Last Car to Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 16

I went back to work Monday morning. I took a legal pad from my desk drawer and wrote Junior Crudup's name at the top of it, then drew a circle around it. This is where it had all started, I thought, both for me and the Lejeune family. Under Junior's name I wrote the names of Castille Lejeune, Theodosha, Merchie, and Theodosha's psychiatrist in Lafayette, the man who supposedly committed suicide.

Then I angled a line from Castille Lejeune's name to the names of Will Guillot and the dead daiquiri shop operator and Dr. Parks, who had died in Will Guillot's driveway.

To one side I placed the names of the New Orleans players Father Jimmie Dolan, Max Coll, the Dellacroce family, and Gunner Ardoin, the part-time porn actor.

The connections between the names and the deeds associated with them seemed byzantine on the surface, but for me the answers in the investigation lay in the past and the key was still the first name on the page, Junior Crudup.

Helen opened my office door. "The Lafayette Sheriff's Department just called. Get this," she said. "The archdiocese is having a clerical conference of some kind. One of the out-of-towners happened to be an Irish priest. His jokes were a big hit. Then a pistol fell out of his shoulder bag in the lobby of the Holiday Inn."

"Our man Max?"

"What's with this guy?"

"He's nuts."

"That's the best you can do?"

"Got a better explanation? Where'd he go?"

"They don't know. They think he was driving a rental."

"He'll be back."

"You sound almost happy."

"He saved my life. Maybe he has redeeming qualities," I said, grinning at her.

"The guy who said 'suck on this' and blew away two people?"

"It's only rock'n'roll," I said.

"Fire your psychiatrist," she said, and closed the door.

I studied the names and lines on my notepad. Years ago, after the murder of my wife Annie, I went twice a week to sessions with an analytically oriented therapist in Lafayette. He was one of those who believed most aberrations in behavior and personality development were caused by fairly obvious dysfunctions in the patient's environment. The problem in treating them, he maintained, was that they were so obvious the patient usually would not buy the connection between the cause and the problem.

Theodosha had told me her husband, Merchie, was having what she called another flop in the hay and that she couldn't blame him for it. I took that to mean she had a sexual problem of her own, one that had sent her husband elsewhere. But I also remembered a remark our dispatcher Wally had made about Merchie Flannigan, as well as one made by Clete Purcel.

I walked up front and leaned on the half-door that enclosed Wally in the dispatcher's cage. He was writing on a clipboard, the top of his head and his neatly parted, little-boy haircut bent down. His shirt pocket was stuffed with cellophane-wrapped cigars. "Whatchu want, Dave?" he asked without looking up.

"You told me Merchie Flannigan was a bum, that he was a guy you never liked. Let's clear that up," I said.

"So I got a big mout'," he replied.

"This is part of a murder investigation, Wally. I'm not going to ask you again."

"He's got a wife, but he messes around on the side."

"A lot of men do."

"He was driving my wife's niece home. She was working at his office in Lafayette. She was seventeen years old at the time. He axed her if she wanted to go swimming at his club. It was late and the club was closed, but he said it didn't matter 'cause he had a key and the owner and him was golf buddies. She didn't have a suit, but he said that wasn't no problem 'cause they'd get one from behind the counter and put it on his tab.

"There wasn't no lights on in the pool when she came out of the dressing room. She started swimming back and fort' across the shallow end, then he come up to her and axed her if she could swim on her back. She said she always got water up her nose, and he says just turn over and rest on my hands and I'll show you how to do it."

I waited for him to go on but he didn't.

"What happened?" I said.

"He tole her how pretty she was, how she had to be careful about young boys only got one thing on their mind. She tole him she was cold and she better go back inside and get dressed. He said it was okay, they'd come back another time, that she was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen."

He stopped again, ticking his pencil on the clipboard, looking at nothing.

"That was it?" I said.

"It was enough for her daddy. He was gonna go over to Flannigan's house and break his jaw but his wife hid the car keys. So the next morning he walked into Flannigan's office and made sure the door was open so everybody could hear it and tole him his daughter wouldn't be coming back to work no more."

