Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Then my phone rang. “I just had lunch with Ida,” Jimmie’s voice said. “There’s something real weird going on with Valentine Chalons.”

  “He wouldn’t see Ida?” I said.

  “No, she visited him at Iberia General. He was overjoyed. They were supposed to have supper in Lafayette last night. Lou Kale dropped her off under the porte cochere at the restaurant. But Chalons takes one look at her, turns to stone, and has the valet bring up his car. Ida was pretty shook up. What a prick.”

  “Did Kale try to come in with her?”

  “No, he just drove her there.”

  “Did Chalons see him?”

  “I guess. Why?”

  “Get away from them.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Val Chalons is behind everything that’s been happening. The old man wasn’t even an adverb.”

  “Behind what?” he said. “Are you drinking again?”

  But I had no moral authority on the subject of the Chalons family and I didn’t try to answer Jimmie’s question. At quitting time, I called Molly and told her I’d be late for supper and drove to Clete Purcel’s motor court.

  “You’re saying Valentine Chalons is the son of Lou Kale?” Clete said.

  “That’s been the engine the whole time,” I said.

  “No, the engine’s money. It’s always money, no matter what they say.”

  “Same thing,” I said. “Val Chalons has spent his whole life lying about who he is. What happens to his credibility as a TV broadcaster if he admits he’s always known his real father is a pimp? Imagine Lou Kale showing up at Chalons’s country club.”

  Clete studied my face. “You want to salt the mine shaft?” he said.

  “You doing anything else?” I asked.

  The two of us sat down at Clete’s old Smith-Corona portable and composed the following letter. Actually, most of it was Clete’s work and in my estimation a masterpiece Ring Lardner would have tipped his hat to.

  Dear Mr. Chalons,

  A hooker I happened to know by the name of Big Tit Flora Mazaroni just gave me some interesting information about a pimp who is now in Lafayette, one Lou Coyne, a.k.a. Lou Kale. After packing too much flake up his nose, he told Flora he’s got an illegitimate son in Jeanerette, a famous TV guy who just inherited between eighty and one hundred million dollars. Guess who this famous TV guy is?

  Guess what else? Kale says this TV guy is not only a liar and a phony but also a horny sex freak who is so hard up he had to bop his space-o sister. Flora says Kale is going to milk this particular TV dude for every cent he’s got.

  I happen to be in the P.I. business. I got a personal score to settle with Kale, but I can also protect your interests if the above material seems to describe anyone in your acquaintance. If you need references, call Nig Rosewater at Bimstine’s Bonds in New Orleans. Nig will vouch for my confidentiality and total professionalism.

  Have a nice day,

  Clete Purcel

  But masterpiece or not, Clete and I decided we should not neglect Lou Kale. Clete rolled another sheet of paper into the Smith-Corona and started typing, his porkpie hat cocked at an angle, his stomach hanging over a pair of boxer shorts that were printed with sets of blue dice.

  Lou—

  You are probably surprised to hear from me after you set me up and your two hired bean-rollers tried to put out my lights. But business is business. Valentine Chalons does not want you and your wife hustling cooze in this area. I get the sense there’s a family fight of some kind going on here, but I couldn’t care less on the subject and I’m not pursuing it. The point is Chalons is inheriting eighty to one hundred million dollars and indicates he does not need his life and reputation queered by a lot of baggage from a Galveston whorehouse.

  The short version is the guy’s seriously pissed off and he’s hired me to take care of the problem. He says you’re a gutless douche bag and you’ll squirm back under the rocks with the first shot across your bow. True or not, I’d like to hear a counteroffer.

  In my opinion, this guy is not normal and the cops should have taken a lot harder look at him for his sister’s murder. This is not a guy who shares the bucks. For some reason he seems to think you and your old lady got a sniff of his money and are going to lay claims on it. Believe me when I tell you his feelings about you are real strong. Did you hurt this guy when he was a kid or something?

  Keep a smiley face.

