DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  "Think?" I said.

  "A detective talked to Father Dolan. Seems like Father Dolan has got us mixed up with the bad guys," she said.

  "Why you showing me this stuff?"

  "Hate to see your friend get clipped 'cause he's a poor listener. That goes for you, too, handsome."

  "You're with the G?"

  "We think the priest was lucky yesterday. What we can't figure is why. Max Coll is a lot of things but fuck-up isn't one of them," she said.

  "You're DEA?"

  She looked up into my face, her head tilted at an angle, her teeth white behind her grin. "I heard you had a cinder block for a head," she said.

  "Have you had lunch yet?" I said.

  "Some people are all work and no play. That's me, Robicheaux. Max Coll uses a silencer, sometimes an ice pick. You heard it first from your ex-meter maid friend at N.O.P.D."

  "Right," I said.

  She stuck a business card in my shirt pocket and hit me on the hip with her satchel. "See you around, darling'," she said.

  I walked with her to the front door of the building and watched her get in her automobile and drive away. Helen Soileau was standing behind me.

  "What's with Miss Hip-Slick?" she said.

  "She's with N.O.P.D.," I said.

  "The hell she is. She's a state trooper. She used to work undercover narcotics in Shreveport. She got into a firefight with some dealers about ten years ago and shot all five of them."

  Later, while I was out of the office, Clete Purcel left a message that he had checked into the old motor court on East Main, one that had long served as his field office in southwest Louisiana and his home away from home. The motor court was located inside a massive bower of live oak trees and slash pines on the bayou, and when I drove through the entrance that evening I saw Clete in front of the last cottage, barechested, wearing shorts with dancing elephants on them, flip-flops, and a Marine Corps utility cap, drinking from a bottle of Dixie while he flipped a steak on a naming grill.

  "Running down bail skips?" I said.

  "No, I just had to get out of the Big Sleazy for a while. Gunner Ar-doin is driving me nuts," he said.

  "What's happening with Gunner?"

  "He thinks somebody's going to clip him. Maybe he's right. So I..."

  "So you what?"

  "Gave him my apartment."

  "Your apartment? To Gunner Ardoin?"

  "His wife skipped town and left his little girl with him. What was I supposed to do? Quit looking at me like that," he said. He picked up a can of diet Dr. Pepper from an ice chest and tossed it at me.

  I sat down in a canvas chair, out of the smoke from the grill. Through the trees the sunlight looked like gold foil on the bayou. A tugboat passed, its wake slapping against the bank.

  "Ever hear of a button man by the name of Max Coll?" I said.

  "A freelance guy out of Miami?"

  "That's the one."

  "What about him?"

  "That black patrolwoman who answered the complaint in Ardoin's kitchen, Clotile Arceneaux? She's an undercover state trooper. She told me this guy Coll tried to kill Father Dolan yesterday," I said.

  "Dolan thinks he walks on water. You might tell him the saints died early deaths."

  "He's not a listener," I said.

  "Yeah, like somebody else I know," Clete said.

  I walked down in the trees and watched the boats pass on the bayou while Clete finished grilling his steak. On the opposite bank two black laborers were trenching a waterline while a white man in a straw hat supervised them. When I walked back out of the trees Clete was laying out two plates, paper napkins, and knives and forks on a picnic table.

  "I don't want to steal your supper," I said.

  "Don't worry about it. My doctor says when I die I'll need a piano crate just to put my cholesterol in," he said.

  "I'm trying to find out what happened to a convict in Angola back in the fifties. A guy named Junior Crudup. He went in and never came out," I said.

  "Yeah?" Clete said, dividing up his steak, looking at a woman in a bathing suit on the bow of a speedboat.

  "Father Jimmie and I were at the house of Castille Lejeune Saturday evening. Lejeune got Crudup off the levee gang back in 1951. But he said he has no memory of it," I said.

  "You're talking about stuff that happened a half century ago?" Clete said.

  "Crudup's family got swindled out of their property."

