Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I pressure-hosed the dried fish blood and scales off the cleaning boards, then folded the Cinzano umbrellas that protruded from the spool tables on the dock and went inside the shop.

  A few years ago a friend had given me a replica of the classic Wurlitzer jukebox, one whose domed plastic casing swirled with color, like liquid candy that had not been poured into the mold. He had stocked it with 45 rpm records from the 1950s, and I had never replaced them. I dropped in a quarter painted with red nail polish and played Guitar Slim’s “The Things That I Used to Do.”

  I had never heard a voice filled with as much sorrow as his. There was no self-pity in the song, only acceptance of the terrible conclusion that what he loved most in the world, his wife, had become profligate and had not only rejected his love but had given herself to an evil man.

  Guitar Slim was thirty-two when he died of his alcoholism.

  “That’s old-time blues there, ain’t it?” Batist said.

  Batist was well into his seventies now, his attitudes intractable, his hair the color of smoke, the backs of his broad hands flecked with pink scars from a lifetime of working on fishing boats and shucking oysters at one of the LaSalle canneries. But he was still a powerful, large man who was confident in himself and took pride in his skill as a boatmate and fisherman and was proud of the fact that all of his children had graduated from high school.

  He had grown up in a time when people of color were not so much physically abused as taken for granted, used as a cheap source of labor, and deliberately kept uneducated and poor. Perhaps an even greater injury done to them came in the form of the white man’s lie when they sought redress. On those occasions they were usually treated as children, given promises and assurances that would never be kept, and sent on their way with the feeling that their problems were of their own manufacture.

  But I never saw Batist show bitterness or anger about his upbringing. For that reason alone I considered him perhaps the most remarkable man I had ever known.

  The lyrics and the bell-like reverberation of Guitar Slim’s rolling chords haunted me. Without ever using words to describe either the locale or the era in which he had lived, his song re-created the Louisiana I had been raised in: the endless fields of sugarcane thrashing in the wind under a darkening sky, yellow dirt roads and the Hadacol and Jax beer signs nailed on the sides of general stores, horse-drawn buggies that people tethered in stands of gum trees during Sunday Mass, clapboard juke joints where Gatemouth Brown and Smiley Lewis and Lloyd Price played, and the brothel districts that flourished from sunset to dawn and somehow became invisible in the morning light.

  “You t’inking about Tee Bobby Hulin?” Batist asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Boy got a bad seed in him, Dave.”

  “Julian LaSalle’s?”

  “I say let evil stay buried in the graveyard.”

  A half hour later I turned off the outside floodlamps and the string of electric lights that ran the length of the dock. Just as I locked the front door of the shop I heard the phone inside ring. I started to let it go, but instead I went back in and reached over the counter and picked up the receiver.

  “Dave?” the sheriff’s voice said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’d better get over to the jail. Tee Bobby just hung himself.”

  CHAPTER 4

  When the jailer had walked past Tee Bobby’s cell and seen his silhouette suspended in midair, he had thrown open the cell door and burst inside with a chair, wrapping one arm around Tee Bobby’s waist, lifting him upward while he sawed loose the belt that was wrapped around an overhead pipe. After he dropped Tee Bobby like a sack of grain on his bunk, he yelled down the hall, “Find the son of a bitch who put this man in a cell with his belt!”

  When I went to see Tee Bobby the next morning in Iberia General, one of his wrists was handcuffed to the bed rail. The capillaries had burst in the whites of his eyes and his tongue looked like cardboard. He put a pillow over his head and drew his knees up to his chest in an embryonic position. I pulled the pillow out of his hands and tossed it at the foot of the bed.

  “You might as well plead out,” I said.

  “What you talking about?” he said.

  “Attempted suicide in custody reads just like a confession. You just shafted yourself.”

  “I’ll finish it next time.”

  “You grandmother’s outside. So is your sister.”

  “What you up to, Robicheaux?”

  “Not much. Outside of Perry LaSalle, I’m probably the only guy on the planet who wants to save you from the injection table.”

