Last Car to Elysian Fields

“But what?”

  I sucked in my cheeks and widened my eyes and looked out at the tranquility of the day. “Nothing, sir. My wife and I both wish you the very best and extend our sympathies and hope that all good things come to you and your family.”

  Then I rejoined Molly in the backyard and did not mention my exchange with Raphael Chalons. Tripod climbed down from his perch in the live oak, and Snuggs appeared out of the bamboo, his tail pointed straight up, as stiff as a broomstick. The four of us commenced to share breakfast at the redwood table.

  When the world presents itself in the form of a green-gold playground, blessed with water and flowers and wind and centuries-old oak trees, and when you’re allowed to share all these things on a fine Sunday morning with people and animals you love, why take on the burden of the spiritually afflicted?

  THAT AFTERNOON I jogged through City Park and saw Clete sailing a Frisbee with a bunch of black kids by the baseball diamond. He was bare-chested, wearing only a pair of swim trunks and his porkpie hat, his skin running with sweat.

  “Married?” he said.

  “Right. Last night. Got something smart to say?” I said.

  “Know somebody a few weeks, start a shitstorm all over town, then hit the altar with about three hours planning…. Seems normal to me,” he said.

  I told him about Raphael Chalons’s offer to put me on his payroll.

  “That’s what rich guys do. I don’t see the big deal there,” he said.

  “No, I think he wants to prove to himself that someone close to him didn’t kill his daughter.”

  Clete sailed the Frisbee to a black kid, then sat on a bench in the shade and drank from a glass of iced tea. He wiped his hair and chest with a towel. There were strawberry bruises ringed around his brow and scabs in his scalp where his tormentors in Miami had wrapped a chain around his head. “So you told the old man to fuck himself?” he said.

  “Not in those words.”

  “You should have. We need to take it to them.”

  “In what way?” I said.

  “Same rules as when we were at NOPD—bust ’em or dust ’em.”

  “That’s why we’re not at NOPD any longer.”

  “It’s not over between me and this Lou Kale dude, either. By the way, where’s Jimmie?”

  “I think he may have gone to find Ida Durbin.”

  “Think?”

  “I don’t have his umbilical cord stapled to the corner of my desk. You’re the one who brought back the story about Ida saving your ass. Now, give it a rest.”

  “Married life must really be agreeing with you.”

  “Clete, you can absolutely drive people crazy. I mean it. You need your own Zip code and time zone. Every time I have a conversation with you, I feel like I have blood coming out of my ears.”

  “What’d I say?” he replied, genuinely perplexed.

  The only sound was the creak of the trees and the kids playing by the ball diamond. “Molly wants you to come over for dinner this evening. We called earlier but you weren’t home,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you try my cell?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Better check with your wife again.”

  You didn’t put the slide on Clete Purcel. But at 6:00 p.m. he was at the house anyway, resplendent in a new blue suit, his face glowing with aftershave. He clutched a dozen red roses in each meaty paw, a wedding gift wrapped in ribbon and satin paper clamped under one arm. It contained a sterling silver jewelry box that probably cost him several hundred dollars. “I’m really happy for Dave,” I heard him say to Molly when I was in another room. “He’s got polka dot giraffes running around in his head, but he’s the best guy I’ve ever known.”

  ON MONDAY MORNING I undertook a task that no drunk willingly embarks upon. I tried to find out what I had done during a blackout, where I had gone, and the identity of the people who had seen me commit acts that were so embarrassing, depraved, or even monstrous that my conscious mind would not allow me to remember them.

  I checked out a cruiser and returned to the camp in the Atchafalaya Basin where I had awakened on a Sunday morning, hovering on the edges of psychosis, praying the sky might rain Jack Daniel’s at any moment and let my drunkard’s game go into extra innings.