  Clete plopped a foil-wrapped potato on my plate and sat down. He looked at me for a long time. "So you think this character Lejeune is lying?" he said.

  "I couldn't tell."

  "Wake up, big mon. Rich guys don't care whether the rest of us believe them or not. That's why they're great liars."

  "His daughter saw two kids about to fall into a fish pond. But she was afraid to climb inside a fence and get them," I said.

  "Is Father Dolan part of this?"

  "He took me out to the Crudup place in St. James Parish."

  "This guy is playing you, Dave. He knows you don't like authority or rich people and you're a real sucker for a sob story. How about letting Dolan and the Throw-ups or whatever clean up their own shit?"

  "I'm getting played? You just gave a pornographic actor your apartment. The same guy you hit in the head with a coffeepot. You go from one train wreck to the next."

  "That's why I never listen to my own advice."

  He drank from his bottle of Dixie beer, his green eyes filled with an innocent self-satisfaction, his jaw packed with steak.

  The next morning I drove to the house of Josh Comeaux, the clerk who I believed had sold daiquiris to Lori Parks and her friends the afternoon they burned to death. He lived with his mother in a small, weathered frame house not far from the Southern Pacific railway tracks. In the front yard was a post with hooks on it, from which vinyl bags of garbage hung so they would not be torn apart by dogs before the trash pickup.

  Josh pushed open the screen door and stepped out on the gallery. He was barefoot and wore recycled jeans without a belt and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. A heart with a circle of thorns twisted around it was tattooed high up on his right arm. Through the screen I could see a fat woman in a print dress watching a television program.

  "You come to arrest me?" he said.

  "Not yet. Who bruised up your face?"

  He touched the yellow-and-purple discoloration below one eye.

  "Dr. Parks did. Last night. After I got off from work."

  "Lori's father?" I said.

  "Yes, sir. That's why I figured you were here."

  "He knocked you around?"

  "I went in for gas at the all-night station. He walked me out in the shadows and hit me. He was pretty mad."

  "Are you telling me you confessed something to Dr. Parks?"

  "Yeah. I mean yes, sir. I told him what I did."

  "Before you go any farther, I need to advise you of certain rights you have, the most important of which is your right to have an attorney."

  "Who is that?" the fat woman in the chair yelled through the screen.

  "Just a guy, Mom," Josh said, and walked out into the yard, out of earshot from his mother. "I told Dr. Parks I sold daiquiris to Lori and her friends. They were there three times that afternoon. It's not the only time I've sold to underage kids, either. Mr. Hebert tells us not to hold up the line 'cause somebody can't find their driver's license. But what he means is on weekend nights don't pass up any business."

  "Mr. Hebert is your employer?"

  "Yes, sir. At least till this morning. He fired me when I told him I'd served Lori and the other girls."

  "Did Lori give you an ID of any kind?"

  He shook his head. "When Lori Parks wanted something, you gave it to her. She was the prettiest girl in Loreauville."

  "Josh, I'm placing you under arrest. Turn around while I hook you up."

  "Am I going to prison?"

  "That's up to other people, partner," I said, and put him in the backseat of the
cruiser, my hand on top of his head.

  As we drove away I saw his mother walk out on the gallery and look in both directions, wondering where her son had gone.

  That afternoon I called Lori Parks's father at his office. His receptionist told me he was not expected in that day.

  "Is the funeral today?" I asked.

  "It was yesterday," she replied.

  "Would you give me his home number, please?"

  "I'm not supposed to do that."

  "We can send a cruiser out there and bring him in, if you like," I said.

  When I called his home no one answered and the message machine, if he had one, was turned off. I checked out a cruiser and drove to Loreauville, nine miles up the Teche, and found his house in a wooded, hilly area on the bayou, just outside of town.

  The one-story house was long and flat and constructed of what is called South Carolina brick, torn down from nineteenth-century buildings and shipped to Louisiana for use in custom-built homes. Apple green wood shutters that were ornamental rather than operational were affixed to the walls on each side of the windows and looked as if they had been painted on the brick. The porch ran the width of the house and was intersected with a series of miniature fluted columns. With its flat roof and squeezed windows, the house looked like a constipated man crouched back in the trees. It had probably cost a half million dollars to build.

