Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “It speaks for itself,” I replied.

  “If you’re talking about incest, this lab has no evidence of that.” He paused a moment. “Dave, can I offer some advice?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not a fan of either Raphael or Valentine Chalons. But I think you’re barking at the moon on this one.”

  “Thanks for your time.”

  “My wife and I are taking the kids to the Little League game tonight. Care to join us?”

  “Tied up. But you’re the best, Mack,” I said.

  I had learned long ago you can have all the friends you want when you’re in tall cotton. But your real friends are the ones you meet during hard times, when you’ve blown out your doors and every sunrise comes to you like a testimony to personal failure. Mack Bertrand was a real friend.

  IT WAS FRIDAY NIGHT and Molly was at a meeting of Pax Christi at Grand Coteau. I had deliberately stayed away from her since Doogie Dugas had arrested me on camera at my home and Val Chalons had used footage on his various news channels of Molly standing half-undressed in the bedroom doorway. She herself was undaunted by the experience and I suspect had long ago become inured to the wickedness that the socially respectable were capable of. But I did not want to see her hurt more than she already had been, and at the same time I wanted to see her terribly.

  At sunset I took a long walk down Main, through the business district and out to the west side, where there is a neatly mowed green lot that is the only reminder of a smithy and wagonworks that was there when I was a child during World War II.

  The wagonworks was a very old structure even then, its red paint cracked and faded by the elements, the wood planks shrunken and warped by the heat in the forge. The owner was Mr. Antoine, a small, wizened man who spoke beautiful French but little English. At that time in New Iberia there were black people still alive who remembered the Emancipation, what they came to call “Juneteenth,” and there were white people who had seen General Banks’s Federal soldiers, twenty thousand of them, march through town in pursuit of the chivalric Confederate general, Alfred Mouton. But our only surviving Confederate veteran was Mr. Antoine.

  He loved to regale us with tales of what he always referred to as “La Guerre.” He had served in Jackson’s Shenandoah Campaign and had been with Jubal Early when Early had thrown twenty-five thousand men against the Union line just before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Mr. Antoine’s regiment was caught in a cornfield and blown into piles of gray and butternut rags by canister and grapeshot. But the point of Mr. Antoine’s tale about the last days of the war was not the carnage, or the crows that pecked out the eyes of southern dead, or the snuffing sounds of feral hogs that would come at dusk. Instead, Mr. Antoine’s story was about a fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama who found his regimental colors in the dust, tied them to a musket barrel, and mounted a terrified stray horse.

  The Union soldiers two hundred yards up the slope could not believe what they saw next—a boy without shoes, clamped on the spine of a horse like a clothespin, charging across his own dead toward a line of pointed weapons that could have reduced him and his animal to a bloody mist.

  But no soldier fired a shot. When the boy’s horse leaped across their wall, they pulled him from the saddle and pinned him to the dirt, all the while laughing, one of them saying, “You ain’t got to fight no more, son. You’re on the Lord’s side now.”

  Mr. Antoine still carried a pistol ball in his forearm and would let us children run our fingers over the hard lump it made under his skin. Once, in a dark mood, he decried the war and described the bloody shuddering and gurgling sounds of a young Union soldier who had died on Mr. Antoine’s bayonet. But the story he obviously took most pleasure in retelling was that of the Alabama drummer boy. Now, after many years, I think I understand why.

  Mr. Antoine did not let the evil of the world overcome him, just as the Union soldiers behind the limestone wall did not let the war rob them of their humanity; just as military defeat and fear of death could not undo the drummer boy who placed honor and loyalty to the dead above concern for his own life.

  As I stood on the sidewalk, looking at a green lot bordered in back by live oaks and Bayou Teche, I could almost see Mr. Antoine’s forge puff alight in the shadows and hear his burst of laughter at the completion of his story about the Alabama drummer boy. I wanted to tell him that flags were emblematic of much more than national boundaries. But I suspected Mr. Antoine had learned that lesson a long time ago.

