Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  In any slammer, powerlessness is the norm. You defecate in full view of others; you eat when you’re fed. If you’re truly unlucky, or young and very frightened and physically weak, you will be the daily punch of sexual predators, a bar of soap passed around in the shower, an item gambled away in a card game or rented out for a deck of smokes.

  But as I lay on a steel bunk suspended from chains screwed into the wall, I really didn’t care about any of these things. My nemesis was not jail, the unraveling of my career, or even the machinations of Val Chalons. It was me. I remembered a line written by Billy Joe Shaver: “The first time the devil made me do it/ The second time I done it on my own.” I had stoked my resentments, fed my sense of loss over Bootsie, and turned my depression into a wardrobe of sackcloth and ashes in order to get drunk again.

  I felt like a man who had set fire to his own home in order to warm up an unappetizing dinner.

  Then I had a peculiar experience, not unlike one of many years ago when I heard a metallic sound, a brief klatch, on a night trail in a tropical country that no one talks about anymore. There was a moment’s silence, the kind you automatically know is a prelude to your entrance into eternity, just before a waist-high explosion cut a black PFC nicknamed “Doo-Doo Dogshit” in half and laced my side and thigh with shrapnel that looked like twisted steel fingers.

  A white light filled the inside of my head. I felt myself float up toward the canopy, then crash to the earth. Later, I would swear I saw Doo-Doo walking through the jungle, unharmed, strings of smoke rising from his clothes. He turned, gave me the peace sign in farewell, and said, Got to dee-dee, Loot. Big Boss Man upstairs need me to hep out. Hey, don’t you worry none. Chuck going back alive in ’65.

  My men could have left me there. I’d screwed up and taken them down a night trail that was strung with bouncing betties and trip-wired 105 duds. But that was not their way. They came from barrios and southern shitholes and black northern slums and were the bravest and finest kids I ever knew. While I lay on a poncho liner and a mountain boy from North Georgia rigged up a litter with web gear, I could hear the rounds from an offshore battery arcing with a whooshing sound out of their trajectory, exploding in the jungle, shaking the earth under me. I was laced with morphine and blood-expander and knew I was going to die unless I got to battalion aid. I heard someone calling for the dust-off, then a voice whispering, “They can’t get the slick in. He’s fucked, man. Oh Jesus Christ, they’re coming through the grass.”

  But they carried me all night, with no sleep, their arms straining against one hundred eighty pounds of dead weight, while they humped their own weapons and packs and radios and sweltered inside their flak vests, their exposed skin a feast for the mosquitoes that boiled out of the elephant grass.

  That’s when I felt my long-held fear of death finally use itself up and lift from my soul the way ash floats off a dead fire. I closed my eyes in surrender to my fate and placed my trust in the tender mercies of those who bore me toward an uncertain destination, perhaps one that would be lit by flame and filled with explosions that sounded like ships’ boilers blowing apart.

  But I was not a player any longer. The dice had rolled out of the cup, and if the numerical sum on them was snake-eyes or boxcars, the matter was out of my control, and that simple conclusion about my lifespan on earth set me free.

  I fell asleep in the jail cell, even though a drunk snored loudly on the floor and a deranged man in sweatpants and a woman’s blouse kept shouting accusations through the bars at a city cop he claimed had stolen his airline tickets to Paris.

  When the sun came up, I realized I’d just had the first restful sleep since I had gotten drunk. With my cell partners I ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, tiny sausages, toast, jelly, and coffee. Then I heard Helen Soileau’s voice in a foyer and a moment later a screw unlocked my cell door and walked me to the front of the jail.

  “Saw you on early-morning TV,” Helen said as she drove us back to New Iberia.

  “Val Chalons doesn’t take prisoners,” I said.

  “What were your latents doing at the crime scene, Dave?”