  I found the Creole woman who had watched over me that morning and who had told me I had been in the company of poachers and men who carried knives. Her name was Clarise Lantier, and she was picking up trash behind the lakefront bar her husband operated, stuffing it heavily into a gunnysack. She wore trousers and men’s work shoes, and when she stooped over and stared at me sideways, her recessed, milky-blue eye and misshapen face were like those of a female Quasimodo.

  “Who were these poachers and men with knives, Miss Clarise?” I asked.

  “They live yonder, ’cross the lake. Don’t ax me their names, either, ’cause they don’t give them. Maybe they from up nort’.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They talk different from us.”

  “You’re not telling me a whole lot.”

  “They dangerous men, Mr. Dave. That’s enough to know, ain’t it?” she said.

  But she gave me directions to their camp, anyway. I drove on a dirt track around the northern rim of the lake, through stands of swamp maples and persimmon and gum trees. The interior of the woods was dark with shade, the grass a pale green, the canopy rippling in the wind. On the east shore I saw a shack built on stilts by the water’s edge, an outboard and a pirogue tied under it. A pickup with crab traps in back and a Tennessee plate was parked up on the high ground, a bullet hole in the rear window.

  There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the ’Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin.

  I got out of the cruiser and stood behind the opened door, my right hand on the butt of my .45. “It’s Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I need somebody to come down here and talk to me,” I called up at the shack.

  A dark-haired man with a ragged beard appeared in the back doorway, just above the wood steps that led down to dry ground. “Holy shit, you’re a cop?” he said.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them, please,” I said. “Who else is in the camp?”

  “Nobody. They went to run the trot line.”

  “Come down here, please,” I said.

  His body was so thin it looked skeletal. His jeans and T-shirt were filthy, his neck beaded with dirt rings. He walked slowly down the steps, as though his connective tissue barely held his bones together. It was impossible to tell his age or estimate his potential. He seemed ageless, without cultural reference, painted on the air. He had teeth on one side of his mouth and none on the other. There was a black glaze in his eyes, a long, tapered skinning knife in a scabbard on his belt. His odor was like scrapings from an animal hide that have burned in a fire.

  “I sure didn’t make you for no lawman,” he said.

  “What’s your name, podna?”

  “Same name it was when we met you ’cross the lake at the bar—Vassar Twitty.”

  “I’m not here to bother you guys about game regulations, Vassar. I don’t care what kind of history you might have in other places, either. But I’ve got a personal problem I think you might be able to help me with. I went on a bender and don’t know what I did.”

  It felt easier saying it than I had thought. He sat down on a step, his knees splayed, and looked about the ground with an idiotic grin on his face.

  “Want to let me in on the joke?” I asked.

  “You was pretty pissed off. We kept telling you to just have another drink and come coon hunting with us. But you was set on getting even with some guy.”

  “Which guy?” I said.

  “Some TV newsman you said was jamming you up. We
tried to get your keys away from you, but there wasn’t nothing for it.”

  “For what?” I said, swallowing.

  “When a man wants to rip somebody from his liver to his lights, you leave him alone. We left you alone. I reckon nothing bad happened or you wouldn’t be driving a cruiser. Right? Boy, you was sure stewed,” he said.

  The wind gusted off the lake. It must have been ninety in the shade, but my face felt as cold and bright as if I had bathed it in ice water.

  I WASN’T IN A GOOD STATE of mind when I got back to the department. Could I have gone to Valentine Chalons’s guesthouse and in a bloodlust attacked his sister? How do you reach memories that are locked inside a black box?

  I had another problem, too, one I had kept pushing to the edges of my consciousness. I went into Helen’s office and closed the door behind me. “You don’t look too hot,” she said.

  “I found a guy in the Basin I was drinking with the night Honoria Chalons was murdered. He said I talked about ripping up Val Chalons. He said he and his friends tried to stop me but I took off in my truck.”

  “I think we know all that, don’t we?”

  “You’ve been protecting me, Helen.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I gave you that CD with a blood smear on it. You didn’t turn it over to Doogie Dugas.”

