Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  That same afternoon the phone rang on the desk in Father Jimmie Dolan’s office. He stared at the phone as it rang four times, then listened to the voice that came through the speaker on the message machine.

  “Are you there, Father? Excuse me if I sound strange, but I have a broken nose, a mouth that looks like a smashed plum, and a tooth knocked out of my head. All done by a Catholic priest,” the voice said.

  In the background Father Jimmie could hear piano music and the sounds of street traffic.

  “I know you’re listening, Father. Would you please have the courtesy to pick up the fucking phone,” the voice said.

  “What is it this time?” Father Jimmie said.

  “Because of you I’m up to my bottom lip in Shite’s Creek and the motorboat is about to go roaring by.”

  “Could you do something about your language, please?”

  “My language?” Coll said, his voice like a nail being pried out of dry wood. “I took ten thousand dollars up front for the whack on you. Now I have to pay it back or prepare to go through life with no thumbs.”

  “Then return it.”

  “I lost it at the dog track.”

  “Change your way, Coll.”

  “Sir, please don’t be talking to me like that. I’m miserable enough.”

  “I called the police on you yesterday. If you won’t worry about your soul, you might give some thought to what New Orleans’ finest will do to you.”

  “If there’s a trace on your line, it won’t help. I’m on a cell.”

  “You’re close by the little alcove in the French Market. I know the pianist who plays there. She’s playing her theme song, ‘Down Yonder,’ right now.”

  “You leave a man no dignity. Can you help with the ten thousand? Maybe I could borrow it from one of your charities?”

  “I’m hanging up now. I don’t want you to contact me again.”

  “Oh, sir, don’t do this to me. Don’t fucking do this to a man who—”

  “Who what?”

  “Maybe wants to remember who he used to be.”

  Father Jimmie replaced the receiver in the phone cradle, the plastic surface as warm as human tissue against his palm, his hand trembling for reasons he couldn’t readily explain.

  Early the next morning I drove to Abbeville and interviewed Gretchen Peltier, the woman whose name had been given to me by Will Guillot as his alibi witness. She was middle-aged, slightly overweight, her hair dyed a deep black to hide the white roots. She worked as a secretary for an insurance agency and her hands trembled on the desktop when I asked her about her whereabouts Monday night. Her employer was inside a glass-windowed office, his door closed.

  “Can’t we do this somewhere else?” she said.

  “Sorry,” I replied.

  “I was with Mr. Will. At his camp. We’re friends.”

  “What hours were you with him?”

  “I left his camp at dawn. The next day. Does that satisfy you?” Her eyes were filmed with embarrassment.

  Later the same morning, Helen Soileau and I and another plainclothes served the search warrant on Dr. Parks at his home. His face looked sleepless; he had just finished shaving and a piece of bloody tissue paper was stuck to a cut on his chin. He stared at the warrant incredulously. “Search for what?” he said.

  “Let’s start with your shoes. Take them off, please,” I said.

  He stared long and hard at me, then the resolution seemed to go out of his eyes. He sat on a footstool in the living room and unlaced each of his black dress shoes and handed them to me. The shoes were new and the leather on them was buffed and smooth and bright as mirrors. “Let’s take a look in your closet, Doctor,” I said.

  We went inside the master bedroom. The curtains were closed, the air oppressive. I felt almost claustrophobic inside the room. “Could you open the curtains, please?” I said.

  He started to turn on the overhead lighting.

  “No, sir. Open the curtains,” I said.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because I see better with natural light,” I said.

  When he pulled back the curtains the room was immediately flooded with sunshine. The window gave onto a patio and a beautiful view of the bayou and the live oaks in the side yard. But the potted plants on the patio were dead, the glass-topped table marbled with dirt and the dried rings of evaporated rainwater. Helen and I pulled all the shoes out of the closet and bagged two pairs of black ones.

  Dr. Parks sat on the side of the bed, his shoulders rounded. His wife opened the bathroom door, looked at us briefly, then closed it again. “Look, you’ve got your job to do. I accept that. But I heard…” he said.

