DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  There was also a voice message from Donna Parks: "Why don't you answer my goddamn letter, you callous fuck?"

  It was going to be a long day.

  I tried to eat lunch but had no appetite. As I washed my dishes and put away my uneaten food, I looked through a window and saw Helen Soileau pull into the driveway. She got out of the cruiser and walked to the gallery, wearing faded jeans, boots, and a mackinaw, her jaw set. I opened the door before she could knock.

  "I was out of town, so I just got the report on the car sniper," she said, walking past me into the warmth of the living room. "Go over it for me."

  I went over each detail with her and also told her I had been to Franklin that morning to look for the compact car I had put three rounds in.

  "Anybody from St. Mary Parish contact you?" she asked.

  "No," I said.

  "Yesterday somebody got past the alarm system at both Castille Lejeune's and Will Guillot's house. In the middle of the afternoon. A real pro. Know who it might be?"

  "Max Coll," I said.

  "What was he looking for?"

  "Evidence they put a hit on him."

  "I hate to even ask this question. How would you know this?"

  "He called here yesterday. I more or less told him there were two local guys behind the contract on him and they lived in Franklin."

  She stood at the ceiling-high living room window and stared out at the street and at the rain dripping through the canopy of live oaks that arched over it, her fists propped on her hips. "Want to tell me your motivation for doing that?" she said.

  "I owed him one."

  "We don't owe criminals. We break their wheels and put them out of business. We don't make individual judgments on the people we need to arrest."

  "I don't see it that way."

  "There are a lot of things you don't see," she replied, turning to look directly at me. "I'm pulling your shield, bwana."

  I nodded, my expression flat. "It's been that kind of day," I said. I slipped my badge holder out of my pocket and handed it to her. "Coll thinks Theo Flannigan may have been the porn connection to Sammy Figorelli. Maybe she was the shooter in the daiquiri drive-by. In case you want to follow that up."

  Helen flipped my badge holder back and forth in her hand while she listened, then she tucked it into her pocket. "Sometimes you break my heart," she said.

  I had been suspended before, put on a desk, investigated by Internal Affairs, locked up on at least three occasions, and years ago fired by N.O.P.D. But this time was different. The suspension came not from a career administrator but from my old partner, a woman who had been excoriated as a lesbian and who had never allowed the taunts and odium heaped upon her to diminish either her integrity or the dignity and courage that obviously governed her life.

  The fact that it was she who had pulled my plug made me wonder if indeed I hadn't gone way beyond the envelope and become one of those jaundiced and embittered law officers whose careers do not end but flame out in a curlicue of dirty smoke that forever obscures the clarity of their moral vision.

  But that kind of thinking is what we call in AA. the paralysis of analysis. In terms of worth it shares commonalities with masturbation, asking a rage-a-holic for advice on spiritual serenity, or listening to your own thoughts while trapped by yourself between floors in a stalled elevator.

  I went into the kitchen and called Donna Parks at her home. There was no answer. I left a message on her machine and drove to Franklin to visit Clete Purcel in jail.

  A turnkey walked me down a corridor to an isolation cell, one with horizon al bars, flat cross-plates, and an iron food slit in the door, but with nothing inside except a stainless steel toilet and a metal bench bolted to the floor. Clete was sitting on the bench, still in his street clothes, his wrists locked to his hips with a waist chain, another chain locked between his ankles. His right eye was swollen into a puffed knot, his forehead and chin scraped raw. The cement floor outside the cell door was splattered with red beans, rice, two pieces of white bread, and coffee from a broken Styrofoam cup.

  "Who did that to his face?" I said.

  "He come in like that," the turnkey said.

  "That's a lie," I said.

  "He wouldn't put on his jumpsuit. He threw his tray at a deputy. You got issues with it, talk to the boss. I just clean up the mess," the turnkey said, and walked away.

  I hung my hands through the bars. "How you doin', Cletus?" I said.

  He stood up from the bench and shuffled toward me, his chains clinking on the cement. "I'm going to look up a couple of these guys when I get out of here," he said.

