Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  “How’s the life, Ida?” I said.

  “Oh, I hope that’s not meant to injure. It’s not, is it?”

  I sat down without being asked. “Why didn’t you write and tell us you were okay, Ida?”

  “Because I wasn’t okay. Because I was a kid. Because I told myself Jimmie would be fine without me. Pick one you like.”

  “A guy named Troy Bordelon went to the grave thinking he was partly responsible for your death,” I said.

  “I never heard of this person. I didn’t choose the life I’ve lived, Dave. It was chosen for me. But others may see it differently.”

  “I happen be in the latter category, Ida. Val Chalons is trying to frame me on a child molestation charge. He also defamed my wife. That’s why he’s in Iberia General Hospital. I stomped the shit out of him. If I had it to do over again, I’d rip up his whole ticket. The only regret I have is that his father may have had a seizure because of the damage I did to his son.”

  If she took any offense at my remarks, it disappeared inside her face. “You seem to be handling the pressures of life well enough,” she said, gazing at the terrace and the moss that was lifting in the oak trees by the pool.

  I said earlier that in my view age is not a magic agency in our lives. But perhaps Ida was the exception after all. The country girl who had paddled an inner tube far out from shore and saved Jimmie and me from sharks was gone; the woman who had replaced her possessed the timeless and inured hauteur of a successful medieval courtesan. Jimmie had said she had wanted to see her son, Valentine. But where had she been all those years? Raphael Chalons had raised him, not she. Had Mr. Raphael excluded her from her son’s life? I doubted it.

  “Lost in thought?” she said.

  “Why has your son done so much to harm me and my wife? Is he that fearful people will discover who his mother is? Is he that cowardly and insecure?”

  She drank from her teacup, then set it back down in the saucer. The freckles on her shoulders seemed to disappear in the glaze of sunlight through the French doors. “It was good seeing you, Dave. I hope things work out for you and your wife,” she said.

  “Next time you want to wish me well, Ida, put it on a postcard and drop it in a mailbox,” I said.

  “You’re a bitter man,” she said.

  “Just a realistic one,” I replied.

  But my failed effort at reconciliation with Ida Durbin and the past was not over. On my way out of the lobby into the porte cochere, I almost knocked down a man dressed in a blazer, an open-collar print shirt, knife-creased slacks, and oxblood loafers. He was a muscularly compact man, his skin deeply tanned, his iron-gray hair slick with gel. When I collided with him, he had been holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a gold lighter in the other. He apologized, lit his cigarette in an expansive fashion, and started to walk around me.

  “You pointed a gun at me in a Galveston motel in 1958, Mr. Kale,” I said. “You really scared me. You called yourself the butter and egg man.”

  “Some people are walking memory banks. Me? I can’t remember what I ate for supper last night,” he said.

  “You guys are here to do business, aren’t you? Your visit doesn’t have anything to do with Val Chalons.”

  “We need to dial it down, my man. I need to get inside, too, if you’ll step aside.”

  “I’m a sheriff’s detective, Mr. Kale. You’re a pimp. You want a trip down to the bag, that can be arranged. But regardless of what happens here, you keep your ass out of New Iberia, and you keep a lot of gone between you and Clete Purcel. You reading me on this, Mr. Kale?”

  He removed his cigarette from his mouth and tipped his ashes away from his person so they didn’t blow back on his coat. “The name is Coyne, Lou Coyne. And you got the wrong dude, buddy.”

  He went through the revolving door into the motel. It had rained that morning, and the breeze under the porte cochere smelled of wet flowers and leaves and the lichen that was crusted on the massive limbs of the live oaks. I didn’t want to get any deeper into the world of Ida Durbin and Lou Kale, no more than you want to immerse yourself in the effluent that backs up from a sewage pipe. But I knew a predator when I saw one. Lou Kale and Ida Durbin were no longer symbols or milestones out of Jimmie’s and my adolescent experience. Nor were they simply foils to the innocence of the postwar era in which we had grown up. They may have been upgraded from their origins and elevated by economic circumstance into a larger world, but Ida Durbin and Lou Kale were the emissaries of organized crime, no matter what they called themselves. They were real and they were here.