  “Heard what?” I said.

  “You people found the gun that killed the daiquiri-shop operator,” he said.

  “The man who owns the weapon makes a convincing case it was stolen,” I said.

  “You think I go around stealing guns from people?”

  “You attend gun shows, Dr. Parks?” Helen asked.

  “Sure. All over the country.”

  “Ever buy a firearm at a tailgate sale?” she asked.

  He rubbed his brow. “It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I’ve heard about stuff like this. You can’t make your case and you zero in on the survivors of the victim,” he said.

  There were many rejoinders either Helen or I could have made. But you don’t break off the barb of a harpoon in a man who has already been ripped from his liver to his lights.

  We got back in the cruiser and crossed the drawbridge in Loreauville, then headed up the state highway toward New Iberia. We passed cane trucks and the old Negro quarters left over from plantation days and an emerald green horse farm with big red barns and pecan trees next to a white house.

  “Why’d you want the curtains open back there?” Helen asked, watching the road.

  “Their bedroom was like a grave. I couldn’t breathe.”

  She glanced sideways at me.

  “You didn’t feel it?” I asked.

  “You worry me, bwana,” she said.

  Chapter 8

  On Saturday morning I drove with Clete to New Orleans to check out his apartment, which he had loaned to Gunner Ardoin and his little girl. We crossed the Atchafalaya on the arched steel bridge at Morgan City, the docked shrimp boats and old brick buildings and tile roofs and palm-dotted streets of the town spread out below us in the sunshine. Then we drove into rain that seemed to blow out of the cane fields like purple smoke, and by the time we approached the giant bridge spanning the Mississippi, Clete’s Cadillac was shaking in the wind, the fabric in the top denting with hailstones.

  We drove into the French Quarter and parked in front of his apartment on St. Ann. He ran through the rain and went upstairs into his apartment. A few minutes later he was back in the car, his brow knitted.

  “Gunner taking care of the place?” I said.

  “Yeah, everything looks fine,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “He left a message on the machine. He said an Irish guy was asking around in the neighborhood a couple of days ago. A weird-looking dude with little ears. Gunner thought maybe this guy had business with me.”

  “Max Coll?” I said.

  “Yeah. I think Gunner’s got it wrong, though. Coll doesn’t have any reason to be interested in me. Gunner might get himself popped.”

  “Where’s Gunner now?”

  “He didn’t say. How do I get involved in crap like this?”

  “Let’s have a talk with Fat Sammy.”

  “I can’t stand that guy. He looks like a blimp after all the air has gone out of it.”

  “There’re worse guys in the life.”

  “Oh, I forgot, he gives discounts to the meth whores who work in his porn films,” he said.

  He fired up the Caddy, the rust-eaten muffler roaring against the asphalt, and we drove in the rain to Fat Sammy’s house on Ursu
lines.

  I rang the iron bell at the entrance.

  “Who is it?” Sammy’s voice said from the speaker inside the archway.

  “Dave Robicheaux,” I replied.

  He buzzed open the gate and we walked through the flooded courtyard to the door of his house, which he had already unbolted and left ajar. I had not told Sammy that Clete was with me. When we stepped inside the living room he was lying on the floor, dressed in purple gym trunks and a strap undershirt, watching an opera on cable TV while he curled dumbbells into his chest. His massive legs were as white and hairless as a baby’s, his pale blue eyes looking at us upside down.

  “What’s the haps, Sammy?” Clete said.

  “Who said you could come in here, Purcel?” Fat Sammy asked.

  Clete looked at me. “I’ll wait in the car,” he said.

  “Clete’s my friend, Sammy.”

  Sammy set down the dumbbells and got to his feet, his lungs wheezing. The living room was dark, the windows covered with thick velvet curtains. Through a side door I could see two men, neither of whom I recognized, shooting pool. Sammy looked down from his great height at both me and Clete.

  “So you want to watch some opera?” he asked. He spread his feet and began touching his toes.

