Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “That doesn’t mean he’s mobbed up today.”

  “A guy who trucks oil waste into black neighborhoods? Not a chance. When I was a kid we had a rumble with the Ibervilles. It was supposed to be fist, feet, and elbows, no shanks, no chains. Merchie opened a switchblade and busted it off in my cousin’s arm. In my opinion he’s still a project street rat as well as full-time punk and gash hound. Quit defending these assholes.”

  “Gash hound?” I said.

  “Forget it, big mon. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Your head is encased in cement.”

  I had long ago learned there was no point in arguing with Clete or expecting him to understand that the people he resented most were those who came from the same background he did. He pushed his porkpie hat down on his brow and stared disgustedly at the rain. “I’m going to cripple the motherfuckers behind this, Dave. I mean that literally,” he said.

  He walked away under a dripping live oak toward his Caddy, his sports coat stretched to splitting on his huge shoulders.

  He dropped me off at the house and I went inside and lay down on the bed in the back room. Earlier I said I had slept for fifteen hours. The truth is a little different. I could not rid myself of the sense of violation I had experienced at the hands of Tito and Caesar Dellacroce and the man who had urinated on me. I felt that soap could not cleanse my skin or my hair. When I closed my eyes and began to drift into sleep, I didn’t dream of the Dellacroces but instead of a war few people are interested in today. I heard automatic weapons fire, the thropping of helicopter blades, and I saw strings of white light fountaining inside jungle foliage from the explosion of a phosphorus round. I felt a medic from Staten Island tying my wrists so I would not tear at the compress on my side. I smelled the odor of blood and feces in the uniforms of both the living and the dead being piled around me on the floor of an overloaded slick piloted by a nineteen-year-old warrant officer who had taken a steel splinter in one eye.

  Sleep occurred in ten-minute intervals, and each time I awoke I wanted four inches of Black Jack straight up, vodka that had been at least twelve hours in a freezer, beer that hit the back of the throat like a spray of golden needles, yellow mescal with a thick green worm in the bottom of the bottle.

  An hour after Clete had dropped me off I sat on the side of the bed with a head full of cobwebs, my mouth dry and tasting like bitters. Helen had told me not to come back to work until the following Monday. But memory was the enemy, and solitude and inactivity gave me no respite from it. I called N.O.P.D. and left a message for Clotile Arceneaux. A half hour later she called me back. “What’s happenin’, baby cakes?” she said.

  “Baby cakes?”

  I heard her laugh. “What can I help you with?” she said.

  “What have you got on Merchie Flannigan?”

  “A pipeline or oil guy, grew up in the projects, did some time when he was a kid?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ll check but I think he’s pretty inactive.”

  “Clete thinks maybe Merchie and his wife might have been mixed up with the Dellacroce brothers.”

  “What about the Dellacroces?”

  “They’re dead. Max Coll smoked them both.”

  “So much for inner-department communications. Coll killed them?”

  “He’s posing as a priest and carrying a couple of .45 autos in a briefcase. Tito and Caesar Dellacroce abducted me. They took me to a fish camp not far from where Coll killed their cousin.” It sounded foolish when I said it.

  She paused a moment. “What did they do to you at this fish camp?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Coll capped them.”

  She paused again and I could tell she didn’t believe me. “Let me give you a tip. Screw Max Coll and screw the Dellacroces. The issue is porn and crystal meth. Everything else is secondary. New Orleans was made for it. You with me on this?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said.

  “Don’t give me any of your guff, Robicheaux. You doin’ okay over there?”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause you don’t sound like it,” she said.

  So that’s why she was undercover at N.O.P.D., I thought after I hung up. Some cops were probably on a meth pad and maybe the pornographers had gotten to a few of them, too. Porn had always been there, in one form or another, and sex and the economics of New Orleans tourism were longtime business companions. The Mob maintained they didn’t traffic in porn, just as they claimed they didn’t deal in narcotics. But they lied. They were involved in every pernicious enterprise in the United States, and decades ago had branched into shipping, the meat industry, and coal mining. The numbers racket used to be the lubricant that fueled and greased all their other machinery, but since state lotteries and legalized gambling had replaced numbers as their chief source of money, the progeny of Lucky Luciano and Benny Siegel had shifted gears to keep up with the times.