  The sky was still pink with sunrise, the air sweet with the smell of flowers and rain, the cane waving in the fields. I started to lie, to say that perhaps indeed I had been at Val’s guesthouse on another occasion, even though earlier I had already denied that possibility to her. But I couldn’t do it. “I’m not sure how they got there. I got back on the juice. I was drunk all weekend,” I said.

  She took a call on her radio, her expression frozen in place. Then she hung her microphone back on the dash. “What was that last part?”

  “I’ve got two days sobriety now,” I said.

  “Two days?”

  I waited for her to go on. But she didn’t. In the silence I could hear the tires of the cruiser on the asphalt. “I think maybe I went to Val Chalons’s guesthouse in a blackout. I think I took a CD from his stereo, one with Ida Durbin’s voice on it,” I said.

  “Ida Durbin again?”

  “The CD is at the house. I think there’s a blood smear on it, maybe from my own hand.”

  She rubbed at one temple with the ends of her fingers, as though an intolerable migraine had begun to eat its way through her head. “Maybe it’s time for you not to say any more without a lawyer.”

  “I didn’t kill Honoria.”

  “You don’t know what you did, so don’t give me your doodah. Dave, you make me so mad I want to stop the car and beat the shit out of you. Goddamn it!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She swerved the cruiser to the shoulder and got out under a spreading oak tree. She walked up and down by my window, her fists on her hips, the corner of her mouth bitten white. For a moment I thought she was truly going to lose it. She stood still for a long time, her back to me, then got back in the vehicle.

  “Helen—”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  She did not speak again until she turned into my drive. “Be in my office in one hour, looking sharp, your head out of your ass for a change,” she said.

  DOOGIE DUGAS and his posse comitatus had tossed my house from one end to the other. They had even pulled all my lawn tools out of my shed and left them scattered in the yard. The doors to my truck were ajar, the lock on the steel toolbox I had welded to the bed sheared in half by bolt cutters. The driver’s seat was still pushed against the steering wheel, the floor area behind it empty of the flop hat and hooded raincoat I had worn during my blackout Saturday.

  The irony of Dugas’s search was that he had probably tainted any evidence he had seized by using an improperly acquired warrant. The greater irony was the fact that he and his friends had evidently ignored an item they should have picked up.

  It was a sheet of yellow legal pad paper, now rain-damaged, speckled with mud, blown into the canebrake that separated my yard from Miss Ellen’s. I would have probably paid little attention to it as well, but every day I picked up litter that either blew or was thrown into my yard. It was dated Saturday, 9:15 P.M. and read:

  Dear Dave,

  Why don’t you stay home? Who’s taking care of your cat and raccoon? Anyone who neglects or who is cruel to a defenseless creature deserves to be tortured.

  I have to tell someone about the secrets nobody in our family will deal with. My father won’t admit the harm our silence has caused. Maybe our souls are damned. My prayer today is that hell is oblivion and not a place of torment.

  You must call me. I can tell you about Ida Durbin.

  Love,

  H.

  Was she insane? Twisted on coke and booze? Or perhaps touched with an insight into evil that would make most of us shudder? Whatever the answer, she had taken her secrets to the grave.

  After I shaved and showered and changed clothes, I placed Honoria’s note in one Ziploc bag and put the CD with the blood smear on the surface in another, and drove to the department. Helen was waiting for me, her mood still rumpled. “What’s that?” she said, indic
ating Honoria’s note.

  I placed it on her desk. She was standing up, her palms propped on her desk blotter as she read Honoria’s words, her chest rising and falling. The door was closed now, the blinds open, and people passing in the corridor made a point of not glancing inside. The room seemed to grow warmer, the sunlight through the window more intense.

  “This was in your yard?” Helen said.

  “Right.”

  “This is your parachute on a murder beef?”

  “I don’t know what it is. My guess is Honoria was an incest victim.”

  “Where in the name of God do you get these ideas?”

  “Koko Hebert says Honoria had intercourse in the twenty-four-hour period before she died. She was about to shower in the guesthouse, where Val Chalons lives, not in the main house, where she lived. She had every behavioral characteristic of someone who has been the long-term victim of a sexual predator.”

