James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“What?” Dr. Parks said.

The fireman spread the wires across his palm and cracked open the insulation on them. “These were in the wall of your game room. See, they’re burned from the inside out,” he said.

“That’s impossible. I just had that game room added on two years ago,” Dr. Parks said.

“It’s not impossible if somebody installed oversized breakers in your breaker box,” the fireman said.

“Who did the work on your house, Doctor?” I said.

“Sunbelt Construction,” he said.

I tried to walk away from him, as though I were preoccupied with the destruction at the back of his home. But he grabbed my arm roughly.

“What do you know about Sunbelt Construction?” he asked.

“It’s owned by Castille LeJeune,” I replied.

“Who the hell is Castille LeJeune?”

“His company owns the daiquiri store where your daughter and her friends bought their drinks on the day they died,” I said.

Had I just set up another man, in this case Castille LeJeune? I asked myself on the way back to the department.

No, I had simply told the truth.

But that did not change the fact I had let Frank Dellacroce take the big exit at the hands of Max Coll.

Later I went home for lunch and found Father Jimmie on a ladder, screwing a basketball hoop to the back of the porte cochere.

“You do open-air reconciliations?” I said.

“Yeah, hold the ladder for me. What’s the problem?” he replied, still concentrated on his work.

“It’s not overdue library books,” I said.

He looked down at me.

“I think Max Coll capped a wise guy out at Whiskey Bay. I probably could have prevented it,” I said.

He climbed down from the ladder and replaced his tools in a metal box and clicked it shut. “Run that by me again,” he said.

We walked toward the bayou while I told him what had happened the abiding anger that had made me seek out a violent situation, the savage beating I had given Frank Dellacroce, my recognizing Coll among the crowd in front of the cafe, and, most serious of all, my releasing Dellacroce from custody when I knew, with a fair degree of certainty, I was turning him over to his executioner.

Father Jimmie picked up a pine cone and tossed it into the middle of the bayou. “Dave, if you share responsibility for this man’s death, then so do I,” he said.

“How?”

“I was uncooperative with N.O.P.D. I could have worked with them and helped bust Coll. He would have been past history now.”

I sat down on a stone bench by the edge of the bayou. Its surfaces felt cold and hard through my trousers. The wind gusted and red and yellow leaves tumbled out of the trees into the water. “You going to give me absolution?” I asked.

“You were forgiven as soon as you were sorry for what you did. But you need to tell this to someone else or you’ll have no peace of mind.”

“Sir?”

“What’s the new sheriff’s name? The woman who used to be your partner? Let me know how it comes out,” he said.

He walked back up the slope and removed a basketball from a cardboard box and swished it through the hoop. You got no free lunch from Father Jimmie Dolan.

Helen listened quietly while I told her about the events of the night I beat Frank Dellacroce within an inch of his life. Her elbows rested on the ink blotter, her chin resting on her thumbs, her fingers knitted together. “This guy Coll is wanted in Florida on two murders?” she said.

“For questioning, at the least.”

“What do you think he’s doing around here?”

“That’s open to debate,” I said.

“Meaning what?”

“He has an obsession with the priest who’s staying at my house. He’s obviously hunting down the people who are trying to take him out. His brains were probably in the blender too long. Take your choice.”

She stood up from her chair and stared out the window, her fingers opening and closing against the heel of her palm. “So far there’s no evidence it was Coll who shot Dellacroce?” she asked.

“No.”

“And you never saw Coll in person?”

“Only in photographs.”

“I think you’re under a lot of strain. And that’s where we’re going to leave it for now.”

She had given me a temporary free pass, a complicitous wink of the eye; all I had to do was acknowledge it. “My perceptions aren’t the issue here. Coll called me at my house. He told me he was in the crowd the night I busted up Dellacroce.”

“Coll called you?”

“That’s right.”

“This isn’t police work. It’s a soap opera. Are you drinking?”

“No.”

“Dave, you either get your act together or we seek other alternatives. None of them good.”

“You want my shield?”

“I won’t be a party to what you’re doing,” she said.

“Doing what? ”

“Ripping yourself apart so you can get back on the bottle. You don’t think other people read you? Give yourself a wake-up call.” She wadded up a piece of paper and tossed it angrily at the wastebasket.

That evening I went to an AA. meeting in a tan-colored, tile-roofed Methodist church, not far from the railway tracks. From the second-story window I could see the palm trees in the churchyard, the old brick surfacing in the street, the green colonnade of an ancient fire-house, the oaks whose roots had wedged up the sidewalks, and the strange purple light the sun gave off in its setting.

Across the railway tracks was another world, one that used to be New Iberia’s old redlight district, whose history went back to the War Between the States. But today the three-dollar black prostitutes and five-dollar white ones were gone and the cribs on Railroad and Hopkins shut down. Instead, white crack whores, called rock queens, and their black pimps worked the street corners. The dealers, with baseball caps reversed or black silk bandannas tied down skintight on their scalps, appeared in the yards of burned-out houses or in the parking lots of small grocery stores as soon as school let out. After sunset, unless it was raining, their presence multiplied exponentially.

They offered the same street menu as dealers in New Orleans and Houston: weed, brown skag, rock, crystal meth, acid, reds, leapers, Ecstasy, and, for the purists, perhaps a taste of China white the customer could cook and inject with a clean needle in a shooting gallery only four blocks from downtown.

Down the hall, on the second floor of the Methodist church, was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Most of the attenders there had been sentenced by the court. Few were people you would normally associate with criminality. Almost all of them, in another era, would have been considered run-of-the-mill blue-collar people whose lives had nothing to do with the trade on Hopkins and Railroad avenues.

But on that particular evening I was not thinking about the ravages of the drug trade. Instead, I was wondering how long it would be be fore I walked into a saloon and ordered four inches of Black Jack or Beam’s Choice with a long-neck Dixie on the side.

Then I looked across the room and saw a man who was geographically and psychologically out of place. He saw me staring at him and raised one meaty paw in recognition. His eyes were like merry slits, his jowls glowing with a fresh shave, his sparse gold hair oiled and flattened into his pate. I crossed the space between us and sat in the chair next to him.

“This is a closed meeting of A. A. What are you doing here?” I said.

“I checked it out. It’s an open meet. Besides, I belong to Overeaters Anonymous, which means I probably got trans-addictive issues. That means I can go to any fucking meeting I choose,” Fat Sammy Figorelli replied.

“That’s the worst bullshit I ever heard. Get out of here,” I said.