Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Jericho Johnny Wineburger owned a saloon on a side street between Magazine and Tchoupitoulas, and claimed to have been out of the life for a least a decade. But he had at least a thirty-year history of killing people, and supposedly, with another button man, had taken out Bugsy Siegel’s cousin with a shotgun on a train roaring through West Palm Beach. Clete believed Jericho Johnny had turned down the contract on Clete’s life either out of fear of Clete or respect for the fact they both grew up in the Irish Channel.

  I doubted either possibility. Jericho Johnny had ice water in his veins and I suspect was capable of killing his victim and eating a sandwich while he did it.

  The air was cold and smelled of ozone. The streets were flooded, and thunder was booming over the Gulf when I parked in front of his saloon and ran for the colonnade. The only customers in the saloon were some kids shooting pool in back and a white woman in a house robe who slept with her face on her hands at a table. Jericho Johnny stood behind the bar drying glasses while he watched a professional wrestling match on TV. He looked at me and slid a toothpick into the corner of his mouth. “This about Purcel?” he asked.

  His words came out in an accentuated whisper, as though they were filtered through wet grit. Some said his vocal cords were impaired when he was a child and he accidentally drank rug cleaner. But I think the story was romantic in origin. I think Jericho Johnny came out of a different gene pool than the rest of us.

  “I need the name of the cop who wanted you to clip Clete,” I said.

  I thought he might give me a bad time, but he didn’t. He looked at the backs of his nails. “Pitts,” he said.

  “But you told him to get lost?” I said.

  “In so many words, yeah, I did. You still on the wagon?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “’Cause I’ll stand you a beer and a shot if you’re not. Otherwise, I’ll offer you a cup of coffee. Take the two-by-four out of your ass, Robicheaux.”

  His accent could have been mistaken for Flatbush or South Boston. He had worked on the docks when he was a kid, and he had silver hair, short, powerful forearms wrapped with tattoos, and a face that could have been called handsome except for the thinness in his lips. He poured me a demitasse of black coffee and placed it on a small saucer with a cube of sugar and a tiny spoon. He saw me look at the woman who was sleeping with her face on her hands. “She lives up the street. She’s scared of lightning and can’t sleep during an electrical storm, so she comes down here,” he said.

  “You didn’t piece off the work?” I asked.

  “I never pieced off a job in my life,” he replied.

  “Why’d you tell Nig Rosewater about it?”

  “I didn’t. This cop, this guy Pitts, he went to two or three people in the business about Purcel. I was just one of them. That’s how Nig heard about it. I own a saloon today. I live in a nice house out back. I been out of the life a long time now.”

  “You think somebody else took the contract?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know.”

  A phone rang in back and he went to answer it. The rain and lightning had quit, and the street was dark and in the light from the saloon I could see the fronds of a banana tree flapping against a side window. The woman who had been sleeping at the table woke up and looked around, as though unsure of where she was. “I want to go home,” she said.

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Down the block, next to the grocery store,” she replied.

  “I’ll take you there,” I said.

  “Do I know you?” she said.

  “I’m a friend of Johnny’s,” I said.

  She was very old, quite feeble, and even with her hand on my arm she had to take small steps as we walked toward the front door.

  “Where you going?” Jericho Johnny said from behind the bar. I explained I was taking the elderly woman home.

  His toothpick flexed in the corner of his mouth and his eyes looked at a neutral space between us. “Come back when you’re done,” he said.

  A few minutes later I reentered the saloon and finished my coffee. The kids who had been shooting pool bought a bagful of cold long-neck beers to go and went out the door. The wind was blowing through the screen doors, and the inside of the saloon smelled like rain and sawdust.

  Jericho Johnny leaned on his arms. “Here’s the deal, Robicheaux. That guy Pitts wasn’t trying to put a kite on just Purcel. He wanted a twofer—seventy-five hundred for the whole job.”

  “Who was the other hit?” I asked.

  “Who you think?” he said.

  “Pitts used my name specifically?”

