DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

Early the next morning Clete picked me up for breakfast, cheerful, wearing his utility cap low on his brow, a Hawaiian shirt under his bomber jacket, driving with one hand down East Main toward Victor's Cafeteria.

  "You moved back into the motor court?" I said.

  "Yeah, why not?"

  "You burned a guy's trailer. You assaulted a man in Lafayette."

  "They're not filing charges. Not if they want to stay on the planet. So I don't see the big deal. Things get out of control sometimes. I'm cool with it," he said, fiddling with the radio.

  Clete was Clete, a human moving violation, out of sync with both lawful and criminal society, no more capable of changing his course than a steel wrecking ball can alter its direction after it's been set in motion. Why did I constantly contend with him? I asked myself.

  But I knew the answer and it wasn't a comforting one: We were opposite sides of the same coin.

  I told him about my visit to Merchie Flannigan's house.

  "That punk said that to you?" he asked.

  "I got a little personal about his wife," I replied.

  "That's another question I have. You actually asked him if his wife wouldn't come across?"

  "I guess that sums it up."

  "I can see that might piss him off. Particularly when he knows you bopped her."

  "Can't you show some subtlety, just a little, once in a while?"

  "You bump uglies with a guy's wife, then tell him she's an ice cube, but it's me who's got a problem with language?"

  "She was drunk. We both were. Stop harping on it."

  He looked at me, then turned into the parking lot across from Victor's. The old convent across the bayou was still in shadow, the live oaks speckled with frost. "Why get into Flannigan's face about his wife's sex life?" he said.

  "A psychiatrist would probably say she has trouble with intimacy. So she gets it on when she's drunk, usually with strangers or people she doesn't care about. It's characteristic of women who were molested as children," I replied.

  "You're really going to hang Lejeune's cojones over a fire, aren't you?"

  "You better believe it," I said.

  Later I signed out a cruiser and drove to the Lafayette Police Department to see my old friend Joe Dupree, the homicide cop and airborne veteran who had investigated the gunshot death of Theo Flannigan's psychiatrist. While I talked he sat behind his desk, picking one aspirin, then another, then a third out of a tin container, swallowing them with water he drank from a cone-shaped paper cup. His tie was configured to the shape of his pot stomach, his hair combed like strands of wire across the bald spot on top of his head.

  "So you think this guy Will Guillot is blackmailing Castille Le-Jeune and it has something to do with Lejeune's daughter?" he said.

  "Right."

  "About what?"

  "Molestation."

  Joe leaned back in his chair and rubbed his mouth. Through the window I could see a chained-up line of black men in orange jumpsuits being placed in a jail van. "Well, Ms. Flannigan's file was missing from Dr. Bernstine's office. But I found out several other files were missing, too. Maybe Bernstine took them home and they got lost somehow. Or somebody could have stolen several files to throw off the investigation. Anyway, it's been a dead-end case," he said.

  "You checked out the secretaries, any reports of forced entry?" I said.

  "If Bernstine was burglarized, he didn't report it. The alarm company never had to do a 911, either. The secretary is a church-going, family woman, with no reason to steal files from her employer."

  "How long was she there?"

  He looked down at the torn notebook pages that were clipped inside a case folder. "Seven months," he said.

  "Who was the secretary before this one?" I asked.

  He looked again at his notes. "A woman named Gretchen Peltier. But she quit before Ms. Flannigan starting seeing Bernstine."

  "What was that name again?"

  I drove to the alarm company that had serviced Dr. Bernstine's office. Like most alarm companies, it was an electronic shell that didn't provide security but instead relayed distress signals to the fire department or a law enforcement agency. In other words, the chief expense of home security was passed on to the taxpayers and the alarm company was able to maintain its entire system, which monitored several parishes, with no more than a half dozen technicians and sales and clerical employees.

