Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  That was it. The damage Val Chalons could do was endless. His kind planted lies in the popular mind, smeared people’s names, destroyed lives, and floated above the fray while others did their dirty work for them. As their victim, you never got the opportunity to confront your accusers. You didn’t get to walk out on a dirt street in nineteenth-century Arizona and empty a double-barrel twelve gauge into the Clanton gang. Instead, you and your family picked flypaper off your skin.

  In the meantime, the predators would continue hunting on the game reserve. They’d transport crack, brown skag, and crystal meth down I-49 and across I-10 and peddle it in the projects and on inner-city basketball courts and street corners, where teenage kids carried beepers and nine-Mikes and looked you straight in the eye when they explained why they had to do a drive-by on their own classmates.

  The by-product was the whores. Sexual liberation and herpes and AIDS be damned, the demand was still there, as big as ever. But depressed times didn’t produce the whores anymore. The dope did.

  And guys like Lou Kale were there to help in any way they could. Yes indeed, I thought, Lou Kale, now living regally in Lafayette, about to open an escort service.

  YEARS AGO, many street cops used to keep a second weapon they called a “drop” or a “throw-down.” It was usually junk, foreign-made, pitted with rust, the grips cracked, sometimes without grips at all. The important element was the filed-off or acid-burned serial numbers. When the scene went south and a fleeing suspect turned out to be unarmed, the “throw-down” had a way of ending up under the body of a dead man.

  Mine was an old .38 I took off a Murphy artist and part-time drug mule who used to work out of a bar two blocks from the Desire Welfare Project. The barrel and sight had been hacksawed off an inch from the cylinder. The grips were wrapped with electrician’s tape. But the previous owner’s carelessness and neglect had not affected his weapon’s mechanical integrity. The cylinder still locked firmly in place when the hammer snapped down on the firing pin and didn’t shave lead on the back end of the barrel.

  I put on my raincoat and hat, dropped the revolver in my pocket, and drove to Lou Kale’s motel in Lafayette.

  IT WAS STILL RAINING HARD when I parked under a spreading oak and showed my badge to a young woman at the desk. “Lou Kale,” I said.

  She was probably a college kid. Her face was plain, earnest, eager to please, totally removed for any implication my presence might have. “He’s in one-nineteen. Would you like me to ring his room?” she said.

  “That’s all right. Would you let me have a key, please?”

  “I’m not sure I’m supposed to do that,” she said.

  “It’s fine. This is part of a police investigation,” I said.

  “Well, I guess it’s all right, then,” she said, programming a card for me.

  I walked down the corridor, past soft drink and candy machines, and entered an annex that paralleled the swimming pool. I didn’t feel good about what I had just done. The girl at the desk was probably a good person and I had taken advantage of her trust and deceived her. In my mind’s eye I saw myself somehow making it up to her, and I knew at that moment that the script for the next few minutes was already written in my head and the final act was one that I must not allow myself to see. I stuck the electronic key into the door of Room 119 and pulled it out quickly. When the tiny green light flashed at me, I twisted the door handle and stepped inside, my right hand squeezed around the taped grips of the .38.

  Lou Kale was asleep on his side, bare-chested, a pair of pajama bottoms notched into his love handles. The room was dark, but the swimming pool lights were on outside and the surface of the water glowed with a misty green luminosity in the rain. When I closed the curtain on the sliding door, Lou Kale’s eyes opened as though he had been shaken violently awake.

  “You know what a dry drunk is, Lou?” I said.

  “Dry what?”

  “It’s a guy like me. That means you’re shit out of luck.”

  He lifted himself up on his arms. His abdominal muscles looked as hard as the rollers on a washtub, his chest and shoulders coated with soft strips of monkey fur. Even with the air-conditioning on, the room smelled like an animal’s lair or unburied offal. By the bed was a service table, and in the middle of it a steak knife and ragged pink T-bone rested on a white plate marbled with gravy and blood.

  “I got no beef with you, Jack,” he said.

  “Remember when you woke me up in that motel in Galveston? You touched the muzzle of a nickel-plated automatic to the center of my forehead. You called me ‘hoss’ and told me I had a lot of luck. I was twenty years old.”

  “What are you doing with that gun, man?”

  I had dumped all six shells from the cylinder into my palm. I inserted one of them into a random chamber and clicked the cylinder back into the revolver’s frame. Then I put the hammer on half-cock, spun the chamber, and reset the hammer.

  “I’m going to hand you this pistol, Lou. When I do, I want you to point it at me and squeeze the trigger. Maybe you’ll punch my ticket. But if not, it will be my turn, and the odds for you will have shrunk appreciably. Are you processing this, Lou?”

  “You need to fire your psychiatrist.”

  “Take it,” I said.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “This is as good as it’s going to get, partner. I advise you to take it.”

  But he kept his hands at his sides, his face jerking away each time the barrel came close to him. “Take it, you piece of shit,” I said.

  “No!” he said, teeth clenched.

  That’s when I lost it. I hooked him in the face with my left, mashed my knee into his chest, and forced the revolver into his hands. “Do it!” I said.

  “No!”

  “Do it, you motherfucker!”