  “He said it was a friend of Purcel. An Iberia Parish plainclothes. He said the guy had been an NOPD Homicide roach, but got kicked off the force because he was a drunk. He said if this guy gets smoked, no cops around here are gonna be burning candles. Sound like anybody you know?”

  “You willing to wear a wire?”

  He laughed to himself and began stacking bottles of Bacardi and Beam and Jack Daniel’s on a shelf.

  “Why’d you tell me all this, Johnny?” I said.

  “That was my mother you drove home. I don’t like to owe people. You mixed up with politics?”

  “No.”

  “I think the juice on this deal is coming from up high. Watch your ass. This city is full of dirtbags. It ain’t like the old days,” he said.

  THE NEXT MORNING was Friday. As soon as I came into the office I told Helen of my visit to Jericho Johnny’s saloon.

  A deep line cut across her brow. “You want to have Wineburger picked up?” she said.

  “Waste of time. Plus, I’d lose him as an informant,” I replied.

  “He said the juice was coming from up high? Who are you a threat to? I don’t think this goes any higher than Billy Joe Pitts.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “Raphael Chalons is not behind this, Dave, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m just reporting what happened.”

  “I’m going to call Pitts’s boss and tell him what we have.”

  “Mistake,” I said.

  “My life is full of them,” she replied.

  JIMMIE HAD BEEN OUT of town for a day, without telling me where he had gone. Friday evening his Lincoln pulled into the drive, shotgunned with dried mud. He was beaming when he came through the front door. “Guess where I’ve been,” he said.

  “Galveston,” I said.

  “Galveston, then I got a lead on an old guy over in Beaumont. He used to play backup for Floyd Tillman and Ernest Tubb. Remember Floyd Tillman, wrote ‘Slipping Around’?”

  “Jim—”

  “This old-timer used to play in a lot of beer joints along the Texas coast. He said a girl from one of the hot pillow houses used to sit in with his band. He said she played the mandolin and guitar.”

  I tried to look attentive, but I could not get my mind off Jericho Johnny Wineburger. Jimmie held up a 45-rpm record in a water-stained paper jacket. “The old man gave me this. One side is titled ‘Ida’s Jump.’ He said this gal always played a song by that name. He always thought this recording must have been her song.”

  “Can I see that?” I said.

  The group was called the Texas Tumbleweeds. The recording had been made at a small studio in Corpus Christi, the same studio where Harry Choates had made his famous recording of “Jolie Blon” in 1946.

  “It was cut in 1960, two years after she disappeared,” Jimmie said.

  “The name Ida Durbin is nowhere on the label, Jim.”

  “Does that phonograph in the living room work?”

  The people who had sold me my house had left behind an ancient combination radio and high-fidelity console, with a three-speed turntable and a mechanical arm that made use of reversible needles. The top squeaked on a rusted hinge when Jimmie raised it up and fitted the small 45-rpm recording on the spindle.

  The groves in the record were filled with
static, but I could hear a string band of the kind you associate with country music of the 1940s and ’50s—a fiddle, stand-up bass, Dobro, muted drums, an acoustical guitar outfitted with an electronic pickup, and a mandolin. Then a woman and two or three men began singing. They reminded me of Rose and the Maddox Brothers or Wilma Lee and Stony Cooper. Their harmony was beautiful.

  “It’s her,” Jimmie said.

  “How can you be sure?” I said.

  “It’s her,” he repeated.

  I gave up. I told him about my conversation with Jericho Johnny Wineburger. “Are you hearing me?” I said.

  “You’re talking about Whiplash Wineburger’s brother? He’s a meltdown. He was cleaning his gun on the toilet and ricocheted a round into his own head,” he replied.

  “I don’t want you getting mistaken for me again,” I said.

  But he’d already blown me off and moved on. “My friend at UL can re-create an old record through a digital process that removes all the static and leaves only the music. It’s Ida, Dave. We didn’t get that poor girl killed. Why don’t you be happy about something once in a while?”

