Last Car to Elysian Fields

  There was a pause, then Max Coll said, “Now, how would you be knowing where I am?”

  “There’s only one streetcar line in operation today. It runs only on those two streets. So that means you’re not too far away from me.”

  “You’re a mighty intelligent man. But I need to—”

  “You stay out of my church.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me. If you ever bring a weapon into my confessional again, I’ll tear you apart.”

  “Excuse me for saying this, Father, but that is a fucking mean-spirited statement for a Christian minister to make.”

  “Be thankful I don’t have my hands on you,” Father Jimmie said, and hung up.

  Then he stood motionlessly by his desk, his heart hammering against his chest.

  Chapter 6

  That same evening, Leon Hebert, the daiquiri-store operator who had fired Josh Comeaux, had to handle the window by himself because Josh’s replacement had called in sick. Hebert didn’t like to work alone, at least not at night. He was a cautious man, both with money and people, and had made his living over the years on the soiled edges of society wherever he had gone. If there was any group of people he understood in this world, it was his clientele.

  After he was discharged from the United States Navy, he had owned a liquor store on South Central Avenue in Los Angeles. The profits were huge and, except for the insurance, the overhead minimal. He accepted food stamps, welfare grocery orders, and even Bureau of Public Assistance bus tokens in place of money. After 2:00 A.M. he and a hired man would drive a panel truck down to East Fifth Street and sell eighty-nine-cent bottles of fortified wine, called short dogs, for two dollars apiece to the desperate souls who could not wait for the bars to open at 6:00 A.M.

  But Leon Hebert learned there was a downside to running a business in a ghetto. On a warm summer night a white L.A. patrolman tried to hook up a drunk driver and force him into the back of a cruiser. In five minutes bricks, bottles, and chunks of curb stone were being flung into the traffic on Century Boulevard. This was in the era before the Crips and Bloods, but their predecessors—the Gladiators, Choppers, Eastside Purple Hearts, Clanton 14, and the Aranas—rose to the occasion and strung fires all over the south and east sides of Los Angeles.

  A Molotov cocktail crashed through the window bars and front glass of Leon Hebert’s store. The inventory went up like gasoline.

  In the riot only two groups of white-owned businesses were spared: funeral homes and the offices of bail bondsmen. The lesson was not lost on Leon. When he got back to New Iberia, his birthplace, he sold burial insurance to people of color, collecting their half-dollar and seventy-five-cent premiums weekly, wending his way without fear through every back-of-town slum in south Louisiana.

  Then he discovered the fast lane to prosperity was still available. He didn’t have to go into the ghetto to sell his wares, either. The ghetto dwellers came to him, inside a shady grove on the four-lane, their gas-guzzlers smoking at his drive-by window, his ice-packed daiquiris, sweet and cold, ready to go at five bucks a pop.

  He should have felt good about his situation, he told himself. He’d saved every cent he’d made peddling burial insurance and put it in a surefire franchise that gave him 60 percent of the profits. He made people happy, didn’t he? Why did these damn kids from Loreauville get themselves killed with his cups in their car? And how about Josh Comeaux telling the physician, what was his name, Dr. Parks, teenagers were always served at Leon’s drive-by?

  Mondays were slow and Leon thought about closing up early. What was it that was bothering him? The doctor? The sheriff’s detective who got in his face? He looked out the service window into the dusk and saw blue-collar families leaving a barbecue-and-po’boy place on the corner of the short span of asphalt that joined the eastbound and westbound highways, between which he operated his store. The evening was warm and fireflies floated in the oak trees. He watched the people from the barbecue place getting into their cars and pickups, their children bouncing up and down on the seats. For just a moment he wanted to join them and free himself from whatever presence it was that seemed to cling to his skin like road film.

  Three spoiled brats from Loreauville run themselves off the road into a telephone pole and he’s in the toilet. There was no justice, he told himself.

