DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  He was outside, grilling a chicken, drinking from a quart bottle of beer, his eyes watering in the smoke, the collar of his jacket pulled up around his neck, his utility cap cocked sideways.

  "What's shakin', big mon?" he said.

  "Think the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide should make a house call down in Franklin?" I said.

  "Oh my, yes indeedy," he replied, as though the statement were one word.

  The shrubs and gazebo and wide gallery of Will Guillot's house were threaded with Christmas lights, and sequined cutouts of reindeer,

  with tinted flood lamps aimed at them, were spiked into the lawn. We pulled into the driveway and parked just inches from where Dr. Parks had bled to death on the cement. I unlocked the steel box in the truck bed, removed my cut-down twelve-gauge, and tossed it to Clete. He went into the shrubbery with it, deliberately silhouetting against the Christmas lights and tinted flood lamps the barrel held at an upward angle. As I walked up on the gallery I saw Will Guillot pull aside a curtain on a tall window and look outside. I hung my badge holder on the breast pocket of my sports coat and banged hard on the door with the flat of my fist.

  Everything I did in the next few minutes would be based on my belief that Gretchen Peltier had truly been sickened by her experience with Will Guillot and had not gone back to him or confessed she had given him up.

  He jerked open the door and stared into my face. He wore a burgundy corduroy shirt and gray slacks and loafers, and in the dim light the birthmark on his face looked like a scar from a hot iron. Behind him I saw a woman get up from the couch and go into the back of the house. "Do I need to call the cops?" he said.

  "I'm the least of your troubles, Mr. Guillot. I think your electrician wants to park one in your brainpan," I said.

  "What?" he said, his eyes shifting from me to Clete, who had just walked out of the yard, stepping up on the gallery with the twelve-gauge resting in the crook of his arm.

  "It's clear," Clete said to me.

  "What's clear? Why are you walking around in my yard with that shotgun?" Guillot said.

  "Your electrician, Herbert Vidrine, gave you up. But I guess that wasn't enough for him. Evidently he hates your guts. What'd you do to the poor guy?" I said.

  "I already found out about that letter you or somebody else sent him with my name on it. It didn't work," Guillot said, his eyes flicking from me to Clete and the shotgun again.

  "Try this. You got Herbert Vidrine to help you break into Dr. Samuel Bernstine's office the same weekend Bernstine took two .25

  caliber rounds in the head. You set off the alarm, then found out you had the wrong code numbers for the keypad. But fortunately for you somebody had given you the password and you were able to give it to the alarm service when they called."

  Guillot tried to let my words slide off his face, biting down with his back molars so his jaw didn't sag. "Then arrest me so I can sue you into the next dimension," he said.

  "You think this is about some pissant BE?" Clete said.

  "Who is this guy?" Guillot said to me.

  "There's my buzzer," Clete said, opening his PI. badge, then flipping it closed again before Guillot could look at it carefully. "The G doesn't spend its time on nickel-and-dime farts who make dirty movies. But unlucky for you, a guy we do care about, a psychopath named Max Coll, is in the neighborhood, and it's got something to do with you and the cocksucker you work for."

  Guillot looked behind him, as though he did not want our words heard by the woman who had gone into the back of the house. If he had closed the door in our faces and called his attorney, it would have been over. But Clete had set the hook and Guillot couldn't pull it out. He stepped out on the porch with us and pulled the door shut behind him, shivering slightly in the cold.

  "What's the deal on this guy you mentioned, what's his name, this guy Coll?" he said.

  "He blows heads for the IRA or the Mob or just because he can't get it up in the morning," Clete said.

  "He's here, in Franklin?" Guillot said to Clete.

  "You tell us," Clete said.

  Guillot looked out into the darkness, as though trying to see beyond the Christmas lights that partly illuminated his yard. "None of this has anything to do with me," he said.

  "Let me ask you this question: When the warrants are cut, or if Max Coll is in town, looking for the people who put the whack on him, whose grits are going into the fire, yours or Castille Lejeune's?" I said.

