Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Clete Purcel watched the show in a blue-collar bar on the west end of town, made a call on a pay phone, then drove to my house and threw a pecan hard against my front window.

  “What’s up, Cletus?” I said, stepping out on the gallery.

  “You see the molestation story in the morning paper?”

  “Nope.”

  “You see yourself on television tonight?” he said.

  “Yep.”

  “Stop waiting for Chalons to fall in his own shit. It’s time to take this lying cocksucker off at the neck. I’ve got a call in to Jericho Johnny Wineburger.”

  I walked into the yard. The wind in the trees caused shadows to slide across Clete’s face, like water running down a window glass. He was wearing his porkpie hat and a wilted tropical shirt and gray slacks, and I could smell weed and beer-sweat trapped in his clothes.

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I said.

  “You think you can beat these guys playing by the rules? Wake up. They own the ballpark. We’re just the humps who carry out the garbage.”

  “Been toking on a little Mexican gage tonight?”

  “No, what I’ve been doing is wrapping a ‘drop’ in black tape and filing off a few serial numbers.”

  “Come on in and eat something.”

  “I’m going to take Chalons down. Nobody is calling my partner a perve. You see Jericho Johnny around town, pretend you don’t.”

  He climbed in his pink Cadillac and roared off, a tape deck blasting out Bob Seeger’s “The Horizontal Bop,” leaves blowing from under the wire wheels.

  Would Clete actually try to pop Val Chalons? Or was that just a mixture of weed and beer talking? I thought about it. Clete’s Caddy swerved at the corner in front of the Shadows, flattening a garbage can into a building.

  Chapter 25

  THE 911 CALL from a fisherman out by Lake Dautrieve came in at 5:43 Monday morning. “She don’t have no clothes on. I t’ought maybe it was some kind of accident. Like maybe she fallen out of a tree or somet’ing,” he said.

  “Sir, calm down. Is the person injured?” the female dispatcher said.

  “Injured? What you talkin’ about?” the caller replied.

  Helen picked me up in my front yard. The sun was just striking the brick buildings on Main as we crossed the drawbridge and headed up Loreauville Road toward the lake.

  “I thought I was on the desk,” I said.

  “This cruiser is your desk, so shut up,” she said.

  We arrived at the crime scene just behind the coroner’s van. Uniformed sheriff’s deputies from both Iberia and St. Martin parishes were already there, stringing yellow tape through scrub oaks and gum and willow trees on the edge of the lake. The shallows were carpeted with hyacinths, and I could see the black heads of moccasins between the lily pads, barely breaking the water. High up on the windstream, turkey buzzards circled like ragged-edged oriental kites. I watched Koko Hebert stoop under the tape and walk toward a forked oak tree with the plodding ennui of a man who has long given up on the world.

  Helen took a call on a hand-held radio, then tossed it on the seat of the cruiser. “The boys from Baton Rouge are on their way,” she said.

  “They think it’s the Baton Rouge guy?” I said.

  “A tattoo on the vic is the same as on a woman who was abducted by LSU Sunday afternoon,” she replied.

  The abduction had taken place in a middle-income neighborhood a few blocks off Highland Road. The victim, Barbara Trajan, was the mother of two children, an aerobics instructor at a health club, and the wife of a high school football coach. She had a tattoo of an orange and purple butterfly on her abdomen, just below her navel. The previous afternoon, she had been working in her flower bed, one that paralleled the driveway. Her husband had taken the children to a church softball game. When they returned home, Barbara Trajan had disappeared. Her gardening trowel and one cotton glove lay on the concrete.

  I looked across the lake at the sun. It was molten and watery, wrapped in vapor, just above the tree line. The previous night had been hot and dry, the clouds crackling with thunder that gave no rain. Now, a breeze suddenly sprang up in the south and riffled across the lake. A gray, salty odor that had been trapped inside the woods struck my face. Helen cleared her throat and spit to the side. “Oh boy,” she said.

