullible people. Except she’s not a real nun. She’s got some kind of half-ass status that doesn’t require her to take vows. So she hides behind the veil and gets to have it both ways.”

  “What’s she got on you, partner?”

  He put his hands on his hips, like a drill instructor, and looked sideways out a window, as though the room was too small for the level of anger he needed to express. Then he snuffed down in his nose and shook it off. “Give my dad a break, will you?”

  “He’s a heart patient but he smokes cigars?” I said.

  “You’re a beaut, Dave,” he said.

  MOLLY BOYLE’S NOTE was a simple one: Please call. Thanks—Molly B. I rang her office number and was told she was mowing the grass and would return my call later. But why wait, I asked myself, and headed down the road in a cruiser toward Jeanerette.

  Then I had to ask myself a more serious question: What was so urgent about seeing Molly Boyle? Why not just wait for her call? The answer that started to suggest itself was one I quickly put out of my mind.

  When I pulled in to her agency I saw her seated on a tractor, towing a grass-cutter though a field of buttercups, a little black boy in the seat with her. She turned at the end of a long swath, then saw me walking toward her and shut off the engine. She wore a baseball cap and cotton gloves and a sleeveless blouse that was peppered with sweat. The tops of her arms were dusty and sprinkled with sun freckles. She introduced the little black boy as Tee Bleu Bergeron. “His daddy is our best birdhouse builder,” she said.

  “Your father works for the Chalons family?” I said.

  “Yes, suh, he work for Mr. Raphael. We live right up the bayou from the big house,” he replied.

  The little boy was many generations removed from antebellum days, but he still obeyed the same custom of referring to the main building on a plantation as “the big house,” just as his antecedents had. Sister Molly asked him to go to her office and wait for her. “You’ve been a good helper, Tee Bleu. I’ll drive you home in a little bit,” she said.

  “Why is he called ‘Little Blue’?” I asked.

  “His daddy says the umbilical cord was wrapped around his throat when he was born. I think he has some brain damage. But he’s a sweet little guy. Why’d you ask?” Sister Molly said.

  “I was just curious.” But
my answer was not an honest one. The little boy did not look like his father, the black man named Andre Bergeron. He was light-skinned, with high cheekbones, and liquid brown eyes and jet-black straight hair. He looked like Honoria Chalons.

  “You asked me yesterday about a woman named Ida—” Sister Molly began.

  “Ida Durbin,” I said.

  “Yes. Did something happen to her?”

  “I think she may have been murdered many years ago.”

  “Was she a prostitute?”

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. But you said the Chalonses would like to forget about her. I think the Chalonses have secrets. I think one of their secrets is their involvement with prostitution. So I should have spoken up when you asked about this Durbin woman.”

  “What do you know about the Chalonses and prostitution, Sister?”

  “Call me Molly. I grew up in Port Arthur. My father was career army and a policeman. He always said the brothels in Galveston were owned by the Chalons and Giacano families. Raphael Chalons is infamous for his sexual behavior.” She stopped, obviously conflicted with herself and her own motivations. “I don’t feel very comfortable with any of this, Detective Robicheaux. I think I’ve said too much.”

  “Call me Dave.”

  The field fell into shadow and the wind came up and wrinkled the bayou and flattened the uncut wildflowers in the field. She removed her cap and blew a wisp of hair out of one eye. Her face looked dilated in the heat. There were beads of field dirt around her neck and a throbbing insect bite on one cheek. She reminded me of a countrywoman of years ago. In a way, she reminded me of my mother.

  “I think you’ve done a lot for poor people in this area, Sister Molly. I think you and your friends are what the Church is all about,” I said, realizing I still could not bring myself to call her by her first name.

  Her eyes fastened on mine and her mouth parted slightly. “Thank you,” she said.

  The silent moment that followed was one neither of us had chosen. I looked out at the bayou and the Spanish moss straightening in the trees along the banks. She fitted her cap back on her head and took the keys out of the ignition for no reason, then tried to reinsert them in the slot. They dropped from her fingers into the uncut grass below the tractor.