  A junker car filled with black men pulled to the window and Leon removed six plastic-sealed daiquiris from the ice compartment of his giant refrigerator and handed them one by one through the driver’s window.

  Leon waited for the car to pull away, but it didn’t. The driver continued to stare into Leon’s face, a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. A passenger in the backseat was smoking a cigarette, the ash glowing in the darkness. The passenger by the right front window held a metallic object in his lap, one that glinted dully in the light from the dashboard.

  “I’m not alone. I got a man here with me,” Leon said, his pulse quickening.

  “What you talking ’bout, man?” the driver said.

  The passenger by the right front window lifted a Zippo from his lap and lit a cigarette with it.

  Leon let out his breath. “Y’all want something else?” he said.

  “Yeah, you ain’t give me my change,” the driver said.

  Three hours later Leon Hebert put his money bag in the floor safe, locked the doors, and turned off the lights. It was a beautiful night. The wind rustled in the trees overhead and the constellations were stenciled across the sky. An eighteen-wheeler passed on the highway, then an ambulance with its flashers on. The ambulance continued on past the hospital and turned onto the drawbridge and the state highway that fed into Loreauville Road, where the three girls had been trapped inside their burning Buick.

  Why did he have to think in images like that? He didn’t do it, he told himself. That kid who worked for him, Josh Comeaux, had a boner in his pants for the Parks girl and would have let her slam it in the car door if she’d wanted to. Why didn’t they put that in the paper? he said to himself.

  No justice, he thought.

  Someone started a pickup truck in front of the barbecue place and backed out of the parking lot, then headed slowly down the asphalt strip toward Leon Hebert’s store, pieces of gravel clicking under the tires.

  Leon fished his car keys out of his pocket, then dropped them in the darkness. When he bent over to retrieve them, the driver of the pickup turned into the oyster-shell loop that curved past Leon’s drive-by service window.

  “We’re closed,” Leon said, the high beams of the pickup burning red circles into his eyes.

  But there was no response from inside the truck.

  “Who is that?” he said, trying to smile.

  A figure opened the truck door and stepped out on the oyster shells. Leon raised his hand to shield his eyes and squinted into the brilliance of the headlights. “My clerk already went to the bank. There’s nothing here for you,” he said.

  The first pistol shot hit him high up on the chest with an impact like an anvil iron, knocking him backward, the hard-packed oyster shells slamming into the back of his head. The shooter had cut the lights on the pickup and was walking toward him, stooping for just a second to pick an object off the ground. The shooter stared down at Leon, perhaps realizing a mistake had been made, that the wrong person had been shot, that Leon Hebert should not have had a fate like this imposed upon him.

  The figure leaned over him, blotting out the sky. Leon tried to speak, but the only sound that issued from his body was the air wheezing through the hole in his lung.

  Then his mouth was pried apart and something that was stiff and bittersweet and crusted with dirt was shoved between his teeth and forced deep into his throat. Leon’s right hand tried to clasp the shoe of the figure bending over him, to somehow telegraph the plea for mercy that his lungs and throat could not make. At that moment he looked into the face of his tormentor and knew what his final moments on earth would be like. He twisted his head sideways and looked despera
tely out at the highway, wondering how the world of normal people and normal events could be only a heartbeat away.

  No one reported the shooting until just before sunrise, when a tramp who had been sleeping in the weeds by the railway track crossed the road and tripped over the body. Helen Soileau picked me up at my house in a cruiser and handed me a thermos filled with coffee and hot milk. She hit the flasher and we rolled through town to the crime scene.

  “You’re the skipper now. You don’t have to do this early A.M. stuff anymore,” I said.

  “Somebody has to keep you guys on your leash,” she replied.

  Her eyes looked straight ahead, her expression flat. We passed a long row of shacks, the reflection of the flasher rippling across the house fronts.

  “This isn’t a robbery-homicide, is it?” I said.

