James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Theo, I’d feel a lot better if we could ask Merchie over,” I said.

“I knew you’d say something like that.”

She set a gumbo bowl on the table and stared at it emptily. She removed a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth and walked to within a foot of me. She started to touch me, then folded her arms in front of her, as though she had no place to put her hands. Her breath was cold and smelled of bourbon and orange slices.

“I was going to a meeting today. I had no plans to drink. I swear. I drove twice around the block, then went into a bar and drank for two hours.” She looked up at me desperately. “Dave, I’m seriously fucked up. Nothing I do works.”

She lowered her head and inverted her palms and clasped them around my wrists. She stood on my shoes with her sandals and her stomach touched my loins. I could smell the shampoo in her hair and the perfume behind her ears. She pulled my hands to her sides and held them there. I could feel a thickness growing in me, a dryness like confetti in my mouth. She slipped her arms around my waist and pressed her face sideways against my chest.

“Dave, why didn’t you ask me to marry you?” she said.

“This is no good, Theo.”

“We had fun together. Why did you go away?”

“I was a drunk. I would have made any woman unhappy.”

Her eyes were wet against my shirt. I patted her on the back and tried to step away from her. Then she turned up her face to be kissed.

“I’ll see you,” I said.

“What?”

“I have to go back to the office,” I lied. “I just came home to get something. I don’t even remember what it was.”

Then I left my own house, feeling stupid and inadequate, which was perhaps an honest assessment.

When I returned to the house two hours later she was gone. The kitchen was immaculate, the food she had fixed carted away. I didn’t fall asleep until after midnight. Then I woke at three in the morning and sat on the edge of the mattress, my skin filmed with sweat, my loins like concrete, the darkness creaking with sound. I put my loaded .45 under the pillow and when the sun came up the hardness of the steel frame was cupped in my palm.

Later, I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and milk and sliced bananas on the kitchen table, then heard Snuggs at the back screen. I opened the door for him and he walked to his pet bowl under the kitchen sink and waited for me to fill it with the box of dry food I kept on top of the icebox.

The red silk bow Theodosha had tied around his neck was coated with mud. I took a pair of scissors from the dresser in the hallway and snipped the bow loose from his fur. “It looks like Theo’s concern for you was limited, Snuggs,” I said.

Somehow that thought made me feel more comfortable about leaving her and the meal she had prepared for me the previous night. I returned the scissors to the dresser drawer. But before I shut it I glanced down at the box where I kept all the sympathy cards that had been sent to me when Bootsie died. A corner of an envelope stuck out of the pile and the return address on it made me wince inside. On my visit to Theo and Merchie’s house several weeks ago she had expressed her sympathies about Bootsie’s death, but I’d had no memory of her sending a card and had concluded her sentiments were manufactured.

But her card was in the pile and the statements on it were obviously heartfelt. I picked up Snuggs and set him on the countertop and patted his head. “How can one guy’s thought processes be this screwed up?” I asked.

Snuggs rubbed against me, brushing his stiffened tail past my nose, and made no comment.

The phone on the counter rang. I started to pick it up, then hesitated and stared at it, my heart quickening, because I knew who it was, who it would have to be, if he was the obsessed and driven man I thought he was.

“Hello?” I said.

“Is the good father there?” the voice asked.

“No, he’s not.”

“Would you be knowing his whereabouts?”

“No, I don’t. But I recommend you not call here again.”

“Oh, do you now?”

“Air. Coll, I’m a lot less tolerant about you than Father Dolan. You drag your sickness into my life and I’m going to put a can of roach spray down your throat.”

“ I’m the sick one? Two nights ago you kicked the bejesus out of that poor fuck in front of the bar. I’d say you’re a piece of work, Mr. Robicheaux.”

Use the cell phone to call the office and get the line open, I told myself. But Max Coll was ahead of me. “I’m not on a ground line, sir. You needn’t fiddle around with technologies that will serve no purpose. Tell Father Dolan he and I share a common destiny.”

“Are you insane? You’re talking about a Catholic priest.”

“That’s the point. It’s the likes of me who keep him in business. Thanks for your time, Mr. Robicheaux. I hope to meet you formally. I think you might be my kind of fellow.”

He hung up.

So the guy’s a nutcase,” Clete said at lunch.

I pushed my food away. We were in a place called Bon Creole, a small family-owned cafe that specialized in po’boy sandwiches. It was two in the afternoon and the other tables were empty. “I’ve got another problem, Clete,” I said.

“No kidding?”

“It’s not funny.”

“Look, big mon, Frank Dellacroce’s mother was probably knocked up by leakage from a colostomy bag. He got what he deserved. Stop thinking about it.”

“I’m not talking about Dellacroce.”

“Then maybe you should take whatever it is to Father Dolan. I don’t know what else to say.”

He waited for me to reply. When I didn’t, he widened his eyes and opened his hands, as if to say, What?

I want a drink. Worse than I’ve ever wanted one in my life, I heard a voice say.

Clete’s next remark did not help. “I’m a bad guy to ask for advice. I always handled my problems with a pint of Beam and a six-pack of Dixie, then I wake up the next morning with a Bourbon Street stripper whose idea of world news is the weather channel.” He read the expression on my face and grimaced. “Sorry, Streak. Sometimes I don’t know when to shut up,” he said.

When I got back to the office, Wally, our three-hundred-pound, hypertensive dispatcher, gestured at me from the cage. Long ago every plainclothes in the department had become inured to Wally’s sardonic sense of humor and his comments about our bumbling ways and collective lack of intelligence. But this afternoon he was different. His eyes were evasive, his smile like an incision in clay. “Been to lunch, huh?” he said.

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“That fellow Flannigan was in here.”

“Merchie Flannigan?”

“He was pacing up and down for an hour, like he was about to piss his pants. When he got ready to go I axed him if he wanted to leave a message.” Wally shifted in his chair, arching his eyebrows.

“Would you just spit it out?” I said.

“He said tell Dave not to be running his pipeline under the wrong man’s fence. The district attorney and some Chamber of Commerce people was in the waiting room. So was Helen.”

A woman passed us and looked back at me briefly. “Okay, Wally, I appreciate it,” I said, and started to walk away.

“Hey, Dave?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I never liked that guy. He’s a bum. Put a cork in his mout’.”

I walked back to the cage. “What are you telling me?” I said.

Wally picked up a pencil and went back to his paperwork. “Nothing. I didn’t mean to mix in nobody’s bidness he replied.

I went into my office and stood at the window, tapping my fingers on the sill. I had no doubt Merchie wanted trouble. Otherwise he would not have brought his complaint into the place where I worked.