Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  But the politicians who sent my friend the sergeant into that Third World village would never have to carry his burden, nor would any civil or military authority ever hold them accountable.

  That’s the way it is. The right people seldom go down. Closure is a word that does not work well with the victims of violent crime. If you’re a cop and you’re lucky, you won’t let your point of view put you in late-hour bars.

  On a spring Saturday afternoon last year, I answered the phone on my desk at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and knew I had just caught one of those cases that would never have an adequate resolution, that would involve a perfectly innocent, decent family whose injury would never heal.

  The father was a cane farmer, the mother a nurse at Iberia General. Their sixteen-year-old daughter was an honor student at the local Catholic high school. That morning she had gone for a ride across a fallow cane field on a four-wheeler with her boyfriend. A black man who had been sitting on his back porch nearby said the four-wheeler had scoured a rooster tail of brown dust out of the field and disappeared in a grove of gum trees, then had rumbled across a wooden bridge into another field, one that was filled with new cane. A low-roofed gray gas-guzzler was parked by the coulee with three people inside. The black man said the driver tossed a beer can out the window and started up his automobile and drove in the same direction as the four-wheeler.

  My partner was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career as a meter maid at NOPD, then had worked as a patrolwoman in the Garden District before she returned to her hometown and began her career over again. She had a masculine physique and was martial and often abrasive in her manner, but outside of Clete Purcel, my old Homicide partner at NOPD, she was the best police officer I had ever known.

  Helen drove the cruiser past the grove of gum trees and crossed the bridge over the coulee and followed a dirt track through blades of cane that were pale green with the spring drought and whispering drily in the wind. Up ahead was a second grove of gum trees, one that was wrapped with yellow crime scene tape.

  “You know the family?” Helen asked.

  “A little bit,” I replied.

  “They have any other kids?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Too bad. Do they know yet?”

  “They’re in Lafayette today. The sheriff hasn’t been able to reach them,” I said.

  She turned and looked at me. Her face was lumpy, her blond hair thick on her shoulders. She chewed her gum methodically, a question in her eyes.

  “We have to inform them?” she said.

  “It looks like it,” I replied.

  “On this kind, I’d like to have the perp there and let the family put one in his ear.”

  “Bad thoughts, Helen.”

  “I’ll feel as guilty about it as I can,” she said.

  Two deputies and the black man who had called in the “shots fired” and the teenage boy who had been the driver of the four-wheeler were waiting for us outside the crime scene tape that was wound around the grove of gum trees. The boy was sitting on the ground, in an unplanned lotus position, staring dejectedly into space. Through the back window of the cruiser I saw an ambulance crossing the wooden bridge over the coulee.

  Helen parked the cruiser and we walked into the lee of the trees. The sun was low in the west, pink from the dust drifting across the sky. I could smell a salty stench, like a dead animal, in the coulee.

  “Where is she?” I asked a deputy.

  He took a cigarette out of his mouth and stepped on it. “The other side of the blackberry bushes,” he said.

  “Pick up the butt, please, and don’t light another one,” I said.

  Helen and I stooped under the yellow tape and walked to the center of the grove. A gray cloud of insects swarmed above a broken depression in the weeds. Helen looked down at the body and blew out her breath.

  “Two wounds. One in the chest, the other in the side. Probably a shotgun,” she said. Her eyes automatically began to search the ground for an ejected shell.

  I squatted down next to the body. The girl’s wrists had been pulled over her head and tied with a child’s jump rope around the base of a tree trunk. Her skin was gray from massive loss of blood. Her eyes were still open and seemed to be focused on a solitary wildflower three feet away. A pair of panties hung around one of her ankles.

  I stood up and felt my knees pop. For just a moment the trees in the clearing seemed to go in and out of focus.

  “You all right?” Helen asked.

  “They put one of her socks in her mouth,” I said.

  Helen’s eyes moved over my face. “Let’s talk to the boy,” she said.