  But the assistant director of the company, a black woman named Dauterive who had been an elementary school teacher, did her best to help me. A computer record of all electronic warning signals originating during the last year at Dr. Bernstine's office was laid out on the desk. "See, there were a number of power failures. Those were either during an electrical storm or when a power line was knocked down. These other dates are the times the customer didn't disarm the system fast enough. The dispatcher had to call and get the password."

  She was heavyset and wore glasses and a pink suit with a small corsage on the lapel. She glanced at her watch.

  "Am I taking up too much time?" I asked.

  "Oh, no. It's my anniversary. My husband's meeting me for lunch," she replied.

  "Who's the dispatcher?"

  "We use the Acadiana Ambulance Service. When they receive an emergency signal, they call the residence or the business and clear it up, or they notify the appropriate response service," she replied.

  "When was the last time you received an alarm that could have indicated an unauthorized entry?" I asked.

  "Here," she said, and tapped her finger on the computer printout. The date was one day after the gunshot death of the psychiatrist, Dr. Bernstine. "But the dispatcher called and got the password."

  I ran my finger up the column on the printout to a billing notation for July and a description of services that amounted to two thousand dollars. "What's this?" I asked.

  "It looks like the customer changed out the system. If I remember correctly, a power surge fried the main panel and the customer decided to use the opportunity to upgrade."

  I was getting nowhere. "Let me think about this stuff and come back," I said.

  "I don't know if this is of any help to you, but the customer changed his keypad code when he got his new system. See?" she said, and tapped the notation again.

  "Yes?"

  "He didn't change his password. Sometimes people don't like to change the password, particularly if it's a pet name or part of a private joke in the family," she said.

  She looked me flatly in the face.

  "That's a hole in the dike, isn't it?" I said.

  "You might say that," she replied.

  "Did you say today was your anniversary?" I asked.

  "That's correct. Our twenty-seventh."

  "Have a great anniversary, Ms. Dauterive."

  I headed straight for Abbeville, twenty miles south on the Vermilion River, and the insurance company that employed Gretchen Peltier,

  the woman who had given Will Guillot his alibi for the night the drive-by daiquiri shop operator was murdered and who had also turned out to be a former employee of the slain psychiatrist.

  She was terrified. Like most people who lead ordinary lives and stray across a line, usually in concert with someone far more devious than themselves, she could neither defend herself nor lie convincingly. Instead, she began to perspire and swallow like someone in an elevator hearing steel cables snap a strand at a time.

  "I don't think you're a bad person, Ms. Peltier. But you're taking the weight for a bad guy," I said.

  "Taking the weight?" she said, more confused and frightened than ever now, her eyes flicking to the open door of her employer's office.

  "You're about to take Will Guillot's fall. That means you'll go to prison. You'll live behind razor wire and cell with murderers and sexual deviates of every stripe. Snitch one of them off and you get glass put in your food. That's where Will Guillot has taken you."

  My rhetoric was cruel. She was a sad woman, her eyes etched with mascara, her clothes obviously bough
t at a discount store. I could only guess at the means of seduction Will Guillot had used to entice her into cooperating with the systematic destruction of her own life.

  "I knew the code numbers to the alarm system in Dr. Bernstine's office," she said. "Dr. Bernstine had shot himself in the park. I gave the numbers to Will because he said his wife, the one he's divorcing, told Dr. Bernstine a lot of lies that were going to be used in court against him. I gave him the password, too."

  "How did he get into the building?" I said.

  "A man who works for him, an electrician, opened the door. But the numbers on the keypad had been changed. The alarm went off. If Will hadn't had the password, the cops would have come out."

  Her eyes were wet. She rested her forehead on the heel of her hand.

  "You told me Guillot was with you the night the daiquiri store operator was killed. Was that a lie?"

  "No."

  "You sure?" I said, looking down into her face.

  "I thought I was helping Will. Why have you done this to me?" she replied. She found a handkerchief in her purse and pressed it against her eyes.

  "What's going on out here?" her employer said, standing in the doorway of his office, his tie printed with hundreds of tiny blue stars against a red background, a small American flag pinned on the lapel of his suit.