  “You know a guy named Max Coll?” I said.

  “Do I know him? No. Do I know who he is? Yeah, he works out of Miami ’cause it’s suppose to be an open city there. Here’s the short version. You want somebody clipped, there’s guys in Little Havana who work for a service. You want it done right, you ask for this Irish character. Except some people say he’s a wacko.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Clete staring intently through the side doorway at the two men shooting pool.

  “Wacko how?” I said.

  “I don’t know, ’cause I don’t keep company with them kind of people,” Sammy said. “Look, what I hear is the wacko screwed up a job in New Orleans and stiffed the wrong people. That means if he goes back to Miami he might float up in a barrel. Now, we done with this?”

  “The guy in there with the patent-leather hair? Is that Frank Dellacroce?” Clete asked.

  “What about it?” Sammy said.

  “Nothing. I thought he was down on a murder beef in Texas. Maybe George W. slipped up during his days as chief needle injector,” Clete said.

  Sammy’s eyes looked at nothing while he scratched at his cheek with three fingers. “Come back another time, Robicheaux,” he said.

  Outside, rain was sluicing off the rooftops while Clete and I ran for his Cadillac. We got inside and slammed the doors. “Why do you always have to start up the garbage grinder?” I said.

  “That greaseball shooting pool put his infant daughter in the refrigerator and held a gun to his wife’s head while he did it. You think Sammy is on the square? I think he’s a fat douche bag who should have been blown out of his socks years ago.”

  “You don’t listen, Clete. It’s hopeless. You’ll never change.”

  “Neither will you, Dave. You’d like to splatter every one of these shitheads, but you won’t admit it. Bootsie’s death is eating your lunch. You talk about getting honest at meets? Why don’t you stop stoking up your own fires?”

  We drove over to Decatur in silence, wrapped in anger, with no destination, the sky as gray as dirty wash. Rainwater was spouting from the sewer grates, the guttural roar of the ruptured muffler vibrating through the Cadillac’s frame.

  “If you want to attack me, Clete, do it. But don’t drag my wife’s death into it,” I said.

  “I’m finished talking about it. Live your own life,” he replied.

  At the traffic light in front of the Cafe du Monde I got out of the car, slammed the door behind me, and ran through the rain to the pavilion. When I looked back over my shoulder Clete was gone and Jackson Square looked as cold and stark as a black-and-white photograph taken in the dead of winter.

  I ordered coffee and hot milk and a plate of beignets, but couldn’t eat. I walked the streets in the rain, keeping under the balconies, threading through the tourists carrying street-sale ten-dollar umbrellas. I looked through steam-coated windows of cafes and bars where people were watching Saturday-afternoon football on television. On Dauphine I went into a bar that was packed with gay men, all of them shouting in unison to punctuate the gyrations of a famous transvestite dancing on the stage. The bartender wore a pencil-line mustache and earrings and a black leather cap and leather vest without a shirt. He stared at me across the bar.

  “You have coffee?” I asked.

  “This look like a Starbucks?” he replied in a New England accent.

  “Give me a soda with a lime twist,” I said.

  He fixed my drink and set it on the bar. He smiled to himself, but not offensively.

  “On the job?” he said.

  “No, not on the job,” I said.

  “No problem, sir,” he said.

  I closed my eyes as I drank down the soda and lime in the glass. I could have sworn I tasted the traces of bourbon in the ice. I used the rest room and walked back out on the street, my skin and clothes reeking of cigarette smoke, my head buzzing with sounds like an electric wire popping in a rain puddle.

  I lost track of time. It stopped raining toward evening and a wet fog settled on the French Quarter and drifted like colored smoke off the neon lights over the clubs. Bourbon Street, which was closed at night to automobile traffic, became filled with college boys drinking beer out of plastic cups, conventioneers and tourists strung with cameras peering into strip joints that featured both topless and bottomless performances, and black kids tap dancing like minstrel caricatures or running a shuck that begins, “Bet you five dollars I can tell you where you got your shoes at.”

