Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “You blew it, Dave. Fat Sammy would have cracked,” Clete said later.

  “What did Sammy do when you and your friends threw waterbomb condoms at him and his girlfriend?” I said.

  We were coming out of Galatoire’s, into the pre-Christmas holiday atmosphere of late-night Bourbon Street. The street was loud with music, the neon like purple and pink angel hair inside the fog blowing off the river. “He cried and came at us with both fists,” Clete said.

  “He’s still the same kid.”

  “All of us are. Except Fat Sammy became a pimp and dope pusher. It’s only rock ’n’ roll, Dave. Everybody dies. Go with the flow and try to have a few laughs,” Clete said. He propped his shoe on a fire hydrant and buffed the tip with a cloth napkin he had taken from the restaurant.

  Chapter 16

  I went back to work Monday morning. I took a legal pad from my desk drawer and wrote Junior Crudup’s name at the top of it, then drew a circle around it. This is where it had all started, I thought, both for me and the LeJeune family. Under Junior’s name I wrote the names of Castille LeJeune, Theodosha, Merchie, and Theodosha’s psychiatrist in Lafayette, the man who supposedly committed suicide.

  Then I angled a line from Castille LeJeune’s name to the names of Will Guillot and the dead daiquiri shop operator and Dr. Parks, who had died in Will Guillot’s driveway.

  To one side I placed the names of the New Orleans players—Father Jimmie Dolan, Max Coll, the Dellacroce family, and Gunner Ardoin, the part-time porn actor.

  The connections between the names and the deeds associated with them seemed byzantine on the surface, but for me the answers in the investigation lay in the past and the key was still the first name on the page, Junior Crudup.

  Helen opened my office door. “The Lafayette Sheriff’s Department just called. Get this,” she said. “The archdiocese is having a clerical conference of some kind. One of the out-of-towners happened to be an Irish priest. His jokes were a big hit. Then a pistol fell out of his shoulder bag in the lobby of the Holiday Inn.”

  “Our man Max?”

  “What’s with this guy?”

  “He’s nuts.”

  “That’s the best you can do?”

  “Got a better explanation? Where’d he go?”

  “They don’t know. They think he was driving a rental.”

  “He’ll be back.”

  “You sound almost happy.”

  “He saved my life. Maybe he has redeeming qualities,” I said, grinning at her.

  “The guy who said ‘suck on this’ and blew away two people?”

  “It’s only rock ’n’ roll,” I said.

  “Fire your psychiatrist,” she said, and closed the door.

  I studied the names and lines on my notepad. Years ago, after the murder of my wife Annie, I went twice a week to sessions with an analytically oriented therapist in Lafayette. He was one of those who believed most aberrations in behavior and personality development were caused by fairly obvious dysfunctions in the patient’s environment. The problem in treating them, he maintained, was that they were so obvious the patient usually would not buy the connection between the cause and the problem.

  Theodosha had told me her husband, Merchie, was having what she called another flop in the hay and that she couldn’t blame him for it. I took that to mean she had a sexual problem of her own, one that had sent her husband elsewhere. But I also remembered a remark our dispatcher Wally had made about Merchie Flannigan, as well as one made by Clete Purcel.

  I walked up front and leaned on the half-door that enclosed Wally in the dispatcher’s cage. He was writing on a clipboard, the top of his head and his neatly parted, little-boy haircut bent down. His shirt pocket was stuffed with cellophane-wrapped cigars. “What chu want, Dave?” he asked without looking up.

  “You told me Merchie Flannigan was a bum, that he was a guy you never liked. Let’s clear that up,” I said.

  “So I got a big mout’,” he replied.

  “This is part of a murder investigation, Wally. I’m not going to ask you again.”

  “He’s got a wife, but he messes around on the side.”

  “A lot of men do.”

  “He was driving my wife’s niece home. She was working at his office in Lafayette. She was seventeen years old at the time. He axed her if she wanted to go swimming at his club. It was late and the club was closed, but he said it didn’t matter ’cause he had a key and the owner and him was golf buddies. She didn’t have a suit, but he said that wasn’t no problem ’cause they’d get one from behind the counter and put it on his tab.

