Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I squatted down to eye-level with him and shone a flashlight on his face and inside the rest of the car. There was a small entry hole in his neck, his cheek, and the side of his head. The wounds had bled out and had washed clean in the water and had started to pucker around the edges.

  “Ever think anybody could sucker-drop Fat Sammy Figorelli?” Helen said behind me.

  “No,” I said. I reached inside the car and closed Sammy’s eyes. The inverted weight of his massive buttocks and thighs had curved his spine so that his back and neck were compressed like a gargoyle’s.

  “Don’t waste your sympathies, Streak. He was a pimp and a pusher and the world’s a better place every time one of these shitbags gets stuffed into a hole,” Helen said.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. But I could not help remembering the stories of a French Quarter fat kid who had spent years being the butt of people’s jokes.

  Helen stood up from the spot where she had crouched behind me. “Wrap it up here. At oh-eight-hundred tomorrow go to work on the warrant. It’s time Castille LeJeune learned this is the United States,” she said.

  “You got it, Top,” I said, referring to her old rank in the U.S. Army.

  “Call me that again and I’ll tear off your head and spit in it,” she replied.

  I think even Fat Sammy would have enjoyed that one.

  We had the warrant by late Tuesday afternoon. Without announcement and with a balmy breeze at our backs and a sky the color of a ripe peach, two cruisers from the Iberia Sheriff’s Department, three from St. Mary Parish, a front-end loader, and a bulldozer chain-boomed on a flatbed tractor-trailer rig all came down Castille Le Jeune’s front drive, raking through the lone tunnel of oaks, right into the middle of an outdoor dinner party LeJeune was holding on his terrace.

  Helen and I and a plainclothes from the St. Mary sheriff’s office served the warrant on him in front of his guests, who included, among at least a dozen others, Theo and Merchie Flannigan. LeJeune tried to feign an amused dismay and the good cheer of the professional bon vivant, but Theo imposed no such restraints on herself.

  She wore a low-cut white evening dress and a necklace of red stones around her throat. Her skin was flushed with either the challenge of the moment or the glass of bourbon and crushed ice with a sprig of mint she had been drinking. She placed her small fists on her hips, as a drill instructor might, and turned her face up into mine. “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  “Excuse me, madam, but you need to sit down and stay out of this,” Helen said.

  “And you need to work on your sexual-identity problems before you lecture other people in their homes,” Theo said.

  Helen gazed through the trees at the bayou and the deserted shacks that had once housed prison inmates, her breasts hard-looking as softballs against her shirt. She reread the warrant to herself, seemingly indifferent to Theo’s insult. Then she lifted her eyes into Theo’s. “Repeat what you just said.”

  “You have no business here,” Theo said.

  “Where do you think the burial site is?” Helen said to me, ignoring Theo.

  “On a line between here and what would have been the front gate of the prison camp. I’d put it pretty close to that pond inside the fenced area,” I said.

  LeJeune raised his hands. “Listen to me,” he said. “I don’t know anything about this man Junior Crudup or whatever his name is. My wife befriended the convicts who worked out their sentences on our farm. She was a kind, gentle, decent person. How in God’s name can you accuse us of hiding the remains of a murdered man on our property?”

  Helen walked out into the yard. “Take out that fence and start in a circle. Drain the pond if you have to,” she said to the two heavy-equipment operators.

  Helen went back to her cruiser and I began walking down the slope toward the old work camp. Inside the evening shade of the trees I could hear the conversation and tinkle of glasses resume among LeJeune’s guests on the patio.

  “Dave, stop,” Theo said, catching my arm.

  She’d just had her hair cut and it was thick and even and shiny on the whiteness of her shoulders. The bourbon and smell of ice and mint on her breath touched my face like the tracings of a kiss.

  “Your father commissioned a murder,” I said.

  “You have it all backwards,” she said.

  “Then why are you afraid to go down to the pond?”

  “For reasons you don’t understand.”

  “You can tell the jury that at your father’s trial.”

  “Why do you hate him so much?”

