DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  According to witnesses, the owner tried to exit the trailer but discovered the door had been sealed shut with a bonding adhesive used to repair the bodies of wrecked automobiles. The perpetrator skidded the trailer out of the court onto the surfaced road, bouncing it across a drainage ditch, smashing mailboxes and parked cars. When the trailer toppled on its side, witnesses thought they saw the owner trying to climb out of an exposed window. But the driver of the wrecker accelerated, knocking Fontenot, the owner, back inside. The driver then dragged the trailer across the steel grid of the drawbridge, geysering rooster-tails of sparks in the darkness.

  A liquid blue flame enveloped one of the butane tanks on the rear of the trailer. The explosion that ensued blew burning paper, fabric,

  and particle board all over the bayou. The owner, who by this time had broken out a window and cleaned the glass from the frame with a hammer, barely escaped with his life.

  The perpetrator abandoned the wrecker and burning trailer, which was tightly wedged between the steel side beams on the bridge, and disappeared into the darkness on the far side of the bayou. A moment later an ancient Cadillac convertible was seen speeding down the road toward New Iberia, the engine misfiring, leaking oil smoke, the driver wearing a small, short-brim hat perched on the front of his head.

  "Wow, that's something, isn't it?" I said, handing the fax sheets back to Helen.

  "Any idea who could pull a stunt like that?" she said.

  "There're a lot of old gas guzzlers like that around," I replied, my eyes drifting around the room.

  "Right," she said.

  "No mention of the Cadillac's color?"

  "Nope," she said.

  "It's not in our jurisdiction, anyway. Let St. Mary Parish do some work for a change."

  "You get Clete Purcel in here right now," she said.

  But Clete did not answer his phone, and when I drove by the motor court, the manager told me he had not seen Clete's car in the last day or two. I called Clete's office in New Orleans. The temporary secretary he sometimes used was an ex-nun by the name of Alice Weren-haus who put the fear of God in some of Clete's clients.

  "You are Mr. Robicheaux?" she said.

  "I was when I got up this morning," I replied, then quickly regretted my mistake in attempting humor with Alice Werenhaus.

  "Oh, it is you, isn't it? I should have immediately recognized the quick wit at work in your rhetoric," she said. "Mr. Purcel left a message for you. Would you like me to read it to you?"

  "Yes, that would be very nice, Ms. Werenhaus," I replied.

  "It says, "Give Alice a pay phone number and a time. Fart, Barf, and Itch probably have you tapped.""

  "What's going on?" I said.

  "I suspect that's why he'd like to talk with you, Mr. Robicheaux. To explain everything to you. I'm sure by this time you're rather used to that," she said.

  I walked downtown and got the number off a public telephone and called it back to Alice Werenhaus. "I'll be at this number at one P.M.," I said.

  I expected another rejoinder at my expense. But she surprised me. "Mr. Robicheaux, be careful. Watch after Mr. Purcel, too. Under all his bluster he's a vulnerable man," she said.

  At 1:04 P.M. the payphone across from Victor's Cafeteria on Main Street rang. I picked it up and didn't wait for Clete to speak. "Have you lost your mind?" I said.

  "About what?" he said.

  "You stole a tow truck out of a filling station. You almost burned Bobby Joe Fontenot to death in his trailer. The drawbridge in Jean-erette is still closed with the melted wreckage you left on top of it. Boat traffic is backed up ten miles."

  "Oh, yeah, that,"" he replied. "Things got a little out of hand. Look, big mon "

  "No, you look, Clete. Helen wants to feed you into an airplane propeller."

  "She's emotional sometimes. I talked with Clotile Arceneaux. She says your phone is tapped."

  "I already got that. Listen to me "

  "You think the Feds are tapping a cop's phone because they're worried about an Irish button man whacking out a couple of grease balls These guys still haven't found Jimmy Hoffa. It's Merchie Flannigan and his wife they're worried about."

  "You're making no sense."

