Last Car to Elysian Fields

  Then I heard someone wedge a tool between the back door and the jamb, splinter the deadbolt, and enter the house. Whoever it was moved quickly toward the band of light at the bottom of the bathroom door, opened it slightly, and looked in at me.

  “I wasn’t planning to meet you like this, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity. Can I be getting you anything? You don’t look too well,” the figure said.

  “Coll?”

  “Right you are. No, don’t get up. Take care of business while I have my say, then I’ll be off.” His hand came through the opening and removed the key from the lock. He shut the door and locked it from the outside.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I said.

  I heard him go into the bedroom, then scrape a chair into position. “This is a fine cat you have here. Been in a few fights, has he?”

  “Listen, Coll—”

  “He’s got a real pair of bandoliers back there.”

  My face was cold with sweat, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach. Gray spots danced before my eyes.

  “Father Dolan and I have nothing to do with your life,” I said.

  “Oh, but you do. Two rather nasty cretins just arrived in town, Mr. Robicheaux, the cousins of Frank Dellacroce. Stone killers, they are, sir, with no parameters and no charitable impulses. Evidently a few of the greaseballs think you blew poor Frank’s head off. Would you like to hear what they did to a friend of mine?”

  “No.”

  “Took a blowtorch to him. What’s the name of your cat?”

  “Snuggs.”

  “What a fine little fellow. Built like a fucking fire hydrant. It’s a shame the innocent suffer. But maybe that’s the only thing that causes us to take action.”

  I could feel my heart quicken. “What are you saying?”

  “I didn’t make the world. I just live in it as best I can. I’ll be going now.”

  “You leave that cat here.”

  But he didn’t reply. I heard his chair scrape but did not hear him set Snuggs down. “Coll? Did you hear me?” I yelled.

  I heard him banging about in the kitchen, then a hard, clunking sound and his footsteps going heavily through the house and out the front door. By the time I was able to climb out the bathroom window, the yard and the street were empty, the ground puffing with fog, the moon as bright as a white flame behind the skeletal outline of a water oak.

  I went around back and entered the house through the kitchen door. A pitcher of milk rested on the drainboard and Snuggs was lapping from a bowl next to it, one Max Coll had filled with both milk and dry cat food.

  I started to dial 911, then gave it up, propped a chair against the kitchen door, and went back to sleep, my .45 under my pillow.

  At 8:05 Monday morning Clotile Arceneaux walked into my office. She wore a pair of navy blue slacks, a blouse printed with tropical flowers, and a polished black gunbelt with her badge holder hung from the front and her cuffs pushed through the back. She had the blackest hair and wore the brightest lipstick I had ever seen.

  “How’s life in the Big Sleazy?” I said.

  She grinned broadly, then sat down without being asked. “You’re a magnet, Robicheaux,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Trouble. We keep a few people at the New Orleans airport, watching to see who comes and goes, know what I mean? Three days ago a couple of greaseballs from Ft. Lauderdale got into town, spent the night with some hookers, then caught a flight to Lafayette. Guess what their last names are?”

  “Dellacroce?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Max Coll was at my house last night.”

  “Say again?”

  “He was walking around inside my house. He talked to me through the bathroom door.”

  She looked up at one corner of the ceiling, her eyelids fluttering. Then she scratched her neck and looked at me. “I brought mug shots of the Dellacroces. They’re brothers, Tito and Caesar. Tito’s friends call him the Heap, ’cause he looks like a haystack with eyes. But the mean one is Caesar. He’s short and not very bright.”

  “He uses a blowtorch on people?”

  “You do know about these guys.”

  “Max Coll is tops when it comes to intel.”

  “I’ve got to get a job over here. New Orleans just doesn’t cut it.”

  “Want to go to lunch later?”

  “Like to, slick, but the Big Sleazy calls. I’ve got a little more here on your man Coll.”

  “He’s not my man. He’s a meltdown you guys shipped to New Iberia.”