  THE FUNERAL MASS for Honoria Chalons was held Saturday morning in Jeanerette. I attended it, although I took a pew at the back of the church and made no attempt to offer condolences or to accompany the funeral possession to the cemetery. That afternoon I was at Wal-Mart and had one of those experiences that make me wonder if our commonality lies less in our humanity than the simple gravitational pull of the earth and a grave that is already dug and numbered.

  The sweeping breadth of the store’s interior was crowded with people for whom a Wal-Mart is a gift from God. In my hometown, most of these are poor and uneducated, and assume that the low-paying jobs that define their lives are commonplace throughout the country. The fact that the goods they buy are often shoddily made, the clothes sewn in Third World sweatshops by people not unlike themselves, is an abstraction that seems to have no application to the low price on the item.

  By late Saturday afternoon every trash can in front of the store is overflowing on the sidewalk. The parking lot is littered with dumped ashtrays, fast-food containers, chicken bones, half-eaten fruit, soft drink and beer cans, and disposable diapers that have been flattened into the asphalt by car tires. It’s the place where the poor go, or those who don’t want to drive twenty miles to Lafayette. It’s not where I expected to see Raphael Chalons on the day of his daughter’s burial.

  But he was three places in front of me at the cash register, dressed in a dark suit and a tie and starched white shirt, even though the temperature had been in the nineties all day. His hair was as sleek and black as a seal’s pelt, his face that of a stricken man.

  In one hand he held a jar of peanut brittle while he stared out the front window. In his tailored suit and shined shoes, he looked like a visitor from an alien world.

  “You got to put it on the counter, suh,” the cashier said. She was a short, overweight Cajun woman, with a round face and thick glasses and hair pulled back tightly on her head.

  “Pardon?” he said.

  “You got to put the peanut brittle down so’s I can scan it,” she said.

  “Yes, I see,” he replied.

  “Wit’ the tax, that’s fo’ dol’ars and t’ree cents,” she said.

  “It’s what?”

  She repeated the amount. But he didn’t take his wallet from his pocket. She tried to smile. Her eyes seemed unnaturally large behind the magnification of her glasses and it was obvious she knew something was wrong and that she could not correct it. The two people waiting in line immediately behind Raphael Chalons took their purchases to another counter.

  “Suh, you want to pay me? It’s fo’ dol’ars and t’ree cents,” the cashier said.

  “Oh yes, excuse me. I’m sure I have my wallet here somewhere. How much did you say?”

  I pushed a five-dollar bill across the counter to the cashier. She took it without speaking, returned my change, and dropped Raphael Chalons’s jar of peanut brittle in a plastic sack. I picked it up and handed it to him. He walked a short distance away, then stopped in the concourse and removed the jar from the sack and read the label on it, oblivious to the shoppers who had to walk around him.

  “Can I offer you a ride to your automobile, Mr. Chalons?” I said.

  “No, I’m quite all right. But thank you for your courtesy,” he replied, looking at me as though my face were not quite in focus.

  “May I speak with you outside?” I asked.

  He walked ahead of me, the jar of peanut brittle clasped in his hand, the sack with the receipt inside it blowing
away in the draft through the sliding doors. The woman who checked purchases at the entrance held up her hand to stop him. I knew her and placed my palm on Mr. Raphael’s shoulder and gestured at her in a reassuring way.

  He entered the crosswalk and was almost hit by an SUV.

  “Let me arrange to have someone drive you home,” I said.

  He stared at the label on the jar and either did not hear me or chose to ignore the content of my words. “The store didn’t have the kind she liked,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “Honoria loved peanut brittle and pralines. I was going to bring her back some from New Orleans, but I forgot. It was such a small gift. But I forgot to buy it.”