  "That broad's been giving you a hand job. I did some checking on Merchie's company. He's in line for some big drilling contracts in Iraq after Shrub turns it into an American colony. That means his father-in-law, what's-his-face, Castille Lejeune, is probably mixed up in it, too. The Feds are after Coll because he's about to pop somebody with a lot of juice, not because they're worried about Coll trying to kill a Catholic priest or smoking the Dellacroce brothers."

  It was pointless to argue with Clete. He was the best investigative cop I ever knew, his blue-collar instincts for deception and hypocrisy and flimflam always on target. But his antipathy toward Federal law enforcement agencies, particularly the FBI, was unrelenting, and at best he considered them bumbling and inept and at worst lazy and arrogant.

  "Why'd you say Theodosha Flannigan was giving me a hand job?" I asked.

  "She and her husband are business partners. She set you up to either get drunk or clipped, she didn't care which. Rich broads look after their money first and think about the size of your Johnson second. You think she's going to let a guy like you screw up her family's finances?"

  "You really know how to say it, Cletus."

  "You want to be a dildo for this broad, that's your choice. She's dirty, Streak, just like her husband and her old man."

  "What are you up to?"

  "I told you before, I'm going to make cripples out of the shitheads who hurt you. Get this. I saw a guy in Franklin who looks just like your description of Max Coll."

  "Stay away from him, Clete."

  "Lose a resource like that? By the way, what's the name of that electrician who burned down your house?"

  I started to give him the name, then refused.

  "That's all right. I already had a talk with him. He might be contacting your department, but don't believe anything he says."

  Later, I went into Helen's office. She was on the phone, nodding, while someone on the other end talked, her eyes on mine. "All right, we'll take care of it.... I agree with you. Absolutely.... This isn't the Wild West. You got it," she said, and hung up. Her face looked scorched.

  "Who was that?" I asked.

  "The Lafayette sheriff. An electrical contractor by the name of Herbert Vidrine was pulled out of his house at around six-thirty this morning and worked over in his backyard," she said.

  She looked down at the yellow legal pad on her desk, widening her eyes, as though she could not quite assimilate what she had just heard and written down. "By 'pulled out," I mean just that. His attacker was wearing work gloves of some kind and grabbed Vidrine by the mouth like he was picking up a bowling ball," she said. "He swung him around in a circle and threw him into the side of a garbage truck. Vidrine is in Our Lady of Lourdes now. A neighbor got the tag number of the attacker's car. A lavender Cadillac convertible. Guess who it belongs to?"

  "I just talked to Clete on the phone. He's not coming in," I said.

  "The electrical contractor is too scared to file charges. But Clete's not going to use Iberia Parish as his safe house while he goes around kicking people's asses."

  I nodded.

  The heat went out of her face. "What's the score on this electrical contractor?" she said.

  "He's the guy who installed bad wiring in my house. He works for Will Guillot."

  "I'm fed up with the stuff, Dave. Clean it up or you and Clete can start making your own plans," she said.

  I took the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette and hit a rainstorm just outside of town. By the time I got to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital the streets were flooding. I ran past a row of blooming camellia bushes into the side entrance of the hospital and asked at the nurse's station on the second floor for directions to Herbert Vidrine's room.

  "Three rooms past the elevator, on your left," the nur
se said.

  I thanked her and started down the hall. Then I stopped and went back to the station. I opened my badge holder. "How's Mr. Vidrine doing?" I asked.

  "A concussion and a broken arm. But he's doing all right," the nurse replied. She was young and had clean features and brown hair that was clipped on her neck.

  "Has anyone else been in to see him?"

  "Not since I've been here. I came on at eight A.M.," she said.

  "Could I use your typewriter?" I said.

  I had taken a fiction-writing course when I was an English education major at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. I hoped my old prof, Lyle Williams, would be proud of the letter I was now composing. I typed rather than signed a name at the bottom, folded and put the letter in an envelope the nurse gave me, then printed Herbert Vidrine's name on the outside.

  "Would you wait ten minutes, then deliver this to Mr. Vidrine's room?" I said.

