The John Gottis of the world make good entertainment. The polluters and the war advocates can be seen at prayer, on camera, in the National Cathedral. Unlike John Gotti, they’re not very interesting, but they cause infinitely more damage.
The chances were I would never take down Castille LeJeune for the murder of Junior Crudup. Nor did it look like I would solve the shooting of the drive-by daiquiri store operator or Fat Sammy Figorelli. The people who had committed these crimes did not have patterns and to one degree or another operated with public sanction. They might go down for an ancillary offense, but at worst they would do minimum time, if not get probation.
But regardless of what occurred in the lives of others, I was going to clear my conscience of a problem I had created because of my desire to control a situation in which I had failed.
I drove through the wet streets of Franklin, out to Fox Run, and lifted the false knocker on the front door that activated the chimes deep inside the house. A moment later Castille LeJeune answered the door, dressed in sweat clothes, a towel twisted around his throat, surprisingly pleasant, his face ruddy from riding an exercise bike by the sun room that gave onto the back patio, the same patio where Junior Crudup had entertained him and his wife fifty years ago.
“Come in, sir,” he said, opening the door wider.
“I don’t know if you’ll want me in your house after you hear what I have to say,” I said.
He laughed and closed the door behind me. “Go ahead. I know a determined man when I see one. But excuse me just a minute. I have to use the bathroom,” he said.
He went into a hallway and closed a door behind him, then I heard him urinating into a toilet bowl. Through the French doors I could see the long slope of his backyard tapering down to the bayou, a yellow bulldozer parked by the area we had excavated during our search for Junior Crudup’s remains. Much of the dirt had been filled in, smoothed and tamped down, so that the lawn was now a mottled brown and green, in patterns like camouflage.
I heard LeJeune washing his hands, then he came back into the living room.
“I couldn’t stick you with Junior Crudup’s death, so I tried to sic a psychological nightmare by the name of Max Coll on you,” I said.
“Ah, a mea culpa because you’ve put me at risk. Let me clarify something for you—”
“If I can finish, please. Using Coll was a gutless act on my part. If I had wanted you smoked, I should have done it myself instead of exploiting a headcase.”
“I admire your candor, Mr. Robicheaux. But I’m not bothered by Coll’s presence in the community. I walked in on him and he fled. If this fellow is indeed a soldier for the IRA, which is what I’ve been told, then I understand why the British are still in control of northern Ireland.”
“Wait a minute. You saw Coll?”
“I just told you that.” He stared at me, his eyes probing mine.
“Was he armed?”
“He might have been. It’s hard to say. I didn’t bother to ask.”
“Where did he go?”
“Out the back door. I’ve reported all this.”
“You might drop by the church today and light a candle, maybe offer a prayer of thanks that a guy like Father Jimmie Dolan is a minister in the Catholic Church,” I said.
“As always with you, Mr. Robicheaux, I have no idea what you’re talking about. But if this man Coll comes back around, he’ll rue the day he left his little shanty back in the peat bogs or wherever he comes from…. Am I losing your attention?”
“Hubris has always been my undoing, Mr. LeJeune. Maybe it will be different with you. Anyway, my badge has been pulled and I’m done. Run your happy warrior act on somebody else,” I said.
When I got back home I put on sweat pants and a hooded jersey, tied on my running shoes, and jogged down East Main, past the Shadows and the plantation caretaker’s house across the street, which now served as a bed-and-breakfast, and crossed the drawbridge into City Park. I ran along the winding paved road through the live oak trees, my clothes soggy with mist, then cut across the closely clipped grass and ran along the edge of the bayou. In our area the sugar mills are fired up twenty-four hours a day during the cane-grinding season, and in the distance I could see a huge red glow on the horizon, like fire trapped inside a thunderhead, and I could hear the heavy thumping sound of the machines, like the reverberation of giant feet stamping upon the earth. There was not another soul inside the park, and for just a moment my heart quickened and I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.
