Last Car to Elysian Fields dr-13

by James Lee Burke

  "Who popped him, Janet?" I said.

  "I don't know. Sammy always said it was the normals you got to watch out for, 'cause they never learn who they really are."

  She stared through the front windows at the palm trees beating in the wind and the rain slashing on the glass.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was afternoon when Clete dropped me off at the house. The sky was a cold blue, dense and flawless in texture and color, the lawns along the street ridged with serpentine lines of leaves where the rainwater had receded into the streets. I shaved, showered, changed clothes, and went to the office.

  Helen listened quietly while I told her of what had happened in New Orleans, her gaze fixed out the window on the crypts in the old cemetery.

  "You called N.O.P.D. about Coll?"

  "Yes."

  "When?" she said.

  "When we left town."

  "I don't think you wanted to arrest him."

  "Then why would I have chased him across town?"

  "You should have called N.O.P.D. as soon as you saw him inside the church."

  "Picture this scene, Helen. A couple of hot dogs coming through the vestibule with M-16s and 12-gauge pumps and Max Coll with a nine-millimeter," I said.

  "Coll saved your life. You think you owe him."

  I started to speak but she raised her hand for me to be quiet. "The state attorney's office put us on notice this morning. We're going to be investigated for harassment of Castille Lejeune, destruction of his property, and for deliberately damaging his reputation. What do you think of that?" she said.

  "You warned me," I replied.

  "You never understand what I'm saying, Dave. You were right about the murder of Junior Crudup. Lejeune was behind it. He thinks we've got information that in reality we don't. Find out what it is. You're a handful, bwana."

  She folded her arms on her chest, shaking her head, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

  At quitting time I drove to the home of Merchie and Theodosha Flannigan. It was almost the winter solstice now, and the sepia-tinted light in the trees and on the bayou seemed to emanate from the earth rather than the sky. Merchie greeted me at the door, wearing glasses, a book in his hand, his long hair like white gold against the soft glow of a living room floor lamp. "She's not here," he said.

  "It's you I want to talk to," I replied.

  "Why is it you keep finding reasons to put yourself in my wife's path? Just doing your job?"

  "You're out of line, Merchie."

  "Could be. Could also be you'd like to get into Theo's pants. If that's the case, good luck, because she's out drunk somewhere."

  I cleared my throat and shifted my eyes off his face. His thoroughbreds were nickering inside a pecan orchard beyond a white fence, their bodies barely distinguishable in the shadows. "The murder of Junior Crudup isn't going away. His remains were moved, but eventually we'll find out what happened to them. If I have anything to do with it, your father-in-law is going to have an opportunity for on-the-job training in soybean farming," I said.

  "So why tell me about it?"

  "Because I think you wouldn't mind seeing that happen."

  "You want to dip your wick, go do it. But leave us out of your personal problems."

  "I think Theodosha knows what happened to Junior Crudup's body."

  "My wife is a sick person. That's why she's spent a hundred thou sand dollars on psychiatrists and clinics. But I think you like stirring her up. I think you like feeding on our troubles."

  He started to close the door but I held it open with one hand. "Your wife's frigid, isn't she?" I said.

  He released the tension on the door, slipped off his glasses, and dropped them in his shirt pocket. "If you weren't already an object of pity and public ridicule, I'd splatter your nose all over your face. Now go home," he said.

  The door clicked shut. I stared at it stupidly, my ears ringing in the silence.

  Early the next morning Clete picked me up for breakfast, cheerful, wearing his utility cap low on his brow, a Hawaiian shirt under his bomber jacket, driving with one hand down East Main toward Victor's Cafeteria.

  "You moved back into the motor court?" I said.

  "Yeah, why not?"

  "You burned a guy's trailer. You assaulted a man in Lafayette."

  "They're not filing charges. Not if they want to stay on the planet. So I don't see the big deal. Things get out of control sometimes. I'm cool with it," he said, fiddling with the radio.

