DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I couldn't listen to it. I left the meeting and drove home. When I pulled into the driveway my yard was flooded halfway to the gallery and Theodosha Flannigan was waiting for me by the door, a rain-spotted scarf tied on her head, her face filled with consternation. Snuggs was turning in circles around her ankles.

  "I know all about last night," she said.

  "Not a good day for it, Theo," I said, unlocking the door.

  I went in the house without inviting her inside, but she followed me anyway, Snuggs racing past us toward the food bowl in the kitchen.

  "My father didn't molest me. It was a black man. That's why I was seeing Dr. Bernstine," she said.

  "Don't do this, Theo."

  "When I was a little girl a black convict got in our house and hurt me. He was killed running down toward the bayou."

  "Killed by whom?"

  "A prison guard. He worked at the labor camp. He and the other guards buried him in back. I saw the bones when the fish pond was dug. They were sticking out of the dirt in a front-end loader."

  "You've been fed a lie."

  "It's the truth. I went over every detail of it with my father."

  "Bernstine told you your father raped or molested you, didn't he?"

  "It doesn't matter. I know what happened."

  "When you first told me about Bernstine's death, you said you thought you had something to do with it."

  "I was confused. I know the truth now."

  I gave up. Through the kitchen window I could see steam rising off the bayou in the rain. Theodosha picked up Snuggs, set him on the counter, and rubbed her hand down his back. "Merchie is leaving me," she said.

  "That's too bad."

  "We're not good for each other. We never were. I'm too messed up and he's too ambitious."

  "I have some things to do today, Theo."

  I could hear an oak branch slapping against the side of the house, water rushing out of a gutter into the drive.

  "We had fun together, didn't we?" she said.

  "Yeah, sure," I replied.

  "Know why we're alike?"

  "No."

  "We both live in the cities of the dead. We don't belong with other people."

  "That's not true. Why did you use that term?" I said, my heart quickening.

  But she didn't answer. She lifted up Snuggs and set him back down on the floor, then touched me on both cheeks and kissed me on the mouth. "So long, baby. I never told you this, but you're the only man I ever slept with and dreamed about later," she said.

  She went out the front door, letting the screen slam behind her, then ran for her car. I had to force myself not to go after her.

  I lay down on my bedspread, with my arm across my eyes, and listened to the rain on the roof. I drifted off to sleep and suddenly saw an image out of my past, one that had no catalyst other than perhaps the story told by the war veteran at the noon AA. meeting.-I saw the members of my platoon marching at night through a rain forest that had been denuded by napalm. Their faces and uniforms and steel pots, even the green sweat towels draped over their heads like monk's cowls, were gray with ash. They cast no shadows and made no sound as they marched and their eyes were all possessed by the strange non-human look that soldiers call the thousand-yard stare.

  I sat straight up in my bed, my throat choking.

  The phone was ringing in the kitchen. I went to the counter and picked it up, the dream still more real than the world around me. "Hello?" I said.

  "Is Father Dolan there?"

  "Coll?"

  "Sorry to be a nuisance, Mr. Robicheaux. I just wanted to pass on something to Father Dolan."

  My mind began to race. Castille Lejeune had remained untouchable and was about to skate. Will Guillot could probably not be charged with any crime more serious than breaking and entering, and the evidence against him was problematic and subject to easy dissection by a defense attorney.

  "I owe you one, Max. That means I don't want to see you taken off the board by a couple of local scum wads," I said.

  "Could you be speaking a little more plainly, sir?" he replied.

  My pulse was beating in my wrists, the veins dilating in my scalp. "I think the clip on you came down from a couple of homegrown characters in the porn and meth trade. Maybe you should stay out of Franklin, Louisiana, and spend more time at Biscayne Dog Track," I said.

