James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Is there a problem over there?” the group leader said.

Sammy didn’t speak during the meeting. But afterward he helped stack chairs and wash coffee cups and put away all the AA. literature in a locker. “I like this place,” he said.

“You’re about to have some major trouble,” I said.

“ I’m gonna have trouble? You’re beautiful, Robicheaux. Take a walk with me,” he said.

I followed him down the stairs, into the darkness outside and the odor of sewer gas and wet leaves burning. “If you’re using AA. to...” I began.

“You drunks think you’re the only people who got a problem. How would you like food to be your enemy? Anybody can stay off booze a him nerd percent. Try staying off something just part way and see how you feel,” he said.

“What’s your point?”

“My sponsor says I got to own up to a couple of things or I’m gonna go on another chocolate hinge, which don’t do my diabetes a lot of good.

Max Coll not only cowboyed a couple of high-up guys in Miami, he stiffed the sports book they owned for a hundred large. The word is he’s gonna be hung by his colon on a meat hook. Last point, there’s a guy around here you don’t want to mess with.”

He stopped and lit a cigarette. The cigarette looked tiny and innocuous in his huge hand. He watched a car full of black teenagers pass, their stereo thundering with rap music, his face clouding with disapproval.

“Which guy?” I said.

“A guy who hurts people when he don’t have to. You want to find him, follow the cooze. In the meantime, don’t say I ain’t warned you.”

Then he labored down the sidewalk toward his Cadillac, his football-shaped head twisted back at the sunset.

“Come back here,” I said.

He shot me the finger over his shoulder.

I thought I was finished with Sammy Fig for awhile. Wrong. The phone rang at 2:14 in the A.M. “There’s something I didn’t tell you,” he said.

I sat on the edge of the bed, the receiver cold against my ear.

Outside, the moon was bright and glowing with a rain ring behind the sculpted limbs of a pecan tree. “Time to desist, Sammy. That means join Weight Watchers or go to the fat farm, but stay out of my life,” I said.

“Frankie Dellacroce’s family is in Fort Lauderdale. A couple of them are on their way here.”

“So long,” I said, and started to lower the receiver from my ear.

“They got you made for the pop on Frankie.”

“Me?”

“You broke his sticks in front of a bunch of colored people earlier in the night. Later the same night he catches a .44 mag in the head. You’re a cop. Who would you put it on?” he said.

I could hear my breath against the receiver. “This is crazy,” I said.

“I got to get some sleep. You’re lucky you ain’t got insomnia,” he said, and hung up.

In the morning I confronted Father Jimmie at the breakfast table. “Sammy Figorelli says a couple of Frank Dellacroce’s relatives might be coming around,” I said.

“What for?” he said.

“They think I killed him.”

“Not too good, huh?”

“Where can I find Max Coll, Jimmie?”

“If I knew, I’d tell you,” he replied.

“I’d like to believe that. But I’m starting to have my doubts.”

“Want to repeat that?” he said, chewing his food slowly.

“He’s going to call again. When he does, I’d like for you to set up a meet with him.”

I saw his brow furrow. “I can’t do that,” he said.

“You sentimental about this guy?”

“He’s a tormented man,” he said.

“Tell yourself that the next time he empties somebody’s brainpan.” I picked up my cup of coffee and took it with me to work.

Except I did not go to work. I turned around in the parking lot and drove to the cemetery in St. Martinville, where Bootsie was buried in a crypt right up the bayou from the Evangeline Oak. I sat on the ventilated metal bench in front of the crypt and said the first two decades of my rosary, then lost my concentration and stared woodenly at the bayou and the leaves swirling in the current and the ducks wimp ling the water around lily pads that had already turned brown from early frost. My skin felt chafed, as dry as paper, my palms stiff and hard to close. I replaced my rosary in my coat pocket and put my face in my hands. The sun went behind a cloud and the wind was like ice water on my scalp.

Why did you go and die on us, Boots? I heard myself say, then felt ashamed at the selfish nature of my thoughts.

An hour later I walked into the department, washed my face in the men’s room, then undertook all the functions of the working day that give the illusion of both normalcy and productivity. Clete Purcel dropped by, irreverent as always, telling outrageous jokes, throwing paper airplanes at my wastebasket. He even used my telephone to place an offtrack bet. By noon the day seemed brighter, the trees outside a darker green against blue skies.

But I could not concentrate on either the growing loveliness of the day or the endless paperwork that I was sure no one ever looked at after it was completed.

We had no one in custody for the shooting of the drive-by daiquiri store operator, even though we had a suspect with motivation in the form of Dr. Parks, and a connection, through the murder weapon, to an employee of Castille LeJeune. In the meantime a Celtic killing machine like Max Coll was running loose in our area; I had been made by the family of Frank Dellacroce for the murder of their relative; and Theo and Merchie Flannigan continued to hover on the edge of my vision, chimeric, protean, like the memory of a college prom that, along with youth, belongs in the past.

It was the kind of criminal investigation in which thinking served no purpose. The motivation in most crimes was not complex. Usually people steal and cheat because they’re either greedy or lazy or both.

People kill for reasons of money, sex, and power. Even revenge killings indicate a sense of powerlessness in the perpetrator.

At least that was the conventional wisdom of duffer cops who think psychological profiling works best in films or TV shows that have little to do with reality.

But where did Junior Crudup fit into this? Or did he? Maybe Helen was right, I just wanted to nail the Daddy Warbucks of St. Mary Parish, Castille LeJeune, to a tree.

I spread the photos of Junior Crudup given me by our reference librarian on my desk blotter. Did you dream at night of the black Betty slicing across your back? I wanted to ask him. Didn’t you learn you can’t beat the Man at his own game? What happened to you, partner?

I picked up the last photo in the series and looked again at the image of Junior staring up at a mounted gun bull across the bayou from Castille LeJeune’s home, his hoe at an odd angle on his shoulder, his face puzzled by a world whose rules ensured he would never have a place in it. But the focus of my attention was not Junior. In the wintry background, guiding a single-tree plow through the cane stubble, was a muscular, coal black convict, with the clear detail of welted scars on his forearms, the kind a convict might earn in a half dozen knife beefs.

I held a magnifying glass to the grainy black-and-white image. I was almost sure the face was that of a youthful Hogman Patin, the long-time recidivist who had been on the Red Hat Gang with Junior but had said he did not know Junior’s fate.

I picked up the telephone and called my house.

“Hello?” Father Jimmie said.

“Want to check out some Louisiana history you don’t find in school books?”

“Why not?” he said.

Wherever Hogman lived, he created a bottle tree, for reasons he never explained. During winter, when the limbs were bare, he would insert the points of the branches into the mouths of colored glass bottles until the whole tree shimmered with light and tinkled with sound.