  “Because it didn’t come from the crime scene. Because Doogie is an incompetent idiot.”

  “I know that’s Honoria’s blood on it.”

  “No, you don’t. Listen, Dave, Val Chalons has done everything in his power to put your head on a stick. But luminol doesn’t lie. There were no blood traces in your truck, your clothes, or in your house. Now stop building a case against yourself.”

  “Raphael Chalons came to my house yesterday and tried to put me on his payroll,” I said.

  “That’s interesting,” she said, looking at the tops of her nails.

  “One other item. Molly Boyle and I got married Saturday night.”

  Her elbow was propped on her desk. She rested her chin on her knuckles, her face softening. She seemed to think a long time before she spoke. “You did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Figured out a way to marry your own church. No, don’t say anything. Just quietly disappear. Bwana say ‘bye’ now.”

  JIMMIE’S RESOURCEFULNESS rarely let him down. His friendship with police officers, private investigators, and people in the life extended from Key Biscayne, Florida, to Brownsville, Texas, which was the long, sickle-shaped rim of America’s sexual playground long before the invention of Vegas or Atlantic City. Three hours after his flight had arrived in Miami, he obtained the home address of the man who now called himself Lou Coyne. He also obtained the name of his wife, a woman who called herself Connie Coyne and who lived three houses down from her husband on a canal in Miami Beach.

  Jimmie stayed that night in a hotel that fronted the ocean. In the morning, he dressed in a linen suit and lavender silk shirt, had his shoes shined in the hotel lobby, then took a cab to a two-story white stucco house, one with a faded red tile roof, scrolled iron balconies, heavy, brass-ringed oak doors, and gated walls that towered over the grounds. Each house on the street was similar in ambiance, a fortress unto itself, the name of its security service prominently displayed. But even though it was Saturday, there were no people on this dead-end street, no sounds of children playing on a ficus-shaded lawn.

  A Hispanic gardener came to the gate after Jimmie pushed the buzzer. The St. Augustine grass was closely clipped and thick, the bluish-green of a Caribbean lagoon. The flower beds bloomed with every tropical plant imaginable, and royal palms touched the eaves of the second story. Off to one side of the yard Jimmie could see a lime-colored swimming pool coated with leaves, the cracked dome of a 1950s underground atomic-bomb shelter protruding from the sod, like the top of a giant toadstool, and a boat dock that offered a sweeping view of the ocean.

  “Is Ms. Coyne at home?” Jimmie asked.

  “Sí,” the gardener replied.

  “Would you tell her Jimmie Robicheaux would like to speak to her?”

  “Sí,” the gardener replied, staring into Jimmie’s face.

  “Would you go get her, please?”

  “Sí,” the gardener replied, obviously not comprehending a word.

  “Quién es?” a woman said from inside the fronds of a giant philodendron, where she was pulling weeds on her knees and dropping them in a bucket.

  “My name is Jimmie Robicheaux, Ms. Coyne. I’m looking for an old friend and thought you might be able to help me,” Jimmie said.

  The woman stood up, brushing grains of dirt off a pair of cotton work gloves. She was slender, her hair a silvery-red. She wore a straw hat on the back of her head and a halter and Capri pants, and her shoulders were sprinkled with freckles. She walked to the gate, her eyes examining Jimmie’s face.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.

  But the formality of her speech couldn’t hide her regional inflection, nor disguise the fact she had correctly pronounced Jimmie’s last name, after hearing it only once, which most people outside Louisiana are not able to do easily.

  “Ida Durbin is the name of the lady I need to find,” he said.

  She looked at her watch and rubbed the glass with her thumb, more as an idle distraction from her own thoughts than as an effort to know the time.

  “How’s your friend, the private investigator?” she said.

  “Clete Purcel? He’s doing all right. I think he’d like to have a talk with your husband, though.”

  She stepped near the gate and closed her hand around one of the twisted iron spikes inside the grillework. “And yourself? You been doin’ okay, Jimmie?”

