Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I ran toward it, breathless, waving my arms at the driver. As the bus pulled away from the curb I struck the side with my fists. Behind the elongated glass windows in the back door I saw Max Coll standing in the aisle, holding a support strap with one hand. He grinned, unzipped his jacket, and pulled out the sides to show me he had no weapon on his person.

  The bus sped through the next intersection and disappeared down the street. I reached for my cell phone to punch in a 911 call, then remembered hearing it clatter across the sidewalk two blocks behind me.

  I stopped in the men’s room at the casino and tried to dry off with paper towels before I went in search of Janet Gish and Clete Purcel. A few minutes later, my clothes glued to my skin, I found the two of them eating breakfast in the restaurant, Janet looking half revived by food and coffee. Clete chewed his food thoughtfully, his eyes traveling up and down my person. “I’m not even going to ask,” he said.

  “He was at Mass. He got away,” I said.

  “At Mass? A stone killer?”

  “I just told you.”

  “So instead of calling the locals, you decided to talk him in?” he said.

  “Something like that,” I replied.

  “Couldn’t have used any backup from me, of course?”

  “Lay off it, Clete,” I said.

  He took a coffee cup and saucer that was set up on an empty table, poured the cup full, and pushed it toward me. “Sit down, big mon, and let Janet tell you how Fat Sammy was shipping porn out and crystal in,” he said.

  “It all had to do with those Mideastern degenerates,” she said.

  “Those what?” I said.

  “Those Muslim lamebrains or whatever who crashed the planes into the towers. Sammy Fig said he was going to round them up for the FBI,” Janet said.

  I gave Clete a look.

  “You’re going to love this, Streak. Sammy straightening out Fart, Barf, and Itch,” he said.

  It seemed a grandiose and bizarre tale, but in truth no more peculiar than many in New Orleans’ long history of political intrigue, from William Walker’s military adventurism into Nicaragua during the 1850s to Lee Harvey Oswald’s involvement in the city with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

  According to Janet Gish, Fat Sammy felt tainted by a past association with a mobster who had been an enforcer in Brooklyn and later one of the Watergate Plumbers. The mobster was part of a blackmail sting involving Cuban prostitutes in Miami, and just before Kennedy’s visit to Dallas on November 22, 1963, the mobster showed up in New Orleans with a hooker and stayed at a motel owned by Sammy’s uncle. As soon as Sammy heard John Kennedy had been shot, he was convinced New Orleans had been the staging area for the assassination.

  From that time on, Fat Sammy did everything in his power to demonstrate his patriotism and disassociate himself from the people who he believed had murdered the president.

  “The night before the planes crashed into the towers, these Mideastern guys were in Sammy’s club by the airport. They told one of the girls they were pilots,” Janet said.

  “Maybe they were,” I said.

  “Except they were sweating so bad the janitor had to scrape the B.O. off the furniture. They had another problem, too. Like keeping napkins over their boners.”

  “Sorry, I’m just not following all this,” I said.

  “Sammy calls the FBI. They send some guys out and Sammy looks at all these photos and says that’s not the guys who were in the club. One of the FBI guys says, ‘Well, these are the hijackers who died in the planes.’

  “Sammy says, ‘Yeah, but there must have been other hijackers whose planes got grounded. The guys in my club are the ones who probably never got off the tarmac.’ Even while he’s talking you can already hear the toilet flushing.

  “Two weeks go by and Sammy calls the FBI in Washington. He tells some agent there they’re looking in the wrong place for terrorists. He says these guys are not Muslim revolutionaries, they’re degenerates and losers, just like the other jack-offs who come into the club. Sammy says to the FBI agent, ‘Use your fucking head. These guys weren’t hanging in mosques or living in Nebraska. They were holed-up in Miami and Vegas and hanging in dumps like mine ’cause they want to get laid. You want to nail ’em, float some cooze out on the breeze and see what happens.’ ”

  People at other tables were turning to stare.

