Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  But Helen was right. We were dealing with middle-class people who didn’t have the proclivities and personal associations of career criminals, most of whom were basket cases who left a paper trail through the system from birth to the grave.

  Why had Theodosha Flannigan been afraid to climb through the fence surrounding the fish pond on her father’s property? Why did Castille LeJeune say he had no memory of using his influence to get Junior Crudup off the levee gang at Angola? People denied evil deeds, not good ones.

  And how about the suicide of Theodosha’s psychiatrist? If she was his regular patient, why wasn’t her case file in his records?

  I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union’s impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin’s leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative.

  So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing?

  After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup.

  She looked thoughtfully into space. She had a round face and wore glasses with pink frames and parted her hair down the middle. “I have a history of blues and swamp pop here. That might be helpful,” she said.

  “I’ve already used that. This guy disappeared from Angola about1951. There’s no record anywhere of what happened to him.”

  “Wait here a minute,” she said.

  I watched her moving around in the stacks, sliding a book off a shelf here and there, then clicking on a computer keyboard. A few minutes later she waved for me to join her at a back table, where she had spread open several books that contained mention of Junior Crudup.

  “I looked at those already, I’m afraid,” I said.

  “Well, there’s a photographic collection in Washington, D.C., that might be worth looking at,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “In the forties and fifties a photographer who once worked with Walker Evans photographed convicts all over the South. He had a penchant for black musicians. He tracked some of their careers for decades. There are hundreds of photographs in his collection.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No, he died twenty years or so ago.”

  “How do we get a hold of the collection?”

  “All the ones he took of Crudup or of Louisiana prisons are downloading and printing right now. You need anything else?”

  The photographs were stunning, shot with grainy black-and-white film in Jim Crow jails and work camps, when the convicts still wore stripes and the hacks carried lead-weighted walking canes and made no attempt to hide the spiritual cancer that lived in their faces. Nor was there any attempt to hide the level of severity and privation that characterized the lives of the prisoners in the photographs. In each photo the camera caught an image or a detail that left no doubt in the viewer’s mind about what he was seeing: a wheeled cage tiered with bunks parked inside a swamp; a convict sitting in the bottom of a wood sweatbox, a forced grin on his face, a waste bucket by his foot; a work gang assembled at morning-bell count, while in the background two men tried to balance themselves barefoot atop a case of empty pop bottles; a mounted gunbull in a cowboy hat framed against a boiling sun, his arm pointed, yelling a command at a convict pulling a fourteen-foot cotton sack behind him.

  It was called stacking time on the hard road.

  But in each of the photographs the reference librarian had downloaded, Junior Crudup was obviously the odd piece in the puzzle box, regardless of his surroundings. In a ditch with a dozen other convicts, he was the only light-skinned man, the only one with an etched mustache, and the only one to look directly into the camera. His eyes were clear, his face marked by neither resentment nor grandiosity. I suspected he was one of those for whom the gunbulls did not have a category, which would not have been good news for Junior Crudup.

  But some of the photographs were taken outside of prison. One showed him with Leadbelly, the two of them laughing at a joke in front of what appeared to be a practice session of Cab Calloway’s orchestra. Another showed him at a crowded table in a supper club, a beautiful black woman in a pillbox hat and polka-dot organdy dress, with an orchid pinned to her shoulder, seated next to him. Everyone in the picture was grinning at the camera, except Junior Crudup. He was dressed in a tuxedo, his tie pulled loose, a cigarette trailing a line of smoke from between two fingers. There was a half grin on his mouth, his eyes focused on a neutral spot, as though he were not entirely connected to the environment around him.

  I got a manilla envelope from the reference librarian and began slipping the printouts of the photos inside it. Then a detail in the last photo caught my eye and made me pull it back out. The photo was far less dramatic than the others and showed eight or nine convicts in denims, not stripes, plowing under cane stubble with mules in a sugarcane field that sloped down to a bayou.

  An obese white man in a straw hat, with a doughlike face and a shotgun propped on his thigh, was watching them from atop his horse. Junior was staring up at the gunbull, a hoe at an odd angle over his shoulder, his face puzzled, as though he had just been told something that made no sense. It was wintertime and the bayou was low, the roots of the cypress trees exposed along the banks. A stump fire was burning on the edge of the field, the smoke drifting like a dirty smudge across the sun. Across the bayou, on the edge of the picture, was the back of a Victorian home that had obviously been built to resemble a steamboat.

  The home of Castille LeJeune.

  A half hour later I rang the bell on his front porch, without having called or gone through his corporate office in Lafayette. “I thought you might be interested in this photo. According to the cutline on it, it was taken in 1953,” I said when he opened the door.

  His eyes dropped to the photo briefly but he did not take it from my hand. “Mr. Robicheaux, how nice of you to drop by,” he said.

  “That’s Junior Crudup in the picture, Mr. LeJeune. That’s your house in the background.”