  Sincerely,

  Clete Purcel,

  Private Investigator

  Clete folded the letters, placed them in envelopes, and addressed each of them. Twenty minutes later one of his bonded-out clients, a habitual alligator poacher, picked up the envelopes for delivery in Lafayette and Jeanerette.

  “Beautiful work, Cletus,” I said.

  “Not bad. There’s only one problem,” he said.

  “What?”

  “What if Val Chalons is not Lou Kale’s kid?”

  BUT OTHER EVENTS THAT EVENING, involving an anachronistic New Orleans player, would soon take our minds off the letters we had just composed.

  Chapter 28

  JOHNNY WINEBURGER had erotic dreams, but not of a kind that he understood. Sometimes he woke throbbing and hard in the morning, and briefly recalled a fleeting glimpse of an undressed woman, a pale, black-haired creature wrapped in mist, but the dream never contained a face or a name. In some instances, the figure kissed his hands, then put his fingers in her mouth. In some instances, she bit down on them, hard, her eyes veiled by a skein of shiny hair. The pain he felt was not entirely an unpleasant one.

  Johnny did not know what the dream meant. A friend of his in the life, a kid named Jimmy Figorelli or Jimmy Fig or sometimes Jimmy Fingers, who had been with the First Cav at Khe Sanh, told Johnny to talk to a psychiatrist.

  “Why?” Johnny asked.

  “It means you got repressed desires to be a bone smoker,” the Fig said.

  “How you know that?”

  “’Cause that’s what the shrink told me,” the Fig replied.

  But in truth Jericho Johnny didn’t really care what the dream meant. Women were interesting on occasion but not terribly necessary in his life. In fact, if asked what was important in his life, he would not have had a ready answer. He had graduated from a Catholic high school and his parents had gone to temple, but he himself never took religion seriously. Nor had he ever understood people’s apparent worries about moral issues. If there were any mysteries to life or human behavior, he failed to recognize them. You were born, you hung around a while, then you died. You had to read books to find that out?

  At age nineteen he carried a union card with both the Teamsters and the Operating Engineers. That’s when he met the Calucci brothers and picked up a cool five hundred bucks for popping the snitch who sent Tommy Fig’s old lady to the women’s prison at St. Gabriel.

  He’d always heard the first hit was the hard one. Not so. It was a breeze. The guy was in his car at the Fair Grounds, eating a chili dog with melted cheese on it. Johnny walked up to the open window, put a Ruger behind the guy’s ear, and pulled the trigger three times. The guy still had the plastic fork sticking out of his mouth when Johnny drove off with a young friend he helped throw a newspaper route.

  If Johnny had an ethos, what some would call a worldview, it was one that operated in his head like shards of light and sometimes sound. His second hit wasn’t on a dirtbag at a racetrack parking lot. The target was the cousin of Bugsy Siegel, a guy who, like Bugsy, had made his bones with Murder, Incorporated. This dude was a stone killer—smart, armed, and with no mercy for the poor schmucks he took out.

  Johnny and his partner had gotten on the train at Jacksonville, headed south along the Florida coast, their sawed-off double-barrel shotguns broken down inside their suitcases. The evening sky was pink and blue, the ocean sliding in long fingers up empty beaches, miles and miles of orange groves slipping past the Pullman’s windows. It was the most beautiful evening of Johnny Wineburger’s life. />
  Just outside of West Palm, the sun went down in the ’Glades and a black shade fell across the land. Johnny and his partner fitted the pieces of their shotguns together, plopping twelve-gauge shells packed with double-aught bucks into the open breeches. When their train passed another train headed in the opposite direction, Johnny and his pal kicked open the door to the bedroom occupied by Siegel’s cousin.

  Then one of the most peculiar moments in Johnny’s life occurred. In the jittering light and roar of noise created by the trains passing each other, amid the flashes of gunfire and explosions of wadding and pellets inside the closed room, all the color drained out of the world. The entire earth reduced itself to a black-and-white ink wash that was like the reductive nature of his dreams. Life was simpler than he had ever thought. You pulled the trigger and the target exploded. In this instance, the target was holding a pitcher of martinis and was dressed in a robe with a fur collar, as a king might be. In fact, the shower of gin and broken glass sparkled like a crown in the dead man’s hair. But the power he had represented was now Johnny’s, just as if the dead man’s testosterone had been injected into his own.