  The muzzle was pointed into my chest, inches from my sternum. I forced his thumb onto the trigger and pressed it back against the trigger guard. I heard the hammer snap on an empty chamber. His eyes were wide with disbelief as they stared up into mine.

  “You’re crazy,” he said, his voice seizing in his throat, like a child who has been crying uncontrollably.

  “My turn,” I said, pulling the revolver from his hands.

  “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Val Chalons is your son, isn’t he?”

  “That’s what this is about? Are you nuts? You make me pull the trigger on a cop over—”

  I clenched my left hand on his throat and jammed the .38 into his mouth with my right, forcing the cylinder over his teeth. He gagged, spittle running from the corners of his mouth. I pulled the trigger and heard the hammer snap again on an empty chamber.

  “Oh Jesus,” he said, trembling all over when I slid the barrel from his mouth.

  “Is Val Chalons your—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we found out when the old man needed a kidney donation. He had to get the kidney from the girl.”

  “Honoria?”

  He nodded, blotting the spittle and blood on his mouth with the bedsheet.

  “Val put the contract on me?” I said.

  “Figure it out. How many people want you snuffed?”

  “I wouldn’t be clever.”

  “He don’t consult with me. He’s an educated man. People get in his face, he deals with it. That he gets from me.”

  I looked at him a long time. There were other questions I could have asked him, but the surge of terror that had robbed him of his defenses was gone and I had no inclination to restore it. In fact, I wondered if the moral insanity that characterizes terminal alcoholism had not taken up presence in my own life. I wiped the .38 clean on a towel and opened the curtain on the sliding glass door. Hailstones were bouncing on the St. Augustine grass and the cement by the pool.

  “I can’t force you out of the area, Lou, but I’m going to make life as uncomfortable for you as I can,” I said.

  “You did a switcherroo on that gun, didn’t you? You palmed the shell?”

  I
flipped open the cylinder on the .38 and shucked out the cartridge I had loaded earlier. It had been one chamber removed from rotating under the firing pin.

  “You got a lot of luck, Lou. Wear this on your key chain,” I said, and bounced the cartridge off his chest.

  As I turned to walk out, I heard him scrape the steak knife off his dinner plate and charge at my back. I drove my elbow into his face and left him on the carpet, holding his nose with both hands.

  A moment later I stopped at the desk in the lobby. “I owe you an apology, Miss,” I said.

  “What for?” the girl behind the desk said, smiling.

  “One day I’ll tell you. Here are a couple of gift certificates for a dinner at the Patio in New Iberia. The owner gave them to me, so it’s no big deal.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night,” she replied.

  I got in my truck and drove out from under the spreading oak where I had parked. A blue and pink neon sign in the shape of a martini glass and a reclining nude inside it was stenciled against the sky. I floored the truck through a broken chain of puddles and swerved out onto the old two-lane to New Iberia, the road ahead black with rain.

  Chapter 30

  AT 8:01 A.M. FRIDAY I called Koko Hebert at his office. “Was Honoria Chalons a kidney donor?” I said.

  He put down the receiver, then scraped it up a moment later. “Neither a donor nor a recipient,” he said. “Why?”

  “Val Chalons was asked to be a kidney donor for his father. It turned out they weren’t related. Supposedly Honoria bailed out the old man.”

  “Honoria took all her parts into the grave.”

  “You know how to say it, Koko.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Where do we start a search on a kidney transplant for Raphael Chalons?”

  “No, where do you start a search,” he corrected, and hung up.

  Outside, the rain was twisting in sheets, cars inching along in water up to the doors. The phone on my desk rang in less than thirty seconds after Koko had broken the connection. “What are you trying to tell me?” he said.

  “Val is not the son of Raphael Chalons. The old man didn’t leave a will. The Chalons estate is probably up for grabs.”

  “He sliced up his sister?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. But I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t have the guts.”

  “How does this figure into anything, except the fact you hate Valentine Chalons?”

  “He tried to have me killed. I’m getting tired of your social outrage, partner.”

  For the first time I could remember, Koko Hebert had nothing acerbic to say.

  “The old man always went to Houston for his serious medical work. We need to get the judge involved,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll process some stuff on the computer. Organ transplants involve lots of agencies. Maybe I can take a shortcut. I used to know the Chalons family physician in Lafayette. But I think he might be dead,” he said.

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  “No, you’re like all drunks, Dave. You just want your way,” he replied.

  He was probably right, but at that point I didn’t care. I attended the noon meeting of the Insanity Group, then drove back to the department through streets where the storm sewers had backed up and cars had flooded out and been left abandoned by their owners. At the noon meeting I made no allusion to the fact that the previous night I had forced a terrified man to point a revolver into my chest and pull the trigger and that I in turn had jammed the weapon down his throat and done the same to him. I began to wonder if in fact there were some deeds you confessed only to God, because no one else would believe them.

  At 1:36 p.m. Dana Magelli called from NOPD. “There’s no DNA match on Ernest Fogel,” he said. “We’ve got him on the abduction of the fifteen-year-old, but that’s it. You got anything at your end?”

  “Nothing I haven’t already told you,” I replied.