  “Maybe we should move to a quieter spot,” I said.

  “Well, excuse me. Here’s the briefer version so I don’t offend anybody,” she said, her eyelids fluttering. “The FBI agent blew Sammy off, so he set up an Internet site out in Arizona to sell his movies. He was using a P.I. to run the credit card numbers of anybody with a Mideastern name who bought from the site.”

  “Who were his partners?” I said.

  “You met a couple of them,” she replied.

  “The Dellacroces?” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows innocuously.

  “Tell him the rest of it, Janet,” Clete said.

  “Sammy got paid in crystal. It’s cooked across the border and comes through Tucson,” she said. Then she looked at nothing, the whites of her eyes veined, her facial skin like flesh-colored clay that had been molded on bone. “Sammy wasn’t a bad guy. He took us all to Disney World once. He wore a Mouseketeer hat on the plane all the way back home.”

  “Who popped him, Janet?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Sammy always said it was the normals you got to watch out for, ’cause they never learn who they really are.”

  She stared through the front windows at the palm trees beating in the wind and the rain slashing on the glass.

  Chapter 23

  It was afternoon when Clete dropped me off at the house. The sky was a cold blue, dense and flawless in texture and color, the lawns along the street ridged with serpentine lines of leaves where the rainwater had receded into the streets. I shaved, showered, changed clothes, and went to the office.

  Helen listened quietly while I told her of what had happened in New Orleans, her gaze fixed out the window on the crypts in the old cemetery.

  “You called N.O.P.D. about Coll?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?” she said.

  “When we left town.”

  “I don’t think you wanted to arrest him.”

  “Then why would I have chased him across town?”

  “You should have called N.O.P.D. as soon as you saw him inside the church.”

  “Picture this scene, Helen. A couple of hot dogs coming through the vestibule with M-16s and 12-gauge pumps and Max Coll with a nine-millimeter,” I said.

  “Coll saved your life. You think you owe him.”

  I started to speak but she raised her hand for me to be quiet. “The state attorney’s office put us on notice this morning. We’re going to be investigated for harassment of Castille LeJeune, destruction of his property, and for deliberately damaging his reputation. What do you think of that?” she said.

  “You warned me,” I replied.

  “You never understand what I’m saying, Dave. You were right about the murder of Junior Crudup. LeJeune was behind it. He thinks we’ve got information that in reality we don’t. Find out what it is. You’re a handful, bwana.”

  She folded her arms on her chest, shaking her head, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

  At quitting time I drove to the home of Merchie and Theodosha Flannigan. It was almost the winter solstice now, and the sepia-tinted light in the trees and on the bayou seemed to emanate from the earth rather than the sky. Merchie greeted me at the door, wearing glasses, a book in his hand, his long hair like white gold against the soft glow of a living room floor lamp. “She’s not here,” he said.

  “It’s you I want to talk to,” I replied.

  “Why is it you keep finding reasons to put yourself in my wife’s path? Just doing your job?”

  “You’re out of line, Merchie.”

  “Could be. Could also be you’d like to get into Theo’s
pants. If that’s the case, good luck, because she’s out drunk somewhere.”

  I cleared my throat and shifted my eyes off his face. His thoroughbreds were nickering inside a pecan orchard beyond a white fence, their bodies barely distinguishable in the shadows. “The murder of Junior Crudup isn’t going away. His remains were moved, but eventually we’ll find out what happened to them. If I have anything to do with it, your father-in-law is going to have an opportunity for on-the-job training in soybean farming,” I said.

  “So why tell me about it?”

  “Because I think you wouldn’t mind seeing that happen.”

  “You want to dip your wick, go do it. But leave us out of your personal problems.”

  “I think Theodosha knows what happened to Junior Crudup’s body.”

  “My wife is a sick person. That’s why she’s spent a hundred thousand dollars on psychiatrists and clinics. But I think you like stirring her up. I think you like feeding on our troubles.”