  On his second hit he had found the secret few button men shared: Clipping a rat or a dirtbag was scut work for pay; clipping a king was both an acquisition and a high that had no equal.

  But times had changed. The Giacano family had crashed and burned with the death of Didi Gee, and Asians and black street pukes had flooded the projects with crack and turned New Orleans into a septic tank. Punks the Italians would have thrown off a roof now jackrolled family people and sometimes shot them to death just for fun. There was no honor in the life anymore. There was no money in it, either.

  The pukes ran the dope and did drive-bys on school yards. The government not only legalized lotteries and casinos but encouraged addiction in its citizenry. The income for a fence or good house creep was chump change compared to the amounts corporate CEOs scammed off their investors through stock options.

  But a guy still had to pay the bills. The twenty grand Jericho Johnny had borrowed from the shylocks, at a point and a half a week, was eating him alive. So push came to shove and he took this gig out here in Bumfuck. Why not? He didn’t invent the world’s problems. Almost everyone he popped had it coming. Some he wasn’t sure about, but that was their grief, not his. Everybody got to the boneyard. Which was better, catching a big one in the ear or dying a day at a time with tubes up your nose and a catheter clamped on your joint?

  It was dark when he parked his car in a turnrow between two sugar cane fields and began walking up Bayou Teche toward the ancient plantation home that was legendary for the strange people who lived inside it and the overgrown trees and plants that seemed intent on pulling the house back into the earth. The moon was down, the sky black with rain clouds. Through the oaks in the yard he could see lights in the windows, a gas lamp burning in the driveway. Jericho Johnny stopped on the edge of the cane and felt the breeze blow against his skin and realized he was sweating.

  A candy-striped awning swelled with the breeze off the bayou. There were white feathers scattered on the grass and the crumpled bodies of pigeons floating among the lily pads along the bayou’s bank. What kind of geek shoots pigeons in his yard? Johnny wondered. Talk about no class. Somebody should ship the guy’s whole family to Iraq, he told himself.

  He was starting to feel uncomfortable about the job. Maybe he was over the hill for it. No, it was something else. He was fooling around with guys who thought real men hit golf balls. Their wives were all neurotic, talked constantly in hush-puppy accents, and treated their husbands like dildos. So their men whocked golf balls like they wanted to kill the tee, got their ashes hauled in Miami, then went back home and pretended they weren’t cooze-whipped dip-shits. Another bunch that should be humping a pack in a sandstorm, Johnny thought.

  But his cynicism and bitter humor provided no relief for the quickening of heart that he felt, the dryness in his mouth, and the loops of sweat under his armpits. What was wrong?

  He pulled back the receiver on his silenced Ruger and checked to see if a .22 long round was seated in the chamber. Up ahead he saw fireflies in the trees and smelled an autumnal odor of dead leaves and gas on the wind. Time to get it over with, pop the dude, and get back to New Orleans, he thought. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself back in his saloon, eating a small white bowl of gumbo, the rain falling on the elephant ears and banana trees outside his back windows.

  He moved along the edge of the trees at the back of the Chalonses’ property, past the back porch, the lighted kitchen, the porte cochere that glowed an off-yellow from a bug lamp. Then he stopped under a cedar tree and gazed at the shotgun house down by the bayou. It was paintless and gray, made of very old cedar, with a tin roof and a brick chimney that reminded him of a decayed tooth. The wind puffed off the bayou and Jericho Johnny heard a solitary pecan ping hard against the roof and roll loudly down the metal.

  In the light of the gallery, he could see a little boy playing in the yard. Bad news, Johnny thought. Nobody said anything about a kid being around. Bad karma, bad options. That’s what happened when you messed with amateurs. No class at all.

  He went up the slope toward the main house, into trees black with shadow, his face pointed at the ground so no light would reflect off it. Then he made an arc that took him back down toward the water, past the yard where the child was playing.