I sat down on a bench, my palms propped on my thighs, my breath coming hard in my throat. What was it Theodosha had said? We were alike because we both lived in the cities of the dead? I wiped the sweat off my face with my jersey and fought to get my breath back, widening my eyes, concentrating on the details around me, as though my ability to remain among the quick depended on my perception of them.
Is this the way it comes? I thought—not with a clicking sound and a brilliant flash of light on a night trail in Vietnam, or with a high-powered round fired by a sniper in a compact automobile, but instead with a racing of the heart and a shortening of the breath in a black-green deserted park smudged by mist and threaded by a tidal stream.
My head hammered with sound that was like helicopter blades thropping overhead, and for just a moment I was back on a slick piled with wounded and dying grunts, AK-47 rounds vectoring out of the jungle canopy down below, the inside of the airframe crawling with smoke.
I put my head down between my knees, my hands on the pavement, the world spinning around me.
I looked up and saw from out of the mist a pink Cadillac convertible headed toward me, one with wire wheels, tail fins, Frenched headlights, and grillwork that was like a chromium smile, the radio blaring with 1950s Jerry Lee Lewis rock ’n’ roll.
The Cadillac passed me and behind the wheel I saw a man with an impish face, the features cartoonlike, as though they had been sketched with a charcoal pencil, the hair shaved on the sides and left long and curly on the neck.
“Gunner?” I said out loud.
But the driver did not hear me, and the Cadillac wound its way out of the park, the only piece of bright color inside the failing light.
Gunner Ardoin in New Iberia? I asked myself. No, I had let my imagination run away with itself. The year was 2002, not 1957, and the rock ’n’ roll days of pink Cadillacs, drive-in movies, Jerry Lee Lewis, and American innocence were over.
At 10:00 P.M. I turned on the local news. The lead story involved a homicide inside a Franklin residence. The television camera panned on a tree-lined street and a Victorian home where paramedics were exiting a side door with a gurney on which a figure inside a body bag was strapped down. The reporter at the scene said the victim had been shot once in the temple and once in the mouth and, according to the coroner, had been dead approximately twelve hours. The victim’s name was William Raymond Guillot.
Chapter 27
It was still raining Monday morning, the air cold, the fog heavy among the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery as I pulled into the parking lot at the courthouse.
Wally, our leviathan dispatcher, made a face when he saw me come through the front door. “Dave, you ain’t suppose to be here,” he said.
“Pretend I’m not,” I said.
“Don’t jam me up here. I’m your friend, remember?”
“Is anybody working the Guillot homicide?” I said.
“I didn’t even hear you say that. I’m deaf and dumb here. Go home,” he replied.
Helen’s door was ajar. I went inside without knocking. “What’s happening in Franklin with the Guillot shooting?” I said.
“None of your business,” she said.
“They made Max Coll for the hit?”
“One in the temple, one down the throat. The signature of a pro,” she said.
“I don’t buy it.”
“What you need to buy is a hearing aid. You were suspended as of yesterday. Now haul your ass out of here.�
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“I talked with Castille LeJeune late yesterday afternoon. He says he walked in on Coll while Coll was creeping his house. If Coll was going to pop anybody, he would have done it then.”
“You went out to LeJeune’s, after I pulled your badge?”
“I told him I was suspended. It was a personal visit.”
She shook her head, nonplussed. “We have an attorney in lawyer jail right now. I’m about to put you in there with him,” she said.
“Coll isn’t the shooter.”
“Don’t be on the premises when I get back.” She walked down the hall and into the women’s restroom, glancing back at me just before she pushed open the door, as though my argument for Coll’s innocence had just sunk a hook on the edge of her mouth.
Louisiana is a small state, with a comparatively small population. In the year 2002 over 950 people were killed and 55,000 injured on our state highways. Booze was a major factor in most of the fatalities. Hence, the presence of a drunk person behind the wheel of an automobile in Louisiana is hardly an anomaly. So I had no reason to be surprised when I picked up the phone in my kitchen and heard a woman’s voice say, “Why don’t you do something about this goddamn traffic light out here on the four-lane?”