  I walked along the river where bums sat on stone benches with sack-wrapped bottles of fortified wine between their thighs. I turned up Esplanade and walked all the way to the ragged edge of the Quarter at Rampart, past a hallelujah mission with a neon cross above its door, past Louis Armstrong Park, a place no white person in his right mind enters either day or night, over to Basin Street and the long white wall that fronted St. Louis Cemetery. Through the gates I could see row upon row of whitewashed crypts and stone crosses, framed against the sodium lamps of the Iberville Project that burned in the fog with the incandescence of pistol flares.

  I sat down on a bus bench next to a huge man with a wild beard and head of black hair. He wore a suit that looked like it had been pulled from a garbage can, a tie knotted like a garrote in the collar of his flannel shirt. His skin was so grimed with dirt it was hard to tell his race. His eyes made me think of the renegade Russian priest Rasputin.

  “You got any money?” he said.

  “What do you need it for?” I answered.

  “Something to eat. Maybe a drink or two.”

  I found four dollars and seventy-three cents in my pocket and gave it to him. He clenched it in his hand but remained seated on the bench. “I got me a dry place in one of the tombs. The mission is all full on Saturday nights,” he said.

  I nodded. A group of tourists were walking by, talking among themselves about either A Streetcar Named Desire, the play by Tennessee Williams, or the original streetcar itself, which today sits like an immobile and disconnected anachronism on a cement pad down by the river.

  The disheveled man stood up and began waving his arms at them. “That streetcar didn’t go out to Desire,” he yelled. “It went out to Elysian Fields. It was the last car that still run out to Elysian Fields. All these streets here was Storyville. It was full of colored whorehouses and women who killed themselves with morphine. Hey, don’t you go in them crypts! The kids from the Iberville Project climb over the wall and bust people like you in the head. Are you listening to me? This ain’t New Orleans. You’re standing in the city of the dead. You just don’t know it yet.”

  The tourists walked quickly up the street toward Canal, their faces ashen.

  A minute later Clete Purcel’s Cadillac ca
me around the corner, oil smoke leaking from under the frame, a hubcap rolling loose across the asphalt, like a paean to the disorder in his life. He pushed open the passenger door.

  “Want to go back to New Iberia?” he said.

  “Why not?” I said, and got inside. I looked through the back window at the silhouette of the disheveled man receding behind us.

  “Sorry I got on your case. But I think Fat Sammy has been putting the slide on you,” Clete said.

  “Maybe he has.”

  “No maybe about it, Streak. Every ounce of meth going into the projects has Sammy’s greasy prints all over it. He makes me think of a giant snail trailing slime all over the city.”

  “You’re one in a million, Cletus.”

  He looked at me uncertainly, a pocket of air in one cheek, then roared up the ramp onto I-10. We poured it on all the way back to New Iberia, like two over-the-hill low riders who no longer look at calendars or watch the faces of clocks.

  On Monday morning Mack Bertrand called me from the lab and said the shoes we had removed from Dr. Parks’s house were not the source of the leather scrapings found under the fingernails of the dead daiquiri vendor, Leon Hebert. A few minutes later Helen came into my office and I told her of the lab’s findings.

  “So where does that leave us?” she said.

  “A revenge killing of some kind. The daiquiri cup stuffed down the victim’s throat indicates a high level of rage. Dr. Parks had motivation.”

  “You don’t sound convinced,” she said.

  “Parks has so much anger I doubt he’d deny killing the man if he did it.”

  “How about this guy Guillot?”

  “He’s a poster child for obnoxiousness. But why would he shoot someone and throw the weapon, registered in his name, on the side of the road?”

  “We’re talking about middle-class people, Streak. Career perps are predictable. Dagwood and Blondie aren’t.”

  Beautiful.

  But I believed there were other factors at work in this case that were more complex than a simple act of vengeance. It was too much for coincidence that Castille LeJeune’s corporation owned the daiquiri store where Leon Hebert had been murdered and that the murder weapon belonged to Will Guillot, one of his employees.