Last Car to Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 13

Ordinary people sometimes do bad things. A wrong-headed business decision, a romantic encounter in a late-night bar, a rivalry with a neighbor over the placement of a fence, any of these seemingly insignificant moments can initiate a series of events that, like a rusty nail in the sole of the foot, can systemically poison a normal, law-abiding person's life and propel him into a world he thought existed only in the perverse imaginings of pulp novelists.

At sunrise on Saturday morning the sky was pink and blue, the trees in my yard dripping from a thunder shower during the night, and I took a cup of coffee and hot milk and a bowl of Grape-Nuts out on the gallery and read the morning paper while I ate. When I was halfway into the editorial page Dr. Parks pulled his battered, beige pickup to the curb and got out. His jaws were heavy with beard stubble, one eye clotted with blood; he wore no socks and jeans that were grass-stained at the knees.

"I need help," he said.

"In what way?"

He sat down on a step, a few inches from me. His long, tapered hands rested between his legs and his body gave off an odor like sour milk. His mouth began to form words, but nothing came out.

"Take it easy, Doctor. This stuff will pass with time. A guy just needs to put one foot in front of the other for a while," I said.

"There's no justice. Not for anything," he said.

"Pardon?"

"My daughter's death. The electrical fire at my house. I bought a home warranty policy from Sunbelt Construction. The policy is underwritten by a bunch of criminals in Aurora, Colorado. I tried to talk to the Louisiana insurance commissioner about it and was told he's on his way to the federal pen."

Like most people whose lives have been left in disarray by events so large he couldn't even describe them to himself, his rage against the universe had now reduced itself to the level of a petty financial quarrel with a fraudulent home warranty company.

"There might be a state senator or two we can call on Monday. How about a cup of coffee?" I said. I rested my hand on his shoulder and tried to smile, then I saw the green cast in the skin under his eyes and the detached stare that made me think of soldiers I had known many years ago.

"I was on a medevac at Khe Sanh. I was in two crashes and one shoot-down. I put my best friends in body bags. It was all for nothing. This goddamn country is going down the sewer," he said.

"I was over there, too, Doc. We can always be proud of what we did and let the devil take the rest of it. Sometimes you've got to throw the bad times over the gunnels and do the short version of the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes you just say full throttle and fuck it."

But my words were of no value. He got to his feet like a man walking in his sleep, then turned and extended his hand. "I insulted you at my home and in your office. I didn't mean what I said. My wife and I are better people than we seem," he said.

He pressed the fingers of one hand against the side of his head, like a man experiencing a pressure band or a level of cerebral pain that gave him no relief. He pulled open the door of his pickup and got inside, holding the steering wheel to steady himself. I walked to the passenger window.

"Where you headed?" I asked.

"To confront the people who cheated me, the ones who put defective wiring in my house, the ones who shouldn't be on the goddamn planet."

"I don't think that's a good idea, Doc."

"Stand away from the truck," he replied. He ground the transmission into gear and swung the truck into traffic, almost hitting an automobile packed with Catholic nuns.

I went back inside and called the dispatcher. Wally happened to be on duty. "You want us to pick up this guy, Dave?" he asked.

I thought about it. Roust Dr. Parks now, in his present state of mind, and we would probably only add to his grief and anger. With luck he would eventually go home or at worst get drunk somewhere, I told myself. "Let it go," I said.

Helen Soileau called me just after lunch. "How busy are you?" she said.

"What's up?"

"It's Dr. Parks. Wally said you called in on him earlier."

"What about him?"

"Evidently he went looking for Castille Lejeune. He didn't find him, so he went after this guy Will Guillot."

"What do you mean 'he went after him'?"

"With a cut-down double-barrel twelve-gauge."

"He shot Guillot?" I said.

"You got it backwards. Parks is dead. Say good-bye to our prime suspect in the drive-by daiquiri shooting."

"Wait a minute. I can't get this straight. Parks is dead?"