  He started to close the door but I held it open with one hand. “Your wife’s frigid, isn’t she?” I said.

  He released the tension on the door, slipped off his glasses, and dropped them in his shirt pocket. “If you weren’t already an object of pity and public ridicule, I’d splatter your nose all over your face. Now go home,” he said.

  The door clicked shut. I stared at it stupidly, my ears ringing in the silence.

  Early the next morning Clete picked me up for breakfast, cheerful, wearing his utility cap low on his brow, a Hawaiian shirt under his bomber jacket, driving with one hand down East Main toward Victor’s Cafeteria.

  “You moved back into the motor court?” I said.

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “You burned a guy’s trailer. You assaulted a man in Lafayette.”

  “They’re not filing charges. Not if they want to stay on the planet. So I don’t see the big deal. Things get out of control sometimes. I’m cool with it,” he said, fiddling with the radio.

  Clete was Clete, a human moving violation, out of sync with both lawful and criminal society, no more capable of changing his course than a steel wrecking ball can alter its direction after it’s been set in motion. Why did I constantly contend with him? I asked myself.

  But I knew the answer and it wasn’t a comforting one: We were opposite sides of the same coin.

  I told him about my visit to Merchie Flannigan’s house.

  “That punk said that to you?” he asked.

  “I got a little personal about his wife,” I replied.

  “That’s another question I have. You actually asked him if his wife wouldn’t come across?”

  “I guess that sums it up.”

  “I can see that might piss him off. Particularly when he knows you bopped her.”

  “Can’t you show some subtlety, just a little, once in a while?”

  “You bump uglies with a guy’s wife, then tell him she’s an ice cube, but it’s me who’s got a problem with language?”

  “She was drunk. We both were. Stop harping on it.”

  He looked at me, then turned into the parking lot across from Victor’s. The old convent across the bayou was still in shadow, the live oaks speckled with frost. “Why get into Flannigan’s face about his wife’s sex life?” he said.

  “A psychiatrist would probably say she has trouble with intimacy. So she gets it on when she’s drunk, usually with strangers or people she doesn’t care about. It’s characteristic of women who were molested as children,” I replied.

  “You’re really going to hang LeJeune’s cojones over a fire, aren’t you?”

  “You better believe it,” I said.

  Later I signed out a cruiser and drove to the Lafayette Police Department to see my old friend Joe Dupree, the homicide cop and airborne veteran who had investigated the gunshot death of Theo Flannigan’s psychiatrist. While I talked he sat behind his desk, picking one aspirin, then another, then a third out of a tin container, swallowing them with water he drank from a cone-shaped paper cup. His tie was configured to the shape of his pot stomach, his hair combed like strands of wire across the bald spot on top of his head.

  “So you think this guy Will Guillot is blackmailing Castille LeJeune and it has something to do with LeJeune’s daughter?” he said.

  “Right.”

  “About what?”

  “Molestation.”

  Joe leaned back in his chair and rubbed his mouth. Through the window I could see a chained-up line of black men in orange jumpsuits being placed in a jail van. “Well, Ms. Flannigan’s file was missing from Dr. Bernstine’s office. But I found out several other files were missing, too. Maybe Bernstine took them home and they got lost somehow. Or somebody could have stolen several files to throw off the investigation. Anyway, it’s been a dead-end case,” he said.

  “You checked out the secretaries, any reports of forced entry?” I said.

  “If Bernstine was burglarized, he didn’t report it. The alarm company never had to do a 911, either. The secretary is a church-going, family woman, with no reason to steal files from her employer.”

  “How long was she there?”

  He looked down at the torn notebook pages that were clipped inside a case folder. “Seven months,” he said.

  “Who was the secretary before this one?” I asked.

  He looked again at his notes. “A woman named Gretchen Peltier. But she quit before Ms. Flannigan starting seeing Bernstine.”

