Last Car to Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 11

Some people seem to be born under a bad sign.

At 8:30 A.M. the following day an arson inspector called me at the office. In the early hours of the morning a fire had broken out in Dr. Parks's game room and had quickly spread through the roof, destroying the back third of his house. "I know the guy just lost his daughter, but he's hard to take. How about coming out here, Dave?" the inspector said.

"What's the deal?" I said.

"Parks is convinced somebody tried to burn him out."

"My relationship with Dr. Parks isn't a very good one."

"You could fool me. He seems to think you're the only guy around here with a brain."

I drove up to Loreauville and crossed the drawbridge there and followed the state road to the shady knoll where Dr. Parks's home sat among the trees like a man with an angry frown. A solitary firetruck was still there and two firemen were ripping blackened wood out of a back wall with axes. Dr. Parks approached me as though somehow I were the source of all the problems and missing solutions in his life. "I want an arson investigation initiated right now," he said.

"That's a possibility, but so far there doesn't seem to be enough evidence to warrant one." I raised my hand as he started to interrupt. "No one is saying your suspicions don't have merit. These guys just haven't found an accelerant or a "

"It's connected to my daughter's death."

"No, it's not, sir." I fixed my eyes on the blackened back of his house and the roof that had caved in on the kitchen and master bedroom. It was so quiet I could hear my watch ticking on my wrist.

"Look here, Mr. Robicheaux, I asked that you come out because I know about some of the losses in your own life. I thought you would understand what's going on here," he said.

I tried to ignore the personal nature of his statement. "These firemen are good guys. You can trust what they tell you. I think you've just had a lot of bad luck," I said.

"There's no such thing as luck," he replied.

Just then an unshaved, mustached fireman in rubber pants and suspenders and a big hat walked from behind the house with a clutch of fried electrical wiring in his hand. "We got an ignition point," he said.

"What?" Dr. Parks said.

The fireman spread the wires across his palm and cracked open the insulation on them. "These were in the wall of your game room. See, they're burned from the inside out," he said.

"That's impossible. I just had that game room added on two years ago," Dr. Parks said.

"It's not impossible if somebody installed oversized breakers in your breaker box," the fireman said.

"Who did the work on your house, Doctor?" I said.

"Sunbelt Construction," he said.

I tried to walk away from him, as though I were preoccupied with the destruction at the back of his home. But he grabbed my arm roughly. "What do you know about Sunbelt Construction?" he asked.

"It's owned by Castille Lejeune," I replied.

"Who the hell is Castille Lejeune?"

"His company owns the daiquiri store where your daughter and her friends bought their drinks on the day they died," I said.

Had I just set up another man, in this case Castille Lejeune? I asked myself on the way back to the department. No, I had simply told the truth.

But that did not change the fact I had let Frank Dellacroce take the big exit at the hands of Max Coll.

Later I went home for lunch and found Father Jimmie on a ladder, screwing a basketball hoop to the back of the porte cochere.

"You do open-air reconciliations?" I said.

"Yeah, hold the ladder for me. What's the problem?" he replied, still concentrated on his work.

"It's not overdue library books," I said.

He looked down at me.

"I think Max Coll capped a wise guy out at Whiskey Bay. I probably could have prevented it," I said.

He climbed down from the ladder and replaced his tools in a metal box and clicked it shut. "Run that by me again," he said.

We walked toward the bayou while I told him what had happened the abiding anger that had made me seek out a violent situation, the savage beating I had given Frank Dellacroce, my recognizing Coll among the crowd in front of the cafe, and, most serious of all, my releasing Dellacroce from custody when I knew, with a fair degree of certainty, I was turning him over to his executioner.

Father Jimmie picked up a pine cone and tossed it into the middle of the bayou. "Dave, if you share responsibility for this man's death, then so do I," he said.

"How?"

"I was uncooperative with N.O.P.D. I could have worked with them and helped bust Coll. He would have been past history now."

I sat down on a stone bench by the edge of the bayou. Its surfaces felt cold and hard through my trousers. The wind gusted and red and yellow leaves tumbled out of the trees into the water. "You going to give me absolution?" I asked.

"You were forgiven as soon as you were sorry for what you did. But you need to tell this to someone else or you'll have no peace of mind."

"Sir?"

"What's the new sheriff's name? The woman who used to be your partner? Let me know how it comes out," he said.

He walked back up the slope and removed a basketball from a cardboard box and swished it through the hoop. You got no free lunch from Father Jimmie Dolan.

Helen listened quietly while I told her about the events of the night I beat Frank Dellacroce within an inch of his life. Her elbows rested on the ink blotter, her chin resting on her thumbs, her fingers knitted together. "This guy Coll is wanted in Florida on two murders?" she said.

"For questioning, at the least."

"What do you think he's doing around here?"

"That's open to debate," I said.

"Meaning what?"

