Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “Let’s talk about this guy Lou Kale. You told Chalons it was Kale who called your house and tried to warn you off the Ida Durbin disappearance?”

  “More or less.”

  “How’d you know it was Kale?”

  “The guy who called me talked like a pimp. But I wasn’t sure it was Kale until I saw Val Chalons’s reaction to the name.”

  “And you got the feeling Ida Durbin was alive?”

  “Yep.”

  “This is the way I see it. Somebody hired Bad Texas Bob to leave both of us dead in my fish camp. That’s known as a violation of the Eleventh Commandment, which is, don’t screw with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Time to get back on the full-tilt boogie, noble mon. Y’all got a fix on Kale’s cell phone?”

  “It bounced off a tower down in the Keys.”

  “Hmmm,” Clete said. “One way or another, all this stuff is connected to organized prostitution. Doing anything today?”

  JACKSON SQUARE, across from the Café du Monde, is a fine place to be on Saturday afternoon, as is the rest of the French Quarter. It’s a transitional time of day, caught between the tropical freshness of morning when families are exiting St. Louis Cathedral and sidewalk artists are setting up their easels, and the coming of twilight and the tourists and revelers on Bourbon Street, who in their mind’s eye probably see themselves as aloof visitors at the Baths of Caracalla—in control, faintly amused by its pernicious influences.

  The truth is that during times of high pedestrian traffic the Quarter is a safe place, its vice illusory, designed to titillate conventioneers from Omaha. The Quarter has always been a cash cow the city is not about to give over to jackrollers, crack dealers, Murphy artists, and indiscreet hookers. But after two in the morning, the glad-at-heart are gone, the nightclub and sidewalk bands have packed up, and the streetlamps seem coated with an iniquitous chemical vapor.

  If you’re really swacked, and without friends to care for you, you will in all probability have experiences you will not want to take with you into the daylight hours. A black pimp may step out of an alley and catch you by the sleeve, his face split with a lascivious grin, his breath as rife as a garbage can. A cabbie with a hooker in the back of his vehicle may pull to the curb and ask if he can help you find a motel room out on Airline Highway. A gang of kids coming out of Louis Armstrong Park may make you wonder if we all descend from the same tree.

  Before leaving New Iberia I tried to reach Molly, but her machine had been turned off. When Clete and I got to New Orleans, I called again and this time she answered. I told her I would probably not be back home until late Sunday afternoon.

  “Where are you now?” she said.

  “In Jackson Square, trying to get a lead on the man I had to shoot,” I replied.

  The line was quiet and I could tell Molly’s mind was on something else. “Do you feel any regret about last night?” she said.

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “Sometimes people think differently in the morning than they do at night.”

  “Can I see you tomorrow evening?” I said.

  “Yes,” she replied. Then she said it again. “Yes, we’ll go somewhere. We’ll take a boat ride maybe. We’ll do something good together, won’t we? I really want to see you, Dave.”

  After I closed my cell phone, I sat down on a bench in the square and listened to a street band knock out “The Yellow Dog Blues” while a juggler tossed wood balls in the air and an old man clutching a black umbrella peddled a unicycle in a circle. But the real song I heard were Molly Boyle’s words through the cell phone, like an urgent whisper in the ear.

  During the next five hours Clete and I covered the Quarter, the lower end of Magazine, a strip of water-bed motels on Airline, and a half dozen bars across the river in Algiers. New Orleans’ tradition of vice and outlawry goes back almost two hundred years, when the French used southern Louisiana as a dumping ground for both criminals and prostitutes. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess at the kind of offspring they bred.