  He moved quickly along the grassy slope, through a vegetable garden and over a half-collapsed rick fence. Through a side window of the shotgun house he could see a fat black woman rolling pie dough on top of a table.

  Nobody had said anything about a woman being home. This gig was starting to suck worse and worse. Maybe he should just blow it off, he thought. But the thought of continuing to pay a point and a half a week on twenty large didn’t sit well with him, either.

  Then he saw a man get up from his chair and step out on the gallery and speak to the little boy. The little boy began picking up his toys from the yard and putting them in a wagon. Johnny waited in the darkness, the lint from the cane field itching inside his shirt like lines of ants. Why would anybody want to click the switch on a black guy like this, anyway? Twenty large for a guy who probably worked for collard greens and neck bones?

  Because Johnny was supposed to do the woman and the kid, too, he thought. Well, screw that. The deal was for the man. What was that joke Jimmy Fig used to make about the door gunner in ’Nam? How can you shoot women and children? It’s easy, man, you just don’t lead them as much.

  Yeah, screw that twice.

  The front screen slammed, but Johnny could still see the kid in the yard. Was the man still out front? Again, Johnny smelled an odor that was like sewer gas and humus and leaves that have turned yellow and spotted inside pools of rainwater. It was a pleasant smell, like late fall, except it was still summer and too early for the fireflies that were weaving their smoky circles inside the cedar trees.

  Time to boogie, he thought. Pay the vig and find a new gig. Messing with law-abiding people genuinely blew.

  He turned to retrace his steps back to his vehicle. Just as he did, he thought he saw a woman moving toward him through the live oaks on the slope. She was barefoot, her dress little more than gauze, her skin glowing, her hair a black skein across her face. He stood transfixed, dumbfounded by the presence of a figure who had escaped from his dreams and who seemed to be approaching him in slow motion, as though until this moment she had not been allowed to be a full participant in his life.

  Johnny felt his ankle sink in a depression and the tendon twist against the bone. He bit down on the pain and righted himself, momentarily losing sight of the woman in the trees. Behind him, he thought he heard leaves blowing across the ground or wind rustling in a canebrake. When he turned toward the bayou, a figure stepped out from behind an abandoned privy and swung a short cutting instrument out of the sky, whipping it down with such force that the blow exploded inside his skull like an electrical flash
.

  He did not remember striking the ground, or the blow that landed on the back of his neck or the one that cut deep into his shoulder. A black man stood above him, cocking his head one way, then another, a hatchet hanging from his right hand. The black man had big half-moon eyebrows and an innocuous pieface; his erratic, jerky motions reminded Johnny of an owl sitting on a branch in a tree.

  Taken out by Uncle Remus. What a laugh, he thought.

  “Wasn’t going to hurt your boy or woman,” Johnny said.

  The black man leaned over him. “Say again?” he said.

  I whack kings. I took out Benny Siegel’s cousin, Johnny said somewhere deep inside himself.

  Then the barefoot woman who wore only white gauze approached him from the trees, parting the veil of hair on her face with her fingers. She knelt beside him, cupping her hands behind his head, lifting his face to hers. When she put her mouth on his it was cold and dry, as hollow as the grave. Then he felt her tongue slide past his teeth and probe deep inside him, stirring a heat in his genitals he had never experienced before. In the distance he heard a train, one that rattled with light and roared with sound, and he now realized what it was he had always wanted.

  THE HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION was conducted by the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department, and it wasn’t until the next morning that Helen Soileau and I went out to the home of Andre Bergeron and interviewed him in the warm shade of a pecan tree. Out in the sunlight I could see the depression and blood splatter in the grass where Jericho Johnny had spent the last few minutes of his life.

  “You hit him three times with the hatchet?” I said.

  “I ain’t counted. Man had a pistol in his hand,” Andre replied. “Say, I done tole all this to them others.”

  “But not to us,” Helen said.

  “I ain’t meaning no disrespect, but ain’t y’all just suppose to work inside Iberia Parish?”