  Not only had the Internet provided huge new markets for porn producers, their businesses had a built-in edge on dope trafficking. They had the First Amendment to hide behind, and most zoning boards had no problem in allowing them to open their businesses in neighborhoods where the residents, usually the poor and elderly, had no power.

  The overhead was low. Junkies, demented sluts, and perverts of every stripe couldn’t wait to take off their clothes in front of the camera, convinced their acting careers were just beginning.

  The subject of pornography brought to mind Fat Sammy Figorelli again. He had warned me about a man he said hurt people without cause, although Sammy, in his self-serving fashion, managed not to mention the man’s name. Clete was right. I had given Sammy a free pass too long. I called Clotile Arceneaux again.

  “I need a favor,” I said.

  “What kind?”

  “While my eyes were taped shut a guy urinated in my face. I think Fat Sammy Figorelli knows who he is.”

  “Say all that again?”

  I did, this time in detail. She was quiet a long time. “What do you want from me?” she said.

  “Help me jam up Sammy Fig.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “We think Fat Sammy might be talking to us soon.”

  “As an informant?”

  “Think FBI and Witness Protection.”

  “These guys were going to burn my kite, on film, one frame at a time. I’m not too interested in hearing about federal needs right now.”

  “Too bad. Stay in New Iberia, Robicheaux. That’s not just a cautionary statement, either,” she said.

  That evening I took Clete to dinner at the Patio in Loreauville. After we ate we walked to the iron bridge over Bayou Teche and stared down at the water. The sky was crimson, full of birds, the air heavy with the smell of the sugar mills grinding cane. In the distance I heard a boat horn blowing on the water.

  “I’m worried about you, noble mon,” Clete said.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “You fool lots of people. But you never fool your old podjo. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  I couldn’t, so I changed the subject. “Fat Sammy knows who put the hit on me,” I said.

  “I told you he was a grease bag.”

  “I need to put the squeeze on him. N.O.P.D. was no help.”

  “You mean the black broad, what’s-her-name, Clotile Whatever?”

  “She’s got her own problems.”

  “Save the St. Francis of Assisi routine for another time. What’s today?”

  “Wednesday,” I said.

  Clete put a stick of gum in his mouth and looked at the shadows the trees made on the bayou’s surface. “You really want to put a freight train up Sammy’s cheeks?”

  “I couldn’t have said it better.”

  “Remember Janet Gish? Used to be a dancer out on Airline?” he said.

  “What about her?”

  “She was Gunner Ardoin’s costar in one of Fat Sammy�
��s films. You like Italian opera?”

  During the next two days Clete made several phone calls to New Orleans and was mysterious about all of them. But taciturnity in Clete, at least with me, usually meant he was working on a scheme that was so outrageous no sane person would involve himself in it. No one who reviewed Clete’s record could doubt his creativeness when it came to spreading mayhem and chaos wherever he went. He not only shot a federal witness to death in a hog lot, he filled a New Orleans’ gangster’s vintage convertible with cement, destroyed a half-million-dollar home out on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth grader, pinned a hitman on the floor of the Greyhound depot’s men’s room and poured the contents of a liquid soap container down his throat, dropped a Teamster steward off a fourth-floor hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool, handcuffed a U.S. congressman to a fire hydrant on St. Charles, cuffed a dirty cop to the conveyor chain in a car-wash and hot-wax machine, and was believed to have put sand in the fuel tank of an airplane that crashed and exploded in the mountains of western Montana, stringing the spruce trees with the remains of several Galveston and Las Vegas mobsters.

  He considered his own behavior perfectly reasonable and did many of the above deeds and others that were worse with a lopsided grin on his face, thinking them hardly worthy of mention.

