Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I WENT HOME FOR LUNCH. My next-door neighbor was Miss Ellen Deschamps. She was eighty-two years old, a graduate of a girls’ finishing school in Mississippi, and she lived in the two-story, oak-shaded frame house she had been born in. Miss Ellen had never married, and every afternoon at three served tea on her upstairs veranda for herself and her older sister or friends who were invited by written invitation.

  Miss Ellen was devoted to gardening and feeding stray cats. Each spring her flower beds and window boxes were bursting with color; her oaks were surrounded by caladiums that looked individually hand-painted. Cats sat or slept on every stone and wood surface in her yard. But Miss Ellen had another obsession as well. She monitored every aspect of life on East Main and wrote polite notes on expensive stationery to her neighbors when they didn’t cut their lawns, take in their empty trash cans in timely fashion, trim their hedges, or paint their houses with colors she considered tasteful.

  With Miss Ellen on the job, which was twenty-four hours a day, we didn’t have to worry about a Neighborhood Crime Watch program.

  When I pulled into the drive, she was weeding a flower bed in the lee of her house. She got to her feet and called out to me: “Mr. Robicheaux, so glad I saw you. Did you find out who that man was?”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  She walked through the bamboo that separated our property. She wore cotton gloves, a denim dress with huge pockets for garden tools, and rubber boots patinaed with mud. A half dozen cats, including Snuggs, trailed along behind her. “The man looking in your windows Friday night. I called the police about him. They didn’t tell you?” she said.

  “No, they didn’t,” I replied.

  “Well, he surely didn’t have any business in your yard. Besides, it was raining to beat the band. So why would he have been by your window if he wasn’t a Peeping Tom?”

  “What did this fellow look like, Miss Ellen?”

  “I don’t really know. He was wearing a raincoat, one with a hood.”

  “Was he white?”

  “I wouldn’t know that, either. Are you going to have your cat fixed?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You should. His romantic inclinations seem to have no bounds,” she said.

  I wondered if there was a second meaning in her statement.

  Inside, I called the city police department and talked to the dispatcher. He told me a patrol car had been sent to my address at 11:16 Friday night, but no one had been in the yard, and the responding officer saw no point in waking me up. “Dave, Miss Ellen said the Peeping Tom was in her yard, yours, and maybe two or t’ree yards on the other side of you,” the dispatcher said. “We would have had to wake up the whole block. You know how many calls we get from that lady every week?”

  I went outside and walked through the side yard by my bedroom windows. The flower bed was planted with hydrangeas and camellias, and the mixture of black dirt, coffee grinds, and compost mixed with horse manure that I used in my gardens was still soggy from Friday night’s downpour. Underneath the windowsill were the deeply etched prints of a man’s work boots. The blinds were just as they had been Friday night—two inches short of the sill, a perfect viewing slot for a voyeur to have watched Molly Boyle and me in the throes of our passion.

  AFTER WORK I drove down Old Jeanerette Road to Molly’s agency and caught her at the end of her workday, carrying a shovel, hoe, and steel rake over her shoulder toward the barn, a machete hanging from her other hand. “How was New Orleans?” she said.

  “The same,” I said, not mentioning the death of the runaway girl from Iowa. Inside the barn, I watched her put away her tools, first wiping each of them clean, hanging them from nails on the walls. “Molly, would anyone have reason to follow you around?” I asked.

  “Why would anyone want to follow me around?”

  “The neighbor thought someone might have been in my yard Friday night,” I replied. “But my neighbor is a little eccentric sometimes.”

  Molly smiled, as though the subject were of little consequence, then began sharpening her machete on the emery wheel, orange and blue stars dancing on her jeans. She wiped the blade on an oily rag, then hung the machete on a wood peg.

  “You keep your tools sharp,” I said.

  “My father taught me that. He had simple admonitions: ‘Feed your animals before you feed yourself…. Take care of your tools and they’ll take care of you…. Put your shotgun through the fence, then crawl after it.’ My favorite was ‘Never trust a white person black people don’t like.’ ”

  “Come to the house,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “I know a motel on the other side of Morgan City. It’s on the water, off the highway. Not many people go there. There’s a restaurant where we can have dinner.”