"At least he was five minutes ago. Get pictures if you can," she said.

When I got to the home of Will Guillot emergency vehicles were still parked along the street and barricades set up to prevent the curious and the voyeuristic from driving past the house. The incongruity of the images there would not fit in time and place. In a tree-covered neighborhood of nineteenth-century homes and thick St. Augustine lawns, where the hydrangeas and impatiens and Confederate roses were softly dented by the breeze, and blue jays and robins sailed in and out of the live oaks, Dr. Parks lay on his side in the driveway, his mouth and eyes locked open, one cheek pressed flat against the cement, a pool of dried blood issuing from a ragged hole in his throat into the sunlight. Six inches from his outstretched hand lay a cut-down twelve-gauge, the stock wood-rasped and sanded into a pistol grip.

The crime-scene investigator was a nervous, tightly wrapped man with a strong cigarette odor by the name of Dale Louviere. When I ducked under the crime-scene tape he glared into my face, as though challenged, nests of green veins pulsing in his temples. Before he had entered law enforcement he had been a gofer and point man for a notorious casino operator in Lake Charles.

"What do you want, Robicheaux?" he said.

"Dr. Parks was part of an Iberia Parish homicide investigation. Where's the coroner?" I said.

"Him and the sheriff fish together on Saturday. We're still waiting on them," Louviere replied.

"Are there any witnesses?"

"Yeah, the shooter, Will Guillot. He's in the kitchen."

"How do you read it?" I asked.

"Open and shut. The vie went nuts about a house fire or a home warranty policy or something. He came here to wax Guillot and instead caught a .45 in the throat. The round hit the oak tree in front."

I leaned over to look more closely at the cut-down twelve-gauge. I couldn't see a brand name on it, but the steel around the magazine was incised with delicately engraved images of ducks and geese in flight. "Handsome gun to chop down with a hacksaw," I said.

"Get some mud in the barrel and that's what people do, Robicheaux," Louviere replied.

"Except this guy was a collector. How many collectors spend their time converting their firearms into illegal weapons?"

"The next time I investigate a homicide, I'll have the crime scene shipped to Iberia Parish so you can supervise it," he said.

I walked through the porte cochere to a back door and entered the kitchen without knocking. Will Guillot was at the counter, gazing out the back window into the yard, while he ate a ham-and-lettuce sandwich. A tall, half-empty glass of milk rested by his sandwich plate. He turned and looked at me quizzically, the birthmark that drained like purple dye from his hairline to the corner of his eye al most obscured by shadow, so that one side of his face looked like the marred half of a large coin.

"You were in fear for your life, were you, Mr. Guillot?" I said.

"Yeah, I guess that describes it," he answered, one cheek stiff with a piece of bread. "You have jurisdiction here?"

"You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to."

"I don't want to."

"Fair enough. On an unrelated subject, are you a hunter or a gun collector?"

"I hunt. Why?"

"No reason. Were you in "Nam?"

"No. What's that have to do with anything?"

"Dr. Parks was on a medevac. He had his problems, but I don't think he was a violent man. I don't think that cut-down twelve on the driveway was his, either."

"This conversation is over, Mr. Robicheaux, and you can get out of my house."

"Does it bother you?" I said.

"Bother me? That I defended myself against a lunatic?"

"His daughter was burned alive after buying liquor illegally at one of Castille Lejeune's daiquiri shops. His house burned after you put bad wiring in it, and you shot him to death after he came here to complain about a fraudulent home warranty policy you sold him. It's hard to believe one guy can have that much bad luck, isn't it? Enjoy your sandwich, Mr. Guillot. I'll be in touch," I said.

"Kiss my ass," he said.

