Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “Wipe your ass with it,” Joe replied.

  Uniformed deputies and city police were now pulling Joe’s people out of their cottages, lining them up, pushing them into search positions against trees and cars.

  “Turn around and place your hands on that tree, please,” the sheriff said to Joe.

  Nests of veins rippled through Joe’s chest and shoulders; rose petals of color bloomed in his throat. He threw his chicken bone into the bushes.

  “Somebody beat my daughter so bad her face didn’t look human. But you’re out here, knocking around blue-collar guys ain’t done you nothing. You know why that is? Because I bother you. You can’t do nothing about the degenerates you got in this town, so you lean on people you think are easy. Hey, you’re as old as I am. I look easy to you?” Joe said.

  Joe saw two uniformed deputies shove a man with a leviathan stomach and melancholy face and jowls like a St. Bernard’s over a car fender. “Hey, that’s Frankie Dogs they’re rousting,” Joe said. “You know who Frankie Dogs is? Even in a shithole like this they got to know who that is. Hey, you get your fucking hands off me.”

  But two deputies already had Joe against the tree and were feeling inside his thighs.

  Just then a city cop escorted Clete Purcel and Zerelda Calucci out of Zerelda’s cottage. It was all moving fast now.

  “What do you want to do with him ?” the city cop asked, indicating Clete.

  “He goes down with the rest,” the sheriff replied.

  Clete and Zerelda propped their arms against the side of Clete’s Cadillac, waiting to be searched. Clete looked at me over his shoulder, then raised his eyebrows and looked away and watched a tugboat passing on the bayou, his sandy hair blowing in the wind.

  Cletus, Cletus, I thought.

  Joe Zeroski began to fight with the deputies who were shaking him down. A half-dozen cops swarmed him, including the city cop who had been about to search Clete and Zerelda.

  Marvin Oates was standing right behind Zerelda now, his face trans-fixed, a strange, almost ethereal light in his eyes. He stepped closer to her, as though drawing near a presence from another world, leaves crackling under the soles of his shoes. He leaned down toward her shoulders, perhaps trying to breathe in the heat from her body or the perfume in her hair. Then his hands slid down the muscles in her back, under her arms and on her sides. I saw her body jerk, as though she were being sexually violated, but Oates whispered something in her ear and his hand went to her blue jeans pocket and came away with a small bag, which he pushed up into his coat sleeve.

  I headed toward him with my cane, the shotgun still propped on my shoulder.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

  His face drained.

  “Trying to hep out,” he replied.

  “You’re not a police officer. You don’t have the right to put your hand on anybody here. You understand that?” I said.

  “You’re right, sir. I dint have no bidness coming here. I’m just a simple student at the university. You ain’t gonna have no trouble with the likes of me,” he said.

  He hurried through the trees toward the bayou, pushing through bamboo and underbrush, his sports coat tearing on a thorn bush.

  “Come back here,” I said.

  But he was gone. I limped down to the bank and amid a tangle of morning glory vines saw a Ziploc bag that was fat with a greenish-brown substance inside. I poked at the bag with my cane, then picked it up and shook out the marijuana inside it and put the bag in my pocket.

  When I got back up to the driveway, Joe Zeroski and all of his men were hooked up on a long wrist chain, and so were Clete and Zerelda.

  “How about some slack on Purcel, Skipper?” I said.

  “Let him sit in his own mess for a change,” the sheriff replied.

  “Earlier today you made a remark about the women who were raped on the LaSalles’ plantation. You said maybe they should have gotten jobs somewhere else. I believe that’s the filthiest fucking thing I’ve ever heard you say, sir,” I said.

  I pumped open the breech on my shotgun and threw the shotgun in the backseat of the sheriff’s cruiser. Then I hooked my walking cane on the limb of a persimmon tree, like a misplaced Christmas ornament, and limped unassisted toward the front of the motor court.

  “Where you going, Dave?” Helen asked.

  “To get a haircut,” I said, and gave her the thumbs-up sign.

