Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “I’m all thumbs some days,” she said.

  I found the keys for her and placed them in her hand, my fingertips touching the graininess of her skin and the wetness in the cup of her palm. On the way back to New Iberia, I tried to keep an empty place in the center of my mind and not think the thoughts I was thinking.

  QUESTION: What can dumb and fearful people always be counted on to do?

  Answer: To try to control and manipulate everyone in their environment.

  Question: What is the tactic used by these same dumb people as they try to control others?

  Answer: They lie.

  That night I got a call from a man out of my past, an anachronism from a more primitive time by the name of Robert Cobb, also known as Bad Texas Bob. Years ago in Louisiana, when a convict escaped from a work camp, the state police always assigned the recapture to Bad Texas Bob. Bob’s lifetime record was eight for eight, all DOA. He thrived on gunsmoke and blood splatter, and if he ever experienced remorse for his deeds, I never saw any indication of it.

  There used to be an all-night café in New Orleans where cops of all kinds hung out. Pimps, wiseguys, junkies, and jackrollers knew to take their business up the street. One night an out-of-town black man walked in, laid a .38 inside a folded newspaper on the counter, and told the cashier to empty the register. Bad Texas Bob climbed out a side window, waited at the entrance for the stickup man to emerge, and blew his brains all over the glass panels of the revolving door.

  Over the phone Bob’s voice sounded like wet sand sliding through a drainpipe. “Hear you’re working a cold case on a whore gone missing,” he said.

  “Yeah, something like that,” I said.

  “Galveston, about 1958 or ’59?”

  “You have some information for me, Bob?”

  “Maybe. Galveston is where I started out. I’m having a couple of drinks in Broussard. Hey, guys like us were the real cops, weren’t we?”

  No, we weren’t, I thought. But I had learned long ago not to argue with those who need to revise the past.

  I drove on the old Lafayette highway to the little town of Broussard, crossed the train tracks, and parked in front of a low-roofed bar whose cracked windows were held together with silver tape and framed with Christmas tree lights. The interior was dark, the air refrigerated, the cigarette smoke curling through an exhaust fan in back. Bad Texas Bob was at the bar, hunkered over a shot glass and draft beer, wearing a gray suit, string tie, cowboy boots, and a short-brim Stetson canted on the side of his head.

  He wore expensive jewelry, smoked gold-tipped, lavender cigarettes, and tried to affect an aura of contentment and prosperity. But the years had not been kind to Bob. His teeth were as long as a horse’s, his face emaciated, the backs of his hands brown with liver spots. Bad Texas Bob was the nightmare that every cop fears he might become.

  “You still in the Dr Pepper club?” he said.

  “No other place will have me. How you been doing, Bob?”

  “I do a little consulting work. I work part-time at the casino in Lake Charles. Billy Joe Pitts says you were interested in a whore by the name of—” He snapped his fingers at the air.

  “Ida Durbin,” I said.

  He tossed back his whiskey and chased it with the draft beer, then wiped the salt from the beer glass off his mouth. “Yeah, that was her name. I knew her. What do you want to know?”

  His eyes were level with mine—watery, iniquitous, harboring thoughts or memories of a kind you never want to guess at, the skin at the corners as wrinkled as a turtle’s.

  “What happened to her, Bob?” I said.

  “Nothing, as far as I know. People who run cathouses don’t kill their whores, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  He pointed for the bartender to refill his shot glass. He seemed to be disconnected from our conversation now, but when I glanced at the bar mirror I saw his eyes looking back at me. “She had sandy hair, nice-looking, tall gal? I remember her. Didn’t nothing happen to her. I would have knowed about it,” he said.

  But Bob’s confidence level had slipped and he was talking too fast.

  “Her pimp was named Lou Kale. Remember a lowlife by that name?” I said.

  “I never worked Vice. I just used to see this little gal around the island, is all.”

  But I remembered another story connected to Bob and some of his colleagues, one I had always hoped was exaggerated or apocryphal, in the same way you hope that stories about pedophilia among the clergy or financial corruption in your own family are untrue.

