Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “What are you doing?” Barbara said.

  “That kid with the mush-mouth accent, Marvin something or other? Where does he live?” he asked.

  The next day, Saturday, Clete parked his car in my drive and walked across the road and down the boat ramp, where I had propped a ladder against one of the dock pilings and was painting termicide and tar on some of the wood that had started to rot. He sat down heavily in a moored outboard, in the dock’s shade, and told me of the previous evening. “You slapped Marvin Oates around?” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s fair to say,” he replied. He pulled on his nose and looked into space. “He told me he left the Bible earlier in the evening.”

  “I think you got the wrong guy. Marvin doesn’t smoke.”

  “There was a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard of his car,” Clete said.

  “Unfiltered cigarettes?”

  “No.”

  “You got the wrong guy, Clete. In more ways than one.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Bad things seem to happen to people who hurt Marvin Oates.”

  “Why did I have all those weird feelings when I saw that milk truck passing by the convent?” he asked.

  “Maybe you’re like me. You wonder about where you’ve been and who you are now and what you’ll eventually become. It has something to do with mortality.”

  “My old man could be a decent guy. He’d take me to ball games and out fishing for green trout. Then he’d get drunk and tell me the best part of me ran down my mother’s leg.”

  “Time to cut loose from it, Cletus.”

  “You think Barbara and I could have a serious go at it? I mean, marriage, kids, stuff like that?”

  He lifted his head and looked up at me from his seat on the boat, the water chucking against the aluminum hull in the silence, one of his eyes watery from a shaft of sunlight that fell through the slats in the dock.

  Later that afternoon Alafair, Bootsie, and I went to Mass. After I took them back home I drove to Iberia General and asked at the reception desk for the room number of Sonny Bilotti. I bought a magazine in the gift shop and walked down the corridor to a double-occupancy room. Bilotti was in the room by himself, propped up against pillows, his jaws wired shut, his eyes raccooned, his lips black with stitches. The windowsill was lined with bouquets of carnations, roses, and hollyhocks, but they obviously did little to cheer the man in the bed, who had probably taken one of the worst beatings I had ever seen. “Your friend already check out?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, his eyes following me across the room as I pulled a chair up to his bedside.

  “Here’s an Esquire magazine in case you need something to read,” I said. “My name is Dave Robicheaux. I’m a detective in the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department.”

  Before he could speak, I heard someone behind me. I turned and saw Zerelda Calucci standing in the doorway, wearing white jeans, cowboy boots, and a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt cut off at the armpits.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “This is official business, so please get out of here,” I said.

  “I have a bone to pick with Clete Purcel. Where is he?” she said.

  “I don’t think you’re hearing me. You need to move yourself out of this immediate environment,” I said.

  She leaned against the doorjamb, her arms folded, chewing gum, her black hair hanging almost to her breasts. “Then hook me up, darlin’. I get wet just thinking about it,” she said.

  “You were a rumdum in the First District. You used to hang in Joe Burton’s piano bar on Canal,” Sonny Bilotti interjected himself, compressing his words flatly, his head motionless against the pillows.

  “That’s me, partner,” I said. “The word is you shanked a guy from the Aryan Brotherhood in Marion. You’ve got to be stand-up to ’front the A.B., Sonny. Don’t let a sack of shit like Legion Guidry get away with what he did. File against him and we’ll bust his wheels.”

  Bilotti’s head shifted slightly on the pillow so that he could look directly at me. His eyes possessed the luminosity of obsidian, but they were also marked by an uncertain glimmer, a conclusion or perhaps a new knowledge about himself that would plague him the rest of his days.

  “You scared of this guy, Sonny?” I said.

  His eyes went to Zerelda.

  “You’re done here,” she said to me.

  “If that’s the way you want it,” I said, and walked outside.

  She followed me to the front door of the hospital, then out into the parking lot under the trees. The air was warm, golden, smelling of smoke from Saturday-afternoon leaf fires.