  “There wasn’t no lights on in the pool when she came out of the dressing room. She started swimming back and fort’ across the shallow end, then he come up to her and axed her if she could swim on her back. She said she always got water up her nose, and he says just turn over and rest on my hands and I’ll show you how to do it.”

  I waited for him to go on but he didn’t.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “He tole her how pretty she was, how she had to be careful about young boys only got one thing on their mind. She tole him she was cold and she better go back inside and get dressed. He said it was okay, they’d come back another time, that she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.”

  He stopped again, ticking his pencil on the clipboard, looking at nothing.

  “That was it?” I said.

  “It was enough for her daddy. He was gonna go over to Flannigan’s house and break his jaw but his wife hid the car keys. So the next morning he walked into Flannigan’s office and made sure the door was open so everybody could hear it and tole him his daughter wouldn’t be coming back to work no more.”

  “Thanks, Wally.”

  “What do I know?” he said.

  A lot, I thought.

  I went back to my office and started in on the paperwork that had built up during the days I was off. The phone on my desk rang.

  “Tell me what I’m hearing isn’t true,” the voice of Clotile Arceneaux said.

  “I’m not too keen on rumors.”

  “Did you and your buddy Purcel brace Sammy Fig out in Metairie Friday night?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Some federal agents are seriously pissed off about this, as well as somebody else, meaning myself. What gives you the right to go into another jurisdiction and intimidate other people’s witnesses?”

  “I don’t read it that way.”

  “Well, read this. Sammy Fig thinks either I or federal agents gave you information that sent you over to Metairie. He says he’ll no longer be cooperating with us and we can shove Witness Protection up our ass.”

  “That’s the way it flushes sometimes.”

  “I love your metaphors. I even like you. But right now I’d like to push you off a tall building.”

  “Where’s Sammy now?”

  “I left that part out, did I? We have no idea. Gone. My guess is he’s gonna try to take it to them before they get to him first.”

  “Take it to whom?”

  “To whom? I love talking to cops who need to show me how educated they are. How would we know, since eighteen months of casework just got dumped in the toilet? You’re something else, Robicheaux. I hope you come out of this all right, but remind me to be on vacation the next time I catch a case you’re involved with. Did you and Purcel really take a bunch of hookers to Galatoire’s?”

  “I think we’ve got a bad connection. Let me call you back later.”

  “Not necessary. I’ve had all the horse shit I can take in one day,” she said.

  Top that.

  At noon I signed out of the office and drove up the bayou to Hogman Patin’s house. He was building a chicken coop under a pecan tree in his side yard and pretended not to see me when I turned into the drive. He slipped his hammer through a hole in a leather pouch on his belt, looking intently at his creation, then walked around the back of his house, out of sight.

  I left my truck on top
of the oyster-shell drive, the engine ticking with heat, and followed him. He was sitting on his steps, his big hands cupped on his knees, the knife scars on his arms like the backs of worms that had burrowed under the skin. The sun’s reflection wobbled brightly on the bayou’s surface, but he stared at it without blinking. “Ain’t goin’ to let the past alone, are you?” he said.

  “You have to confront it to get rid of it, Hogman,” I replied.

  “I done tole you almost all I know. Why don’t you let it be?”

  “What happened to Jackson Posey, the guard who had to keep taking Junior up to Miss Andrea’s house?”

  “Cancer eat him up. Heard he died at Charity Hospital in Lafayette. Died hard, too.”

  I picked up a handful of moldy pecans from a shady, damp area and began chunking them into the bayou. “You’ve never told anybody why you made a bottle tree in your backyard, have you?” I said.

  “Ain’t nobody else’s bidness.”

  “You’re a religious man, Hogman. Each one of those bottles represents a different prayer. Every time the wind makes the glass sing in the branches, a prayer goes up from each of those bottles, doesn’t it?”