  She raised her eyebrows and made an innocent face as she opened a manilla folder in her lap. “The Coll family was hooked up with the IRA for generations,” she said. “Some of them may have been behind the bombing of a pub in Belfast. Some Protestant militants decided to get even and took Max’s whole family out, including an older brother who was a Catholic priest.”

  “That’s how he ended up in the orphanage,” I said, more to myself than to her.

  She looked down again at the open folder in her lap. “Yeah, that’s right. He was there until he was fifteen,” she said.

  “Go to lunch with me,” I said.

  She thought about it. “Make it a beignet and a cup of coffee,” she said. She studied me with one eye half closed.

  That afternoon I looked down at the booking photos of Tito and Caesar Dellacroce she had left on my desk. Tito, known as the Heap by his peers, stared back at me with eyes that were like cups of black grease. His brother made me think of a ferret in need of a haircut. Both Max Coll and Fat Sammy Figorelli had indicated Frank Dellacroce’s relatives had put his death on me. Maybe. But I believed their real target was still Max Coll, and Max was in New Iberia for reasons other than a religious obsession with Father Jimmie. I believed Max had intimations about where the hit on Father Jimmie had come from, and Max blamed that same person for putting a contract on him and had come to our area to wipe the slate clean.

  Or perhaps he was simply crazy.

  Regardless, it was time to dial up Max’s head and see how he liked having things turned around on him. I called the Daily Iberian and scheduled an ad to run in the next day’s personal notices.

  “Let me read this back to you,” the clerk said. “‘Max, you owe me $57.48 for the damage you did to my back door. Why don’t you pay your debts instead of acting like a window-licking voyeur who breaks into people’s houses and molests their pets? Tito and Caesar just blew into town and seem upset because you canceled their cousin’s ticket. Have a nice day—Dave.’”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Mr. Robicheaux, this ad doesn’t make much sense.”

  “It does if you’re morally insane,” I replied.

  Did you ever have a song in your mind you couldn’t get rid of? For me, at least on that Monday afternoon, it was “Goodnight Irene.” I kept thinking of Junior Crudup sitting on the steps of his cabin in the work camp, playing his twelve-string guitar, singing the words to Leadbelly’s most famous composition, while he waited to catch a glimpse of Andrea LeJeune’s purple Ford convertible passing on the dirt road. Did she arrange for him to return to the house again? Did the guard, Jackson Posey, continue to torment him because of the hatred Posey felt for himself and the lot the world had dealt him?

  If God in that moment looked down upon His creations, I wondered if He wasn’t terribly saddened by the level of madness that had become the province of His children.

  The song was still in my head when I went that afternoon to Baron’s, the health club where I worked out, and saw Castille LeJeune seated on a hardwood bench in the dressing room, his face bright with sweat from his racquet ball game, a towel wrapped around his neck. He was jovial and expansive, sipping from a glass of icewater while he talked with a group of businessmen, although a sign on the wall stated no glass containers were allowed in the room. It was 5 P.M. and both black and white workers from the salt mines out in the wetlands and the sugar mills that ringed the town burst lou
dly into the dressing room. Instead of being intimidated by LeJeune’s presence, they treated him as they would a celebrity, greeting him as “Mr. Castille.” Somehow he was one of them, at least for the moment, a patrician who knew them by their first names and spoke both demotic French and English without being patronizing.

  There were great differences in the room, but not between the races. The black and white working men spoke the same regional dialect and shared the same political attitudes, all of which had been taught them by others. They denigrated liberals, unions, and the media, considered the local Wal-Mart store a blessing, and regularly gave their money to the Powerball lottery and casinos that had the architectural charm of a sewer works. They were frightened by the larger world and found comfort in the rhetoric of politicians who assured them the problem was the world’s, not theirs. And most heartening of all was the affirmation lent them by a genteel person like Castille LeJeune, a Distinguished Flying Cross recipient who, unlike many members of his class, showed no fear or lack of confidence in their midst, which told them of his respect for their humanity.