"Thanks, Wally."

"What do I know?" he said.

A lot, I thought.

I went back to my office and started in on the paperwork that had built up during the days I was off. The phone on my desk rang.

"Tell me what I'm hearing isn't true," the voice of Clotile Arce-neaux said.

"I'm not too keen on rumors."

"Did you and your buddy Purcel brace Sammy Fig out in Metairie Friday night?"

"Maybe."

"Some federal agents are seriously pissed off about this, as well as somebody else, meaning myself. What gives you the right to go into another jurisdiction and intimidate other people's witnesses?"

"I don't read it that way."

"Well, read this. Sammy Fig thinks either I or federal agents gave you information that sent you over to Metairie. He says he'll no longer be cooperating with us and we can shove Witness Protection up our ass."

"That's the way it flushes sometimes."

"I love your metaphors. I even like you. But right now I'd like to push you off a tall building."

"Where's Sammy now?"

"I left that part out, did I? We have no idea. Gone. My guess is he's gonna try to take it to them before they get to him first."

"Take it to whom?"

"To whom? I love talking to cops who need to show me how educated they are. How would we know, since eighteen months of casework just got dumped in the toilet? You're something else, Robi-cheaux. I hope you come out of this all right, but remind me to be on vacation the next time I catch a case you're involved with. Did you and Purcel really take a bunch of hookers to Galatoire's?"

"I think we've got a bad connection. Let me call you back later."

"Not necessary. I've had all the horse shit I can take in one day," she said.

Top that.

At noon I signed out of the office and drove up the bayou to Hogman Patin's house. He was building a chicken coop under a pecan tree in his side yard and pretended not to see me when I turned into the drive. He slipped his hammer through a hole in a leather pouch on his belt, looking intently at his creation, then walked around the back of his house, out of sight.

I left my truck on top of the oyster-shell drive, the engine ticking with heat, and followed him. He was sitting on his steps, his big hands cupped on his knees, the knife scars on his arms like the backs of worms that had burrowed under the skin. The sun's reflection wobbled brightly on the bayou's surface, but he stared at it without blinking. "Ain't goin' to let the past alone, are you?" he said.

"You have to confront it to get rid of it, Hogman," I replied.

"I done tole you almost all I know. Why don't you let it be?"

"What happened to Jackson Posey, the guard who had to keep taking Junior up to Miss Andrea's house?"

"Cancer eat him up. Heard he died at Charity Hospital in Lafayette. Died hard, too."

I picked up a handful of moldy pecans from a shady, damp area and began chunking them into the bayou. "You've never told anybody why you made a bottle tree in your backyard, have you?" I said.

"Ain't nobody else's bid ness

"You're a religious man, Hogman. Each one of those bottles represents a different prayer. Every time the wind makes the glass sing in the branches, a prayer goes up from each of those bottles, doesn't it?"

He lowered his eyes and pared one of his fingernails with a toothpick. "What a man do in his home is what he do in his home," he said.

"You helping cover up a murder, Hogman."

"Ain't right you talk to me like that, Dave. No, suh."

"Maybe not. But why do you want to protect the Lejeune family?"

"I ain't seen what happened after I left the camp. Cain't tell you about what I ain't seen. Don't want to tell you about what I ain't seen, either."

"Somebody saw. Somebody knows."

He breathed hard through his nose, his nostrils flaring in his frustration with me and his own conscience. The wind was cool and wrinkled the bayou's surface, and Hogman's bottle tree rang like spoons clinking on crystal. "There's a man down at Pecan Island stacked time in the same camps as me and Junior. He was a check writer and used to carry the water can when we road-ganged. Him and his gran'daughter sell crabs and vegetables off a truck out on the state road. His name is Woodrow Reed."

"How does he feel about talking to a white man?"

"He don't care what color you are. He climbed up on a power pole to get a cat down and got 'lectrocuted. His eyes cooked in his head.

You'll t'ink he's looking at you but don't no light go t'rew his eyes.

His eyes scare people. Maybe that's why ain't nobody ever been around axing Woodrow questions about what he seen."

