DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  But Woodrow believed it was the first blow that killed Junior and that the others were visited upon the body of a dead man, because Junior made no sound as the slapjack whistled down on his head and neck and back, thudding to the ground on his knees, his eyes already rolled upward in his head.

  And while his friend died Woodrow stood by impotently, his fists balled in front of him, a cry coming from his throat that sounded like a child's and not his own.

  Jackson Posey's chest was heaving when he looked down at his work. He flung the slapjack aside. "Damn!" he said. He paced up and down, staring back at the camp, then at the lights burning in the Lejeune house. Woodrow was so frightened his teeth knocked together in the back of his mouth.

  Posey steadied his foot against Junior's shoulder and tried to shove his body over the edge of the hole. But Junior's body fell sideways and Boss Posey couldn't move it with his foot. In fact, Woodrow could not believe how weak Posey was.

  "Get a holt of his feet," Posey said.

  "Suh?"

  "Pick up his feet or join him. Which way you want it?"

  Woodrow gathered up Junior's ankles while Boss Posey lifted his arms, and the two of them flung Woodrow's friend over the rim of the hole. The thump it made when it hit the bottom was a sound Woodrow would hear in his sleep the rest of his life.

  "Go over there and set on the ground," Posey said.

  Posey mounted the bulldozer and started the engine. With the lights off he lowered the blade and pushed the huge pile of clay into the hole, backing off it, packing it down, scraping it flat, until the hole was only a dimple in the landscape. When he cut the engine Woodrow could hear the first drops of rain pinging on the steel roof over the driver's seat.

  "Junior transferred out of here tonight. Ain't none of this happened. That's right, ain't it, Woodrow?"

  "If you say so, boss."

  "There's a half inch of whiskey left in that bottle. You want it?"

  "No, suh."

  "Have a Camel," Posey said, and shook two loose from his pack. "Go ahead and take it. It's a new day tomorrow. Don't never forget that. Sun gonna be breakin' and a new day shakin'. That's what my daddy always used to say."

  How'd you come by this little farm here?" I asked Woodrow.

  "Mr. Lejeune sold it to me. Give me a good price wit' out no interest," he replied.

  "To shut you up?"

  "He sent a black man to me wit' the offer. Never saw Mr. Le-Jeune." Woodrow stared at me with his flat, sightless eyes that could have been large painted buttons sewn on his face. Lightning jumped in the clouds over the Gulf.

  I slipped my business card between his fingers. "Let me know if I can do anything for you," I said.

  His hand folded around the card. "Whatever happened to Mr. Lejeune's li'l girl, the one named T'co?" he asked.

  "Theodosha? She's around."

  "My cousin, the maid for Mr. and Miz Lejeune? She always worried about that li'l girl. She said tings wasn't right in that house."

  I asked him what he meant but he refused to explain.

  "How long were you inside?" I said as I was leaving.

  "Five years."

  "What'd you go down for?"

  "Fifty-tree-dol'ar bad check," he replied.

  Chapter 18.

  As I drove back toward New Iberia a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf and marched across the southern tip of Vermilion Parish, thrashing the sugarcane in the fields, the rain twisting in my headlights. I could not shake the tale told me by Woodrow Reed, nor the sense of needless death and cruelty and loss that it instilled in the listener. I turned on my radio and tried to find a station that was playing music, but my radio went dead, although it had been working fine earlier.

  I tried to get Helen again on my cell phone, but I couldn't raise the wireless service and gave it up and tossed the cell phone on the seat. I passed flooded rice fields wrinkled with wind and lighted farmhouses that looked like snug islands inside the storm. Then I passed a billboard on a curve and my lights flashed across a woman standing by the side of the road.

  She wore blue jeans and an unbuttoned tan raincoat that whipped back in the wind. Her hair was honey colored, tapered on her neck, her skin almost luminous in the glare of headlights. Hey, G.I." give a girl a ride? I thought I heard a voice say.