"He has an obsession with the priest who's staying at my house. He's obviously hunting down the people who are trying to take him out. His brains were probably in the blender too long. Take your choice."

She stood up from her chair and stared out the window, her fingers opening and closing against the heel of her palm. "So far there's no evidence it was Coll who shot Dellacroce?" she asked.

"No."

"And you never saw Coll in person?"

"Only in photographs."

"I think you're under a lot of strain. And that's where we're going to leave it for now."

She had given me a temporary free pass, a complicitous wink of the eye; all I had to do was acknowledge it. "My perceptions aren't the issue here. Coll called me at my house. He told me he was in the crowd the night I busted up Dellacroce."

"Coll called you?"

"That's right."

"This isn't police work. It's a soap opera. Are you drinking?"

"No."

"Dave, you either get your act together or we seek other alternatives. None of them good."

"You want my shield?"

"I won't be a party to what you're doing," she said.

"Doing what?"

"Ripping yourself apart so you can get back on the bottle. You don't think other people read you? Give yourself a wake-up call." She wadded up a piece of paper and tossed it angrily at the wastebasket.

That evening I went to an AA meeting in a tan-colored, tile-roofed Methodist church, not far from the railway tracks. From the second-story window I could see the palm trees in the churchyard, the old brick surfacing in the street, the green colonnade of an ancient fire-house, the oaks whose roots had wedged up the sidewalks, and the strange purple light the sun gave off in its setting.

Across the railway tracks was another world, one that used to be New Iberia's old redlight district, whose history went back to the War Between the States. But today the three-dollar black prostitutes and five-dollar white ones were gone and the cribs on Railroad and Hopkins shut down. Instead, white crack whores, called rock queens, and their black pimps worked the street corners. The dealers, with baseball caps reversed or black silk bandannas tied down skintight on their scalps, appeared in the yards of burned-out houses or in the parking lots of small grocery stores as soon as school let out. After sunset, unless it was raining, their presence multiplied exponentially.

They offered the same street menu as dealers in New Orleans and Houston: weed, brown skag, rock, crystal meth, acid, reds, leapers, Ecstasy, and, for the purists, perhaps a taste of China white the customer could cook and inject with a clean needle in a shooting gallery only four blocks from downtown.

Down the hall, on the second floor of the Methodist church, was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Most of the attenders there had been sentenced by the court. Few were people you would normally associate with criminality. Almost all of them, in another era, would have been considered run-of-the-mill blue-collar people whose lives had nothing to do with the trade on Hopkins and Railroad avenues.

But on that particular evening I was not thinking about the ravages of the drug trade. Instead, I was wondering how long it would be be fore I walked into a saloon and ordered four inches of Black Jack or Beam's Choice with a long-neck Dixie on the side.

Then I looked across the room and saw a man who was geographically and psychologically out of place. He saw me staring at him and raised one meaty paw in recognition. His eyes were like merry slits, his jowls glowing with a fresh shave, his sparse gold hair oiled and flattened into his pate. I crossed the space between us and sat in the chair next to him.

"This is a closed meeting of A. A. What are you doing here?" I said.

"I checked it out. It's an open meet. Besides, I belong to Overeaters Anonymous, which means I probably got trans-addictive issues. That means I can go to any fucking meeting I choose," Fat Sammy Fig-orelli replied.

"That's the worst bullshit I ever heard. Get out of here," I said.

"Fuck you," he said.

"Is there a problem over there?" the group leader said.

Sammy didn't speak during the meeting. But afterward he helped stack chairs and wash coffee cups and put away all the AA. literature in a locker. "I like this place," he said.

"You're about to have some major trouble," I said.

"Fm gonna have trouble? You're beautiful, Robicheaux. Take a walk with me," he said.

I followed him down the stairs, into the darkness outside and the odor of sewer gas and wet leaves burning. "If you're using AA. to " I began.

"You drunks think you're the only people who got a problem. How would you like food to be your enemy? Anybody can stay off booze a him nerd percent. Try staying off something just part way and see how you feel," he said.

"What's your point?"

"My sponsor says I got to own up to a couple of things or I'm gonna go on another chocolate hinge, which don't do my diabetes a lot of good. Max Coll not only cowboyed a couple of high-up guys in Miami, he stiffed the sports book they owned for a hundred large. The word is he's gonna be hung by his colon on a meat hook. Last point, there's a guy around here you don't want to mess with."

He stopped and lit a cigarette. The cigarette looked tiny and innocuous in his huge hand. He watched a car full of black teenagers pass, their stereo thundering with rap music, his face clouding with disapproval.

"Which guy?" I said.

"A guy who hurts people when he don't have to. You want to find him, follow the cooze. In the meantime, don't say I ain't warned you."

Then he labored down the sidewalk toward his Cadillac, his football-shaped head twisted back at the sunset.

"Come back here," I said.

He shot me the finger over his shoulder.