I drove back to New Iberia and on south of Abbeville, where sugarcane acreage gave way to saw grass and clumps of gum trees and the miles of wetlands that bled into the Gulf of Mexico, forming the watery, ill-defined coastline of southwest Louisiana. I crossed a bridge onto one of the few remaining barrier islands left in Louisiana, a reef composed of hard-packed shell ground up by the tides, the crest topped with alluvial soil that is among the richest in the western hemisphere. The adjacent islands had been dredged and scooped out of the surf and hauled away on barges decades ago for highway-construction material, but portions of Pecan Island, preserved largely by an oil corporation as a recreational area for its CEOs, contains wooded acreage where the canopy of live oaks rises perhaps two hundred feet into the sky and the sunlight breaking through the moss and branches and air vines is the same color as light filtering through green water in the Florida Keys.

In the midst of duck-hunting camps with wide, screened-in porches and adjacent boat houses was the tiny vegetable farm and blue-point crab business of Woodrow Reed. Stacks upon stacks of collapsible wire crab traps, webbed with dried river trash, stood by the side of his small, paint less house. A middle-aged black woman was chopping up nutria parts on a butcher block a short distance away, the rubber gloves on her hands spotted with brown matter.

Woodrow Reed's eyes were large, round and flat, unblinking, like painted facsimiles that had been cut out of paper and pasted on the face of a mannikin. They stared at me intently, the pupils dilated and black, although it was obvious Woodrow Reed was sightless.

"I'm Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said. I opened my badge holder and held it aloft so the middle-aged woman in the side yard could see it.

"I knowed you was coming," he said, rising from where he sat on the front steps.

"Hogman called you?" I said.

"Yeah, but he didn't have to. I knowed somebody was coming one day. Want to come in, suh?" He opened the rusted screen door to his front porch and waited for me to enter.

He could not have been over five feet. His skin was the color of a razor strop that has yellowed with wear, his body compressed and hard looking, his cheeks and chin scrolled with gray whiskers. But I could not get over his eyes. I had seen eyes like his only once before, in the body of a man who had been exhumed from a grave in northern Montana where he had lain for decades under frozen ground.

"How'd you come by your farm, Mr. Reed?" I asked.

"You already know the answer to that."

"Can you tell me how Junior Crudup died?" I asked.

Woodrow Reed was sitting on what looked like a motion-picture theater seat mounted on a wood block, his palms propped on his thighs. His denim pants were neatly pressed, the cuffs and pockets buttoned on his long-sleeve work shirt.

"The doctor give me another year. I already put my farm in my daughter's name. Ain't a whole lot can touch me no more. I got cancer, just like Jackson Posey, although I never smoked like he did or had no problems with my skin," he said.

"Tell me about Junior, sir."

"Junior was gonna be Junior. He didn't wear no other man's hat. That was Junior," he said. For the first time he smiled.

In the waning days of summer, when the amber light at evening turned the countryside into a yellowing antique photograph, Junior

Crudup took his twelve-string Stella guitar out on the steps of the cabin in the work camp and began composing a song whose lyrics he penciled on a paper bag flattened down on the board plank beside him.

"What you calling your song?" Woodrow asked, sitting down next to him in the dusk.

" ‘The Angel of Work Camp Number Nine,’" Junior replied.

Woodrow rubbed the whiskers that grew like black wire on his chin. "T'ink that's a good idea, Junior?" he asked.

"Gonna record it up in Memphis one day. You gonna see," Junior replied.

"I seen her car out here last night. Parked right there on the road. She was smoking a cigarette behind the wheel and playing the radio in the dark."

"You better not be fooling with me, Woodrow."

"It was her. Cap'n Posey walked up to her window and axed if any ting was wrong. She said she was just taking a drive. Then she drove on down the road toward the li'l sto' by the bridge. A li'l while later I seen her drive on back to the big house. She was drinking a bottle of beer, tilting her chin up each time she took a sip."

"Why didn't you come get me?"

"You spent too much time up Nort', Junior. You're having t'oughts ain't no nigger in Lou'sana ought to be having."