  “Because he’s a sonofabitch.”

  “I’ll remember you said that to the day I die.”

  “Go back home, Theo. Your guests are waiting.”

  “I can’t believe I slept with you. I want to peel my skin off.”

  Perhaps her response was justified, but at that moment I didn’t care one way or another. Down below, the bulldozer and front-end loader were tearing apart a white-rail fence and a sloping green pasture, looking for the bones of a man who had been beaten to death so a cancer-ridden prison guard could keep his pension and a cuckolded husband his pride.

  The heavy-equipment operators worked by gasoline-powered light until midnight, blading away the grass and topsoil, pushing it into water-beaded, black-green mounds. They came back at sunrise and started in again, scooping huge amounts of wet clay and feeder roots from the oak trees onto LeJeune’s lawn, trenching a drainage into his fish pond, smashing his dock into kindling. By noon the entire landscape between the trees in his backyard and the cluster of cabins by the bayou was an ecological disaster, water oozing from the substrata, perch and catfish fighting for survival in small pools, a cow’s ribs arching out of the clay like a woman’s comb.

  A half dozen uniformed deputies in rubber boots raked and probed for hours but found no sign of a human burial. By Wednesday afternoon the excavation area had become a giant, water-filled pit. Since the previous day I had slept three hours. My eyes stung, my jaws were like sandpaper, and a stale, clammy odor rose from my clothes. The heavy-equipment operators shut down their machines and waited. Helen shook her head and the operators climbed down and began packing up.

  “We’re in the Dumpster, bwana,” Helen said.

  “That body was here. He moved it,” I said.

  “Ride back with me. You look like a car wreck,” she said.

  “He’s not going to get away with it. I’m going to fry that bastard.”

  “You probably will. Even if you have to take everybody down with you. You might give that some thought,” she said.

  I opened and closed my mouth and felt my ears popping, the horizon tilting slightly, a buzzing sound inside my head, as though my old companion the malarial mosquito was having its way with me again.

  Helen cupped her hand around my upper arm and kneaded the muscles in it. “Come on, Loot, give a girl a lift,” she said.

  “What? What did you say?” I said.

  She looked at me strangely, her eyes filled with a mixture of pity and sadness.

  Not far away, just outside the little town of Jeanerette, Clete Purcel drove down a back road past three antebellum homes that were so stunning in appearance, the tree-shaded lots they sat on so perfect in arboreal and floral arrangement, they looked like Hollywood movie fabrications rather than homes that people of enormous wealth actually lived in. He turned at the green, embanked property corner of the last house in the row, crossed a steel bridge over the Teche, and passed, within fifty yards of the last antebellum home, a rural slum composed of rusted trailers, desiccated sheds, and junker cars that could have been replicated from a photograph taken in Bangladesh.

  He removed a pair of binoculars from his glovebox and went inside a cafe from which his line of sight allowed him to see the trailer slum that spilled haphazardly to the edge of the bayou. It had not been a good day for Clete. Early that morning he had picked up a bail skip for Wee Willie Bimstine in Opelousas and was about to transport him ba
ck to New Orleans, when the skip began jerking against the D-ring anchored on the floor of the Caddy, his face twisted with visceral pain, threatening to soil himself and the convertible if he wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom. Clete cuffed him to a pipe next to the toilet in a filling station and waited outside. In less than two minutes the skip managed to put seventy-five cents in a sexual-enhancement dispenser, smear his wrist with a desensitizing lubricant, slip the cuff, and escape out a window.

  Score one for the meltdowns, Clete thought.

  A half hour later a woman did a hit-and-run on his convertible in a church parking lot; the investigating traffic officer gave him a citation for an expired inspection sticker; and while Clete argued the situation a flock of robins lit in a tree above his car, the top of which was down, and defecated all over the seats and upholstery.

