Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Chapter 11

  THE PHONE ON MY KITCHEN COUNTER rang early Monday morning. “Is this Mr. David Robicheaux?” a voice said.

  I looked at the caller ID. The number was blocked. “What can I help you with?” I said.

  “That one-eyed brother of yours cain’t let the past rest. Looks like you cain’t, either. Time to stop messing in other people’s berry patch.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “I knew this was a mistake.”

  Where had I heard the voice? Nowhere and everywhere, I thought. The speech pattern and accent were generic, the kind you hear in carnival people—laconic, faintly peckerwood with hard urban edges, the cynicism and private frame of reference always veiled. “I know you?” I asked.

  “Did you lose your cherry in a cathouse? Bet you did. Bet I can tell you the thoughts you had the night you done it. Fantasies about a big-titty girl with a soft ass an ax handle wide. Except she turned out to be a sack of flab that smelled bad and yawned in your face when you got off her. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Still haven’t figured out what you’re selling, partner, so I’d better ring off now. Thanks for your call.”

  “Ring off?”

  I hung up, then punched in 911 on my cell. Wally, our wheezing dispatcher, answered. “Call the phone company and open up my home line,” I said.

  “You got it, Dave,” he said.

  The phone on the counter rang again just as I clicked off the cell. “Hey, man, I ain’t your enemy,” the voice said. “Let Ida go. She don’t—”

  The transmission broke up and the connection went dead. Fifteen minutes later, Wally called. “It was from a cell phone, somewhere down in the Keys. What’s going on?” he said.

  “Some guy with too much time on his hands having dirty thoughts,” I said.

  “Anyt’ing I can get in on?” he replied.

  I walked to work that morning and decided not to tell Helen about the caller. She was sick of hearing the name Ida Durbin and also sick of hearing the kind of vague, uncentered information I had been offering her. In this instance, I had asked an anonymous caller if I knew him. He had answered my question with a reference to brothels. It wasn’t a complimentary response. Also it made little sense and hardly seemed worth passing on to anyone else.

  But in truth the caller had made one slip which I suspected he sorely regretted. He had spoken of Ida in the present tense. I also had a feeling I would hear from him again.

  MUCH IS WRITTEN about contract killers. Much of it is accurate. If they’re Mobbed-up, they tend to be ethnic, with tribal loyalties. But in the final analysis their race or nationality is coincidental. A button man is a sociopath first and an Italian, Jew, Latino, or Irishman second.

  Jericho Johnny Wineburger was a Jew who graduated from a Catholic high school and did hits for a Neapolitan crime family.

  The common denominators among professional assassins, at least in my experience, are greed, sometimes desperation, and total indifference to the fate of their victims and the pain visited upon their families. They possess neither anger nor curiosity and struggle with no problems of conscience whatsoever.

  Years ago, when Clete Purcel and I were at NOPD, we had to fly to New York and interview a man being held in the West Street Jail. He had admitted to murdering over thirty people for one of the major crime families, one based in both Queens and Hallandale, Florida. The only emotion he showed was concern about his own situation. He maintained he had cut a deal that should have allowed him to enter the federal Witness Protection Program but the United States Attorney had betrayed him.

  He droned on about governmental treachery and a life sentence without possibility of parole that had just been dropped on his head. I finally reached the point where I had to ask the question that lingers in the mind of every homicide cop who finds himself in a small room with a man whose handiwork he has seen up close, before the odors and the body fluids have been scrubbed out of the environment. “Did you ever have any regrets about the families of the guys you popped?” I said.

  “Who?” he said.

  “The families—their parents, their wives and kids.”

  “I didn’t know them,” he said. He shook his head and thought hard to make sure he was being honest. “No, I’m certain I didn’t know none of them. Why?”

  When I didn’t reply, he snuffed down in his nose, complained about the coolness of the room, and asked if I could get the screw to bring him a box of Kleenex.

