James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“Get out,” I said.

“I can really pick them,” she said. She stepped out into the storm and slammed the truck door as hard as she could.

Lesson? Chasing a nighttime mirage on a rain-swept highway has no happy ending for either the quick or the dead.

The one-car fatality at West Cote Blanche Bay seemed to lack any plausible explanation. The witness, an elderly Cajun hired to pick litter out of the ditches along the roadside, had seen an expensive, large car parked next to a compact in a grove of pine trees. Children had been lighting fireworks all evening, shooting Roman candles and rockets over the bay. Then he had heard firecrackers in the trees, just before the compact had driven away. When he looked again at the grove of pines, the large car started up and drove out onto a pier, snapping the supports on the guardrail into sticks, finally plunging off the end of the pier into the water.

Helen Soileau had arrived at the bay only a few minutes before me. She walked with me up a shell ramp and introduced me to the witness. As with most elderly Cajun men, his handshake was as light as air. “How many firecrackers did you hear?” I asked him.

“Two, maybe tree,” he replied.

He was a tiny man, dressed in neat khakis, with cataracts and a supple face that resembled brown tallow. He seemed nervous and kept glancing over his shoulder at the bay and at the splintered guardrail on the pier and at the wrecker that so far had not been able to pull the sunken car off a submerged pipeline, all of it lit in the glare of searchlights mounted on a firetruck.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked.

“I seen a big man behind the wheel. Seen him go crashing right off the end of the pier there. I cain’t swim, me. I keep t’inking maybe there was air inside the car. Maybe if I’d brung hep sooner—”

“You have no reason to feel bad about anything, sir. Who was in the compact?”

“Just somebody driving a li’l car. It was an old one. I ain’t sure what kind.”

“Was a man or woman driving?”

His shook his head, his face blank.

“What color was the car?” I asked.

“I just ain’t paid it much mind, no.”

“You see a license tag?” I asked.

“No, suh.”

“The firecrackers you heard, those were in the pine trees? You’re sure about that?” I said.

“No, suh, I ain’t sure about none of it no more.”

I patted him on the shoulder and walked down to the water’s edge. The bay was black, dimpled with rain rings, and the tide was pushing small waves that glistened with gasoline up on the sand. Two scuba divers, both of them sheriff’s deputies, had already been down on the wrecked car. They were sitting on the running board of the firetruck in their wet suits, sharing a thermos of coffee.

“What’s it look like down there?” I asked.

“The vehicle landed on its side. Driver’s face is down in the silt. The ignition is on and the gearshift in “Drive,” one of them said. His name was Darbonne. He was unshaved and had curly black hair, his throat prickled with cold.

“Any chance air was trapped in there?” I asked.

“The front windows were down. The driver’s arm is tangled up in the seat belt, like he couldn’t find the release button. All that water probably hit him like a hammer,” Darbonne said.

“The witness blames himself for not getting back with help sooner. Tell him about the air situation, will you?” I said.

Darbonne nodded and yawned. “When they drive off bridges or piers, they’re drunks, nutcases, or suicides,” he said. “If a guy in a Caddy ices himself, he should have the courtesy to do it without inconveniencing people who make twenty-five grand a year.”

“Say again?”

“The whale who just offed himself. I wish he’d gone to a heated, indoor pool to do it,” the driver said, then looked at my expression. “ What , I just spit on the floor in church?”

A few minutes later the divers went down again to reset the hook on the Cadillac’s frame so the car could be flipped over on its top and slid off the pipeline it partially rested on. Helen and I stood by the water’s edge and watched. The moon had broken through a slit in the clouds, and far out on the horizon there were whitecaps that looked like tiny bird’s wings.

“Castille LeJeune’s lawyer called again. He’s talking about a harassment suit against the department,” she said.

“He’d like my job?”

“What did you find out down at Pecan Island?” she said, ignoring my question.

“Castille LeJeune had Junior Crudup killed. He was beaten to death by a prison guard, a guy named Jackson Posey,” I replied.

She looked at the black surface of the bay and at the slickness of the wrecker cable as it extracted the submerged car from the water. Her face did not change expression. She wiped away a raindrop that had caught in her eyelash. “Where’s Crudup’s body?” she asked.

“Probably still buried on the LeJeune’s property,” I said.

“Get a search warrant,” she said.

The wrecker man winched the Cadillac upside-down out of the shallows and slid it up on the bank, the front windows gushing with water and oil-blackened silt. The body of a huge man hung against the safety strap, his shoulders and neck pressed against the roof, his face twisted toward the open window so he appeared to be staring at a bizarre event taking place outside his automobile.

I squatted down to eye-level with him and shone a flashlight on his face and inside the rest of the car. There was a small entry hole in his neck, his cheek, and the side of his head. The wounds had bled out and had washed clean in the water and had started to pucker around the edges.

“Ever think anybody could sucker-drop Fat Sammy Figorelli?” Helen said behind me.

“No,” I said. I reached inside the car and closed Sammy’s eyes. The inverted weight of his massive buttocks and thighs had curved his spine so that his back and neck were compressed like a gargoyle’s.

“Don’t waste your sympathies, Streak. He was a pimp and a pusher and the world’s a better place every time one of these shit bags gets stuffed into a hole,” Helen said.

“I guess you’re right,” I said. But I could not help remembering the stories of a French Quarter fat kid who had spent years being the butt of people’s jokes.

Helen stood up from the spot where she had crouched behind me. “Wrap it up here. At oh-eight-hundred tomorrow go to work on the warrant. It’s time Castille LeJeune learned this is the United States,” she said.

“You got it, Top,” I said, referring to her old rank in the U.S. Army.

“Call me that again and I’ll tear off your head and spit in it,” she replied.

I think even Fat Sammy would have enjoyed that one.

We had the warrant by late Tuesday afternoon. Without announcement and with a balmy breeze at our backs and a sky the color of a ripe peach, two cruisers from the Iberia Sheriff’s Department, three from St. Mary Parish, a front-end loader, and a bulldozer chain-boomed on a flatbed tractor-trailer rig all came down Castille Le Jeune’s front drive, raking through the lone tunnel of oaks, right into the middle of an outdoor dinner party LeJeune was holding on his terrace.

Helen and I and a plainclothes from the St. Mary sheriff’s office served the warrant on him in front of his guests, who included, among at least a dozen others, Theo and Merchie Flannigan. LeJeune tried to feign an amused dismay and the good cheer of the professional bon vivant, but Theo imposed no such restraints on herself.

She wore a low-cut white evening dress and a necklace of red stones around her throat. Her skin was flushed with either the challenge of the moment or the glass of bourbon and crushed ice with a sprig of mint she had been drinking. She placed her small fists on her hips, as a drill instructor might, and turned her face up into mine. “You’re an idiot,” she said.