Last Car to Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 18

As I drove back toward New Iberia a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf and marched across the southern tip of Vermilion Parish, thrashing the sugarcane in the fields, the rain twisting in my headlights. I could not shake the tale told me by Woodrow Reed, nor the sense of needless death and cruelty and loss that it instilled in the listener. I turned on my radio and tried to find a station that was playing music, but my radio went dead, although it had been working fine earlier.

I tried to get Helen again on my cell phone, but I couldn't raise the wireless service and gave it up and tossed the cell phone on the seat. I passed flooded rice fields wrinkled with wind and lighted farmhouses that looked like snug islands inside the storm. Then I passed a billboard on a curve and my lights flashed across a woman standing by the side of the road.

She wore blue jeans and an unbuttoned tan raincoat that whipped back in the wind. Her hair was honey colored, tapered on her neck, her skin almost luminous in the glare of headlights. Hey, G.I." give a girl a ride? I thought I heard a voice say.

I braked the truck to the side of the road, my heart beating, and looked through the back window. The woman stood on the shoulder of the road, silhouetted against a light that shone on the face of the billboard. Don't buy into this, I told myself. It's not her. Your wife is dead and all the delusions and misery you inject into your life will not change that inalterable fact.

Then I put the truck in reverse and began backing toward the figure on the side of the road.

She glanced back over her shoulder once and began running. I accelerated faster, swerving on and off the pavement, until I was abreast of her. Through the rain-streaked glass her face stared at me, beaded with water, eyeshadow running down her cheeks, her mouth glossy with lipstick. I closed and opened my eyes, like a man coming out of darkness into light, her face forming and reforming in the rain.

I shoved open the passenger door and held up my badge holder. "Get in," I said.

She hesitated a moment, then sat down in the passenger seat and slammed the door behind her. She gave me a hard look in the glow of the dash panel. Her cheeks were pitted and heavily made up, her clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and booze. "Thanks for the ride. My old man threw me out," she said.

"Where do you want to go?" I asked.

"First bar we pass," she said. "For a minute you scared me. I had trouble with a couple of black guys last night. You stopped just 'cause you saw me in the rain?"

"I thought you were somebody else," I said.

She gave me a look. "There's a bar past the curve. Right by the motel," she said.

I put on my turn indicator and began to slow the truck. I knew the bar. It was a ramshackle, sullen place owned by a man who ran dog fights.

"I left my purse at the house. The sonofabitch I live with has probably drunk it up by now," she said.

I stopped in the parking lot and waited. She took a cigarette from her shirt pocket and lit it with a plastic butane lighter. She continued rubbing the striker wheel under her thumb. "Look, I can't drink in there for free. You want some action or not?" she said.

"Get out," I said.

"I can really pick them," she said. She stepped out into the storm and slammed the truck door as hard as she could.

Lesson? Chasing a nighttime mirage on a rain-swept highway has no happy ending for either the quick or the dead.

The one-car fatality at West Cote Blanche Bay seemed to lack any plausible explanation. The witness, an elderly Cajun hired to pick litter out of the ditches along the roadside, had seen an expensive, large car parked next to a compact in a grove of pine trees. Children had been lighting fireworks all evening, shooting Roman candles and rockets over the bay. Then he had heard firecrackers in the trees, just before the compact had driven away. When he looked again at the grove of pines, the large car started up and drove out onto a pier, snapping the supports on the guardrail into sticks, finally plunging off the end of the pier into the water.

Helen Soileau had arrived at the bay only a few minutes before me. She walked with me up a shell ramp and introduced me to the witness. As with most elderly Cajun men, his handshake was as light as air. "How many firecrackers did you hear?" I asked him.

"Two, maybe tree," he replied.

He was a tiny man, dressed in neat khakis, with cataracts and a supple face that resembled brown tallow. He seemed nervous and kept glancing over his shoulder at the bay and at the splintered guardrail on the pier and at the wrecker that so far had not been able to pull the sunken car off a submerged pipeline, all of it lit in the glare of searchlights mounted on a firetruck.

"Is anything wrong?" I asked.