  Clete pumped a shell out of the shotgun's chamber and dropped it into Guillot's shirt pocket. "Twelve-gauge double-ought bucks. Load up your bird buster and stick it under your bed. Better than a warm glass of milk. You'll sleep like a baby. I guarantee it," he said, and gave Guillot the thumbs-up sign.

  Ten minutes later we turned into Fox Run and drove down the long, oak-lined driveway to Castille Lejeune's front entrance. Almost the entire house was scrolled with white Christmas lights, so that the house glowed like a nineteenth-century paddle-wheeler inside a fog bank on the Mississippi. My guess was that Will Guillot had called Lejeune as soon as we had left his house, and I hoped, in an undeniably mean-spirited fashion, that for the first time in his life Castille Lejeune was genuinely afraid.

  I parked at the end of the drive and cut the headlights on my truck. A solitary shadow moved across the windows in the living room. I started to get out, but Clete hadn't moved, the shotgun propped at an angle between his legs, the chamber open.

  "Dave, Guillot's a sex freak and a lowlife and dirty up to his elbows. I'm not so sure about the guy in that house," he said.

  I looked at him.

  "All this crap isn't adding up for me," he said. "The war hero didn't pop the drive-by daiquiri guy and neither did Guillot, not if you buy his alibi. But for one reason or another we keep looking at the war hero. No matter what happens, it's always the war hero. Meanwhile Merchie Flannigan's old lady gets a free pass, the same broad who got you kidnapped."

  "Theodosha is south Louisiana's answer to Bonnie Parker?" I said.

  "Be a wise-ass if you want. You hate the guy in that house and the class of people he comes from."

  "I do? You've been at war with these people all your life."

  He took off his utility cap, looked at it as though he had never seen it before, then refitted it on his head. "He really bagged Bed Check Charley?" he asked.

  "That's the story."

  "I'd like to get his autograph. Hey, I'm serious," he said.

  He got out of the truck, trying to suppress his grin, and followed me onto the porch. A white-jacketed black houseman answered door, a broom and dustpan in his hands.

  "Is Mr. Lejeune home?" I said.

  "Took his guests to the country club a half hour ago. I'm still cleaning up," the houseman said.

  I opened my badge. "Did you receive a phone call in the last ten minutes?" I said.

  "Yes, suh, I sure did," he answered.

  "From whom?"

  "My wife. She tole me to bring home a loaf of bread."

  On the way to the country club Clete was still grinning.

  "Why is all this funny?" I said.

  "I miss the Mob. Shaking up a bunch of Kiwanians just doesn't cut it."

  "You're too much, Cletus."

  In that mood we pulled into the tree-bowered entrance of a small tennis and golf club outside the city limits. It wasn't hard to find Castille Lejeune. He and his friends were having drinks under a pavilion and driving golf balls on a lighted practice range dotted in the distance with moss-hung live oaks that smoked in the mist. The range looked hand clipped, immaculate, with neither a leaf nor windblown scrap of paper on it.

  The pavilion seemed as isolated and disconnected from the outside world as the golf range was from the trash-strewn roads beyond the hedges that bordered the club. Deferential black waiters brought Lejeune and his friends their buttered rum drinks on silver trays; a Wurlitzer jukebox next to the bar played Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey recordings; a rotund, cherry-cheeked man was speaking affectionat
ely about "an old nigger" who had worked for his family, as though the waiters would take no offense at his language.

  We locked the truck, with the twelve-gauge inside, and walked past the clay tennis courts, all of them deserted, the wind screens rattling in the breeze, just as Castille Lejeune whacked a ball off a tee and sent it downrange in a high, beautiful arc. The people at theta bles or teeing up from wire buckets filled with golf balls showed no recognition of our presence. Lejeune positioned himself, swung his driver back, and once again lifted the ball surgically off the tee, high into the darkness, a testimony to his health, the power in his wrists and shoulders, and the maturity and skill he brought to his game.

  Clete used a toothpick to spear a peeled shrimp from a large bowl of crushed ice on the bar, dipping it in hot sauce, inserting it in his mouth. His badge holder was stuck in his belt, mine in the breast pocket of my sports coat. But still no one looked at us.

  "Give me a Jack straight up with a beer back," he said to the bartender.

