Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “So this fits with what the bartender told us. Four quick pops, then a pause and another pop. The last round was close-up. The muzzle flash burned the hair above the ear,” Dronet said.

  “Meaning?” Helen said.

  “The shooter was a pro. This guy Dogs was mobbed up, right? Another greaseball whacked him out,” Dronet said.

  The man with silver hair sat at the bar, waiting for us to interview him. He was a local liquor distributor and was watching a baseball game on the television mounted up on the wall.

  “Both the bartender and the liquor salesman say the only other person in the building was the guy in cowboy boots. You know any cowboys in the Mob?” I said.

  “Greaseballs don’t go to western stores?” Dronet said.

  “You’ve got a point,” I said.

  We talked to the liquor distributor. He kept looking at his watch and jiggling his car keys in his coat pocket.

  “You got somewhere to go?” Helen asked.

  “I’m taking my wife out tonight. I’m already late. I’m trying to get home before the storm breaks,” he replied.

  “You saw the guy in cowboy boots go out the back door?” I said.

  “I didn’t say that. I saw a man playing pinball. I didn’t pay any attention to him. I heard the shots, then I went into the rest room. I wish I hadn’t gotten mixed up in this.”

  “You saw no one else?” Dronet asked.

  “No. I feel sorry for the man who died. But I don’t know anything. The guy with the cowboy boots, they were green and red. I remember that. Like a Mexican might wear. But I didn’t see his face. Can’t we do this tomorrow?”

  “If you didn’t bother to look at his face, why’d you look at his boots?” Helen asked.

  “Because his pants were tucked inside them. Can I go now?”

  “Yeah. You and your wife have a good time,” Dronet said.

  “Who’s Johnny?” the liquor distributor asked.

  “Say again?” I said.

  “The man on the floor was still alive when I got to him. He said, ‘Hey, Johnny, some guy took me down hard.’ It was funny, because my first name is Johnny. My wife’s not gonna believe this.”

  “Get out of here,” Helen said.

  The bartender was an over-the-hill ex-wrestler and competition weight lifter from New Orleans, with a walleye and a polished round head and strands of braided barbed wire tattooed around both his upper arms.

  “You got a look at the cowboy?” I asked him.

  “It’s a dump. I don’t concentrate on the faces that come in here. Short version, I failed Braille school. You guys finished back there? I got to mop out the shitter,” he replied.

  Helen was thoughtful and quiet on the way back into New Iberia. Rain was falling on Spanish Lake, and fog rolled off the water and hung in the trees and smudged the lit windows in the houses set back from the road. “You think it was a Mob hit?” she asked.

  “Nope. Frankie was a made guy, Joe Zeroski’s number one man.”

  She yawned and steered the cruiser around a possum that was crossing the road in the headlights, the windshield wipers beating hard against the rain.

  “Long day, bwana. You want to hang it up for tonight?” she said

  “How about a visit to our local Bible salesman first?”

  “Surprise, surprise,” she said.

  Marvin Oates lived downtown on St. Peter Street in a rented shotgun house, one with ventilated shutters, left over from the 1890s. Banana trees were wedged in a cluster against one side of his gallery, and on the other side bougainvillea with stems as thick as broomsticks had tangled itself in the railings so that the front of the house looked like an impacted tooth.

  An ancient Buick, one side burned black by a fire, the entire paint job encrusted with soot and rust, sat in the shell drive, the rain pinging on the metal. Helen placed her hand on the hood.

  “Still ticking,” she said.

  Marvin Oates answered the door in pajama bottoms and a pajama shirt that was unbuttoned on his chest, barefoot, his face full of sleep, his breath sweet with mouthwash through the screen.

  “Can we come in?” I asked.

  “I was sleeping. I get up early.”

  “We’d sure like to come in. It’s wet out here,” I said.

  He pushed open the door, then stepped back in the shadows and removed a pair of blue jeans from a hat rack and put them on with his back to us.