"Maybe it was that way at first. But not now. You know what she got that make her special?"

"Her tits ain't bad."

"Don't be talking that way, Woodrow. She's special 'cause she got respect for other people."

Junior adjusted the belly of his guitar on his thigh and slipped his three steel finger picks on his right hand, then corded the neck of the guitar and began singing:

At Camp Number Nine its "Roll, nigger, roll, No heaven for you, boy, the state own your soul." They took my home and family,

Give me chains, fat side and beans, Bossman making me a Christian, God Almighty, hear that Betty scream.

"You risking your ass for somebody don't know you alive," Wood-row said.

"Rich ladies like that got all kinds of things they got to do, places they got to travel to, Woodrow. She cain't be coming down here all the time."

"Don't let Boss Posey hear that song."

"When she invites me back up to the house?" Junior said.

"Yeah?"

"That's the first song I'm gonna play."

There was drought in the fall and the fields hardened and cracked under a merciless sun and an empty sky that by noon was like white glass. The leaves of the cane baked in the wind and frayed into thread on the ends and rattled dryly on the stalks, and by evening the sky was cinnamon colored with dust and the convicts filling mule-drawn water tanks with buckets they flung into the bayou on ropes had to tie wet handkerchiefs across their nostrils and mouths. To conserve water the convicts bathed in the bayou, then sat listlessly on the porches of their cabins until lock-up. Every third or fourth evening, while the cicadas sang in a grove of cedar trees near the camp, Junior worked on the song he was composing in tribute to Andrea Lejeune, waiting for the invitation to play on her lawn again, telling himself she was contacting the governor and that any day a parole order for his release would be delivered at the camp's front gate.

At bell count on a September morning Jackson Posey saw the folded brown paper sack covered with penciled lyrics sticking from Junior's back pocket.

"What you got there, Junior?" he asked.

The early sun was already a dull red inside the dust blowing out of the fields. At the bottom of the slope that led down to the bayou, the water was low and swarming with gnats, algae-webbed snags protruding from the surface, all of it smelling of dead fish that lay bloated and fly-specked on the banks.

"Just li'l notes I keep for myself, boss," Junior replied.

"Let's see it," Jackson Posey said, fitting a pair of glasses on his nose. He took the bag from Junior's fingers and studied the words on it, his lips moving slightly as he read. The sores on his arms seemed deeper, more black than purple now. His eyes fixed on Junior's. "You got Camp Number Nine in here?" he said.

"Yes, suh."

"Camp Number Nine is us."

"It is and it ain't, boss."

The guard read both sides of the paper bag, then shook a Camel loose from his cigarette pack and slipped it into his mouth. He laughed to himself and handed the song lyrics back to Junior. "I ain't a big judge of poetry, but I'd say keep this one."

"Thank you, suh."

"To wipe yourself with. You never cease to entertain me, Junior," Posey added.

At morning bell count two days later Andrea Lejeune got out of her Ford convertible at the camp's front gate, wearing a polka-dot sun dress and dark glasses and a blue bandanna tied tightly on her head, the wind whipping her dress around her legs.

"We're taking Junior to a recording studio in Crowley, Mr. Posey. Make sure he brings his guitar and his harmonica and a sack lunch. Y'all will follow me in your truck," she said.

Jackson Posey involuntarily looked toward the big house. "Mr. Lejeune at home, ma'am?" he asked.

"No, he's not, and I resent your asking," she replied.

Junior wrapped his Stella in a blanket, tied string around the belly and the neck, and slipped his E-major Marine Band harmonica in his shirt pocket. Before they left the camp, Posey put chains on Junior's ankles and handcuffs on his wrists, and set the guitar in the bed of the truck. As they drove away Junior looked out the back window at his friend Woodrow flinging a bucket into the bayou on a rope under the gaze of a mounted gun bull

Then Junior and Jackson Posey were on the highway, driving through a long tunnel of oak trees behind Andrea Lejeune's purple convertible, the broken sunlight flicking by overhead, the wind cool in their faces.