  “I did some checking on you. You were in this same hospital. Somebody made you count your bones. Maybe with a blackjack. I have a feeling it was Legion Guidry,” she said.

  “So?” I replied, my eyes focused across the street on the bayou.

  “You didn’t bring charges against him. You’re trying to use Sonny to get even. Because you’re too gutless to do it head-on,” she said.

  I turned from her and walked to my truck. But she wasn’t finished with me yet. She stepped between me and the door.

  “Guidry did something to you that makes you feel ashamed, didn’t he?” she said.

  “I’d appreciate your moving out of the way.”

  “I bet you would. Here’s another flash. You got a beef with Legion Guidry, take it to Perry LaSalle. He got Guidry his job at the casino. Then ask yourself why Perry has influence at the casino.”

  “Is there any particular reason I’ve earned your anger?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Sonny Bilotti is my cousin and you’re an asshole,” she replied.

  CHAPTER 20

  I awoke early Sunday morning and drove 241 miles to Houston, then got lost in a rainstorm somewhere around Hermann Park and Rice University. When I finally found the Texas Medical Center and the hospital where the sheriff’s wife had just undergone a double mastectomy the previous week, the rain had flooded the streets and was thundering on the tops of cars that had pulled to the curb because their drivers could not see through the windshields. I parked in an elevated garage, then splashed across a street and entered the hospital soaking wet. She was asleep. So was the sheriff, his body curled up on two chairs he had pushed together, a blanket pulled up to his chin. I walked back to the nurses’ station. No one was there except for a physician in scrubs. He was a tall, graying man, and he was writing on a clipboard. I asked him if he knew how the sheriff’s wife was doing.

  “You a friend of the family?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She’s a sweetheart,” he said, and let his eyes slip off mine so I could read no meaning in them.

  “Is the flower shop open downstairs?” I asked.

  “I believe it is,” he said.

  On the way out of the hospital I paid for a mixed bouquet and had it sent up to the sheriff’s wife. I signed the card “Your friends in the department” and drove back to New Iberia.

  The next morning, Monday, the sheriff and I were both back at work. I knocked on his office door and went inside. “Got a minute?” I said.

  He sat behind his desk in a pinstripe suit and turquoise western shirt, his eyes tired, trying not to yawn. “You sound like you have a cold,” he said.

  “Just some sniffles.”

  “You get caught in the rain?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  I closed the door behind me.

  “It was Legion Guidry who worked me over with a blackjack. When he finished, he held my head up by the hair and put his tongue in my mouth and called me his bitch,” I said.

  It was quiet in the room. The sheriff rubbed his fingers on the back of one hand.

  “You were ashamed to tell me this?” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  He nodded. “Write it up and get a warrant,” he said.

  “It won’t stick. Not after all this time,” I said.

  “If it doe
sn’t, it’s because you tore up Jimmy Dean Styles.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “You do everything in your power to convince people you’re a violent, unstable, and dangerous man. Get a warrant. Nobody assaults an officer in my department. I want that son of a bitch in custody.”

  I started to speak, then decided I’d said enough.

  “I think you had another reason for not reporting this,” the sheriff said. “I think you planned to pop Guidry yourself.”

  “I was never big on self-analysis.”

  “Right,” he said.

  I got up to leave.

  “Hold on,” the sheriff said.

  “Sir?”

  He touched the bald spot in the center of his head, then looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. “My wife and I appreciated the flowers,” he said.

  I paused in the doorway, my face blank.

  “I saw you leaving the flower shop at the hospital. I’ll never figure you out, Dave. That’s not necessarily a compliment,” he said.