  “Even if that’s Ida’s voice, there’s no way to determine when the recording was made. It could have been recorded on tape, then put on wax later,” I said.

  “Why would the studio sit on a tape for two years? You can think up more bad news than any person I’ve ever known. Are you going to your AA meetings?” he said.

  Maybe he was right, I told myself. Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice. Who was I to steal it from him?

  Chapter 10

  THE DAYS WENT BY UNEVENTFULLY. I made two weekend trips to Galveston and talked to retired cops, checked death records in the coroner’s office, interviewed a madam who had run a house on Post Office Street, called the state attorney in Austin, and found out absolutely nothing about the fate of Ida Durbin. The studio that had cut the recording of “Ida’s Jump” had gone out of business many years ago, and the musician who had told Jimmie a girl named Ida had sat in with his band during the late 1950s turned out to be a lonely old fellow who became more and more confused and contradictory in his account the more I talked with him.

  If Ida Durbin was alive, she had left no paper trail of any kind.

  I also began to wonder if Jimmie wasn’t right about Jericho Johnny. Jericho Johnny’s brother was Whiplash Wineburger, a part-time Mob lawyer and full-time gasbag who, when accused by his wife in divorce court of sleeping with the Puerto Rican maid, exclaimed, “I’m no snob, Your Honor! Guilty as charged!” At best, Jericho Johnny was a sociopath with blood up to his elbows. Why believe anything he said?

  For a few nights I slept with my .45 automatic under my bed and kept my cut-down twelve-gauge Remington behind the couch in the living room. But after a while I no longer looked with caution upon the arrival of a deliveryman or a meter reader from the utility company. The world was a good place, the early dawn announced by birdsong and blue shadows on the lawn and fog puffing off the bayou. Why let fear and suspicion invade the heart and lay claim on your life?

  Then on a windswept, burning Friday afternoon, when the sky was yellow with dust, Helen called me into her office. The Baton Rouge Advocate was spread open on her desk. “Looks like Billy Joe Pitts won’t be bothering you anymore,” she said.

  “Say again?”

  She tapped her finger on a back-page article. “A boating accident. He was drunk in an outboard on his old man’s lake. He fell out of the boat and it circled around and hit him in the head. I just got off the phone with the sheriff,” she said. She tilted her weight back in her chair and watched my face. “What bwana say?”

  “You buy it?” I asked.

  She picked up a ballpoint pen and twisted it in her fingers, then let it drop on her desk blotter. “I’d already told the sheriff we believed Pitts may have been involved in a murder-for-hire plot. So I asked him why I had to find out about Pitts’s death in the newspaper.”

  “And?”

  “He said he’d been real busy of late.”

  “You talk to the coroner?”

  “I have a call in. But it’s not going anywhere. That place is corrupt even beyond Louisiana standards,” she replied.

  “Maybe it was just an accident, Helen. Guys like Pitts eventually blow out their doors.”

  “I’m going to ask NOPD to roust Jericho Johnny.”

  “Don’t do it,” I said.

  She scratched her forearm. “Okay, boss man,” she said.

  THAT EVENING just at dusk, it rained hard, pounding on the tin roof of my house, the raindrops dancing with a strange yellow light on the bayou. Then suddenly it was quiet outside, the trees dripping, the air cool and smelling of flowers and wet leaves. I wanted to believe that Billy Joe Pitts had died accidentally, that there was no contract on my life, that I was no different from any other police officer or, for that matter, any ordinary person who went about his day with goodwill toward others and tried to do the best he could with the life he had. I did not want to believe that somehow I was a harbinger of violence and death, a man who dwelled in the cities of the dead and who trailed the stench of a necropolis wherever he went.