  I braked the truck to the side of the road, my heart beating, and looked through the back window. The woman stood on the shoulder of the road, silhouetted against a light that shone on the face of the billboard. Don't buy into this, I told myself. It's not her. Your wife is dead and all the delusions and misery you inject into your life will not change that inalterable fact.

  Then I put the truck in reverse and began backing toward the figure on the side of the road.

  She glanced back over her shoulder once and began running. I accelerated faster, swerving on and off the pavement, until I was abreast of her. Through the rain-streaked glass her face stared at me, beaded with water, eyeshadow running down her cheeks, her mouth glossy with lipstick. I closed and opened my eyes, like a man coming out of darkness into light, her face forming and reforming in the rain.

  I shoved open the passenger door and held up my badge holder. "Get in," I said.

  She hesitated a moment, then sat down in the passenger seat and slammed the door behind her. She gave me a hard look in the glow of the dash panel. Her cheeks were pitted and heavily made up, her clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and booze. "Thanks for the ride. My old man threw me out," she said.

  "Where do you want to go?" I asked.

  "First bar we pass," she said. "For a minute you scared me. I had trouble with a couple of black guys last night. You stopped just 'cause you saw me in the rain?"

  "I thought you were somebody else," I said.

  She gave me a look. "There's a bar past the curve. Right by the motel," she said.

  I put on my turn indicator and began to slow the truck. I knew the bar. It was a ramshackle, sullen place owned by a man who ran dog fights.

  "I left my purse at the house. The sonofabitch I live with has probably drunk it up by now," she said.

  I stopped in the parking lot and waited. She took a cigarette from her shirt pocket and lit it with a plastic butane lighter. She continued rubbing the striker wheel under her thumb. "Look, I can't drink in there for free. You want some action or not?" she said.

  "Get out," I said.

  "I can really pick them," she said. She stepped out into the storm and slammed the truck door as hard as she could.

  Lesson? Chasing a nighttime mirage on a rain-swept highway has no happy ending for either the quick or the dead.

  The one-car fatality at West Cote Blanche Bay seemed to lack any plausible explanation. The witness, an elderly Cajun hired to pick litter out of the ditches along the roadside, had seen an expensive, large car parked next to a compact in a grove of pine trees. Children had been lighting fireworks all evening, shooting Roman candles and rockets over the bay. Then he had heard firecrackers in the trees, just before the compact had driven away. When he looked again at the grove of pines, the large car started up and drove out onto a pier, snapping the supports on the guardrail into sticks, finally plunging off the end of the pier into the water.

  Helen Soileau had arrived at the bay only a few minutes before me. She walked with me up a shell ramp and introduced me to the witness. As with most elderly Cajun men, his handshake was as light as air. "How many firecrackers did you hear?" I asked him.

  "Two, maybe tree," he replied.

  He was a tiny man, dressed in neat khakis, with cataracts and a supple face that resembled brown tallow. He seemed nervous and kept glancing over his shoulder at the bay and at the splintered guardrail on the pier and at the wrecker that so far had not been able to pull the sunken car off a submerged pipeline, all of it lit in the glare of searchlights mounted on a firetruck.

  "Is anything wrong?" I asked.

  "I seen a big man behind the wheel. Seen him go crashing right off the end of the pier t
here. I cain't swim, me. I keep t'inking maybe there was air inside the car. Maybe if I'd brung hep sooner "

  "You have no reason to feel bad about anything, sir. Who was in the compact?"

  "Just somebody driving a li'l car. It was an old one. I ain't sure what kind."

  "Was a man or woman driving?"

  His shook his head, his face blank.

  "What color was the car?" I asked.

  "I just ain't paid it much mind, no."

  "You see a license tag?" I asked.

  "No, suh."

  "The firecrackers you heard, those were in the pine trees? You're sure about that?" I said.

  "No, suh, I ain't sure about none of it no more."

  I patted him on the shoulder and walked down to the water's edge. The bay was black, dimpled with rain rings, and the tide was pushing small waves that glistened with gasoline up on the sand. Two scuba divers, both of them sheriff's deputies, had already beenjdown on the wrecked car. They were sitting on the running board of the firetruck in their wet suits, sharing a thermos of coffee.