  “Mr. Chalons, I know your family bears me enmity, but I want to offer my sympathies. I also want you to understand that I never had a romantic liaison with your daughter and that I always respected her. Both my mother and my second wife, Annie, died at the hands of violent men, and for that reason I think I can understand the nature of your loss. I thought your daughter was a good person. It was an honor to have been her friend.”

  He looked at the parking lot, the heat shimmering on the rows of vehicles, an American flag popping on an iron pole.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “But you’re a police officer, and you were in our guesthouse for reasons of a romantic nature or to make use of my daughter in a legal investigation. Whichever it was, sir, it belies your statement now.”

  I should have walked away. But there are certain moments in our lives that even the saints would probably not abide, and I suspect being impugned as a liar is one of them. “I think your son is at the heart of a great iniquity,” I said.

  “My son?” he said, one eye narrowing with confusion. “Which son are you talking about? What are you saying to me? My son is—”

  He pinched his temples and broke off in midsentence, as though both his words and thoughts had been stolen from him. A gust of hot wind blew a fast-food container tumbling past the cuffs of his trousers, splattering the fabric and the tops of his shoes.

  LATER, I went to Molly’s cottage on the bayou. There was probably every reason not to go there, but I had tired of wearing the scarlet letter and seeing others try to sew it upon Molly’s blouse as well. The truth was Molly had no official or theological status as a nun and in the eyes of the Church was a member of the laity. Let Val Chalons and those who served him do as they wished. I’d take my chances with the Man on High, I told myself.

  My father, Big Aldous, spoke a form of English that was hardly a language. Once, when explaining to a neighbor the disappearance of the neighbor’s troublesome hog, he said, “I ain’t meaned to hurt your pig, no, but I guess I probably did when my tractor wheel accidentally run over its head and broke its neck, and I had to eat it, me.”

  But when he spoke French he could translate his ideas in ways that were quite elevated. On the question of God’s nature, he used to say, “There are only two things you have to remember about Him: He has a sense of humor, and because He’s a gentleman He always keeps His word.”

  And that’s what I told Molly Boyle on the back porch of her cottage, on a late Saturday afternoon in New Iberia, Louisiana, in the summer of the year 2004.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said.

  “Because I say screw Val Chalons and his television stations. I also say screw anyone who cares to condemn us.”

  “You came over here to tell me that?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  The sun went behind a rain cloud, burning a purple hole through its center. The cypress and willow trees along the bayou swelled with wind. “I say why do things halfway?”

  “Will you please take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth?” she said.

  “How about we get married tonight?”

  “Married? Tonight?”

  “Unless you’re doing something else.”

  She started to remove a strand of hair from her eye, then forgot what she was doing. She fixed her eyes on mine, her face perfectly still, her mouth slightly parted. “Get married where?” she asked.

  “In Baton Rouge. I have a priest friend who’s a little unorthodox. I told him we wanted to take our vows.”

  “Without asking me?”

  “That’s why I’m doing it now.”

  She was wearing jeans without a belt, a Ragin’ Cajun T-shirt, and moccasins on her feet. She made a clicking sound with her mouth, and I had no idea what it might mean. Then she stepped on top of my shoes and put her arms around my neck and pressed her head against my chest. “Oh, Dave,” she said. Then, as though language were inadequate or she were speaking to an obtuse person, she said it again, “Oh, Dave.”

  And that’s the way we did it—in a small church located among pine trees, twelve miles east of the LSU campus, while lights danced in the clouds and the air turned to ozone and pine needles showered down on the church roof.

  Chapter 21

  WE SLEPT LATE the next morning, then had breakfast in the backyard on the old redwood table from my house that had burned. I had forgotten how fine it was to eat breakfast on a lovely morning, under oak trees on a tidal stream, with a woman you loved. And I also had forgotten how good it was to be free of booze again and on the square with my AA program, the world, and my Higher Power.

  At first Tripod had been unsure about Molly, until she gave him a bowl of smoked salmon. Then she couldn’t get rid of him. While she tried to eat, he climbed in her lap, sticking his head up between her food and mouth, turning in circles, his tail hitting her in the face. I started to put him in his hutch.