  The pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte and their business partner James Bowie made large sums smuggling slaves from the West Indies through the bayous, in violation of the federal prohibition of 1807, which forbade the importation of slaves into the United States. Brothels and gambling halls thrived, shootings and knifings were commonplace, and stolen goods from the Spanish Main could be found in the best homes along St. John’s Bayou. The woman considered the wisest person in old New Orleans was a witch by the name of Marie LeVeau. Outside of Mardi Gras, the most well-attended and festive celebrations in the city were the public hangings, conducted in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

  Those hedonistic and pagan traditions are still alive and well in contemporary New Orleans, modernity’s influence upon them cosmetic if non-extant. Crack cocaine hit the city like a hydrogen bomb in the 1980s, decimating black communities and the political viability they had gained during the Civil Rights era. Alcoholism is not a disease here but a venerated family heirloom. The Mafia introduced itself in New Orleans in 1890 by murdering the police commissioner and has been here ever since. Upscale brothels with baroque interiors and carriage houses may have become interesting anachronisms, but the industry of prostitution itself is more widespread, uncontrolled, disease-ridden, and dangerous than it has ever been.

  Pimps don’t have to seek recruits. Crack addicts, runaways, and desperate single mothers are everywhere, many of them glad to have the protection of a pimp who does not physically abuse them. Clete and I talked to a sixteen-year-old girl from Iowa, street name Holly, who had tracks on her arms, doll-like circles of orange rouge on her cheeks, and a black eye a john gave her after he tried to force her to perform oral sex on him without paying. The pimp, who posted bail for his girls regularly through Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, found the john and used a tire iron to extort three hundred dollars from him, half of which he gave to the girl.

  “So you think Claude isn’t a bad dude?” I said to her.

  She was sipping a Coke through a straw at an outdoor table at McDonald’s. Her pimp, whose name was Claude Deshotels, had instructed her to tell us whatever we wanted to know. “He’s got his moments,” she said, looking at the intersection, where two black women in skin-tight white shorts were talking to a man through a car window.

  “You know a guy by the name of Bob Cobb? Some people call him Bad Texas Bob,” I said.

  “What’s he look like?” she asked.

  “Old, dresses like a cowboy, long teeth, used to be a cop,” Clete said.

  She twisted her lips thoughtfully. She was overweight, powdered, her hair dyed gold, hanging in tresses on her shoulders. She looked like a girl who could have worked at a small-town dollar store or the McDonald’s where we were eating. “Got lines around his mouth like a prune?” she said.

  “Sounds like our guy,” I said.

  “There was an old guy who told me to call him Bob. He put a gun and a blackjack on the nightstand. He kept a cigarette burning in the ashtray while we did it,” she said.

  “How long ago?” I said.

  “Two, maybe three weeks,” she said.

  “Did he say anything about wanting to clip somebody? Anything about a kite being up on somebody?” I asked.

  “Kill them?” she said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “I don’t get in the car with johns like that.”

  “How do you know when not to get in a car?” Clete said.

  “I can just tell, that’s all. That’s why nothing real bad ever happened to me. The dangerous ones look at you in a certain way. You can always tell.”

  “The old guy named Bad Texas Bob is dead. He can’t hurt you. You sure you don’t remember anything else about him?” I said.

  “Cops don’t talk when they do it. They just want to get off, then pretend they don’t know you. Can I have another Big Mac?” she said.

  BUT IN OUR SEARCH through New Orleans we had little success in finding the individual who was of mos
t interest to us—Apollonaire Babineau, also known as Jigger Babineau because he had served his apprenticeship in the Mob as a lookout man for a gang of smash-and-grab jewel thieves.

  Jigger was actually a coonass from Barataria, who had never shed his accent or his Cajun attachment to both his wife and mother. But perhaps because of his christened name, Jigger suffered delusions of grandeur. He claimed he had helped Jack Murphy rob the richest women in Miami and West Palm Beach of their jewels, and on a dare had picked the coat pocket of Meyer Lansky at Joe’s Stone Crab. As miscreants go, he was a fairly innocuous character, an anachronism from an earlier era who believed washing stolen and counterfeit money at racetracks was honorable work suitable for a family man.

  Unfortunately for Jigger, he was a degenerate gambler and he lost a pile of money from an armored car robbery in a card game run by the Giacano family. The game got busted, two of the Giacanos went away for the armored car job, even though they were innocent, and Jigger had to go into Witness Protection. Clete and I were the cops who busted the game.