  A notorious Baton Rouge madam by the name of Vicki Rochon used to run a house specializing in oral sex. A fundamentalist Christian group was about to close her down when the local cops offered her a deal: Vicki and her girls could take a vacation in Panama City, then return to town in a couple of months and their business would not be interrupted again. No money was involved. Vicki became an invaluable snitch and personally provided free ones for the cops. As a bonus, her son, who was doing hard time in Angola’s Camp J, was transferred to an honor farm. Bad Texas Bob became one of Vicki’s most ardent free patrons.

  “Thanks for passing on the information, Bob. But if I were you, I’d let your friend Pitts drown in his own shit. He’s on a pad for the Chalons family. Did you know that?” I said.

  “I was trying to do you a favor, for old times’ sake. Screw Pitts.” Bob knocked back his whiskey and drew in on his cigarette, the whites of his eyes threaded with tiny veins.

  “Let me buy you a round,” I said.

  “I’m covered.”

  “See you around, partner,” I said.

  “You might think I’m pulling your joint, but I remember a Galveston whore by the name of Ida Whatever. She played a fiddle. No, that wasn’t it. She played a mandolin. Played the fire out of it.”

  “Say that again?”

  But he had nothing to add. Bad Texas Bob had outsmarted me. Like all corrupt people, he had wrapped a piece of truth inside a lie. To try to discern the fact from the lie was to empower the agenda of a classical manipulator, I told myself. I left Bob to his booze in Broussard, wondering if I had just revisited my alcoholic past or seen my future.

  Chapter 9

  THE CORONER, Koko Hebert, was waiting for me when I got to work Thursday morning. He dropped his great weight down ponderously in a chair and fanned his face with his hat. His skin was flushed, his beachball of a stomach rising up and down as he breathed. A package of cigarettes protruded from his shirt pocket. He was probably the most unhealthy-looking human specimen I had ever seen. “How’s life, Koko?” I said.

  “Burning up out there,” he said.

  He pulled his tropical shirt off his chest and shook the cloth. I could smell an odor like talcum and stale antiperspirant wafting off his skin. “The contents of the DOA’s purse, you got a list in your file?” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “Were there car keys in there, house keys on a chain, maybe a penlight on a chain, something like that?” he asked.

  “Yeah, car keys,” I said.

  “On a chain?”

  “No, as I remember, they were on a ring. They’re in an evidence locker,” I replied.

  He held up a small Ziploc bag. Inside it was a thin piece of brass chain, no more than an inch long, with very tiny links. “Maybe this fell out of her clothes. I’m not sure. One of the paramedics found it in the body bag,” he said.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “You said something about the DOA I couldn’t forget. You said a woman who’d swallow her own wedding ring might also figure a way to tell us who killed her. So I wondered about this chain.”

  It was obvious humility did not come easily to Koko Hebert, and I was reminded of George Orwell’s admonition that people are always better than we think they are. Koko fiddled with his Panama hat, then flipped the Ziploc bag and chain on my desk. “Did Mack Bertrand get ahold of you yet?” he asked.

  Mack was our forensic chemist out at the lab.
I told Koko I had not heard from him.

  “The DOA’s clothes had small traces of grease and rubber on them,” he said.

  “She was inside the trunk of a car?” I said.

  “That’d be my guess. Give me a call if you need anything else.” He stood up from his chair, the bottom of his stomach like a giant watermelon inside his linen slacks.

  “There is one other thing, Koko. Why do you always give Helen a bad time? Why not cut her some slack?” I said.

  “She’s a dyke trying to do a man’s job. Get a life, Robicheaux,” he replied.

  Lesson learned? Don’t expect too many miracles in one day.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Helen buzzed my extension. “I just got a call from Raphael Chalons. Clete Purcel was out at his house. Know anything about that?” she said.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Then why was he out there?”

