DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  He slipped his hands into his pockets and looked at the rain falling through the live oaks onto the street, as though any conversation with me was useless and the problem was mine, not his. "Theo and I are taking a cruise to the Islands. I came by here to do the right thing. But I can see it was a mistake."

  "Where'd it go wrong for you, partner?"

  "Wrong about what?" he said.

  "You were Jumpin' Merchie Flannigan, a stand-up kid from the Iberville who did the crime and stacked the time. Why'd you become a hump for a bum like Castille Lejeune?"

  The skin of his face seemed to crinkle, like a sheet of yellow paper held against a hot light bulb. He raked his hair back over his head again and started to speak, his eyes tangled with thoughts I could only guess at, then stepped off the gallery and walked through a water puddle to his Mercedes.

  I headed down the four-lane toward Franklin and five miles outside New Iberia felt a front tire on my pickup go soft and begin to wobble. I pulled to the shoulder and changed the tire in the rain. It was almost 11:30 when I got to the St. Mary Parish Courthouse. Across the street I saw the restored pink Cadillac I had seen in City Park the previous night. A curious black man holding an umbrella was bent down by the driver's window, admiring the interior.

  "Do you know who owns this?" I asked.

  "A man who got a lot of money," he replied.

  I went inside the courthouse and peeled off my raincoat in front of a coffee stand run by a blind man. I had no way of knowing the amount of Clete's bail, but obviously it would be high, and the 10 percent bondsman's fee would probably clean out my checking account and part of my savings. Of course, my paying a bondsman's fee was predicated on the assumption a local bondsman would be willing to write a bond on Clete, whose past record included fleeing the United States on a murder warrant.

  "You want a cup of coffee, Dave?" the blind man behind the counter said.

  "Yeah, sure, Walter," I said, distracted by a brown-haired little girl, no older than six or seven, sitting on a bench by the courtroom entrance. A small teddy bear, a red ribbon with a silver bell on it tied around the neck, was perched on her lap. Where had I seen her before? Then I remembered, with a rush of shame. It had been at Gunner Ardoin's house, on the morning I had rousted him last fall, chambering a round in the .45, sticking it in his face, causing him to soil himself while his little girl watched.

  I walked up to her, my raincoat slung over my arm. "Is your daddy here?" I asked.

  "He's inside the big room," she replied.

  "What's he doin'there?"

  "Helping Clete."

  "You remember me?" I asked.

  "You're the man who pointed a gun at my daddy."

  I went inside the courtroom just as the morning's proceedings were breaking up. Clete was talking to a local attorney while a deputy put cuffs on him for his trip back to jail. The judge left the room for his chambers, and among the people filing out in the corridor I saw Gunner Ardoin.

  "Clete's going back to lock-up?" I said.

  "Just till he bonds out," Gunner said.

  "How much is his bond?"

  "Fifty grand," he said.

  "How'dheputitup?"

  "He didn't. I did."

  "You went a fifty-thou bond?"

  "You don't watch the news? I hit the Powerball last week. Three million bucks. I bought him that pink Caddy out front, too."

  I looked at him, stupefied. He walked past me and took his little girl by the hand. "Want something to eat? Clete's going to meet us outside in a few minutes," he said.

  "Why not?" I replied.

  A half hour later the four of us were eating gumbo at a checker-cloth-covered table inside a cafe one block from the courthouse. The pink Cadillac convertible was parked outside, rainwater standing up in beads as big as marbles on the waxed surface.

  "I appreciate it, Gunner, but I can't accept it," Clete said.

  "The title's already in your name, man," Gunner said.

  "We'll have to change that," Clete said.

  Gunner looked at a spot on the far wall of the cafe. "There's something I didn't mention. A couple of guys I was inside with needed a place to crash. Remember Flip Raguzi, used to run a chop shop for the Giacanos over in Algiers? He started a grease fire on the stove. It sort of changed the way your kitchen and the ceiling look."

  "You let Flip Raguzi stay in my place? This guy has diseases scientists haven't found names for," Clete said.

  "What's he talking about, Daddy?" the little girl asked.