  Clete was Clete, a human moving violation, out of sync with both lawful and criminal society, no more capable of changing his course than a steel wrecking ball can alter its direction after it's been set in motion. Why did I constantly contend with him? I asked myself.

  But I knew the answer and it wasn't a comforting one: We were opposite sides of the same coin.

  I told him about my visit to Merchie Flannigan's house.

  "That punk said that to you?" he asked.

  "I got a little personal about his wife," I replied.

  "That's another question I have. You actually asked him if his wife wouldn't come across?"

  "I guess that sums it up."

  "I can see that might piss him off. Particularly when he knows you bopped her."

  "Can't you show some subtlety, just a little, once in a while?"

  "You bump uglies with a guy's wife, then tell him she's an ice cube, but it's me who's got a problem with language?"

  "She was drunk. We both were. Stop harping on it."

  He looked at me, then turned into the parking lot across from Victor's. The old convent across the bayou was still in shadow, the live oaks speckled with frost. "Why get into Flannigan's face about his wife's sex life?" he said.

  "A psychiatrist would probably say she has trouble with intimacy. So she gets it on when she's drunk, usually with strangers or people she doesn't care about. It's characteristic of women who were molested as children," I replied.

  "You're really going to hang Lejeune's cojones over a fire, aren't you?"

  "You better believe it," I said.

  Later I signed out a cruiser and drove to the Lafayette Police Department to see my old friend Joe Dupree, the homicide cop and airborne veteran who had investigated the gunshot death of Theo Flannigan's psychiatrist. While I talked he sat behind his desk, picking one aspirin, then another, then a third out of a tin container, swallowing them with water he drank from a cone-shaped paper cup. His tie was configured to the shape of his pot stomach, his hair combed like strands of wire across the bald spot on top of his head.

  "So you think this guy Will Guillot is blackmailing Castille Lejeune and it has something to do with Lejeune's daughter?" he said.

  "Right."

  "About what?"

  "Molestation."

  Joe leaned back in his chair and rubbed his mouth. Through the window I could see a chained-up line of black men in orange jumpsuits being placed in a jail van. "Well, Ms. Flannigan's file was missing from Dr. Bernstine's office. But I found out several other files were missing, too. Maybe Bernstine took them home and they got lost somehow. Or somebody could have stolen several files to throw off the investigation. Anyway, it's been a dead-end case," he said.

  "You checked out the secretaries, any reports of forced entry?" I said.

  "If Bernstine was burglarized, he didn't report it. The alarm company never had to do a 911, either. The secretary is a church-going, family woman, with no reason to steal files from her employer."

  "How long was she there?"

  He looked down at the torn notebook pages that were clipped inside a case folder. "Seven months," he said.

  "Who was the secretary before this one?" I asked.

  He looked again at his notes. "A woman named Gretchen Peltier. But she quit before Ms. Flannigan starting seeing Bernstine."

  "What was that name again?"

  I drove to the alarm company that had serviced Dr. Bernstine's office. Like most alarm companies, it was an electronic shell th
at didn't provide security but instead relayed distress signals to the fire department or a law enforcement agency. In other words, the chief expense of home security was passed on to the taxpayers and the alarm company was able to maintain its entire system, which monitored several parishes, with no more than a half dozen technicians and sales and clerical employees.

  But the assistant director of the company, a black woman named Dauterive who had been an elementary school teacher, did her best to help me. A computer record of all electronic warning signals originating during the last year at Dr. Bernstine's office was laid out on the desk. "See, there were a number of power failures. Those were either during an electrical storm or when a power line was knocked down. These other dates are the times the customer didn't disarm the system fast enough. The dispatcher had to call and get the password."

  She was heavyset and wore glasses and a pink suit with a small corsage on the lapel. She glanced at her watch.

  "Am I taking up too much time?" I asked.

  "Oh, no. It's my anniversary. My husband's meeting me for lunch," she replied.

  "Who's the dispatcher?"

