Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Theodosha heard me walk up behind her. She turned abruptly, startled, her expression one of both fear and shame.

  “That water is fairly deep, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, turning back toward the pond. “Yes, those children shouldn’t be out there. Where are their parents?”

  I started to climb through the fence.

  “No, I’ll do that. I’m sorry. I’m—” She didn’t finish whatever she was going to say. She ducked under the top rail of the fence and ran awkwardly onto the dock, then returned, clasping each of the children by the hand.

  The children’s faces were hot, angry, a bit frightened, their cheeks pooled with color.

  “We didn’t know we did anything wrong, Miss Theo,” the little boy said.

  “You shouldn’t go near a lake or pond or the bayou without your mother or father. Don’t you ever do this again,” Theo said, and shook him.

  Both of the children began to cry.

  “Hey, you guys, let’s get a soft drink,” I said.

  I took them by the hand and walked them to the drink table and asked the waiter to give each of them a Coca-Cola. Through the trees I saw Theodosha walking rapidly toward the back of her house, her arms clinched across her chest, as though the temperature had dropped thirty degrees.

  I decided I’d had enough of the LeJeune family for one evening. I told Father Jimmie I’d say good night to our hosts for both of us and went to find Theodosha inside the house. I didn’t have to look far. She was in the den with her father, sitting on a stuffed leather footstool beneath the mounted airplane propeller, her face in her hands. Castille LeJeune stood above her, stroking her hair, his eyes filled with pity.

  Neither one of them saw me. I backed out of the doorway and joined Father Jimmie outside.

  “Do you know where Merchie is?” I asked.

  “He and another man went to the stables. The other guy seems to have his own Zip code,” he said.

  “Let’s go, Father.”

  “I was too hard on Flannigan?”

  “What do I know?” I said.

  We got in my pickup truck and headed down the long driveway toward the state road. I thought the bizarre nature of my visit to the plantation home of Castille LeJeune was over. It wasn’t. In the glare of floodlamps, by a long white, peaked stable, Merchie Flannigan was perched on top of a fence, drinking from a bottle of Cold Duck, while a tall, gray-headed, crew-cropped, angular man in cowboy boots and western-cut slacks was lighting strings of Chinese firecrackers and throwing them in the air while a group of children screamed in delight. In the background, a half-dozen thoroughbred horses raced back and forth across a fenced pasture.

  Merchie flagged me down and walked toward my truck, slightly off balance.

  “Not leaving, are you?” he said.

  “Looks like it. Thanks for having us out,” I said.

  Merchie bent down to window level to see across me. “I’m a bum Catholic, Father. But I try,” he said.

  “You were in the reformatory?” Father Jimmie asked.

  Merchie’s face reddened. “Yeah, I guess I was.”

  “We’ll compare stories sometime,” Father Jimmie said.

  The tall, crew-cropped man lit another string of firecrackers and threw it popping into the air. One of the thoroughbreds struck the fence and knocked a slat onto the grass.

  “Why are you letting that guy panic those horses like that?” I said.

  “That’s Will Guillot. Those are his kids,” Merchie replied, then seemed to look into space at the vacuity of his words. “Will does things for my father-in-law. You don’t know him?”

  “No.”

  “You should,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You’re a police officer,” he said. He leaned on his arms against the side of my truck, his eyes slightly out of focus, his breath like a wine vat.

  Chapter 5

  The telephone call to Father Jimmie came on Sunday afternoon, while he was watching a pro football game on television at the rectory. It was raining, and through the window he could see the rainwater cascading off the roof, pounding the small garden he tended in the green space between the gray, back wall of the church and the alley where the sanitation service picked up the garbage.

  “I need to go to confession, Father,” the voice said.

  “Reconciliation is scheduled every afternoon at four, except Sundays,” he said.

  “I need to go now.”

  Father Jimmie looked over his shoulder at a quarterback completing a thirty-yard pass on the television screen.