  "A couple of local fellows, you say? Now, that's interesting, be cause I'd come to a very different conclusion. I thought the porn connection was the woman, the screenwriter, Ms. Flannigan. She's the brains in the family, not her father. The colored people hereabouts say he may have had his way with her when she was a child. This fellow Guillot is trying to take over the business, so Ms. Flannigan does the daiquiri fellow, draws a lot of attention to her father's selling grog to teenagers and drunk drivers, and uses Guillot's gun to do it. Perfect way to screw both her daddy and her business rival."

  "Why would Theo Flannigan be the porn connection?"

  "I'm ashamed to say I'm well acquainted with a number of lowlifes in the underworld who say Sammy Figorelli's films were successful because they were written by a famous woman author. It's not a big reach to figure out who that might be.... Hello? Are you there?"

  "Yes," I said weakly.

  "I've never harmed a woman, sir, so I let the matter go. But I'll be reamed up the bung hole with a spiked telephone pole if you haven't made me reconsider the Lejeune and Guillot fellows."

  "Hold on, Coll."

  "No, you've done me a favor. I've got to cancel my flight reservations and give it all a good think. Tell Father Dolan thanks for his help. A tip of the hat to yourself as well."

  The line went dead. I replaced the receiver and wiped my face with a dish towel. I tried to sort through the conversation I had just had with Max Coll. My head was a basket of snakes, my mouth dry, my thoughts suddenly centered on a jigger of Beam poured into an iced mug of draft beer inside a Saturday-afternoon bar that was only two blocks up the street.

  Father Jimmie Dolan's car pulled into the driveway, pushing a wave of water under the house. When he entered the front door he was smiling, his tan, wide-brim hat dripping. "Any calls for me?" he asked.

  I drove downtown to the restaurant that used to be Provost's Pool Room. It was warm and cheerful and crowded inside, and I sat at the hand-carved mahogany bar and looked out the window at the wetness of the day and the traffic passing in the street. As a boy I used to come to the pool room on Saturday afternoons with my father, Big Aldous, in a era when the plank floors were strewn with football betting cards and green sawdust and the owner served free robin gumbo out of big pots that he set on an oilcloth-covered pool table. The stamped tin ceilings and mahogany bar and old brick walls still remained, but the building was an upscale restaurant now that catered to tourists who came to see a world that no longer existed.

  The bartender wore his hair slicked back and black pants and a white jacket and black tie. "You just gonna have coffee, sir?" he asked.

  "How about I buy you a drink?" I said.

  "Sir?"

  "It's not a complicated question." It sounded bad but I grinned when I said it.

  He shrugged. "I get off in a hour," he said.

  I put several one-dollar bills on the bar. "Make sure it's Beam or Jack," I said.

  "You got it," he said, scooping up the bills.

  Then I drove back home and went into the kitchen, where Father Jimmie was reading the newspaper. He lowered the paper, then looked curiously at my face. "It can't be that bad, can it?" he said.

  So I told him how bad it was, or at least how bad I thought it was; but I was to learn my education about my own obtrusiveness was ongoing. After I finished he sat for a long time without speaking, his gaze turned inward, unable to conceal his disappointment at either me or his own missionary failure, or the world as it really is. I suspect I wanted absolution, like a child going to confession on a Saturday afternoon, leaving behind his imaginary sins, bounding down the street as tho
ugh a stricken world has just been made whole again. But that wasn't to be.

  Father Jimmie had a look of sadness in his eyes that I cannot adequately describe. "You don't know what you've done," he said.

  "Maybe I have at least a fair idea," I replied.

  "Max met with me outside Franklin. He expressed what I think was genuine remorse for the evil he's done in his life. I gave him absolution. But you hung the bait in his face and energized him. My God, man, we're talking about his soul."

  I felt light-headed, as though I were coming down with the flu. When I tried to speak I couldn't clear the obstruction in my throat. Father Jimmie filled a glass with water but did not hand it to me.

  "Listen, Coll changed his direction because he didn't want to kill a woman," I said.

  "It makes no difference."

  "It does. I never thought about Theo being involved. Even though Clete kept warning me, I never thought about Theo."

