Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  As Alafair and I walked back toward the happy throng on Duval Street, the yards around us blooming with flowers, the air touched with salt and the smell of firecrackers, I thought perhaps the world was more than just a fine place, that perhaps it was a domed cathedral and we only had to recognize and accept that simple fact to enjoy all the gifts of both heaven and earth.

  Castille LeJeune was sentenced to Angola Prison for manslaughter in the shooting of Max Coll and for first-degree homicide in the death of Will Guillot. Because of his age, he was transferred to an honor farm, where he did clerical work in an office. The correctional officers at the farm admired him for his genteel manners and military bearing and his fastidiousness about his dress. In fact, they came to call him “Mr. LeJeune” and often sought his advice about financial matters. But a visiting prison psychologist put an evaluation in his jacket that indicated LeJeune was not only experiencing depression and self-loathing over the death of his daughter but perhaps intense levels of guilt characteristic of a father who has sexually molested his daughter.

  An inmate’s jacket is confidential only until the first trusty clerk reads it.

  Castille LeJeune became what is known as a short-eyes in the prison population. Other inmates shunned him; the correctional officers became distant and formal in their dealings with him. He was transferred back to Angola after he bit into pieces of broken glass that had been mixed into his food.

  Ironically, he was placed in a segregated unit within viewing distance of the levee built by the Red Hat Gang on which Junior Crudup had pulled what Leadbelly called his great, long time.

  We couldn’t make our homicide case against Merchie Flannigan and he got away with the murder of the daiquiri-store operator. At least legally he did. But Castille LeJeune nailed him from jail by having his lawyers file a wrongful death suit against him, freezing his personal and corporate accounts, then using Donna Parks to bring statutory rape charges against him. Merchie’s reputation was ruined and his pipeline business went bust. For a while he ran a welding service, then began hanging out at a bar frequented by Teamsters in Baton Rouge. I ran into him one day by the capitol building, where Huey Long was shot down in 1935.

  “Hey, Dave, no hard feelings, huh?” he said.

  “Not on my part,” I replied.

  He smelled of cigarettes and was fat and puffy, sporting a mustache and goatee, driving a junker car that was parked at the curb, a young girl in the passenger seat.

  “That’s my niece,” he said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Putting together a drilling deal in Iran, can you believe it?”

  “That’s great, Merch.”

  “Good seeing you, Dave. I mean that,” he said, taking my hand, trying as hard as he could to hold my eyes without averting his. The girl tossed a beer can out of the window as they drove away.

  Father Jimmie and I and two employees of a funeral home made up the entire retinue at the graveside ritual for Max Coll in a Catholic cemetery outside Franklin. I felt partly responsible for his death, but had he not died, Castille LeJeune would not have gone down, nor would Castille LeJeune have utilized an opportunity to take Will Guillot off the board. Ultimately I came to think of Max Coll in another fashion. In his way he was a brave man who made his own choices, and it was an arrogance on my part and a disservice to him for me to pretend that somehow I was the designer of his fate.

  Father Jimmie went back to his conservative parish in New Orleans and worked as a chaplin at Central Lock-Up. After Alafair returned to college in Portland, I invited both him and Clotile Arceneaux to dinner at a Mexican restaurant off the upper end of St. Charles.

  “Pretty slick how you took down LeJeune, searching his property without a warrant,” she said.

  “It was dumb,” I said.

  “You never flinched, even though LeJeune had a pistol on you and you thought you didn’t have backup,” she said.

  “Say that again.”

  “I watched you through a pair of field glasses. An FBI sharpshooter watched LeJeune through a scope on a rifle.” She put a forkful of food in her mouth and raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Y’all were using me as bait?”

  “Got a job for you with the state if you want to start putting away bad guys again.”

  “I’m out.”

  She placed her foot on mine under the table and squeezed. “Come see me sometime and we’ll talk about it,” she said.

  “Am I missing something here?” Father Jimmie said.

  “Dave likes to pretend he can stop being a police officer. Make him go to confession, Father,” she replied.

  Clete Purcel spent three months in the St. Mary Parish Prison, paid twenty-thousand dollars in damages to the sheriff’s deputies he had busted up with his fists, and upon his discharge moved in with me, saying he was going to start up another P.I. office in New Iberia. We fished for sac-a-lait and bass at Henderson Swamp and Bayou Benoit, and Clete tried to appear light-hearted and unaffected by his time in jail. But I knew better. Clete was a natural-born cop and despised the new breed of criminals and literally washed himself in the shower with peroxide when he got out of the bag.

  But out on Bayou Benoit, with the spring breezes up and the bream spawning back in the bays, the levee sprinkled with buttercups, we didn’t talk about the bad times of the past or the present. I had never looked to the skies for great miracles, and, as St. Augustine once indicated, to watch a vineyard soak up the water in a plowed row and produce a grape that could be translated into wine was all the proof we needed of higher realities. But when Clete and I were deep in the swamp, the lacy green branches of the cypress trees shifting back and forth across the sun, I fell prey to a new temptation as well as hope.

