James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Are you coming?” I asked.

He pulled an unlit cigarette from his mouth and threw it out the window. “Why not?” he said.

We walked up Gunner Ardoin’s driveway, past a garbage can overflowing with shrimp husks. Banana trees grew against the side of the house and the leaves were slick and green and denting in the rainwater that slid off the roof. I jerked the back screen off the latch and went into Gunner Ardoin’s kitchen.

“You beat up Catholic priests, do you?” I said.

“What?” he said, turning from the sink with a metal coffeepot in his hand. He wore draw-string, tin-colored workout pants and a ribbed undershirt. His skin was white, clean of jailhouse art, his underarms shaved. A weight set rested on the floor behind him.

“Lose the innocent monkey face, Gunner. You used a steel pipe on a priest name of Jimmie Dolan,” Clete said.

Gunner set the coffeepot down on the counter. He studied both of us briefly, then lowered his eyes and folded his arms on his chest, his back resting against the sink. His nipples looked like small brown dimes through the fabric of his undershirt. “Do what you have to do,” he said.

“Better rethink that statement,” Clete said.

But Gunner only stared at the floor, his elbows cupped in his palms.

Clete looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“My name’s Dave Robicheaux. I’m a homicide detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said, opening my badge holder. “But my visit here is personal.”

“I didn’t beat up a priest. You think I did, then I’m probably in the shitter. I can’t change that.” He began picking at the calluses on his palm.

“You get that at a twelve-step session up at Angola?” Clete said.

Gunner Ardoin looked at nothing and suppressed a yawn.

“You raised Catholic?” I said.

He nodded, without lifting his eyes.

“You’re not bothered by somebody hospitalizing a priest, breaking his bones, a decent man who never harmed anyone?” I said.

“I don’t know him. You say he’s a good guy, maybe he is. There’s a lot of priests out there are good guys, right?” he said.

Then, like all career recidivists and fulltime smart-asses, he couldn’t resist the temptation to show his contempt for the world of normal people. He turned his face away from me, but I saw one eye glimmer with mirth, a grin tug slightly at the corner of his mouth. “Maybe they kept the altar boys away from him,” he said.

I stepped closer to him, my right hand balling. But Clete pushed me aside. He picked up the metal coffeepot from the counter and smashed it almost flat against the side of Gunner Ardoin’s head, then threw him in a chair. Gunner folded his arms across his chest, a torn grin on his mouth, blood trickling from his scalp.

“Have at it, fellows. I made both y’all back on Napoleon. I dialed 911 soon as I came in. My lawyer loves guys like you,” he said.

Through the front window I saw the emergency flasher on an N.O.P.D. cruiser pull to the curb under the live oak tree that grew in Gunner Ardoin’s front yard. A lone black female officer slipped her baton into the ring on her belt and walked uncertainly toward the gallery, her radio squawking incoherently in the rain.

I slept that night on Clete’s couch in his small apartment above his PI. office on St. Ann. The sky was clear and pink at sunrise, the streets in the Quarter puddled with water, the bougainvillea on Clete’s balcony as bright as drops of blood. I shaved and dressed while Clete was still asleep and walked past St. Louis Cathedral and through Jackson Square to the Cafe du Monde, where I met Father Jimmie Dolan at a table under the pavilion.

Although we had been friends and had bass fished together for two decades, he remained in many ways a mysterious man, at least to me.

Some said he was a closet drunk who had done time in a juvenile reformatory; others said he was gay and well known among the homosexual community in New Orleans, although women were obviously drawn to him.

He had crewcut, blond good looks and the wide shoulders and tall, trim physique of the wide-end receiver he had been at a Winchester, Kentucky, high school. He didn’t talk politics but he got into trouble regularly with authority on almost all levels, including six months in a federal prison for trespassing on the School of the Americas property at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

It had been three months since he had been waylaid in an alley behind his church rectory and methodically beaten from his neck to the soles of his feet by someone wielding a pipe with an iron bonnet screwed down on the business end.

“Clete Purcel and I rousted a guy named Gunner Ardoin last night. I think maybe he’s the guy who attacked you,” I said.

Father Jimmie had just bitten into a beignet and his mouth was smeared with powdered sugar. He wore a tiny sapphire in his left ear-lobe. His eyes were a deep green, thoughtful, his skin tan. He shook his head.

“That’s Phil Ardoin. Wrong guy,” he said.

“He said he didn’t know you.”

“I coached his high school basketball team.”

“Why would he lie?”

“With Phil it’s a way of life.”

An N.O.P.D. cruiser pulled to the curb out on Decatur and a black female officer got out and fixed her cap on her head. She looked like she was constructed of twigs, her sky blue shirt too large on her frame, her pursed lips layered with red lipstick. Last night Clete had said she reminded him of a black swizzle stick with a cherry stuck on the end.

She threaded her way through the tables until she was abreast of ours.

The brass name tag on her shirt said C. ARCENEAUX.

“I thought I should give you a heads-up,” she said.

“How’s that?” I asked.

She looked off abstractly at the traffic on the street and at the artists setting up their easels under the trees in Jackson Square.

“Take a walk with me,” she said.

I followed her down to a shady spot at the foot of the Mississippi levee. “I tried to talk to the other man, what’s his name, Purcel, but he seemed more interested in riding his exercise bike,” she said.

“He has blood pressure problems,” I said.

“Maybe more like a thinking problem,” she replied, looking idly down the street.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked.

“Gunner Ardoin is filing an assault charge against you and your friend. I think maybe he’s got a civil suit in mind. If I was you, I’d take care of it.”

“Take care of it?” I said.

Her eyes squinted into the distance, as though the subject at hand had already slipped out of her frame of reference. Her hair was black and thick and cut short on her neck, her eyes a liquid brown.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“Don’t like people who mule crystal into the projects.”

“You work both the night and the morning watch?”

“I’m just up from meter maid. Low in standing, know what I mean, but somebody got to do it. Tell the priest to spend more time with his prayers,” she said, and started to walk back to her cruiser.

“What’s your first name?” I asked.

“Clotile,” she said.

Back at the table I watched her drive away into the traffic, the lacquered brim of her cap low on her forehead. Meter maid, my ass, I thought.

“Ever hear of Junior Crudup?” Father Jimmie asked.

“The blues man? Sure,” I said.

“What do you know about him?”

“He died in Angola,” I said.

“No, he disappeared in Angola. Went in and never came out. No record at all of what happened to him,” Father Jimmie said. “I’d like for you to meet his family.”

“Got to get back to New Iberia.”

“It’s Saturday,” he said.

“Nope,” I said.