James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“That’s a little strong.”

I thought she was going to give it to me but she didn’t. “As far as you know, Guillot didn’t try to call LeJeune after you went to Guillot’s house?” she said.

“When we went to LeJeune’s house, the man cleaning up said nobody had called except his wife. She wanted him to pick up a loaf of bread.”

“Maybe LeJeune is not the guy we should be after.”

“He’s the guy.”

“I think I’m going to do something more rewarding today, like have a conversation with a pile of bricks,” she said.

“Did you just hear something on the line?”

“Hear what?”

“A friend in New Orleans said I probably have a federal tap on my phone.”

“Have a nice weekend, Dave.”

Clete was in serious trouble and would not be able to bond out of jail until he was arraigned Monday morning. The impersonation beef was a gray area. A person does not have to specifically claim to be a police officer in order to be guilty of impersonating one. He simply has to give the impression of being one. But Clete had licensed PI. status and ironically, as an employee of a bail bond service, possessed legal powers that no law officer did, namely, he could cross state lines and even break into residences without a warrant to arrest a bail skip who was a fugitive from a court proceeding.

The assault-and-battery beef was another matter. With luck and some finesse, an expensive, politically connected lawyer could probably get the charge kicked down to resisting. But it wasn’t going to be easy.

Clete’s reputation for violence, destruction of property, and general anarchy was scorched into the landscape all the way across southern Louisiana. His enemies had longed for the day he would load the gun for them. Now I had helped him do it.

I went to Baron’s Health Club, worked out with free weights, then sat for a half hour in the steam room. When I came back outside it was still raining, harder than before, litter floating in the ditches that bordered the streets. I went to an afternoon AA. meeting above the Methodist church by the railroad tracks and listened to a man talk about nightmares he still had from the Vietnam War. His face was seamed, unshaved, his body flaccid, his clothes mismatched. He had been eighty-sixed out of every bar in the parish and he had been put out of two V.A. alcoholic treatment programs. He began to talk about a massacre of innocent persons inside a free-fire zone.

I couldn’t listen to it. I left the meeting and drove home. When I pulled into the driveway my yard was flooded halfway to the gallery and Theodosha Flannigan was waiting for me by the door, a rain-spotted scarf tied on her head, her face filled with consternation. Snuggs was turning in circles around her ankles.

“I know all about last night,” she said.

“Not a good day for it, Theo,” I said, unlocking the door.

I went in the house without inviting her inside, but she followed me anyway, Snuggs racing past us toward the food bowl in the kitchen.

“My father didn’t molest me. It was a black man. That’s why I was seeing Dr. Bernstine,” she said.

“Don’t do this, Theo.”

“When I was a little girl a black convict got in our house and hurt me. He was killed running down toward the bayou.”

“Killed by whom?”

“A prison guard. He worked at the labor camp. He and the other guards buried him in back. I saw the bones when the fish pond was dug. They were sticking out of the dirt in a front-end loader.”

“You’ve been fed a lie.”

“It’s the truth. I went over every detail of it with my father.”

“Bernstine told you your father raped or molested you, didn’t he?”

“It doesn’t matter. I know what happened.”

“When you first told me about Bernstine’s death, you said you thought you had something to do with it.”

“I was confused. I know the truth now.”

I gave up. Through the kitchen window I could see steam rising off the bayou in the rain. Theodosha picked up Snuggs, set him on the counter, and rubbed her hand down his back. “Merchie is leaving me,” she said.

“That’s too bad.”

“We’re not good for each other. We never were. I’m too messed up and he’s too ambitious.”

“I have some things to do today, Theo.”

I could hear an oak branch slapping against the side of the house, water rushing out of a gutter into the drive.

“We had fun together, didn’t we?” she said.

“Yeah, sure,” I replied.

“Know why we’re alike?”

“No.”

“We both live in the cities of the dead. We don’t belong with other people.”

“That’s not true. Why did you use that term?” I said, my heart quickening.

But she didn’t answer. She lifted up Snuggs and set him back down on the floor, then touched me on both cheeks and kissed me on the mouth.

“So long, baby. I never told you this, but you’re the only man I ever slept with and dreamed about later,” she said.

She went out the front door, letting the screen slam behind her, then ran for her car. I had to force myself not to go after her.

I lay down on my bedspread, with my arm across my eyes, and listened to the rain on the roof. I drifted off to sleep and suddenly saw an image out of my past, one that had no catalyst other than perhaps the story told by the war veteran at the noon AA. meeting.-I saw the members of my platoon marching at night through a rain forest that had been denuded by napalm. Their faces and uniforms and steel pots, even the green sweat towels draped over their heads like monk’s cowls, were gray with ash. They cast no shadows and made no sound as they marched and their eyes were all possessed by the strange non-human look that soldiers call the thousand-yard stare.

I sat straight up in my bed, my throat choking.

The phone was ringing in the kitchen. I went to the counter and picked it up, the dream still more real than the world around me. “Hello?” I said.

“Is Father Dolan there?”

“Coll?”

“Sorry to be a nuisance, Mr. Robicheaux. I just wanted to pass on something to Father Dolan.”

My mind began to race. Castille LeJeune had remained untouchable and was about to skate. Will Guillot could probably not be charged with any crime more serious than breaking and entering, and the evidence against him was problematic and subject to easy dissection by a defense attorney.

“I owe you one, Max. That means I don’t want to see you taken off the board by a couple of local scum wads,” I said.

“Could you be speaking a little more plainly, sir?” he replied.

My pulse was beating in my wrists, the veins dilating in my scalp. “I think the clip on you came down from a couple of homegrown characters in the porn and meth trade. Maybe you should stay out of Franklin, Louisiana, and spend more time at Biscayne Dog Track,” I said.

“A couple of local fellows, you say? Now, that’s interesting, be cause I’d come to a very different conclusion. I thought the porn connection was the woman, the screenwriter, Ms. Flannigan. She’s the brains in the family, not her father. The colored people hereabouts say he may have had his way with her when she was a child. This fellow Guillot is trying to take over the business, so Ms. Flannigan does the daiquiri fellow, draws a lot of attention to her father’s selling grog to teenagers and drunk drivers, and uses Guillot’s gun to do it. Perfect way to screw both her daddy and her business rival.”

“Why would Theo Flannigan be the porn connection?”

“I’m ashamed to say I’m well acquainted with a number of lowlifes in the underworld who say Sammy Figorelli’s films were successful because they were written by a famous woman author. It’s not a big reach to figure out who that might be... Hello? Are you there?”