  Late that night, after Joe Zeroski and all of his men were released from jail, a car pulled into the motor court and stopped in front of Zerelda Calucci’s cottage. A young man in a white straw hat and pale blue cowboy shirt with flowers stitched on it got out of the car and walked to the cottage door, bending down briefly, then got back in the car and drove away. The next morning, when Zerelda Calucci opened her door, she found a dozen red roses, wrapped in green tissue paper, lying across a gold-embossed copy of the Bible.

  CHAPTER 12

  Friday night I experienced what recovering alcoholics refer to as drunk dreams, nocturnal excursions into the past that represent either a desire to get back on the dirty boogie or a fear of it. In my dream I visited a saloon on Magazine Street in New Orleans, where I stood at a mirrored bar with two inches of Beam in a glass and a long-necked Jax on the side. I drank as I did before I entered Alcoholics Anonymous, knocking back doubles with the careless disregard of a man eating a razor blade, con.-dent that this time I would not wake trembling in the morning, filled with rage and self-hatred and an insatiable desire for more drink. Then I was in another saloon, this one located in an old colonial hotel in Saigon, one with wood-bladed ceiling fans and ventilated shutters on the windows and marble columns and potted palms set between tables that were covered with white linen. I wore a freshly pressed uniform and sat in a tall chair at a teakwood bar next to a friend, an Englishman who owned an export-import company there and who had been an intelligence agent in Hanoi when the Viet Minh, later named the Viet Cong, were America’s allies. He wore a white suit and a Panama hat and a trimmed white mustache, and was always kind and deferential toward those who thought they could succeed as colonials where he could not. Aside from his flushed complexion, the enormous quantities of scotch he drank seemed to have little influence on him.

  He tapped my glass with his, his blue eyes sorrowful, and said, “You’re such a nice young officer. A shame you and your chaps have to die here. Oh, well, give the little buggers hell.”

  Then it was night and I was looking out on a sea of windswept elephant grass lit by the phosphorus halos of pistol flares. Inside the grass toy men in conical straw hats and black pajamas, armed with captured American ordnance and French and Japanese junk, tripped a wire strung with C-rat cans. The Zippo-tracks cut loose, with a mewing sound like a kitten’s, arcing liquid flame over the grass, filling the sky with voices and a smell that no amount of whiskey ever rinses from the soul.

  I sat up on the edge of the bed and pushed the sleep out of my eyes. The window curtains were blowing in the wind, and the clouds above the swamp were as black as soot, heat lightning ballooning inside them, and I could smell a trash fire in a coulee and hear the hysterical shrieking sound of a nutria calling to its mate.

  I went into the bathroom and opened a bottle of aspirin and poured eight into my hand, then ate them off my palm, biting down on the acidic taste of each, cupping water into my mouth, taking the rush just as if I had eaten a handful of white speed.

  I lay back down on top of the sheets, a pillow over my face, but did not sleep again until dawn.

  It was Saturday morning and I drove to Morgan City and searched the city newspaper’s morgue for an account of a homicide involving the man some called Legion Guidry. It wasn’t hard to find. On a weekday night in December of 1966 a freelance writer named William O’Reilly, age thirty-nine, of New York City, had acted belligerent in a bar down by the shrimp docks. When asked to leave, he had pulled a pistol on the bartender. The bartender, one Legion Guidry, had tried to disarm him. William O’Rei
lly was shot twice, then had staggered into the parking lot, where he died. The story did not run until two days after the death of the victim and appeared on the second page of the newspaper. The story stated that William O’Reilly had been unemployed for several years and had been dismissed from both a newspaper and a university teaching job for alcohol-related problems.

  I turned off the microfilm scanner and looked out the window at the palm trees and rooftops of Morgan City. I could see the bridges over the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya River and the shrimp boats and bust-head saloons down by the waterfront and the dead cypresses in the chain of bays that formed a deep-water channel into the Gulf of Mexico. Butto the denizens of America’s criminal subculture, Morgan City was more than a piece of Jamaica sawed loose from the Caribbean. It had always been the place to go to if you were on the run and needed a new identity, access to dope, whores, foreign ports, and money that was not on the record. What better place to murder a worrisome alcoholic writer from New York and get away with it, I thought.