  We tried Jigger’s cottage off Tchoupitoulas and hunted in the bars where he drank. He had left Witness Protection after Didoni Giacano died of colon cancer, but obviously he had learned we were looking for him and had decided to fly under the radar. We began to believe Jigger had blown the Big Sleazy.

  That Saturday night we stayed in Clete’s apartment above his office on St. Ann Street, and in the morning went to Jigger’s cottage again and to a pool hall where he sometimes shot nine ball. No Jigger. We ended up at a lunch counter in the Carrollton district, empty-handed, discouraged, looking through the window at the St. Charles streetcar warping in the heat. Clete glanced at his watch. “It’s twelve-thirty Sunday,” he said.

  “So what?” I said.

  “I wasn’t thinking. Order some meatball sandwiches to go and meet me on the back end of Audubon Park,” he said.

  He was out the door and down the street in his Caddy before I could reply.

  A half hour later I was laying out our lunch on a picnic table under a live oak dripping with Spanish moss when I saw the Caddy coming hard up the street, swerving in a shower of leaves at the park’s entrance. Clete parked in a shady spot among the trees and walked across the grass toward me, a small ice cooler swinging from his hand, an unlit cigarette bouncing in his mouth. “You get some pecan pie?” he said.

  “Where’d you go?” I said.

  “The old Washington Street Cemetery.” He ripped the tab off a beer and drank from it. His face was hot and flushed in the heat, the can cold-looking and beaded with moisture in his big hand.

  “So why’d you go to the cemetery?” I said.

  “Let’s eat first. Wow, what a scorcher. You could fry eggs on the sidewalk.”

  I began to regret we’d come to New Orleans. We’d revisited the underside of the city, a world of avarice, use, and deceit, even enlisting the aid of a pimp in order to interview a child prostitute, gaining nothing of value in turn except the cynical knowledge that no vice flourishes without sanction. I wanted to take a shower and burn my clothes. I wanted to be back in New Iberia with Molly Boyle.

  Clete finished eating and pinched a paper napkin on his mouth, then studied his convertible, his jaw cocked thoughtfully. Some black teenagers had been parked by Clete’s vehicle for a few minutes, their radio blaring, but they had driven away and now the Caddy sat by itself in the warm shade of the oak tree. Clete stuffed our trash in a barrel and hefted up his ice cooler. “Let’s rock,” he said.

  He fished his keys out of his slacks, but walked to the rear of the Caddy rather than to the driver’s door. He propped one of his two-tone shoes on the bumper and brushed dust off it with his handkerchief. “You going to behave now?” he said to the car trunk.

  Inside, I could hear muffled cries and feet kicking against a hard surface. “Who’s in there?” I said, incredulous.

  “Jigger Babineau. I forgot it was Sunday. Jigger always visits his wife’s tomb on Sunday. The little bastard tried to stab me with the file on his nail clippers.”

  Clete slipped the key in the lock and popped the hatch. The smell of body odor and urine mushroomed out of the trunk. Jigger Babineau sat up, blinking at the light, then tumbled onto the grass, gasping for cool air.

  Jigger had facial features like a stick figure. He had sprayed hair remover on his eyebrows, for reasons he had never explained, and now daily re-created his eyebrows with black eye pencil so that he looked perpetually surprised or frightened. He was short, pear-shaped, and wore double-soled shoes and suits with padded shoulders and some said a roll of socks stuffed inside his fly. His hands were white and round and as small as a ten-year-old child’s. He was plainly disgusted with his circumstances and the indignity that had been visited upon him. “I figured if elephant-ass was back in town, you weren’t far away,” he said.

  “Comment la vie, Jigger?” I said.

  “He’s good. Throw him a beer,” Clete said.

  “How’d you hear about a cop wanting to pop me?” I asked.

  “Why should I tell you anyt’ing?” he said.

  “Because we don’t mind riding you around in my car trunk some more,” Clete said.

  “Do it, you fat fuck. I couldn’t care less. I already pissed myself,” he said.

  “Not a good choice of words, Jigger,” Clete said.