  "We use the Acadiana Ambulance Service. When they receive an emergency signal, they call the residence or the business and clear it up, or they notify the appropriate response service," she replied.

  "When was the last time you received an alarm that could have indicated an unauthorized entry?" I asked.

  "Here," she said, and tapped her finger on the computer printout. The date was one day after the gunshot death of the psychiatrist, Dr. Bernstine. "But the dispatcher called and got the password."

  I ran my finger up the column on the printout to a billing notation for July and a description of services that amounted to two thousand dollars. "What's this?" I asked.

  "It looks like the customer changed out the system. If I remember correctly, a power surge fried the main panel and the customer decided to use the opportunity to upgrade."

  I was getting nowhere. "Let me think about this stuff and come back," I said.

  "I don't know if this is of any help to you, but the customer changed his keypad code when he got his new system. See?" she said, and tapped the notation again.

  "Yes?"

  "He didn't change his password. Sometimes people don't like to change the password, particularly if it's a pet name or part of a private joke in the family," she said.

  She looked me flatly in the face.

  "That's a hole in the dike, isn't it?" I said.

  "You might say that," she replied.

  "Did you say today was your anniversary?" I asked.

  "That's correct. Our twenty-seventh."

  "Have a great anniversary, Ms. Dauterive."

  I headed straight for Abbeville, twenty miles south on the Vermilion River, and the insurance company that employed Gretchen Peltier, the woman who had given Will Guillot his alibi for the night the drive-by daiquiri shop operator was murdered and who had also turned out to be a former employee of the slain psychiatrist.

  She was terrified. Like most people who lead ordinary lives and stray across a line, usually in concert with someone far more devious than themselves, she could neither defend herself nor lie convincingly. Instead, she began to perspire and swallow like someone in an elevator hearing steel cables snap a strand at a time.

  "I don't think you're a bad person, Ms. Peltier. But you're taking the weight for a bad guy," I said.

  "Taking the weight?" she said, more confused and frightened than ever now, her eyes flicking to the open door of her employer's office.

  "You're about to take Will Guillot's fall. That means you'll go to prison. You'll live behind razor wire and cell with murderers and sexual deviates of every stripe. Snitch one of them off and you get glass put in your food. That's where Will Guillot has taken you."

  My rhetoric was cruel. She was a sad woman, her eyes etched with mascara, her clothes obviously bought at a discount store. I could only guess at the means of seduction Will Guillot had used to entice her into cooperating with the systematic destruction of her own life.

  "I knew the code numbers to the alarm system in Dr. Bernstine's office," she said. "Dr. Bernstine had shot himself in the park. I gave the numbers to Will because he said his wife, the one he's divorcing, told Dr. Bernstine a lot of lies that were going to be used in court against him. I gave him the password, too."

  "How did he get into the building?" I said.

  "A man who works for him, an electrician, opened the door. But the numbers on the keypad had been changed. The alarm went off. If Will hadn't had the password, the cops would have come out."

  Her eyes were wet. She rested her forehead on the heel of her hand.

  "You told me Guillot was with you the night the daiquiri store operator was killed. Was that a lie?"

  "No."

  "You sure?" I said, looking down into her face.

  "I thought I was helping Will. Why have you done this to me?" she replied. She found a handkerchief in her purse and pressed it against her eyes.

  "What's going on out here?" her employer said, standing in the doorway of his office, his tie printed with hundreds of tiny blue stars against a red background, a small American flag pinned on the lapel of his suit.

  I walked to my cruiser, which was parked on Abbeville's town square. The sun was already deep in the west, the light thin and brittle on the old brick cathedral in the square and the cemetery behind it, where the bodies of Confederate dead from Shiloh and Port Hudson lay in crypts stained with lichen and split with fissures, as though the earth were determined to absorb them and their contents back into itself. I could hear traffic crossing the steel bridge over the Vermilion River and smell the odors of diesel oil and water and shrimp husks piled behind a restaurant, and as I looked at the bare limbs of the willows along the river I was suddenly filled with the sense the sun was not simply completing part of its cycle across the sky, it was about to descend over the rim of the earth for the last time.