  “I got to get my shirt. Excuse me,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll just be a minute. Have you been anywhere tonight?” Helen said.

  “To the show. I come home just a little while ago,” he replied.

  “Then went right to sleep?” Helen said. She sniffed at the air. “You smell anything, Dave?”

  “Smoke?” I said.

  “Something burning in your house?” Helen said.

  “No,” Marvin replied.

  “It sure smells like it,” she said, and walked through the front room into the middle area of the house and opened his closet. “I’d swear it was coming from here. You want us to call the fire department?”

  “No. What’s going on?” Marvin said.

  Helen picked up a pair of cordovan cowboy boots from the bottom of the closet. “These are sure nice. You got any others?” she said.

  “I don’t think y’all are s’pposed to come in my bedroom. You’re s’pposed to have a warrant or something,” Marvin said.

  Helen set the boots back on the floor and casually glanced over the shelf above Marvin’s row of hanging shirts. She turned around.

  “A greaseball named Frankie Dogs got popped tonight, Marvin. You own a gun?” she said.

  “No. Why you telling me this?”

  “Because he used your head for a toilet brush in McDonald’s,” she replied.

  Outside, the yard was flooded and rain blew in a mist through the window screen onto Marvin’s bedsheets. He pushed the glass down and twisted the lock in the frame. His chest and stomach were flat, his nipples the size of dimes. He pulled the covers off his bed and sat on the dryness of the mattress and looked at nothing, his arms propped on the mattress, his eyes focused on thoughts inside his head.

  “The Lord is my light, my sword, and my shield,” he said.

  “That’s not a bad statement. If I were you, I’d get my side of the situation on record. In my opinion, nobody’s going to be missing Frankie Dogs,” I said.

  But Marvin Oates was not easily manipulated. “I been bothering you since I looked the wrong way at your daughter, Mr. Robicheaux. That’s my fault, not yours. But I ain’t gonna hep y’all hurt me. And I don’t want y’all treating me like I’m stupid, either.”

  “We’re sorry we woke you up, partner,” I said.

  Outside, in the cruiser, Helen started the engine and clicked on the windshield wipers. The rain was sliding in torrents off Marvin’s roof, the banana fronds whipping in the wind against the side of his porch. The inside of his house was absolutely dark now.

  “When’s the last time you saw somebody sleep in a damp bed?” Helen said.

  “Marvin’s an unusual guy,” I replied.

  Helen switched on the interior light and studied my face. I felt my eyes break.

  “You’re not tired at all?” she said.

  “No, I feel fine.”

  “I saw you go into an aspirin bottle twice tonight. But I don’t think those were aspirins in the bottle. You doing whites on the half shell, Dave?”

  When the man called Legion was much younger, he hung in Hattie Fontenot’s bar down on Railroad Avenue, a tin-roofed frame building that shook with nickelodeon music, the passing of trains, and the drunken shrieks of deranged whores. Cops hung in there, too, because the coffee and boudin and cracklings were free—sometimes the whores, too—and the bouree game at the big round green-felt table in back was in progress twenty-four hours a day. Negro shoeshine boys brought their wood shine boxes inside and knelt in the tobacco spittle and sawdust and cleaned and pol
ished shoes and boots for ten cents. The white women in the cribs were five dollars, the black ones three. A long-necked Jax or Regal was twenty cents, a shot of whiskey a quarter. A Negro shucked oysters out of the shell and slid them down the bar in a trail of melting ice, briny and cold, a nickel apiece, the sliced lemon free. All the pleasures of the earth were available to any white male who desired them.

  Then the times changed, without visible cause or explanation, so rapidly the man the Negroes knew only by the name Legion guessed that forces far to the North, where he had never visited, were behind the events reshaping the Louisiana he had grown up in. The cribs closed and most of the prostitutes drifted away. The state police hauled off the slot machines and sunk them in a hundred feet of salt water. Cops no longer hung in Hattie Fontenot’s bar and the color line began to dissolve, then broke like a dam. Black men took the jobs white men had always considered theirs at birth and walked with white women on the street.