  That afternoon Clete Purcel came into the bait shop and rented a boat. I had not seen him since he had been released from jail. “You want to talk about anything?” I asked.

  “About getting put in the bag with psychopaths like Frankie Dogs? Not really,” he said.

  “I was going to ask you if you’d had any contact with Legion Guidry.”

  His face became vague, then he yawned and looked at his watch. “Wow, the fish are waiting,” he said.

  He loaded his tackle box and cooler and spinning rod and himself into a narrow aluminum outboard and roared down the bayou, splitting the water in a yellow trough behind him. He returned just before dark, sunburned, his face dilated from drinking beer all afternoon, an eleven-pound large-mouth bass iced down in the cooler, the treble hooks of the Rapala still buried deep in its throat.

  I heard him scaling and scraping out his fish under a faucet on the dock, then he entered the bait shop and washed his hands and face with soap at a sink in back and helped himself to a sandwich off the shelf and a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter, his eyes clear now. He counted the money out of his wallet for the sandwich and coffee, then lost his concentration and knitted his fingers in front of him.

  “I need to put my schlong in a lockbox,” he said.

  “You’re talking about your involvement with Zerelda?”

  “I can’t believe I was in a cell with Frankie Dogs. He was a bodyguard for one of the guys who probably killed John Kennedy. It’s like standing next to a disease.”

  “Go back to New Orleans for a while.”

  “That’s where all these guys live.”

  “So pull the plug with Zerelda.”

  “Yeah,” he said vaguely, looking into space, puffing out the air in one cheek, then the other. “I think she’s still got the hots for Perry LaSalle, anyway. I guess he poked her a few times, then decided to zip up his equipment. Zerelda says he did the same thing with Barbara Shanahan.”

  I busied myself at the cash register, then carried out a bucket of water that had drained from the pop cooler and threw it across one of the bait tables. When I came back inside, Clete was looking at me, his face flat.

  “You don’t want to hear about other people’s sex lives?” he said.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, you’d better hear this, because this guy LaSalle has thumbtacks in his head and makes a full-time career of finding reasons to jam boards up everybody’s ass except his own.

  “Barbara and Zerelda used to know each other when Barbara and LaSalle were at Tulane together. Barbara wouldn’t have anything to do with LaSalle, because LaSalle’s family let Barbara’s grandfather do time that should have been theirs. Then one night outside a law-school party on St. Charles, LaSalle saw these gangbangers tearing up two Vietnamese kids. LaSalle waded into about six of them, so they stomped him into marmalade instead of the Vietnamese.

  “Barbara took LaSalle home and cleaned up his cuts and fed him soup and, guess what, they end up doing the horizontal bop.

  “Guess what again? LaSalle comes around a few more times for some more boom-boom, then turns her off like she doesn’t exist.”

  “This means he has thumbtacks in his head?” I asked.

  “A guy who dumps a woman like Barbara Shanahan? Either he’s got shit for brains or he’s a closet bone-smoker.”

  “You called her a woman instead of a broad,” I said.

  Clete raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I guess I did,” he said.

  The phone rang. When I got finished with the call, Clete was gone. I caught him at his car, out by the boat ramp.

  “The other day the sheriff told me somebody slashed Legion Guidry’s truck tires. You were seen in the neighborhood,” I said.

  “That’s a heartbreaking story,” he said.

  “Stay out of it, Cletus.”

  “The show is just getting started, big mon,” he replied, and drove away.

  . . .