  His best friends were drunks, grifters, and brain-fried street people, his girlfriends strippers and junkies. Gangbangers, pushers, strong-arm robbers, and dirty cops crossed the street when they saw him coming. He swallowed his blood and ate his pain and never flinched in a fight, no matter what his adversaries did to him. He was the bravest and most loyal man I ever knew, and also the most irreverent, reckless, irresponsible, and self-destructive.

  I tried not to think of how Janet Gish could be a player in Clete’s plan to jam up Fat Sammy Figorelli. Friday evening I found out.

  He told me to meet him in Metairie, in front of a rented hall on the edge of a middle-class neighborhood. Metairie had become a white-flight refuge during the mass exodus from New Orleans in the 1970s, known for its strict law-and-order attitudes and the distinction of having given David Duke his start in the state legislature.

  I waited for Clete in the parking lot, the sky ribbed with strips of pink cloud, the trees ruffling in the yards of the modest homes beyond a shopping mall, the rental hall filling with families dressed as though they were going to church. The scene made me think of Levittown but not in a bad way. The rental hall, with its gravel roof and artificial brick shell, seemed to transcend its own cheapness, like an excursion back into an earlier era when American neighborhoods had sidewalks and were defined by their sense of community and generational continuity.

  I looked again at my watch. Where was Clete? The light was fading, the air growing cold. From inside the hall I could hear someone adjusting the volume on a microphone. Then I saw Clete’s lavender Cadillac coming hard down the street, the front and back seats packed with people, slowing down for a stop sign just before he bounced into the parking lot, dust and exhaust fumes rising like a dirty halo from the car frame. When he cut the engine the entire car body seemed to gasp and shrivel like an animal that had been mortally wounded. The windows were open and I could smell a heady, thick odor, like burning leaves, drifting out on the wind, then someone flicked a marijuana roach sparking onto the pavement.

  Clete got out of the car and closed the door behind him, then leaned down to the window. “Crack open another six-pack and go easy on the stash. I’ll be right back,” he said.

  “Where’s the fucking opera? You said we were gonna see an opera,” a woman in back said.

  “I’ve got reserved seats. Trust me. Just be cool. Everything’s copacetic,” he replied.

  He walked past me, so I would have to follow him, out of earshot of the people in the car. He lifted his shirt off his chest and sniffed at it. “Do I smell like a whorehouse?” he asked.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Fat Sammy belongs to this group of amateur opera singers. They perform once a month at the hall. It’s Ozzie and Harriet night by way of Palermo. The archbishop is a big fan and sits up on the front row. Starting to get the picture?”

  “No.”

  “You want to squeeze Fat Sammy, forget conventional methods. Sammy’s a geek and closet pervert who always wanted people to like him. So he comes out here and pretends he’s a normal member of the human race. That’s about to end.”

  “Who’s in the car?”

  “Janet Gish and Big Tit Judy Lavelle and four others who got bonds with Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater. Either Sammy gives up the guy who put the whack on you or I’m marching all of them right up the front aisle and turning them loose.”

  “This doesn’t sound too good, Clete.”

  “Oh, Sammy Fig as victim, I forgot. Every one of those broads has worked in either his porn films or his massage parlor. Ask them how they like giving twenty-dollar blowjobs to conventioneers from Birmingham.”

  I walked back to the Cadillac and looked inside. “How y’all doin’?” I said.

  “Hey, Robicheaux, Clete say you taking us to supper at Galatoire’s,” a black woman in shades said. She called herself Cody Wyoming, although she had grown up on Prytania Street in New Orleans, not far from where Lillian Hellman was born.

  “He hasn’t filled me in on that yet,” I replied.

  “You might be getting old, Streak, but I bet you still got the thrust under the hood,” she said. Everybody in the car roared.

  I walked back to Clete. “Galatoire’s?” I said.

  “Nig and Willie owe me a thousand for running down a skip in Mobile. Except they say they don’t owe me anything because I told Willie to write the bond on this guy when I knew he was mainlining six balloons a day. So I told them they pay for the dinner at Galatoire’s, I tell the girls it’s on Willie and Nig, which means they’ll tell all the other hookers in New Orleans Willie and Nig are great guys, and we call it even.”

