Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  I got in my truck and began backing up into the East Main. But a pearly limo with charcoal-tinted windows pulled to the curb and blocked my way. Someone in the backseat rolled a window down on its electrical motor.

  “Get out of the driveway, Val,” I said.

  He sat on the rolled white leather seat, dressed in pleated beige slacks and a golfing shirt, a bottle of Cold Duck balanced on his knee. On the far side of him was a woman I didn’t know. Her face was stiff with makeup, her blouse unbuttoned on the tops of her breasts. I saw her take the last hit on a roach and drop it out of the top of her window onto the street.

  “Your wife shouldn’t make remarks about Andre,” Val said. “Big mistake.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Somebody told Andre how your wife made fun of him. Not good, Davey boy. No, no, not at all good,” he said.

  “You move your fucking car before I pull your teeth out,” I said.

  He laughed, spoke to his chauffeur, then rolled up his window while handing the bottle of Cold Duck to the woman, as though the world beyond the boundaries of his limo no longer existed.

  I backed into the street, cars swerving and blowing around me, then ran the red light down by the Shadows and headed for Molly’s agency.

  On the way I punched in a 911 on my cell phone and asked the dispatcher to send a cruiser to the agency and one to Andre Bergeron’s house in Jeanerette.

  “What’s the nature of the emergency, sir?” she asked.

  “My wife’s life could be in danger. Who is this?” I said.

  She gave me her name. She was new on the job and obviously swamped with calls reporting traffic accidents and power outages. “Two of the bridges have been hit by boats and are closed,” she said. “The bridge at Nelson’s Canal might be open in a few minutes. But we can’t be certain.”

  “Call Jeanerette. Ask them to send a city car to the Chalons property. Tell them to place the black man, Andre Bergeron, in custody.”

  “Sir, I can’t do that without an explanation,” she said.

  “He’s the Baton Rouge serial killer.”

  “Sir, I have to have verification of who you are,” she replied.

  I dropped the cell phone on the seat and steered around a truck from the electric company and a repair crew that was working on a downed power line. Up ahead, I could see the turnbridge at the confluence of Nelson’s Canal and Bayou Teche. Evidently the huge sprockets on the bridge had jammed when it was partially opened, and now traffic had backed up for hundreds of yards on both sides of the bayou.

  There was only one thing for it. I abandoned my truck and began running by the side of the road toward the bridge, my hand tight on my holstered .45. But even as I was running past the line of idling cars and the faces of the curious and the bemused, the image of Val Chalons seated in the back of his limo would not go out of my head. No, it was not his imperious or insulting manner that bothered me, or that he seemed to be embracing and flaunting the meretricious world represented by his mother and Lou Kale. It went beyond that, something that was raw, designing, inhuman, genuinely evil.

  But what?

  You’re being set up again, I told myself.

  But sometimes your only option is to play out the hand, no matter what the consequences. Sometimes when you’re deep in Indian country, the only speeds available are full throttle and fuck it.

  The bridge’s rotary system had locked against itself when the steel grid was only five feet from the asphalt. I backed off, then jumped into space and landed upright with a loud ping on the metal. People were starting to get out of their cars and stare. I raced to the other end of the bridge and jumped again, this time skinning my elbow and tearing the knee of my trousers on the road surface.

  I got up and starting running toward the rear of the traffic jam. A fat man wearing a silver suit and a Stetson short-brim was getting out of a huge purple Cadillac. The factory hood ornament on the Cadillac had been replaced with a pair of needlepointed brass cattle horns. “What the hell is going on?” the fat man said.

  “How much gas is in your car?” I said.

  “Gas?”

  “This is an emergency situation,” I said, opening my badge holder in his face. “I’m taking your vehicle.”

  “Not my car, you’re not. I’ve got to be at the Oil Center in Lafayette in thirty minutes.”

  “In about thirty seconds you’re going to be on the ground in cuffs,” I said.