  He wore slacks and a tie and a blue sweater with buttons on it. His eyes fixed on mine, twinkling. “I’m sure what you say is true. But the burning issue here seems to escape me.”

  “You said you had no memory of getting Crudup off the levee gang. But here he is, harrowing your sugarcane field across the bayou from your house.”

  He tried to suppress a laugh. “Let’s see if I understand. You’ve driven out here to talk to me about a photo taken of convicts almost fifty years ago?”

  “Did you rent convict labor back then, Mr. LeJeune?”

  “The people who ran my family’s agricultural interests might have. I don’t remember.” He looked at his wristwatch and raised his eyebrows. “Oh heavens, I’m supposed to leave for New Orleans shortly.”

  His patrician insouciance, his disingenuousness and contempt for the truth were part of a lifelong attitude on which there were no handles. I could feel words breaking loose in my throat that I didn’t want to say. “You received the Distinguished Flying Cross from Harry Truman, did you?”

  “Do you wish me to confirm what you already know, or do you wish to ask me a meaningful question?” he said, his eyes gazing benignly out on the flowers and palm and oak trees in his yard.

  I could feel my left hand opening and closing against my thigh, the veins tightening in the side of my head. Don’t get into this, I heard a voice s
ay in the back of my mind. “I met Audie Murphy once. It was a great honor,” I said.

  “I’m happy to hear that,” he said.

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. LeJeune,” I said.

  He made no reply. Even though I had managed to control my anger I felt like a fool, one of that great army of salaried public servants who were treated by the very rich as doormen and security guards. I got in my cruiser and began backing down the long, shaded driveway to the state road, the sun flashing through the canopy like the reflection off a heliograph. When I reached the entrance to the state road I had to wait for a long line of cane trucks to pass, the wagon beds swaying heavily with the enormous loads they carried. In the meantime Castille LeJeune had gotten into his Oldsmobile and was driving toward me.

  I got out of the cruiser and walked to his car, then waited for him to roll down the window. “I’m sorry, I forgot to leave you a business card,” I said, and placed it on his dashboard. “I think something real bad happened to Junior Crudup. Please be advised there’s no statute of limitation on murder in the state of Louisiana, Mr. LeJeune. By the way, it was an honor to meet Audie Murphy because he seemed to be both a patriot and a straight-up guy who didn’t try to get by on bullshit.”

  On Tuesday morning Helen called me into her office. “I just got off the phone with Castille LeJeune’s attorney. He says you made a nasty accusation yesterday at LeJeune’s house,” she said.

  “News to me.”

  “You think you can jam a guy like Castille LeJeune?”

  “He’s lying about Junior Crudup.”

  “The R&B convict again?”

  “Right.”

  “How about we concentrate on crimes in this century? Starting with the homicide at the daiquiri store.”

  “No matter what avenue we take, I think it’s going to lead back to LeJeune.”

  “Maybe because you want it to.”

  “Say again?”

  “You hate rich people, Dave. You can’t wait to get into it with them.”

  “No, I just don’t like liars.”

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Go somewhere else. Now.”

  That afternoon Father Jimmie Dolan was at a basketball practice in a Catholic high school gymnasium not far from his church, when his cell phone rang inside his gym bag. “Father Dolan,” he said into the receiver.

  “I need only a quick word. Don’t be hanging up on me now,” the caller said.

  “How did you get this number?”

  “Told the secretary at the rectory I was your grandfather. I need something from you.”

  “What could I possibly have that you want?”

  “I was paid to take out this fellow Ardoin. But I’m not going to do it.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. What is it you want?”

  “There’s an open contract on me, Father. That means I’m anybody’s fuck. But they messed with the wrong fellow, you get my drift?”

  “No, and I don’t want to.”

  “I’m going to loosen some people’s earthly ties.”

  Father Jimmie stared listlessly across the gym at the boys who were taking turns laying up shots under the basket. He had a sore throat and fever and wanted nothing else in life at that moment except a glass of whiskey and a warm bed to lie down in.

  “You know what I’m asking from you, don’t you?” Max Coll said.

  “I think you want absolution for your sins, Max. But you can’t have it. Not over the phone, certainly. And perhaps never, not unless you give up your violent ways.”

  The cell phone was silent.

  “Did you hear me?” Father Jimmie said.

  “I think I’ve misjudged you. Under it all you’re a hard-nosed bastard of a kind I remember only too well, one whose cassock and collar come before his humanity. Shite if you’re not a disappointment to me.”

  The transmission went dead. Father Jimmie’s cheek stung as though it had been slapped.

  Chapter 9

  That evening I fixed a bowl of milk for a stray cat and watched him drink it on the gallery. He was a hard-bodied, short-haired, unneutered white cat with chewed ears and pink claw scars inside his coat. His tail was as thick as a broom handle. When I petted him he looked at me blankly, then went back to his milk.