  WANT TO FIND OUT who the closet boozers are in your neighborhood? Ask the garbage man. Want to check out the local politics? Talk with the barber. Want to find out what your neighbors are really like? Ask a kid. Want to find out who’s washing money at the track, fencing stolen property, running dope, greasing the zoning board, providing hookers for conventioneers, or selling gang-bangers Tech-nines modified with hell triggers? Forget news media and police pencil pushers and official sources of all kinds. Ask a beat cop who hasn’t slept since 1965 or a street junkie whose head glows in the dark.

  During the morning I talked with a retired DEA agent while he drove golf balls on a practice range; an ex–Air American pilot who flew nine years inside the Golden Triangle; an old-time Washington, D.C., hooker who operated a bar in North Lafayette; and a pharmaceutically addicted city Vice cop who had done two tours in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. They all shared one commonality—they had been witnesses to events of historical importance that few people knew about and they had seen forms of human behavior about which they never spoke. The latter quality alone, to my mind, made them exceptional human beings.

  For generations all the vice in Louisiana had been run by a few individuals in New Orleans. Even when I was a beat cop, no one opened a brothel, set up a slot machine, or sold one lid of Afghan skunk without first kissing the ring of Didoni Giacano. But Didi Gee was pushing up mushrooms, gambling was a state-sponsored industry, and narcotics had become part of the culture. Louisiana, once a closed fiefdom operated by the appointees of Frank Costello, was now wide open to the entrepreneurial spirit. Drug mules hammered down Interstate 10, from both Houston and Miami, loaded with weed, meth, and coke. Pimps had their pick of crack whores, whose managerial costs were minimal.

  But none of my friends had ever heard of Lou Kale or Ida Durbin. Nor had they heard of anyone going by the names of Connie and Lou Coyne. I began to wonder if I had been too hard on Ida. She may have saved Clete Purcel’s life, I told myself, and according to Clete’s account, even Lou Kale had seemed a reluctant participant in his interrogation and beating.

  Or was I being romantic and foolish about people who had invested their lives in the use of others?

  I drove back to New Iberia, unable to think straight. Helen had left a Post-it on my door. SEE ME, it said.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, looking up from her desk.

  “I took some personal time in Lafayette. I called Wally before eight,” I replied.

  “What kind of ‘personal time’?”

  “I saw Ida Durbin.”

  “I have to meet this woman.”

  “What is it, Helen?”

  “Raphael Chalons wants to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “You got me. Unless he thinks you’re a priest.” She looked at her watch. “It sounded to me like he was already on the bus.”

  I HAVE HEARD both hospice personnel and psychologists maintain that human beings lose body weight at the moment of death, that the dimensions of the skeleton and the tissue visibly shrink before the eye, as though the escape of the soul leaves behind a cavity swirling with atoms. Raphael Chalons was not dead when I reached Iberia General, but his stricken face and hollow eyes and the sag of his flesh on his bones made me wonder if the Angel of Death was not deliberately casting a slow shadow on the haunted man who stared back at me from the hospital bed.

  “I tried to bring you fl
owers earlier, Mr. Raphael. But the nurse felt my visit wasn’t an appropriate one,” I said.

  My words and their banality were obviously of no interest to him.

  His eyes were as black as a raven’s wing, his facial skin oily, spiked with whiskers, furrowed around the mouth. One hand lay palm-up on top of the sheet. He crooked his fingers at me.

  I did not want to approach him. I did not want to inhale his breath. I did not want his words to put talons in my breast. I did not want to be held captive by another dying man.

  But I leaned over him just the same. His fingers rose up and tapped my chest, as though he could convey meaning through my skin to compensate for the failure of his vocal cords. His lips moved, but his words were only pinpricks of spittle on my face.

  “I can’t understand you, sir,” I said.

  A flame burned in his cheeks and his eyes rolled up at mine, as a dependent lover’s might. A clot broke in his throat. “Not his fault,” he said.