  I got behind the wheel, and with the driver’s door still open I backed straight down the two-lane to the next intersection, cut the wheel, then floored the accelerator down Old Jeanerette Road toward Molly’s agency, slamming the door as the cement raced by me.

  I ran a stop sign at eighty, clipped a mailbox and a garbage can, passed a tractor-drawn cane wagon, and forced an oncoming truck into a rain ditch. Water oaks along the road and collapsed barbed-wire fences and shacks and single-wide trailers with broken windows sped by me, then I saw Molly’s compound up ahead.

  The grounds were empty, the blinds drawn in the administration building, the St. Augustine grass green and stiff with the rain, an inch higher since yesterday. I pulled into the entrance, my heart hammering, sweat breaking on my forehead. I saw no sign of Molly’s car, nor any other vehicle.

  Think, I told myself. Would Molly have gone to Andre Bergeron’s house to confront him about the unauthorized use of her farm tools? No, she did things in a measured way and was not a compulsive person. Normally, she would have telephoned a person who had wronged her, asked him to explain himself, perhaps invited him to come by and have coffee and talk with her. That was Molly Boyle’s way.

  But Molly’s recorded telephone message had mentioned that she was “disappointed” and the fact that someone had borrowed her tools without permission “again.” She may not have been an obsessive person, but she had a low level of tolerance for people who lied or violated the trust of others, which she always referred to as an act of spiritual theft.

  I parked by the administration building and rattled the doors, then walked next door to the cypress cottage which Molly used to share with a nun who had returned to the Midwest to care for her mother. The nun’s car was parked under a pecan tree, covered by a clear plastic tarp fogged with humidity and pooled with wet leaves and bird droppings.

  I wiped my face with my shirt. The air stank of stagnant mud, raw sewage backed up from the treatment plant, the bloated body of a drowned cow that gars were feeding on in the shallows. I could hear bottle flies buzzing inside the plastic tarp on the nun’s car.

  When the sun broke through a cloud, the tops of the cypress trees along the bayou lit up as though they had been touched with a flame. I saw an aluminum boat snugged inside a clump of flooded willows, its motor pulled out of the water, an anchor consisting of a cinder block threaded by a rope thrown up on the bank.

  Forty yards downstream, Molly’s car was parked behind the barn, wedged between the back wall and the remains of a disease-eaten mulberry tree that had been uprooted by the storm. Both the driver and passenger doors hung open.

  I felt a wave of nausea and fear wash through my system. I ran back to the tarp-covered vehicle of Molly’s friend, a pressure band like a strip of metal tightening against the side of my head. I meshed the plastic in both hands and ripped it free of the roof, showering myself with water and birdshit. A cloud of beetles and greenflies and a stench of rats rose into my face. But there was no one inside the car and no footprints around the trunk area.

  I flung the tarp down and headed for the barn.

  Chickens were pecking under the pole shed and the live oak that arched high over the barn roof. I started to go down by the bayou and circle behind the barn and come up on the other side, but I remembered there was a window in back that gave a clear view down to the water. I removed my .45 from my holster and pulled back the receiver and slipped a hollow-point forward into the chamber.

  A rooster came out from under the tractor, its wings spread wide, its
throat warbling, scattering hens across the apron of dirt that extended out to the drip line of the oak tree. I pressed myself against the front of the barn, the .45 pointed upward, the pressure band on the right side of my head squeezing tighter. The barn door was ajar. From inside I heard a hissing sound and smelled an odor like scorched metal.

  I ripped the door open and went inside, pointing the .45 into the gloom with both hands.

  Molly’s wrists were locked with plastic cuffs behind a chair, her head enclosed in a burlap bag that Andre Bergeron had cinched around her neck with his belt. An acetylene torch lay on the workbench, a concentrated blue flame knifing from its nozzle. Bergeron held the sharpened edge of a machete under Molly’s chin. He was bare-chested, his skin glistening, a bandanna wrapped around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes.

  “T’row the gun down or I take her head off,” he said.

  I now realized how Valentine Chalons had played me. “Chalons set us both up, Andre. I’m supposed to pop you so he can inherit Mr. Raphael’s estate.”