  We pulled on latex gloves and went inside the tape. The ground was leaf strewn and soft, torn with drag marks, gouged by boots or heavy shoes, as though a man had been pulling a weight that resisted his grasp. The victim was nude, her chin fitted at an upward angle in the fork of a tree. Her wrists were bound behind her with plastic cuffs, her eyes open, as though they had been poached by a vision of human behavior she had never imagined. A white cotton work glove protruded from her mouth.

  Koko Hebert stood behind the dead woman, wiping mosquitoes out of his face. I saw him stoop over, reach out with his latex-gloved hand, then rise up again and jot something on a notepad. A moment later he walked past me, without speaking, his shoulders humped, his face flushed and oily in the heat. He ducked under the crime scene tape and went out by the lake, by himself, into the breeze. I followed him down by the lakeside. He was still writing on his notepad.

  “Wait for the postmortem and I’ll be able to speak with more specificity,” he said.

  “I’m on a short tether. I’m not sure how much time I have left with the department,” I said.

  “Entrance through the rear. Bite marks on the shoulders. Death by strangulation. With a chain of some kind. With tiny links in it.” He looked at me.

  “Like the little piece of chain Fontaine Belloc hid on her person before she died?”

  “That’d be my bet,” he said.

  “How do you read this guy? Don’t give me your cynical runaround, either, Koko. You’re an intelligent man.”

  “He’s a classic psychopath, which means we don’t have a clue about what goes on inside his head. But if you ask me, I think he’s trying to lead the hunt away from Baton Rouge. I don’t think he’s from around here.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s transported two vics eighty miles into Iberia Parish. Both were alive during the trip. That means he incurred risks he didn’t have to. It was for a reason. My guess is he lives not far from Baton Rouge, maybe around Port Allen or Denham Springs. He’s squeezing his big-boy every time he sees us scratching our heads on TV.”

  “Maybe he had another reason,” I said.

  Koko lit a cigarette and studied the lake, either lost in his own thoughts or out of indifference to anything I had to say. Twenty feet out from the bank, I saw the gnarled, green-black tail of a gator roil the lily pads. Koko exhaled his cigarette smoke into the wind. “Yeah?” he said.

  “What if dropping the vic here is a ‘fuck-you’ card for people he knows?” I said.

  Koko continued to puff on his cigarette, his eyes veiled. I walked back toward the cruiser, then heard him laboring his way up the slope behind me.

  “Know anything about anthropology, primitive man’s behavior, that kind of crap?” he said.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Sometimes serial killers mark their territory, particularly when it has some kind of personal meaning to them. It looks like there’re piss stripes on a tree back there. There were also piss stripes on a tree by the pond where we found the Belloc woman. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time because we had the semen on the vic.

  “I’ve read through all the forensics on the Baton Rouge crime scenes. None of them makes mention of the perpetrator marking the area with urine. I think our guy is telling us something.”

  “Why didn’t he disfigure this one?” I asked.

  “He did. Inside. I told you to wait on the post, but you don’t listen. If you ever get this demented fuck in your sights, ask God to look the other way.”

  IT WAS NOT A MORNING to think about what I had seen.

  Any inner-city street cop, homicide investigator, or member of a sex crimes unit carries im
ages in his head that never go away, not unless he wants to burn them out of his skull with booze or yellow jackets or black speed. But what if the problem is not him or even the job? What if the problem is the simple fact that there is something bestial and cruel at work in the human race? What if his perception as a police officer is not a jaded but an accurate one?

  When I was on loan to Miami P.D. I saw a black mob in Liberty City drag three Cuban kids from a car and crush their heads into pulp with curbstones. I also saw five uniformed cops in Opa Locka beat a black motorcyclist to death with batons. Clete and I cut a corpse dancing with maggots out of a brick wall and had our unmarked car Molotoved in the same night. I’ve worked child abuse cases I will never discuss with anyone.

