Last Car to Elysian Fields

  “What kind of guy are we looking for, Doc?” he asked.

  “You ever get drunk and do something you wished you hadn’t?” the coroner asked.

  The detective seemed to study his notepad. “Yeah, once or twice,” he replied.

  “The man who did this wasn’t drunk. He beat her for a very long time. He enjoyed it immensely. He crushed every bone in her face. One eye is knocked all the way back into the skull. She may have strangled to death on her own blood. The beating may have gone on after she was dead. What kind of man is he? The kind who looks just like your next door neighbor,” the coroner said.

  The next afternoon Clete Purcel dropped by my office. He was living in a lovely old stucco motor court, shaded by live oaks, on Bayou Teche, and he was trying to convince me to go fishing with him that evening. Then something out the window caught his attention. “Is that Joe Zeroski coming up the walk?” he asked.

  “Probably.”

  “What’s he doing around here?”

  “The prostitute who was killed on Bayou Benoit yesterday? That was his daughter,” I said.

  “I didn’t make the connection. I’ll wait for you outside.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He and I have a history.”

  “Over what?”

  “When I was at the First District, I had to clock him once with a flashlight. Actually, I had to clock him five or six times. He wouldn’t stay down. The guy’s nuts, Streak. I’d lose him.”

  Then Clete grinned with self-irony, as he always did when he knew his advice was of no use, and left my office and went into the men’s room across the corridor.

  Joe Zeroski grew up in the Irish Channel of New Orleans and quit high school when he was sixteen in order to become a high-rise steelworker. Even as a kid Joe was wrapped so tight his fellow workers treated him as they would gasoline fumes around an open flame. When he was twenty, a notoriously violent and cruel Texas oilman and his bodyguard came into Tony Bacino’s club in the French Quarter and arbitrarily decided to pulverize someone at the bar. The oilman chose a laconic, seemingly innocuous working-class kid who was hunched over a draft beer. The kid was Joe Zeroski. Fifteen minutes later the oilman and his bodyguard were in an ambulance on their way to Charity Hospital.

  Two Detroit wrestlers were hired by a construction company to escort scabs through a union picket line. One of them stiff-armed Joe aside. Before the wrestler ever knew what hit him, he was on the ground and Joe was astraddle his chest, packing handfuls of gravel into his mouth while the strikers cheered.

  But Joe’s first big score was one he could never claim official recognition for. At twenty-two he made his bones with the Giacano family by taking out a cop killer who had tried to clip Didoni Giacano’s son. Wiseguys and off-duty cops all across New Orleans bought Joe a beer and a shot whenever they saw him.

  Joe came into my office like a man who had just clawed his way out of a tomb. He stood flat-footed in the center of the room, slightly hunched, his nostrils white-edged, his hands balling and unballing by his sides.

  “Sorry about your daughter, Joe. I hope to be of some help in finding the guy who did this,” I said.

  His hair was steel-gray, parted in the middle, sheep-sheared on the sides, and his gray eyes were filled with an analytical glare that seemed to dissect both people and objects with the same level of suspicion. He wore a tweed sports coat, gray slacks, loafers with white socks, and a pink shirt with a charcoal-colored tennis racquet above the pocket. When he stepped closer to my desk, I smelled an odor like heat and stale antiperspirant trapped in his clothes.

  “There’s a black kid just made bond. He raped and snuffed a white girl with a shotgun. Why ain’t he in here?” His speech was like most New Orleans working-class people of his generation, an accent and dialect that sounded much more like Brooklyn than the Deep South.

  “Because he’s not connected with your daughter’s death,” I replied.

  “Yeah? How many people you got around here could do these kinds of things?” he said. When he spoke, he tilted his face upward so that his bottom teeth were exposed in the way a fish’s might.

  “We’re working on it, partner,” I said.

  “The black kid’s name is Hulin. Bobby Hulin. He lives on an island somewhere.”

  “Right. You stay away from him, too.”

  He leaned down on my desk, his fists denting my ink blotter. His breath was moist, sour, rife with funk, like the smell a freshly opened grease trap might give off.