  Cane trucks packed to the top were already on the road when we got to the crime scene, snarling traffic at the intersection by the drawbridge. The early sun was red through the trees and mist was rising off the bayou behind the hospital. Leon Hebert lay on the oysters shells a few feet from his drive-by window, a bullet wound in his chest, a second one puckered in the center of his forehead, a third through the eye. A blue daiquiri cup had been compressed into a cone and stuck in his mouth.

  An ambulance and three sheriff’s department vehicles were parked outside the yellow crime-scene tape that had been strung through the oak trees. The coroner had not arrived but our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, was kneeling beside the body, slipping plastic bags over the hands of the dead man. A small man in tattered clothes and tennis shoes without socks sat outside the tape, his back against a tree trunk, his knees drawn up before him.

  “How do you read it, Mack?” I said.

  “The shooter used a revolver or he picked up his brass. I’d say the wounds were made with either a .38 or a nine-millimeter,” he replied. He had ascetic features and wore a clip-on bow tie, suspenders, a crinkling white shirt, and a briar pipe in a little leather holster on his belt.

  He lifted the dead man’s right wrist. “It looks like there’s shoe polish under his fingernails,” he said. “My guess is the first round was fired from a distance and hit him in the chest. Then the shooter walked up close and put the next two in him point-blank. The victim probably looked up into the shooter’s face and grabbed his shoe before he died.”

  “Why would he do that?” Helen asked.

  Mack shook his head. He popped open another plastic bag and with a pair of tweezers lifted the coned plastic cup from the dead man’s mouth, then dropped it inside the bag. “Take a look at this,” he said, getting to his feet. “There’s blood on the bottom of the cup. That means the victim’s heart was probably still pumping when the cup was shoved into his mouth.”

  “Meaning?” Helen said.

  “Who knows?” he said.

  “No forced entry on the building?” I said.

  “None that I could see,” he said.

  “How about tire impressions?” Helen asked.

  “Probably every kind of tire made in the western world has been through here. Did y’all know this guy?” Mack said.

  “He moved back here from L.A. He used to sell burial insurance,” Helen said.

  I looked at the small man in tattered clothes sitting against the tree trunk outside the tape. “Is that the guy who found the victim?”

  “Yeah, good luck. I get the impression he’s a traveling wine connoisseur,” Mack said.

  I stepped outside the crime-scene tape and squatted down eye-level with the man in tattered clothes. His skin was grimed with dirt and he wore a greasy cap crimped down on his head. Like all men of his kind, his origins, the people who had conceived him, the place or home where he grew up had probably long ago ceased being of any importance to him.

  “You were sleeping by the tracks?” I said.

  “I fell off the train. I was pretty much knocked out,” he said.

  “Did you see or hear anything that might be helpful to us?” I asked.

  “I told it to that other guy.” He nodded toward Mack Bertrand.

  “Nothing bad is going to happen to you, podna. You’re not going to jail. We’re not holding you as a material witness. All those things are off the table. Just tell me what you saw.”

  He wiped his nose with his wrist. “Late last night I heard something go ‘pop.’ Then I heard it again. Maybe twice. Then a pickup truck drove off.”

  “Did you see the driver?”

  “No.”

  “What did the pickup truck look like?”

  “Just a truck. It was going down toward the bridge there.”

  “Why’d you come across the road this morning?”

  “They got free coffee at the hospital,” he replied.

  My knees ached when I stood up. I took two dollars from my wallet and gave it to him. “There’s a donut shop back toward town. Why don’t you get yourself something to eat?” I said. I started to walk away from him.

  “I seen something go flying out the truck window. Under the streetlight. Down toward the drawbridge. I don’t know if that’s any help to you or not,” he said.

  A few minutes later the coroner arrived. Later, the paramedics unzipped a black body bag and placed the remains of Leon Hebert inside it and lifted it onto a gurney. Mack Bertrand fiddled with his pipe and put it between his teeth, upside down. He was a family man, a Little League coach and regular church goer, and usually not given to a public expression of sentiment.