Sunday Father Jimmie had gone to Lafayette to collect signatures on a petition to shut down drive-by daiquiri windows and had stayed the night at a retreat house in Grand Coteau. I ate a plate of clam spaghetti at a cafe in Jeanerette, then went to sleep reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, with Snuggs on the foot of the bed. My windows were open and in my sleep I heard the wind in the trees, a solitary pecan husk rattle on the tin roof, a workboat chugging heavily on the bayou. The air was cool and clean smelling with ground fog, rainwater ticking in the trees, and I felt Snuggs walk across my back so he could sniff the breeze blowing through the screen. Just after midnight, my bowels constricted as though I had swallowed a piece of broken glass. I went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, my thighs trembling with nausea.

Then I heard someone wedge a tool between the back door and the jamb, splinter the deadbolt, and enter the house. Whoever it was moved quickly toward the band of light at the bottom of the bathroom door, opened it slightly, and looked in at me.

"I wasn't planning to meet you like this, but I couldn't resist the opportunity. Can I be getting you anything? You don't look too well," the figure said.

"Coll?"

"Right you are. No, don't get up. Take care of business while I have my say, then I'll be off." His hand came through the opening and removed the key from the lock. He shut the door and locked it from the outside.

"What do you think you're doing?" I said.

I heard him go into the bedroom, then scrape a chair into position. "This is a fine cat you have here. Been in a few fights, has he?"

"Listen, Coll "

"He's got a real pair of bandoliers back there."

My face was cold with sweat, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach. Gray spots danced before my eyes.

"Father Dolan and I have nothing to do with your life," I said.

"Oh, but you do. Two rather nasty cretins just arrived in town, Mr. Robicheaux, the cousins of Frank Dellacroce. Stone killers, they are, sir, with no parameters and no charitable impulses. Evidently a few of the grease balls think you blew poor Frank's head off. Would you like to hear what they did to a friend of mine?"

"No."

"Took a blowtorch to him. What's the name of your cat?"

"Snuggs."

"What a fine little fellow. Built like a fucking fire hydrant. It's a shame the innocent suffer. But maybe that's the only thing that causes us to take action."

I could feel my heart quicken. "What are you saying?"

"I didn't make the world. I just live in it as best I can. I'll be going now."

"You leave that cat here."

But he didn't reply. I heard his chair scrape but did not hear him set Snuggs down. "Coll? Did you hear me?" I yelled.

I heard him banging about in the kitchen, then a hard, clunking sound and his footsteps going heavily through the house and out the front door. By the time I was able to climb out the bathroom window, the yard and the street were empty, the ground puffing with fog, the moon as bright as a white flame behind the skeletal outline of a water oak.

I went around back and entered the house through the kitchen door. A pitcher of milk rested on the drain board and Snuggs was lapping from a bowl next to it, one Max Coll had filled with both milk and dry cat food.

I started to dial 911, then gave it up, propped a chair against the kitchen door, and went back to sleep, my .45 under my pillow.

At 8:05 Monday morning Clotile Arceneaux walked into my office. She wore a pair of navy blue slacks, a blouse printed with tropical flowers, and a polished black gunbelt with her badge holder hung from the front and her cuffs pushed through the back. She had the blackest hair and wore the brightest lipstick I had ever seen.

"How's life in the Big Sleazy?" I said.

She grinned broadly, then sat down without being asked. "You're a magnet, Robicheaux," she said.

"For what?"

"Trouble. We keep a few people at the New Orleans airport, watching to see who comes and goes, know what I mean? Three days ago a couple of grease balls from Ft. Lauderdale got into town, spent the night with some hookers, then caught a flight to Lafayette. Guess what their last names are?"

"Dellacroce?"

"How'd you know?"

"Max Coll was at my house last night."

"Say again?"

"He was walking around inside my house. He talked to me through the bathroom door."

She looked up at one corner of the ceiling, her eyelids fluttering. Then she scratched her neck and looked at me. "I brought mug shots of the Dellacroces. They're brothers, Tito and Caesar. Tito's friends call him the Heap, 'cause he looks like a haystack with eyes. But the mean one is Caesar. He's short and not very bright."

"He uses a blowtorch on people?"

"You do know about these guys."