  Dr. Parks stood on a shady knoll overlooking the bayou, slashing golf balls across the water into a grove of persimmon trees. When I walked up behind him, leaves crackling under the soles of my shoes, he glanced at me for only a moment, then whacked another ball into the persimmons.

  "I arrested Josh Comeaux this morning," I said.

  "Glad to hear it," he said. His face was heated, freshly shaved, even though it was late in the day. He picked another ball out of a bucket and set it on a tee.

  "He says you knocked him around."

  "What's your business here, Detective?" He rested his driver by his foot. He wore doeskin gloves that had no fingers and a long-sleeve maroon polo shirt and casual slacks that accentuated the flatness of his stomach and the graceful line of his hips.

  "I'd like to see the owners of these drive-by daiquiri stores run through a tree shredder. But you're taking out your anger on the wrong person, Dr. Parks," I said.

  "I moved my family here from Memphis. We thought small-town America wouldn't have drugs and political officials on the take and bastards who sell children booze to kill themselves with. I've been a stupid man."

  He took his position on the tee, lifted his golf club with perfect form, and whipped it viciously into the ball.

  "Don't add to your grief, sir," I said.

  He turned and faced me. "You have any idea of what it might have been like inside that car?" he said.

  "The tox screen showed traces of marijuana in Lori's blood," I said.

  "So what?"

  "Maybe Josh Comeaux is a victim, too."

  "I must have done something wrong in a former life," he said.

  "Pardon?"

  "My daughter was burned alive and the cop who should be kicking somebody's ass is a goddamn titty-sucking liberal. You need to leave my property."

  I took my sunglasses out of their case, then replaced them and stuck the case back in my shirt pocket. The wind was cold blowing out of the trees and I could smell the heavy odor of the bayou in the shadows. The skin under Dr. Parks's right eye seemed to twitch uncontrollably.

  "Are you hard of hearing?" he asked.

  "The judge will probably go light on Josh's bond. That means he'll probably be back home in a day or so. Axe we clear on the implication, sir?" I said.

  "That I'd better not hurt him?"

  He waited for an answer but I didn't give him one. I fitted on my sunglasses and walked back to the cruiser, my shoes crunching through the leaves the doctor had raked into piles, only to see them blown apart by the wind. The doctor's wife emerged from the front door, wearing a house robe and slippers, a drink in her hand, the makeup on her face like a theatrical mask.

  "You think I care about that boy? You think that's what this is about? Where are your brains, man?" the doctor shouted after me.

  The following evening I ate supper in the backyard, then went to the old cemetery by the drawbridge in St. Martinville where Bootsie was buried. The air was cold and smelled of distant rain, the sky yellow with dust blown from the fields. Several of the houses bordering the cemetery had signs on the galleries announcing TOMB PAINT FOR SALE. In south Louisiana we bury the dead on top of the ground and it's a tradition to whitewash the crypts of family members on All Saints Day. But it wasn't November yet. Or was it? I had to look at the calendar window on my watch to assure myself the month was still October.

  Bootsie's crypt was located by the bayou, and standing next to it I

  could look downstream and see on the opposite bank the ancient French church and the Evangeline Oak where she and I had first kissed as teenagers and the stars overhead had swirled like diamonds inside a barrel of black water.

  I removed the three roses I had placed in a vase two nights previous and washed and refilled the vase under a tap by the gravel path that led through the cemetery. Then I put three fresh roses in the vase and set it in front of the marble marker that was cemented into the front of Bootsie's crypt. The roses were yellow, the petals edged with pink, the stems wrapped in green tissue paper by a young clerk at the Winn-Dixie store in New Iberia. When he handed me the roses I was struck by the bloom of youth on his face, the clarity of purpose in his eyes. "I bet these are for a special lady," he had said.