  Clete shut his eyes, then opened them. "Give me the keys," he said.

  One of my favorite lines of all time, one excerpted from a 1940s song understood readily by all those who experienced the human and economic realities of the Depression and war years, goes as follows: "You don't get no bread with one meatball."

  "What's funny?" Gunner said.

  "Nothing," I said. "Take a walk with me, will you?"

  We went outside and stood under a canvas awning, the mist blowing in our faces.

  "That's a decent thing you did for Clete, Gunner," I said.

  "I don't use that name anymore," he said.

  "How about Father Jimmie? You do the right thing by him, too?" I said.

  "Matter of fact, I did. But that's my business."

  "I respect that, Phil. But I need your help, too. Know a woman named Theo Flannigan?"

  "Jumpin' Merchie's old lady? I know who she is, but I don't know her personally."

  "Was she writing scripts for Fat Sammy Figorelli?"

  He shook his head. "No, but she might as well have. Her books were lying around the set. The director would lift the dialog from the love scenes in her books. So a bunch of degenerates, that includes me, were doing sixty-nines on each other and talking like Shakespeare."

  "Why would the director pick her work to steal from?" I asked.

  "A guy named Ray was involved. His girlfriend was my co star I never saw him, but I think he was the same guy who'd call me and tell me where to pick up my meth delivery to the projects."

  Ray?

  Why hadn't I seen it? William Ray Guillot, lately of Franklin, Louisiana, now having his blood drained and replaced with formaldehyde.

  "You're sure Theo wasn't part of Fat Sammy's action?" I said.

  "Ever see one of Fat Sammy's films?"

  "No."

  "You don't want to," he said. "Let's go inside. Clete needs to drive me and my daughter to the airport in Lafayette. I'm buying a Mexican restaurant in San Antonio. You get to town, have a free dinner on me."

  "You're a stand-up guy, Phil."

  "I'm out of the life. I'm a millionaire. What's a few bucks to show some gratitude?"

  I started to say something else, but he cut me off.

  "I got your drift. Give it a rest," he said.

  I drove back to my house on East Main and tried to put the Lejeune family and Junior Crudup out of my mind, but I couldn't rest. I did not believe Max Coll killed Will Guillot, and I couldn't shake the feeling that Castille Lejeune had been unduly happy when I went to his home, as though with a broad sweep of a broom he had gotten rid of a large problem in his life. In fact, I believed Castille Lejeune was about to get away with at least one if not two additional homicides.

  And I also felt I had a problem of conscience about Theo Flannigan. I had falsely accused her of involvement in the shooting of the daiquiri-store operator and the production of pornographic films.

  In fact, I rued the day I had ever heard of the Lejeunes or Junior Crudup.

  On top of my more elevated level of problems, Batist stopped by the house with another one, namely Tripod, Alafair's three-legged raccoon, whom Batist carried up on the gallery inside Tripod's wood-frame hutch.

  "Cain't keep him at my house no mo'," he said.

  "Why can't you?" I asked, looking down at Tripod, who was standing up in the hutch, his claws hooked on the wire screen, his whiskered snout pointed at me.

  "He's old, like me. He went to the bat
' room on the kitchen no'," Batist said.

  "Thanks, Batist."

  "You welcome," he replied, and drove off.

  I opened the wire door on Tripod's hutch and he stepped out on the floor and looked up at me. "How's it hangin, "Pod?" I said.

  He responded by running into the kitchen and eating Snuggs's food out of the pet bowl.

  But I could not distract myself from my problems with the world of play and innocence represented by animals. I wanted to believe I'd been dealt a bad hand. There was even some truth in my self-serving conclusion. But unfortunately I had dealt the hand to myself, beginning with the day I stepped into the unsolved disappearance of Junior Crudup, a man who had probably sought self-immolation all his life.

  I called Theo at her house and apologized for my accusation.

  "Drunks are always sorry. But they do it over and over again," she said.

  "Could you define 'it," please?"

  "Acting like an asshole."

  "I see."

  "Have you apologized to my father?" she asked.

  "Are you serious?" I said.