  But the expression on the face of the Trajan woman, her neck and head trapped helplessly in the fork of a tree, contained a suggestion about the human condition I couldn’t get out of my mind. I suspected she was a brave woman and fought her attacker to the end. I also suspected she was not undone by either her fear or the pain and sexual humiliation he visited upon her. But what I had seen in her eyes was worse. “Loss” is not the right word for it. It was a realization that she was alone and powerless, and that beyond the perimeter of her vision a sadist was about to steal everything of value she owned—her dignity, her self-respect, her husband, her children, her career as an aerobics instructor, the quiet home she returned to daily, and finally her life. All to satisfy the libidinous pleasure of a deviate to whom she had as much importance as a stick of chewing gum.

  What sociological factors could produce a man like this?

  I felt almost as though I could see his face, like a figure moving around on the edge of a dream. Maybe I had seen him the night Honoria Chalons was murdered. Maybe I had processed him into jail, held each of his fingers in mine and rolled them on an ink pad, pressing the whorls in his skin onto paper, as though I were creating a dermatological artwork. Maybe the oil in his skin was transferred to mine.

  But I knew with certainty that he was not far away, and that he would strike again soon, perhaps much closer to home, and that his intention was to deliver as much injury as possible to our community. I knew this in a way that was not demonstrable, not even to myself. But I knew it just the same, perhaps because I could not deny the cathartic, hard-pounding rush that violence had always brought me, one that was as pure and bright as a glass of ninety-proof whiskey flung onto a fire.

  I went into Helen’s office. She was gazing out the window at the cemetery, her hands in her back pockets, her breasts as firm as grapefruit against her shirt. “How’s it rockin’, Pops?” she said.

  “The serial guy is somebody we know.”

  “Like down at the Kiwanis?”

  “He broke his pattern when he murdered the teenage street hooker in New Orleans. It’s not coincidence she talked to Clete and me a few hours before she died.”

  “I know all this, Dave. It’s not helpful.”

  “Answer me this: With all the power and influence that Val Chalons has, why would he waste his time trying to ruin my reputation instead of finding his sister’s killer?”

  “He thinks you did it?”

  “No, he doesn’t. He’s covering his own butt.”

  I could see the fatigue in her eyes and I felt like a fool. What was she supposed to do? Take me off the desk because I had an unprovable intuition? Then I realized she wasn’t thinking about our conversation at all.

  “Raphael Chalons just got the paddles at Iberia General. He may not make it,” she said.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “He was visiting his son and had a stroke.”

  I collected my mail from my box and went back to my office, dazed, unable to explain my feelings to myself about a man I had always thought of as corrupt and vaguely sinister. I found myself staring at the envelopes and memos in my hand without the words on them registering. I sat down at my desk and called the hospital. An intern in the intensive-care unit told me Raphael Chalons was alive but paralyzed down one side and unable to speak.

  “Is he going to pull through?” I said.

  “You say you’re with the sheriff’s department?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He’s been in bad health for some time,” he said.

  A half hour later Mack Bertrand called from the lab. “I don’t know if this is good news or bad news,” he said. “The casts I made out at the Trajan crime scene this morning? I’m reasonably sure we’ve got a match with the casts I made under your bedroom window.”

  “You say ‘reasonably sure’?”

  “You ever watch this TV show where guys are always examining used Q-tips or a Kleenex some gal wiped her lipstick on?”

  “I’m lost,” I said.

  “None of this stuff is nuclear science. We’re talking about muddy boots,” he said.

  I called Molly at her agency and told her the voyeur at our house may have been the Baton Rouge serial killer.

  “Well, he’d better not come around again,” she said. “I’m going to pick up some steaks on the way home. Is there anything else you want from the store?”

  You want a stand-up woman in your life? Marry a nun.

  I BOUGHT FLOWERS at the Winn-Dixie and took them to the nurse’s station in the intensive-care unit at Iberia General. “They’re for Mr. Raphael,” I said.