  “Try these—bite my pole. Also, teach your sister to be a little more tidy. She left her diaphragm under my bed again,” Jigger said.

  I cracked a beer and handed it to him. “You could have taken the bounce on that armored car job, Jigger, but we got you into Witness Protection and let the Giacanos go down for the robbery. They’re dead, you’re on the street, and you never did time. Tell me, you really think you got a raw deal?”

  But Jigger was still noncommittal. I tried again, this time using his birth name. “You’re a family guy, Apollo. Clete and I knew that. That’s why you got slack and the Giacanos got back-to-back nickels in Angola,” I said.

  He lifted his shirt off his chest and smelled himself. “You got any salt?” he asked.

  “Hang on,” I said.

  I went back to the trash barrel by our picnic table and dug a tiny pack of salt from our take-out box. Clete could hardly hide his impatience. Jigger sprinkled his beer can and drank from it, then cut a grateful belch. “The word was out somebody had a kite up on an Iberia Parish detective. But no pro in New Orleans is gonna hit a cop. So they didn’t get no takers.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I said.

  “Like they hand out business cards wit’ their names on them?” he said.

  “How’d you like the side of your head kicked in?” Clete said.

  “That’s it, Purcel. Tell your sister she’s glommed my magic twanger for the last time,” Jigger said.

  I thought Clete was going to hit him, but this time he couldn’t help but laugh. Jigger drank again from the can and looked at me. “I heard the juice was coming down from some people who used to own some cathouses. That’s how come the work went to this cop. He was tight with the people running these cathouses.”

  “Why did these guys want me out of the way, Jigger?”

  “I didn’t try to find out. It’s amateurs who’s messed up this city. I stay away from them,” he said. “You got another brew in there?”

  I squatted down, eye-level with him. “You’re not giving us a lot of help here, partner,” I said.

  “Jericho Johnny put you on to me?” he said.

  “Your name came up in the conversation,” I replied.

  “What’s that tell you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The number-one button man in New Orleans giving up a made guy to a cop? The old days are gone, Robicheaux. Live wit’ it,” he said.

  WHEN I GOT HOME Sunday evening, I called Molly Boyle, but she was not home. I went to bed early, then was awakened by the phone ringing inside the sound of rain. It was Dana Magelli, an old friend at NOPD. “Did you and Clete Purcel questi
on a kid by the name of Holly Blankenship, a runaway from Iowa?” he asked.

  “Yesterday?”

  “Right. Her pimp says y’all talked to her at a McDonald’s.”

  “She didn’t use that last name,” I said.

  “She’s not using any name now,” Dana said.

  “What?”

  “Her body was dumped in a trash pit out by Chalmette in the early a.m. The guy who strangled her used a coat hanger. You working on the Baton Rouge serial killer case?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not why we were in town,” I said, trying to shake the image of a hapless, overweight girl murdered and thrown away like yesterday’s coffee grinds.

  “You there?” Dana said.

  “I was trying to get a lead on a guy I had to shoot. His name was Bob Cobb.”

  “Yeah, I know all about that. Funny the girl ends up dead right after she talks to you. Must be just coincidence, huh? Why would anyone kill a girl because she talked to a cop? Her pimp gave you permission, didn’t he?” he said.

  Chapter 14

  EARLY MONDAY MORNING I was in Helen’s office. “There was semen in the girl?” she said.

  “That’s what Dana said,” I replied.

  “So let’s see what their lab says. In the meantime, there’s no connection between her homicide and you being in New Orleans, none at least that we can see. You reading me on this?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We’re buried in open cases. Our backlog looks like the national debt. Don’t stir up things with NOPD. If they want your help, they’ll call. That translates into mind your own business.”

  She stared at me steadily, biting at a hangnail, waiting to see if her words had taken effect.

  “The girl got it on with Bad Texas Bob, a guy who contracted to kill me. The girl talks to me, then she’s dead. What’s the point in saying there’s no connection?”

  Helen removed a tiny piece of skin from her tongue and dropped it in the wastebasket.