  “Don’t matter. T’row down the gun. Both of us know you ain’t gonna shoot it.”

  “That’s a bad bet,” I said.

  “You t’ink? One more don’t mean nothing to me,” he said.

  My eyes had adjusted to the poor light and I could see him clearly now. He was standing on the opposite side of Molly, much of his body protected by hers. His skin was powdered with dust and bits of hay, his chest running with sweat, the top of his beltless trousers soaked with it. He tightened the machete against Molly’s throat, lifting her chin upwards, the burlap stretching against her face.

  “Okay, we’ll work it out,” I said, and began to lower my weapon.

  I saw his lips part over the whiteness of his teeth. “That’s more like it. Yes, suh, it gonna go smooth now,” he said.

  His back was slightly stooped, his arm probably stressed by the unnatural way he had to hold the machete under Molly’s chin. He straightened up slightly, shifting a crick out of his back.

  I locked my sights on the top of his sternum and pulled the trigger. The round hit him at an angle and spun him against the side of a stall. The round had cored through his back and blown a white swatch out of the wood. He lay on the floor, his head against the stall, his fingers spidered across the entry wound. Like most people who are the gunshot victims of a weapon like a .45 auto, his face could not register the amount of damage his body had just incurred. His mouth hung open, his stomach went soft and trembled like a bowl of Jell-O, his eyes fluttered and rolled as he went into shock.

  Then he turned on his side and curled into an embryonic ball. Beneath one of his love handles was a half-moon incision, as thick as a night crawler, where he had given up a kidney for the father who had relegated him to a shack on the back of the family property.

  But I didn’t care about the fate of Andre Bergeron or the perverted genes or social injustices that had produced him. In fact, I didn’t even care enough about him to hate him or deliver another round into his body, which I could have done and gotten away with. I uncinched the belt from Molly’s neck and pulled the burlap bag from her head. I held her face against me and kissed the sweat in her hair and touched her eyes and mouth. I opened my pocketknife and sliced the plastic cuffs on her wrists and stroked her shoulders and arms and wiped the hair out of her eyes and lifted her to her feet, my hands shaking so badly she had to hold them tightly in hers.

  In the distance I could hear a siren coming hard down Old Jeanerette Road.

  Molly placed her forehead on my chest, and the two of us stood there a long time like that, not speaking, listening to the wind blow through the open door and out the back window, the green-gold splendor of the outside world beckoning like an old friend on the edges of our vision.

  Epilogue

  CAPITALISTS are hanged by the rope they sell their enemies. Mystics who help formulate great religious movements writhe in sexual torment over impure thoughts a shoe salesman leaves behind with adolescence. A Crusader knight in search of the True Cross returns to Marseilles from Palestine with a trunkful of Saracen robes, inside of which is a plague-infested mouse.

  My experience had been, like George Orwell’s, that human beings are possessed of much more courage and self-sacrifice than we give them credit for, and when the final test comes, they usually go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. Our moral failure lies in the frailty of our vision and not in our hearts. Our undoing is in our collective willingness to trust those whom we shouldn’t, those who invariably used our best instincts against us. But as a police officer I also learned long ago that justice finds us in its own time and of its own accord, and in ways we never, and I mean absolutely never, anticipate.

  I would like to say I tacked up Valentine Chalons with a nail gun. But I didn’t. Not even close. Val’s denouement began and ended with his own peers and his own machinations. First, there were rumors he was the son of a pimp, then suspicion spread that out of fear for his own reputation he had concealed his intuitions that Andre Bergeron was the Baton Rouge serial killer, allowing Bergeron to continue murdering innocent women, including Val’s own sister, with whom some said Val had conducted an affair.

  The woman who had filed molestation charges against me admitted she was paid by one of Val’s employees. The photographer who had stuck a camera in my face after I gave Val a beating in Clementine’s told an alternative news magazine he had been personally assigned by Val Chalons to take my life apart with vise grips.