  Father Jimmie realized I had already moved on from my own irresponsibility and was now concentrating on another matter, one that showed a degree of obsession beyond his grasp. He set down the glass and turned on me. I saw his right hand close. His next words were spoken through his teeth: "Don't deceive yourself. You're a violent and driven man, Dave, just like Max Coll."

  His eyelids were stitched to his brows, his throat bladed with anger and rebuke.

  That evening the sky was as dark as I had ever seen it. Lightning rippled like quicksilver across the thunderheads in the south, and the sugarcane in the fields along the road to St. Martinville thrashed and flickered in the wind and rain, the oak canopy blowing leaves that stuck like leeches on my windshield. I went to Mass in the old French church on the square in St. Martinville, then when the church was empty put five dollars in the poor box and removed an unlit votive candle in a red glass receptacle and took it with me down to the cemetery on the bayou.

  It was a foolish thing to do, I suspect, but I had long ago come to view the world as an unreasonable place, not to be contended with, better left to pragmatists and the mercantile who view the imagination and the unseen as their enemy. I parked under the streetlight, opened an umbrella, and walked between the crypts toward Bootsie's tomb. A generic compact car passed behind me, turned at the corner, and disappeared down a side street.

  The bayou was high, dented with rain rings, yellow in the lights from the drawbridge. I placed the votive candle next to the marble tablet on Bootsie's tomb, wedged the umbrella so that it sheltered the candle from the rain and wind, then lit the wick.

  The same compact car came out of the square and crossed the drawbridge, but I paid little attention to it. An event I had never seen in my life was taking place in front of me. Two huge brown pelicans drifted out from under the bridge, floating south on the tidal current, their wings folded tightly against the wind, their long yellow bills tucked down on their chests. I had never seen pelicans this far inland and had no explanation for their presence. Then I did something that made me wonder about my level of sanity.

  I rose from the steel bench I was sitting on, pointing at the two birds, and said, "Take a look, Boots. These guys were almost extinct a few years ago. They're beautiful."

  Then I sat down and folded my arms on my chest, the rain clicking on my coat.

  That's when I saw the compact in plain relief against the streetlight at the corner. It was pulled into a careless position at the curb, steam rising from the hood, the driver moving around in silhouette, as though he were having trouble with his safety belt.

  Dave! a voice said, as audibly as a voice speaking to you on the edge of sleep, as denned as a stick snapping inside the eardrum.

  I rose from the bench just as the streetlight glinted on the lens of a telescopic sight and the muzzle flash of a rifle splintered from the passenger window of the compact car. The bullet whanged off the steel bench and blew pieces off a statue of Jesus's mother.

  I ducked down between the crypts and pulled my .45 from my belt holster and sighted with two hands on the compact. But there were houses on the far side of the street and I couldn't fire. I started running toward the compact, the .45 held at an upward angle, zigzagging between the crypts, my eyes locked on the driver, who was fighting to straighten the car's wheels so he would not hit the curb.

  He pulled around a parked pickup truck and floored the compact down the street. In seconds he would be beyond any safe angle of fire that I would have. I left the sidewalk and ran toward the corner of the cemetery, jumped on top of a crypt, and went over the chain link fence into the street. The compact was twenty-five to thirty yards away, headed down the bayou in the direction of the church, the license plated patinaed with mud. I stood in the center of the street, both arms extended, and aimed low on the trunk.

  I squeezed off three rounds, the recoil knocking my forearms upward, the muzzle throwing sparks into the darkness, the spent shells tinkling on the pavement. I don't know what I hit inside the compact, but I heard the hard slap of all three hollow-point rounds bite into metal.

  The compact swerved around a corner and disappeared down a tree-lined side street that looked like an illustration clipped from a 1940 issue of The Saturday Evening Post,

  I went back to my truck and used my cell phone to punch in a 911 on the compact, then walked to Bootsie's tomb, my ears still ringing from the explosions of the .45. The umbrella had not been disturbed by the wind and the candle was burning brightly inside its red receptacle, but the pelicans had flown or drifted southward on the current.