"You gonna make the big time, huh?" Posey said.

"Don't know about that, suh."

"Think it's coincidence she's taking you to Crowley?"

"I ain't following you, boss."

"That's where she meets a man I wouldn't take time to spit on. Castille Lejeune should have invested some of his money in a chastity belt. Know the difference between rich people and us?" Posey said.

"No, suh," Junior answered.

"They don't get caught."

When they pulled into the Crowley town square Andrea Lejeune parked her car next to one of the old elevated sidewalks and went inside the dime store, one with a popcorn machine in front, to use the pay telephone. Then they drove out into the countryside again, through rice fields that were separated by hedgerows, to a white-painted, flat-top building constructed entirely of cinder blocks that was located inside a grove of cedar and pine trees like a machine-gun bunker.

This was the same primitive studio where a few years later Warren Storm and Lazy Lester would record and Phil Phillips would cut the master for "Sea of Love," which would sell over one million copies. The equipment was prewar junk, the resonator for Junior's acoustic Stella a chunk of storm sewer pipe with a microphone on the other end. But each person working in the studio knew who Junior Crudup was, and his identity as both a black man and a convict seemed to melt away as the session progressed.

He recorded eight pieces, the last of which was "The Angel of Work Camp Number Nine." As he sang the lyrics he looked through a greasy side window and saw her by the front fender of her convertible, talking to a tall white man who had just gotten out of an Olds-mobile with grillwork that resembled chromium teeth. The white man was thin, dark haired, his crisp shirt tucked tightly inside his seersucker slacks. He rested one foot on the bumper of his car and re moved a blade of grass from the tip of his two-tone shoe, then took his car keys from his pocket and inserted his finger through the ring and spun them in the air.

He drove away toward town in his Oldsmobile and Andrea Lejeune followed him. Junior's voice broke in the middle of his song and he had to start again.

Later, Junior and Jackson Posey rode back through the town square of Crowley, past the colonnaded storefronts and tree-shaded elevated sidewalks inset with iron tethering rings, past the dime store with a popcorn machine in front from which Andrea had made a phone call.

Junior was hunched forward on the seat, his wrists cuffed, the chain between his ankles vibrating with the motion of the truck, his expression concealed from Jackson Posey.

"I'll show you something," Posey said, and cut down a side street and out onto a state road, past a shady motor court that featured a swimming pool in back and a supper club in front. Posey slowed the truck so he and Junior could have a clear view of the stucco cottages inside the trellised entrance.

"Don't need to be seeing none of this, boss," Junior said.

"There's his Oldsmobile. There's her little Ford. What do you reckon he's doing to her right now?"

Junior stared at the tops of his cuffed hands and did not speak again until they were back at the camp.

But his day was not over. Just after supper Jackson Posey came for him again. "She wants to see you," he said.

"Wore out, boss."

He was alone, sitting on an upended Coca-Cola box in the corner of the dirt yard, next to the fence topped by five strands of barbed wire tilted back at an inward angle, his guitar still wrapped with a blanket and tied with string on top of his bunk inside. The sun was only a smudge on the western horizon and the lilac-colored sky throbbed with the droning of cicadas.

"Get your skinny ass up before I kick it up between your shoulder blades," Posey said. "One other thing?"

"What's that, boss?"

"You tell her I drove you past that motor court today, I'm gonna take you out to a stump, nail your balls to it, and leave you there with a knife. Ain't storying to you, Junior. I seen my daddy do it when I was a boy," Posey said.

But Junior did not get up from the Coca-Cola box. "I ain't playing no more today," he said.

Posey raised his fist and knocked him to the ground. "Whup me or put me on the bucket. I ain't going to play no more," Junior said.

"I don't have to whup you. I'm gonna do it to Woodrow Reed instead," Posey said.

On the way to the house of Castille and Andrea Lejeune, Junior wondered what he had done in this world to earn the grief that seemed to be his daily lot.

He waited on the patio with his guitar and harmonica for Andrea Lejeune to come downstairs and through the French doors. When she emerged she was still wearing the polka-dot dress she had worn earlier. Her face looked haggard, somehow thinner in the evening light.