  I walked to my cruiser, which was parked on Abbeville's town square. The sun was already deep in the west, the light thin and brittle on the old brick cathedral in the square and the cemetery behind it, where the bodies of Confederate dead from Shiloh and Port Hudson lay in crypts stained with lichen and split with fissures, as though the earth were determined to absorb them and their contents back into itself. I could hear traffic crossing the steel bridge over the Vermilion River and smell the odors of diesel oil and water and shrimp husks piled behind a restaurant, and as I looked at the bare limbs of the willows along the river I was suddenly filled with the sense the sun was not simply completing part of its cycle across the sky, it was about to descend over the rim of the earth for the last time.

  In psychoanalysis it's called a world destruction fantasy.

  Were my irrational feelings connected to the fact I had just helped dismantle a woman's life? Or were the rats' nests of rags and bones in those crypts reminders that Shiloh was not a grand moment in history, but a three-day meat-cutter that soaked the hills with the blood of farm boys most of whom never owned a slave or knew anything about the economics of northern textile mills? Or was the sum total of my own life finally being made apparent to me?

  The streets were almost empty, swirling with dust and pieces of newspaper, the water oaks bare of leaves, many of the old stores permanently closed. The world in which I had grown up was gone. I wanted to pretend otherwise, to find excuses for the decay, the strip malls, the trash strewn along the roadways, the century-old live oaks that developers lopped into stumps with almost patriotic pride. In my vanity I wanted to believe that I and others could turn it around. But it was not going to happen, not in my lifetime nor in my child's.

  It was 4:45 when I got back to the department and rain had begun falling in big fat drops on the sidewalk that led into the courthouse. I pulled my mail out of my pigeon hole and went into my office. A few minutes later Helen came in.

  "So what happened today?" she asked.

  I told her.

  "Will Guillot creeped the psychiatrist's office and stole Theo Flan-nigan's file so he could blackmail Castille Lejeune?" she said.

  "It's more serious than that. I think he murdered the psychiatrist on orders from Castille Lejeune. He was probably supposed to deliver the file back to Lejeune, but he either didn't do that or he xeroxed it and is using it to take over the old man's business."

  Through the window I saw a hearse pass on its way to the funeral home on St. Peter Street. I got up from my desk and let down the Venetian blinds. My office suddenly seemed hermetically sealed, artificially lit, shut off from the rest of the world.

  "You unhappy about something?" Helen said.

  "No. Everything is fine."

  She looked somberly at my face. "Have dinner with me, Pops," she said.

  "Why not?" I said.

  Chapter 24.

  That evening I walked into the kitchen while Father Jimmie was on the phone. Unconsciously he turned his back to me, rounding his shoulders, as though somehow creating a shell around his conversation.

  "I believe you, but we'll do this on my terms. No, you have my word. I'll be there. Now, good-bye," he said. After he hung up he turned around and grinned sheepishly. "I get calls from a neurotic parishioner once in a while," he said.

  "Was that one of them?" I asked.

  "Let's don't clutter up the evening, Dave."

  "You're meeting Max Coll?"

  "He's ready to change his way. I can't deny him reconciliation or communion."

  "Coll is planning to kill somebody. But you're supposed to repair his soul so he can sneak into heaven through a side window?"

  "That last sentence describes two thirds of my constituency," he said.

  He picked up Snuggs and a box of cat food and went out on the back steps to feed him.

  "I already fed him," I said.

  "He's a warrior. He needs extra rations," Father Jimmie replied.

  There was no moon that night. Screech owls were screaming in the trees and the humidity was so thick I could hear moisture ticking in the leaves on the ground. Father Jimmie had gone out, although I had no idea where. I went into the small office I had created in my rented house and sat at the desk and began writing a letter to Alafair.

  DearAlf,

  We're going to have a swell time at Christmas. Clete's in town and is anxious to see you, as of course am I. How is your novel going? I bet it's going to be a fine one. Hope you're through exams by now. Don't be too worried about grades. You always did well in school and college is not going to be any different. Would you like to take a ride out on the salt if the weather permits? Batist says he's found a new spot for redfish by Southwest Pass.