  His skin was filmed with dust and lines of sweat had run out of his hair and dried on his face. His T-shirt was grimed with dirt and looked as though it had been tied in knots before he had put it on. When he looked up at us, his eyes were heated with resentment.

  “There were two black guys?” I said.

  “Yes. I mean yes, sir,” he replied.

  “Only two?”

  “That’s all I saw.”

  “You say they had ski masks on? One of them wore gloves?”

  “That’s what I said,” he replied.

  Even in the shade it was hot. I blotted the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve.

  “They tied you up?” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “With your T-shirt?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I squatted down next to him and gave the deputies a deliberate look. They walked to their cruiser with the black man and got inside and left the doors open to catch the breeze.

  “Let’s see if I understand,” I said to the boy. “They tied you up with your shirt and belt and left you in the coulee and took Amanda into the trees? Guys in ski masks, like knitted ones?”

  “That’s what happened,” he replied.

  “You couldn’t get loose?”

  “No. It was real tight.”

  “I have a problem with what you’re telling me. It doesn’t flush, partner,” I said.

  “Flush?”

  “T-shirts aren’t handcuffs,” I said.

  His eyes became moist. He laced his fingers in his hair.

  “You were pretty scared?” I said.

  “I guess. Yes, sir,” he replied.

  “I’d be scared, too. There’s nothing wrong in that,” I said. I patted him on the shoulder and stood up.

  “You gonna catch those damned niggers or not?” he asked.

  I joined Helen by our cruiser. The sun was low on the horizon now, bloodred above a distant line of trees. Helen had just gotten off the radio.

  “How do you read the kid?” she asked.

  “Hard to say. He’s not his own best advocate.”

  “The girl’s parents just got back from Lafayette. This one’s a pile of shit, bwana,” she said.

  The family home was a one-story, wood-frame white building that stood between the state road and a cane field in back. A water oak that was bare of leaves in winter shaded one side of the house during the hot months. The numbered rural mailbox on the road and a carport built on the side of the house, like an afterthought, were the only means we could use to distinguish the house from any other on the same road. The blinds were drawn inside the house. Plastic holy-water receptacles were tacked on the doorjambs and a church calendar and a handstitched Serenity Prayer hung on the living room walls. The father was Quentin Boudreau, a sunburned, sandy-haired man who wore wire-rim glasses and a plain blue tie and a starched white shirt that must have felt like an iron prison on his body. His eyes seemed to have no emotion, no focus in them, as though he were experiencing thoughts he had not yet allowed himself to feel.

  He held his wife’s hand on his knee. She was a small, dark-haired Cajun woman whose face was devastated. Neither she nor her husband spoke or attempted to ask a question while Helen and I explained, as euphemistically as we could, what had happened to their daughter. I wanted them to be angry
with us, to hurl insults, to make racial remarks, to do anything that would relieve me of the feelings I had when I looked into their faces.

  But they didn’t. They were humble and undemanding and probably, at the moment, incapable of hearing everything that was being said to them.

  I put my business card on the coffee table and stood up to go. “We’re sorry for what’s happened to your family,” I said.

  The woman’s hands were folded in her lap now. She looked at them, then lifted her eyes to mine.

  “Amanda was raped?” she said.

  “That’s a conclusion that has to come from the coroner. But, yes, I think she was,” I said.

  “Did they use condoms?” she asked.

  “We didn’t find any,” I replied.

  “Then you’ll have their DNA,” she said. Her eyes were black and hard now and fixed on mine.

  Helen and I let ourselves out and crossed the yard to the cruiser. The wind, even full of dust, seemed cool after the long hot day and smelled of salt off the Gulf. Then I heard Mr. Boudreau behind me. He was a heavy man and he walked as though he had gout in one foot. A wing on his shirt collar was bent at an upward angle, like a spear point touching his throat.

  “What kind of weapon did they use?” he asked.

  “A shotgun,” I said.