  “He can’t have flowers in his room now. But I can keep them here at the station and put them in his room when he’s moved,” she said. She was a pleasant-looking older woman, with soft pink skin and blue-tinted white hair.

  “That would be fine,” I said. “Can I talk to him?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” she replied. “Who did you say you are?”

  “Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Are you the one who—”

  “Mr. Chalons’s son insulted my wife and I tore him up. I’m the one.”

  “I see.” She had set my flowers on a shelf under the counter. She retrieved them and pushed them toward me. “You need to talk to the resident about these,” she said, holding her eyes on mine. “Sometimes the water in the container forms bacteria and creates problems for us.”

  I walked off and left the flowers where they were. Through a partially opened door I saw the comatose face of Raphael Chalons, his head sunk deep in the pillow, his leaded eyes and hooked nose strangely suggestive of a carrion bird’s.

  THAT EVENING, while Snuggs and Tripod watched Molly flip a pair of sirloin steaks on the grill in the backyard, I called Jimmie at his apartment and asked for the address and phone number of the home on Lake Pontchartrain where Ida Durbin was staying with Jimmie’s friends.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “I’m being hung out to dry by her son. That might have something to do with it.”

  “Why blame her?”

  “I’m not. So lose the attitude.”

  “She’s not in New Orleans.”

  “Jimmie—”

  “She’s in Lafayette. Out on Pinhook Road. So is Lou Kale. Stay away from Kale. He’s a real shithead.”

  “You figured that out?”

  After I hung up the phone, I joined Molly at our picnic table in the backyard and we ate supper under the trees with Tripod and Snuggs, who had their own bowls at the end of the table. Then she and I walked downtown and had ice cream, as couples do on a late-summer evening, and I said nothing about Ida Durbin or the Baton Rouge serial killer.

  At sunup the next day I drove to Lafayette.

  Chapter 26

  I DON’T KNOW what I expected. My experience with age is that it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us. Perhaps I’m wrong. I wanted to be wrong when I met Ida Durbin. I also wanted to believe I would not act on an old resentment should I have the bad luck to run into her estranged husband, Lou Kale.

  They were staying in separat
e rooms in a lovely old motel built of historic brick on a part of Pinhook Road that had not been blighted by urban development and was still shrouded by spreading live oaks. It was not yet 7:00 a.m. when I showed my badge at the desk and asked for the room number of Ms. Connie Coyne. I had not called in advance.

  “We don’t have anyone by that name staying here,” the clerk said.

  “Look again,” I said.

  “No one by that name is staying here, sir,” he repeated, looking past me at someone waiting to check out.

  “Don’t tell me that. She’s here. So is her husband. His name is Lou Coyne.”

  “Oh, yes. They’re both registered under his name. I just saw her go into the dining room,” the clerk said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  According to Jimmie, Ida and her husband kept separate homes in Miami and obviously separate accommodations when they traveled. But the fact they were both registered at the motel under his name, indicating the charges were probably billed to the same credit card, made me wonder how separate in reality Ida’s life was from her husband’s.

  Few people were in the dining room and it wasn’t hard to pick out Ida from the other motel guests eating breakfast by the French doors, not far from the buffet table. Her hair still had its natural reddish tone and the years had not taken away her height or the thin, well-defined features of her face. The dramatic change was in her complexion. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, but in the broken light from the terrace her skin seemed etiolated, the freckles drained of color.

  She was nibbling on a piece of dry toast while she read from a hardbound book. The only food on her plate consisted of a few melon slices, a half dozen grapes, and a piece of Swiss cheese. Her cup was filled with hot tea. She wore a flowered sundress that I suspected came from an expensive shop on Biscayne Boulevard.

  She glanced up at me only when my shadow fell across her reading page. “Why, Dave,” she said. “I never could get over how much you and Jimmie looked alike.”