DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Merchie Flannigan was standing now on the rim of the depression, his face disjointed as he stared down at the half-exhumed body of Max Coll. "Who's this dead guy? What's happening here?" he said.

  "You were having an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl?" Le-Jeune said.

  "Hold on, there, Castille," Merchie said.

  "I always told Theo you were trash, with your blow-dried hair and Thesaurus vocabulary. You shot my sales person at the drive-by window?"

  "I think I'm going to boogie and let you and Dave work it out. Maybe y'all can tell each other war stories. But I'd say from the looks of things here, you're genuinely fucked, Castille," he said, and began walking back up the slope.

  The temperature had dropped, and the air was bitter, like the taste of copper coins, the tin roofs of the old convict cabins speckled with frost. I could see a lump of cartilage working in Lejeune's jaw. Merchie was halfway up the slope when Lejeune raised the revolver and fired three times, pop, pop, pop.

  Either his hand shook from cold or anger or he was simply not a good shot, because he missed with all three rounds, and I heard the bullets break glass in the French doors that gave onto his patio.

  Merchie ran past the carriage house and down the drive, hunkered low, the brim of his Australian flop hat angled down over his neck. I walked up behind Lejeune, slipping my hand down his forearm, removing the revolver from his grasp.

  "You killed Will Guillot and were going to put it on Max Coll?" I said.

  "I have nothing more to say," he replied.

  "Guillot killed both Bernstine and Sammy Figorelli and took a shot at me, didn't he?"

  "Can't help you, sir," he replied.

  Up at the house there was no sound or any movement behind a window or the French doors. I snicked open the cylinder on Le-Jeune's revolver, ejected all the shells into my palm, then retrieved my .45 from the mud.

  "My vision isn't very good anymore. You know I tied Ted Williams' gunnery record? Highest ever set by a Marine or Navy aviator. That's God's honest truth," he said.

  "I believe you. Better take a walk with me," I said, punching in 911 on my cell with my thumb.

  "Of course. We're going up to my house. I'll fix coffee for us. I have no personal feelings about this," he said.

  He walked up the slope beside me, his chin lifted, his hands stuck in the pockets of his silver shooting jacket, his nostrils flaring as he breathed in the fresh coldness of the afternoon. I studied the back of the house, but still there was no movement inside. I felt Lejeune's attention suddenly refocus itself on the side of my face.

  "Why are you so somber, Mr. Robicheaux? It should be a red-letter day for you," he said.

  "My father taught me to hunt, Mr. Lejeune. He used to say, "Don't be shooting at nothin' you cain't see on the other side of, no." He was a simple man, but I always admired his humanity and remembered his words."

  "As always, your second meaning eludes me."

  "Is that Theo's car in the driveway?"

  He stared at the rear end of the Lexus that protruded just past the edge of the carriage house. His eyes began to water and he rushed across the patio through a cluster of winter-killed potted plants and tore open the French doors.

  Theodosha Flannigan sat in an antique chair, with a crimson pad inset in the back, her guitar perched on her lap, her trimmed fingernails like shavings from seashell, her knees close together, at a slight ladylike angle, her mouth parted in mild surprise, a hole with a tiny trickle running from it in the center of her forehead.

  Through the front window I saw a half dozen emergency vehicles turn off the state road and come roaring up the drive through the long tunnel of live oaks, their flashers beating with light and color, their sirens muted, as though the drivers were afraid they might wake the dead.

  EPILOGUE

  My daughter Alafair and I flew to Key West for Christmas and hired a charter boat I could scarcely afford and scuba-dived Seven Mile Reef. The water was green, like lime Jell-O, with patches of hot blue floating in it, the reef swarming with bait fish and the barracuda that fed off them. At sundown we set the outriggers and trolled for a stray marlin or wahoo as we headed back into port, the gulls wheeling and squeaking over our wake, the sun bloodred as it descended into the Gulf.

  Alafair looked beautiful in her wet suit, her body as sleek and hard and tapered as a seal's, her Indian-black hair flecked with seaweed. As she stood in the stern, watching our baited hooks skip over our wake, she reminded me of Theo Flannigan and all the innocent victims of violence everywhere, here, in this country, where friends clasped hands and leaped from flaming windows into the bottomless canyons of New York City, or in the Mideast, where a storm of ballistic missiles and guided bombs would rain down upon people little different from you and me.

  But it was the season of Christ's birthday and I did not want to dwell upon all the corporate greed and theological fanaticism that had rooted itself in the modern world. We attended Mass in a church James Audubon had sat in, strolled Duval Street among revelers with New York accents, ate dinner at a Cuban cafe by the water under a ficus tree threaded with Christmas lights, and visited the home of Ernest Hemingway down on Whitehead Street. The sun was gone, the sky full of light, the incoming tide wine dark against the horizon,

  and bottle rockets fired from Mallory Square were popping in pink fountains high above the waves. How had Hemingway put it? The world was a fine place, and well worth the fighting for.

  As Alafair and I walked back toward the happy throng on Duval Street, the yards around us blooming with flowers, the air touched with salt and the smell of firecrackers, I thought perhaps the world was more than just a fine place, that perhaps it was a domed cathedral and we only had to recognize and accept that simple fact to enjoy all the gifts of both heaven and earth.