  Val tried to immerse himself in charity drives and the activities of a scholar who was above the fray. He hired a young woman named Thelma Lou Rooney to do research on his ancestors who had ridden with the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction. Evidently Val had long been possessed of a secret ambition to become a historical writer, an ambition that ironically he could have fulfilled without any help from anyone else. But Val was one of those who defined himself in terms of the control he exerted over others rather than in terms of what he accomplished as an individual.

  Thelma Lou was pretty, blond, and extremely bright. She claimed a double degree in history and anthropology from the University of North Carolina, plus three summer sessions at the Sorbonne. She was a miracle worker when it came to extracting arcane information from decaying courthouse records. She was also an amazing filter for the Chalonses’ participation in the activities of the White League, particularly the murder of blacks during the Colfax Massacre of 1873. Whatever information she dug up on the Chalons family either sanitized their roles or indicated that somehow they were victims themselves, or, as Val would say, “forced to take extreme measures in extreme times.” The staff at Val’s television stations loved her. So did Val.

  In fact, Val and Thelma Lou were soon in the sack. He flew with her to Dallas and New York and bought her clothes that were arguably the most beautiful on any woman in our area. Unfortunately for Val, Thelma Lou Rooney was a pathological liar and con artist who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

  Her real name was Thelma Lou Watkins, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a bovine, peroxide-headed woman who operated a mail-order quilt company out of Jellico, Kentucky. Her mother showed up out of nowhere with a birth certificate and filed statutory rape charges against Val, followed one week later by a civil suit asking for millions in damages.

  Val compounded his problem by denying on the air any knowledge of the girl’s age, then apologizing for any emotional injury he may have caused her. He was repentant, paternal, and dignified. On camera he looked like the patrician he had always aspired to be. But the next day Thelma Lou caught him at a restaurant frequented by Chamber of Commerce and media people and let go with a dish-throwing tirade that had the waiters backed against the walls. Then Thelma Lou’s mother produced a taped telephone conversation between her daughter and Val that was so lascivious only one Lafayette broadcaster, a scurrilous late-night shock jock, had the temerity to air it.

  When Val thought his
problems couldn’t get any worse, the woman I had seen toking on a roach in the back of his limo sold a video to a cable channel of herself and Val going at it on a water bed.

  The same people whom he had enlisted in his attempt to destroy Molly and me homed in on him like piranha on a drowning water buffalo.

  The day Val died, his gardens were abloom with chrysanthemums, the air golden, the oaks in his yard sculpted against a hard blue sky. But inside the guesthouse, where he had continued to live, the floors and counters and tables were cluttered with fast-food containers, the bathroom pungent with mildew, the trash baskets overflowing. For days he had not changed out of his pajamas or bathed or shaved. Evidently he rose early on the last morning of his life and dissolved a bottle of Seconal in a glass of bourbon, then sat down to listen to a CD on his stereo. The body of the man who had been the friend of the powerful, surrounded by sycophants, was not found for five days, when a meter reader reported an unusual odor to the city police department.

  The song that had played on the stereo over and over again was “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” sung by his mother, Ida Durbin.

  The probate court that decided the disposition of the Chalons estate put its worth at nearly ninety-six million dollars. Attorneys whose only professional recommendation was the fact they were legally qualified to practice law under the Napoleonic Code appeared out of the woodwork from Shreveport to New Orleans. DNA testing proved that Andre Bergeron was the son of Raphael Chalons and that Val was not. Bergeron was convicted on three counts of capital murder and sentenced to death by injection, but this did not stop his wife from retaining a half dozen lawyers on contingency to represent her claim and her son Tee Bleu’s. In the meantime, Lou Kale and Ida Durbin hired a private investigative group that, surprise, produced a last will and testament signed by Raphael Chalons, leaving his wealth to Honoria and Val.

  The problem was the attorney who had notarized it was Sookie Motrie, a man so notorious for his various scams that an association of Louisiana trial lawyers introduced a bill in the legislature specifically designed to prevent Sookie from taking the state bar exam.