  I could see the conflict in her face. “Come on, Molly,” I said, my voice almost plaintive.

  We were there in under a half hour. Not only there, but in the shower stall, the hot water beating down on our heads, her legs clenched around my thighs, her fingers splayed on my back, her mouth wide with a cry that she fought to suppress but could not.

  Then we were on the bed and she came a second time, her stomach and thighs rolling under me, her mouth wet against my cheek. Her hair and skin smelled like the ocean, or the smell a wave full of seaweed gives off when it bursts on hot sand. Then somewhere down below a coral shelf a mermaid winked a blue eye at me and invited me to come and rest inside a pink cave where she lived. The sound went out of the room, and when I opened my eyes the shadows of the overhead wood fan were flicking across Molly’s face, like clock hands out of control.

  NEW IBERIA has always been an insular place, Shintoistic, protective of its traditions, virtually incestuous in its familial relationships and attitudes toward outsiders. It did not take long for the rumors to start about me and Molly Boyle. One week after our tryst in the motel outside Morgan City, Molly received a call from a priest in the diocesan office. He was an elderly, genteel man who obviously did not enjoy the charge that had been given him. He asked about her health, how she was doing in her work, was there any problem in her life that either he or another clergy member could help her with.

  “No, but it’s very thoughtful of you to ask,” she replied. “Everything is wonderful here, Father. Come visit us sometime.”

  “Well, I guess that answers that,” he said. Then, probably because of his years and his long experience with human frailty and the harsh judgment the world can visit upon the innocent, his voice changed. “Take care of yourself, Molly. You’re a good girl. Don’t load the gun so others can hurt you.”

  That same day, Helen tapped on my door. “How you doin’, Streak?” she said.

  “Right as rain,” I replied.

  She sat on the corner of my desk and fed a stick of gum into her mouth. Her triceps were ridged like rolls of nickels. “I’ve gotten three phone calls and several anonymous letters about someone you might be seeing,” she said.

  “Who might that be?”

  She chewed her gum, her eyes roving over my face. “I’m your friend, bwana. Don’t treat me disrespectfully.”

  “A person’s private life is his private life,” I said.

  “That might flush in San Francisco, but not on Bayou Teche. If you’re involved with a Catholic nun, I’d damn well better know about it.”

  “The person you’re talking about never took vows. In fact, she’s been thinking about returning to the role of a lay person. She’s a person of enormous conscience.”

  My words sounded rehearsed, even to me, as though I had read them off an index card. Helen looked out the window at a freight train wobbling down the tracks between two rows of shacks. “They’re going to put you inside the Iron Maiden,” she said.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I said.

  “Take your choice,” she replied.

  THREE MORE DAYS WENT BY. People were polite to me on the street and at the supermarket or the filling station, but it was obvious that somethin
g in my life had changed. Few stopped to talk, and none joined me at a coffee counter or table in a restaurant. Those who could not escape a social encounter with me held their eyes steadily on mine, fearful I would read the knowledge that was hidden there. Frequently another cop gave me a thumbs-up or hit me on the shoulder, as if I were spiritually ill. I even cornered one of them in the department’s men’s room and learned quickly that acceptance of sympathy is not without a price.

  “I look like the walking wounded?” I said, and tried to grin.

  “Thought you needed a boost in morale, Dave, is all I was doing. Didn’t mean to get in your face,” he said.

  “Can you spell that out?”

  “My ex spread rumors I molested my stepdaughter. So I know where you’re at right now. I say, screw all them people. You know the troot’ about my situation? She come on to me. But don’t nobody care about the troot’. So I’m like you, screw ’em.”

  Then, just before quitting time, a phone call changed my perspective in ways I could not quite put together. It was from Dana Magelli in New Orleans. “We got the DNA report back on Holly Blankenship. It’s a match,” he said.

