James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Oh, it’s a darling pair we have here. Suck on this,” he said. He began firing with both guns, shooting Tito in the mouth and through the throat, hitting his brother Caesar Dellacroce in the sternum and thigh.

Tito crashed into a wall and collapsed on his spine, his legs spread, his jaw torn loose from his head. Caesar tried to crawl away from the rounds that blew the sole of his shoe off his foot, tore through a buttock, and splattered blood off his shoulder in a horsetail on the floor.

The room was littered with ejected shell casings when Max Coll finally stopped firing. He nudged Tito in the chest with his polished shoe, satisfying himself that Tito was dead, then leaned down and studied Caesar’s face. “Oops, looks like you’re still on board, little fellow,” he said, and fired a round into the side of Caesar’s head, stepping back to avoid the splatter.

He stood erect and took my measure, his cheeks rosy, a cleft in his chin slick with sweat. He pulled the sponge from my mouth. “You all right, Mr. Robicheaux?” he asked.

My heart was pounding, my ears almost deaf. “Cut me loose,” I said.

“Can’t do that, sir. You’re a copper through and through. You’d figure out a way to have me in cuffs for sure. Give my best to Father Dolan. He’s a bit hard-headed, but under it all I think he’s a fine man of the cloth. His kind make me proud I’m a Catholic,” he said.

And with that he was gone.

Fifteen minutes later three cruisers from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department arrived at the fish camp, having been notified of my situation from a payphone by Max Coll.

On Wednesday afternoon, after sleeping almost fifteen hours, I drove with Clete Purcel in his Caddy to City Park and sat under a barbecue pavilion in the rain on the banks of Bayou Teche.

“A guy pissed in your face?” he said.

“No, first he pissed in my face. Then he pissed all over me,” I replied.

He lit a Lucky Strike and spit a piece of matter off his tongue. A moment later he nipped the cigarette into the bayou and watched it float away. “Don’t let me light one of these again,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“The Flannigan broad set you up,” he said.

“I don’t believe that.”

“She got you out of your house and into a bar. What’s that, working the Steps one drink at a time?”

“It was my idea to go over there.”

“Why? You got some big obligation to keep other people from drinking if they want to? “

I didn’t answer. I tried to avoid his eyes. “Are we talking about boom-boom out of times past?” he said.

“Why don’t you give some thought to the way you talk to other people, Clete?”

“Did you ever get it on with her or not?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” He nodded profoundly. “So after you made your expunch’s father look like a vindictive prick in front of his friends, you don’t think she would lure you to a slop chute in hopes you’d either get killed or drunk again? Perish the thought.”

I stared at the rain dimpling the surface of Bayou Teche. “Theo isn’t connected with people like Tito and Caesar Dellacroce,” I said.

“Merchie worked for the Teamsters in Baton Rouge. They’d force guys to buy a union book, then get them fired after a month so they could crank up their membership numbers. That’s how he got into the pipeline business.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s mobbed up today.”

“A guy who trucks oil waste into black neighborhoods? Not a chance. When I was a kid we had a rumble with the Ibervilles. It was supposed to be fist, feet, and elbows, no shanks, no chains. Merchie opened a switchblade and busted it off in my cousin’s arm. In my opinion he’s still a project street rat as well as full-time punk and gash hound. Quit defending these assholes.”

“Gash hound?” I said.

“Forget it, big mon. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Your head is encased in cement.”

I had long ago learned there was no point in arguing with Clete or expecting him to understand that the people he resented most were those who came from the same background he did. He pushed his porkpie hat down on his brow and stared disgustedly at the rain. “I’m going to cripple the motherfuckers behind this, Dave. I mean that literally,” he said.

He walked away under a dripping live oak toward his Caddy, his sports coat stretched to splitting on his huge shoulders.

He dropped me off at the house and I went inside and lay down on the bed in the back room. Earlier I said I had slept for fifteen hours.

The truth is a little different. I could not rid myself of the sense of violation I had experienced at the hands of Tito and Caesar Dellacroce and the man who had urinated on me. I felt that soap could not cleanse my skin or my hair. When I closed my eyes and began to drift into sleep, I didn’t dream of the Dellacroces but instead of a war few people are interested in today. I heard automatic weapons fire, the thropping of helicopter blades, and I saw strings of white light fountaining inside jungle foliage from the explosion of a phosphorus round. I felt a medic from Staten Island tying my wrists so I would not tear at the compress on my side. I smelled the odor of blood and feces in the uniforms of both the living and the dead being piled around me on the floor of an overloaded slick piloted by a nineteen-year-old warrant officer who had taken a steel splinter in one eye.

Sleep occurred in ten-minute intervals, and each time I awoke I wanted four inches of Black Jack straight up, vodka that had been at least twelve hours in a freezer, beer that hit the back of the throat like a spray of golden needles, yellow mescal with a thick green worm in the bottom of the bottle.

An hour after Clete had dropped me off I sat on the side of the bed with a head full of cobwebs, my mouth dry and tasting like bitters.

Helen had told me not to come back to work until the following Monday.

But memory was the enemy, and solitude and inactivity gave me no respite from it. I called N.O.P.D. and left a message for Clotile Arceneaux. A half hour later she called me back. “What’s happening baby cakes?” she said.

“Baby cakes?”

I heard her laugh. “What can I help you with?” she said.

“What have you got on Merchie Flannigan?”

“A pipeline or oil guy, grew up in the projects, did some time when he was a kid?”

“That’s the one.”

“I’ll check but I think he’s pretty inactive.”

“Clete thinks maybe Merchie and his wife might have been mixed up with the Dellacroce brothers.”

“What about the Dellacroces?”

“They’re dead. Max Coll smoked them both.”

“So much for inner-department communications. Coll killed them?”

“He’s posing as a priest and carrying a couple of .45 autos in a briefcase. Tito and Caesar Dellacroce abducted me. They took me to a fish camp not far from where Coll killed their cousin.” It sounded foolish when I said it.

She paused a moment. “What did they do to you at this fish camp?” she asked.

“Nothing. Coll capped them.”

She paused again and I could tell she didn’t believe me. “Let me give you a tip. Screw Max Coll and screw the Dellacroces. The issue is porn and crystal meth. Everything else is secondary. New Orleans was made for it. You with me on this?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Sorry to bother you,” I said.

“Don’t give me any of your guff, Robicheaux. You doin’ okay over there?”

“Why?”

””Cause you don’t sound like it,” she said.

So that’s why she was undercover at N.O.P.D.” I thought after I hung up. Some cops were probably on a meth pad and maybe the pornographers had gotten to a few of them, too. Porn had always been there, in one form or another, and sex and the economics of New Orleans tourism were longtime business companions. The Mob maintained they didn’t traffic in porn, just as they claimed they didn’t deal in narcotics. But they lied. They were involved in every pernicious enterprise in the United States, and decades ago had branched into shipping, the meat industry, and coal mining. The numbers racket used to be the lubricant that fueled and greased all their other machinery, but since state lotteries and legalized gambling had replaced numbers as their chief source of money, the progeny of Lucky Luciano and Benny Siegel had shifted gears to keep up with the times.