James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“This doesn’t sound too good, Clete.”

“Oh, Sammy Fig as victim, I forgot. Every one of those broads has worked in either his porn films or his massage parlor. Ask them how they like giving twenty-dollar blow jobs to conventioneers from Birmingham.”

I walked back to the Cadillac and looked inside. “How y’all doin’?” I said.

“Hey, Robicheaux, Clete say you taking us to supper at Gala-to ire a black woman in shades said. She called herself Cody Wyoming, although she had grown up on Prytania Street in New Orleans, not far from where Lillian Hellman was born.

“He hasn’t filled me in on that yet,” I replied.

“You might be getting old, Streak, but I bet you still got the thrust under the hood,” she said. Everybody in the car roared.

I walked back to Clete. “Galatoire’s?” I said.

“Nig and Willie owe me a thousand for running down a skip in Mobile. Except they say they don’t owe me anything because I told Willie to write the bond on this guy when I knew he was mainlining six balloons a day. So I told them they pay for the dinner at Galatoire’s, I tell the girls it’s on Willie and Nig, which means they’ll tell all the other hookers in New Orleans Willie and Nig are great guys, and we call it even.”

“I don’t think this is going to work.”

“It’ll work. Ever hear that story about Sammy taking a girl to the Prytania and a bunch of kids in the balcony hitting them with water bombs made from condoms? I was one of the kids in the balcony. I guess I’m sorry for what we did, but that’s the way it was back then. Come on, Streak, this is the life we chose.”

On that note I walked through the double doors of the hall into the heart of middle America, cloistered, far from the inner city, passenger jets decelerating overhead as they approached the airport, a bustling shopping mall close by, and a freeway streaming with headlights to reassure everyone God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.

Clete had not lied to Janet Gish and her friends about reserved seating. Eight folding metal chairs in the front row remained empty, a program resting on the seat of each one. Otherwise the house was packed. Sammy Figorelli stood resplendent on the stage with his fellow singers, beaming, stuffed inside a summer tux, the footlights surrounded by bouquets of plastic flowers. Clete took out his cell phone and pushed a button on the speed dial.

“I’m down in front, Janet. I’ll wave to you when I’m sure we’ve got the right seats. Yeah, wait for me to wave. It’s mass confusion here,” he said, and clicked off his phone.

By now Sammy had seen us and was watching us out of the corner of his eye while he tried to hold a conversation with the other singers. Clete mounted the wood steps that led onto the stage as though he were part of the production, stepping carefully over the plastic flowers clumped around the footlights. “Got a second, Mr. Figorelli?” he said.

Fat Sammy walked toward him, his eyes like hot BBs. “What do you think you’re doing, Purcel?” he asked.

“Check out the ladies in the doorway at the back of the hall. They’ve been doing a little weed, so I hope they don’t get too giggly,” Clete replied.

Sammy stared at the back of the hall like a man witnessing the erection of his own gallows. His cheeks bladed with color and pinpoints of sweat popped on his forehead. He labored down the steps, forcing Clete to follow him. “You get rid of them people,” he said hoarsely.

“And miss the reception afterwards? You kidding? Can we get introductions to the archbishop?” Clete said.

“What are you after?” Sammy said, his breath coated with funk.

“Give us the name of the guy who sicced the Dellacroces on Dave.”

Sammy’s face was shiny with a greasy film now, his boutonniere like a red wound on his jacket. “You got no right to do this to me, Purcel,” he said.

“I’m counting to three, then waving Janet Gish into action.”

“The guy’s out there now, you dumb Mick.”

“Where?” Clete said, twisting his head to survey the crowd.

“Don’t do that. You’re gonna get me clipped,” Sammy said.

“I don’t see anybody out there I know. Do you, Dave?”

“We’re done here,” I said.

“No, no. Sammy’s going to give us a name,” Clete replied, waving a finger.

“Sammy’s going down with the ship. Right, Sammy?” I said.

But Sammy Fig’s embarrassment was such he could no longer speak. In fact, I thought he was on the edge of having a coronary attack. The fatty layer under his chin trembled, his chest heaved, and sweat ran like hair oil into his shirt collar. I was convinced, at that moment, that inside every adult human being the child was still present, in this case an obese little boy struggling to free himself from the metal coils of a tuba while a packed football stadium laughed at his discomfort.

“We’re going to boogie. Tell the guy who pissed on me I’ll be looking him up,” I said.

“You already burned me. Y’all don’t know what you’ve done,” Sammy said.

“That’s the breaks. Anything else happens to Dave, I’m going to see you first. That means you’re going to be the deadest douche bag in New Orleans,” Clete said, jabbing Sammy in the chest with his finger.

We left Sammy standing numb and shaken in front of his audience and rounded up Janet Gish and her friends and headed for Gala-to ire on Bourbon Street.

On the way out of the rental hall I searched the crowd for a familiar face, one that might belong to the man who had crisscrossed me from head to foot with his urine. But if he was there, I did not see him.

“You blew it, Dave. Fat Sammy would have cracked,” Clete said later.

“What did Sammy do when you and your friends threw water-bomb condoms at him and his girlfriend?” I said.

We were coming out of Galatoire’s, into the pre-Christmas holiday atmosphere of late-night Bourbon Street. The street was loud with music, the neon like purple and pink angel hair inside the fog blowing off the river. “He cried and came at us with both fists,” Clete said.

“He’s still the same kid.”

“All of us are. Except Fat Sammy became a pimp and dope pusher. It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, Dave. Everybody dies. Go with the flow and try to have a few laughs,” Clete said. He propped his shoe on a fire hydrant and buffed the tip with a cloth napkin he had taken from the restaurant.

I went back to work Monday morning. I took a legal pad from my desk drawer and wrote Junior Crudup’s name at the top of it, then drew a circle around it. This is where it had all started, I thought, both for me and the LeJeune family. Under Junior’s name I wrote the names of Castille LeJeune, Theodosha, Merchie, and Theodosha’s psychiatrist in Lafayette, the man who supposedly committed suicide.

Then I angled a line from Castille LeJeune’s name to the names of Will Guillot and the dead daiquiri shop operator and Dr. Parks, who had died in Will Guillot’s driveway.

To one side I placed the names of the New Orleans players Father Jimmie Dolan, Max Coll, the Dellacroce family, and Gunner Ardoin, the part-time porn actor.

The connections between the names and the deeds associated with them seemed byzantine on the surface, but for me the answers in the investigation lay in the past and the key was still the first name on the page, Junior Crudup.

Helen opened my office door. “The Lafayette Sheriff’s Department just called. Get this,” she said. “The archdiocese is having a clerical conference of some kind. One of the out-of-towners happened to be an Irish priest. His jokes were a big hit. Then a pistol fell out of his shoulder bag in the lobby of the Holiday Inn.”