DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I left a note on the kitchen counter for Father Jimmie, then Clete and I headed out in the predawn wetness for New Orleans, a thermos of coffee and a box of beignets on the seat between us. The old homes along East Main were still dark, the live oaks dripping on the sidewalks. I was still not quite awake.

  "Run it by me again," I said.

  "Janet Gish is trying to get off the nose candy without a program, so she spends most of the night at Harrah's. She says a guy with a Mick accent was in the casino until early Saturday morning, then he left just before seven. He came back at eight-thirty, ate a plate of steak and eggs, played some more blackjack, and drove off in a Honda."

  "Why was she paying so much attention to a guy with an accent?" I asked.

  "One, I'd already described Coll to her, and, two, she still hooks a little on the side and thought he'd be an easy trick. Here's the rest of it. He had on black dress pants, like a priest might wear."

  It was raining and still dark when we crossed the high bridge over the Atchafalaya at Morgan City. Down below I could see shrimp boats in their berths, the red-tiled roofs of the town, and the great, cypress-dotted expanse of the wetlands in the south, all of which were being eaten away by saltwater intrusion at a rate of hundreds of square miles a year.

  "Doesn't your heater work?" I said.

  "It's full blast, mon."

  Clete's cell phone rang. He answered it, listened, then said thanks to someone and clicked it shut again. "That's Janet. The guy who looks like Coll is still there. By the way, she's got a porn lead for us, too," he said.

  We crossed the wide sweep of the Mississippi just as the first cold band of light, like the blunt edge of a sword, appeared on the eastern horizon. Then we were rolling down I-10 past the northern shore of Lake Pontchartain, into the heart of the city, the welfare projects, the cemeteries where the dead were entombed in white brick, the homeless and the hopelessly addicted gathered around fires next to the cement pillars that supported the elevated highway.

  At the head of Canal Street stood the casino, the royal palms at the entrance beaded with rainwater in the graying of the dawn. The gamblers inside were not a group that took note of changes in either weather or clocks. The rain might beat against the windows and lightning flicker on the streets outside, but the blacks and Hispanics and blue-collar whites who crowded the tables or fed the endless banks of slot machines were committed to their own form of solipsism, one in which the amounts that were lost or gained were far less important than the gamblers' desire to stay in the game, to be a part of the action, at the table or in front of the machine, until they were physically and emotionally sated in a way no sexual or narcotic experience can equal.

  Janet Gish was at the bar, a scotch and milk in front of her. Her hair was currently orange, stiff with spray, the tops of both breasts tattooed with a blood red star, her skin rough grained, freckled, layered with makeup. But in spite of all the cosmetics and chemicals she used on herself, she had one natural gift that was unimpaired by the life she lived. Her eyes were like a doll's, with weighted lids that clicked open suddenly, so that she always seemed surprised, somehow still vulnerable.

  She turned on the stool, drew in on her cigarette, and looked at us without expression. "Lend me twenty bucks, Streak?" she said.

  I took out my wallet and found fifteen. She took it and slipped it under her glass. "I got to get out of this shit. I just dropped three hundred in a half hour. How about lunch at Galatoire's? God, I hate this place," she said, although I had no idea which place she meant.

  "On the clock today. You know how it is," I said.

  She was obviously stoned or drunk or both, staying off coke with booze and baccarat, paying the rent with fifty-dollar tricks, starting her daily routine at 4 P.M. with eyewash, thirty-minute hot showers, and white speed on the half shell. Anyone who thinks prostitution is a victimless crime needs his head drilled with a brace and bit.

  "Where's our Irish friend?" I asked.

  "Just went out the door. Like voom," she replied.

  Clete's face reddened with exasperation. "Why didn't you call?" he said.

  "It's been a long night. I don't need criticism right now. I just don't need that kind of unjustified negativity in my morning," she said, a thin wire quivering in her throat.

  "Right," he said, glancing up and down the bar.

  "Because if that's why you two are here, I'll just go back to the tables," she said. She gestured at the bartender. "This milk is curdled. Give me a tequila sunrise."