  The images out of the past, created by my own words, made my eyes film. I saw Bootsie, Alafair, and me in the stern of our boat, with Batist at the wheel, the throttle full out, slapping across West Cote Blanche Bay at sunrise, the salt spray like a wet kiss on a spring morning.

  I put aside the letter and stared at the guns mounted on the gun-rack I had screwed into the wall: an AR-15, a sporterized '03 Springfield, and my old Remington twelve-gauge, the barrel sawed off even with the pump, the sportsman's plug long ago removed from the magazine.

  I knew what had been on my mind all afternoon and evening. Since I had interviewed Gretchen Peltier at the insurance office in Abbeville I'd had little doubt about Will Guillot's involvement in the burglary of Dr. Bernstine's office and Bernstine's death by gunshot in Lafayette's Girard Park. I also had no doubt he was mixed up in pornography and narcotics and the blackmail of Castille Lejeune. The problem was his crimes had all been committed in other parishes, and there was no way to hang the killing of either Sammy Fig-orelli or the drive-by daiquiri store operator in New Iberia on him.

  In order to get at him and subsequently Castille Lejeune, I would have to work with at least three other law-enforcement agencies. Then the legal processes of indictment and prosecution would be turned entirely over to others, perhaps in a parish Castille Lejeune controlled.

  I turned off the light and sat in the darkness with the twelve-gauge across my lap. The steel and the wood of the stock felt cool against my palms. I opened the breech and smelled the odor of the machine oil I had used to clean the chamber and the magazine, then set the stock butt-down between my legs, moving my thumb along the edges of the barrel where I had sawed it off and sanded it smooth with emery paper. I thought about my dead wife Bootsie and the systemic corruption of the place I loved and the inhumanity and cruelty that had been visited upon a great blues artist like Junior Crudup.

  I removed a box of double-ought buckshot from my closet shelf and bega
n pressing a handful of shells one at a time into the magazine of my Remington. I sat in the darkness a long time, the gun resting on my knees, my mind free of all thought, a strange numbness in my body. Then I ejected the shells and replaced them one by one in their box, set the shotgun back in the rack, and took a walk down by the drawbridge. A lighted tug was waiting for the bridge tender to raise the bridge. I waved at him in the pilot house and he waved back at me, then I walked back home and went to bed, with Snuggs sleeping at the foot.

  The next day, Friday, I contacted Joe Dupree in Lafayette, and we went to work on getting a search warrant on Will Guillot's home and place of business. But it was going to be a long haul. The warrant request was based on statements made by Gretchen Peltier, the psychiatrist's former secretary, about a break-in committed in Lafayette by a man who lived in Franklin. Also, Will Guillot was probably many things, but stupid wasn't one of them. It was highly unlikely he would keep the stolen case file, which he was using to blackmail Castille Lejeune, in either his home or office.

  There are days in law enforcement, just like those at the craps table, when you think the dice have no combinations on them except treys and boxcars. Then suddenly they magically bounce off the backboard, all elevens and sevens.

  Just before quitting time Helen opened my door and leaned inside. "The sheriff in St. Mary just called. Will Guillot made a prowler report last night. The city cops who responded told him there'd been a peeping Tom in the neighborhood, but Guillot seemed to think it was someone else."

  "Who?"

  "He was walking around in the yard with a gun and not saying."

  "Thanks for passing it on," I said.

  I continued with the paperwork I was doing, my expression flat. I thought she was about to close the door and go back to her office but instead she approached my desk, her eyes on mine.

  "My words don't have much influence on you. But be careful, Dave. Don't give power to a guy like Castille Lejeune," she said.

  "I hear you," I said.

  "Yeah," she said.

  At 5 p.M. I went home, reloaded my cut-down twelve-gauge, locked it in the steel box that was welded to the bed of my pickup truck, and drove to Clete's cottage at the motor court.