  “He’ll settle down in a minute,” Molly said.

  “Tripod has a little problem with incontinence.”

  “That’s different,” she said.

  But before I could gather him out of her lap, his head lifted up suddenly and his nose sniffed at the wind blowing from the front of the house. He scampered up a live oak and peered back down at us from a leafy bough. I heard the doorbell ring.

  “Be right back,” I said to Molly.

  Raphael Chalons was at my front door, dressed in slacks and a sports coat out of the 1940s, a Panama hat hooked on one finger, his shoulders and back as straight as a soldier’s. “You were very thoughtful in paying for my purchase yesterday at the Wal-Mart store. But I forgot to reimburse you,” he said. He held up a five-dollar bill that was folded stiffly between two fingers.

  I opened the screen and took the money from his hand. I had hoped his mission was a single-purpose one. But he remained on the gallery, gazing at the trees in the yard and the squirrels that darted across the grass. “Can I invite you in?” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said, and stepped inside, his eyes examining the interior of my home. “I want to hire you to find the man who murdered my daughter, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “I’m a sheriff’s detective, Mr. Chalons, not a private investigator.”

  “A man is what he does. Titles are a distraction created to deceive obtuse people. I want the monster who killed my daughter either in jail or dead.”

  “My fingerprints were at the crime scene. In some people’s eyes I should be a suspect.”

  “Those might be my son’s perceptions, but they’re not mine. Valentine is sometimes not a good judge of character. You may have a penchant for alcohol, Mr. Robicheaux, but you’re not a murderer. That’s an absurdity. I know it and so do you.”

  “I’m complimented by your offer, but it’s not an appropriate one.”

  “I think a degenerate or psychotic person wandered in from the highway and did this terrible thing to my daughter. But I can’t seem to convince anyone else of that. Some speculate it’s the Baton Rouge serial killer.”

  “The Baton Rouge guy abducts his victims and rapes them before killing them. Bondage is part of his M.O., as well as baiting the authorities. The guy who killed Honoria is somebody else.”

  He pulled at an earlobe. “I have to find out who. If nothing el
se, I have to exclude people who might have had opportunity or motivation,” he said, glancing sideways at me. “I can’t live in ignorance about the circumstances of her death. I just cannot do that. No father can.”

  There was no point in continuing the conversation. For a lifetime his money had bought him access and control, and now it was of no value to him.

  “As you suggest, it may have been a random killing, Mr. Chalons. Deranged and faceless men wander the country. Sometimes they commit horrible crimes over a period of decades and are not caught.” I made no reference to the fact a cross had been incised inside Honoria’s hairline.

  “So you do think that could be the case with my daughter?”

  I saw what seemed a hopeful glimmer in his eye, as though I had presented him with good news. Or maybe I was reading him wrong. “I have no idea, sir,” I replied.

  He unhooked his hat from his finger and straightened the brim, then glanced through the back window into the yard. “Ah, the outlaw nun who’s purchased you an inordinate amount of negative attention,” he said.

  “The outlaw nun is now my wife.”

  “Is that meant as a joke?”

  “That’s Molly Robicheaux out there, Mr. Chalons—not a nun, not an outlaw, but my wife.”

  “Well, she’s a disciple of liberation theology and has been at odds with our government’s policies in Central America, but no matter. Chacun à son goût, huh?”

  He let himself out without saying good-bye, then paused on the gallery and fitted on his Panama hat. I followed him outside. “Run that statement by me again?”

  “Your wife is a traitor, Mr. Robicheaux. Perhaps she’s done many good deeds for the Negroes in our area, but she is nonetheless a traitor. If you choose to marry her, that’s your business. I’m an old man and many of my attitudes are probably overly traditional.”

  I stepped close to him. “I don’t wish to offend you, Mr. Chalons—” I began, a phosphorous match flaming alight somewhere in the center of my head.