  “Can it wait?” he asked.

  “I have to get something of a serious nature off my conscience.”

  In the silence Father Jimmie could hear the man breathing into the receiver. “I’ll be in the confessional at four o’clock,” he said.

  He finished his sandwich in front of the television, and a half hour later walked down the center aisle of the church toward the three confessionals that were inset in a side wall at the rear of the building. The inside of the church was magnificent. Twin balconies draped with brilliant red tapestries extended all the way from the choir to the altar area. The pulpit was hand-carved from teak wood and had been constructed high above the laity, in a time when there were no microphones to magnify the minister’s voice. Whenever the sunlight struck the stained-glass windows, the effect inside the church was stunning. The celestial scenes on the ceiling and the paintings depicting Christ’s passion in the Garden of Gethsemane and his ordeal by scourge and mockery and spittle and finally crucifixion made the viewer swallow in both reverence and trepidation.

  The front doors of the church were open, and Father Jimmie could see the grayness of the afternoon out on the street and the drabness of the neighborhood and the rainwater welling up from the storm sewers. Perhaps a dozen people were in the pews, all of them old, their clothes shabby, their rosary beads wrapped around their hands. Some nodded at him and smiled as he passed. Their faith was genuine, he thought, their level of devotion long since proven by the lives they had led, but if they did not have this place to visit, where they could say their beads and confess sins that were either imaginary or inconsequential, he knew they would have no lives at all.

  A homeless man slept in a back pew, curled up in a fetal position, his odor rising from his clothes like a living presence. A bottle of fortified wine had fallen from his coat pocket and was precariously balanced on the edge of the pew.

  Father Jimmie picked it up, tightened the cap, and placed it on the floor, within arm’s reach of the sleeping man.

  Then, on the far side of the church, he saw a man he had never seen before. The man wore a tight-fitting tan raincoat buttoned to his neck, like a prison on his body. His face was beaded with water, his ears like small cauliflowers, his hair cut short, combed neatly, reddish in color. He was sitting rather than kneeling, his hand resting on a domed, black lunch box. His eyes never made contact with Father Jimmie’s.

  Father Jimmie went into the vestibule of the church and smelled the wind and rain and leaves blowing in the street. He wished he had not answered the phone in the rectory. It was a gray, wet day, with a touch of winter in the air, but it reminded him of Kentucky in the late fall, just before Advent, when a great dampness would settle on the Cumberland Mountains and the color would drain out of the sky and the fields and the leaves of the hardwoods would turn to flame in the hollows. It should have been a day to watch football and eat soup and hot bread and perhaps jog in Audubon Park. But he could not refuse a request for reconciliation, no matter how neurotic, self-absorbed, or irritating the source was.

  He opened the door to a side corridor that led to the back entrance of a confessional, placed his stole around his neck, and sat down inside. He heard someone open the door to the adjoining box and the person’s weight depress the kneeler that was attached to the partition separating the penitent from the confessor. Father Jimmie pushed back the wood slide that covered the small, grill
ed, gauze-covered window through which the penitent, in this case a man who smelled of street damp and hair tonic, would make his confession.

  But the man did not speak.

  “Are you the gentleman who called the rectory?” Father Jimmie asked.

  “That I am, Father.”

  “What is it you’d like to tell me?”

  Father Jimmie could see the outline of the man’s head. The ears looked like they had been carved around the edges with a paring knife. He heard the man snuff down in his nose and shift his weight on the kneeler.

  “Been a while since I’ve visited one of these,” the man said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m a bit flummoxed. Hold on a bit, Father, while I organize my thoughts.”

  Father Jimmie heard what he thought was the man’s lunch box clattering open inside the confessional. “What are you doing in there?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” The man was breathing hard now. “I met a Catholic sister on the train. I was rude to her. She’s a friend of yours. So I apologize for that.”

  “Oh, you’re the fellow. Well, she already called me. I’ll pass on your apologies. Is that it?”