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Donna Parks, who does it sound like? The man in front of me is driving a shit box that’s smoking up the whole town. He won’t turn left because there’s no arrow on the traffic light and I have to breathe his goddamn exhaust fumes.”
For just a moment I had the uncharitable thought that her husband, Dr. Parks, was better off dead.
“What could I do for you, Ms. Parks?”
“I want to file rape charges.”
“You’ve been sexually assaulted?”
“Like my deceased husband said, you people are really dumb. I’ll come over there and explain it to you. Where are you?”
“Since you dialed me at my home number, I think we should both conclude I’m at home.”
She belched softly, then I heard what was probably her car horn blowing just before the line went dead.
With luck she would have an accident before she got to my house, I thought.
I looked at my watch. Clete’s arraignment was at 11:00 A.M. I wrote a note for Donna Parks, included my cell phone number on it, and stuck the note inside the grill on the front screen. Eventually I would have to deal with her, but it would be easier to do by phone than in person. I put Snuggs on the back porch, slipped my checkbook in my pocket, and started out the door, just as Merchie Flannigan pulled into the driveway, blocking my truck. He worked his way around the puddles in the yard and stepped up on the gallery, raking back his long, white-gold hair with his fingers.
“Hang on, old buddy. Need to clear up my remarks to you when you came by the house,” he said.
“I’m in a hurry, Merchie,” I said.
“Let’s face it. I was jealous. Theo and I haven’t had the best marriage. You said I was out of line. You were right.” He extended his hand, his jaw square, like an imitation of an athletic, educated, country club millionaire, one he had probably seen on a movie screen as a child and had spent a lifetime trying to become.
I didn’t take his hand. “I think you’re here covering your wife’s ass. Will Guillot got popped and the cops are going to be taking a hard look at his enterprises. I believe Theo is part of a porn operation in New Orleans,” I said.
The smile died on his face. “You’re actually serious? You believe Theo is involved with pornography?” he said.
“The word is she wrote scripts for Fat Sammy Figorelli. Where was she the night the daiquiri store operator got shot?”
He slipped his hands into his pockets and looked at the rain falling through the live oaks onto the street, as though any conversation with me was useless and the problem was mine, not his. “Theo and I are taking a cruise to the Islands. I came by here to do the right thing. But I can see it was a mistake.”
“Where’d it go wrong for you, partner?”
“Wrong about what?” he said.
“You were Jumpin’ Merchie Flannigan, a stand-up kid from the Iberville who did the crime and stacked the time. Why’d you become a hump for a bum like Castille LeJeune?”
The skin of his face seemed to crinkle, like a sheet of yellow paper held against a hot light bulb. He raked his hair back over his head again and started to speak, his eyes tangled with thoughts I could only guess at, then stepped off the gallery and walked through a water puddle to his Mercedes.
I headed down the four-lane toward Franklin and five miles outside New Iberia felt a front tire on my pickup go soft and begin to wobble. I pulled to the shoulder and changed the tire in the rain. It was almost 11:30 when I got to the St. Mary Parish Courthouse. Across the street I saw the restored pink Cadillac I had seen in City Park the previous night. A curious black man holding an umbrella was bent down by the driver’s window, admiring the interior.
“Do you know who owns this?” I asked.
“A man who got a lot of money,” he replied.
I went inside the courthouse and peeled off my raincoat in front of a coffee stand run by a blind man. I had no way of knowing the amount of Clete’s bail, but obviously it would be high, and the 10 percent bondsman’s fee would probably clean out my checking account and part of my savings. Of course, my paying a bondsman’s fee was predicated on the assumption a local bondsman would be willing to write a bond on Clete, whose past record included fleeing the United States on a murder warrant.