  “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  “It’ll work. Ever hear that story about Sammy taking a girl to the Prytania and a bunch of kids in the balcony hitting them with water bombs made from condoms? I was one of the kids in the balcony. I guess I’m sorry for what we did, but that’s the way it was back then. Come on, Streak, this is the life we chose.”

  On that note I walked through the double doors of the hall into the heart of middle America, cloistered, far from the inner city, passenger jets decelerating overhead as they approached the airport, a bustling shopping mall close by, and a freeway streaming with headlights to reassure everyone God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.

  Clete had not lied to Janet Gish and her friends about reserved seating. Eight folding metal chairs in the front row remained empty, a program resting on the seat of each one. Otherwise the house was packed. Sammy Figorelli stood resplendent on the stage with his fellow singers, beaming, stuffed inside a summer tux, the footlights surrounded by bouquets of plastic flowers. Clete took out his cell phone and pushed a button on the speed dial.

  “I’m down in front, Janet. I’ll wave to you when I’m sure we’ve got the right seats. Yeah, wait for me to wave. It’s mass confusion here,” he said, and clicked off his phone.

  By now Sammy had seen us and was watching us out of the corner of his eye while he tried to hold a conversation with the other singers. Clete mounted the wood steps that led onto the stage as though he were part of the production, stepping carefully over the plastic flowers clumped around the footlights. “Got a second, Mr. Figorelli?” he said.

  Fat Sammy walked toward him, his eyes like hot BBs. “What do you think you’re doing, Purcel?” he asked.

  “Check out the ladies in the doorway at the back of the hall. They’ve been doing a little weed, so I hope they don’t get too giggly,” Clete replied.

  Sammy stared at the back of the hall like a man witnessing the erection of his own gallows. His cheeks bladed with color and pinpoints of sweat popped on his foreh
ead. He labored down the steps, forcing Clete to follow him. “You get rid of them people,” he said hoarsely.

  “And miss the reception afterwards? You kidding? Can we get introductions to the archbishop?” Clete said.

  “What are you after?” Sammy said, his breath coated with funk.

  “Give us the name of the guy who sicced the Dellacroces on Dave.”

  Sammy’s face was shiny with a greasy film now, his boutonniere like a red wound on his jacket. “You got no right to do this to me, Purcel,” he said.

  “I’m counting to three, then waving Janet Gish into action.”

  “The guy’s out there now, you dumb Mick.”

  “Where?” Clete said, twisting his head to survey the crowd.

  “Don’t do that. You’re gonna get me clipped,” Sammy said.

  “I don’t see anybody out there I know. Do you, Dave?”

  “We’re done here,” I said.

  “No, no. Sammy’s going to give us a name,” Clete replied, waving a finger.

  “Sammy’s going down with the ship. Right, Sammy?” I said.

  But Sammy Fig’s embarrassment was such he could no longer speak. In fact, I thought he was on the edge of having a coronary attack. The fatty layer under his chin trembled, his chest heaved, and sweat ran like hair oil into his shirt collar. I was convinced, at that moment, that inside every adult human being the child was still present, in this case an obese little boy struggling to free himself from the metal coils of a tuba while a packed football stadium laughed at his discomfort.

  “We’re going to boogie. Tell the guy who pissed on me I’ll be looking him up,” I said.

  “You already burned me. Y’all don’t know what you’ve done,” Sammy said.

  “That’s the breaks. Anything else happens to Dave, I’m going to see you first. That means you’re going to be the deadest douche bag in New Orleans,” Clete said, jabbing Sammy in the chest with his finger.

  We left Sammy standing numb and shaken in front of his audience and rounded up Janet Gish and her friends and headed for Galatoire’s on Bourbon Street.

  On the way out of the rental hall I searched the crowd for a familiar face, one that might belong to the man who had crisscrossed me from head to foot with his urine. But if he was there, I did not see him.