  "Why do you have to provoke them?"

  "It's fun."

  "I'm suspended. I don't have any clout to help you."

  "What'dyoudo?"

  "Fired up Max Coll and pointed him at Lejeune and Guillot. I figured my line was tapped and I might get the Feds in here."

  "I keep telling you, it's the broad."

  "Maybe it is."

  Then his eyes went away from mine and looked into space. "Nig and Wee Willie won't go bail," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "They're pissed because of that dinner I charged on their card at Galatoire's. Plus two of the girls skipped their court appearances and Nig's putting it on me."

  "What kind of bail are we talking about?" I asked.

  "A screw tried to do an anal search on me. He's going to need some dental work. So I've got two separate A&B's on a law officer."

  I touched my forehead against the bars and closed my eyes. Clete kicked the door with the point of his shoe, rattling it in the jamb. "Listen up, Dave. We're the good guys. The problem is nobody else knows it. But that's their problem, not ours," he said.

  I left the jail and parked my truck on an oyster-shell road down by Bayou Teche, just outside the Franklin city limits. Rain was falling on the trees around my truck, and across the bayou were a cow pasture, a collapsed red barn, and a solitary black man in a straw hat, sitting on an inverted bucket, cane-pole fishing under a live oak. I got out of the truck, tossed a pine cone into the current, and watched it float southward toward the Gulf.

  Clete had made a point, one which I don't think was either vituperative or vain. Legal definitions had little to do with morality. It was legal to systemically poison the earth and sell arms to Third World lunatics. Politicians who themselves had avoided active service and never had listened to the sounds a flame thrower extracted from its victims, or zipped up body bags on the faces of their best friends, clamored for war and stood proudly in front of the flag while they sent others off to fight it.

  The polluters and the war advocates are always legal men, as the Prince of Darkness is always a gentleman.

  The John Gottis of the world make good entertainment. The polluters and the war advocates can be seen at prayer, on camera, in the National Cathedral. Unlike John Gotti, they're not very interesting, but they cause infinitely more damage.

  The chances were I would never take down Castille Lejeune for the murder of Junior Crudup. Nor did it look like I would solve the shooting of the drive-by daiquiri store operator or Fat Sammy Fig-orelli. The people who had committed these crimes did not have patterns and to one degree or another operated with public sanction. They might go down for an ancillary offense, but at worst they would do minimum time, if not get probation.

  But regardless of what occurred in the lives of others, I was going to clear my conscience of a problem I had created because of my desire to control a situation in which I had failed.

  I drove through the wet streets of Franklin, out to Fox Run, and lifted the false knocker on the front door that activated the chimes deep inside the house. A moment later Castille Lejeune answered the door, dressed in sweat clothes, a towel twisted around his throat, surprisingly pleasant, his face ruddy from riding an exercise bike by the sun room that gave onto the back patio, the same patio where Junior Crudup had entertained him and his wife fifty years ago.

  "Come in, sir," he
said, opening the door wider.

  "I don't know if you'll want me in your house after you hear what I have to say," I said.

  He laughed and closed the door behind me. "Go ahead. I know a determined man when I see one. But excuse me just a minute. I have to use the bathroom," he said.

  He went into a hallway and closed a door behind him, then I heard him urinating into a toilet bowl. Through the French doors I could see the long slope of his backyard tapering down to the bayou, a yellow bulldozer parked by the area we had excavated during our search for Junior Crudup's remains. Much of the dirt had been filled in, smoothed and tamped down, so that the lawn was now a mottled brown and green, in patterns like camouflage.

  I heard Lejeune washing his hands, then he came back into the living room.

  "I couldn't stick you with Junior Crudup's death, so I tried to sic a psychological nightmare by the name of Max Coll on you," I said.