"Max Coll is tops when it comes to intel."

"I've got to get a job over here. New Orleans just doesn't cut it."

"Want to go to lunch later?"

"Like to, slick, but the Big Sleazy calls. I've got a little more here on your man Coll."

"He's not my man. He's a meltdown you guys shipped to New Iberia."

She raised her eyebrows and made an innocent face as she opened a manilla folder in her lap. "The Coll family was hooked up with the IRA for generations," she said. "Some of them may have been behind the bombing of a pub in Belfast. Some Protestant militants decided to get even and took Max's whole family out, including an older brother who was a Catholic priest."

"That's how he ended up in the orphanage," I said, more to myself than to her.

She looked down again at the open folder in her lap. "Yeah, that's right. He was there until he was fifteen," she said.

"Go to lunch with me," I said.

She thought about it. "Make it a beignet and a cup of coffee," she said. She studied me with one eye half closed.

That afternoon I looked down at the booking photos of Tito and Caesar Dellacroce she had left on my desk. Tito, known as the Heap by his peers, stared back at me with eyes that were like cups of black grease. His brother made me think of a ferret in need of a haircut. Both Max Coll and Fat Sammy Figorelli had indicated Frank Del-lacroce's relatives had put his death on me. Maybe. But I believed their real target was still Max Coll, and Max was in New Iberia for reasons other than a religious obsession with Father Jimmie. I believed Max had intimations about where the hit on Father Jimmie had come from, and Max blamed that same person for putting a contract on him and had come to our area to wipe, the slate clean.

Or perhaps he was simply crazy.

Regardless, it was time to dial up Max's head and see how he liked having things turned around on him. I called the Daily Iberian and scheduled an ad to run in the next day's personal notices.

"Let me read this back to you," the clerk said. '"Max, you owe me $57.48 for the damage you did to my back door. Why don't you pay your debts instead of acting like a window-licking voyeur who breaks into people's houses and molests their pets? Tito and Caesar just blew into town and seem upset because you canceled their cousin's ticket. Have a nice day Dave.""

"Perfect," I said.

"Mr. Robicheaux, this ad doesn't make much sense."

"It does if you're morally insane," I replied.

Did you ever have a song in your mind you couldn't get rid of? For me, at least on that Monday afternoon, it was "Goodnight Irene." I kept thinking of Junior Crudup sitting on the steps of his cabin in the work camp, playing his twelve-string guitar, singing the words to Leadbelly's most famous composition, while he waited to catch a glimpse of Andrea Lejeune's purple Ford convertible passing on the dirt road. Did she arrange for him to return to the house again? Did the guard, Jackson Posey, continue to torment him because of the hatred Posey felt for himself and the lot the world had dealt him?

If God in that moment looked down upon His creations, I wondered if He wasn't terribly saddened by the level of madness that had become the province of His children.

The song was still in my head when I went that afternoon to Baron's, the health club where I worked out, and saw Castille Lejeune seated on a hardwood bench in the dressing room, his face bright with sweat from his racquet ball game, a towel wrapped around his neck. He was jovial and expansive, sipping from a glass of ice water while he talked with a group of businessmen, although a sign on the wall stated no glass containers were allowed in the room. It was 5 P.M. and both black and white workers from the salt mines out in the wetlands and the sugar mills that ringed the town burst loudly into the dressing room. Instead of being intimidated by Lejeune's presence, they treated him as they would a celebrity, greeting him as "Mr. Castille." Somehow he was one of them, at least for the moment, a patrician who knew them by their first names and spoke both demotic French and English without being patronizing.

There were great differences in the room, but not between the races. The black and white working men spoke the same regional dialect and shared the same political attitudes, all of which had been taught them by others. They denigrated liberals, unions, and the media, considered the local Wal-Mart store a blessing, and regularly gave their money to the Powerball lottery and casinos that had the architectural charm of a sewer works. They were frightened by the larger world and found comfort in the rhetoric of politicians who assured them the problem was the world's, not theirs. And most heartening of all was the affirmation lent them by a genteel person like Castille Lejeune, a Distinguished Flying Cross recipient who, unlike many members of his class, showed no fear or lack of confidence in their midst, which told them of his respect for their humanity.