  She hung up.

  I called Helen Soileau at the department and told her I'd been wrong about Theo.

  "How'd you clear her?" she asked.

  "A porn actor told me a guy named Ray, as in William Raymond Guillot, was responsible for lifting material from Theo's books for Sammy Figorelli's movies. Theo had nothing to do with it."

  "Thanks for telling me."

  "Can you get another warrant to search Castille Lejeune's property?"

  "No."

  "I want to resign from the department, Helen. I'll have a formal letter on your desk by tomorrow."

  "That's the way you want it?"

  "Absolutely."

  "I love you, bwana, but I don't trust you. And I..."

  "What?"

  "Want to kill you sometimes."

  I got in my truck and backed into East Main. The bamboo and gardens in front of the Shadows breathed with mist that blew into the street, and as I looked at the old, massive brick post office on the corner, where a Creole man sold sno'balls and chunks of sugarcane off a canopy-shaded wagon when I was a kid, and as I watched the traffic turn at the next light onto the drawbridge, just past the Evangeline Theater where my father, mother, and I went to see cowboy movies in the 1940s, I had the feeling, not imagined, not emotional in nature, that I would never see any of these places or things again.

  Chapter 28.

  As I approached Fox Run I could see sleet marching across the barren cane fields on the far side of the Teche, the same fields where Junior and Woodrow Reed labored a half century ago under the watchful eyes of Boss Posey and the other mounted gun bulls all of them, one way or another, controlled by the man who lived across the bayou in the great white house that resembled a Mississippi paddle-wheeler.

  I parked by the carriage house. The automobiles were gone and even though the sky was dark, no lights burned inside the main house. I dropped my cell phone in the pocket of my raincoat and walked down the slope toward the bayou, where the yellow bulldozer sat, huge, mud smeared, and clicking with soft white hail.

  Helen had said we were looking for Dagwood and Blondie, whose advantage was they did not feel guilty and hence hid in plain sight. But amateur criminals have another kind of problem, one that professionals do not. They're arrogant and they presume. They're psychologically incapable of believing the system was not constructed to benefit them, and consequently they cannot imagine themselves standing in front of a law-and-order judge who can send them away for decades.

  The bulldozer blade was partially raised, the tractor-treads pressed deeply into the earth, fanning back off the rear of the dozer in patterns like horse tails, as though the operator had been involved intensely with one particular area of repair rather than the entire environment.

  The keys were hanging from the ignition. I turned over the engine revved the gas once, and clanked the transmission into reverse. As I backed up the dozer, a different kind of topography began to emerge from under the suspended blade an unevenly filled depression, one that had not been graded and tamped down, so that the surface was spiked with severed tree roots and ground-up divots of grass.

  I dropped the blade, shifted into forward gear, and raked off the top layer of the depression, then backed up again so I could see where the blade had cut. The dirt was loose, sinking where there were air pockets, water oozing from the subsoil that had been compressed by the weight of the tractor-treads. I dropped the blade lower, this time cutting much deeper into the hole, trundling up a huge, curled pile of mud, blue clay, and feeder roots that looked like torn cobweb. But this time, when I backed off the hole, I saw something I hoped I would not find.

  I cut the engine, pulled loose a shovel that was behind the seat, and walked around the front of the blade to a spot where a human arm, shoulder, and the curved back of a hand protruded from the soil, the hail rolling down the sides of the depression, pooling around them.

  I pushed the shovel under the back of the person and wedged the torso and the face free from the soil. The skin had turned a bluish gray, either in the water or because of the clay in the alluvial fan of the bayou, but his eyes were open and still emerald green, his small ears tight against the scalp, his shoulders somehow far too narrow for the violent and dangerous man he had once been.

  There were entrance wounds in his face, under one arm, and in his left temple.

  I speared the shovel blade into the clay and reached for the cell phone in my raincoat pocket, just as the cell phone began ringing. I flipped it open and placed it against my ear. "Dave Robicheaux," I said.

  "Are you trying to avoid me?" a woman's voice said.