"I wanted you to know the producer at the studio called to say how thrilled he was. I'm just sorry I didn't get to hear you perform," she said.

"I understand, ma'am," he replied.

"I have to go away, Junior. But I'm going to do everything I can to see you released from prison. What happened to your head?"

"Fell down the steps," he replied, his face empty.

She gave a long, hard look at Jackson Posey standing by the pickup truck in the driveway. "Come in the house," she said.

"That ain't a good idea, Miss Andrea," Junior said.

She walked to the edge of the drive. "Mr. Posey, Junior is coming into the living room for a few minutes. We're not to be disturbed," she said.

"I cain't allow that, ma'am."

"You can't what?" she said.

She stared him down, then turned on her heel and marched inside her house, curling one finger for Junior to follow her.

"Sit down," she said.

"Miss Andrea, Boss Posey ain't an ordinary man," Junior said.

"I'm going to call every week and have someone check on you. You have nothing to be afraid of."

"It don't work like that."

She sat down in an antique chair with an egg-shaped crimson pad inset in the back and folded her hands in her lap. "The producer said you wrote a song called "The Angel of Camp Number Nine." Is that about me?"

He hesitated, then said, "Yes, ma'am, I reckon it is."

"That's one of the most touching compliments I've ever received. I'd appreciate it very much if you'd play it."

He slipped the guitar over his neck and began to sing:

White coke and a red moon sent me down, Judge say ninety-nine years, son, you Angola bound, Its the Red Hat Gang from cain't-see to cain't-see, The gun bulls say there the graveyard, boy, If you wants to be free.

Lady with roses in her hair come to Camp Number Nine, Say you ain 't got to stack no mo' Lou sana time, Gonna carry you up to Memphis in a rubber-tired hack, Buy you whiskey, cigars, and an oxblood Stetson hat.

Miss Andrea is an angel drive a Wl purple car, Live on cigarettes, radio, and a blues man s guitar

Even before he looked through the front window and saw the automobile of Castille Lejeune approaching the house, he knew there was something terribly wrong. Andrea Lejeune's face seemed repelled, as though someone had touched it with a soiled hand.

"You don't need to sing anymore," she said.

"Ma'am?"

"What you've done is very nice, but I don't think this song needs to be recorded."

"I don't rightly understand," he said.

"This particular composition would probably be better deleted from your recording session. I think that's clear enough, isn't it?"

He felt his mouth pucker as though a nerve ending had been cut in his face. From outside he heard a car door slant, then footsteps on the gallery. He lowered his eyes. "Why ain't it supposed to be recorded?" he asked.

"I don't think I should have to explain that to you," she replied.

His throat felt as though he had swallowed a handful of needles. "I'm ready for Boss Posey to take me back now," he said. He pulled the Marine Band harmonica from his shirt pocket and set it on a flower-patterned couch by the French doors.

"I'm not in the habit of having people return gifts to me," she said.

"I'd really appreciate it, ma'am, I mean appreciate more than anything else in the world, if you could just yell at Boss Posey for me, tell him Fse on my way," Junior said.

Just then Castille Lejeune opened the front door and walked into the living room, a Panama hat hanging from his fingertips, his mouth twisted in an incredulous smile.

"Please explain it to me, or I'll have to conclude I've either lost my mind or walked into the wrong house," he said.

I heard the cell phone ring on the front seat of my truck. I went outside and picked it up.

"Where are you?" Helen Soileau's voice said.

"Pecan Island."

"What are you doing at Pecan Island?"

"Interviewing a man who did time with Junior Crudup."

She exhaled her breath into the phone. "We've got a submerged car in West Cote Blanche Bay. The driver's still in there. A witness says he heard firecrackers going off before the car went into the water. Then the car drove off a pier."

"How about sending someone else?"

"Dave, your separate itinerary ends right now. Get your butt over there."

"Soon as I can," I said.

"Not good enough."

I turned off the ringer on the cell and went back inside to finish my interview with Woodrow Reed.