  The following Monday I drove down East Main, past the antebellum and gingerbread homes along the Teche and the shady lawns scattered with the bloom of azalea bushes. I parked by the Shadows, where a tourist bus was unloading, and crossed the street and entered a two-story Victorian house that had been remodeled into the law offices of Perry LaSalle. It was like entering a monument to the past. Three secretaries sat behind computers in the front office, phones ringing, a fax machine pumping laser-printed correspondence into a basket, but these concessions to modern times were clearly overwhelmed in significance by an enormous glass-encased, sun-faded Confederate battle flag that had been carried by members of the 8th Louisiana Volunteers, its cloth rent by grapeshot or minnie balls, the names Manassas Junction, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Cross Keys, Malvern Hill, Chantilly, and Gettysburg inked into brown patches that were hand-stitched along the flag’s border. Oil paintings of LaSalles hung over the fireplace and between the high windows. A Brown Bess musket used by one of them at the Battle of New Orleans was propped on the mantelpiece, a framed letter of gratitude written to Perry’s ancestor by Andrew Jackson resting on the flintlock mechanism.

  But it was not the LaSalles’ historical memorabilia that captured my attention. Through the window I saw a tall man backing a fire-engine-red pickup truck out the driveway. He wore a flower-print shirt and a straw hat, with the brim slanted over his forehead, but I could see the vertical furrows in his face, like those on a prune.

  The secretary told me I could go upstairs to Perry’s office.

  “You look a little battered. What happened?” Perry said from behind his desk.

  “Bad day on the job. You know how it is. Who was that backing his truck out your driveway?”

  Perry gazed out the window at the traffic passing on the street. “Oh, that fellow?” he said casually. “That’s Legion, the guy you were asking about once before.”

  “He’s your client?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then what’s he doing here?”

  “None of your business.”

  I sat down without being asked.

  “You know the name William O’Reilly?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “He was a writer from New York. Legion shot him to death outside a bar in Morgan City.”

  Perry picked up a pen and rotated it in his fingers, then dropped it back on his desk. His office shelves were filled with law and historical books and leather-bound biographies of the classical world. A photograph of the legendary Cajun musician Iry LeJeune hung on the wall. An old canvas golf bag stuffed with mahogany drivers stood in the corner like a reminder of an earlier, more leisurely time.

  “Legion’s a leftover from a bygone era. I can’t change what he is or what he’s done,” Perry said. “Sometimes he needs money. I give it to him.”

  “I had a recent encounter with this man. I think he’s evil. I don’t mean bad. I mean evil, in the strictest theological sense.”

  Perry shook his head. His brownish-black hair w
as untrimmed and curly at the back of his neck, his eyes deeply blue inside his tanned face. “I thought I’d heard it all,” he said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Here’s an old man, an illiterate Cajun, who is as much victim as he is victimizer, and you make him out to be the acolyte of Satan.”

  “Why is it I always have the sense you glow with blue fire, while the rest of us bumble our way through the moral wilderness?” I said.

  “You really know how to go for the throat, Dave.”

  “Next time you see Legion, ask him why a police officer would spit in his food,” I said, and got up to go.

  “Somebody spit in his food? You?” Perry put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars. He laughed to himself. “You’re a heck of a guy, Dave. By the way, Tee Bobby Hulin passed a lie detector test. He didn’t rape or shoot Amanda Boudreau.”

  That afternoon I met Clete Purcel for coffee at McDonald’s on East Main. “So what?” he said. “You get the right polygraph expert, you get the right answers. No Duh Dolowitz always said he could throw the machine off by scrunching his toes.”

  “Maybe I’ve helped set up an innocent man.”

  “If they’re not guilty for one caper, they’re guilty for another. Innocent people don’t leave their DNA on the person of a murder victim. That kid probably should have been poured out with the afterbirth, anyway.”

  I finished my coffee and watched a group of black kids dribbling a basketball down the sidewalk under an oak tree. Clete began to relate another detailed account of his ongoing problems with Zerelda Calucci. He caught the look on my face.

  “What, you got to be someplace?” he asked.

  “To tell you the truth—”

  “I’ll make it fast. Last night I’m grilling a steak with her on the little patio by her cottage, trying to find the right words to use, you know, so I can kind of ease on out of what I’ve gotten myself into without getting hit with a flowerpot. But she keeps brushing against me, pulling the meat fork out of my hand and flipping the steak like I’m a big kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing, smoothing my shirt on my shoulders, humming a little tune under her breath.