  “Sir?” I said.

  His fingers tore a button on my shirt. His breath was dank, earth-smelling, like dirt spaded from a tree-covered grave. “The fault is mine. All my fault. Everything,” he whispered. “Please stop my son.”

  “From doing what, Mr. Raphael?”

  But his hand released my shirt and his gaze receded from mine, as though he were sinking into a black well and I was now only a marginal figure on its perimeter.

  The nurse came in and closed the blinds. It was only then I noticed that my flowers were on the windowsill. “Don’t worry, he’s only sleeping,” she said. “He has bursts of energy, then he falls asleep. He liked your flowers.”

  “Has he talked about his son?” I asked.

  “No, not at all,” she replied. She nodded toward the door, indicating she wanted to finish the conversation in the corridor. “May I be frank? I was very disturbed by something I saw take place here. It was very distressing.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Mr. Val came into the room with two lawyers. They tried to get Mr. Raphael to dictate a will. But he wouldn’t do it. Mr. Val was quite upset. No, the better term is irate.”

  “Thank you for telling me this,” I said.

  “You and Mr. Raphael must be very close.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He only asked to see one other person. Someone named Ida. Fortunately, she showed up here about an hour ago. I saw her stroking his hair on the pillow. She seemed a very elegant person. Do you know her, Detective Robicheaux?”

  At three that afternoon a nurse’s aide found Raphael Chalons half out of his bed, his sightless eyes staring out of his head as though he had looked into a camera’s flash. The blanket and sheet had cascaded over his shoulders, like the mantle a medieval lord might wear as he walked toward a blade of light on the earth’s rim.

  Chapter 27

  WEDNESDAY EVENING Molly and I towed my boat to Henderson Swamp and fished at sunset inside a grove of flooded cypress trees. In the distance we could see car headlights flowing across the elevated highway that traverses a chain of bays and canals inside the center of the Atchafalaya Basin. The air was breathless, the moon rising above the cypress into a magenta sky, the water so still you could hear the hyacinths popping open back in the trees.

  We kept two largemouth bass that we caught on plugs and headed across a long bay toward the boat landing. In the dusk I could see cows standing on a green levee and lights inside the baitshop and restaurant at the landing. We winched the boat onto our trailer, then drove up the concrete ramp and went inside the baitshop for a cold drink. Through the window I saw a man on the gallery pouring a bag of crushed ice into his cooler, rearranging the fish inside. He put the plastic wrapper in a trash can and drank from a bottle of beer while he admired the sunset.

  “Wait here a minute,” I said to Molly.

  “Somebody you know?” she said.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  I approached the man on the gallery. The wind had come up, and I could see the leaves of the cypress trees lifting like green lace out on the water. The man felt my weight on the plank he was standing on. He lowered the bottle from his mouth without drinking from it and turned toward me. “Yeah, I remember you used to talk about fishing over here,” he said.

  “Always a pleasure to see you, Johnny,” I said.

  He nodded, as though a personal greeting did not require any other response.

  “How’s your mother?” I asked.

  “When you’re that old and you smell the grave, you’re thankful for little things. She don’t complain.”

  He slid another bottle of beer out of his cooler and twisted off the cap. The fish in the cooler were stiff and cold-looking and speckled with blood and ice under the overhead light. Jericho Johnny’s shirt puffed open in a gust of wind across the water. He turned his face toward the horizon, as though a fresh scent had invaded his environment. As he stood framed against a washed-out sky, his eyes devoid of any humanity that I could detect, his nose wrinkling slightly, I wondered if he wasn’t in fact the liege lord of Charon, his destroyed voice box whispering in the blue-collar dialect of the Irish Channel while he eased his victims quietly across the Styx.

  I leaned on the railing, my arm only inches from his. “You can’t do business in Iberia Parish, Johnny,” I said.

  He raised his beer bottle to his mouth and took a small sip off it. He glanced over his shoulder at Molly, who sat at a table in the baitshop, reading a magazine. “That your lady?” he said.