  "Ah, a mea culpa because you've put me at risk. Let me clarify something for you "

  "If I can finish, please. Using Coll was a gutless act on my part. If I had wanted you smoked, I should have done it myself instead of exploiting a head case

  "I admire your candor, Mr. Robicheaux. But I'm not bothered by Coil's presence in the community. I walked in on him and he fled. If this fellow is indeed a soldier for the IRA, which is what I've been told, then I understand why the British are still in control of northern Ireland."

  "Wait a minute. You saw Coll?"

  "I just told you that." He stared at me, his eyes probing mine.

  "Was he armed?"

  "He might have been. It's hard to say. I didn't bother to ask."

  "Where did he go?"

  "Out the back door. I've reported all this."

  "You might drop by the church today and light a candle, maybe offer a prayer of thanks that a guy like Father Jimmie Dolan is a minister in the Catholic Church," I said.

  "As always with you, Mr. Robicheaux, I have no idea what you're talking about. But if this man Coll comes back around, he'll rue the day he left his little shanty back in the peat bogs or wherever he comes from.... Am I losing your attention?"

  "Hubris has always been my undoing, Mr. Lejeune. Maybe it will be different with you. Anyway, my badge has been pulled and I'm done. Run your happy warrior act on somebody else," I said.

  When I got back home I put on sweat pants and a hooded jersey, tied on my running shoes, and jogged down East Main, past the Shadows and the plantation caretaker's house across the street, which now served as a bed-and-breakfast, and crossed the drawbridge into City

  Park. I ran along the winding paved road through the live oak trees, my clothes soggy with mist, then cut across the closely clipped grass and ran along the edge of the bayou. In our area the sugar mills are fired up twenty-four hours a day during the cane-grinding season, and in the distance I could see a huge red glow on the horizon, like fire trapped inside a thunderhead, and I could hear the heavy thumping sound of the machines, like the reverberation of giant feet stamping upon the earth. There was not another soul inside the park, and for just a moment my heart quickened and I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

  I sat down on a bench, my palms propped on my thighs, my breath coming hard in my throat. What was it Theodosha had said? We were alike because we both lived in the cities of the dead? I wiped the sweat off my face with my jersey and fought to get my breath back, widening my eyes, concentrating on the details around me, as though my ability to remain among the quick depended on my perception of them.

  Is this the way it comes? I thought not with a clicking sound and a brilliant flash of light on a night trail in Vietnam, or with a high-powered round fired by a sniper in a compact automobile, but instead with a racing of the heart and a shortening of the breath in a black-green deserted park smudged by mist and threaded by a tidal stream.

  My head hammered with sound that was like helicopter blades thropping overhead, and for just a moment I was back on a slick piled with wounded and dying grunts, AK-47 rounds vectoring out of the jungle canopy down below, the inside of the airframe crawling with smoke.

  I put my head down between my knees, my hands on the pavement, the world spinning around me.

  I looked up and saw from out of the mist a pink Cadillac convertible headed toward me, one with wire wheels, tail fins, Frenched headlights, and grillwork that was like a chromium smile, the radio blaring with 1950s Jerry Lee Lewis rock 'n' roll.

  The Cadillac passed me and behind the wheel I saw a man with an impish face, the features cartoonlike, as though they had been sketched with a charcoal pencil, the hair shaved on the sides and left long and curly on the neck.

  "Gunner?" I said out loud.

  But the driver did not hear me, and the Cadillac wound its way out of the park, the only piece of bright color inside the failing light.

  Gunner Ardoin in New Iberia? I asked myself. No, I had let my imagination run away with itself. The year was 2002, not 1957, and the rock 'n' roll days of pink Cadillacs, drive-in movies, Jerry Lee Lewis, and American innocence were over.

  At 10:00 P.M. I turned on the local news. The lead story involved a homicide inside a Franklin residence. The television camera panned on a tree-lined street and a Victorian home where paramedics were exiting a side door with a gurney on which a figure inside a body bag was strapped down. The reporter at the scene said the victim had been shot once in the temple and once in the mouth and, according to the coroner, had been dead approximately twelve hours. The victim's name was William Raymond Guillot.

  Chapter 27.