  He drank coffee and focused his binoculars on a trailer that was broken in the center and had vinyl garbage bags taped across the windows. It was the home of the skip’s one-time fall partner, an Angola parolee who had been down twice for sexual battery against children. There was no movement inside the trailer, but next door a woman in faded jeans, tennis shoes without socks, and peroxided hair that was waved on only one side walked down to the school-bus stop and waited for her child. Then she escorted the child, a boy of about eight, back home and closed the door behind her.

  A moment later she reemerged with a tall, equestrian-looking man who had a hard, flat stomach and a purple birthmark that seeped from his hairline to the corner of his eye. They kissed on the mouth and the man put on a yellow hard hat and got into a waiting car driven by another man wearing an identical hard hat. The two men parked in front of the cafe and came in and sat down in the booth next to Clete’s.

  “Kid come home a little soon?” the driver of the car, a truncated, moon-faced man, said.

  The man with the birthmark didn’t reply but instead snapped his fingers repeatedly for the waitress’s attention. After she took the order and went away, he said, “This guy Robicheaux is a walking hemorrhoid. You should see the old man’s property. It looks like a bombing zone.”

  “Tell me about it,” the other man replied. His blond hair was combed straight back from a receding hairline, and he kept leaning forward, reverentially, each time the other man spoke. But the man with the birthmark was silent now, not interested in whatever the blond man had intended to say. The blond man, who wore a pair of electrician’s wire snips in a leather case on his belt, tried again. “His house was so dried out a popcorn fart could have set it on fire but he blames me for it. He tried to screw me with the Better Business Bureau and get my license pulled.”

  But the man with the birthmark, whom Clete had now connected with the name Will Guillot, only sipped his coffee and looked out the window at the bayou and the antebellum home on the far side of the steel bridge.

  “You think he sent that doctor to your house?” the moon-faced man said.

  “Probably.”

  “You’re a mean machine, Will.”

  “Nope.”

  “The guy came at you with a sawed-off shotgun?”

  “He thought he could go into a man’s house and kick ass. He lost. End of story,” Will Guillot said.

  “Pow!” his friend said.

  Both men became silent, eating slices of apple pie, drinking their coffee, picking their teeth. Clete went to the rest room, then waited for his check. The men in the other booth were talking about football now. Go home, he thought. You don’t need any more bad luck today.

  He looked out the window and saw the child of Will Guillot’s girlfriend playing on a swing set, a cheap one that was probably bought at Wal-Mart. The skip’s fall partner, the sex predator, pulled up next door, talked to the boy briefly, tousling his hair, then went inside his trailer.

  Clete paid his check and started toward the door. He paused, thinking to himself, then reset his porkpie hat and walked back to Will Guillot’s table. He grinned without speaking, his Hawaiian shirt partially unbuttoned on his chest, his eyes flicking sideways as though he did not know how to introduce himself.

  “Help you?” Guillot said.

  “You guys were in the Crotch?” Clete said.

  “The what?” the blond man said.

  “I heard you say something about a ‘mean machine,’ so I thought you were talking about Mother Green’s Mean Machine. See, jar-heads call—”

  “Yeah, I know all about that. What can I do for you?” Guillot said.

  Clete cleaned an ear with one finger, looking sideways again as he did it, his face filling with thought. “I think I know who you are,” he said.

  “You do?” Guillot said.

  “You popped a doctor from Loreauville in your driveway. Guy was some kind of weirded-out Vietnam vet, right? That’s some kind of irony, huh? Guy probably had a thousand AK rounds shot at him, then loses his Kool-Aid and gets smoked in the suburbs.”

  Guillot looked across the table at his friend and tapped his fingernail on the cover of his wristwatch. The two men started to get up.

  “Whoa,” Clete said.

  “Whoa, what?” Guillot said.

  “The lady up there in the trailer, the one you’re banging? She’s got a little boy. The guy next door happens to be a sex predator. So while you’re getting your twanger taken care of, the freak who was just patting her kid on the head is figuring out ways to sodomize him. My suggestion is you take your mind off your dick long enough to move the lady and her son out of that shithole before the kid’s life is ruined. Can you relate to that?”

  “You’ve got some fucking nerve,” Guillot said.