"I seen a big man behind the wheel. Seen him go crashing right off the end of the pier there. I cain't swim, me. I keep t'inking maybe there was air inside the car. Maybe if I'd brung hep sooner "

"You have no reason to feel bad about anything, sir. Who was in the compact?"

"Just somebody driving a li'l car. It was an old one. I ain't sure what kind."

"Was a man or woman driving?"

His shook his head, his face blank.

"What color was the car?" I asked.

"I just ain't paid it much mind, no."

"You see a license tag?" I asked.

"No, suh."

"The firecrackers you heard, those were in the pine trees? You're sure about that?" I said.

"No, suh, I ain't sure about none of it no more."

I patted him on the shoulder and walked down to the water's edge. The bay was black, dimpled with rain rings, and the tide was pushing small waves that glistened with gasoline up on the sand. Two scuba divers, both of them sheriff's deputies, had already beenjdown on the wrecked car. They were sitting on the running board of the firetruck in their wet suits, sharing a thermos of coffee.

"What's it look like down there?" I asked.

"The vehicle landed on its side. Driver's face is down in the silt. The ignition is on and the gearshift in "Drive,"" one of them said. His name was Darbonne. He was unshaved and had curly black hair, his throat prickled with cold.

"Any chance air was trapped in there?" I asked.

"The front windows were down. The driver's arm is tangled up in the seat belt, like he couldn't find the release button. All that water probably hit him like a hammer," Darbonne said.

"The witness blames himself for not getting back with help sooner. Tell him about the air situation, will you?" I said.

Darbonne nodded and yawned. "When they drive off bridges or piers, they're drunks, nutcases, or suicides," he said. "If a guy in a Caddy ices himself, he should have the courtesy to do it without inconveniencing people who make twenty-five grand a year."

"Say again?"

"The whale who just offed himself. I wish he'd gone to a heated, indoor pool to do it," the driver said, then looked at my expression. "What, I just spit on the floor in church?"

A few minutes later the divers went down again to reset the hook on the Cadillac's frame so the car could be flipped over on its top and slid off the pipeline it partially rested on. Helen and I stood by the water's edge and watched. The moon had broken through a slit in the clouds, and far out on the horizon there were whitecaps that looked like tiny bird's wings.

"Castille Lejeune's lawyer called again. He's talking about a harassment suit against the department," she said.

"He'd like my job?"

"What did you find out down at Pecan Island?" she said, ignoring my question.

"Castille Lejeune had Junior Crudup killed. He was beaten to death by a prison guard, a guy named Jackson Posey," I replied.

She looked at the black surface of the bay and at the slickness of the wrecker cable as it extracted the submerged car from the water. Her face did not change expression. She wiped away a raindrop that had caught in her eyelash. "Where's Crudup's body?" she asked.

"Probably still buried on the Lejeune's property," I said.

"Get a search warrant," she said.

The wrecker man winched the Cadillac upside-down out of the shallows and slid it up on the bank, the front windows gushing with water and oil-blackened silt. The body of a huge man hung against the safety strap, his shoulders and neck pressed against the roof, his face twisted toward the open window so he appeared to be staring at a bizarre event taking place outside his automobile.

I squatted down to eye-level with him and shone a flashlight on his face and inside the rest of the car. There was a small entry hole in his neck, his cheek, and the side of his head. The wounds had bled out and had washed clean in the water and had started to pucker around the edges.

"Ever think anybody could sucker-drop Fat Sammy Figorelli?" Helen said behind me.

"No," I said. I reached inside the car and closed Sammy's eyes. The inverted weight of his massive buttocks and thighs had curved his spine so that his back and neck were compressed like a gargoyle's.

"Don't waste your sympathies, Streak. He was a pimp and a pusher and the world's a better place every time one of these shit bags gets stuffed into a hole," Helen said.

"I guess you're right," I said. But I could not help remembering the stories of a French Quarter fat kid who had spent years being the butt of people's jokes.

Helen stood up from the spot where she had crouched behind me. "Wrap it up here. At oh-eight-hundred tomorrow go to work on the warrant. It's time Castille Lejeune learned this is the United States," she said.

"You got it, Top," I said, referring to her old rank in the U.S. Army.

"Call me that again and I'll tear off your head and spit in it," she replied.