  But the man named Legion did not change. He wore his starched khaki work shirts and trousers like a uniform, a Lima watch fob hanging from his watch pocket, his cuffs buttoned at the wrists, his straw hat slanted over one eye. He smoked his cigarettes unfiltered, drank his whiskey neat, disdained warnings about diet and lungs and liver, coerced a black girl into bed when he felt like it, and occasionally on a Friday afternoon sat at a back table in Hattie’s old bar on Railroad Avenue, a saucer and tiny spoon and demitasse of French coffee by his elbow, a hand of solitaire spread out on the felt cover, as though forty years had not passed and the building still shook with music and the rumble of trains and the disconnected laughter of deranged prostitutes.

  He pared out the detritus from each of his fingernails with a penknife and brushed it off the knife blade on the table and watched a loud black man at the bar, the black man knocking back shots, joking with the white barmaid, yelling at people out on the porch. The black man’s hair was mowed into his scalp, his skin shiny, his face beaded with either sweat or rainwater. He went to the rest room and reemerged, an idiot’s grin on his mouth, flicking his hands to the music playing on the jukebox.

  “What’s happenin’, cap?” he said to Legion.

  The black man went to the bar, picked up his shot glass, and was about to drink from it when he looked at the expression on the barmaid’s face and saw her eyes riveted on someone behind him.

  “You shook piss off your hands on my neck,” Legion said.

  “Say what?” the black man said.

  “Don’t you pretend wit’ me, nigger.”

  “You out of line, man.”

  The black man turned to set down his shot glass, raising his eyebrows at the barmaid, as though she and he were both witness to an aberration from out of the past that had to be temporarily tolerated. Then the black man made a serious mistake. He grinned at Legion.

  Legion seized the black man’s throat with his left hand and drove him against the wall, shutting down his air, almost lifting him from the floor. Then he inserted the blade of a penknife into the black man’s left nostril.

  “Mr. Legion, he ain’t meant you no harm,” the barmaid said.

  “Pick up that phone, I’ll be back later,” Legion said.

  Ropes of spittle drained from the corners of the black man’s mouth. Legion tightened his grip and pushed the black man’s head and neck harder into the wall, then worked the knife blade higher into the nostril, wedging the sharpened edge against the rim.

  “You ready for it? Tell people your girl closed her legs,” he said.

  Legion looked deeply into his victim’s eyes, his own face tangled with a twisted light that caused the black man to lose control of his sphincter.

  Legion hurled him into a chair.

  “I’m gonna finish my coffee, me. You clean that chair befo’ you go,” he said.

  Helen Soileau and I were at the city police station when the anonymous 911 call came in from a passerby who had witnessed the scene in Hattie’s old bar through a window. We got in the cruiser and drove down Main toward Railroad, past the Shadows and Perry LaSalle’s office. “Why you want to take a city call?” she asked.

  Rainwater was over the curbs now, rippling back from the tires of passing cars into the bamboo that bordered the Shadows.

  “The assailant is that guy Legion Guidry we checked out at the casino,” I replied.

  “So what? Let the city guys pick him up. We have our own collection of assholes to worry about,” she said.

  “He’s the guy who used a blackjack on me.”

  She turned, fixed her eyes on me. Water flew up under a fender. I heard her fingernails clicking on the steering wheel.

  We drove down Railroad, bounced across the tracks, passed a crack house, clapboard bars, shacks without doors or glass in the windows, and yards that were covered with litter. Helen pulled under a spreading oak by a small general store with an ice locker in front that steamed in the rain.

  “Why you stopping?” I asked.

  “I’m tired of you deciding what I should know and not know. Or in this case when I should know it.”

  “He put his tongue in my mouth. He’s an old man who took me apart in front of my own house. It’s not a story many people would believe.”

  “We tell rape victims they have to meet it head-on if they ever want any peace. What makes you different?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  A swath of rainwater and leaves blew out of the tree across the windshield.

  “You going to tell the old man?” she asked.