  "I don't know if I should get involved in this," she replied.

  I placed the envelope on her desk. "You'd be helping out the good guys," I said.

  Vidrine was sitting up in bed when I entered his room, one arm in a cast, easing a teaspoon of Jell-O past a severely swollen bottom lip.

  "How are you, Herbert?" I said.

  He put his spoon back in a bowl that rested on his bed tray. "You're Iberia Parish. What are you doing here?" he said.

  "We're looking for the guy who hurt you but on different charges," I said, laying my raincoat and hat on a chair.

  "Maybe you're here to rub salt in a wound, too," he said.

  "You burned my house down, partner. But I'm like you, I'm a drunk. I can't carry resentments. Did you ever go back to meetings?"

  His eyes left mine. Even though he was a hard-bodied man, he looked small in the bed, his spoon clutched in a childlike fashion. "I never had that big a drinking problem. It was just when I was married," he said.

  "The man who attacked you didn't have the right to do what he did," I said.

  He frowned and ran his tongue over the swelling in his bottom lip. "Just leave me alone," he said.

  "One day you're going to have to do a Fifth Step on the injury you caused me and my family. My father built that house in the Depression with his own hands. My second wife was murdered in it. Her blood was in the wood," I said.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "Maybe you are," I said. I put my business card on his nightstand. "I think you have a lot of information about the dealings of some bad people, Herbert. Why take their bounce?"

  "I haven't done anything wrong," he replied.

  I drummed my fingers on top of the chair where my raincoat rested and looked out the window at an oak tree whipping in the wind, its leaves shredding high in the air. Then I picked up my raincoat and left, just as the nurse entered with the letter I had typed at the nurse's station.

  "This was left for you, Mr. Vidrine," I heard her say behind me.

  I waited five minutes, then reentered Vidrine's room. "I forgot my hat," I said, picking it up from the chair.

  The letter I had written lay unfolded on top of his bed tray. He was staring into space, his expression disjointed, like a man at a bus stop who has watched the bus's doors close in his face and the bus drive away without him.

  The letter I had typed at the nurse's station read as follows:

  Herbert,

  Sorry you got your ass stomped by that queer bait we had trouble with at the cafe in Jeanerette. But if you can't deal with a fat shit like that, I don't need you on the job. Take this as your official notice of termination. Also be advised you are forfeiting all fees due on uncompleted work.

  Will Guillot

  "Something wrong?" I asked.

  "Yeah, there is. You want to know about Sunbelt Construction?"

  "Yeah, what's up with these guys?"

  "They got connections with gangsters in New Orleans."

  "That's not real specific."

  "Maybe they're selling dope. I'm not sure. But Will Guillot is going to take over the company. He's got something on the old man."

  "CastilleLeJeune?"

  "Yeah, him. The war hero."

  "What does Guillot have on him?"

  "I don't know. I asked him once and all he said was, "I finally got the goods on both him and that cunt." I asked him which cunt he meant. He told me it wasn't my business."

  "Ever hear the name of Junior Crudup?"

  "No," he said.

  It had stopped raining outside. The sky was gray, the sun buried in a cloud like a wet flame, the hospital lawn blown with camellia petals. "That's all you got for me, Herbert? It's not too much," I said.

  "I'm an electrician. People don't confess their sins to me."

  "See you around," I said.

  "One time I told Will Fox Run was a beautiful place. He said, "Don't let it fool you. All these places got a nigger in the woodpile." I wasn't sure what he meant, though." He tilted his head inquisitively, waiting for me to speak, as if somehow we were old friends.

  So Vidrine repeated a racist remark that confirms what you already knew," Helen said in her office an hour later. "Maybe a convict was killed on the Lejeune plantation fifty years ago. Or maybe not. We didn't find a body, bwana."

  "That's the point," I said. "How could Will Guillot be blackmailing Castille Lejeune about the death of Junior Crudup? Guillot has something else on him."

  "I'm glad we cleared that up. Now get out of here," she replied.

