James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“You are Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.

“I was when I got up this morning,” I replied, then quickly regretted my mistake in attempting humor with Alice Werenhaus.

“Oh, it is you, isn’t it? I should have immediately recognized the quick wit at work in your rhetoric,” she said. “Mr. Purcel left a message for you. Would you like me to read it to you?”

“Yes, that would be very nice, Ms. Werenhaus,” I replied.

“It says, “Give Alice a pay phone number and a time. Fart, Barf, and Itch probably have you tapped.””

“What’s going on?” I said.

“I suspect that’s why he’d like to talk with you, Mr. Robicheaux. To explain everything to you. I’m sure by this time you’re rather used to that,” she said.

I walked downtown and got the number off a public telephone and called it back to Alice Werenhaus. “I’ll be at this number at one P.M.,” I said.

I expected another rejoinder at my expense. But she surprised me. “Mr. Robicheaux, be careful. Watch after Mr. Purcel, too. Under all his bluster he’s a vulnerable man,” she said.

At 1:04 P.M. the payphone across from Victor’s Cafeteria on Main Street rang. I picked it up and didn’t wait for Clete to speak. “Have you lost your mind?” I said.

“About what?” he said.

“You stole a tow truck out of a filling station. You almost burned Bobby Joe Fontenot to death in his trailer. The drawbridge in Jean-erette is still closed with the melted wreckage you left on top of it. Boat traffic is backed up ten miles.”

“Oh, yeah, that ,”” he replied. “Things got a little out of hand. Look, big mon—”

“No, you look, Clete. Helen wants to feed you into an airplane propeller.”

“She’s emotional sometimes. I talked with Clotile Arceneaux. She says your phone is tapped.”

“I already got that. Listen to me—”

“You think the Feds are tapping a cop’s phone because they’re worried about an Irish button man whacking out a couple of grease balls These guys still haven’t found Jimmy Hoffa. It’s Merchie Flannigan and his wife they’re worried about.”

“You’re making no sense.”

“That broad’s been giving you a hand job. I did some checking on Merchie’s company. He’s in line for some big drilling contracts in Iraq after Shrub turns it into an American colony. That means his father-in-law, what’s-his-face, Castille LeJeune, is probably mixed up in it, too. The Feds are after Coll because he’s about to pop somebody with a lot of juice, not because they’re worried about Coll trying to kill a Catholic priest or smoking the Dellacroce brothers.”

It was pointless to argue with Clete. He was the best investigative cop I ever knew, his blue-collar instincts for deception and hypocrisy and flimflam always on target. But his antipathy toward Federal law enforcement agencies, particularly the FBI, was unrelenting, and at best he considered them bumbling and inept and at worst lazy and arrogant.

“Why’d you say Theodosha Flannigan was giving me a hand job?” I asked.

“She and her husband are business partners. She set you up to either get drunk or clipped, she didn’t care which. Rich broads look after their money first and think about the size of your Johnson second. You think she’s going to let a guy like you screw up her family’s finances?”

“You really know how to say it, Cletus.”

“You want to be a dildo for this broad, that’s your choice. She’s dirty, Streak, just like her husband and her old man.”

“What are you up to?”

“I told you before, I’m going to make cripples out of the shitheads who hurt you. Get this. I saw a guy in Franklin who looks just like your description of Max Coll.”

“Stay away from him, Clete.”

“Lose a resource like that? By the way, what’s the name of that electrician who burned down your house?”

I started to give him the name, then refused.

“That’s all right. I already had a talk with him. He might be contacting your department, but don’t believe anything he says.”

Later, I went into Helen’s office. She was on the phone, nodding, while someone on the other end talked, her eyes on mine. “All right, we’ll take care of it... I agree with you. Absolutely... This isn’t the Wild West. You got it,” she said, and hung up. Her face looked scorched.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“The Lafayette sheriff. An electrical contractor by the name of Herbert Vidrine was pulled out of his house at around six-thirty this morning and worked over in his backyard,” she said.

She looked down at the yellow legal pad on her desk, widening her eyes, as though she could not quite assimilate what she had just heard and written down. “By ‘pulled out,” I mean just that. His attacker was wearing work gloves of some kind and grabbed Vidrine by the mouth like he was picking up a bowling ball,” she said. “He swung him around in a circle and threw him into the side of a garbage truck. Vidrine is in Our Lady of Lourdes now. A neighbor got the tag number of the attacker’s car. A lavender Cadillac convertible. Guess who it belongs to?”

“I just talked to Clete on the phone. He’s not coming in,” I said.

“The electrical contractor is too scared to file charges. But Clete’s not going to use Iberia Parish as his safe house while he goes around kicking people’s asses.”

I nodded.

The heat went out of her face. “What’s the score on this electrical contractor?” she said.

“He’s the guy who installed bad wiring in my house. He works for Will Guillot.”

“I’m fed up with the stuff, Dave. Clean it up or you and Clete can start making your own plans,” she said.

I took the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette and hit a rainstorm just outside of town. By the time I got to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital the streets were flooding. I ran past a row of blooming camellia bushes into the side entrance of the hospital and asked at the nurse’s station on the second floor for directions to Herbert Vidrine’s room.

“Three rooms past the elevator, on your left,” the nurse said.

I thanked her and started down the hall. Then I stopped and went back to the station. I opened my badge holder. “How’s Mr. Vidrine doing?” I asked.

“A concussion and a broken arm. But he’s doing all right,” the nurse replied. She was young and had clean features and brown hair that was clipped on her neck.

“Has anyone else been in to see him?”

“Not since I’ve been here. I came on at eight A.M.,” she said.

“Could I use your typewriter?” I said.

I had taken a fiction-writing course when I was an English education major at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. I hoped my old prof, Lyle Williams, would be proud of the letter I was now composing. I typed rather than signed a name at the bottom, folded and put the letter in an envelope the nurse gave me, then printed Herbert Vidrine’s name on the outside.

“Would you wait ten minutes, then deliver this to Mr. Vidrine’s room?” I said.

“I don’t know if I should get involved in this,” she replied.

I placed the envelope on her desk. “You’d be helping out the good guys,” I said.

Vidrine was sitting up in bed when I entered his room, one arm in a cast, easing a teaspoon of Jell-O past a severely swollen bottom lip.

“How are you, Herbert?” I said.

He put his spoon back in a bowl that rested on his bed tray. “You’re Iberia Parish. What are you doing here?” he said.

“We’re looking for the guy who hurt you but on different charges,” I said, laying my raincoat and hat on a chair.

“Maybe you’re here to rub salt in a wound, too,” he said.

“You burned my house down, partner. But I’m like you, I’m a drunk. I can’t carry resentments. Did you ever go back to meetings?”