  It was still raining Monday morning, the air cold, the fog heavy among the crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery as I pulled into the parking lot at the courthouse.

  Wally, our leviathan dispatcher, made a face when he saw me come through the front door. "Dave, you ain't suppose to be here," he said.

  "Pretend I'm not," I said.

  "Don't jam me up here. I'm your friend, remember?"

  "Is anybody working the Guillot homicide?" I said.

  "I didn't even hear you say that. I'm deaf and dumb here. Go home," he replied.

  Helen's door was ajar. I went inside without knocking. "What's happening in Franklin with the Guillot shooting?" I said.

  "None of your business," she said.

  "They made Max Coll for the hit?"

  "One in the temple, one down the throat. The signature of a pro," she said.

  "I don't buy it."

  "What you need to buy is a hearing aid. You were suspended as of yesterday. Now haul your ass out of here."

  "I talked with Castille Lejeune late yesterday afternoon. He says he walked in on Coll while Coll was creeping his house. If Coll was going to pop anybody, he would have done it then."

  "You went out to Lejeune's, after I pulled your badge?"

  "I told him I was suspended. It was a personal visit."

  She shook her head, nonplussed. "We have an attorney in lawyer jail right now. I'm about to put you in there with him," she said.

  "Coll isn't the shooter."

  "Don't be on the premises when I get back." She walked down the hall and into the women's restroom, glancing back at me just before she pushed open the door, as though my argument for Coil's innocence had just sunk a hook on the edge of her mouth.

  Louisiana is a small state, with a comparatively small population. In the year 2002 over 950 people were killed and 55,000 injured on our state highways. Booze was a major factor in most of the fatalities. Hence, the presence of a drunk person behind the wheel of an automobile in Louisiana is hardly an anomaly. So I had no reason to be surprised when I picked up the phone in my kitchen and heard a woman's voice say, "Why don't you do something about this goddamn traffic light out here on the four-lane?"

  "Who is this?" I asked.

  "Donna Parks, who does it sound like? The man in front of me is driving a shit box that's smoking up the whole town. He won't turn left because there's no arrow on the traffic light and I have to
breathe his goddamn exhaust fumes."

  For just a moment I had the uncharitable thought that her husband, Dr. Parks, was better off dead.

  "What could I do for you, Ms. Parks?"

  "I want to file rape charges."

  "You've been sexually assaulted?"

  "Like my deceased husband said, you people are really dumb. I'll come over there and explain it to you. Where are you?"

  "Since you dialed me at my home number, I think we should both conclude I'm at home."

  She belched softly, then I heard what was probably her car horn blowing just before the line went dead.

  With luck she would have an accident before she got to my house, I thought.

  I looked at my watch. Clete's arraignment was at 11:00 A.M. I wrote a note for Donna Parks, included my cell phone number on it, and stuck the note inside the grill on the front screen. Eventually I

  would have to deal with her, but it would be easier to do by phone than in person. I put Snuggs on the back porch, slipped my checkbook in my pocket, and started out the door, just as Merchie Flannigan pulled into the driveway, blocking my truck. He worked his way around the puddles in the yard and stepped up on the gallery, raking back his long, white-gold hair with his fingers.

  "Hang on, old buddy. Need to clear up my remarks to you when you came by the house," he said.

  "I'm in a hurry, Merchie," I said.

  "Let's face it. I was jealous. Theo and I haven't had the best marriage. You said I was out of line. You were right." He extended his hand, his jaw square, like an imitation of an athletic, educated, country club millionaire, one he had probably seen on a movie screen as a child and had spent a lifetime trying to become.

  I didn't take his hand. "I think you're here covering your wife's ass. Will Guillot got popped and the cops are going to be taking a hard look at his enterprises. I believe Theo is part of a porn operation in New Orleans," I said.

  The smile died on his face. "You're actually serious? You believe Theo is involved with pornography?" he said.

  "The word is she wrote scripts for Fat Sammy Figorelli. Where was she the night the daiquiri store operator got shot?"