  “My wife died of leukemia last year. Linda was my only child. I ain’t got a lot to lose. You reading me on this?” he said.

  “Wrong way to talk to people who are on your side, Joe,” I said.

  “Y’all are lucky I ain’t who I used to be.”

  “I’ll walk you to the front door,” I said.

  “Flog your joint,” he replied.

  So instead I got a drink from the watercooler in the corridor and watched Joe walk toward the front of the courthouse, then I went to check my mail.

  But it was not over.

  Perry LaSalle had just walked into the department. Joe Zeroski’s head jerked around when he heard Perry give his name to the dispatcher.

  “You’re the lawyer for that Hulin kid?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” Perry replied.

  “It makes you feel good putting a degenerate kills young girls back on the street?” Joe asked.

  “Looks like I wandered in at the wrong time,” Perry said.

  “My daughter was Linda Zeroski. I find out some shitbag you sprung beat her to death . . .”

  He couldn’t finish his sentence. His eyes watered briefly, then he brushed his wrist across his mouth, staring disjointedly into space. Outside, the bells on the railway crossing clanged senselessly in an empty street.

  Wally, our three-hundred-pound, hypertensive dispatcher, stopped his work and slipped his horn-rimmed glasses into their leather case and placed the case on his desk and stepped out into the foyer. Clete Purcel stood at the reception counter, motionless, his damp comb clipped inside the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, his pale blue porkpie hat slanted on his head. He inserted a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth and opened the cap on his Zippo but never struck the flint.

  “You all right, Joe?” Clete asked.

  Joe stared at Clete, his temples pulsing with tiny veins.

  “What the fuck you doing here?” he asked.

  Then Perry LaSalle decided to continue on his way to the sheriff’s office. “I’m sorry for your loss, sir,” he said.

  He accidentally brushed against Joe’s arm.

  Joe blindsided him and hooked him murderously in the jaw, the blow whipping Perry’s face sideways, flinging spittle against the wall. Then Joe hit him below the eye and a third time in the mouth before Clete caught him from behind and wrapped his huge arms around Joe’s chest and lifted him off the ground and slammed his face down on a desk.

  But Joe freed one arm and ripped an elbow into Clete’s nose, splattering blood across Clete’s cheek. The dispatcher and I both grabbed Joe and threw him against the desk again and kicked his legs apart and pushed the side of his face down on a dirty ashtray.

  “Put your wrists behind you! Do it now, Joe!” I said.

  Then Joe Zeroski, who had killed perhaps nine men, sank to one knee, the backs of his thighs trembling, his arms forming a tent over his head as he tried to hide the shame and grief in his face.

  CHAPTER 5

  I walked with Perry LaSalle into the men’s room and held his coat for him while he washed his face with cold water. There was a cluster of red bumps under his right eye and blood in his saliva when he spit. “You cutting that guy loose?” he asked.

  “Unless you want to press charges,” I replied.

  He felt his mouth and looked in the mirror. His eyes were still angry. Then, as though realizing his expression was uncharacteristic of the Perry LaSalle we all knew, he blew out his breath and grinned.

&nb
sp; “Maybe I’ll catch him down the road,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t. Joe Zeroski was a hit man for the Giacano family,” I said.

  His eyes became neutral, as though he did not want me to read them. He took his coat from my hand and put it on and combed his hair in the mirror. Then he stopped.

  “Are you staring at me for some reason, Dave?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You think I’m bothered because this guy was a meatball for the Giacanos?” he said.

  “On my best day I can’t even take my own inventory, Perry,” I said.

  “Save the Twelve Step stuff for a meeting, old pard,” he replied.

  A few minutes later I walked with Clete Purcel to his car. The top was down and a half-dozen fishing rods were propped against the backseat. We watched Perry LaSalle’s Gazelle pull out of the parking lot and cross the train tracks and turn onto St. Peter Street.

  “He’s not going to file on Zeroski?” Clete asked.