  THE WEEK PASSED and I made no progress on the case of Fontaine Belloc, the woman the Baton Rouge serial killer had raped, bludgeoned, strangled, and dumped in a pond inside the Iberia Parish line. Sometimes in my dreams I thought I saw her ruined face speak to me. I had long ago learned the dead have their ways, and I was sure that a lady who was so brave that she would swallow her own wedding ring to keep it from the hands of her killer would find a way to tell me who he was.

  But on Friday night I decided to put away my cares and go fishing with Clete for two days out on the salt. At false dawn on Saturday morning, just as the trees were turning gray inside the fog, I hitched my boat to my truck, loaded my tackle and an ice chest in the bed, and was about to pull out of the backyard onto the street when I heard the phone ring inside.

  Ignore it, I told myself.

  But my daughter, Alafair, was attending the summer session at Reed College in Portland, and no father who loves his daughter ever ignores a call that might be related to her welfare. I cut the engine and went back inside the house.

  “Wake you up?” the voice said, one that sounded like that of a man with infected membrane on his vocal cords.

  “Jericho?” I said.

  “I know it’s early, but I let Jigger Babineau sleep it off in the back of my saloon. Then he goes crazy about an hour ago and starts breaking out my windows with pool balls. Remember Jigger? He used to wash money for the Giacanos? So I’m sticking his head in a bucket of ice water when he tells me he saw you coming out of my saloon and you’re gonna get clipped by a cop. I say, ‘Why tell me, Jigger?’ He goes, ‘Because Robicheaux is a prick and so are you.’

  “So I ask him if the hitter is a guy name of Billy Joe Pitts, since Pitts ain’t a player anymore. He says no, that ain’t the name, it’s a cop on a pad who’s also a gash-hound and likes to nail young girls but he don’t know the name. In fact, he don’t know nothing except that Dave Robicheaux, who he called a self-righteous lush, is about to get his wick snuffed. So I thought I ought to pass it on.”

  “Anything about Purcel?” I said.

  “You’re the hit, my man. You know a dirty cop who’d go so far he’d smoke another cop?”

  “Pitts’s partner, a dude named J. W. Shockly,” I replied.

  “If I was you, I’d start hanging around with a better class of people,” he said.

  CLETE AND I FISHED for speckled trout and gafftop catfish in Atchafalaya Bay, just south of Point au Fer. The trout were not running, but we loaded the ice chest with big, hard-bodied gafftop and that evening put ashore at a camp built on stilts in the sawgrass that Clete leased by the year. We cleaned and filleted the fish on the dock and deep-fried them in a huge skillet, while the sun went down like a red wafer in the Gulf of Mexico.

  That night the wind came up and blew the mosquitoes back into the marsh. Then at sunrise it rained hard for thirty minutes and the air was sweet and cool as we headed south through groundswells that burst on the bow in ropes of green and white foam. Clete had not had any alcohol in two days, and his face looked youthful and handsome inside the boat cabin, where he was tying fresh leaders and feathered spoons onto the rods we were about to set in the outriggers. The mist-covered Louisiana coastline fell away behind us, and we left the westward alluvial flow of the Mississippi and entered the smoky green, rain-dimpled roll of the Gulf, flying fish sailing across our bow like sleek, salmon-colored birds.

  I could have stayed on that stretch of water the rest of my life.

  But a sto
rm broke in the early afternoon, and we headed back for land, eating fried-oyster po’boys, our skin stiff with salt and sunburn, a good thirty pounds of gutted fish in the ice chest.

  The problems of the workweek had completely disappeared from my mind. We winched the boat up on the trailer and washed it down, then started to clean up the cabin. The rain was hitting hard on the tin roof now, and the gum trees and sawgrass in the marsh were turning gray inside the mist. Without explanation, Clete seemed to be growing agitated, faintly irritable, looking at his watch as though he were late for an appointment.

  “Give me the keys and I’ll gas up and buy some groceries to replace what we used,” he said.

  “We can buy gas on the way out,” I said.

  “I know that. But I want to restock my canned goods. That’s why I just said I wanted to buy groceries,” he replied.

