James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

Not only had the Internet provided huge new markets for porn producers, their businesses had a built-in edge on dope trafficking. They had the First Amendment to hide behind, and most zoning boards had no problem in allowing them to open their businesses in neighborhoods where the residents, usually the poor and elderly, had no power.

The overhead was low. Junkies, demented sluts, and perverts of every stripe couldn’t wait to take off their clothes in front of the camera, convinced their acting careers were just beginning.

The subject of pornography brought to mind Fat Sammy Figorelli again.

He had warned me about a man he said hurt people without cause, although Sammy, in his self-serving fashion, managed not to mention the man’s name. Clete was right. I had given Sammy a free pass too long.

I called Clotile Arceneaux again.

“I need a favor,” I said.

“What kind?”

“While my eyes were taped shut a guy urinated in my face. I think Fat Sammy Figorelli knows who he is.”

“Say all that again?”

I did, this time in detail. She was quiet a long time. “What do you want from me?” she said.

“Help me jam up Sammy Fig.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“We think Fat Sammy might be talking to us soon.”

“As an informant?”

“Think FBI and Witness Protection.”

“These guys were going to burn my kite, on film, one frame at a time.

I’m not too interested in hearing about federal needs right now.”

“Too bad. Stay in New Iberia, Robicheaux. That’s not just a cautionary statement, either,” she said.

That evening I took Clete to dinner at the Patio in Loreauville. After we ate we walked to the iron bridge over Bayou Teche and stared down at the water. The sky was crimson, full of birds, the air heavy with the smell of the sugar mills grinding cane. In the distance I heard a boat horn blowing on the water.

“I’m worried about you, noble mon,” Clete said.

“You shouldn’t.”

“You fool lots of people. But you never fool your old podjo. Tell me I’m wrong.”

I couldn’t, so I changed the subject. “Fat Sammy knows who put the hit on me,” I said.

“I told you he was a grease bag.”

“I need to put the squeeze on him. N.O.P.D. was no help.”

“You mean the black broad, what’s-her-name, Clotile Whatever?”

“She’s got her own problems.”

“Save the St. Francis of Assisi routine for another time. What’s today?”

“Wednesday,” I said.

Clete put a stick of gum in his mouth and looked at the shadows the trees made on the bayou’s surface. “You really want to put a freight train up Sammy’s cheeks?”

“I couldn’t have said it better.”

“Remember Janet Gish? Used to be a dancer out on Airline?” he said.

“What about her?”

“She was Gunner Ardoin’s costar in one of Fat Sammy’s films. You like Italian opera?”

During the next two days Clete made several phone calls to New Orleans and was mysterious about all of them. But taciturnity in Clete, at least with me, usually meant he was working on a scheme that was so outrageous no sane person would involve himself in it. No one who reviewed Clete’s record could doubt his creativeness when it came to spreading mayhem and chaos wherever he went. He not only shot a federal witness to death in a hog lot, he filled a New Orleans’ gangster’s vintage convertible with cement, destroyed a half-million-dollar home out on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth grader, pinned a hit man on the floor of the Greyhound depot’s men’s room and poured the contents of a liquid soap container down his throat, dropped a Teamster steward off a fourth-floor hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool, handcuffed a U.S. congressman to a fire hydrant on St.

Charles, cuffed a dirty cop to the conveyor chain in a car-wash and hot-wax machine, and was believed to have put sand in the fuel tank of an airplane that crashed and exploded in the mountains of western Montana, stringing die spruce trees with the remains of several Galveston and Las Vegas mobsters.

He considered his own behavior perfectly reasonable and did many of the above deeds and others that were worse with a lopsided grin on his face, thinking them hardly worthy of mention.

His best friends were drunks, grifters, and brain-fried street people, his girlfriends strippers and junkies. Gangbangers, pushers, strong-arm robbers, and dirty cops crossed the street when they saw him coming. He swallowed his blood and ate his pain and never flinched in a fight, no matter what his adversaries did to him. He was the bravest and most loyal man I ever knew, and also the most irreverent, reckless, irresponsible, and self-destructive.

I tried not to think of how Janet Gish could be a player in Clete’s plan to jam up Fat Sammy Figorelli. Friday evening I found out.

He told me to meet him in Metairie, in front of a rented hall on the edge of a middle-class neighborhood. Metairie had become a white-flight refuge during the mass exodus from New Orleans in the 1970s, known for its strict law-and-order attitudes and the distinction of having given David Duke his start in the state legislature.

I waited for Clete in the parking lot, the sky ribbed with strips of pink cloud, the trees ruffling in the yards of the modest homes beyond a shopping mall, the rental hall filling with families dressed as though they were going to church. The scene made me think of Levittown but not in a bad way. The rental hall, with its gravel roof and artificial brick shell, seemed to transcend its own cheapness, like an excursion back into an earlier era when American neighborhoods had sidewalks and were defined by their sense of community and generational continuity.

I looked again at my watch. Where was Clete? The light was fading, the air growing cold. From inside the hall I could hear someone adjusting the volume on a microphone. Then I saw Clete’s lavender Cadillac coming hard down the street, the front and back seats packed with people, slowing down for a stop sign just before he bounced into the parking lot, dust and exhaust fumes rising like a dirty halo from the car frame. When he cut the engine the entire car body seemed to gasp and shrivel like an animal that had been mortally wounded. The windows were open and I could smell a heady, thick odor, like burning leaves, drifting out on the wind, then someone flicked a marijuana roach sparking onto the pavement.

Clete got out of the car and closed the door behind him, then leaned down to the window. “Crack open another six-pack and go easy on the stash. I’ll be right back,” he said.

“Where’s the fucking opera? You said we were gonna see an opera,” a woman in back said.

“I’ve got reserved seats. Trust me. Just be cool. Everything’s copacetic he replied.

He walked past me, so I would have to follow him, out of earshot of the people in the car. He lifted his shirt off his chest and sniffed at it. “Do I smell like a whorehouse?” he asked.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Fat Sammy belongs to this group of amateur opera singers. They perform once a month at the hall. It’s Ozzie and Harriet night by way of Palermo. The archbishop is a big fan and sits up on the front row. Starting to get the picture?”

“No.”

“You want to squeeze Fat Sammy, forget conventional methods. Sammy’s a geek and closet pervert who always wanted people to like him. So he comes out here and pretends he’s a normal member of the human race.

That’s about to end.”

“Who’s in the car?”

“Janet Gish and Big Tit Judy Lavelle and four others who got bonds with Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater. Either Sammy gives up the guy who put the whack on you or I’m marching all of them right up the front aisle and turning them loose.”