  His eyes blinked behind his glasses. “Did they shoot my little girl in the face?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” I replied.

  “’Cause those sons of bitches just better not have hurt her face,” he said, and began to weep in his front yard.

  By the next morning the fingerprints lifted from the beer can thrown out of the automobile window at the crime scene gave us the name of Tee Bobby Hulin, a twenty-five-year-old black hustler and full-time smart-ass whose diminutive size saved him on many occasions from being bodily torn apart. His case file was four inches thick and included arrests for shoplifting at age nine, auto theft at thirteen, dealing reefer in the halls of his high school, and driving off from the back of the local Wal-Mart with a truckload of toilet paper. For years Tee Bobby had skated on the edge of the system, shining people on, getting by on rebop and charm and convincing others he was more trickster than miscreant. Also, Tee Bobby possessed another, more serious gift, one he seemed totally undeserving of, as though the finger of God had pointed at him arbitrarily one day and bestowed on him a musical talent that was like none since the sad, lyrical beauty in the recordings of Guitar Slim.

  When Helen and I walked up to Tee Bobby’s gas-guzzler that evening at a drive-in restaurant not far from City Park, his accordion was propped up in the backseat, its surfaces like ivory and the speckled insides of a pomegranate.

  “Hey, Dave, what it is?” he said.

  “Don’t call your betters by their first name,” Helen said.

  “I gots you, Miss Helen. I ain’t done nothing wrong, huh?” he said, his eyebrows climbing.

  “You tell us,” I said.

  He feigned a serious concentration. “Nope. I’m a blank. Y’all want part of my crab burger?” he said.

  His skin had the dull gold hue of worn saddle leather, his eyes blue-green, his hair lightly oiled and curly and cut short and boxed behind the neck. He continued to look at us with an idiot’s grin on his mouth.

  “Put your car keys under the seat and get in the cruiser,” Helen said.

  “This don’t sound too good. I think I better call my lawyer,” he said.

  “I didn’t say you were under arrest. We’d just like a little information from you. Is that a problem?” Helen said.

  “I gots it again. White folks is just axing for hep. Don’t need to read no Miranda rights to nobody. Sho’ now, I wants to hep out the po-lice,” he said.

  “You’re a walking charm school, Tee Bobby,” Helen said.

  Twenty minutes later Tee Bobby sat alone in an interview room at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department while Helen and I talked in my office. Outside, the sky was ribbed with maroon strips of cloud and the train crossing guards were lowered on the railway tracks and a freight was wobbling down the rails between clumps of trees and shacks where black people lived.

  “What’s your feeling?” I asked.

  “I have a hard time making this clown for a shotgun murder,” she said.

  “He was there.”

  “This case has a smell to it, Streak. Amanda’s boyfriend just doesn’t ring right,” she said.

  “Neither does Tee Bobby. He’s too disconnected about it.”

  “Give me a minute before you come in,” she said.

  She went into the interview room and left the door slightly ajar so I could hear her words to Tee Bobby. She leaned on the table, one of her muscular arms slightly touching his, her mouth lowered toward his ear. A rolled-up magazine protruded from the back pocket of her jeans.

  “We’ve got you at the crime scene. That won’t go away. I’d meet this head-on,” she said.

  “Good. Bring me a lawyer. Then I bees meeting it head-on.”

  “You want us to get your grandmother down here?”

  “Miss Helen gonna make me feel guilty now. ’Cause you a big family friend. ’Cause my gran’mama used to wash your daddy’s clothes when he wasn’t trying to put his hands up her dress.”

  Helen pulled the rolled-up paper cylinder from her back pocket. “How would you like it if I just slapped the shit out of you?” she said.

  “I bees likin’ that.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully a moment, then touched him lightly on the forehead with the cusp of the magazine.

  His eyelids fluttered mockingly, like butterflies.

  Helen walked out the door past me. “I hope the D.A. buries that little prick,” she said.