  But I had always subscribed to the belief that there is no mystery to the human personality. People are what they do. My own record was one I did not care to examine. The faces of the men I had killed did not appear in my sleep, but sometimes, on the periphery of my vision, I saw a moving shadow, a figure inside the elephant grass, a tiny man in black pajamas and a conical straw hat, or I heard a voice, the phlegmy death rattle of the man who murdered my second wife, Annie, and whose life I took in turn. Or sometimes I sat on the edge of the bed, in the middle of the night, inside a square of moonlight, wondering if indeed the wind in the trees or the thropping of helicopter blades overhead was nothing more than the auditory manifestation of a world at peace or if in fact hell was a place that some individuals carried inside themselves the rest of their lives.

  I did not trust myself alone anymore. Sometimes I thought I, too, was infected with bloodlust. There were moments when I could feel shards of color explode behind my eyes, a balloon of anger surge in my chest without cause. I avoided watching the evening news. I would quickly turn off the radio in my truck when I would hear the voices of what we used to call REMFs, rear echelon motherfuckers, cheering on a war they or their family members would never serve in. There were moments when I had thoughts I would never share with anyone.

  I wanted to reclaim my dead wife and lead her back from the underworld, as Orpheus did when he stole Eurydice from Hades.

  IN THE FRIDAY ISSUE of the Daily Iberian was a feature story about a picnic and hot dog roast at Sister Molly Boyle’s self-help housing agency and a race down Bayou Teche involving hundreds of plastic ducks. According to the article, the children would draw numbers from a barrel that corresponded to numbers painted on the bottom of the ducks. Then at 10:00 a.m. the ducks would be released at the drawbridge on Burke Street, when the tidal current was flowing southward. Eight miles down the Teche the first ten ducks across the finish line would determine which children would win a T-shirt with Donald Duck’s face ironed on it.

  I convinced myself my attendance Saturday morning at the picnic was innocent in nature. It was a fine day, the sun covered by rain clouds, the wind flecked with salt, the Spanish moss straightening in the oak trees along the bayou, Frisbees sailing through the air. What could be wrong in eating ice cream and grilled frankfurters among people of color for whom a plastic duck race down the bayou was a grand event?

  But it wasn’t long before I found ways to put myself next to Sister Molly Boyle. I helped her set tables, turn franks on a flame-streaked grill, paint margarine on hot dog buns, and finally to dip ten ducks out of the water with a crab net.

  It was all in the spirit of fun, wasn’t it?

  But regardless of what I was doing, my eye would travel to wherever she was on the grounds
. I felt foolish and wondered if I had entered that self-deluded stage in an aging man’s life when others have to protect him from knowledge about himself.

  She was certainly lovely to look at. She was hard-bodied, her jeans stretched tight on her rump and hips, her shoulders powdered with freckles, her red hair feathered with light when the wind blew it, her eyes interested in whatever was being said to her, without any sign of impatience or hidden thoughts in them that I could see. My brother was a light-bearer. I believed Molly Boyle was probably one, too.

  I went into the office to use the restroom. As I was coming out, I saw a little boy wandering in the hallway, about to wet his pants. I took him into the restroom and helped him use the toilet and wash his hands. When I came back out, his mother was standing by the door, fat and angry, her print dress damp against her distended dugs. “You didn’t have no bidness taking him in there,” she said. Then she pointed her finger at the little boy. “You gonna get it, you.”

  I started to speak, then saw Molly Boyle come through the door, the sun bright and hot at her back. “There was a man in a boat up the bayou. The children say he had a rifle in his boat,” she said.

  The angry, fat woman pulled her child down the hall and slammed the door behind her.

  “Where’s this guy now?” I said to Molly.

  She went to a window and looked across the lawn at a line of cypress trees on the bayou. I stood behind her and could smell the heat from the grill in her clothes and a warm odor like flowers and shampoo in her hair. “He’s gone. He was just behind those trees. He had a pair of binoculars. I think he was watching you walk into the building,” she said.

  When she turned around, her chin was pointed upwards. She seemed smaller, shorter, her face both beautiful and vulnerable, in a way that made my throat dry and caused my loins to tingle. “Can you describe what he looked like, Sister?” I said.

  “Don’t call me that again, will you?” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  “He was white. He had a cap on. But I didn’t get a good look at him. Is someone after you?”