  "We appreciate everything you've done for us, Janet. How long has our man been gone?" I said.

  "Ten minutes," she said.

  "You saw him drive away?" I asked.

  "No, he was walking. Right up Canal. Like he was in alrarry," she said.

  "When he left Saturday morning for an hour or so, did he walk or drive?" I asked.

  She thought about it. "He walked down Canal. Just like this morning," she replied.

  "Stay here, Cletus," I said.

  "Oh, I got it. I just drive people around, then turn into an ashtray. I'm glad I'm your friend, Dave, because otherwise I don't think you'd have any," he said, screwing an unlit Lucky into his mouth.

  I didn't try to explain. I hurried down Canal, past smoking sewer grates and gutters dark with rainwater, to the side street that led into the dilapidated downtown area where Father Jimmie Dolan's church was located, like a fifteenth-century fortress inside which its inhabitants refused to accept a tidal wave of ecclesiastical change.

  The early-morning Latin Mass had already begun when I entered the vestibule and dipped my hand in the holy water fount. In a back pew, hard by a marble pillar, I saw the diminutive form of Max Coll, next to a group of elderly, head-covered women, all of whom had rosary beads threaded through their fingers. He wore black trousers and a puffy, tan down jacket that was zipped halfway up his chest.

  My cell phone was in my pocket, my .45 automatic in a clip-on holster attached to my belt. I started to punch in a 911 call on the phone, then thought better of it and instead genuflected at the end of the pew and knelt down next to Max Coll.

  "Walk out of here with me," I whispered.

  He glanced at me and showed no sign of either recognition or alarm. "Bugger off," he said.

  "No one needs to get hurt here," I said.

  He ignored me and concentrated on the missal in his hands.

  "I know some evil men killed not only your natal family but your wife and son as well," I said. "Both my mother and my second wife died at the hands of murderers. I can understand the feelings you've had to deal with over the years. I think many of the people you killed were bastards and deserved what they got. But it's time to give it up. Take a walk with me, Max. You know it's the right thing to do."

  Other people were beginning to look at us. "You're disturbing the Mass, Mr. Robicheaux. Now show some respect and shut your 'ole," he replied.

  Parishioners who had come in late, one of them weighing at least three hundred pounds, began bottling up the open end of the pew. I was trapped with Max Coll. I thought I might have a chance at him during communion, but as soon as the communicants began filing toward the front of the church, Max helped an elderly woman into a wheelchair and pushed her to the altar.

  I stayed right behind them, received the Host myself, which he did not, and followed them back into the pew. Through the concluding prayers he kept his eyes straight ahead, one thumb hooked inside his half-zipped jacket. Just as the priest gave the final blessing to the congregation, Max turned to me and calmly whispered, "Got a Beretta nine-millimeter, fourteen rounds in the mag, all tucked nicely under my armpit. Try to take me and, House of the Lord or not, I'll leave hair on the walls."

  With that, he wheeled the elderly woman down the center of the aisle and through a crowd in the vestibule, like a mummy wrapped in black cloth being trundled along a cobbled street. He and two other men lifted her down the steps and fitted her chair into a waiting van, then suddenly Max Coll leaped
into the traffic.

  I went after him, my shield held up above my head, a wall of water from a passing truck striking me full in the face, horns blowing, a taxi missing me by inches. Somewhere on the edge of my vision two vehicles crashed into each other. Max was now somewhere on the opposite side of the traffic, hidden behind a city bus or a Mayflower van or a refrigerator truck, all of which were moving through the intersection.

  I reached the opposite sidewalk and looked in both directions.

  No Max Coll.

  I saw the bus stop briefly on the next block, then it turned a corner and headed in the direction of Lee Circle. I started running, threading my way through pedestrians, truck drivers off-loading food for restaurants, winos sitting in doorways with their legs outstretched on the sidewalk. I turned the corner and saw the bus at the curb in the middle of the block, the door opened to allow a passenger to exit.