  "Right away, suh," the bartender replied.

  "That's a joke," Clete said.

  Lejeune's friends were not people who had to contend with the world. They may not have owned it, nor would they take any part of it through the grave, but while they were alive they could lay rental claims on a very large portion of it.

  "Mr. Lejeune, we'd like for you to come with us to the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said.

  "Why should I do that, Mr. Robicheaux?" he replied, addressing the ball on his tee, his feet spread, his thighs flexed tightly.

  "We need you to answer some questions about the murder of Dr. Samuel Bernstine and the fact Will Guillot has been blackmailing you about your molestation of your daughter when she was a child," I said.

  In the silence I could hear leaves scraping across the surface of the tennis court. Lejeune seemed to gaze at an isolated thought in the center of his mind, then he sighted downrange and smacked the ball in a straight line, like a rifle shot, so that it did not strike earth again until it was almost to the oak trees smoking in the electric lights.

  "You need to talk to my attorney, Mr. Robicheaux, not to me," he said.

  "Did you hear what I said? We're investigating a homicide, the second one that happens to be connected with your name. We don't call attorneys to make appointments," I said.

  He turned and dropped his driver in an upended leather golf bag.

  He wore a silk scarf around his neck, as an aviator might, the ends tucked inside a sweater with small brown buttons on it. In the corner of my eye I saw two security guards walking from the club's main building and a man at the bar punching in numbers on a cell phone.

  Lejeune began chatting with a woman seated at a table as though I were not there. Then I started to lose it.

  "You had Junior Crudup beaten to death," I said. "You turned your daughter's childhood into a sexual nightmare. You sell liquor to drunk drivers and probably dope and porn in New Orleans. You think you're going to walk away from all this?"

  "Mr. Robicheaux, I don't know if you're a vindictive man, or simply well-meaning and incompetent. The truth is probably somewhere in between. But you need to leave, sir, to let this thing go and give yourself some peace," he replied.

  His detachment and his pose as a chivalric and charitable patriarch were magnificent. As Clete had always said, some people have no handles on them. Castille Lejeune was obviously one of them, and I felt like a fool.

  Then Clete, who all night had been the advocate of reason and restraint, stepped forward, his thick arm and shoulder knocking against mine. "You were a fighter pilot in the Crotch?" he said.

  "In the what}'" Lejeune said.

  "I was in the Corps, too. Sunny "Nam, class of '69, smokin' grass and stompin' ass with Mother Green's Mean Machine. See?" He removed his utility cap and pointed to the globe and anchor emblem inked on the cloth. "We used to have a Bed Check Charley, but he was a guy who'd start lobbing blooker rounds in on us at about oh-two-hundred so nobody could get any sleep. Do you have any autographed photos? No shit, it'd mean a lot."

  "Sir, I don't ask this for myself, but there're ladies present. Let's don't have this kind of scene here," Lejeune said.

  "I can dig it," Clete said, putting his cap back on, his eyes cocked up in his head as though he were meditating upon a metaphysical consideration. "The problem is some grease balls kidnapped and tortured a police officer and pissed all over his face while he was blind folded. So how about taking the corn bread out of your mouth? It's getting to be a real drag."

  "I apologize for any offense I may have given you," Lejeune said. "Tell me something, that badge you have hanging from your belt? I have the feeling you're not a police officer."

  I could see the heat climbing into Clete's face. "Dave, hook up this prick. Work out the legal stuff later," he said.

  The situation was deteriorating rapidly now. Two security guards had just walked into the pavilion and were standing behind us, awkward, unsure what they should do next. I turned so they could see my badge. "It's all right. Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said.

  They tried to be polite, their eyes avoiding mine. I felt sorry for them. They made little more than minimum wage, paid for their own uniforms, and possessed no legal powers. They waited for Castille Lejeune to tell them what to do.

  But I raised my finger before he could speak. "We're leaving," I said.

  "Screw that," Clete said.

  Two cruisers from the St. Mary Parish Sheriff's office had pulled into the parking lot and three uniformed deputies, one black, two white, were walking toward us, their faces filled with purpose. I slipped my hand around the thickness of Clete's arm and tightened my grip. "We're done here," I said.