  “Perry’s grandfather ran rum with the Giacanos during Prohibition. I don’t think Perry wants to be reminded of the association,” I said.

  “Everybody ran rum back then,” Clete said.

  “Somebody else did his grandfather’s time. You’re not going to try to square that elbow in the nose, are you?”

  Clete thought about it. “It wasn’t personal. For a button man Joe’s not a bad guy.”

  “Great standards.”

  “This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it’s the United States. Life will make a lot more sense,” he said.

  I worked late at the office that evening. The eight-by-ten death photos of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau were spread on my desk. The body postures and faces of the dead always tell a story. Sometimes the jaw is slack, the mouth robbed of words, as though the dying person has suddenly discovered the fraudulent nature of the world. Perhaps the gaze is focused on a shaft of sunlight through a tree, or a tear is sealed in the corner of the eye, or the palms lie open as though surrendering the spirit. I would like to believe that those who die violently are consoled by presences that care for and protect them in a special way. But the eyes of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau haunted me, and I wanted to find their killers and do something horrible to them. On the way home I drove to the pickup corner where Linda Zeroski had gotten into an automobile under a spreading oak and driven off, without concern, into a sunset that looked like purple and red smoke against the western sky. The teenage crack dealers who had supposedly been her friends were bored with my questions, then irritated that I was interrupting the flow of business on the corner. When I did not leave, they glanced at one another, formulating a different response, as though I were not there. Their voices became unctuous, their faces sincere, and they indicated to a man they would certainly call my office if they heard any information that might be helpful. I started to get back into my truck. Then I stopped and walked back under the oak tree.

  “Does Tee Bobby Hulin ever swing by the corner?” I asked.

  “Tee Bobby likes them when they sweet, white, and sixteen. I don’t see nothing like that ’round here, suh,” one kid said. The others snickered.

  “What are you telling me?” I asked.

  “Tee Bobby got his own thing. It just ain’t got nothing to do wit’ us,” the same kid said.

  They lowered their heads in the shadows, suppressing their grins, kicking at the dust, their eyes flicking with amusement at one another. I walked back to my truck and got in. The heat lightning in the south pulsed like quicksilver in the clouds.

  Joe Zeroski had asked how many individuals in our area were capable of the crimes committed against the persons of his daughter and Amanda Boudreau. Could Tee Bobby have been involved in the abduction of Linda Zeroski? Tee Bobby’s grandmother had said that Tee Bobby’s present trouble had started before he was born. Maybe it was time to find out what she had meant. I drove home and parked in the drive and went into the bait shop. Batist was by himself, eating a sandwich at the counter.

  “How well do you know Tee Bobby?” I asked.

  “Good enough so’s I don’t want to know him,” he answered.

  “You think he could rape and murder a young girl?”

  “What I t’ink don’t count.”

  “What do you know about Ladice Hulin’s relationship to the LaSalle family?”

  He finished his coffee and stared out the screen at the bream night-feeding on the moths that fried themselves on the floodlamps and fell into the water.

  “Stories about white men and black field women ain’t never good, Dave. You want to hear it, my sister growed up with Ladice,” he said.

  I told my wife, Bootsie, I’d eat supper late, and Batist and I drove to his sister’s small house outside Loreauville, where I listened to a tale that took me back into the Louisiana of my boyhood.

  But actually, even before Batist’s sister began her account, I already knew much of the LaSalle family’s history, not because I necessarily admired them or even found them interesting, but because their lives had become the mirror and measure of our own. In one fashion or another the town had been a participant in all their deeds, all their reversals of fortune, for good or bad, from the time the first cabins were hewn and notched out of cypress on the banks of Bayou Teche, to the federal occupation in 1863 and later the restoration of the old oligarchy by the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction, into modern times when Cajuns and people of color were deliberately kept uneducated and poor in order to ensure the availability of a huge and easily manipulated labor pool. The LaSalles had believed colonial Louisiana would allow them to realize all the grandiose dreams that Robespierre’s guillotine had denied some of their family members. But they soon learned that revolutionary France had not quite finished paying back their kind for centuries of royal arrogance. In fact, they were the bunch Napoleon Bonaparte selected as the target for his most successful large-scale swindle. They paid large sums to obtain land grants in Louisiana from his government, only to discover in 1803 that Napoleon had sold the land from under their feet to the Americans in order to finance his wars.