  “Maybe.”

  She shook her head and shifted the transmission into drive.

  “I always thought you got a bum deal when you were thrown off the force in New Orleans,” she said.

  “Finish your thought,” I said.

  “I guess there’re two sides to every story,” she said.

  We parked by Hattie Fontenot’s old bar and Helen got out first and slipped her baton into the ring on her gunbelt. We went inside and saw Legion sitting at a back table, playing solitaire, his attention concentrated on his game. The bar stools were all empty; our footsteps were loud on the wood floors that had been scrubbed gray with bleach. The barmaid sat on a stool, hiding behind the cigarette she smoked, her shoulders rounded, her lipsticked mouth as bright as a rose inside the wreaths of smoke and the dyed blond hair that framed her face.

  “Where’s the man Legion assaulted?” I asked.

  She inhaled on her cigarette and tipped her ashes into a beer cap and watched a bottle fly crawl up the wall, her eyelids fluttering. Helen and I walked toward Legion’s table, dividing as we approached him, Helen slipping her baton from its ring.

  “Stand up,” she said.

  “A black boy call y’all?” he said, rising from his chair, his hat brim tilting up now, exposing the long, vertical creases in his face.

  “That’s a gun in your belt?” Helen said.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with that. State man give me a permit,” Legion said. His hand drifted toward the checkered grips on a chrome-plated .25.

  Her baton whipped through the air and cracked across his wrist. The blow was of a bone-bruising kind, one that usually swelled into a plum-colored, blood-filled knot. But Legion showed no reaction other than a flinch in his face, a quiver along the jawline.

  “You got me now, bitch. But wait till down the road,” he said.

  She shoved him into the wall and kicked his legs apart, pulled the .25 automatic from his belt, and tossed it to me. He started to turn around and she whacked him behind the knee with the baton, a blow that should have crumpled him to the floor. Instead he twisted his neck so she could look into his eyes and read the malevolence in them, his breath reaching out and touching her cheek. But Helen was all business. She hooked him up, crimping the cuffs hard into his wrists.

  “You’re under arrest for threatening a police officer,” she said.

  “I give a shit, me,” he said. He jerked his head at me. “Pick up my hat, you.”

  “You
want your hat? Here,” Helen said, and stepped on the crown, then shoved it down on his ears. “I hear you like to put your tongue in men’s mouths. We just ran a couple of black cross-dressers in. I’ll see what I can arrange.”

  After we put Legion in the back of the cruiser and closed the door on him, I touched Helen on the arm.

  “What?” she said, her eyes flashing.

  “Don’t let this bum put a letter in your jacket,” I said.

  Her brow was cut with furrows. She rubbed her palms on her jeans. “I feel like I touched something obscene,” she said.

  At the lockup Helen placed Legion in a cell occupied by two heavily perfumed transvestites in spiked heels, sequined blouses, shorts sewn with lace fringe, layers of makeup, auburn wigs, false eyelashes, and Dracula nail polish. They both leaned against the bars, a cant to one hip, flirtation and fuck-you pouts dancing on their faces. I waited at the cell door until Helen was gone.

  “You going to be all right in here, Legion?” I asked.

  “Sho he is. We gonna take good care of li’l dookie-wookie here,” one of the transvestites said. She pinched a fold of Legion’s cheek between her thumb and forefinger and shook it gingerly, her lips pursed.

  At sunrise the night jailer walked down to Legion’s cell to inform him that his lawyer, Perry LaSalle, had just arranged his bail. The transvestites sat close together on a bench in a corner, holding hands, their faces downcast.

  “What’s wrong with them?” the jailer said.

  “How the hell I know? Where my t’ings at?” Legion said.

  Later in the morning the jailer called me at the bait shop.

  “Sherenda the drag queen wants to see you,” he said.

  “It’s Saturday.”

  “That’s what I told her. She pissed her panties and dropped them out in the corridor for me to pick up. Is it okay if she comes out to your house when she makes bail?” he said.