  “Match with what?” I said.

  “The Baton Rouge serial killer. He killed her within twelve hours of the time you and Purcel interviewed her. I don’t get it, Dave. This guy hasn’t struck in New Orleans, but he shows up in town the same day you do and murders a hooker. That’s not the guy’s M.O. So far, he’s left street people alone. Got any thoughts?”

  “No.”

  “Gee, I wish I had that kind of latitude. Blow into town, blow out of town, body dumped in a trash pit, sayonara, sonofabitch. Can I get a job over there?”

  I wanted to be angry at Dana, but I couldn’t. The fact the Baton Rouge serial killer had targeted a teenage prostitute, a girl who bore no similarity to his other victims, indicated either a dramatic change in the nature of his obsession or the possibility he was sending a message.

  “Did you hear me?” he said.

  “Yeah, I did. I wish I hadn’t gotten near that girl,” I replied.

  That evening I stood outside my bedroom window, staring at the indentations sculpted into my flower bed. Were these from the workboots of the Baton Rouge serial killer? I called Mack Bertrand, our forensic chemist, at his home. “Can you make some casts in my flower bed?” I said.

  “We’re a little backed up, but, yeah, what d’you got, Dave?” he said.

  “Maybe just a Peeping Tom.”

  “Can you be a little more forthcoming?”

  “I interviewed the latest serial killer’s victim shortly before she was killed. Maybe the guy knows me.”

  Mack was quiet a moment, and I realized how grandiose if not paranoid my statement must have sounded. But Mack was always a gentleman. “We’ll get it done first thing in the morning, podna,” he said.

  THAT NIGHT I placed flowers on Bootsie’s tomb in St. Martinville. The bayou was black, wrinkled with wind, bladed by moonlight. I sat for a long time on the steel bench in the darkness, saying nothing to Bootsie, not even thinking thoughts she might hear. Then I walked to the old church in the square, pressed a folded five-dollar bill into the poor box, and returned with a votive candle burning inside a small blue vessel. I heard a flapping of wings overhead, but could see no birds in flight. Then I told Bootsie about Molly and me.

  I believe the dead have voice and inhabit the earth as surely as we do. I believe they speak in our dreams or inside the sound of rain or even in the static of a telephone call, on the other side of which there is no caller. But Bootsie did not speak to me, and I felt an intolerable sense of guilt about the affair I had embarked upon with Molly Boyle.

  I not only felt I had betrayed Bootsie, I could no longer deny I was creating scandal for Molly as well as for my church. My rationalizations of my behavior left me exhausted in the morning and agitated during the day.

  “What should I do, Boots?” I said.

  But there was no answer. On another occasion when I had visited her grave, I had seen two brown pelicans floating on the bayou, farther inland than I had seen pelicans since my childhood. On that day Bootsie had spoken to me. Her voice and her presence were as real as if she had sat beside me, clasped my hand, and looked directly into my face. She said that one day the pelicans would return to Bayou Teche, that hope was indeed eternal, and the world was still a grand place in which to live.

  But the wings I had heard earlier were those of bats and the only sound in the cemetery was music from a jukebox in a neon-scrolled bar across the Teche. An evil man once told me that hell is a place that has no boundaries, a place that you carry with you wherever you go. A puff of wind blew out the candle burning on Bootsie’s tomb. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears as I walked across the drawbridge toward the town square. The hammering sound in my ears was almost as loud as the music and the shouts of the revelers as I pushed open the door of the bar and went inside.

  Chapter 15

  FRIDAY MORNING I kept myself buried in the case file of the Baton Rouge serial killer. The street outside was blown with leaves and pieces of newspaper, the clouds swollen with rain. I heard a trash can bounce violently across the asphalt, then freight cars slam together on the train track. I picked up the coffee mug from my desk and drank from it, all my movements precise, like a man seated on the deck of a pitching ship, unsure of what might befall him in the next few seconds. My mouth was dry, and no amount of liquid could lessen the level of dehydration in my body. My right hand trembled as I tried to make notes on the death of Holly Blankenship.