  Castille Lejeune was sentenced to Angola Prison for manslaughter in the shooting of Max Coll and for first-degree homicide in the death of Will Guillot. Because of his age, he was transferred to an honor farm, where he did clerical work in an office. The correctional officers at the farm admired him for his genteel manners and military bearing and his fastidiousness about his dress. In fact, they came to call him "Mr. Lejeune" and often sought his advice about financial matters. But a visiting prison psychologist put an evaluation in his jacket that indicated Lejeune was not only experiencing depression and self-loathing over the death of his daughter but perhaps intense levels of guilt characteristic of a father who has sexually molested his daughter.

  An inmate's jacket is confidential only until the first trusty clerk reads it.

  Castille Lejeune became what is known as a short-eyes in the prison population. Other inmates shunned him; the correctional officers became distant and formal in their dealings with him. He was transferred back to Angola after he bit into pieces of broken glass that had been mixed into his food.

  Ironically, he was placed in a segregated unit within viewing distance of the levee built by the Red Hat Gang on which Junior Crudup had pulled what Leadbelly called his great, long time.

  We couldn't make our homicide case against Merchie Flannigan and he got away with the murder of the daiquiri-store operator. At least legally he did. But Castille Lejeune nailed him from jail by having his lawyers file a wrongful death suit against him, freezing his personal and corporate accounts, then using Donna Parks to bring statutory rape charges against him. Merchie's reputation was ruined and his pipeline business went bust. For a while he ran a welding service, then began hanging out at a bar frequented by Teamsters in Baton Rouge. I ran into him one day by the capitol building, where Huey Long was shot down in 1935.

  "Hey, Dave, no hard feelings, huh?" he said.

  "Not on my part," I replied.

  He smelled of cigarettes and was fat and puffy, sporting a mustache and goatee, driving a junker car that was parked at the curb, a young girl in the passenger seat.

  "That's my niece," he said.

  "Right," I said.

  "Putting toget
her a drilling deal in Iran, can you believe it?"

  "That's great, Merch."

  "Good seeing you, Dave. I mean that," he said, taking my hand, trying as hard as he could to hold my eyes without averting his. The girl tossed a beer can out of the window as they drove away.

  Father Jimmie and I and two employees of a funeral home made up the entire retinue at the graveside ritual for Max Coll in a Catholic cemetery outside Franklin. I felt partly responsible for his death, but had he not died, Castille Lejeune would not have gone down, nor would Castille Lejeune have utilized an opportunity to take Will Guillot off the board. Ultimately I came to think of Max Coll in another fashion. In his way he was a brave man who made his own choices, and it was an arrogance on my part and a disservice to him for me to pretend that somehow I was the designer of his fate.

  Father Jimmie went back to his conservative parish in New Orleans and worked as a chaplin at Central Lock-Up. After Alafair returned to college in Portland, I invited both him and Clotile Arceneaux to dinner at a Mexican restaurant off the upper end of St. Charles.

  "Pretty slick how you took down Lejeune, searching his property without a warrant," she said.

  "It was dumb," I said.

  "You never flinched, even though Lejeune had a pistol on you and you thought you didn't have backup," she said.

  "Say that again."

  "I watched you through a pair of field glasses. An FBI sharpshooter watched Lejeune through a scope on a rifle." She put a forkful of food in her mouth and raised her eyebrows at me.

  "Y'all were using me as bait?"

  "Got a job for you with the state if you want to start putting away bad guys again."

  "I'm out."

  She placed her foot on mine under the table and squeezed. "Come see me sometime and we'll talk about it," she said.

  "Am I missing something here?" Father Jimmie said.

  "Dave likes to pretend he can stop being a police officer. Make him go to confession, Father," she replied.

  Clete Purcel spent three months in the St. Mary Parish Prison, paid twenty-thousand dollars in damages to the sheriff's deputies he had busted up with his fists, and upon his discharge moved in with me, saying he was going to start up another PI. office in New Iberia. We fished for sac-a-lait and bass at Henderson Swamp and Bayou Benoit, and Clete tried to appear light-hearted and unaffected by his time in jail. But I knew better. Clete was a natural-born cop and despised the new breed of criminals and literally washed himself in the shower with peroxide when he got out of the bag.

  But out on Bayou Benoit, with the spring breezes up and the bream spawning back in the bays, the levee sprinkled with buttercups, we didn't talk about the bad times of the past or the present. I had never looked to the skies for great miracles, and, as St. Augustine once indicated, to watch a vineyard soak up the water in a plowed row and produce a grape that could be translated into wine was all the proof we needed of higher realities. But when Clete and I were deep in the swamp, the lacy green branches of the cypress trees shifting back and forth across the sun, I fell prey to a new temptation as well as hope.

  I waited to see a pair of pelicans drift down off the wind stream

  their wings extended and pouched beaks bulging, their improbable presence a harbinger of better times. I waited for them daily and sometimes in the flapping of wings overhead I thought I heard Boot-she's voice, reminding me of her promise about the pelicans, only to discover that a white crane or blue heron had been frightened by our outboard and had flown through the cypress trees back onto open water.

  But I'm sure one fine day, when I least expect it, the pelicans will return to Bayou Teche, and in the meantime I share my thoughts about them with no one, except perhaps Snuggs and Tripod, who, like me, sleep little and wake before first light.

  James Lee Burke is the author of twenty-one previous novels, including twelve featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux. Black Cherry Blues won the Edgar Award in 1989 and Cimarron Rose in 1997. Sunset Limited was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger in 1998. He lives with his wife, Pearl, in Missoula, Montana and New Iberia, Louisiana.