James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“As always with you, Mr. Robicheaux, I have no idea what you’re talking about. But if this man Coll comes back around, he’ll rue the day he left his little shanty back in the peat bogs or wherever he comes from... Am I losing your attention?”

“Hubris has always been my undoing, Mr. LeJeune. Maybe it will be different with you. Anyway, my badge has been pulled and I’m done. Run your happy warrior act on somebody else,” I said.

When I got back home I put on sweat pants and a hooded jersey, tied on my running shoes, and jogged down East Main, past the Shadows and the plantation caretaker’s house across the street, which now served as a bed-and-breakfast, and crossed the drawbridge into City Park. I ran along the winding paved road through the live oak trees, my clothes soggy with mist, then cut across the closely clipped grass and ran along the edge of the bayou. In our area the sugar mills are fired up twenty-four hours a day during the cane-grinding season, and in the distance I could see a huge red glow on the horizon, like fire trapped inside a thunderhead, and I could hear the heavy thumping sound of the machines, like the reverberation of giant feet stamping upon the earth. There was not another soul inside the park, and for just a moment my heart quickened and I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

I sat down on a bench, my palms propped on my thighs, my breath coming hard in my throat. What was it Theodosha had said? We were alike because we both lived in the cities of the dead? I wiped the sweat off my face with my jersey and fought to get my breath back, widening my eyes, concentrating on the details around me, as though my ability to remain among the quick depended on my perception of them.

Is this the way it comes? I thought — not with a clicking sound and a brilliant flash of light on a night trail in Vietnam, or with a high-powered round fired by a sniper in a compact automobile, but instead with a racing of the heart and a shortening of the breath in a black-green deserted park smudged by mist and threaded by a tidal stream.

My head hammered with sound that was like helicopter blades thropping overhead, and for just a moment I was back on a slick piled with wounded and dying grunts, AK-47 rounds vectoring out of the jungle canopy down below, the inside of the airframe crawling with smoke.

I put my head down between my knees, my hands on the pavement, the world spinning around me.

I looked up and saw from out of the mist a pink Cadillac convertible headed toward me, one with wire wheels, tail fins, Frenched headlights, and grillwork that was like a chromium smile, the radio blaring with 1950s Jerry Lee Lewis rock ‘n’ roll.

The Cadillac passed me and behind the wheel I saw a man with an impish face, the features cartoonlike, as though they had been sketched with a charcoal pencil, the hair shaved on the sides and left long and curly on the neck.

“Gunner?” I said out loud.

But the driver did not hear me, and the Cadillac wound its way out of the park, the only piece of bright color inside the failing light.

Gunner Ardoin in New Iberia? I asked myself. No, I had let my imagination run away with itself. The year was 2002, not 1957, and the rock ‘n’ roll days of pink Cadillacs, drive-in movies, Jerry Lee Lewis, and American innocence were over.

At 10:00 P.M. I turned on the local news. The lead story involved a homicide inside a Franklin residence. The television camera panned on a tree-lined street and a Victorian home where paramedics were exiting a side door with a gurney on which a figure inside a body bag was strapped down. The reporter at the scene said the victim had been shot once in the temple and once in the mouth and, according to the coroner, had been dead approximately twelve hours. The victim’s name was William Raymond Guillot.

It was still raining Monday morning, the air cold, the fog heavy among the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery as I pulled into the parking lot at the courthouse.

Wally, our leviathan dispatcher, made a face when he saw me come through the front door. “Dave, you ain’t suppose to be here,” he said.

“Pretend I’m not,” I said.

“Don’t jam me up here. I’m your friend, remember?”

“Is anybody working the Guillot homicide?” I said.

“I didn’t even hear you say that. I’m deaf and dumb here. Go home,” he replied.

Helen’s door was ajar. I went inside without knocking. “What’s happening in Franklin with the Guillot shooting?” I said.

“None of your business,” she said.

“They made Max Coll for the hit?”

“One in the temple, one down the throat. The signature of a pro,” she said.

“I don’t buy it.”

“What you need to buy is a hearing aid. You were suspended as of yesterday. Now haul your ass out of here.”

“I talked with Castille LeJeune late yesterday afternoon. He says he walked in on Coll while Coll was creeping his house. If Coll was going to pop anybody, he would have done it then.”

“You went out to LeJeune’s, after I pulled your badge?”

“I told him I was suspended. It was a personal visit.”

She shook her head, nonplussed. “We have an attorney in lawyer jail right now. I’m about to put you in there with him,” she said.

“Coll isn’t the shooter.”

“Don’t be on the premises when I get back.” She walked down the hall and into the women’s restroom, glancing back at me just before she pushed open the door, as though my argument for Coil’s innocence had just sunk a hook on the edge of her mouth.

Louisiana is a small state, with a comparatively small population. In the year 2002 over 950 people were killed and 55,000 injured on our state highways. Booze was a major factor in most of the fatalities. Hence, the presence of a drunk person behind the wheel of an automobile in Louisiana is hardly an anomaly. So I had no reason to be surprised when I picked up the phone in my kitchen and heard a woman’s voice say, “Why don’t you do something about this goddamn traffic light out here on the four-lane?”

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Donna Parks, who does it sound like? The man in front of me is driving a shit box that’s smoking up the whole town. He won’t turn left because there’s no arrow on the traffic light and I have to breathe his goddamn exhaust fumes.”

For just a moment I had the uncharitable thought that her husband, Dr. Parks, was better off dead.

“What could I do for you, Ms. Parks?”

“I want to file rape charges.”

“You’ve been sexually assaulted?”

“Like my deceased husband said, you people are really dumb. I’ll come over there and explain it to you. Where are you?”

“Since you dialed me at my home number, I think we should both conclude I’m at home.”

She belched softly, then I heard what was probably her car horn blowing just before the line went dead.

With luck she would have an accident before she got to my house, I thought.

I looked at my watch. Clete’s arraignment was at 11:00 A.M. I wrote a note for Donna Parks, included my cell phone number on it, and stuck the note inside the grill on the front screen. Eventually I would have to deal with her, but it would be easier to do by phone than in person. I put Snuggs on the back porch, slipped my checkbook in my pocket, and started out the door, just as Merchie Flannigan pulled into the driveway, blocking my truck. He worked his way around the puddles in the yard and stepped up on the gallery, raking back his long, white-gold hair with his fingers.

“Hang on, old buddy. Need to clear up my remarks to you when you came by the house,” he said.

“I’m in a hurry, Merchie,” I said.

“Let’s face it. I was jealous. Theo and I haven’t had the best marriage. You said I was out of line. You were right.” He extended his hand, his jaw square, like an imitation of an athletic, educated, country club millionaire, one he had probably seen on a movie screen as a child and had spent a lifetime trying to become.