  I dressed in a corner of the room, my back turned to LeJeune and the cluster of men around him. Maybe I was wrong about him, I thought. Maybe Helen and Theodosha were justified in their criticism of my attitudes. I was born in the late Depression and bore an ingrained resentment toward the wealthy and the powerful. All drunks fear and desire both power and control, and sometimes even years of sobriety inside A.A. don’t rid alcoholics of that basic contradiction in their personalities. Why should I be any different?

  When I had almost thought my way into a charitable attitude toward Castille LeJeune, I felt a hand touch my shoulder. “Would you like to play a round of racquet ball, Mr. Robicheaux?” he said.

  “Never learned how,” I said.

  “Do you have any idea why this deranged physician, what’s-his-name, Parks, would have come to my home, then to my foreman’s?”

  So you’re a showboat as well as a hypocrite, I thought. “His daughter was served illegally at your daiquiri shop before she died in a car crash. Your company defrauded him on the house-remodeling job it did at his home. He also said you sold him a bogus warranty on his house. Maybe that might have something to do with it,” I replied.

  “I’d like to say your reputation precedes you, Mr. Robicheaux. But your potential seems to have no limits,” he said.

  “Your deceased wife brought a black convict to your house out of respect for his musical talent, an event evidently you couldn’t abide. That same convict, Junior Crudup, disappeared from the face of the earth. I suspect, on the day of your death, his specter will be standing by your bed.”

  The only sound in the room was the hum of the overhead fans.

  “How dare you?” he said.

  I’m going to get you, you sorry sack of shit, I said to myself, my eyes fixed six inches from his.

  The days were growing shorter, and by 6 P.M. the sun had set, the sky was black and veined with lightning, and Bayou Teche was high and yellow and chained with rain rings in the glow of the lamps along the banks of City Park. Father Jimmie walked about in the backyard, his hands in his pockets, examining the sky, the wind swirling leaves around his ankles. He came back in the house smelling of trees and humus, his eyes purposeful.

  “I need to work things out with Max Coll,” he said.

  “You have to do what?” I said.

  “He’s in New Iberia because I’m here. Now, these other criminals are showing up because he’s here. Where does it end? One man is already dead.”

  “Frank Dellacroce sexually exploited a retarded girl. I think he got off easy.”

  “I had to own up to some things at the retreat, the big one being pride.”

  “In what?”

  “My feeling of virtuous superiority to others,” he said.

  “You don’t call self-flagellation a form of pride?”

  “You’re a hard sell, Dave.”

  The phone rang like a providential respite. Or at least that’s what I thought until I realized who was on the other end of the line.

  “Where do you get off embarrassing my father in a public place?” a woman’s voice said.

  “Your father is neither a victim nor a martyr. Cut the crap, Theo,” I said.

  “Your anger taints everything in your life. You disappoint me in ways I can’t describe.”

  I heard a sheet of rain clatter across the tin roof. I wanted to pretend I was impervious to her words, but the element of truth in them was like a thorn pressed into the scalp. “Where are you?” I said.

  “In a bar.” She gave the name, a box of a place squeezed between shacks in New Iberia’s worst neighborhood.

  “How much have you had?” I asked.

  “I’m drinking a soda and lime, believe it or not. But I’m about to change that. Why, you want to get loaded?”

  “You wait there,” I said.

  As I backed out of the driveway, the canopy of oaks over the street stood out in lacy, black-green relief against the lightning rippling across the sky. I did not pay particular attention to the car that rounded the corner and followed me past the Shadows.

  Inside the house Father Jimmie tore the wrapper off his hangered dry cleaning and discovered his black suit was missing. He would have sworn it had been with his other things when he had brought them from the laundry three days ago. He searched the rack, then checked the top drawer where he kept his Roman collar and rabat, the backless garment that serves as a priest’s vest.