  “I scared the shite out of her. She tell you that?”

  “Don’t do it anymore and it won’t be a problem. Is that all you have to tell me. Because if it is—”

  “No, it is fucking not, sir.”

  “What did you say?”

  The man was breathing hard through his nose now, a ray of light from outside the confessional glimmering on the planed surfaces of his face.

  “I said give me a fucking minute, if you please,” he said.

  “Are you drunk?”

  The man did not reply. He seemed to burn with energies he couldn’t express. He rocked on the kneeler and twisted his head from side to side, then made a grinding noise in his throat. The lunch box clattered with sound again, as though the man had dropped a heavy object in it and snapped the latch on the lid.

  “Tell the nun she’s a splendid woman and I hope she lives long enough to have a bishop for a son. Send up a thanks to your patron saint, Father. Maybe buy a Powerball ticket while you’re at it,” the man said.

  He flung open the door of the confessional and stalked through the vestibule and out the front of the church. Father Jimmie followed him as far as the front steps and watched him walk toward Canal, a golfer’s cap pulled down on his head, his narrow shoulders hunched forward in the rain, his lunch box glistening with moisture. The man looked back over his shoulder at Father Jimmie, his face contorted, as though he had just fled a burning building.

  It had rained through the night in New Iberia, and in the morning the sun rose like a pink wafer out of a blanket of fog that covered the cane fields. When I got to the office the parents of Lori Parks were waiting for me. Sometimes the survivors of family members who meet violent deaths have no place to direct their anger and loss other than at the police officer who is assigned to help them. Their rage is understandable, particularly when a cop is straight up and informs them the percentages are not in favor of justice being done. But sometimes the anger of the survivors has more to do with guilt than grief.

  The father was sandy haired and tall, with an aquiline nose, the tops of his forearms sun freckled, his hands long and tapered. The wife was built like a stump, a ring of fat under her chin, her hair dyed dark red, her perfume a chemical fog.

  “I hear you’re questioning the employees of the daiquiri shops in town,” the father said.

  “Yes, sir, that’s correct,” I said.

  He and his wife had not taken a seat when I offered them one. They looked down at me, from across my desk, stolid, angry, their defenses and denial rooted in concrete.

  “Are you saying our daughter was DWI?” he asked.

  “That’s the conclusion of our lab.”

  He nodded silently, the color in his eyes deepening, the skin around the rim of his nostrils whitening.

  “So the truck and bus drivers are off the hook?” he said.

  “I don’t think they’re players in this,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” the wife said.

  “I think your daughter and her friends were served alcohol illegally. I’d like to put the people in jail who empowered them to drink and drive. But to be truthful I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  “Our daughter is responsible for her own death? Is that it? A seventeen-year-old girl burns to death and it’s her goddamn fault?” the father said.

  I leaned forward on my desk and picked up a paper clip from the ink blotter, then dropped it. “Dr. Parks, I’m sorry for your loss. Your daughter had a history. It’s one a lot of kids have today. But the fact won’t go away that she’d had her license suspended previously and she was on probation for possession of Ecstacy. Was she ever in any kind of treatment program?”

  “How dare you?” the wife said.

  “How about it, sir?” I said to her husband.

  “You’re scapegoating my daughter, you sonofabitch,” he said.

  “We’re done here,” I said. I folded my hands on my desk blotter and avoided eye contact with them.

  “We’ll be back,” the father said.

  “I have no doubt about that,” I replied.

  At mid-morning I walked down the street, across the railroad tracks, and had coffee and a piece of pastry at Lagniappe Too on Main. When I got back to the department a black woman in blue slacks, a beige shirt, and polished black shoes was waiting for me by the dispatcher’s cage. She carried a zippered satchel under her arm.

  What was her name? Andrepont? No, Arceneaux. Clotile Arceneaux. Clete had said she looked like a black swizzle stick with a cherry stuck on the end. He should have been a writer rather than a chaser of bail skips, I thought.