  “My sister don’t have nothing to do wit’ this. You leave her alone. She cain’t take no kind of stress.”

  “I’m letting go of you, Tee Bobby. I hope Perry gets you some slack. I think Barbara Shanahan is going to put a freight train up your ass.”

  He raised himself up on one elbow, the handcuffs clanking tight against the bed rail. His breath was bilious.

  “I hear you, boss man. Nigger boy got to swim in his own shit now,” he said.

  “Run the Step ’n’ Fetch It routine on somebody else, kid,” I said.

  I passed Ladice and Rosebud in the waiting room. Rosebud had a cheap drawing tablet open on her thighs and was coloring in it with crayons, her face bent down almost to the paper.

  At noon the sheriff buzzed my extension. “You know that black juke joint by the Olivia Bridge?” “The one with the garbage piled outside?” I said.

  “I want Clete Purcel out of there.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Not much. He’s probably setting civil rights back thirty years.”

  I drove down Bayou Teche and crossed the drawbridge into the little black settlement of Olivia and parked by a ramshackle bar named the Boom Boom Room, owned by a mulatto ex-boxer named Jimmy Dean Styles, who was also known as Jimmy Style or just Jimmy Sty.

  Clete sat in his lavender Cadillac, the top down, listening to his radio, drinking from a long-necked bottle of beer.

  “What’s the haps, Streak?” he said.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Checking on a dude named Styles. Nig and Willie wrote a bond on him about the time No Duh was in central lockup.”

  “No Duh said the serial killer was using an alias.”

  “Styles used just his first and middle names—Jimmy Dean.”

  Clete drank out of the beer bottle and squinted up at me in the sunlight. There was an alcoholic shine in his eyes, a bloom in his cheeks.

  “Styles is a music promoter. He’s also the business manager for a kid named Tee Bobby Hulin, who’s in custody right now for rape and murder. I think maybe you should leave Styles alone until we’ve finished our investigation.”

  Clete peeled a stick of gum and slipped it into his mouth. “No problem,” he said.

  “Did you have trouble inside?”

  “Not me. Everything’s copacetic, big mon.” Clete’s eyes smiled at me while he snapped his gum wetly in his jaw.

  A black Lexus pulled into the lot and Jimmy Dean Styles pulled the keys from the ignition and got out and looked at us, flipping the keys back and forth over his knuckles. He had close-set eyes and a nose like a sheep’s and the flat chest and trim physique of the middleweight boxer he’d been in Angola, where he’d busted up all comers in the improvised ring out on the yard.

  “You’re looking good, Jimmy,” I said.

  “Yeah, we all be lookin’ good these days,” he replied.

  “Saw your picture in People magazine. A guy from the Teche doesn’t make it in rap every day,” I said.

  “I’d like to talk wit’ y’all, but I got a call from my bartender. Some big fat cracker was inside, being obnoxious, rollin’ the gold on my customers like he was a real cop ’stead of maybe a P.I. does scut work for a bondsman. I better check to see he took his fat ass somewhere else.”

  “Hey, that’s no kidding? You’re a rapper? You’ve been in Peopl
e magazine?” Clete said, turning around in the car seat to get a better look at Styles, his mouth grinning.

  “You right on top of it, Marse Charlie,” Styles said.

  Clete opened the Cadillac’s door and put one loafered foot out on the dirt, then rose to his full height, like an elephant standing up after sunning itself on a riverbank, his grin still in place, the skin on the back of his neck peeling like fish scales. A slapjack protruded from the side pocket of his slacks.

  “Being in entertainment, you must get out on the Coast a lot,” Clete said.

  I gave Clete a hard look, but he didn’t let it register.

  “See, I travel to promote a couple of groups. That’s the way the bidness work. But right now I got to hep my man inside. So I’m cutting this short and telling you I ain’t shook nobody’s tree. That means they don’t be needing to shake mine.” Styles placed the flat of his hand on his chest to show his sincerity, then went inside.

  “I’m going to join the Klan,” Clete said.

