James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

And I also felt I had a problem of conscience about Theo Flannigan. I had falsely accused her of involvement in the shooting of the daiquiri-store operator and the production of pornographic films.

In fact, I rued the day I had ever heard of the LeJeunes or Junior Crudup.

On top of my more elevated level of problems, Batist stopped by the house with another one, namely Tripod, Alafair’s three-legged raccoon, whom Batist carried up on the gallery inside Tripod’s wood-frame hutch.

“Cain’t keep him at my house no mo’,” he said.

“Why can’t you?” I asked, looking down at Tripod, who was standing up in the hutch, his claws hooked on the wire screen, his whiskered snout pointed at me.

“He’s old, like me. He went to the bat’ room on the kitchen no’,” Batist said.

“Thanks, Batist.”

“You welcome,” he replied, and drove off.

I opened the wire door on Tripod’s hutch and he stepped out on the floor and looked up at me. “How’s it hangin, “Pod?” I said.

He responded by running into the kitchen and eating Snuggs’s food out of the pet bowl.

But I could not distract myself from my problems with the world of play and innocence represented by animals. I wanted to believe I’d been dealt a bad hand. There was even some truth in my self-serving conclusion. But unfortunately I had dealt the hand to myself, beginning with the day I stepped into the unsolved disappearance of Junior Crudup, a man who had probably sought self-immolation all his life.

I called Theo at her house and apologized for my accusation.

“Drunks are always sorry. But they do it over and over again,” she said.

“Could you define ‘it,” please?”

“Acting like an asshole.”

“I see.”

“Have you apologized to my father?” she asked.

“Are you serious?” I said.

She hung up.

I called Helen Soileau at the department and told her I’d been wrong about Theo.

“How’d you clear her?” she asked.

“A porn actor told me a guy named Ray, as in William Raymond Guillot, was responsible for lifting material from Theo’s books for Sammy Figorelli’s movies. Theo had nothing to do with it.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“Can you get another warrant to search Castille LeJeune’s property?”

“No.”

“I want to resign from the department, Helen. I’ll have a formal letter on your desk by tomorrow.”

“That’s the way you want it?”

“Absolutely.”

“I love you, bwana, but I don’t trust you. And I...”

“What?”

“Want to kill you sometimes.”

I got in my truck and backed into East Main. The bamboo and gardens in front of the Shadows breathed with mist that blew into the street, and as I looked at the old, massive brick post office on the corner, where a Creole man sold sno’balls and chunks of sugarcane off a canopy-shaded wagon when I was a kid, and as I watched the traffic turn at the next light onto the drawbridge, just past the Evangeline Theater where my father, mother, and I went to see cowboy movies in the 1940s, I had the feeling, not imagined, not emotional in nature, that I would never see any of these places or things again.

As I approached Fox Run I could see sleet marching across the barren cane fields on the far side of the Teche, the same fields where Junior and Woodrow Reed labored a half century ago under the watchful eyes of Boss Posey and the other mounted gun bulls all of them, one way or another, controlled by the man who lived across the bayou in the great white house that resembled a Mississippi paddle-wheeler.

I parked by the carriage house. The automobiles were gone and even though the sky was dark, no lights burned inside the main house. I dropped my cell phone in the pocket of my raincoat and walked down the slope toward the bayou, where the yellow bulldozer sat, huge, mud smeared, and clicking with soft white hail.

Helen had said we were looking for Dagwood and Blondie, whose advantage was they did not feel guilty and hence hid in plain sight. But amateur criminals have another kind of problem, one that professionals do not.

They’re arrogant and they presume. They’re psychologically incapable of believing the system was not constructed to benefit them, and consequently they cannot imagine themselves standing in front of a law-and-order judge who can send them away for decades.

The bulldozer blade was partially raised, the tractor-treads pressed deeply into the earth, fanning back off the rear of the dozer in patterns like horse tails, as though the operator had been involved intensely with one particular area of repair rather than the entire environment.

The keys were hanging from the ignition. I turned over the engine revved the gas once, and clanked the transmission into reverse. As I backed up the dozer, a different kind of topography began to emerge from under the suspended blade — an unevenly filled depression, one that had not been graded and tamped down, so that the surface was spiked with severed tree roots and ground-up divots of grass.

I dropped the blade, shifted into forward gear, and raked off the top layer of the depression, then backed up again so I could see where the blade had cut. The dirt was loose, sinking where there were air pockets, water oozing from the subsoil that had been compressed by the weight of the tractor-treads. I dropped the blade lower, this time cutting much deeper into the hole, trundling up a huge, curled pile of mud, blue clay, and feeder roots that looked like torn cobweb. But this time, when I backed off the hole, I saw something I hoped I would not find.

I cut the engine, pulled loose a shovel that was behind the seat, and walked around the front of the blade to a spot where a human arm, shoulder, and the curved back of a hand protruded from the soil, the hail rolling down the sides of the depression, pooling around them.

I pushed the shovel under the back of the person and wedged the torso and the face free from the soil. The skin had turned a bluish gray, either in the water or because of the clay in the alluvial fan of the bayou, but his eyes were open and still emerald green, his small ears tight against the scalp, his shoulders somehow far too narrow for the violent and dangerous man he had once been.

There were entrance wounds in his face, under one arm, and in his left temple.

I speared the shovel blade into the clay and reached for the cell phone in my raincoat pocket, just as the cell phone began ringing. I flipped it open and placed it against my ear. “Dave Robicheaux,” I said.

“Are you trying to avoid me?” a woman’s voice said.

The hail was hitting hard on my hat and the steel frame of the bulldozer and I could hardly hear her. “Ms. Parks, I’m no longer with the sheriff’s department. You need to call—”

“I found a diary under Lori’s mattress. There were hearts all over the last page and drawings of a man’s face. It wasn’t some kid’s face, either. There was a phone number, too.” Her voice was starting to crack. “You know who that number belongs to?”

“No, I don’t.”

“A pipeline company in Lafayette. It’s owned by that man who lives in that phony piece of medieval shit across from the junk yard.”

“Say his name, Ms. Parks.”

“Flannigan. Merchie Flannigan. I’m filing charges for statutory rape.”

“Ms. Parks, Lori might have known someone who simply worked at the pipeline company.”

“This number goes into Flannigan’s office. It’s his extension. Why are you covering up for him? I hate you people,” she said.

She was obviously still drunk, but I couldn’t fault her for her rage.

Her daughter had burned to death in an automobile after being sold liquor illegally, and her husband, who had survived a tour as a combat medic, had been killed with impunity by Will Guillot, the investigation written off by a cop on a pad. But family survivors of homicide victims are seldom mentioned in follow-up news stories, even though the grief they carry is like the daily theft of sunlight from their lives.