  I ran toward it, breathless, waving my arms at the driver. As the bus pulled away from the curb I struck the side with my fists. Behind the elongated glass windows in the back door I saw Max Coll standing in the aisle, holding a support strap with one hand. He grinned, unzipped his jacket, and pulled out the sides to show me he had no weapon on his person.

  The bus sped through the next intersection and disappeared down the street. I reached for my cell phone to punch in a 911 call, then remembered hearing it clatter across the sidewalk two blocks behind me.

  I stopped in the men's room at the casino and tried to dry off with paper towels before I went in search of Janet Gish and Clete Purcel. A few minutes later, my clothes glued to my skin, I found the two of them eating breakfast in the restaurant, Janet looking half revived by food and coffee. Clete chewed his food thoughtfully, his eyes traveling up and down my person. "I'm not even going to ask," he said.

  "He was at Mass. He got away," I said.

  "At Mass? A stone killer?"

  "I just told you."

  "So instead of calling the locals, you decided to talk him in?" he said.

  "Something like that," I replied.

  "Couldn't have used any backup from me, of course?"

  "Lay off it, Clete," I said.

  He took a coffee cup and saucer that was set up on an empty table, poured the cup full, and pushed it toward me. "Sit down, big mon, and let Janet tell you how Fat Sammy was shipping porn out and crystal in," he said.

  "It all had to do with those Mideastern degenerates," she said.

  "Those what?" I said.

  "Those Muslim lamebrains or whatever who crashed the planes into the towers. Sammy Fig said he was going to round them up for the FBI," Janet said.

  I gave Clete a look.

  "You're going to love this, Streak. Sammy straightening out Fart, Barf, and Itch," he said.

  It seemed a grandiose and bizarre tale, but in truth no more peculiar than many in New Orleans' long history of political intrigue, from William Walker's military adventurism into Nicaragua during the 1850s to Lee Harvey Oswald's involvement in the city with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

  According to Janet Gish, Fat Sammy felt tainted by a past association with a mobster who had been an enforcer in Brooklyn and later one of the Watergate Plumbers. The mobster was part of a blackmail sting involving Cuban prostitutes in Miami, and just before Kennedy's visit to Dallas on November 22, 1963, the mobster showed up in New Orleans with a hooker and stayed at a motel owned by Sammy's uncle. As soon as Sammy heard John Kennedy had been shot, he was convinced New Orleans had been the staging area for the assassination.

  From that time on, Fat Sammy did everything in his power to demonstrate his patriotism and disassociate himself from the people who he believed had murdered the president.

  "The night before the planes crashed into the towers, these Mideastern guys were in Sammy's club by the airport. They told one of the girls they were pilots," Janet said.

  "Maybe they were," I said.

  "Except they were sweating so bad the janitor had to scrape the

  B.O. off the furniture. They had another problem, too. Like keeping napkins over their boners."

  "Sorry, I'm just not following all this," I said.

  "Sammy calls the FBI. They send some guys out and Sammy looks at all these photos and says that's not the guys who were in the club. One of the FBI guys says, "Well, these are the hijackers who died in the planes."

  "Sammy says, "Yeah, but there must have been other hijackers whose planes got grounded. The guys in my club are the ones who probably never got off the tarmac Even while he's talking you can already hear the toilet flushing.

  "Two weeks go by and Sammy calls the FBI in Washington. He tells some agent there they're looking in the wrong place for terrorists. He says these guys are not Muslim revolutionaries, they're degenerates and losers, just like the other jack-offs who come into the club. Sammy says to the FBI agent, "Use your fucking head. These guys weren't hanging in mosques or living in Nebraska. They were holed-up in Miami and Vegas and hanging in dumps like mine 'cause they want to get laid. You want to nail 'em, float some cooze out on the breeze and see what happens.""

  People at other tables were turning to stare.

  "Maybe we should move to a quieter spot," I said.

  "Well, excuse me. Here's the briefer version so I don't offend anybody," she said, her eyelids fluttering. "The FBI agent blew Sammy off, so he set up an Internet site out in Arizona to sell his movies. He was using a PI. to run the credit card numbers of anybody with a Mideastern name who bought from the site."