  But the LaSalles were a resilient group, not to be undone by a Corsican usurper or their new egalitarian neighbors. They bought slaves whom James Bowie and his business partner, Jean Lafitte, were smuggling into Louisiana from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. They drained swamps and felled forests and later laid log roads and railway tracks for steam engines across acreage that was so black and rich with sediment from the alluvial fan of the Mississippi that any kind of seed would grow on it if the seed were simply thrown on the ground and stepped upon.

  Like his predecessors, Julian LaSalle was a practical man who did not argue or contend with the world. Perhaps his family had built its wealth upon the backs of slave labor, but that had been the ethos of the times and he felt no guilt about it. He paid what was considered a fair wage to his field hands, saw to their medical care, always kept his word, and during the Great Depression never turned a man in need from his door.

  As a little boy I saw him when my father took me with him to Provost’s Bar and Pool Room. Mr. Julian, as we called him, was a dark-haired, handsome man with a cleft chin, who wore suspenders and linen suits and Panama hats and two-tone shoes, like an American you might see at a Havana racetrack. He never sat at the bar but always stood, a cigar in one hand, a tumbler of bourbon and ice in the other. On Saturday afternoons Provost’s was always filled with both business and blue-collar men, the floor spread with green sawdust, sometimes littered with football betting cards. Mr. Julian treated all the patrons there with equal respect, bought drinks for the old men at the domino and bouree tables, and walked away when other men used racist language or told bawdy jokes. He was wealthy and educated, but his graciousness and good nature inspired in others admiration rather than envy.

  There were stories about his involvement with black women, one in particular, but someone was always quick to off
er that Mr. Julian’s wife suffered from cancer and other illnesses and had been in a sanitarium in the North, that her hysterical behavior at Mass was such that even a sympathetic priest had reluctantly asked her not to attend. Who could expect Mr. Julian to abide what even the church could not?

  But Batist’s sister did not begin her story with Mr. Julian. Instead she told of an overseer on Poinciana Island, a lean, rough-grained, angular man who wore sunglasses, western boots, a straw cowboy hat, and khaki clothes when he sat atop his horse and rode among the black workers in the fields. The year was 1953, a time when the white overseer on a Louisiana plantation had the same powers over those in his charge as his antebellum antecedents did. No one knew his origins, but his name was Legion, and the first day he appeared in the field one worker, who had been a convict on Angola Farm, looked into Legion’s face and at first opportunity leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles back to New Iberia and never returned to ask for his pay.

  “You say his name was Legion?” I asked Batist’s sister.

  “That’s the name he give us. Didn’t have no first name, didn’t have no last name. We didn’t even have to call him ‘Mister.’ Just ‘Legion,’” she replied.

  He believed clothes kept the heat off the body, and he buttoned his shirt at the throat and wrists, no matter how humid and hot the weather became. The back of his shirt was peppered with sweat by midday, and while the blacks ate their sandwiches of company-store balogna and potted meat in a grove of gum trees, he tethered his horse under a solitary live oak in the middle of a pepper field and sat in a folding chair a black man hand-carried to him for that purpose. He ate the boudin or pork chops and dirty rice the blacks said a prostitute at Hattie Fontenot’s bar prepared and wrapped in wax paper for him each morning.

  He took the girls and women he wanted from the field, indicating with a nod of the head for one of them to follow his horse into a canebrake or pine thicket, where he dismounted from the saddle and stripped nude and told the girl or woman to remove her underpants and lie down and open her legs, his language as mechanical and dehumanized as the violence of his copulation and the release of his animus as he plunged inside the girl or woman, his upper torso propped up stiffly on his arms, as though he did not want to touch any more of her body than was necessary.