  I sat on a metal bench with a ventilated backrest for a long time and drank a bottle of carbonated water I had brought from home. Then the wind came up and scattered the leaves from a swamp maple on the bayou's surface, and inside the sound of the wind I thought I heard a loon calling.

  I finished the bottle of carbonated water, screwed the top back on, and pitched the bottle at a trash barrel. But the bottle bounced on the rim of the barrel and fell on the gravel path. Rather than get up from the bench and retrieve it, I looked at it dumbly, all my energies dissipated for reasons that made no sense, the light as cold and brittle as if the sun were layered with ice.

  I heard footsteps behind me.

  "I wasn't going to disturb you but I have to get back home," Theo-dos ha Flannigan said.

  "Pardon?" I said.

  "Your neighbor told me you'd be here if you weren't at home," she said. "I was parked in my car, waiting for you to come out. Merchie doesn't know where I am. He ducks bullets in Afghanistan, then gets strung out if he breaks a shoelace. It's because of his mother. I think she was lobotomized. That's not a joke."

  I couldn't follow what she was saying. I started to get up, but she put her hand on my shoulder and sat down beside me.

  "It's about Saturday night. Those two children were in danger of falling in the pond and I just stood there and watched it happening. I feel like shit," she said.

  " "Bravery' and 'fear' are relative terms. What counts is you went after them," I said.

  "I have some bad memories about that pond," she said. She bit on a hangnail and stared into space. "I never go inside that fence. You must think I'm an awful person."

  But the truth was I didn't want to talk about Theo's personal problems. I stood and picked up the plastic bottle that had bounced off the trash can and dropped it inside. When I sat back down I felt the blood rush from my head.

  "Are you okay?" she said.

  "I still have bouts with malaria sometimes," I said.

  She wore a scarf tied under her chin, the points of her hair pressed flat against her cheeks. "Something else is bothering me, too, Dave. I think I make you uncomfortable," she said.

  "No, that's not true. Not at all," I said, focusing my eyes on the bayou.

  "That night we had the little fling? We'd both been drinking our heads off. Neither one of us was married at the time. I admit I thought you might come back aroun
d, but you didn't. So I wrote it off. It's no big deal."

  "You're right, it's no big deal. I didn't say it was a big deal," I replied.

  "Then why are you so "

  "It's not a problem. That's really important to understand here," I said.

  "I'm afraid I've intruded upon you."

  "No, you haven't. Everything is fine. Give Merchie my best."

  "Will you come out to dinner?"

  I pinched my temples and looked down the bayou at the Evange-line Oak looming over the water and at the spire of the old French church, a sliver of moon rising behind the steeple.

  "Maybe we can talk about it later," I said.

  "Sure. I'm sorry for being here like this. Since my psychiatrist died .. . No, that's the wrong word. Since he shot himself I feel this terrible sense of guilt. I've got two days' sobriety now. That's pitiful, isn't it? I mean, taking pride in staying off the hooch for two days, like I invented the wheel?"

  "I'll see you, Theo."

  She exhaled her breath and I felt it touch my skin. She raised her eyebrows, staring inquisitively into my face, as though I needed to supply the endings to all her unfinished thoughts. Then she seemed to give it up and kissed the tips of two fingers, pressed them against my cheek, and walked out of the cemetery, a solitary firefly lighting in a tree above her head.

  In the morning I called a homicide detective at the Lafayette City Police Department by the name of Joe Dupree. He had been in the 173 Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, but never spoke of the war and ate aspirin constantly for the pain he'd carried in his knees for thirty-five years. He was also one of the most thorough investigators I had ever known.

  "What do you have on this psychiatrist who shot himself in Girard Park?" I said.

  "Dr. Bernstine? It's going down as a suicide. Why do you ask?"

  "A woman named Theodosha Flannigan has brought it up a couple of times."

  "Merchie Flannigan's wife?"

  "Yeah, how'd you know?"

  "Her name was in Bernstine's appointment book," he replied.