  He lowered his eyes and pared one of his fingernails with a toothpick. “What a man do in his home is what he do in his home,” he said.

  “You helping cover up a murder, Hogman.”

  “Ain’t right you talk to me like that, Dave. No, suh.”

  “Maybe not. But why do you want to protect the LeJeune family?”

  “I ain’t seen what happened after I left the camp. Cain’t tell you about what I ain’t seen. Don’t want to tell you about what I ain’t seen, either.”

  “Somebody saw. Somebody knows.”

  He breathed hard through his nose, his nostrils flaring in his frustration with me and his own conscience. The wind was cool and wrinkled the bayou’s surface, and Hogman’s bottle tree rang like spoons clinking on crystal. “There’s a man down at Pecan Island stacked time in the same camps as me and Junior. He was a check writer and used to carry the water can when we road-ganged. Him and his gran’daughter sell crabs and vegetables off a truck out on the state road. His name is Woodrow Reed.”

  “How does he feel about talking to a white man?”

  “He don’t care what color you are. He climbed up on a power pole to get a cat down and got ’lectrocuted. His eyes cooked in his head. You’ll t’ink he’s looking at you but don’t no light go t’rew his eyes. His eyes scare people. Maybe that’s why ain’t nobody ever been around axing Woodrow questions about what he seen.”

  I drove back to New Iberia and on south of Abbeville, where sugarcane acreage gave way to sawgrass and clumps of gum trees and the miles of wetlands that bled into the Gulf of Mexico, forming the watery, ill-defined coastline of southwest Louisiana. I crossed a bridge onto one of the few remaining barrier islands left in Louisiana, a reef composed of hard-packed shell ground up by the tides, the crest topped with alluvial soil that is among the richest in the western hemisphere. The adjacent islands had been dredged and scooped out of the surf and hauled away on barges decades ago for highway-construction material, but portions of Pecan Island, preserved largely by an oil corporation as a recreational area for its CEOs, contains wooded acreage where the canopy of live oaks rises perhaps two hundred feet into the sky and the sunlight breaking through the moss and branches and air vines is the same color as light filtering through green water in the Florida Keys.

  In the midst of duck-hunting camps with wide, screened-in porches and adjacent boathouses was the tiny vegetable farm and blue-point crab business of Woodrow Reed. Stacks upon stacks of collapsible wire crab traps, webbed with dried river trash, stood by the side of his small, paintless house. A middle-aged black woman was chopping up nutria parts on a butcher block a short distance away, the rubber gloves on her hands spotted with brown matter.

  Woodrow Reed’s eyes were large, round and flat, unblinking, like painted facsimiles that had been cut out of paper and pasted on the face of a mannikin. They stared at me intently, the pupils dilated and black, although it was obvious Woodrow Reed was sightless.

  “I’m Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. I opened my badge holder and held it aloft so the middle-aged woman in the side yard could see it.

  “I knowed you was coming,” he said, rising from where he sat on the front steps.

  “Hogman called you?” I said.

  “Yeah, but he didn’t have to. I knowed somebody was coming one day. Want to come in, suh?” He opened the rusted screen door to his front porch and waited for me to enter.

  He could not have been over five feet. His skin was the color of a razor strop that has yellowed with wear, his body compressed and hard looking, his cheeks and chin scrolled with gray whiskers. But I could not get over his eyes. I had seen eyes like his only once before, in the body of a man who had been exhumed from a grave in northern Montana where he had lain for decades under frozen ground.

  “How’d you come by your farm, Mr. Reed?” I asked.

  “You already know the answer to that.”

  “Can you tell me how Junior Crudup died?” I asked.

  Woodrow Reed was sitting on what looked like a motion-picture theater seat mounted on a wood block, his palms propped on his thighs. His denim pants were neatly pressed, the cuffs and pockets buttoned on his long-sleeve work shirt.

  “The doctor give me another year. I already put my farm in my daughter’s name. Ain’t a whole lot can touch me no more. I got cancer, just like Jackson Posey, although I never smoked like he did or had no problems with my skin,” he said.