  But it was too late. The three deputies went straight for Clete, with the collective instinct of pack hounds who had just gotten a sniff of a feral hog. At first he didn't resist. When they walked him toward a cruiser, he was seemingly in control of himself again, grinning, full of fun, back in his familiar role of irreverent trickster, ready to let it all play out.

  Maybe I should have stayed out of it. But I didn't.

  "Let's slow it down a little bit," I said to the black deputy, a towering man with lieutenant's bars on his collar.

  "Best let us do our job, Robicheaux," he replied.

  "What's the beef? "I said.

  "Impersonating a police officer," he replied.

  "That's bogus. He never claimed to be a police officer."

  "Work it out at the jail. We just deliver the freight," he said.

  It should have all ended there, a routine roust to appease a rich man, a discussion down at the sheriff's department, maybe a few hours in a holding cell, at worst an appearance in morning court where the charge would be kicked.

  But one of the white deputies, an angry man with corded veins in his neck who had been fired in another parish for abusing a prisoner, had pushed Clete into a search position against the hood of the cruiser and was running his hands down Clete's left leg.

  "Ease up, my man," Clete said.

  "Close your mouth," the deputy said.

  "That's a slapjack in my right hand pocket. I'm not carrying," Clete said, twisting around.

  "I told you to shut up," the deputy said, and slapped Clete's utility cap off his head.

  Clete ripped his elbow into the deputy's face, breaking his nose, then caught him in the jaw with a right hook that lifted him off the ground and knocked him the full length of the cruiser.

  "Ouch," he said, trying to shake the pain out of his hand, trying to step back from his own misdeed.

  Then they were on him.

  Chapter 25.

  It rained at sunrise and kept raining through the morning. Clete was in jail and Father Jimmie had not returned to the house. Because it was Saturday Helen was at home. I called her and told her how it had gone south at Castille Lejeune's golf and tennis club.

  "What did you plan to accomplish over there?" she said.

  "No
t sure."

  "I am. You wanted to provoke a confrontation and blow pieces of Castille Lejeune all over the golf tee."

  "That's a little strong."

  I thought she was going to give it to me but she didn't. "As far as you know, Guillot didn't try to call Lejeune after you went to Guillot's house?" she said.

  "When we went to Lejeune's house, the man cleaning up said nobody had called except his wife. She wanted him to pick up a loaf of bread."

  "Maybe Lejeune is not the guy we should be after."

  "He's the guy."

  "I think I'm going to do something more rewarding today, like have a conversation with a pile of bricks," she said.

  "Did you just hear something on the line?"

  "Hear what?"

  "A friend in New Orleans said I probably have a federal tap on my phone."

  "Have a nice weekend, Dave."

  Clete was in serious trouble and would not be able to bond out of jail until he was arraigned Monday morning. The impersonation beef was a gray area. A person does not have to specifically claim to be a police officer in order to be guilty of impersonating one. He simply has to give the impression of being one. But Clete had licensed PI. status and ironically, as an employee of a bail bond service, possessed legal powers that no law officer did, namely, he could cross state lines and even break into residences without a warrant to arrest a bail skip who was a fugitive from a court proceeding.

  The assault-and-battery beef was another matter. With luck and some finesse, an expensive, politically connected lawyer could probably get the charge kicked down to resisting. But it wasn't going to be easy. Clete's reputation for violence, destruction of property, and general anarchy was scorched into the landscape all the way across southern Louisiana. His enemies had longed for the day he would load the gun for them. Now I had helped him do it.

  I went to Baron's Health Club, worked out with free weights, then sat for a half hour in the steam room. When I came back outside it was still raining, harder than before, litter floating in the ditches that bordered the streets. I went to an afternoon AA. meeting above the Methodist church by the railroad tracks and listened to a man talk about nightmares he still had from the Vietnam War. His face was seamed, unshaved, his body flaccid, his clothes mismatched. He had been eighty-sixed out of every bar in the parish and he had been put out of two V.A. alcoholic treatment programs. He began to talk about a massacre of innocent persons inside a free-fire zone.