  “Got a minute?” she said.

  “For you, anytime,” I said.

  She walked with me to my office. I closed the door behind her. “N.O.P.D. hasn’t busted you back to meter maid, have they?” I said.

  “Thought I might show you some photos of an interesting guy who just got to town,” she said.

  “You want to tell me who you are?”

  She smiled at me with her eyes and removed a manilla folder from her satchel. “You ever see this guy before?” she asked.

  There were four black-and-white photographs inside the folder, three taken with a zoom lens, one taken in the garish light of a Toronto booking room. The man in the photographs made me think of a ring attendant at a boxing gym or a horse groom at the track. “Nope, I don’t know him,” I said.

  “His name is Max Coll. He’s been questioned or been a suspect in thirty-two homicides. Not one conviction. Interpol thinks he worked for the IRA but they’re not sure. Miami P.D. says he’s freelance and jobs out for the Mob. We had a tail on him yesterday, but he shook it. We think he showed up at your friend Father Dolan’s.”

  “Think?” I said.

  “A detective talked to Father Dolan. Seems like Father Dolan has got us mixed up with the bad guys,” she said.

  “Why you showing me this stuff?”

  “Hate to see your friend get clipped ’cause he’s a poor listener. That goes for you, too, handsome.”

  “You’re with the G?”

  “We think the priest was lucky yesterday. What we can’t figure is why. Max Coll is a lot of things but fuck-up isn’t one of them,” she said.

  “You’re DEA?”

  She looked up into my face, her head tilted at an angle, her teeth white behind her grin. “I heard you had a cinder block for a head,” she said.

  “Have you had lunch yet?” I said.

  “Some people are all work and no play. That’s me, Robicheaux. Max Coll uses a silencer, sometimes an ice pick. You heard it first from your ex–meter maid friend at N.O.P.D.”

  “Right,” I said.

  She stuck a business card in my shirt pocket and hit me on the hip with her satchel. “See you around, darlin’,” she said.

  I wal
ked with her to the front door of the building and watched her get in her automobile and drive away. Helen Soileau was standing behind me.

  “What’s with Miss Hip-Slick?” she said.

  “She’s with N.O.P.D.,” I said.

  “The hell she is. She’s a state trooper. She used to work undercover narcotics in Shreveport. She got into a firefight with some dealers about ten years ago and shot all five of them.”

  Later, while I was out of the office, Clete Purcel left a message that he had checked into the old motor court on East Main, one that had long served as his field office in southwest Louisiana and his home away from home. The motor court was located inside a massive bower of live oak trees and slash pines on the bayou, and when I drove through the entrance that evening I saw Clete in front of the last cottage, barechested, wearing shorts with dancing elephants on them, flip-flops, and a Marine Corps utility cap, drinking from a bottle of Dixie while he flipped a steak on a flaming grill.

  “Running down bail skips?” I said.

  “No, I just had to get out of the Big Sleazy for a while. Gunner Ardoin is driving me nuts,” he said.

  “What’s happening with Gunner?”

  “He thinks somebody’s going to clip him. Maybe he’s right. SoI…”

  “So you what?”

  “Gave him my apartment.”

  “Your apartment? To Gunner Ardoin?”

  “His wife skipped town and left his little girl with him. What was I supposed to do? Quit looking at me like that,” he said. He picked up a can of diet Dr Pepper from an ice chest and tossed it at me.

  I sat down in a canvas chair, out of the smoke from the grill. Through the trees the sunlight looked like gold foil on the bayou. A tugboat passed, its wake slapping against the bank.

  “Ever hear of a button man by the name of Max Coll?” I said.

  “A freelance guy out of Miami?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about him?”

  “That black patrolwoman who answered the complaint in Ardoin’s kitchen, Clotile Arceneaux? She’s an undercover state trooper. She told me this guy Coll tried to kill Father Dolan yesterday,” I said.