“You want a cup of coffee, Dave?” the blind man behind the counter said.
“Yeah, sure, Walter,” I said, distracted by a brown-haired little girl, no older than six or seven, sitting on a bench by the courtroom entrance. A small teddy bear, a red ribbon with a silver bell on it tied around the neck, was perched on her lap. Where had I seen her before? Then I remembered, with a rush of shame. It had been at Gunner Ardoin’s house, on the morning I had rousted him last fall, chambering a round in the .45, sticking it in his face, causing him to soil himself while his little girl watched.
I walked up to her, my raincoat slung over my arm. “Is your daddy here?” I asked.
“He’s inside the big room,” she replied.
“What’s he doin’ there?”
“Helping Clete.”
“You remember me?” I asked.
“You’re the man who pointed a gun at my daddy.”
I went inside the courtroom just as the morning’s proceedings were breaking up. Clete was talking to a local attorney while a deputy put cuffs on him for his trip back to jail. The judge left the room for his chambers, and among the people filing out in the corridor I saw Gunner Ardoin.
“Clete’s going back to lock-up?” I said.
“Just till he bonds out,” Gunner said.
“How much is his bond?”
“Fifty grand,” he said.
“How’d he put it up?”
“He didn’t. I did.”
“You went a fifty-thou bond?”
“You don’t watch the news? I hit the Powerball last week. Three million bucks. I bought him that pink Caddy out front, too.”
I looked at him, stupefied. He walked past me and took his little girl by the hand. “Want something to eat? Clete’s going to meet us outside in a few minutes,” he said.
“Why not?” I replied.
A half hour later the four of us were eating gumbo at a checker-cloth-covered table inside a cafe one block from the courthouse. The pink Cadillac convertible was parked outside, rainwater standing up in beads as big as marbles on the waxed surface.
“I appreciate it, Gunner, but I can’t accept it,” Clete said.
“The title’s already in your name, man,” Gunner said.
“We’ll have to change that,” Clete said.
Gunner looked at a spot on the far wall of the cafe. “There’s something I didn’t mention. A couple of guys I was inside with needed a place to crash. Remember Fli
p Raguzi, used to run a chop shop for the Giacanos over in Algiers? He started a grease fire on the stove. It sort of changed the way your kitchen and the ceiling look.”
“You let Flip Raguzi stay in my place? This guy has diseases scientists haven’t found names for,” Clete said.
“What’s he talking about, Daddy?” the little girl asked.
Clete shut his eyes, then opened them. “Give me the keys,” he said.
One of my favorite lines of all time, one excerpted from a 1940s song understood readily by all those who experienced the human and economic realities of the Depression and war years, goes as follows: “You don’t get no bread with one meatball.”
“What’s funny?” Gunner said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Take a walk with me, will you?”
We went outside and stood under a canvas awning, the mist blowing in our faces.
“That’s a decent thing you did for Clete, Gunner,” I said.
“I don’t use that name anymore,” he said.
“How about Father Jimmie? You do the right thing by him, too?” I said.
“Matter of fact, I did. But that’s my business.”
“I respect that, Phil. But I need your help, too. Know a woman named Theo Flannigan?”
“Jumpin’ Merchie’s old lady? I know who she is, but I don’t know her personally.”
“Was she writing scripts for Fat Sammy Figorelli?”
He shook his head. “No, but she might as well have. Her books were lying around the set. The director would lift the dialog from the love scenes in her books. So a bunch of degenerates, that includes me, were doing sixty-nines on each other and talking like Shakespeare.”
“Why would the director pick her work to steal from?” I asked.
“A guy named Ray was involved. His girlfriend was my costar. I never saw him, but I think he was the same guy who’d call me and tell me where to pick up my meth delivery to the projects.”
Ray?
Why hadn’t I seen it? William Ray Guillot, lately of Franklin, Louisiana, now having his blood drained and replaced with formal-dehyde.
Last Car to Elysian Fields Page 68