  “Clete’s uncontrollable sometimes. I’ve already talked to him. He doesn’t listen.”

  There was silence on the line. I wanted to bite my tongue off. “Talked to him about what? What’s he done, Dave?”

  “Made a home call on Billy Joe Pitts.”

  “And?”

  “I think he might have dropped a set of weights on Pitts’s chest.”

  “I just don’t believe this.”

  “That Clete went after Pitts?”

  “No, that I’m having this conversation. The next time I rehire you, just put a bullet in my brain. In the meantime, straighten out this shit with Chalons.”

  “Why not tell Chalons to kiss your ass? He’s not even in our jurisdiction.”

  “Bwana go now. Bwana write report and put it on my desk when he get back.”

  CLETE’S P.I. OFFICE was on Main, in an old brick building hard by the old jail, the front shaded by a solitary oak tree growing out of the sidewalk. A bell tinkled above the door when I went inside. He was sitting at a metal desk, in the middle of large room that was bare except for two file cabinets, flipping through the pages of a notebook that he always carried in his shirt pocket. “Glad you dropped by. I did some more checking on Billy Joe Pitts and that casino over in Lake Charles.” He looked at the expression on my face and raised his eyebrows. “What?”

  “Helen Soileau says you fired up Raphael Chalons,” I said.

  “I don’t read it that way.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Chalons is backing a couple of casinos in western Louisiana. He’s got a religious crusader fronting points for him with some dudes in Washington. The issue is licenses for some Indian tribes who can siphon off the Texas trade before it goes to casinos deeper in the state.”

  “What’s new about that?”

  “I got a call this morning from Nig Rosewater about a couple of bail skips. Then Nig says, ‘What’s this about some peckerwood cop trying to put up a kite on you?’ Get this—Nig says a cop went to Jericho Johnny Wineburger and offered five grand to have me clipped. Except Jericho Johnny knows better and told the cop to get fucked.”

  Jericho Johnny Wineburger was an old-time button man for the Giacano family and was called Jericho because his work product traveled to a dead city and did not return from it.

  “You sure it was Pitts?” I said.

  “Yeah, because I called up Jericho Johnny and he described Pitts exactly,” Clete said.

  “Pitts’s beef with you is personal. Why would you put it on Raphael Chalons?”

  “You’re not hearing anything I say. You were right about Pitts. He works for the Chalonses. The old man is a regular with Pitts’s chippies. ‘Personal’ is when guys like Chalons look the other way while the hired help splatter your grits. So I went out to his house and told him that. As well as a couple of other things.”

  “Like what other things?”

  “That if he kept his stiff red-eye in his pants, he’d probably have a lot fewer problems. By the way, the guy is supposed to have a schlong on him like a fifteen-inch chunk of flex pipe. Stop looking like that. He needed a heart-to-heart. He probably appreciated it.”

  Clete tried to make light of his encounter with Raphael Chalons, but he and I had reached an age when cynicism and humor become poor surrogates for the rage we feel when our lives are treated with disregard. I bought him lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria, then drove up the bayou to the home of Raphael Chalons.

  I HAD ALWAYS WANTED to dismiss him as a vestigial reminder of the old oligarchy—imperious, pragmatic, amoral when necessity demanded it, casual if not cavalier regarding the hardship imposed by his society on the backs of blacks and poor whites. He may have been partially all those things but I also believed he was a far more complex man.

  He was a strict traditionalist, even to the point of refusing to air-condition his home. But during the Civil Rights era, when a group of black men entered the clubhouse at the public golf course and were ignored by the waiters, who were also black and feared for their jobs, Chalons sat at their table and told the manager to put their drinks on his tab. After that one seminal incident, black golfers never had trouble at our public links or clubhouse again.

  He became the legal guardian of orphaned children and paid for their education. I suspected he would not use profane language or be personally abusive at gunpoint. In his own mind the estate he had inherited was a votive trust, and those who would impose their way upon it risked his wrath. Sometimes I wondered if Raphael Chalons heard the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux.