  I followed Styles inside. The interior was dark, lit only by a jukebox and a neon beer sign over the bar. A woman sat slumped over at the bar, her head on her arms, her eyes closed, her open mouth filled with gold teeth.

  She wore pink stretch pants and her black underwear was bunched out over the elastic waistband. Styles pinched her on the rump, hard, his thumb and forefinger catching a thick fold of skin on one buttock.

  “This ain’t Motel 6, mama. You done fried your tab, too,” he said.

  “Oh, hi, Jimmy. What’s happenin’?” she said lazily, as though waking from a delirium to a friendly face.

  “Let’s go, baby,” he replied, and took her under one arm and walked her to the back door and pushed her out into the whiteness of the day and slammed and latched the door behind her.

  He turned around and saw me.

  “Sorry about my friend Clete Purcel out there,” I said. “But a word of caution. Don’t mess with him again. He’ll rip your wiring out.”

  Styles took a bottle of carbonated water from the cooler and cracked off the cap and dropped it between the duckboards and drank from the bottle.

  “What you want wit’ me, man?” he asked.

  “Tee Bobby may go down on a bad beef. He could use some help.”

  “I cut Tee Bobby loose. Zydeco and blues ain’t my gig no more.”

  “You cut loose a talent like Tee Bobby Hulin?”

  “Big shit in South Lou’sana don’t make you big shit in L.A. I got to piss. You want anything else?”

  “Yeah, I’m going to ask you not to manhandle a woman like that again, at least not when I’m around.”

  “She puked all over the toilet seat. You want to take care of her? Hep me clean it up. I’ll drop her by your crib,” he replied.

  Two weeks later Perry LaSalle went bail for Tee Bobby Hulin. Virtually everyone in town agreed that Perry LaSalle was a charitable and good man, although some were beginning to complain about a suspected rapist and murderer being set free, perhaps to repeat his crimes. With time, their sentiments would grow. That same day a white woman named Linda Zeroski had a shouting argument with her pimp, a black man, on her pickup corner in New Iberia’s old brothel district. On the corner was an ancient general store shaded by an enormous oak. In a happier time the store’s owner had sold sno’balls to children on their way home from school. Now the apron of dirt yard around the store was occupied each afternoon and evening and all day Saturday and Sunday by young black men with jailhouse art on their arms and inverted ball caps on their heads. If you slowed the car by the corner, they would turn up their palms and raise their eyebrows, which was their way of asking you what you wanted, simultaneously indicating they could supply it—rock, weed, tar, China white, leapers, downers, almost any street drug except crystal meth, which was just starting its odyssey from Arizona to the rural South.

  Linda Zeroski did not have to pay for the crack she smoked daily or the tar she injected into her veins. Or the fines she paid in city court or the bonds she posted for the incremental privilege of dismantling her own life. Her financial affairs were all handled by her pimp, a pragmatic, emotionless man by the name of Washington Trahan, who viewed women as he would bars of soap. Except for Linda Zeroski, who knew how to put slivers of bamboo under his fingernails and ridicule and demean him in public. Washington would have loved to slap her cross-eyed, to drag her by her hair into a car and dump her naked and stoned on a highway, but Linda’s background was different from that of his other whores.

  She had attended college for three years and was the daughter of Joe Zeroski, an ex-button man for the Giacano crime family.

  I used to see Linda on her corner, her body heavy with beer fat, her hair bleached and full of snarls, wearing jeans and a shirt without a bra, a cigarette always between her fingers, the smoke crawling up her wrist. Sometimes her father would come to New Iberia and haul her off to a treatment center, but in a week or two she would be back on the corner, offering herself up for whatever use her johns wished to extract from her.

  Sometimes I would pull the cruiser or my truck over and talk to her. She was always pleasant to me and appeared to take pride in the fact she had a friendly relationship with a law officer. In fact, except for Perry LaSalle, who sometimes helped her out at the court, I was probably the only white-collar man she knew on a first-name basis in New Iberia other than johns. On one occasion I took her to a drive-in for a root beer and a hamburger. I started to ask her straight out why she allowed men not only to exploit her for their sexual pleasure but, worse, in many instances to use her womb as the depository of their racial anger and their own self-loathing.