  “Dave, AFIS came back with only one match that didn’t belong in that guesthouse—yours.”

  “Except I had no motive to murder her. There was DNA in her genital area. I’ll bet the lab will show it was left there by a relative. My guess is it belongs either to the father or the brother.”

  But I had already lost her attention. “I must have had two dozen calls this morning,” she said. “They want you skinned, salted, and hung in a gibbet.”

  “Am I suspended?”

  “Suspension might be the least of it.”

  “What do you want me to do, Helen?”

  “Lose the nun.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Then please go somewhere else for a while.”

  And that’s what I did. As far as the water cooler, my face burning as though I had been slapped. Then I went back into her office, the door hanging open behind me.

  “You want my shield, just say it.”

  “You’re always psychoanalyzing other people. Why don’t you look inside your own head for a change?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Bootsie died on you and it made you madder than hell. Your daughter is gone and every day you wake up, you’re scared you’ll drink again. So you figured out a way to climb on a cross, a place where it’s safe and people can’t do anything else to you. I don’t think you’re going to like it up there, bwana.”

  THE WEEK WAS NOT GOING WELL. Worse, Clete had called early the previous morning and, without thinking, I told him Jimmie had gotten a lead on Lou Kale and that Kale might be running an escort service out of Miami. That was a mistake.

  Chapter 19

  BY TUESDAY AFTERNOON Clete was standing at the registration desk in the lobby of an old ten-story stucco hotel on the beach in Hollywood, Florida, decked out in shades, his pale blue porkpie hat, a tropical shirt printed with bare-breasted hula girls, white polyester Bermuda shorts, and blue tennis shoes threaded with brand-new white laces. He carried a set of golf clubs on one shoulder, a flight bag on the other, registered as C. T. Perkins from Gulfport, Mississippi, and paid cash for his room.

  The walls of the hotel were spiderwebbed with cracks, the patio in the center of the building spiked with weeds, the potted jacaranda dying from lack of water. But the view of the ocean from his open window on the top floor was magnificent, the overhead fan adequate to cool the room, the salt air wonderful. Clete propped his feet on the windowsill and punched in the telephone number of the Sea Breeze Escort Service. Down below, the tide was sliding high up on the sand and children were running into the waves, leaping in the froth that sucked back over their tanned bodies. On the third ring Clete found himself talking to a man who called himself Lou Coyne.

  “You got the referral where?” Coyne said.

  “Stevie Giacano, in New Orleans,” Clete replied.

  “Oh yeah, Stevie Gee. In the Teamsters, right? How’s ole Stevie doin’?”

  “Not too good. He’s dead. But he always said your service was tops.”

  “We like to think so. So you’re hosting a convention, that’s what you’re saying?”

  “I’m about three blocks away from your office. What if I come on down there and maybe we work out a group rate? You give finder fees? I’ll take mine in trade.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll meet you in a half hour at that little outdoor joint by your hotel, the one looks like a straw hut.”

  “How will I know you?”

  “You won’t,” the man who called himself Lou Coyne said, and hung up.

  Clete read the newspaper in the lobby, then strolled down the boardwalk to a frozen daiquiri stand, one with a thatched roof, set among a grove of coconut palms. A red-headed woman with a Hawaiian skirt hooked over her bikini sat on the stool next to him and ordered a daiquiri. She looked around at the beach, then said, “Hi.”

  “Hello,” Clete replied.

  “Beautiful day,” she said.

  “They don’t get any better.”

  “On vacation?” she said.

  “I wish. With me it’s all business,” Clete said. He paid for her drink, pushing the five-dollar bill across the counter to the bartender with the heel of his hand, not asking the woman if it was all right. “C. T. Perkins is the name. I’m staying at the hotel, down the boardwalk there.”

  Her eyes were green and there was a smear of lipstick on her teeth. Her breath smelled heavily of cigarettes, and she had a habit of repetitively touching the pads of each of her fingers with her thumb on her left hand while she sipped from her drink.