  The owner of the cafe had come from behind the counter and was standing behind Clete now, resolute, his feet planted, his thumb raised in the air.

  “Out,” he said.

  “No problem,” Clete said. He pulled two one-dollar bills from a brass money clip and dropped them on his table.

  But outside Clete could not give it up, standing by his car door, flipping his keys back and forth, his face growing darker. He watched Will Guillot and the electrical subcontractor with him get in their car. “Hold on a minute,” he said.

  “Get a life, queer bait,” Will Guillot said from the passenger window as his car rolled past Clete.

  Clete watched the two men cross the steel bridge over the Teche and turn down the tree-shaded back road that led past the row of antebellum homes. In his mind’s eye he saw himself running them off the road, strolling back to their car, his blackjack in his side pocket, moving the situation on up to the full-tilt boogie. Why not? he thought. The day couldn’t get any worse than it was already.

  He got into his Caddy, slammed the door, and turned the ignition. He heard a dry, clicking sound, then nothing. The battery was as dead as a butcher block.

  It took an hour for a filling station a half block away to send a truck that gave him a quick-start. He sat behind the wheel, revving the engine to charge the battery, oil smoke pouring from under the frame, bird-shit smears on his clothes, all immediate hope of squaring the beef with Will Guillot gone.

  He looked through the windshield at the trailer slum by the bayou and the parolee who was now drinking a can of beer on his steps and talking to the little boy from next door.

  Clete retrieved a pair of leather work gloves from under the seat and put them in his pocket, then dropped the Caddy into low gear and rolled into the trailer slum, gravel and oyster shells ticking softly under his tires.

  “You Bobby Joe Fontenot?” he said.

  The man on the steps was relaxed, smoking a cigarette with his beer, barefoot in the sunshine, his arms flecked with blue tattoos done by an needle improvised from the guts of a ballpoint pen. He wore imitation black leather pants and a tie-dyed strap undershirt, his black hair scalped on the sides and braided into a matador’s pigtail in back.

  “I’m gonna take a guess. Casting director from, what’s that TV show called, Survivor?” he said, squinting against the sunlight.

  Cl
ete grinned and got out of the Caddy, opening his badge holder briefly. “Looking for your friend who jumped his bond with Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater,” he said. “Slipped his cuffs this morning and left me with shit on my nose.”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Mind if I look inside?”

  “Get yourself a beer. It’s in the icebox.”

  “Thanks,” Clete said, and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  Clete stepped inside. The garbage can in the small kitchen was overflowing, the counters covered with pizza and fried-chicken cartons. A television set was playing without sound, the VCR under it lighted, a cassette pushed halfway into the loading slot. Clete shoved the cassette all the way into the unit with his thumb and waited for the video image to transfer to the screen. Then he clicked off the set and the figures on the screen shrank to a small dot. He slipped on his work gloves and called through the screen door: “Did you know you have a gas leak in your stove?”

  Bobby Joe stepped inside the trailer, sniffing at the air. Clete drove his fist into Fontenot’s stomach, burying it to the wrist, so deep he actually felt bone. Then he kicked the wood door shut, flung him headlong into a wall, and pulled a shelf filled with carnival midway ceramics down on top of him. He ripped the cassette from the VCR and bounced it off Bobby Joe’s face, then rooted in the refrigerator’s freezer compartment and pulled out a box of Popsicles and threw them in Bobby Joe’s face, too.

  “You get the kids in here with cartoons and ice cream?” he said.

  Bobby Joe tried to raise himself up against the wall, spittle running from the corner of his mouth. “I’m in treatment. Ask my P.O.,” he said hoarsely.

  Clete opened and closed his huge hands, breathing hard, his cheeks pooled with color. He lifted Bobby Joe by his shirt and belt and threw him into the narrow bathroom at the back of the trailer. Bobby Joe grabbed the side of the lavatory and tried to raise himself up again, his face bewildered.

  “What did your P.O. tell you about putting your hands on little kids, asshole?” Clete said.

  “I ain’t put—”