  The hail was hitting hard on my hat and the steel frame of the bulldozer and I could hardly hear her. "Ms. Parks, I'm no longer with the sheriff's department. You need to call "

  "I found a diary under Lori's mattress. There were hearts all over the last page and drawings of a man's face. It wasn't some kid's face, either. There was a phone number, too." Her voice was starting to crack. "You know who that number belongs to?"

  "No, I don't."

  "A pipeline company in Lafayette. It's owned by that man who lives in that phony piece of medieval shit across from the junk yard."

  "Say his name, Ms. Parks."

  "Flannigan. Merchie Flannigan. I'm filing charges for statutory rape."

  "Ms. Parks, Lori might have known someone who simply worked at the pipeline company."

  "This number goes into Flannigan's office. It's his extension. Why are you covering up for him? I hate you people," she said.

  She was obviously still drunk, but I couldn't fault her for her rage. Her daughter had burned to death in an automobile after being sold liquor illegally, and her husband, who had survived a tour as a combat medic, had been killed with impunity by Will Guillot, the investigation written off by a cop on a pad. But family survivors of homicide victims are seldom mentioned in follow-up news stories, even though the grief they carry is like the daily theft of sunlight from their lives.

  The window on my cell phone cleared. Donna Parks was off the line now, but either because of the weather or my location I was losing service as I tried to punch in a 911 call. I heard someone's feet crunch on the hailstones behind me.

  "You must have been a Marine, Mr. Robicheaux. I think you're the most determined man I've ever met."

  I turned and looked into the face of Castille Lejeune. He wore a silver shooting jacket, one with ammunition loops sewn on the sleeves, a flat-brimmed, pearl-gray Stetson hat, and khaki trousers tucked inside fur-lined, half-topped boots. In his right hand he held a blue-black revolver with walnut grips. But he did not point it at me. Up on the slope, by the carriage house, I could see Merchie Flannigan's Mercedes.

  "You got the jump on me, Mr. Lejeune. You and your son-in-law just pull in?" I said.

  "The question is what do I do with you, Mr. Robicheaux."

  "You didn't just pop o
le Max, did you? You executed him."

  "Could I see your search warrant?"

  "Don't happen to have it with me."

  "Ah."

  "Merchie has been screwing both you and your daughter, Mr. Lejeune. He stole a single-action Army colt from Will Guillot and used it to kill the daiquiri store operator. Then he threw the gun down so we'd put it on Guillot and by extension on you and your enterprises."

  "Why would he kill a liquor salesman?"

  "Merchie was banging a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Lori Parks. She died in a car wreck after she bought booze from a drive-by store you own."

  I could see the connections coming together in Lejeune's eyes. Behind him Merchie Flannigan was walking down the slope, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his shoulders hunched under an Australian flop hat.

  Lejeune glanced over his shoulder, then focused on my face again. "You uncovered evidence in a homicide without a warrant, which destroys the probative value of the discovery," he said. "But you're not a stupid man. Something else is going on here. You quit the sheriff's department, didn't you?"

  I shrugged my shoulders. "We've got your ass in the bear trap, Mr. Lejeune. How's it feel?" I said, and actually laughed.

  Up on the slope I saw Theodosha Flannigan park her Lexus and walk into the front of the house, carrying a guitar case.

  "Open your coat," Lejeune said, raising his pistol toward my chest. "Use your left hand, unsnap the strap on your sidearm, and drop it on the ground."

  "Nope," I said.

  "Say again?"

  "A police officer never surrenders his weapon."

  "You're not a police officer anymore."

  "Old habits die hard."

  I'd like to say my behavior was brave, my principles inviolate, but in reality I didn't feel personally threatened by Castille Lejeune. He didn't care enough about me or the social class I represented to hate or fear me, and in all probability he still retained some of the fatalistic views that had allowed him to survive the Korean War as a decorated combat pilot. The system had served him for a lifetime why should it fail him now?

  But on another level I misjudged him. He could abide a professional enemy such as myself, but treachery inside the castle walls was another matter. He pulled back my coat, removed my .45 from the clip-on holster I wore, and tossed it in the mud.