  I guess I should have felt liberated from the deceit I had practiced on the sheriff. In fact, it should have been a fine day. But I stayed restless, discontented, and irritable, without cause or remedy, and the five miles I jogged that evening and the push-ups and bench presses and sets of curls I did with free weights in my backyard did little to relieve the pressure band along one side of my head and the electricity that seemed to jump off the ends of my fingers. That night I thought I heard caterpillars eating inside a pile of wet mulberry leaves under the window, and I pressed the pillow down on my head so I would not have to hear the sound they made. I dreamed I was teaching a class of police cadets at a community college in north Miami. In my dream I was part of an exchange program with NOPD and Florida law enforcement, and what should have been a vacation in the sun was for me a long drunk in the bars adjacent to Hialeah and Gulfstream Park racetracks. I entered the classroom stinking of cigarette smoke and booze, unshaved, my mouth like cotton, sure that somehow I could get through the hour, with no notes or lesson plan, then find a morning bar in Opa-Locka, where a vodka collins would sweep all the snakes back into their wicker baskets.

  Then I realized, as I stood at the lectern, that I had become incoherent and foolish, an object of pity and shame, and the cadets, who had always treated me with respect, had dropped their eyes to the desks in embarrassment for me.

  The dream wasn’t a fabrication of the unconscious, just an accurate replication of what had actually taken place, and when I woke from it just before dawn, I could not shake the feeling that I was still drunk, still drinking, still caught in the alcoholic web that had made my nights and days a misery for years.

  I showered and shaved and went to an early Mass at Sacred Heart, then stayed alone in the church and said the rosary. But when I came out into the daylight the sun and humidity were like a flame on my skin and I curled and uncurled my fists for no reason.

  Legion Guidry bonded out of jail at 10 a.m. An hour later I saw him crossing Main Street to eat lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria. For just a moment I could taste his tobacco and saliva in my mouth and smell the testosterone on his clothes. My palm ached to fold around the checkered grips of my .45, to feel the heavy, hard, cold weight and the perfect balance of the frame resting securely in my hand.

  Zerelda Calucci had tried to find Clete Purcel for two days, then discovered he’d hooked up a bail skip to the D-ring inset in the back floor of his Cadillac and had driven back to New Orleans to deliver the bail skip to the bondsmen for whom he worked. Zerelda tracked Marvin Oates down on a side street in New Iberia’s old bordello district, where he had dragged his roller-skate-mounted suitcase to the porch of a wood-frame store and was eating from a paper plate filled with rice and beans and sausage in the shade of a spreading oak. A half-block away was a stucco crack house, also shaded by an oak tree, the yard filled with trash, the windows broken, the screens slashed and rusted-out and hanging from the frames. White and black crack whores sat on the porch, walking in turns down to the store for beer or food or cigarettes, but Marvin did not look up from his paper plate when they walked past him.

  Zerelda pulled her pearl-white Mustang convertible onto the oyster shells and did not cut the engine.

  “Throw your suitcase in the back, sweetie, and let’s take a drive,” she said.

  “Where we going?” Marvin asked.

  Her eyes roved over a barked area by his eye, a bruise on his chin. Her face became suffused with pity and anger.

  “To straighten out somebody who thinks he’s a swinging dick because he can knock around someone half his size. Now get in the car, Marvin,” she replied.

  “I dint want to cause no trouble, Miss Zerelda,” Marvin said.

  She opened the car door and started to get out.

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  . . .

  It was almost dusk when Zerelda crossed the Mississippi River and drove down Canal and into the French Quarter and parked around the corner from Clete’s office and upstairs apartment on St. Ann Street. The doors were locked, but a note addressed to an infamous nuisance in the New Orleans underworld was stuck in the corner of a window. It read: “Dear No Duh, I’m over at Nig and Willie’s—Clete.” The bail bond office of Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater was located just off Basin, just inside the ragged edges of the Quarter, not far from St. Louis Cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park. Zerelda pulled to the curb and parked next to a cluster of overflowing garbage cans. Down the street and across Basin she could see the old redbrick buildings and the green wood porches of the Iberville Project, a community whose crack addicts and gangbangers and teenage prostitutes would not only mug tourists and roll johns in the adjacent cemetery but occasionally execute them out of pure meanness. In fact, the city had poured cement barricades across some of the streets leading into the Iberville so that tourists would not drive into it by mistake.