  The rumors that he did business with the Giacanos were I’m sure true. To what degree was up for debate. In the state of Louisiana, systemic venality is a given. The state’s culture, mind-set, religious attitudes, and economics are no different from those of a Caribbean nation. The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in the state of Louisiana and not do business with the devil probably knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana. Chalons was an enigma, a protean creation bound more to the past than the present, and in some ways a mirror of us all. But the best description I ever heard of Chalons came from his own attorney, who once told me, “Raphael hates lawyers, keeps all his records in his own head, and is a ruthless sonofabitch. But by God he always keeps his word.”

  I parked my cruiser in the spangled shade of a live oak and was told by a yardman that Raphael Chalons was in the back, down by the bayou, walking his dog. I went around the side of the building, past slave quarters that were used to store baled hay and a cistern that had caved into sticks on its brick foundation. Down the slope, in the sunlight, I saw Raphael Chalons throwing a stick for his pet Rottweiler to fetch. As I approached him, he snapped his fingers at the dog and clipped a leash onto its collar, then stepped on the end of the leash with one foot.

  He was a tall, ascetic-looking man, with shiny black hair and a scrolled and waxed mustache, like the one worn by the legendary Confederate naval officer Raphael Sims. His hands had the long, tapered quality of a surgeon’s, deeply tanned on the backs, corded with blue veins.

  I told him I had been sent by the sheriff to investigate his complaint regarding Clete Purcel. “Did he bother or threaten you in some way, sir?” I asked.

  “You’re not patronizing me, are you, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Sheriff Soileau doesn’t want someone from our parish threatening people, if in fact that was the case,” I replied.

  I saw the veiled challenge to his veracity register in his eyes. “If he had threatened me, I would have run him off with a shotgun. Did he offend me? Yes, he did. He made an insinuation an employee of mine put a contract on his life. But I have the feeling you know this man.”

  “I do.”

  “So there’s a personal agenda at work here?”

  “No,” I replied, my eyes shifting off his.

  “My son thinks you’re trying to extract information from my daughter about our family. Is that your purpose, Mr. Robicheaux, besides looking out for your friend’s interests?”

  His tone had become pointed, slightly heated, and I saw t
he dog raise its head, a string of slobber hanging from the side of its mouth. The dog was heavily muscled, its hair coarse, the same black, shiny color as Chalons’s, with tan markings around its rump and ears. Chalons snapped his fingers and the dog got down flat on the ground and rested its head on its paws.

  “There’s a hit man in New Orleans by the name of Jericho Johnny Wineburger,” I said. “His specialty is one in the mouth, one in the forehead, and one in the ear. He once told me, ‘When I pop ’em, I shut all their motors down. Forget life support. They’re cold meat when they bounce off the pavement.’ That’s the guy a cop by the name of Billy Joe Pitts was trying to sic on my friend Clete Purcel.”

  I could see the offensive nature of my language and its implication climb into his face. He studied the bayou and a powerboat splitting a long yellow trough down its center. Then he bent over and un-snapped the leash from the dog’s collar.

  Involuntarily I stepped back and rested my palm on the butt of my holstered .45, my heart beating. But Chalons only patted his dog on its head and said, “Go to the house, Heidi.”

  I watched the dog bound up the grassy slope, then I looked back at Chalons’s face. There were long vertical lines in it, the mouth downturned at the corners, as though he had never learned to smile. I took my hand from my weapon, feeling strangely disappointed that he had not forced the moment. I could not begin to guess at the thoughts that went on behind the black light in his eyes.

  Then, as though he had read my mind, he said, “Please leave my family alone, Mr. Robicheaux. We’ve done you no harm.”

  I WENT DIRECTLY from work to New Orleans, driving the four-lane through Morgan City and Des Allemands. I hit rain on the bridge over the Mississippi River, then a full-blown electrical storm as I turned off Interstate 10 and headed up St. Charles Avenue toward the old Irish Channel.