  I went into the interview room and closed the door.

  “Right now your car is being torn apart and two detectives are on their way to your house with a search warrant,” I said. “If they find a ski mask, a shotgun that’s been fired in the last two days, any physical evidence from that girl on your clothes, even a strand of hair, you’re going to be injected. The way I see it, you’ve got about a ten-minute window of opportunity to tell your side of things.”

  Tee Bobby removed a comb from his back pocket and ran it up and down the hair on his arm and looked into space. Then he put his head down on his folded arms and tapped his feet rhythmically, as though he were keeping time with a tune inside his head.

  “You’re just going to act the fool?” I said.

  “I ain’t raped nobody. Leave me be.”

  I sat down across from him and watched the way his eyes glanced innocuously around the walls, his boredom with my presence, the beginnings of a grin on his mouth as he looked at the growing anger in my face.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “She was sixteen. She had holes in her chest and side you could put your fist into. You get that silly-ass look off your face,” I said.

  “I got a right to look like I want. You bring me a lawyer or you kick me loose. You ain’t got no evidence or you would have already printed me and had me in lockup.”

  “I’m a half-inch from knocking you across this room, Tee Bobby.”

  “Yassir, I knows that. This nigger’s bones is shakin’, Cap’n,” he replied.

  I locked him in the interview room and went down to my office. A half hour later a phone call came in from the detectives who had been sent to Tee Bobby’s home on Poinciana Island.

  “Nothing so far,” one of them said.

  “What do you mean ‘so far’?” I asked.

  “It’s night. We’ll start over again in the morning. Feel free to join us. I just sorted through a garbage can loaded with week-old shrimp,” he replied.

  At dawn Helen and I drove across the wooden bridge that spanned the freshwater bay on the north side of Poinciana Island. The early sun was red on the horizon, promising another scorching day, but the water in the bay was black and smelled of spawning fish, and the elephant ears and the cypress and flowering
trees on the banks riffled coolly in the breeze off the Gulf of Mexico. I showed my badge to the security guard in the wooden booth on the bridge, and we drove through the settlement of tree-shaded frame houses where the employees of the LaSalle family lived, then followed a paved road that wound among hillocks and clumps of live oaks and pine and gum trees and red-dirt acreage, where black men were hoeing out the rows in lines that moved across the field as precisely as military formations.

  The log-and-brick slave cabins from the original LaSalle plantation were still standing, except they had been reconstructed and modernized by Perry LaSalle and were now used by either the family’s guests or lifetime employees whom the LaSalles took care of until the day of their deaths.

  Ladice Hulin, Tee Bobby’s grandmother, sat in a wicker chair on her gallery, her thick gray hair hanging below her shoulders, her hands folded on the crook of a walking cane.

  I got out of the cruiser and walked into the yard. Three uniformed deputies and a plainclothes detective were in back, raking garbage out of an old trash pit. As a young woman, Ladice had been absolutely beautiful, and even though age had robbed her in many ways, it had not diminished her femininity, and her skin still had the smoothness and luster of chocolate. She didn’t ask me onto the gallery.

  “They tear up your house, Miss Ladice?” I said.

  She continued to look at me without speaking. Her eyes had the clarity, the deepness, the unblinking fixed stare of a deer’s.

  “Is your grandson inside?” I asked.

  “He didn’t come home after y’all turned him loose. Y’all put the fear of God in him, if that make you feel good,” she replied.

  “We tried to help him. He chose not to cooperate. He also showed no feeling at all over the rape and murder of an innocent young girl,” I said.

  She wore a white cotton dress with a gold chain and religious medal around her neck. A perforated gold-plated dime hung from another chain on her anklebone.

  “No feeling, huh?” Then she brushed at the air and said, “Go on, go on, take care of your bidness and be done. The grave’s waiting for me. I just wish I didn’t have to deal with so many fools befo’ I get there.”

  “I always respected you, Miss Ladice,” I said.