  “You asked why the victim grabbed the shooter’s shoe,” he said. “He was asking for mercy.”

  I waited for him to continue. But he didn’t.

  “Go on, Mack,” Helen said.

  “That’s all. He had a sucking chest wound and couldn’t speak. It was probably like drowning while somebody watched. So he tried to beg with his hand. He must have been a bad judge of character.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Whoever did this poor bastard wanted him to go out as hard as possible,” Mack said.

  Helen and I and a uniformed deputy searched along the edges of the road by the drawbridge, looking for the object the hobo said he had seen thrown from the fleeing pickup truck. But we found nothing of consequence. Helen dropped me at my house and I shaved and showered and drove to the office. At 9:15 A.M. I called the office of Dr. Parks. The receptionist said he would not be in. I called his home.

  “What do you want, Mr. Robicheaux?” he said.

  “How did you know it was—”

  “Caller ID. What’s the problem now?”

  “I’d like to come out to your house a few minutes.”

  “You’re not welcome at my house.”

  “Sorry to hear you say that,” I replied.

  I drove up Loreauville Road, through horse-farm country and fields bursting with mature sugarcane, under a hard blue sky you could have scratched with a nail. The air was cool and sweet smelling, like cinnamon burned on a woodstove, and through the cypress and oak trees that lined the Teche the sunlight glittered like goldleaf on the water’s surface.

  But when I turned into Dr. Parks’s driveway I seemed to enter a separate reality. His house was covered with shadow, the air cold, the birdbaths and empty fishpond and flagstone walkways moss stained and smelling of night-damp. The back end of a battered beige pickup truck stuck out of a shed in the rear of the house. Next to it was a stack of hay bales with a plastic bull’s-eye pinned to them and a dozen arrows embedded in the straw. I had to ring the bell twice before he answered the door.

  He was unshaved, the whites of his eyes shiny with a yellow cast, as though he had jaundice, a sour odor emanating from his clothes.

  “Say it,” he said.

  “May I come in?” I asked.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and walked deeper into the house.

  We entered a large, cheerless room with an unlit gas log fireplace and dark paneling on the walls and windows covered by thick velvet curtains. Track lights on the ceiling wer
e focused on a huge gun case that was filled with both modern and antique firearms.

  “That’s quite a collection,” I said.

  “Get to it, Detective,” he said.

  “Somebody waxed Leon Hebert last night. Somebody who really had it in for him.”

  “That breaks me up.”

  “You own a .38 or a nine-Mike?”

  “A what?”

  “A nine-millimeter.”

  “Yeah, a half dozen of them.”

  “You drive your pickup truck last night?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Home, with Mrs. Parks. And that’s the last question I’m answering without my attorney being present.”

  We were standing no more than one foot apart. I could see the fatigue in his face, the sag in his skin, the manic shine of grief and anger in his eyes.

  “My second wife died at the hands of violent men, Dr. Parks. The sonsofbitches who did it are all dead and I’m glad. But their deaths never brought me peace,” I said.

  “Is that your evangelical moment for the day?”

  “I recommend you not leave town.”

  “One question?” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did Hebert see it coming? Because I hope that motherfucker suffered just the way my daughter did before he caught the bus.”

  I left his house without answering his question. There are times as a law officer when you wish you did not have to look into the soul of another, even a grieving victim’s.

  That afternoon a seventeen-year-old black kid by the name of Pete Delahoussaye came into my office. Pete was over six feet and walked like he was made from coat hanger wire, but he had a fast ball that came down the chute like a B.B. and LSU and the University of Texas had both offered him athletic scholarships. Seven days a week, at 5:00 A.M., Pete and his widowed mother delivered the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate from one end of town to the other.

  He stood in front of my desk, a paper sack hanging from his left hand.

  “What’s happenin’, Pete?” I said.