  “Look at me,” I said. “Val Chalons is off limits. I don’t care what kind of deal you cut with Clete Purcel.”

  He closed the lid on his cooler and latched it. “Purcel don’t have anything to do with me, Robicheaux. You were nice to my mother. I was nice to you. In fact, twice I was nice to you. That means I go where I want. I do what I want,” he said.

  He placed his unfinished beer on the railing and walked toward his car, his cooler balanced on his shoulder, ice water draining down his shirtback as though his skin possessed no sensation.

  I WENT TO CLETE PURCEL’S OFFICE on Main Street during lunchtime the next day. His office had been a sports parlor during the 1940s, then had been gutted by a fire and turned into a drugstore that went bankrupt after the Wal-Mart store was built south of town. In the last week an interior decorator had hung the ancient brick walls with historical photographs of New Iberia and antique firearms encrusted with rust that had been found in a pickle barrel under a nineteenth-century warehouse on the bayou. The new ambiance was stunning. So was the clientele going in and out of the office. Clete was now starting up his own bail bond service, and the utilitarian furniture in the front of the office was draped with people whose idea of a good day was the freedom to watch trash television without interruption.

  I walked through the litter and cigarette smoke and out the back door to the canvas-shaded brick patio where Clete often ate his lunch. He had planted palms and banana trees on the edge of the bricks, and had set up a huge electric fan by a spool table and swaybacked straw chair that served as his dining area. He was hunched over a crab burger, reading the Times-Picayune, the wind flapping the canvas over his head, when he heard me behind him.

  “What’s the gen, noble mon?” he said.

  “You heard about Raphael Chalons’s death?” I said.

  “Yeah, tragic loss.”

  “I saw him just before he died. He asked me to stop his son.”

  “From doing what?”

  “He didn’t get a chance to say.”

  Clete set down his food and wiped his mouth. He gazed out at the whiteness of the sun on the bayou. “You’re saying Val Chalons is a serial killer, maybe?”

  “You tell me.”

  “He’s a punk who thinks he can wipe his ass on other people. He made you out a perve and that’s why I—”

  “What?”

  “Called up Jericho Johnny Wineburger after I’d been toking on some substances I should have left alone.”
<
br />   “That’s the second reason I’m here. I saw him last night at Henderson Swamp.”

  Clete twisted in his chair, the straw weave creaking under his weight. “You saw Wineburger? Here?”

  “I told him he wasn’t going to do business in Iberia Parish. He told me to go screw myself.”

  “Dave, I called this guy back. I said I shouldn’t have bothered him, that I was wired, that we didn’t need his help, that Chalons is not worthy of his talents. We had an understanding.”

  “I didn’t get that impression.”

  “Look, here’s how it went down. Originally I told Johnny we didn’t need Val Chalons as a factor in our lives right now. Don’t look at me like that. Johnny owes twenty grand to a couple of shylocks. The vig is a point and a half a week. If he doesn’t get his act together, he’s going to lose his saloon. I told him the shylocks owe me a favor and I could get them to give him two free months on the vig if he could get the principal together. But I called him back when I was sober and told him it was hands-off on Chalons. I told him the deal with the shylocks was still solid—no vig for two months. But he doesn’t hurt Chalons. That was absolutely clear.”

  “Maybe his pride won’t let him take a free ride.”

  “Wineburger? That’s like a toilet bowl worrying about bad breath.”

  “Then what is he doing here?” I said.

  “With a guy like that—” Clete blew air up into his face and gave me a blank look. “Don’t let me roll any more Mexican imports, will you?”

  ATHUNDERSTORM POUNDED through town that afternoon, then disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. When I got home from work, the lawn was scattered with wet leaves and the birdhouse Molly had nailed in the fork of a live oak had split across the nail holes and cracked apart on the ground, spilling all the birdseed in a yellow pile. I gathered up the broken pieces, dropped them in the garbage can, and found the listing for Andre Bergeron in the Jeanerette section of our local telephone directory.