  “Life’s a breeze. How’s it with you, Ida?”

  She reached into the bugle vine growing on the wall and pushed a button, buzzing the gate open. “Come on in, sailor, and let me tell you a story of hearts and flowers,” she said.

  Chapter 22

  ON THE MORNING they had planned to leave Galveston and start a new life in Mexico, Ida had asked Jimmie to drop her off at the bus depot so she could buy a few items downtown for the trip while he returned our Ford convertible to me and packed his clothes at the motel. She stored her suitcase in a coin locker, bought a pair of shoes and a kerchief and a small box of hard candy up the street, drank a lime Coke at a soda fountain, then retrieved her suitcase from the locker and took a seat in the whites-only section of the waiting room. The bus to Monterrey was due in twenty minutes.

  Then she looked through the window and saw Lou Kale’s ’56 Bel Air pull to the curb, followed by an unmarked police car in which sat two plainclothes cops whom she recognized as regular visitors to the house on Post Office Street. Their names were Robert Cobb and Dale Bordelon. Both were rawboned men with cavernous eyes and square, callused-edged hands and mouths that did not smile, their hair mowed so closely into their scalps the ridges in their skulls glistened through the bristles. They followed Lou Kale into the waiting room, then approached Ida while Kale fished for change in front of a cigarette machine. Lou’s lip was puffed, one eyebrow distorted by a knot, one nostril darker than the other from the beating Jimmie had given him.

  “Take a walk outside with us, Missy,” Cobb said, looking down at her from a great height.

  “I’m waiting on my bus,” she replied.

  Cobb reached down and cupped her by the elbow. She felt herself rising to her feet, even though she had not been told she was under arrest or that she had violated any law. Her eyes swept the waiting room. The Negroes sitting in the section marked COLORED preoccupied themselves with their children or twisting about in their seats to watch the traffic on the street. The two clerks behind the ticket counter had suddenly discovered concerns of great import on printed fare and schedule sheets that moments earlier had seemed of little significance to them.

  In her mind’s eye she saw herself inside a single frame of a filmstrip that had suddenly frozen in
side the projector. The sound was gone and all the figures were stationary, robbed of motion and breath, the selfishness of their ulterior motives in the script as stark as the grain in the film. Every figure in the frame, including herself, was complicit in a deed that the larger society would say could not occur. In this case, the deed was the abduction of an innocent person by law enforcement personnel in the middle of an American city, in full view of people who hid their eyes.

  But the onus was on her, not them. She was a whore. She existed beyond the invisible boundaries of respectability and was not entitled to histrionic displays. To resist her abductors, who were also her users, was to make herself visible and to call into question the legitimacy of an entire system. As she rose from the bench, she could smell the detectives’ armpits through their clothes.

  She walked between the two men to their car, without either of them touching her person again. In the filmstrip that recommenced in her mind’s eye, she saw herself as a gray, nondescript creature in the back of the car, disconnected from the rest of the world, the air tinged with the hot musty odor of the fabric in the seats. The detective named Cobb set her suitcase by her side and said, “It’s gonna be all right, kid.” For reassurance he grinned, his lips stretching back over teeth that were as long as a horse’s.

  As the car pulled away from the curb, with Lou Kale’s Bel Air following close behind, she looked down the street and saw a canary-yellow convertible at the traffic light, with me behind the steering wheel and Jimmie in the passenger seat. Jimmie was tapping his hands on the dashboard to music she could not hear.

  THEY DROVE HER TO A FARMHOUSE, down in the Texas wetlands east of Beaumont. It was raining when they arrived, and through the bedroom window she could see acres of sawgrass and a flooded woods and, out in a bay, the gray outlines of mothballed U.S. Navy warships. The room was bare, except for a chipped chest of drawers and a bed that puffed with dust when she sat upon it. The sky was black now, and when lightning flared in the clouds she saw a solitary blue heron lift from the sawgrass and glide on extended wings toward the protection of the woods.