  "What's it look like down there?" I asked.

  "The vehicle landed on its side. Driver's face is down in the silt. The ignition is on and the gearshift in "Drive,"" one of them said. His name was Darbonne. He was unshaved and had curly black hair, his throat prickled with cold.

  "Any chance air was trapped in there?" I asked.

  "The front windows were down. The driver's arm is tangled up in the seat belt, like he couldn't find the release button. All that water probably hit him like a hammer," Darbonne said.

  "The witness blames himself for not getting back with help sooner. Tell him about the air situation, will you?" I said.

  Darbonne nodded and yawned. "When they drive off bridges or piers, they're drunks, nutcases, or suicides," he said. "If a guy in a Caddy ices himself, he should have the courtesy to do it without inconveniencing people who make twenty-five grand a year."

  "Say again?"

  "The whale who just offed himself. I wish he'd gone to a heated, indoor pool to do it," the driver said, then looked at my expression. "What, I just spit on the floor in church?"

  A few minutes later the divers went down again to reset the hook on the Cadillac's frame so the car could be flipped over on its top and slid off the pipeline it partially rested on. Helen and I stood by the water's edge and watched. The moon had broken through a slit in the clouds, and far out on the horizon there were whitecaps that looked like tiny bird's wings.

  "Castille Lejeune's lawyer called again. He's talking about a harassment suit against the department," she said.

  "He'd like my job?"

  "What did you find out down at Pecan Island?" she said, ignoring my question.

  "Castille Lejeune had Junior Crudup killed. He was beaten to death by a prison guard, a guy named Jackson Posey," I replied.

  She looked at the black surface of the bay and at the slickness of the wrecker cable as it extracted the submerged car from the water. Her face did not change expression. She wiped away a raindrop that had caught in her eyelash. "Where's Crudup's body?" she asked.

  "Probably still buried on the Lejeune's property," I said.

  "Get a search warrant," she said.

  The wrecker man winched the Cadillac upside-down out of the shallows and slid it up on the bank, the front windows gushing with water and oil-blackened silt. The body of a huge man hung against the safety strap, his shoulders and neck pressed against the roof, his face twisted toward the open window so he appeared to be staring at a bizarre event taking place outside his automobile.

  I squatted down to eye-level with him and shone a flashlight on his face and inside the rest of the car. There was a small entry hole in his neck, his cheek, and the side of his head. The wounds had bled out and had washed clean in the water and had started to pucker around the edges.

  "Ever think anybody could sucker-drop Fat Sammy Figorelli?" Helen said behind me.

  "No," I said. I reached inside the car and closed Sammy's eyes. The inverted weight of his massive buttocks and thighs had curved his spine so that his back and neck were compressed like a gargoyle's.

  "Don't waste your sympathies, Streak. He was a pimp and a pusher and the world's a better place every time one of these shit bags gets stuffed into a hole," Helen said.

  "I guess you're right," I said. But I could not help remembering the stories of a French Quarter fat kid who had spent years being the butt of people's jokes.

  Helen stood up from the spot where she had crouched behind me. "Wrap it up here. At oh-eight-hundred tomorrow go to work on the warrant. It's time Castille Lejeune learned this is the United States," she said.

  "You got it, Top," I said, referring to her old rank in the U.S. Army.

  "Call me that again and I'll tear off your head and spit in it," she replied.

  I think even Fat Sammy would have enjoyed that one.,

  We had the warrant by late Tuesday afternoon. Without announcement and with a balmy breeze at our backs and a sky the color of a ripe peach, two cruisers from the Iberia Sheriff's Department, three from St. Mary Parish, a front-end loader, and a bulldozer chain-boomed on a flatbed tractor-trailer rig all came down Castille Le Jeune's front drive, raking through the lone tunnel of oaks, right into the middle of an outdoor dinner party Lejeune was holding on his terrace.

  Helen and I and a plainclothes from the St. Mary sheriff's office served the warrant on him in front of his guests, who included, among at least a dozen others, Theo and Merchie Flannigan. Lejeune tried to feign an amused dismay and the good cheer of the professional bon vivant, but Theo imposed no such restraints on herself.