  “What was that name again?”

  I drove to the alarm company that had serviced Dr. Bernstine’s office. Like most alarm companies, it was an electronic shell that didn’t provide security but instead relayed distress signals to the fire department or a law enforcement agency. In other words, the chief expense of home security was passed on to the taxpayers and the alarm company was able to maintain its entire system, which monitored several parishes, with no more than a half dozen technicians and sales and clerical employees.

  But the assistant director of the company, a black woman named Dauterive who had been an elementary school teacher, did her best to help me. A computer record of all electronic warning signals originating during the last year at Dr. Bernstine’s office was laid out on the desk. “See, there were a number of power failures. Those were either during an electrical storm or when a power line was knocked down. These other dates are the times the customer didn’t disarm the system fast enough. The dispatcher had to call and get the password.”

  She was heavyset and wore glasses and a pink suit with a small corsage on the lapel. She glanced at her watch.

  “Am I taking up too much time?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. It’s my anniversary. My husband’s meeting me for lunch,” she replied.

  “Who’s the dispatcher?”

  “We use the Acadiana Ambulance Service. When they receive an emergency signal, they call the residence or the business and clear it up, or they notify the appropriate response service,” she replied.

  “When was the last time you received an alarm that could have indicated an unauthorized entry?” I asked.

  “Here,” she said, and tapped her finger on the computer printout. The date was one day after the gunshot death of the psychiatrist, Dr. Bernstine. “But the dispatcher called and got the password.”

  I ran my finger up the column on the printout to a billing notation for July and a description of services that amounted to two thousand dollars. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It looks like the customer changed out the system. If I remember correctly, a power surge fried the main panel and the customer decided to use the opportunity to upgrade.”

  I was getting nowhere. “Let me think about this stuff and come back,” I said.

  “I don’t know if this is of any help to you, but the customer changed his keypad code when he got his new system. See?” she said, and tapped the notation again.

  “Yes?”

  “He didn’t change his password. Sometimes people don’t like to chan
ge the password, particularly if it’s a pet name or part of a private joke in the family,” she said.

  She looked me flatly in the face.

  “That’s a hole in the dike, isn’t it?” I said.

  “You might say that,” she replied.

  “Did you say today was your anniversary?” I asked.

  “That’s correct. Our twenty-seventh.”

  “Have a great anniversary, Ms. Dauterive.”

  I headed straight for Abbeville, twenty miles south on the Vermilion River, and the insurance company that employed Gretchen Peltier, the woman who had given Will Guillot his alibi for the night the drive-by daiquiri shop operator was murdered and who had also turned out to be a former employee of the slain psychiatrist.

  She was terrified. Like most people who lead ordinary lives and stray across a line, usually in concert with someone far more devious than themselves, she could neither defend herself nor lie convincingly. Instead, she began to perspire and swallow like someone in an elevator hearing steel cables snap a strand at a time.

  “I don’t think you’re a bad person, Ms. Peltier. But you’re taking the weight for a bad guy,” I said.

  “Taking the weight?” she said, more confused and frightened than ever now, her eyes flicking to the open door of her employer’s office.

  “You’re about to take Will Guillot’s fall. That means you’ll go to prison. You’ll live behind razor wire and cell with murderers and sexual deviates of every stripe. Snitch one of them off and you get glass put in your food. That’s where Will Guillot has taken you.”

  My rhetoric was cruel. She was a sad woman, her eyes etched with mascara, her clothes obviously bought at a discount store. I could only guess at the means of seduction Will Guillot had used to entice her into cooperating with the systematic destruction of her own life.

  “I knew the code numbers to the alarm system in Dr. Bernstine’s office,” she said. “Dr. Bernstine had shot himself in the park. I gave the numbers to Will because he said his wife, the one he’s divorcing, told Dr. Bernstine a lot of lies that were going to be used in court against him. I gave him the password, too.”