  "Who were his partners?" I said.

  "You met a couple of them," she replied.

  "The Dellacroces?" I said.

  She raised her eyebrows innocuously.

  "Tell him the rest of it, Janet," Clete said.

  "Sammy got paid in crystal. It's cooked across the border and comes through Tucson," she said. Then she looked at nothing, the whites of her eyes veined, her facial skin like flesh-colored clay that had been molded on bone. "Sammy wasn't a bad guy. He took us all to Disney World once. He wore a Mouseketeer hat on the plane all the way back home."

  "Who popped him, Janet?" I said.

  "I don't know. Sammy always said it was the normals you got to watch out for, 'cause they never learn who they really are."

  She stared through the front windows at the palm trees beating in the wind and the rain slashing on the glass.

  Chapter 23.

  It was afternoon when Clete dropped me off at the house. The sky was a cold blue, dense and flawless in texture and color, the lawns along the street ridged with serpentine lines of leaves where the rainwater had receded into the streets. I shaved, showered, changed clothes, and went to the office.

  Helen listened quietly while I told her of what had happened in New Orleans, her gaze fixed out the window on the crypts in the old cemetery.

  "You called N.O.P.D. about Coll?"

  "Yes."

  "When?" she said.

  "When we left town."

  "I don't think you wanted to arrest him."

  "Then why would I have chased him across town?"

  "You should have called N.O.P.D. as soon as you saw him inside the church."

  "Picture this scene, Helen. A couple of hot dogs coming through the vestibule with M-16s and 12-gauge pumps and Max Coll with a nine-millimeter," I said.

  "Coll saved your life. You think you owe him."

  I started to speak but she raised her hand for me to be quiet. "The state attorney's office put us on notice this morning. We're going to be investigated for harassment of Castille Lejeune, destruction of his property, and for deliberately damaging his reputation. What do you think of that?" she said.

  "You warned me," I replied.

  "You never understand what I'm saying, Dave. You were right about the murder of Junior Crudup. Lejeune was behind it. He thinks we've got information that in reality we don't. Find out what it is. You're a handful, bwana."

  She folded her arms on her chest, shaking her head, a smile tugging at
the corner of her mouth.

  At quitting time I drove to the home of Merchie and Theodosha Flannigan. It was almost the winter solstice now, and the sepia-tinted light in the trees and on the bayou seemed to emanate from the earth rather than the sky. Merchie greeted me at the door, wearing glasses, a book in his hand, his long hair like white gold against the soft glow of a living room floor lamp. "She's not here," he said.

  "It's you I want to talk to," I replied.

  "Why is it you keep finding reasons to put yourself in my wife's path? Just doing your job?"

  "You're out of line, Merchie."

  "Could be. Could also be you'd like to get into Theo's pants. If that's the case, good luck, because she's out drunk somewhere."

  I cleared my throat and shifted my eyes off his face. His thoroughbreds were nickering inside a pecan orchard beyond a white fence, their bodies barely distinguishable in the shadows. "The murder of Junior Crudup isn't going away. His remains were moved, but eventually we'll find out what happened to them. If I have anything to do with it, your father-in-law is going to have an opportunity for on-the-job training in soybean farming," I said.

  "So why tell me about it?"

  "Because I think you wouldn't mind seeing that happen."

  "You want to dip your wick, go do it. But leave us out of your personal problems."

  "I think Theodosha knows what happened to Junior Crudup's body."

  "My wife is a sick person. That's why she's spent a hundred thou sand dollars on psychiatrists and clinics. But I think you like stirring her up. I think you like feeding on our troubles."

  He started to close the door but I held it open with one hand. "Your wife's frigid, isn't she?" I said.

  He released the tension on the door, slipped off his glasses, and dropped them in his shirt pocket. "If you weren't already an object of pity and public ridicule, I'd splatter your nose all over your face. Now go home," he said.

  The door clicked shut. I stared at it stupidly, my ears ringing in the silence.