  I couldn't blame Helen for her feelings. The real issues were the murders of the daiquiri-store operator and Fat Sammy Figorelli, and in both instances we had no viable suspects. In the meantime I had gotten myself abducted, gotten deeply involved in a murder case from a half century ago, and had helped bring Max Coll to our community.

  As a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, the axiom "keep it simple" was supposed to guide my daily life.

  What a joke.

  But Helen herself had said the real problem lay in the fact we were dealing with Dagwood and Blondie. Amateurs hide in plain sight. They also do not feel guilty about the misdeeds they commit. They attend church, Kiwanis meetings, belong to the Better Business Bureau, support every self-righteous moral cause imaginable, and float like helium balloons right over whole armies of cops looking for miscreants in off-track betting parlors, triple-X motels, and crack houses.

  The word criminal is more an emotional than legal term. Go to any U.S. post office and view the faces on the wanted posters. Like Dick Tracy caricatures, they stare out of the black-and-white photographs often taken in late-night booking rooms unshaved, pig snouted, rodent eyed, hare lipped, reassuring us that human evil is always recognizable and that consequently we will never be its victim.

  But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to have knowledge of.

  Five or six years ago Helen and I had to fly to Deer Lodge, Montana, and question a kid whose execution was scheduled in three days. We were not prepared for what we saw when he was brought into the interview room in a short-sleeve, orange jumpsuit and leg and waist chains. His first name was Kerry, and the softness in his name was like both his features and his North Carolinian accent. He had no cigarette odor, no tattoos, no needle tracks. His auburn hair was shampooed, clipped on the ends, and kept falling across his glasses, so that he constantly twitched his head to shake a loose strand out of his vision.

  While we questioned him about a murder in Iberia Parish, his large glasses wobbled with reflected light and a strange, almost self-effacing smile never left his mouth. If he bore anger or resentment toward anyone, I could not detect it.

  He had been sentenced to death for tying a rancher and his wife to chairs in their kitchen and butchering them alive. While on Death Row he helped organize a riot that resulted in the convict takeover of the entire maximum-security area. Kerry also was a chief participant in the fate of five sn
itches who were pulled out of protection cells, tortured, and lynched with wire loops from the second tier of a lock-down section.

  He said he knew nothing of the homicide in Iberia Parish.

  "Your fingerprints at the murder scene indicate otherwise. Maybe the victim had it coming. Why not get your interpretation of events on the books?" I said.

  He nipped his head to clear a strand of hair from his glasses and smiled at a joke that only he seemed to understand.

  We gave it up. But before we left the interview room I had to ask him another question. "What do you think lies on the other side, Kerry?" I said.

  He had a slight cold and couldn't wipe his nose because his hands were manacled at the waist, so he huffed air out of his nostrils before he answered. "You just move on to another plane of existence," he said.

  The afternoon of his injection he had to be awakened from a sound sleep. Minutes later the death warrant was read and he was videotaped by a member of the medical examiner's office on the way to the execution chamber. He grinned at the camera and said, "Hi, Mom," and jiggled all over with laughter.

  Chapter 22.

  I went to bed early that night and listened to the rain hitting the tin roof of my rented house. The fog was white in the trees, a lighted tugboat out on the Teche, its gunnels hung with rubber tires, glistening inside the rain. I slept the sleep of the dead.

  The time on my alarm clock was 4:16 A.M. when I heard the unmistakable sound of Clete's automobile engine dying in my driveway. A moment later he tapped softly on the front door. He was wearing gloves and a beat-up leather bomber jacket. The jacket was unzipped, and I could see his nylon shoulder holster and his blue-black, pearl-handled .38 revolver inside it.

  "Where have you been?" I said.

  "At a fish camp on Lake Fausse Pointe. Get dressed. I know where Max Coll is," he said.

  "No more cowboy stuff, Clete."

  "Me?" he said.

  "Where is he?" I said.

  Clete stepped inside the living room and started to explain, looking back over his shoulder at the street, then got vexed at being conciliatory. "You want in on this or not?" he said.