  I waited to see a pair of pelicans drift down off the windstream, their wings extended and pouched beaks bulging, their improbable presence a harbinger of better times. I waited for them daily and sometimes in the flapping of wings overhead I thought I heard Bootsie’s voice, reminding me of her promise about the pelicans, only to discover that a white crane or blue heron had been frightened by our outboard and had flown through the cypress trees back onto open water.

  But I’m sure one fine day, when I least expect it, the pelicans will return to Bayou Teche, and in the meantime I share my thoughts about them with no one, except perhaps Snuggs and Tripod, who, like me, sleep little and wake before first light.

  By the Same Author

  In the Moon of Red Ponies

  Last Car to Elysian Fields

  White Doves at Morning

  Jolie Blon’s Bounce

  Bitterroot

  Purple Cane Road

  Heartwood

  Lay Down My Sword and Shield

  Sunset Limited

  Half of Paradise

  Cimarron Rose

  Cadillac Jukebox

  Heaven’s Prisoners

  Burning Angel

  The Lost Get-Back Boogie

  The Convict

  Dixie City Jam

  In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

  A Stained White Radiance

  The Neon Rain

  A Morning for Flamingos

  Black Cherry Blues

  Two for Texas

  To the Bright and Shining Sun

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by James Lee Burke

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Title page photograph © Kathleen Collins/Alamy

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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br />   Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burke, James Lee.

  Crusader’s cross : a Dave Robicheaux novel / James Lee Burke.

  p. cm.

  1. Robicheaux, Dave (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Police—Louisiana—New Iberia—Fiction.

  3. New Iberia (La.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.U723C78 2005

  813’.6—dc22 2005044233

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8756-2

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-8756-8

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-4420-3

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonandShuster.com

  For Linda and Roger Grainger

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE TO THANK George Schiro and the other staff members at the Acadiana Crime Lab in New Iberia, Louisiana, and also Jim Hutchison, Judi Hoffman, Annalivia Harris, Bahne Klietz, Maureen Kocisko, and Debbie Lewis at the Montana State Crime Lab in Missoula for their patience and kind assistance over the years.

  Thanks also to David Rosenthal, Michael Korda, and Chuck Adams for their support and editorial help.

  My thanks again to Patricia Mulcahy and my agent Philip G. Spitzer and his assistant Lukas Ortiz for their loyalty and friendship and goodwill.

  Lastly, I wish to acknowledge those who have been with me for the long haul—my wife, Pearl, and our children, James L. Burke, Jr., Andree Walsh, Pamela McDavid, and Alafair Burke.

  God bless all creatures and things, large and small.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  IT WAS THE END OF AN ERA, one that I suspect historians may look upon as the last decade of American innocence. It was a time we remember in terms of images and sounds rather than historical events—pink Cadillacs, drive-in movies, stylized street hoods, rock ’n’ roll, Hank and Lefty on the jukebox, the dirty bop, daylight baseball, chopped-down ’32 Fords with Merc engines drag-racing in a roar of thunder past drive-in restaurants, all of it backdropped by palm trees, a curling surf, and a purple sky that had obviously been created as a cinematic tribute to our youth.

  The season seemed eternal, not subject to the laws of mutability. At best, it was improbable that the spring of our graduation year would ever be stained by the tannic smell of winter. If we experienced visions of mortality, we needed only to look into one another’s faces to reassure ourselves that none of us would ever die, that rumors of distant wars had nothing to do with our own lives.

  My half brother was Jimmie Robicheaux. He was a hothead, an idealist, and a ferocious fistfighter in a beer-glass brawl, but often vulnerable and badly used by those who knew how to take advantage of his basic goodness. In 1958, he and I worked ten days on and five days off for what was called a doodlebug outfit, or seismograph crew, laying out rubber cable and seismic jugs in bays and swamps all along the Louisiana-Texas coastline. During the off-hitch, when we were back on land, we hung out at Galveston Island, fishing at night on the jetties, swimming in the morning, eating fried shrimp in a café on the amusement pier where the seagulls fluttered and squeaked just outside the open windows.

  The Fourth of July that year was a peculiar day. The barometer dropped and the sky turned a chemical green, and the breakers were full of sand and dead baitfish when they smacked on the beach. The swells were smooth-surfaced and rain-dented between the waves, but down below, the undertow was terrific, almost like steel cable around the thighs, the sand rushing out from under our feet as the waves sucked back upon themselves.

  Most swimmers got out of the water. Perhaps because of our youth or the fact Jimmie and I had drunk too much beer, we swam far out from the beach, to the third sandbar, the last one that provided a barrier between the island itself and the precipitous descent off the edge of the continental shelf. But the sandbar was hard-packed, the crest only two feet below the surface, which allowed the swimmer to sit safely above the tidal current and enjoy a panoramic view of both the southern horizon and the lights that were going on all over the island.