  Theodosha Flannigan pulled her Lexus into the driveway and parked under the pecan tree by the side of the house. A guitar in an expensive case was propped up in the backseat. She wore loafers and a blue terry cloth blouse and jeans low on her hips so they exposed her stomach. The wind gusted and leaves swirled around her, and a single band of dusky sunlight cut across her face.

  “What’s the name of your little friend?” she asked, sitting down on a step next to the cat.

  “He didn’t say,” I replied.

  She picked the cat up in her arms and kissed him on top of his head. Then she flipped him on his back and set him in the crevice formed by her thighs and straightened his body by pulling his tail as though it were a strap on a piece of luggage. She scratched him between his ears and under his chin. “We’re going to call him Mr. Adorable. No, we’re going to call him Snuggs,” she said.

  “What’s happenin’, Theo?” I said.

  “I heard about your visit to my father’s house.”

  “Your father has a problem with the truth. He doesn’t think he needs to tell it.”

  “He says you talked to him as though he were a criminal.”

  “I talked to him as though he were an ordinary citizen. He didn’t like it. Then, rather than confront me about it, he used his attorney to report me to the sheriff.”

  “He comes from a different generation, Dave. Why don’t you have a little compassion?”

  Time to disengage, I said to myself. The streetlights were coming on under the oak trees, and the air was cool and damp and I could smell an odor like scorched brown sugar from the mills. Theo set down the cat and stroked his back, then stood up. “You want to see my new guitar?” she asked.

  “Sure. I didn’t know you played,” I said.

  She came back from the car with her guitar and unsnapped the case. “I’m not very good. My mother was, though. I have some old tapes of her singing some of Bessie Smith’s songs. She could have been a professional. The only person I’ve ever heard like her is Joan Baez,” she said.

  Theo removed the guitar from its case and sat down again on the steps. She made a chord on the neck and brushed her thumb across the strings, then began singing “Corina, Corina” in Cajun French. She had been much too humble about her ability. Her voice was lovely, her accompaniment with herself perfect as she ran each chord into the next. In fact, like all real artists, she seemed to disappear inside the thing she created, as though the identity by which others knew her had nothing to do with the inner realities of her life.

  She smiled at me when she finished, almost like a woman delivering a kiss after she has made love.

  “Gee, you’re great, Theo,” I heard myself saying.

  “My mother used to sing that. I don’t remember her well, but I remember her singing that song to me before I went to sleep,” she said. She began putting away her guitar.

  The cat she had named Snuggs nuzzled his head against her knee. The wind riffled through the oak and pecan trees overhead, and a group of children on their way to the library rode by on bicycles, laughing, the streetlights glowing in the dampness like the oil lamps in a Van Gogh painting. There was not a mechanized sound on the street, only the easy sweep of wind and the scratching of leaves on the sidewalk. I didn’t want the moment to end.

  But like the canker in the rose or the serpent uncoiling itself out of an apple tree, there had been an element in Theo’s song that disturbed me in a way I couldn’t let go of.

  “The melody for ‘Corina, Corina’ is the same as ‘The Midnight Special,’” I said.

  “Un-huh,” she said vaguely.

  “That was Leadbelly’s song. The Midnight Special was a train
he rode into the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. According to the prison legend, the convict who saw the headlight on the locomotive shining at him in his sleep was going to be released in the coming year.”

  But I saw she had still not made the connection.

  “Your father didn’t want to answer questions about Junior Crudup, Theo,” I said. “Crudup was Leadbelly’s friend inside Angola. They probably composed songs together. I think Crudup was a convict laborer on your father’s plantation.”

  She continued snapping her guitar case shut and never looked at me while I spoke. But I could see what I thought was a great sadness in her eyes. She reached over and petted the cat good-bye, then turned toward me. “You have an enormous reservoir of anger inside you, Dave. I guess I feel sorry for you,” she said.

  The next morning events kicked into overdrive, beginning with a phone call from Clotile Arceneaux, the black patrolwoman who Helen said was an undercover state trooper.

  “We’ve got Father Jimmie Dolan in custody,” she said.

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “As a material witness. He won’t give up Max Coll’s whereabouts.”

  “Which administrative moron is behind this?” I said.

  She paused before she spoke again. “Coll tried to kill the priest but he won’t press charges. So a couple of detectives figured Father Jimmie is not a friend of N.O.P.D. and decided to put the squeeze on him. Look, the word on the street is there’s an open contract on Max Coll. We need this guy out of town or in lock-up. We also don’t need trouble from Catholic priests.”

  “Can’t help you,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  She called back three hours later. “Guess who?” she said.

  “Same answer as before,” I said.

  “Try this. We just heard from Miami-Dade P.D. Max Coll flew into Ft. Lauderdale, whacked two greaseballs who were getting laid on a yacht, then caught the last flight back to New Orleans. At least that’s what they think. Get Dolan out of Central Lock-Up. Better yet, get him out of the state,” she said.