  “I bet you’re in the construction business,” she said.

  “How’d you know?”

  “You’ve been out in the sun a lot. You have big arms. There’re calluses on your hands. But you’re probably a supervisor or engineer.”

  “I used to be a general contractor. Now I put shopping mall deals together. Whatever blows up their skirt, that’s what I do.”

  “You up for anything this afternoon?”

  “Could be. You got a cell?” he said.

  She took a gold retractable pen from a canvas tote and wrote a number on a napkin. “Thanks for the drink. Keep that number under your hat, will you?” she said.

  “They couldn’t get it from me at gunpoint,” he replied.

  Clete watched her walk away, her face turned in a regal fashion toward the ocean, her hooked skirt molded tightly across her rump. She passed close to a man who wore linen slacks and a purple shirt with white suspenders, and who combed his hair as he walked toward the daiquiri stand. The two of them seemed to exchange glances, then the man sat at a table among the coconut palms, grinned, and pointed a finger at Clete. “Come talk to me, big man,” he said.

  Clete carried his daiquiri to the table and sat down. Lou Coyne’s hair was the color of gunmetal, greased, long on the neck. His facial skin had an unnatural shine and hardness to it, as though his youth had been surgically restored at the cost of the softening influences purchased by age.

  “If you knew Stevie Gee, you must know his old sidekick, Benny Frizola. Some people call him Benny Freeze,” the man named Lou Coyne said.

  “Never heard of him,” Clete replied.

  Lou Coyne grinned again. “So if I understand you, you’re organizing a convention here—builders, Teamsters, subcontractors, those kinds of guys—and you need some escorts to show them the city?”

  “Not exactly a convention, just a little P.R., get everybody lubricated and in a free-spending mood. Maybe around Thanksgiving. We’ll be in town for five days,” Clete said.

  Lou Coyne’s cheeks were sunken, as though he were sucking the spittle out of his mouth. His ears were small, the way a club fighter’s get when he’s been too long in the ring. “So, up front, you know an escort service offers nothing besides sightseeing, companionship, a walk on the beach if you want it, these are nice girls we’re talking about here, we’re clear on all this?”

  “I respect what you got to do, but I don’t have time for people’s bullshit,” Clete said.

  “What’d you say?”
/>   “I can put together a package in Vegas for the same prices I get here. Except some of the guys like to go deep-sea fishing. Besides, the seafood is better here. What can you do for me, Lou?”

  Lou Coyne pulled on his nose. “Slip on a swimsuit. Let’s take a dip,” he said.

  Clete went back to his hotel and changed into his Everlast boxing trunks and rejoined Lou Coyne on the beach.

  “You going to swim in your clothes?” Clete asked.

  Coyne began walking toward the surf, dropping his suspenders, pulling off his shirt as he went. “I ain’t got a problem with the human body. Other people do, it’s on them,” he replied.

  He removed a weighted-down copy of the Miami Herald from someone’s beach blanket and laid his shirt, shoes, socks, and finally his folded slacks on top of it. He stood raw and white in the sunlight, wearing only a black silk thong that was little more than a sling for his phallus. While other bathers gaped, he flexed his back and rolled his shoulders. “Let’s hit the waves, big man,” he said.

  They crashed through the breakers until they were chest-deep in the water, in a flat space between the swells, the beach behind them biscuit-colored and lined with palm trees and hotels that had fallen into decay.

  “You thought I was a cop?” Clete said.

  “Me? I love cops. I got all the original episodes of Miami Vice.”

  “Need your prices, Lou.”

  Lou Coyne pursed his mouth and thought. “I can give you ten, no, fifteen percent discount on the item. In terms of girls, I got the whole rainbow. The client acts like a gentleman or the service is discontinued. Before the discount, the various prices are as follows—”

  Clete waited until Coyne finished, then said, “Sounds okay. You remind me of a guy I used to know.”