  The sun broke through the thunderheads in the west, just above the earth’s rim, like liquid fire pooled up inside the clouds. For the first time that day we could see our shadows on the water’s surface. Then we realized we were not alone.

  Thirty yards out a shark fin, steel-gray, triangular in shape, cut across the swell, then disappeared under a wave. Jimmie and I stood up on the sandbar, our hearts beating, and waited for the fin to resurface. Behind us we could hear the crackle of lightning in the clouds.

  “It’s probably a sand shark,” Jimmie said.

  But we both knew that most sand sharks were small, yellowish in hue, and didn’t cruise at sunset on the outer shelf. We stared at the water for a long time, then saw a school of baitfish scatter in panic across the surface. The baitfish seemed to sink like silver coins into the depths, then the swell became smooth-surfaced and dark green again, wrinkling slightly when the wind gusted. I could hear Jimmie breathing as though he had labored up a hill.

  “You want to swim for it?” I asked.

  “They think people are sea turtles. They look up and see a silhouette and see our arms and legs splashing around and think we’re turtles,” he said.

  It wasn’t cold, but his skin looked hard and prickled in the wind.

  “Let’s wait him out,” I said.

  I saw Jimmie take a deep breath and his mouth form a cone, as though a sliver of dry ice were evaporating on his tongue. Then his face turned gray and his eyes looked into mine.

  “What?” I said.

  Jimmie pointed southward, at two o’clock from where we stood. A fin, larger than the first one, sliced diagonally across a swell and cut through a cresting wave. Then we saw the shark’s back break the surface, a skein of water sliding off skin that was the color of scorched pewter.

  There was nothing for it. The sun was setting, like a molten planet descending into its own smoke. In a half hour the tide would be coming in, lifting us off the sandbar, giving us no option except to swim for the beach, our bodies in stark silhouette against the evening sky.

  We could hear music and the popping of fireworks on the amusement pier and see rockets and star shells exploding above the line of old U.S. Army officers’ quarters along the beachfront. A wave slid across my chest, and inside it I saw the pinkish blue air sac and long tendril-like stingers of a Portuguese man-of-war. It drifted away, then another one, and another fell out of a wave and twisted in an eddy like half-inflated balloons.

  It was going to be a long haul to the beach.

  “There’s sharks in the water! Didn’t you fellers see the lifeguard’s flag?” a voice called.

  I didn’t know where the girl had come from. She sat astride an inner tube that was roped to two others, a short wood paddle in her hands. She wore a one-piece black swimsuit and had sandy reddish hair, and her shoulders glowed with sunburn. Behind her, in the distance, I could see the tip of a rock jetty that jutted far out into the breakers.

  She paddled her makeshift raft until it had floated directly above the sandbar and we could wade to it.

  “Where did you come from?” Jimmie said.
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br />   “Who cares? Better jump on. Those jellyfish can sting the daylights out of you,” she said.

  She was tall and slight of build and not much older than we were, her accent hard-core East Texas. A wave broke against my back, pushing me off balance. “Are you fellers deaf? Y’all sure don’t act like you care somebody is trying to hep you out of the big mess you got yourself into,” she said.

  “We’re coming!” Jimmie said, and climbed onto one of the inner tubes.

  Waves knocked us over twice and it took us almost a half hour to cross the trough between the third and second sandbars. I thought I saw a fin break the surface and slide across the sun’s afterglow, and, once, a hard-bodied object bumped against my leg, like a dull-witted bully pushing past you on a crowded bus. But after we floated past the second sandbar, we entered another environment, one connected to predictability where we could touch bottom with the ends of our toes and smell smoke from meat fires and hear children playing tag in the darkness.

  We told ourselves a seascape that could contain predators and the visitation of arbitrary violence upon the unsuspecting no longer held any sway in our lives. As we emerged from the surf the wind was as sweet as a woman’s kiss against the skin.

  The girl said her name was Ida Durbin and she had seen us through binoculars from the jetty and paddled after us because a shark had already attacked a child farther up the beach. “You’d do that for anybody?” Jimmie said.

  “There’s always some folks who need looking after, at least those who haven’t figured out sharks live in deep water,” she said.

  Jimmie and I owned a 1946 canary-yellow Ford convertible, with whitewall tires and twin Hollywood mufflers. We drove Ida back to the jetty, where she retrieved her beach bag and used a cabana to change into a sundress and sandals. Then we went to a beer garden that also sold watermelon and fried shrimp. The palm trees in the garden were strung with tiny white lights, and we sat under the palms and ate shrimp and watched the fireworks explode over the water.

  “Are y’all twins?” she asked.

  “I’m eighteen months older,” I said.