I dressed in a corner of the room, my back turned to Lejeune and the cluster of men around him. Maybe I was wrong about him, I thought. Maybe Helen and Theodosha were justified in their criticism of my attitudes. I was born in the late Depression and bore an ingrained resentment toward the wealthy and the powerful. All drunks fear and desire both power and control, and sometimes even years of sobriety inside AA. don't rid alcoholics of that basic contradiction in their personalities. Why should I be any different?

When I had almost thought my way into a charitable attitude toward Castille Lejeune, I felt a hand touch my shoulder. "Would you like to play a round of racquet ball, Mr. Robicheaux?" he said.

"Never learned how," I said.

"Do you have any idea why this deranged physician, what's-his-name, Parks, would have come to my home, then to my foreman's?"

So you're a showboat as well as a hypocrite, I thought. "His daughter was served illegally at your daiquiri shop before she died in a car crash. Your company defrauded him on the house-remodeling job it did at his home. He also said you sold him a bogus warranty on his house. Maybe that might have something to do with it," I replied.

"I'd like to say your reputation precedes you, Mr. Robicheaux. But your potential seems to have no limits," he said.

"Your deceased wife brought a black convict to your house out of respect for his musical talent, an event evidently you couldn't abide. That same convict, Junior Crudup, disappeared from the face of the earth. I suspect, on the day of your death, his specter will be standing by your bed."

The only sound in the room was the hum of the overhead fans.

"How dare you?" he said.

I'm going to get you, you sorry sack of shit, I said to myself, my eyes fixed six inches from his.

The days were growing shorter, and by 6 P.M. the sun had set, the sky was black and veined with lightning, and Bayou Teche was high and yellow and chained with rain rings in the glow of the lamps along the banks of City Park. Father Jimmie walked about in the backyard, his hands in his pockets, examining the sky, the wind swirling leaves around his ankles. He came back in the house smelling of trees and humus, his eyes purposeful.

"I need to work things out with Max Coll," he said.

"You have to do what?" I said.

"He's in New Iberia because I'm here. Now, these other criminals are showing up because he's here. Where does it end? One man is already dead."

"Frank Dellacroce sexually exploited a retarded girl. I think he got off easy."

"I had to own up to some things at the retreat, the big one being pride."

"In what?"

"My feeling of virtuous superiority to others," he said.

"You don't call self-flagellation a form of pride?"

"You're a hard sell, Dave."

The phone rang like a providential respite. Or at least that's what I thought until I realized who was on the other end of the line.

"Where do you get off embarrassing my father in a public place?" a woman's voice said.

"Your father is neither a victim nor a martyr. Cut the crap, Theo," I said.

"Your anger taints everything in your life. You disappoint me in ways I can't describe."

I heard a sheet of rain clatter across the tin roof. I wanted to pretend I was impervious to her words, but the element of truth in them was like a thorn pressed into the scalp. "Where are you?" I said.

"In a bar." She gave the name, a box of a place squeezed between shacks in New Iberia's worst neighborhood.

"How much have you had?" I asked.

"I'm drinking a soda and lime, believe it or not. But I'm about to change that. Why, you want to get loaded?"

"You wait there," I said.

As I backed out of the driveway, the canopy of oaks over the street stood out in lacy, black-green relief against the lightning rippling across the sky. I did not pay particular attention to the car that rounded the corner and followed me past the Shadows.

Inside the house Father Jimmie tore the wrapper off his hangered dry cleaning and discovered his black suit was missing. He would have sworn it had been with his other things when he had brought them from the laundry three days ago. He searched the rack, then checked the top drawer where he kept his Roman collar and rabat, the backless garment that serves as a priest's vest. Both collar and rabat were gone.