I thought I was finished with Sammy Fig for awhile. Wrong. The phone rang at 2:14 in the A.M. "There's something I didn't tell you," he said.

I sat on the edge of the bed, the receiver cold against my ear. Outside, the moon was bright and glowing with a rain ring behind the sculpted limbs of a pecan tree. "Time to desist, Sammy. That means join Weight Watchers or go to the fat farm, but stay out of my life," I said.

"Frankie Dellacroce's family is in Fort Lauderdale. A couple of them are on their way here."

"So long," I said, and started to lower the receiver from my ear.

"They got you made for the pop on Frankie."

"Me?"

"You broke his sticks in front of a bunch of colored people earlier in the night. Later the same night he catches a.44 mag in the head. You're a cop. Who would you put it on?" he said.

I could hear my breath against the receiver. "This is crazy," I said.

"I got to get some sleep. You're lucky you ain't got insomnia," he said, and hung up.

In the morning I confronted Father Jimmie at the breakfast table. "Sammy Figorelli says a couple of Frank Dellacroce's relatives might be coming around," I said. "What for?" he said.

"They think I killed him."

"Not too good, huh?"

"Where can I find Max Coll, Jimmie?"

"If I knew, I'd tell you," he replied.

"I'd like to believe that. But I'm starting to have my doubts."

"Want to repeat that?" he said, chewing his food slowly.

"He's going to call again. When he does, I'd like for you to set up a meet with him."

I saw his brow furrow. "I can't do that," he said.

"You sentimental about this guy?"

"He's a tormented man," he said.

"Tell yourself that the next time he empties somebody's brainpan." I picked up my cup of coffee and took it with me to work.

Except I did not go to work. I turned around in the parking lot and drove to the cemetery in St. Martinville, where Bootsie was buried in a crypt right up the bayou from the Evangeline Oak. I sat on the ventilated metal bench in front of the crypt and said the first two decades of my rosary, then lost my concentration and stared woodenly at the bayou and the leaves swirling in the current and the ducks wimp ling the water around lily pads that had already turned brown from early frost. My skin felt chafed, as dry as paper, my palms stiff and hard to close. I replaced my rosary in my coat pocket and put my face in my hands. The sun went behind a cloud and the wind was like ice water on my scalp.

Why did you go and die on us, Boots? I heard myself say, then felt ashamed at the selfish nature of my thoughts.

Un hour later I walked into the department, washed my face in the men's room, then undertook all the functions of the working day that give the illusion of both normalcy and productivity. Clete Purcel dropped by, irreverent as always, telling outrageous jokes, throwing paper airplanes at my wastebasket. He even used my telephone to place an offtrack bet. By noon the day seemed brighter, the trees outside a darker green against blue skies.

But I could not concentrate on either the growing loveliness of the day or the endless paperwork that I was sure no one ever looked at after it was completed.

We had no one in custody for the shooting of the drive-by daiquiri store operator, even though we had a suspect with motivation in the form of Dr. Parks, and a connection, through the murder weapon, to an employee of Castille Lejeune. In the meantime a Celtic killing machine like Max Coll was running loose in our area; I had been made by the family of Frank Dellacroce for the murder of their relative; and Theo and Merchie Flannigan continued to hover on the edge of my vision, chimeric, protean, like the memory of a college prom that, along with youth, belongs in the past.

It was the kind of criminal investigation in which thinking served no purpose. The motivation in most crimes was not complex. Usually people steal and cheat because they're either greedy or lazy or both. People kill for reasons of money, sex, and power. Even revenge killings indicate a sense of powerlessness in the perpetrator.

At least that was the conventional wisdom of duffer cops who think psychological profiling works best in films or TV shows that have little to do with reality.

But where did Junior Crudup fit into this? Or did he? Maybe Helen was right, I just wanted to nail the Daddy Warbucks of St. Mary Parish, Castille Lejeune, to a tree.

I spread the photos of Junior Crudup given me by our reference librarian on my desk blotter. Did you dream at night of the black Betty slicing across your back? I wanted to ask him. Didn't you learn you can't beat the Man at his own game? What happened to you, partner?

I picked up the last photo in the series and looked again at the image of Junior staring up at a mounted gun bull across the bayou from Castille Lejeune's home, his hoe at an odd angle on his shoulder, his face puzzled by a world whose rules ensured he would never have a place in it. But the focus of my attention was not Junior. In the wintry background, guiding a single-tree plow through the cane stubble,

was a muscular, coal black convict, with the clear detail of welted scars on his forearms, the kind a convict might earn in a half dozen knife beefs.

I held a magnifying glass to the grainy black-and-white image. I was almost sure the face was that of a youthful Hogman Patin, the long-time recidivist who had been on the Red Hat Gang with Junior but had said he did not know Junior's fate.

I picked up the telephone and called my house.

"Hello?" Father Jimmie said.

"Want to check out some Louisiana history you don't find in school books?"

"Why not?" he said.