  Clete’s duration of abstinence from booze was always short-lived. After a maximum of forty-eight hours, a physiological change would take place in him. He would perspire and constantly clear his throat, as though his mouth had turned to cotton, then light up a cigarette and take a deep hit on it, holding it inside, just as if he were toking on a joint. In a short while he would be back on the dirty boogie, tossing back Beam with the happy abandon of a hog rolling in slop.

  But who was I to be the expert on somebody else’s alcoholic chemistry? I tossed him the truck keys and watched through the back window as he drove down the road through the sawgrass and sheets of rain, the northern sky forked with lightning.

  He should have been gone no longer than a half hour. I finished washing the dishes and making our beds, but still no Clete. I tried his cell phone and got no answer. I lay down on top of one of the bunks and by the light of a Coleman lantern read a fine novel titled The Black Echo by Michael Connelly. The wind outside made a humming sound in the sawgrass, and when I glanced through the window I could see whitecaps on the bay, like tiny bird wings, all the way out to the horizon.

  Where was Clete?

  I fell asleep briefly and had a troubling dream that later I couldn’t remember. When I woke I heard my truck coming up the shell road, the boat trailer bouncing through the depressions. I sat on the side of the bunk and rubbed the sleep out on my face, resolving not to be angry or impatient with Cletus. The side window of the cabin had fogged in the rain, and I wiped it clean and looked out at the parking spot by the boat ramp. Clete had somebody with him and they were both drunk.

  I opened the door onto the small gallery and watched them gather up two bags of groceries and a case of beer and head through the rain. The man with Clete was dressed western—in tight jeans, cowboy boots, chrome belt buckle the size of a car tag, a snap-button shirt that glittered like tin, and a short-brim Stetson tilted on the side of his head. His teeth were long, his face as lined as a tobacco leaf.

  “Hey, Streak, look who I ran into—Bob Cobb. Remember Stomp-ass Bad Texas Bob?” Clete said.

  They clomped inside the cabin, shaking off the rain, blowing out their breath, sorting out the beer and snacks on the kitchen table. Bad Texas Bob sat down in a chair, removed his hat, and wiped the water out of his hair onto the floor. “You guys got any chippies down here?” he said.

  “Not a good question, Bob,” Clete said.

  “I was pulling Dave’s joint,” Bob said. “How’s it danglin’, Streak?”

  “We’re just about to head out,” I said, giving Clete a look.

  Bob’s face wrinkled with hundreds of little lines when he grinned, but his eyes contained a steady, forced brightness, the kind you see in people who claim to be born again or wish to sell you something. I had not shaken hands with him, although I wasn’t sure why not. In fact, I had stepped backward, toward my rucksack, which lay against the wall, the flap open.

  “I didn’t know you were a fisherman,” I said.

  “It beats spending your days at the OTB parlor,” he replied. He bent over and began slipping off his boots. “Y’all got a towel? I’m soaked to my socks.”

  His back was to us as he worked the sock off his right foot with his fingers. I could see the whiteness of his ankle, the hair along the bone, the dark yellow, shell-like thickness of his toenails. But more than anything else I could see the liquid glimmer in the corner of his eye.

  “Sorry about this, boys,” he said.

  But even before Bad Texas Bob spoke or turned toward us, I was reaching down into the pouch of my rucksack.

  “What the hell you doing, Bob?” Clete said, lowering a can of beer he was about to drink from.

  Bob had pulled a blue-black .25 auto from a Velcro ankle holster. But Clete kicked the table against him, knocking off his aim, and his first shot went wild and broke out the window behind me.

  I pointed my .45 in front of me with both hands, pulling back the hammer to full cock. When I fired, the room roared with sound and a hollow-point round cored through the top of Bob’s left shoulder. He should have gone down, but he didn’t, perhaps because he was standing up against the wall now, shooting wildly, one palm held up in front of his face, as though it could protect him from the impact of a .45 fired at close range.

  I think it was my second or third round that punched through his hand and sheared off three of his fingers and part of his palm, but I cannot be sure. My ears were ringing, my heart pounding with fear, my wrists bucking upwards with the recoil of my weapon. Then I saw Bad Texas Bob’s face come apart, jaw and teeth and brain matter dissolving like wax held too close to a flame.