  Helen opened my office door without knocking and sat on the corner of my desk, which was the only place she ever sat in my office. “Looks like you nicked up your face this morning,” she said.

  “I think I had a defective blade in my razor,” I said. I placed a breath mint in my mouth and cracked it between my molars, my eyes straight ahead.

  “Mack Bertrand says you had him make casts of some footprints under your bedroom window,” she said.

  “There may have been a Peeping Tom in the neighborhood.”

  I could feel her eyes dissecting my face. “Would you explain why Mack should spend his time on a Peeping Tom?”

  “The Blankenship kid was the eighth known victim of the Baton Rouge killer. She died after I interviewed her. Maybe I know the serial killer. Maybe he was following me.”

  “I think we’re leaving something out of the story, here. Was somebody with you the night the Peeping Tom was at your window?”

  “I’m just not going to answer a question like that,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. She snuffed down in her nose. “You don’t look too good.”

  “I’ve got a touch of stomach flu or something,” I replied.

  She placed her hand on top of mine and pressed it against the desk blotter. “I love you, Pops. Don’t make me hurt you,” she said.

  AT LUNCHTIME I ate a bowl of gumbo at Victor’s, then threw up in the bathroom. By midafternoon I was sweating, my teeth rattling, the sky outside black and bursting with trees of electricity. I ate six aspirin and washed them down with ice water from the cooler but got no relief. I finally forced myself to call my old AA sponsor, an ex-convict and former barroom owner by the name of Tee Neg. “I had a slip,” I said.

  “You ain’t talking about a dry drunk, you? You actually done it?” he said.

  “Last night, in St. Martinville. I was in the cemetery. I don’t remember getting home.”

  “I ain’t interested in blow-by-blow. Where you at now?”

  “I’m coming apart.”

  “I ain’t axed you that.”

  “At the sheriff’s department.”

  “Good. You keep your ass there, you. I’m heading into town.”

  “No, that’s not necessary. Tee Neg, did you hear me?”

  But he had already hung up. I swallowed, already envisioning his arrival and the hours if not days of abstinence before my metabolism would have any semblance of
normalcy.

  Some people say you pick up the dirty boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it. I signed out of the office before Tee Neg arrived and drove through a blinding rainstorm to a bar in the Atchafalaya Basin, where people still spoke French, did not travel farther than two parishes from the place of their birth, and believed, in their incurable innocence, that the smokey, green-canopied swamplands of South Louisiana would always be there for them.

  I DO NOT REMEMBER Saturday at all. At least twenty-four hours of my life had disappeared, just like a large decayed tooth excised from the gums. Later, the odometer on my truck would show I had driven sixty-three miles I could not account for. When I woke Sunday morning, I was in a cabin that was dry and snug, cool from a breeze that inched along the floor. Through the window was a vast, stump-filled lake dimpled by rain. The sky was gray, and when the wind blew the cypress trees on the far side of the lake, the canopy turned a bright green against the somberness of the day, as though the trees drew their color from the wind.

  Inside my head I could hear the original 1946 recording of Harry Choates’s “Jolie Blon,” the song that will always remain for me the most haunting, unforgettable lament ever recorded. Had I dreamed the song? Had I been with someone who had played it over and over again? I had no idea.

  I sat for a long time on the side of the bunk bed in the cabin. The flop hat I wore on fishing trips and my raincoat lay on a chair. My skin had no sensation, as though it had been refrigerated or dry-frozen; my hands were stiff and as thick-feeling as cardboard. I didn’t have the shakes or sweats, nor were there nightmarish images painted on the backs of my eyelids. Instead, I felt nothing—no hunger, thirst, or erotic need, neither guilt nor remorse, as though I had simply ceased to exist.

  My holstered .45 rested on a table, next to a bottle of Scotch, a paper plate containing the remains of a fried-shrimp dinner, a scattered deck of playing cards, and three empty glasses. The .45 was mine; the rest I had no memory of.