  She wore a low-cut white evening dress and a necklace of red stones around her throat. Her skin was flushed with either the challenge of the moment or the glass of bourbon and crushed ice with a sprig of mint she had been drinking. She placed her small fists on her hips, as a drill instructor might, and turned her face up into mine. "You're an idiot," she said.

  "Excuse me, madam, but you need to sit down and stay out of this," Helen said.

  "And you need to work on your sexual-identity problems before you lecture other people in their homes," Theo said.

  Helen gazed through the trees at the bayou and the deserted shacks that had once housed prison inmates, her breasts hard-looking as softballs against her shirt. She reread the warrant to herself, seemingly indifferent to Theo's insult. Then she lifted her eyes into Theo's. "Repeat what you just said."

  "You have no business here," Theo said.

  "Where do you think the burial site is?" Helen said to me, ignoring Theo.

  "On a line between here and what would have been the front gate of the prison camp. I'd put it pretty close to that pond inside the fenced area," I said.

  Lejeune raised his hands. "Listen to me," he said. "I don't know anything about this man Junior Crudup or whatever his name is. My wife befriended the convicts who worked out their sentences on our farm. She was a kind, gentle, decent person. How in God's name can you accuse us of hiding the remains of a murdered man on our property?"

  Helen walked out into the yard. "Take out that fence and start in a circle. Drain the pond if you have to," she said to the two heavy-equipment operators.

  Helen went back to her cruiser and I began walking down the slope toward the old work camp. Inside the evening shade of the trees I could hear the conversation and tinkle of glasses resume among Lejeune's guests on the patio.

  "Dave, stop," Theo said, catching my arm.

  She'd just had her hair cut and it was thick and even and shiny on the whiteness of her shoulders. The bourbon and smell of ice and mint on her breath touched my face like the tracings of a kiss.

  "Your father commissioned a murder," I said.

  "You have it all backwards," she said.

  "Then why are you afraid to go down to the pond?"

  "For reasons you don't understand."

  "You can tell the jury that at your father's trial."

&
nbsp; "Why do you hate him so much?"

  "Because he's a sonofabitch."

  "I'll remember you said that to the day I die."

  "Go back home, Theo. Your guests are waiting."

  "I can't believe I slept with you. I want to peel my skin off."

  Perhaps her response was justified, but at that moment I didn't care one way or another. Down below, the bulldozer and front-end loader were tearing apart a white-rail fence and a sloping green pasture, looking for the bones of a man who had been beaten to death so a cancer-ridden prison guard could keep his pension and a cuckolded husband his pride.

  The heavy-equipment operators worked, by gasoline-powered light until midnight, blading away the grass and topsoil, pushing it into water-beaded, black-green mounds. They came back at sunrise and started in again, scooping huge amounts of wet clay and feeder roots from the oak trees onto Lejeune's lawn, trenching a drainage into his fish pond, smashing his dock into kindling. By noon the entire landscape between the trees in his backyard and the cluster of cabins by the bayou was an ecological disaster, water oozing from the substrata, perch and catfish fighting for survival in small pools, a cow's ribs arching out of the clay like a woman's comb.

  A half dozen uniformed deputies in rubber boots raked and probed for hours but found no sign of a human burial. By Wednesday afternoon the excavation area had become a giant, water-filled pit. Since the previous day I had slept three hours. My eyes stung, my jaws were like sandpaper, and a stale, clammy odor rose from my clothes. The heavy-equipment operators shut down their machines and waited. Helen shook her head and the operators climbed down and began packing up.

  "We're in the Dumpster, bwana," Helen said.

  "That body was here. He moved it," I said.

  "Ride back with me. You look like a car wreck," she said.

  "He's not going to get away with it. I'm going to fry that bastard."

  "You probably will. Even if you have to take everybody down with you. You might give that some thought," she said.

  I opened and closed my mouth and felt my ears popping, the horizon tilting slightly, a buzzing sound inside my head, as though my old companion the malarial mosquito was having its way with me again.