James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

A light on a pole burned overhead. I stared at the circle of faces around me, like a drunkard coming out of a blackout. Their eyes were filled with fear and pity, as though they were watching a wild animal tear his prey apart inside a cage. But there was one man in the crowd who did not belong there. He was white and had narrow shoulders and wore a seersucker suit with a pink tie. His ears were small, convoluted, hardly more than stubs on the sides of his head. His face and expression made me think of the bleached hide on a baseball.

As I looked up into his eyes I had no doubt in the world who he was, no more than you can doubt the presence of death when it suddenly steps into your path. I got to my feet and helped Frank Dellacroce up, then propped him against the grill of an ancient gas guzzler, no more than five feet from the man in the seersucker suit.

“Frank, meet a guy you’ve probably been looking for all your life,” I said.

Then I walked off balance to my truck and drove away.

Early the next morning I soaked my hands until the swelling had gone out of my fingers, then I put Mercurochrome on the cuts in my knuckles and tried to cover them unobtrusively with flesh-colored Band-Aids. I picked up the morning paper off the gallery and went through it page by page, just as I had done for years when I was coming off a drunk, wondering what kind of carnage I may have left in an alley or on a rain-swept highway.

But this morning the paper seemed filled with cartoons and sports and wire-service and local feature stories that had nothing to do with events in front of a cafe-and-bar on the St. Martin Parish line.

Snuggs, my newly adopted cat, followed me back inside and I opened a can of food for him and put it in his bowl and sat with him on the back porch while he ate. The wind was cool and damp and sweet smelling through the trees, but each time I closed my eyes I saw the terrified, blood-streaked face of Frank Dellacroce and wondered who lived inside my skin.

Father Jimmie was still asleep, so I drove over to Clete’s cottage at the motor court and took him for breakfast at the McDonald’s on Main Street. Then I cleared my throat and told him about the previous night at least most of it.

“Wait a minute,” he said, raising his hands from his food. “You had your piece and your cuffs with you?”

“Right,” I said.

“Why?” he said.

I shrugged.

“Maybe because you were looking for trouble when you left home?” he said.

I looked at an oak tree out on the street, one that was strung with moss and lighted by the pinkness of the early sun. “I saw Max Coll there,” I said.

“You did what?”

“In the crowd. I’ve seen pictures of him. It had to be Coll. His head looks like a used Q-tip,” I said.

Clete’s eyes studied my face. They seemed to contain a level of sorrow that I could not associate with the man I knew. “What are you doing to yourself, Streak?” he said.

At 11:30 A.M. Helen leaned her head in my door. “Pick up line two. See how much this has to do with us. If it doesn’t, don’t let it get on our plate,” she said.

The man on the other end of the line was a St. Martin Parish plain-clothes named Dominic Romaine. He was a big, fat, sweaty man, known for his rumpled suits, horse-track neckties, and general irreverence toward everything. He had emphysema and his voice wheezed into the phone when he spoke.

“That guy you beat the shit out of last night, Frank Dellacroce?” he said.

“Uh, there’s a bad connection, Romie. Say again.”

“Pull on your own joint, Robicheaux. I don’t know why you busted this guy up, but it don’t matter. In other words, you’re not gonna be up on an IA beef.”

“Sorry, I’m just not reading you, partner.”

I heard him take a deep breath, the air in his lungs whistling like wind in a chimney. “After you got finished with Dellacroce, he drove to a cabin by Whiskey Bay. It’s actually a fuck pad a bunch of grease-balls out of Houston use. Get this—” he broke off and started laughing, then fought to catch his breath again — “he was behind the wheel of his car, sucking on a bottle of tequila, while this mulatto broad was giving him a blowjob, when a guy comes out of the dark and parks a big one in the back of his head. I mean a big one, too, like a .44 mag. His brains were still running out his nose when we got there.”

Dominic Romaine started laughing again. I felt my vision go in and out of focus. Outside, an ambulance passed the courthouse, its siren screaming. “You still there?” he said.

“Who was the shooter?”

“No idea. No description, either. The mulatto handing out the blowjob is retarded or something. Dave, there’s a question that needs to go into my report.”

“I didn’t see Dellacroce after my encounter with him,” I said.

“Got any speculations on the shooter?”

My head was pounding, my stomach churning. “Check with N.O.P.D. Dellacroce was a hit man and fulltime wise-ass. I think he was a grunt for Fat Sammy Figorelli.”

“It sounds like his passing will go down as a great tragedy. Hey, Dave? You know that song by Louie Prima? “I’ll be standing on the corner plastered when they bring your coffin by’? I love that song. Hey, Dave?”

“What?”

“Next time you go looking for a punching bag, make sure it ain’t in St. Martin Parish,” he said.

I barely got through the day. I tried to convince myself the man I had seen in the crowd the previous night was not Max Coll. I had seen only photos of him, taken through a zoom lens or in a late-night booking room. The man in the crowd could have been a tourist, or someone who had walked over from the convenience store next door, I told myself.

And even had it been Max Coll, was I my brother’s keeper, particularly if my “brother” was a dirtbag like Frank Dellacroce?

But I knew in my heart my thought processes were self-serving and futile and that I had helped set up a man’s death. I worked late at the office, past sunset, then turned out the light on my desk and drove home, just as it began to rain.

I pulled into my drive, expecting to see Father Jimmie’s car under the porte cochere. Instead, I saw Theodosha Flannigan’s Lexus parked in the shadows and a light burning in the kitchen. The trees in the yard and the bamboo along the edge of the driveway were shrouded in mist, and yellow leaves floated in the rain puddles. The front door and the windows of the house were open, and I thought I could smell the odor of freshly baked bread. In fact, the entire scene, the dark cypress planks in the walls of the cottage, the rusted tin roof, the black-green overhang of the oaks and pecan trees, and the warm radiance emanating from the kitchen windows, all made me think of the house where I had lived many years ago with my father and mother.

As soon as I stepped into the house I saw Snuggs resting on the arm of the couch, his eyes shut, his paws tucked under his chest, a red satin bow tied around his neck. I walked into the brightness of the kitchen and stared woodenly at Theodosha, who was lifting a loaf of buttered French bread out of the oven. Behind her, steam curled off a pot of gumbo. Her mouth parted slightly when she saw me, as though I had dragged her away from a troubling thought.

“I fixed you some supper. Hope you don’t mind,” she said.

“Where’s Father Jimmie?” I asked.

“He went to Lafayette. He said he’s probably going to stay over.”

“Is Merchie here?” I said.

“I’m not sure where he is. He’s just out being Merchie. Do you want me to go?”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I’m just a little disconnected today.”

She began setting the table as though I were not there. Her hair looked like it had just been cut and shampooed. She wore Mexican sandals and khakis with big pockets and a denim shirt embroidered with roses and stovepipe cactus. In fact, as I looked at her moving about the room, I realized what it was that drew men to her. She was one of those women whose intelligence and élan and indifference to public opinion allowed her to give symmetry and order to what would have been considered chaos in the life of a lesser person.