James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

She stared through the front windows at the palm trees beating in the wind and the rain slashing on the glass.

It was afternoon when Clete dropped me off at the house. The sky was a cold blue, dense and flawless in texture and color, the lawns along the street ridged with serpentine lines of leaves where the rainwater had receded into the streets. I shaved, showered, changed clothes, and went to the office.

Helen listened quietly while I told her of what had happened in New Orleans, her gaze fixed out the window on the crypts in the old cemetery.

“You called N.O.P.D. about Coll?”

“Yes.”

“When?” she said.

“When we left town.”

“I don’t think you wanted to arrest him.”

“Then why would I have chased him across town?”

“You should have called N.O.P.D. as soon as you saw him inside the church.”

“Picture this scene, Helen. A couple of hot dogs coming through the vestibule with M-16s and 12-gauge pumps and Max Coll with a nine-millimeter,” I said.

“Coll saved your life. You think you owe him.”

I started to speak but she raised her hand for me to be quiet. “The state attorney’s office put us on notice this morning. We’re going to be investigated for harassment of Castille LeJeune, destruction of his property, and for deliberately damaging his reputation. What do you think of that?” she said.

“You warned me,” I replied.

“You never understand what I’m saying, Dave. You were right about the murder of Junior Crudup. LeJeune was behind it. He thinks we’ve got information that in reality we don’t. Find out what it is. You’re a handful, bwana.”

She folded her arms on her chest, shaking her head, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

At quitting time I drove to the home of Merchie and Theodosha Flannigan. It was almost the winter solstice now, and the sepia-tinted light in the trees and on the bayou seemed to emanate from the earth rather than the sky. Merchie greeted me at the door, wearing glasses, a book in his hand, his long hair like white gold against the soft glow of a living room floor lamp. “She’s not here,” he said.

“It’s you I want to talk to,” I replied.

“Why is it you keep finding reasons to put yourself in my wife’s path?

Just doing your job?”

“You’re out of line, Merchie.”

“Could be. Could also be you’d like to get into Theo’s pants. If that’s the case, good luck, because she’s out drunk somewhere.”

I cleared my throat and shifted my eyes off his face. His thoroughbreds were nickering inside a pecan orchard beyond a white fence, their bodies barely distinguishable in the shadows. “The murder of Junior Crudup isn’t going away. His remains were moved, but eventually we’ll find out what happened to them. If I have anything to do with it, your father-in-law is going to have an opportunity for on-the-job training in soybean farming,” I said.

“So why tell me about it?”

“Because I think you wouldn’t mind seeing that happen.”

“You want to dip your wick, go do it. But leave us out of your personal problems.”

“I think Theodosha knows what happened to Junior Crudup’s body.”

“My wife is a sick person. That’s why she’s spent a hundred thou sand dollars on psychiatrists and clinics. But I think you like stirring her up. I think you like feeding on our troubles.”

He started to close the door but I held it open with one hand. “Your wife’s frigid, isn’t she?” I said.

He released the tension on the door, slipped off his glasses, and dropped them in his shirt pocket. “If you weren’t already an object of pity and public ridicule, I’d splatter your nose all over your face. Now go home,” he said.

The door clicked shut. I stared at it stupidly, my ears ringing in the silence.

Early the next morning Clete picked me up for breakfast, cheerful, wearing his utility cap low on his brow, a Hawaiian shirt under his bomber jacket, driving with one hand down East Main toward Victor’s Cafeteria.

“You moved back into the motor court?” I said.

“Yeah, why not?”

“You burned a guy’s trailer. You assaulted a man in Lafayette.”

“They’re not filing charges. Not if they want to stay on the planet. So I don’t see the big deal. Things get out of control sometimes. I’m cool with it,” he said, fiddling with the radio.

Clete was Clete, a human moving violation, out of sync with both lawful and criminal society, no more capable of changing his course than a steel wrecking ball can alter its direction after it’s been set in motion. Why did I constantly contend with him? I asked myself.

But I knew the answer and it wasn’t a comforting one: We were opposite sides of the same coin.

I told him about my visit to Merchie Flannigan’s house.

“That punk said that to you?” he asked.

“I got a little personal about his wife,” I replied.

“That’s another question I have. You actually asked him if his wife wouldn’t come across?”

“I guess that sums it up.”

“I can see that might piss him off. Particularly when he knows you bopped her.”

“Can’t you show some subtlety, just a little, once in a while?”

“You bump uglies with a guy’s wife, then tell him she’s an ice cube, but it’s me who’s got a problem with language?”

“She was drunk. We both were. Stop harping on it.”

He looked at me, then turned into the parking lot across from Victor’s.

The old convent across the bayou was still in shadow, the live oaks speckled with frost. “Why get into Flannigan’s face about his wife’s sex life?” he said.

“A psychiatrist would probably say she has trouble with intimacy. So she gets it on when she’s drunk, usually with strangers or people she doesn’t care about. It’s characteristic of women who were molested as children,” I replied.

“You’re really going to hang LeJeune’s cojones over a fire, aren’t you?”

“You better believe it,” I said.

Later I signed out a cruiser and drove to the Lafayette Police Department to see my old friend Joe Dupree, the homicide cop and airborne veteran who had investigated the gunshot death of Theo Flannigan’s psychiatrist. While I talked he sat behind his desk, picking one aspirin, then another, then a third out of a tin container, swallowing them with water he drank from a cone-shaped paper cup. His tie was configured to the shape of his pot stomach, his hair combed like strands of wire across the bald spot on top of his head.

“So you think this guy Will Guillot is blackmailing Castille LeJeune and it has something to do with LeJeune’s daughter?” he said.

“Right.”

“About what?”

“Molestation.”

Joe leaned back in his chair and rubbed his mouth. Through the window I could see a chained-up line of black men in orange jumpsuits being placed in a jail van. “Well, Ms. Flannigan’s file was missing from Dr. Bernstine’s office. But I found out several other files were missing, too. Maybe Bernstine took them home and they got lost somehow. Or somebody could have stolen several files to throw off the investigation. Anyway, it’s been a dead-end case,” he said.

“You checked out the secretaries, any reports of forced entry?” I said.

“If Bernstine was burglarized, he didn’t report it. The alarm company never had to do a 911, either. The secretary is a church-going, family woman, with no reason to steal files from her employer.”

“How long was she there?”

He looked down at the torn notebook pages that were clipped inside a case folder. “Seven months,” he said.

“Who was the secretary before this one?” I asked.