  “You remember the story about the abduction and murder of John Walsh’s kid?” he said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “The partner of that serial killer in Texas, Henry Lucas? He might have murdered Walsh’s boy. But we’ll never know. The guy died of AIDS in the Broward County Stockade.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what his point was and in truth I was afraid to ask. The story he had alluded to was one of the saddest I had ever encountered as a law officer.

  “I think Ernest Fogel is like that guy in the Broward County Stockade. We’ll never know the extent of his crimes,” Dana said. “He’ll be out in a few years and keep killing people, maybe children, and it won’t stop until mortality catches up with him. My wife says that’s why I don’t sleep at night. How about you? You get a full night’s sleep?”

  THE RADIO SAID the hurricane churning out in the Gulf might make landfall between New Orleans and Mobile. Down in Plaque-mines Parish, whose narrow extremities dangle like a severed umbilical cord far out in the salt, most reasonable people had already begun heading up Highway 1 toward Red Cross shelters in New Orleans. But by midafternoon the wind and rain had stopped in New Iberia and a dripping stillness had descended upon the town. Molly had said she was going to stop at the grocery store after work, but I thought it might be a fine evening to go out for dinner. Before leaving the office for the day, I called Molly at her agency and got the message machine.

  When I parked in the driveway, Snuggs was waiting for me on the gallery railing, his paws tucked under his chest, his thick, short-haired tail flipping and curling and uncurling in the air like a magician’s rope.

  “How’s it hangin’, Snuggs?” I said, picking him up.

  He rested on his back against the crook of my arm, purring, tightening his feet against me for extra purchase. The two of us went inside. Molly was still not home. I called again at the agency. This time the message machine did not pick up.

  I fed Snuggs and Tripod, then walked down to the bayou. The water had risen into the trees along the bank and was swollen with mud and cluttered with broken tree limbs and floating islands of green hyacinths that had torn loose from their root systems and were now blooming incongruently with yellow flowers. In the middle of the bayou an upside-down pirogue spun in an eddy, its hull shining dully in the overcast. The air was as cool and clean and fresh-smelling as spring, the trees dripping chains of rain rings into the bayou. Out of nowhere, two brown pelicans sailed past me and landed on the water not thirty feet from me.

  I heard Tripod waddling down the bank behind me. I scooped him up and folded his tail down and rested his seat on my palm so he could have a good overview of the bayou. “Check it out, Tripod,” I said. “The pelicans are back on the Teche, just like Bootsie said they would be. You happen to know these two guys?”

  If he did, he wasn’t saying.

  The pelicans floated past me, their feathers necklaced with raindrops, their long beaks pulled into their breasts. I flipped Tripod up on my shoulder and walked back toward the house, an unexpected sense of serenity singing in my soul.

  Squirrels were chasing one another around the tree trunks and robins and mockingbirds were picking insects out of the new leaves on the ground. The birdhouse I had bought from Andre Bergeron hung suspended on a wire over my head, canting slightly in the breeze, its perch empty. I remembered I had still not poured birdseed in it. “Time to fill her up, huh, Tripod?” I said, setting him down.

  I got a sack of seed and a stepladder from the shed, and climbed up to the birdhouse. I pulled the beveled plug from the roof and began pouring seed down into the feeder compartment inside. The plug swung back and forth on a tiny brass chain that was affixed to the plug’s bottom and pinned inside the roof, so that the chain didn’t dangle outside the hole and impair the clean structural lines of the wood. The birdhouse, with its pegs and hand-notched
joints and sanded surfaces stained with vegetable oil, was a fine example of craftsmanship and obviously the work of someone who had an aesthetic eye.

  But my attention was diverted away from my activity when I happened to glance back through my kitchen window. Inside, I could see the red light flashing on my message machine. Molly must have called when I had been watching the pelicans with Tripod, I thought. I climbed down from the ladder and went through the back door.

  I pushed the “play” button on the machine. “I might be late. I’ll pick up some frozen gumbo for supper at the Winn-Dixie on the way home, but first I need to take care of a problem,” Molly’s voice said. Then after a pause, as though she were trying to restrain a vexation she didn’t want to vent, she added, “I’m disappointed in someone. He borrowed my tools again without asking. I need to straighten this guy out. Some people, huh, troop?”

  I called the agency, but no one answered and the machine was still off. I tried her cell phone but got her voice-mail recording. The time was 5:43 p.m.

  Straighten which guy out?

  I stared out the kitchen window at the birdhouse suspended on a wire above my stepladder, the plug from the feeder hole dangling from its tiny chain.

  Good God, I thought, and shut my eyes at my own stupidity.

  I looked up Koko Hebert’s phone number in the directory and punched it in on my cell phone as I headed out the door. “Koko, can you go to the evidence locker and find the piece of chain that was on the body of Fontaine Belloc?”

  I heard him sigh. “How about tomorrow?”

  “I bought a birdhouse from Andre Bergeron. Inside the construction is a length of brass chain that looks like the piece you found on the Belloc woman…You there?”

  “Why don’t you take care of it?”

  “Because I think Bergeron may be with my wife now,” I replied.