  I heard your voice, I said.

  But there was no reply.

  I don't care who else knows it, either. That was your voice, Boots, I said.

  Then I said a prayer for her and one for me and headed back for the truck, wishing the pelicans had not gone.

  Don't worry, they'll be back. One of these days when you least expect it, you'll see them on Bayou Teche, she said.

  I turned around, my jaw hanging, the clouds blooming with electricity that made no sound.

  Chapter 26.

  I rose before dawn Sunday morning and ate a breakfast of Grape-Nuts and coffee and hot milk in the kitchen. When I opened the front door to leave I saw an envelope on the porch with a footprint stenciled across it and realized it must have fallen out of the door-jamb the previous night and been stepped on by either me or Father Jimmie.

  The letter inside was handwritten and read:

  Dear Mr. Robicheaux,

  I must talk to you. I don't know why all this is happening. We moved here to live in a decent environment and look what everyone has done to us. I also do not understand this new development. Nobody will answer my questions. I think all of you people suck. Call me at home. Do it right now.

  Sincerely, Donna Parks

  In my memory I saw a stump of a woman, with dyed red hair and perfume that was like a chemical assault on the senses, a ring of fat under her chin. She was the mother of Lori Parks, the teenage girl who had died with two others inside their burning automobile on Loreauville Road. I did not look forward to seeing Mrs. Parks again.

  I put away her note and drove to Franklin. The parking compound for Sunbelt Construction was located behind a house trailer that served as a company office. In the lot were trucks of every kind,

  front-end loaders, bulldozers, and grading machines but no compact car that resembled the shooter's.

  I drove back to New Iberia and parked in Merchie and Theodosha Flannigan's driveway. Their faux medieval home was shrouded in fog puffing off the bayou, their horses nickering and blowing inside the pecan orchard. The morning newspaper was still inside the metal cylinder at the foot of the drive, but woodsmoke was rising from a living room fireplace. There was no compact car anywhere in sight, but I did not expect to see one. In fact, I did not know why I had come to the Flannigans' home. Perhaps it was to prove somehow that Theo was not involved with a criminal enterprise, that she was a victim herself and not capable of setting me up to be kidnapped and tortured by the Dellacroce b
rothers. Maybe I just wanted to believe the world was a more innocent place than it is.

  I got out of the truck and rested my hands on the top rail of the white fence that bordered the pecan orchard and watched the Flannigans' thoroughbreds moving about in the fog. I could hear their hooves thudding on the soft earth, smell the fecund odor of the bayou, like the smell of humus and fish roe, and the pecan husks and blackened leaves that had been trodden into pulp in the trees, and I wondered how it was that a place this beautiful would not be enough for anyone, why each morning would not come to the owner like a blessing extended by a divine hand.

  Theodosha opened the front door and walked down the drive in her bathrobe and slippers, her hair black and shiny in the grayness of the morning. "What are you doing out here?" she asked.

  "How bad would you be willing to screw an old friend?" I said.

  "It's pretty early in the morning for your craziness, Dave."

  "Your novels were nominated twice for Edgars but they didn't win. If your script-writing career was on track, I think you'd be out in the Hollywood Hills, not on the bayou. Maybe Fat Sammy Figorelli's skin films were a shortcut to being back on the big screen."

  "You're sickening," she said.

  "Somebody shot at me last night."

  "I can't imagine why."

  "Did you set me up with the Dellacroces?"

  She walked past me and pulled the morning paper from the metal delivery receptacle, then started back up the drive toward her house. "Too bad it's Sunday," she said.

  "Why's that?"

  "The state mental hygiene unit in Lafayette is closed. But if I were you, I'd jump right on it first thing in the morning," she said, opening the paper, not bothering to even glance at me as she spoke..

  When I got back home, Father Jimmie was gone, his closet empty. He had left a recording for me on my message machine, its brevity like a shard of glass: "So long, Dave. Thanks for your hospitality. I hope everything works out for you."