James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

The time on my alarm clock was 4:16 A.M. when I heard the unmistakable sound of Clete’s automobile engine dying in my driveway. A moment later he tapped softly on the front door. He was wearing gloves and a beat-up leather bomber jacket. The jacket was unzipped, and I could see his nylon shoulder holster and his blue-black, pearl-handled .38 revolver inside it.

“Where have you been?” I said.

“At a fish camp on Lake Fausse Pointe. Get dressed. I know where Max Coll is,” he said.

“No more cowboy stuff, Clete.”

“Me?” he said.

“Where is he?” I said.

Clete stepped inside the living room and started to explain, looking back over his shoulder at the street, then got vexed at being conciliatory. “You want in on this or not?” he said.

I left a note on the kitchen counter for Father Jimmie, then Clete and I headed out in the predawn wetness for New Orleans, a thermos of coffee and a box of beignets on the seat between us. The old homes along East Main were still dark, the live oaks dripping on the sidewalks. I was still not quite awake.

“Run it by me again,” I said.

“Janet Gish is trying to get off the nose candy without a program, so she spends most of the night at Harrah’s. She says a guy with a Mick accent was in the casino until early Saturday morning, then he left just before seven. He came back at eight-thirty, ate a plate of steak and eggs, played some more blackjack, and drove off in a Honda.”

“Why was she paying so much attention to a guy with an accent?” I asked.

“One, I’d already described Coll to her, and, two, she still hooks a little on the side and thought he’d be an easy trick. Here’s the rest of it. He had on black dress pants, like a priest might wear.”

It was raining and still dark when we crossed the high bridge over the Atchafalaya at Morgan City. Down below I could see shrimp boats in their berths, the red-tiled roofs of the town, and the great, cypress-dotted expanse of the wetlands in the south, all of which were being eaten away by saltwater intrusion at a rate of hundreds of square miles a year.

“Doesn’t your heater work?” I said.

“It’s full blast, mon.”

Clete’s cell phone rang. He answered it, listened, then said thanks to someone and clicked it shut again. “That’s Janet. The guy who looks like Coll is still there. By the way, she’s got a porn lead for us, too,” he said.

We crossed the wide sweep of the Mississippi just as the first cold band of light, like the blunt edge of a sword, appeared on the eastern horizon. Then we were rolling down I-10 past the northern shore of Lake Pontchartain, into the heart of the city, the welfare projects, the cemeteries where the dead were entombed in white brick, the homeless and the hopelessly addicted gathered around fires next to the cement pillars that supported the elevated highway.

At the head of Canal Street stood the casino, the royal palms at the entrance beaded with rainwater in the graying of the dawn. The gamblers inside were not a group that took note of changes in either weather or clocks. The rain might beat against the windows and lightning flicker on the streets outside, but the blacks and Hispanics and blue-collar whites who crowded the tables or fed the endless banks of slot machines were committed to their own form of solipsism, one in which the amounts that were lost or gained were far less important than the gamblers’ desire to stay in the game, to be a part of the action, at the table or in front of the machine, until they were physically and emotionally sated in a way no sexual or narcotic experience can equal.

Janet Gish was at the bar, a scotch and milk in front of her. Her hair was currently orange, stiff with spray, the tops of both breasts tattooed with a blood red star, her skin rough grained, freckled, layered with makeup. But in spite of all the cosmetics and chemicals she used on herself, she had one natural gift that was unimpaired by the life she lived. Her eyes were like a doll’s, with weighted lids that clicked open suddenly, so that she always seemed surprised, somehow still vulnerable.

She turned on the stool, drew in on her cigarette, and looked at us without expression. “Lend me twenty bucks, Streak?” she said.

I took out my wallet and found fifteen. She took it and slipped it under her glass. “I got to get out of this shit. I just dropped three hundred in a half hour. How about lunch at Galatoire’s? God, I hate this place,” she said, although I had no idea which place she meant.

“On the clock today. You know how it is,” I said.

She was obviously stoned or drunk or both, staying off coke with booze and baccarat, paying the rent with fifty-dollar tricks, starting her daily routine at 4 P.M. with eyewash, thirty-minute hot showers, and white speed on the half shell. Anyone who thinks prostitution is a victimless crime needs his head drilled with a brace and bit.

“Where’s our Irish friend?” I asked.

“Just went out the door. Like voom ,” she replied.

Clete’s face reddened with exasperation. “Why didn’t you call?” he said.

“It’s been a long night. I don’t need criticism right now. I just don’t need that kind of unjustified negativity in my morning,” she said, a thin wire quivering in her throat.

“Right,” he said, glancing up and down the bar.

“Because if that’s why you two are here, I’ll just go back to the tables,” she said. She gestured at the bartender. “This milk is curdled. Give me a tequila sunrise.”

“We appreciate everything you’ve done for us, Janet. How long has our man been gone?” I said.

“Ten minutes,” she said.

“You saw him drive away?” I asked.

“No, he was walking. Right up Canal. Like he was in a hurry,” she said.

“When he left Saturday morning for an hour or so, did he walk or drive?” I asked.

She thought about it. “He walked down Canal. Just like this morning,” she replied.

“Stay here, Cletus,” I said.

“Oh, I got it. I just drive people around, then turn into an ashtray.

I’m glad I’m your friend, Dave, because otherwise I don’t think you’d have any,” he said, screwing an unlit Lucky into his mouth.

I didn’t try to explain. I hurried down Canal, past smoking sewer grates and gutters dark with rainwater, to the side street that led into the dilapidated downtown area where Father Jimmie Dolan’s church was located, like a fifteenth-century fortress inside which its inhabitants refused to accept a tidal wave of ecclesiastical change.

The early-morning Latin Mass had already begun when I entered the vestibule and dipped my hand in the holy water fount. In a back pew, hard by a marble pillar, I saw the diminutive form of Max Coll, next to a group of elderly, head-covered women, all of whom had rosary beads threaded through their fingers. He wore black trousers and a puffy, tan down jacket that was zipped halfway up his chest.

My cell phone was in my pocket, my .45 automatic in a clip-on holster attached to my belt. I started to punch in a 911 call on the phone, then thought better of it and instead genuflected at the end of the pew and knelt down next to Max Coll.

“Walk out of here with me,” I whispered.

He glanced at me and showed no sign of either recognition or alarm.

“Bugger off,” he said.

“No one needs to get hurt here,” I said.

He ignored me and concentrated on the missal in his hands.

“I know some evil men killed not only your natal family but your wife and son as well,” I said. “Both my mother and my second wife died at the hands of murderers. I can understand the feelings you’ve had to deal with over the years. I think many of the people you killed were bastards and deserved what they got. But it’s time to give it up. Take a walk with me, Max. You know it’s the right thing to do.”