James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

I squeezed off three rounds, the recoil knocking my forearms upward, the muzzle throwing sparks into the darkness, the spent shells tinkling on the pavement. I don’t know what I hit inside the compact, but I heard the hard slap of all three hollow-point rounds bite into metal.

The compact swerved around a corner and disappeared down a tree-lined side street that looked like an illustration clipped from a 1940 issue of The Saturday Evening Post .

I went back to my truck and used my cell phone to punch in a 911 on the compact, then walked to Bootsie’s tomb, my ears still ringing from the explosions of the .45. The umbrella had not been disturbed by the wind and the candle was burning brightly inside its red receptacle, but the pelicans had flown or drifted southward on the current.

I heard your voice , I said.

But there was no reply.

I don’t care who else knows it, either. That was your voice, Boots , I said.

Then I said a prayer for her and one for me and headed back for the truck, wishing the pelicans had not gone.

Don’t worry, they’ll be back. One of these days when you least expect it, you’ll see them on Bayou Teche , she said.

I turned around, my jaw hanging, the clouds blooming with electricity that made no sound.

I rose before dawn Sunday morning and ate a breakfast of Grape-Nuts and coffee and hot milk in the kitchen. When I opened the front door to leave I saw an envelope on the porch with a footprint stenciled across it and realized it must have fallen out of the door-jamb the previous night and been stepped on by either me or Father Jimmie.

The letter inside was handwritten and read:

Dear Mr. Robicheaux,

I must talk to you. I don’t know why all this is happening. We moved here to live in a decent environment and look what everyone has done to us. I also do not understand this new development. Nobody will answer my questions. I think all of you people suck. Call me at home. Do it right now.

Sincerely,

In my memory I saw a stump of a woman, with dyed red hair and perfume that was like a chemical assault on the senses, a ring of fat under her chin. She was the mother of Lori Parks, the teenage girl who had died with two others inside their burning automobile on Loreauville Road. I did not look forward to seeing Mrs. Parks again.

I put away her note and drove to Franklin. The parking compound for Sunbelt Construction was located behind a house trailer that served as a company office. In the lot were trucks of every kind, front-end loaders, bulldozers, and grading machines but no compact car that resembled the shooter’s.

I drove back to New Iberia and parked in Merchie and Theodosha Flannigan’s driveway. Their faux medieval home was shrouded in fog puffing off the bayou, their horses nickering and blowing inside the pecan orchard. The morning newspaper was still inside the metal cylinder at the foot of the drive, but woodsmoke was rising from a living room fireplace. There was no compact car anywhere in sight, but I did not expect to see one. In fact, I did not know why I had come to the Flannigans’ home. Perhaps it was to prove somehow that Theo was not involved with a criminal enterprise, that she was a victim herself and not capable of setting me up to be kidnapped and tortured by the Dellacroce brothers. Maybe I just wanted to believe the world was a more innocent place than it is.

I got out of the truck and rested my hands on the top rail of the white fence that bordered the pecan orchard and watched the Flannigans’ thoroughbreds moving about in the fog. I could hear their hooves thudding on the soft earth, smell the fecund odor of the bayou, like the smell of humus and fish roe, and the pecan husks and blackened leaves that had been trodden into pulp in the trees, and I wondered how it was that a place this beautiful would not be enough for anyone, why each morning would not come to the owner like a blessing extended by a divine hand.

Theodosha opened the front door and walked down the drive in her bathrobe and slippers, her hair black and shiny in the grayness of the morning. “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“How bad would you be willing to screw an old friend?” I said.

“It’s pretty early in the morning for your craziness, Dave.”

“Your novels were nominated twice for Edgars but they didn’t win. If your script-writing career was on track, I think you’d be out in the Hollywood Hills, not on the bayou. Maybe Fat Sammy Figorelli’s skin films were a shortcut to being back on the big screen.”

“You’re sickening,” she said.

“Somebody shot at me last night.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Did you set me up with the Dellacroces?”

She walked past me and pulled the morning paper from the metal delivery receptacle, then started back up the drive toward her house. “Too bad it’s Sunday,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“The state mental hygiene unit in Lafayette is closed. But if I were you, I’d jump right on it first thing in the morning,” she said, opening the paper, not bothering to even glance at me as she spoke..

When I got back home, Father Jimmie was gone, his closet empty. He had left a recording for me on my message machine, its brevity like a shard of glass: “So long, Dave. Thanks for your hospitality. I hope everything works out for you.”

There was also a voice message from Donna Parks: “Why don’t you answer my goddamn letter, you callous fuck?”

It was going to be a long day.

I tried to eat lunch but had no appetite. As I washed my dishes and put away my uneaten food, I looked through a window and saw Helen Soileau pull into the driveway. She got out of the cruiser and walked to the gallery, wearing faded jeans, boots, and a mackinaw, her jaw set. I opened the door before she could knock.

“I was out of town, so I just got the report on the car sniper,” she said, walking past me into the warmth of the living room. “Go over it for me.”

I went over each detail with her and also told her I had been to Franklin that morning to look for the compact car I had put three rounds in.

“Anybody from St. Mary Parish contact you?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Yesterday somebody got past the alarm system at both Castille LeJeune’s and Will Guillot’s house. In the middle of the afternoon. A real pro. Know who it might be?”

“Max Coll,” I said.

“What was he looking for?”

“Evidence they put a hit on him.”

“I hate to even ask this question. How would you know this?”

“He called here yesterday. I more or less told him there were two local guys behind the contract on him and they lived in Franklin.”

She stood at the ceiling-high living room window and stared out at the street and at the rain dripping through the canopy of live oaks that arched over it, her fists propped on her hips. “Want to tell me your motivation for doing that?” she said.

“I owed him one.”

“We don’t owe criminals. We break their wheels and put them out of business. We don’t make individual judgments on the people we need to arrest.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t see,” she replied, turning to look directly at me. “I’m pulling your shield, bwana.”

I nodded, my expression flat. “It’s been that kind of day,” I said. I slipped my badge holder out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Coll thinks Theo Flannigan may have been the porn connection to Sammy Figorelli. Maybe she was the shooter in the daiquiri drive-by. In case you want to follow that up.”

Helen flipped my badge holder back and forth in her hand while she listened, then she tucked it into her pocket. “Sometimes you break my heart,” she said.