  But Marvin Oates’s attention was focused on the window of the bail bond office, where Clete was playing cards at a desk with a thin, nattily dressed, deeply tanned man who wore an oxblood fedora with a gray feather in the band and a mustache that looked like it had been grease-penciled on his upper lip.

  Marvin’s face was wind-burned from the trip to the city, and now he was sweating heavily in the dusk, pinching his mouth dryly in his hand.

  “I’ll wait out here,” he said.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Zerelda said, getting out of the car.

  “That’s ’cause I’m staying out here.”

  She walked around to his side of the convertible. “Comb your hair, sweetie. Then I’m going to take you out to dinner. Don’t you ever be afraid. Not when you’re with me,” she said, and smoothed his hair back up on his head.

  His face looked like a fawn’s.

  Then she went through the door of the bail bond office, her purse swinging heavily from a cloth strap wrapped around her wrist.

  “Zerelda, what’s the haps? Great coincidence. I wanted No Duh here to check out our man Marvin the Voyeur, see if he wasn’t a guy No Duh ran across in central lockup,” Clete said.

  “Where the fuck do you get off knocking around an innocent boy like that?”

  “He has a way of showing up in places where he has no business,” Clete replied.

  “Oh, yeah?” Zerelda said, and swung her purse with both hands at his head, the cloth bottom bulging with the weight of her .357 Magnum.

  He caught the blow on his forearm, but she swung again, this time hitting him squarely across the back of the head.

  “Come on, Zerelda, that hurts,” Clete said.

  “You tub of whale sperm, you thought you could just dump me and get it on with some pisspot at the D.A.’s office?” she said.

  “Remember strolling off to the ice cream parlor with dick brain out there? I took that as a signal to get lost. So I got lost,” Clete said.

  “Well, lose this, you fat fuck,” she said, and hit him again.

  “
What’s going on?” No Duh Dolowitz said. “Hey, Nig, we got some people getting hurt out here!”

  Nig Rosewater came out of the back office. His porcine neck was as wide as his head inside his starched collar, so his head looked like the crown of a white fireplug mounted on his shoulders. Nig took one look at Zerelda and went back inside his office and closed and bolted the door.

  “All right, I’ll talk to him! Calm down!” Clete said, and rose from his chair.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Zerelda said.

  “That guy is a bullshitter, Zee,” Clete said.

  She took a step toward him, but he raised his hand in a placating gesture. “All right, we’ve got no problem here,” he said, and went outside in the dusk, into the noise of the street, the smells of stagnant water and overripe produce and flowers blooming on the overhanging balconies, the air crisscrossed with birds.

  Clete took a deep breath and looked down at Marvin. “If I falsely accused you of something you didn’t do, I apologize,” Clete said. “But that also means you keep that stupid face out of my life and you don’t get anywhere near certain friends of mine. This is as much slack as you get, Jack. We clear on this?”

  “The twelve disciples are my road signs. I ain’t afraid of no bullies. There ain’t no detours in heaven, either,” Marvin said.

  “What?” Clete said.

  “I dint do nothing wrong. I think you was trying to seduce Miss Barbara and somebody messed it up for you. So you put it on me ’cause I give her a Bible.”

  “You listen, shit-for-brains—”

  Marvin got out of the car and lifted his suitcase from the backseat, wrapping the pull strap around his wrist, blade-faced under the brim of his hat, a hot bead of anger buried in his eye.

  “Come back, Marvin,” Zerelda said from the doorway of the bail bond office.

  But Marvin pulled his suitcase down the street between the rows of dilapidated cottages toward Basin, his rumpled pale blue sports coat and coned straw hat and cowboy boots almost lost in the mauve-colored thickness of the evening. Then he crossed Basin amid a blowing of horns and a screeching of tires and tugged his suitcase on its roller skate over the curb and into the bowels of the Iberville Project.