  But that is the one question you never present to a sad woman like Linda Zeroski. The answer is one she knows, but she will never share it, and she will forever despise the man who asks it of her.

  It was hot and dry the day Tee Bobby bonded out of the parish prison. Across town Linda Zeroski was picked up on her corner by a white man, taken to a motel out on the four-lane, and driven back to her corner. She drank beer in the shade of the live oak with the teenage crack dealers who were all her friends, shouted down her pimp when he accused her of shorting him on his forty percent, then had sex in the back of a black man’s car and ate her supper under the tree and tied off her arm in a crack house up the street and cooked a tablespoon of brown tar over a candle flame and shot it into a vein that was as purple and swollen as a tumor.

  Just after sunset a gas-guzzler pulled to the curb on Linda’s corner and parked under the spreading branches of the live oak. A man in a hat, his face and the color of his hands obscured by shadow, smoked a cigarette behind the wheel while Linda leaned into the passenger-side window and read off her list of prices.

  Then she turned and waved good-bye to the crack dealers in front of the store and got into the automobile.

  Two hours later Linda Zeroski, the girl who had attended Louisiana State University for three years, sat very still in a straight-back wood chair next to a beached houseboat off Bayou Benoit, her forearms taped to the chair’s arms, a paper sack placed loosely over her head, while a man who wore leather gloves paced in a circle around her.

  She tried to make sense of the man’s words, to somehow find reason inside the blood rage he was working himself into. If only the brown skag she had shot up would stop hammering in her ears, if only she did not have to breathe through her nose because of the dirty sock he had stuffed in her mouth.

  Then, just as the man wearing leather gloves suddenly ripped into her with both fists, she thought she heard the voice of a little girl inside her. The little girl was calling out her father’s name.

  Her body was found just before dawn the next morning by a black man who was running his trotlines in the swamp. The sun was still low on the horizon, veiled in mist, when Helen Soileau and I boarded a St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department boat with two detectives and the coroner and a uniformed deputy from St. Martinville. We headed up Bayou Benoit in the coolness of the earl
y morning, between flooded woods and through bays that were absolutely silent, undimpled by rain or ruffled by wind, the willows and gum trees and moss-hung cypress as still in the green light as if they had been painted against the sky. The uniformed deputy turned the boat out of the main channel and cut back the throttle and took us through a stand of tupelo gums that were hollowed out by dry rot and whose trunks resonated like drums when the boat’s hull scraped against them. Then we saw the desiccated remains of a houseboat that had lain twisted inside the trees since Hurricane Audrey had struck south Louisiana in 1957, its gray sides strung with blooming morning glories.

  Up on a sand spit that looked like the humped back of a whale, Linda Zeroski sat in the wood chair, her head slumped forward, as though she had nodded off to sleep. At her feet were the bloodied pieces of brown paper that had been the bag covering her head. The coroner, who was a decent elderly man known for his planter’s hats and firehouse suspenders and bow ties, pulled polyethylene gloves on his hands and lifted Linda’s chin, then gingerly rotated her head from side to side. A breeze suddenly came up and the leaves in the canopy fluttered with sunlight, and I looked into Linda’s destroyed face and felt myself swallow.

  The coroner stepped back and pulled off his gloves with popping sounds and dropped them in a garbage bag.

  “How do you read it, Doc?” Helen asked.

  “I’d say she was beaten with fists, probably by somebody who’s as powerful with one hand as with the other,” he said. “There are fragments of what looks like leather in a couple of the wounds. My guess is he was wearing gloves. Of course, he could have been using a leather-covered instrument, but in that case there would probably be lesions on the top of the skull, where the skin would split more easily.”

  A St. Martin Parish detective named Lemoyne was writing in a notepad. He was an overweight man and wore a rain hat and tie and long-sleeved white shirt and galoshes over his street shoes. He kept swiping mosquitoes out of his face.