  “Tell me about Junior, sir.”

  “Junior was gonna be Junior. He didn’t wear no other man’s hat. That was Junior,” he said. For the first time he smiled.

  In the waning days of summer, when the amber light at evening turned the countryside into a yellowing antique photograph, Junior Crudup took his twelve-string Stella guitar out on the steps of the cabin in the work camp and began composing a song whose lyrics he penciled on a paper bag flattened down on the board plank beside him.

  “What you calling your song?” Woodrow asked, sitting down next to him in the dusk.

  “‘The Angel of Work Camp Number Nine,’” Junior replied.

  Woodrow rubbed the whiskers that grew like black wire on his chin. “T’ink that’s a good idea, Junior?” he asked.

  “Gonna record it up in Memphis one day. You gonna see,” Junior replied.

  “I seen her car out here last night. Parked right there on the road. She was smoking a cigarette behind the wheel and playing the radio in the dark.”

  “You better not be fooling with me, Woodrow.”

  “It was her. Cap’n Posey walked up to her window and axed if anyt’ing was wrong. She said she was just taking a drive. Then she drove on down the road toward the li’l sto’ by the bridge. A li’l while later I seen her drive on back to the big house. She was drinking a bottle of beer, tilting her chin up each time she took a sip.”

  “Why didn’t you come get me?”

  “You spent too much time up Nort’, Junior. You’re having t’oughts ain’t no nigger in Lou’sana ought to be having.”

  “Maybe it was that way at first. But not now. You know what she got that make her special?”

  “Her tits ain’t bad.”

  “Don’t be talking that way, Woodrow. She’s special ’cause she got respect for other people.”

  Junior adjusted the belly of his guitar on his thigh and slipped his three steel finger picks on his right hand, then corded the neck of the guitar and began singing:

  At Camp Number Nine it’s “Roll, nigger, roll,

  No heaven for you, boy, the state own your soul.”

  They took my home and family,

  Give me chains, fatside, and beans,

  Bossman making me a Christian,

  God Almighty, hear that Betty scream.

  “You risking your ass for somebod
y don’t know you alive,” Woodrow said.

  “Rich ladies like that got all kinds of things they got to do, places they got to travel to, Woodrow. She cain’t be coming down here all the time.”

  “Don’t let Boss Posey hear that song.”

  “When she invites me back up to the house?” Junior said.

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s the first song I’m gonna play.”

  There was drought in the fall and the fields hardened and cracked under a merciless sun and an empty sky that by noon was like white glass. The leaves of the cane baked in the wind and frayed into thread on the ends and rattled dryly on the stalks, and by evening the sky was cinnamon colored with dust and the convicts filling mule-drawn water tanks with buckets they flung into the bayou on ropes had to tie wet handkerchiefs across their nostrils and mouths. To conserve water the convicts bathed in the bayou, then sat listlessly on the porches of their cabins until lock-up. Every third or fourth evening, while the cicadas sang in a grove of cedar trees near the camp, Junior worked on the song he was composing in tribute to Andrea LeJeune, waiting for the invitation to play on her lawn again, telling himself she was contacting the governor and that any day a parole order for his release would be delivered at the camp’s front gate.

  At bell count on a September morning Jackson Posey saw the folded brown paper sack covered with penciled lyrics sticking from Junior’s back pocket.

  “What you got there, Junior?” he asked.

  The early sun was already a dull red inside the dust blowing out of the fields. At the bottom of the slope that led down to the bayou, the water was low and swarming with gnats, algae-webbed snags protruding from the surface, all of it smelling of dead fish that lay bloated and fly-specked on the banks.

  “Just li’l notes I keep for myself, boss,” Junior replied.

  “Let’s see it,” Jackson Posey said, fitting a pair of glasses on his nose. He took the bag from Junior’s fingers and studied the words on it, his lips moving slightly as he read. The sores on his arms seemed deeper, more black than purple now. His eyes fixed on Junior’s. “You got Camp Number Nine in here?” he said.