  Both collar and rabat were gone.

  Chapter 14

  I drove to the bar Theodosha had called from and parked on the street. The bar was a gray, dismal place, ensconced like a broken matchbox under a dying oak tree, its only indication of gaiety a neon beer sign that flickered in one window. She was at a table in back, the glow of the jukebox lighting her face and the deep blackness of her hair. She tipped a collins glass to her mouth, her eyes locked on mine.

  “Let me take you home,” I said.

  “No, thanks,” she replied.

  “Getting swacked?”

  “Merchie and I had another fight. He says he can’t take my pretensions anymore. I love the word ‘pretensions.’”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to get drunk,” I said.

  “You’re right. I can get drunk for any reason I choose,” she replied, and took another hit from the glass. Then she added incongruously, “You once asked Merchie what he was doing in Afghanistan. The answer is he wasn’t in Afghanistan. He was in one of those other God-forsaken Stone Age countries to the north, helping build American airbases to protect American oil interests. Merchie says they’re going to make a fortune. All for the red, white, and blue.”

  “Who is they?”

  But her eyes were empty now, her concentration and anger temporarily spent.

  I glanced at the surroundings, the dour men sitting at the bar, a black woman sleeping with her head on a table, a parolee putting moves on a twenty-year-old junkie and mother of two children who was waiting for her connection. These were the people we cycled in and out of the system for decades, without beneficial influence or purpose of any kind that was detectable.

  “Let’s clear up one thing. Your old man came looking for trouble at the club today. I didn’t start it,” I said.

  “Go to a meeting, Dave. You’re a drag,” she said.

  “Give your guff to Merchie,” I said, and got up to leave.

  “I would. Except he’s probably banging his newest flop in the hay. And the saddest thing is I can’t blame him.”

  “I think I’m going to ease on out of this. Take care of yourself, kiddo,” I said.

  “Fuck that ‘kiddo’ stuff. I loved you and you were too stupid to know it.”

  I walked back outside into a misting rain and the clean smell of the night. I walked past a house where people were fighting behind the shades. I heard doors slamming, the sound of either a car backfiring or gunshots on another street, a siren w
ailing in the distance. On the corner I saw an expensive automobile pull to the curb and a black kid emerge from the darkness, wearing a skintight bandanna on his head. The driver of the car, a white man, exchanged money for something in the black kid’s hand.

  Welcome to the twenty-first century, I thought.

  I opened my truck door, then noticed the sag on the frame and glanced at the right rear tire. It was totally flat, the steel rim buried deep in the folds of collapsed rubber. I dropped the tailgate, pulled the jack and lug wrench out of the toolbox that was arc-welded to the bed of the truck, and fitted the jack under the frame. Just as I had pumped the flat tire clear of the puddle it rested in, I heard footsteps crunch on the gravel behind me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a short, thick billy club whip through the air. Just before it exploded across the side of my head, my eyes seemed to close like a camera lens on a haystack that smelled of damp-rot and unwashed hair and old shoes. I was sure as I slipped into unconsciousness that I was inside an ephemeral dream from which I would soon awake.

  I knew it was sunlight when I awoke. I could feel its warmth on my skin, see its red-edged radiance at the corners of the tape that covered my eyes. Along with the chemical odor, perhaps ether or chloroform, that still clung to my face I could smell dead fish and ponded water that had gone stagnant inside shade and blackened leaves freshly broken by someone’s shoes. I was seated in a chair, my wrists cuffed behind me with a plastic band. I turned my head into a breeze blowing from a window or door, like a blind man entering his first day without sight, vainly hoping the world around him was not filled with adversaries.

  A motorboat passed a short distance away. When the sound of the wake sliding through flooded trees died, I heard two men talking about a football game in another room. I tried to rise from the chair, then realized both my ankles were strapped to the legs. “Asshole is awake,” I heard one of the men say.