  Bob crashed across the table and rolled dead-up in the center of the floor, while Clete stared at him, openmouthed, his beer splattered on his pants leg.

  I kicked open the front door and walked outside, my weapon hanging from my hand, the rain driving into my eyes. I could smell ozone and fish spawn and the salty odor of dead animals in the marsh, but I could hear no sound, as though both earth and sky had been struck dumb. Clete was shaking me, lifting my weapon from my hand, saying words that were lost in the wind. The marsh was flat and long and green in the mist, and it made me think of elephant grass in a distant country, denting and swirling under helicopters that were painted with shark’s teeth and flown by boys who only last season had played American Legion baseball.

  Chapter 12

  I WAS ON THE DESK a week while Internal Affairs investigated the shooting death of Robert Cobb. During that time my colleagues stopped by to shake hands and chat, perhaps about baseball or fishing, or they’d inquire about Alafair and her life in Portland, then they’d go away.

  The same was true at Victor’s Cafeteria and at the Winn-Dixie store up the street, the golf course where I sometimes bought a bucket of balls and hacked them into trees, and at my church down the bayou in Jeanerette. People went out of their way to show both respect and goodwill toward me. They shook hands and patted me on the shoulder or back, as they would do to a family member of the deceased at a funeral.

  But if you have ever been seriously ill or have received life-threatening injuries in a war, you know what I am about to say is true. People may be kind to you, but they also fear you because you remind them of their own mortality. The insularity they seem to create around themselves is not in your imagination. We have an atavistic sense about death, and we can smell it on others as surely as a carrion bird can.

  The same applies to those who shed blood on our behalf. We collectively absolve them and, if they wear uniforms, we may even give them medals, because, after all, they took human life while defending us, didn’t they? But we do not, under any circumstances, want to know the details of what they did or how they did it; nor do we want to know about the images that will come aborning forever in their dreams.

  ON A WEDNESDAY IN JULY I was cleared by I.A. But I could not shake a pall of depression that seemed to have descended upon me. There were too many shootings and too many dead people in my jacket. With age I had come to believe that each of us is diminished by the death of another. No one is God and no one should have the power of life or deat
h over his brother. Those who say otherwise may have their point of view, but I just don’t share it anymore.

  But I also knew enough about depression and Sigmund Freud to understand that insomnia, guilt, and night sweats are forms of impotent rage aimed at the self.

  Time to change the target, I thought.

  Somebody had contracted Bad Texas Bob Cobb to take me and, if necessary, Clete Purcel off the board. Why should I carry Cain’s mark because of what others had wrought? There was no mystery about where all this started. One way or another, the Chalonses were connected with the story of Ida Durbin, and that connection was one they did not want the world to know about.

  On the day I.A. cleared me I checked out a cruiser and headed to Lafayette and the television station and offices of Valentine Chalons. I kept it at eighty all the way up the four-lane, my flasher on, my chest and arms pumped with an adrenal-like energy, a martial band playing in my head. In AA it’s called a dry drunk. Some just call it terminal assholeitis. The bottom line is it bodes well for no one.

  I hung my badge holder on my belt and went past Valentine’s secretary into his office, thrusting back the door without knocking. His office was huge, done with white furniture and a lustrous black floor and a full glass wall that looked onto an atrium containing a live oak tree circled by a bed of pink and gray caladiums. Several men and women in business suits were sitting in plastic chairs, listening to Valentine Chalons speak to them from behind his desk. Their faces made me think of ceramic that had been painted with flesh tones.

  “I’ve got a story you can put your investigative reporters on, Val,” I said. “The guy I dusted, Robert Cobb? He was a disgraced state police officer who killed eight escaped convicts and used to get free blow jobs at Vicki Rochon’s cathouse in Baton Rouge. Then he ended up doing security work at a casino your family has money in. Is that just coincidence? What do you think about doing a human interest story on ole Bob?”