  In psychoanalysis it's called a world destruction fantasy.

  Were my irrational feelings connected to the fact I had just helped dismantle a woman's life? Or were the rats' nests of rags and bones in those crypts reminders that Shiloh was not a grand moment in history, but a three-day meat-cutter that soaked the hills with the blood of farm boys most of whom never owned a slave or knew anything about the economics of northern textile mills? Or was the sum total of my own life finally being made apparent to me?

  The streets were almost empty, swirling with dust and pieces of newspaper, the water oaks bare of leaves, many of the old stores permanently closed. The world in which I had grown up was gone. I wanted to pretend otherwise, to find excuses for the decay, the strip malls, the trash strewn along the roadways, the century-old live oaks that developers lopped into stumps with almost patriotic pride. In my vanity I wanted to believe that I and others could turn it around. But it was not going to happen, not in my lifetime nor in my child's.

  It was 4:45 when I got back to the department and rain had begun falling in big fat drops on the sidewalk that led into the courthouse. I pulled my mail out of my pigeon hole and went into my office. A few minutes later Helen came in.

  "So what happened today?" she asked.

  I told her.

  "Will Guillot creeped the psychiatrist's office and stole Theo Flan-nigan's file so he could blackmail Castille Lejeune?" she said.

  "It's more serious than that. I think he murdered the psychiatrist on orders from Castille Lejeune. He was probably supposed to deliver the file back to Lejeune, but he either didn't do that or he xeroxed it and is using it to take over the old man's business."

  Through the window I saw a hearse pass on its way to the funeral home on St. Peter Street. I got up from my desk and let down the Venetian blinds. My office suddenly seemed hermetically sealed, artificially lit, shut off from the rest of the world.

  "You unhappy about something?" Helen said.

  "No. Everything is fine."

/>   She looked somberly at my face. "Have dinner with me, Pops," she said.

  "Why not?" I said.

  CHAPTER 24

  That evening I walked into the kitchen while Father Jimmie was on the phone. Unconsciously he turned his back to me, rounding his shoulders, as though somehow creating a shell around his conversation.

  "I believe you, but we'll do this on my terms. No, you have my word. I'll be there. Now, good-bye," he said. After he hung up he turned around and grinned sheepishly. "I get calls from a neurotic parishioner once in a while," he said.

  "Was that one of them?" I asked.

  "Let's don't clutter up the evening, Dave."

  "You're meeting Max Coll?"

  "He's ready to change his way. I can't deny him reconciliation or communion."

  "Coll is planning to kill somebody. But you're supposed to repair his soul so he can sneak into heaven through a side window?"

  "That last sentence describes two thirds of my constituency," he said.

  He picked up Snuggs and a box of cat food and went out on the back steps to feed him.

  "I already fed him," I said.

  "He's a warrior. He needs extra rations," Father Jimmie replied.

  There was no moon that night. Screech owls were screaming in the trees and the humidity was so thick I could hear moisture ticking in the leaves on the ground. Father Jimmie had gone out, although I had no idea where. I went into the small office I had created in my rented house and sat at the desk and began writing a letter to Alafair.

  DearAlf,

  We're going to have a swell time at Christmas. Clete's in town and is anxious to see you, as of course am I. How is your novel going? I bet it's going to be a fine one. Hope you're through exams by now. Don't be too worried about grades. You always did well in school and college is not going to be any different. Would you like to take a ride out on the salt if the weather permits? Batist says he's found a new spot for redfish by Southwest Pass.

  The images out of the past, created by my own words, made my eyes film. I saw Bootsie, Alafair, and me in the stern of our boat, with Batist at the wheel, the throttle full out, slapping across West Cote Blanche Bay at sunrise, the salt spray like a wet kiss on a spring morning.