I think even Fat Sammy would have enjoyed that one.,

We had the warrant by late Tuesday afternoon. Without announcement and with a balmy breeze at our backs and a sky the color of a ripe peach, two cruisers from the Iberia Sheriff's Department, three from St. Mary Parish, a front-end loader, and a bulldozer chain-boomed on a flatbed tractor-trailer rig all came down Castille Le Jeune's front drive, raking through the lone tunnel of oaks, right into the middle of an outdoor dinner party Lejeune was holding on his terrace.

Helen and I and a plainclothes from the St. Mary sheriff's office served the warrant on him in front of his guests, who included, among at least a dozen others, Theo and Merchie Flannigan. Lejeune tried to feign an amused dismay and the good cheer of the professional bon vivant, but Theo imposed no such restraints on herself.

She wore a low-cut white evening dress and a necklace of red stones around her throat. Her skin was flushed with either the challenge of the moment or the glass of bourbon and crushed ice with a sprig of mint she had been drinking. She placed her small fists on her hips, as a drill instructor might, and turned her face up into mine. "You're an idiot," she said.

"Excuse me, madam, but you need to sit down and stay out of this," Helen said.

"And you need to work on your sexual-identity problems before you lecture other people in their homes," Theo said.

Helen gazed through the trees at the bayou and the deserted shacks that had once housed prison inmates, her breasts hard-looking as softballs against her shirt. She reread the warrant to herself, seemingly indifferent to Theo's insult. Then she lifted her eyes into Theo's. "Repeat what you just said."

"You have no business here," Theo said.

"Where do you think the burial site is?" Helen said to me, ignoring Theo.

"On a line between here and what would have been the front gate of the prison camp. I'd put it pretty close to that pond inside the fenced area," I said.

Lejeune raised his hands. "Listen to me," he said. "I don't know anything about this man Junior Crudup or whatever his name is. My wife befriended the convicts who worked out their sentences on our farm. She was a kind, gentle, decent person. How in God's name can you accuse us of hiding the remains of a murdered man on our property?"

Helen walked out into the yard. "Take out that fence and start in a circle. Drain the pond if you have to," she said to the two heavy-equipment operators.

Helen went back to her cruiser and I began walking down the slope toward the old work camp. Inside the evening shade of the trees I could hear the conversation and tinkle of glasses resume among Lejeune's guests on the patio.

"Dave, stop," Theo said, catching my arm.

She'd just had her hair cut and it was thick and even and shiny on the whiteness of her shoulders. The bourbon and smell of ice and mint on her breath touched my face like the tracings of a kiss.

"Your father commissioned a murder," I said.

"You have it all backwards," she said.

"Then why are you afraid to go down to the pond?"

"For reasons you don't understand."

"You can tell the jury that at your father's trial."

"Why do you hate him so much?"

"Because he's a sonofabitch."

"I'll remember you said that to the day I die."

"Go back home, Theo. Your guests are waiting."

"I can't believe I slept with you. I want to peel my skin off."

Perhaps her response was justified, but at that moment I didn't care one way or another. Down below, the bulldozer and front-end loader were tearing apart a white-rail fence and a sloping green pasture, looking for the bones of a man who had been beaten to death so a cancer-ridden prison guard could keep his pension and a cuckolded husband his pride.

The heavy-equipment operators worked, by gasoline-powered light until midnight, blading away the grass and topsoil, pushing it into water-beaded, black-green mounds. They came back at sunrise and started in again, scooping huge amounts of wet clay and feeder roots from the oak trees onto Lejeune's lawn, trenching a drainage into his fish pond, smashing his dock into kindling. By noon the entire landscape between the trees in his backyard and the cluster of cabins by the bayou was an ecological disaster, water oozing from the substrata, perch and catfish fighting for survival in small pools, a cow's ribs arching out of the clay like a woman's comb.

A half dozen uniformed deputies in rubber boots raked and probed for hours but found no sign of a human burial. By Wednesday afternoon the excavation area had become a giant, water-filled pit. Since the previous day I had slept three hours. My eyes stung, my jaws were like sandpaper, and a stale, clammy odor rose from my clothes. The heavy-equipment operators shut down their machines and waited. Helen shook her head and the operators climbed down and began packing up.

"We're in the Dumpster, bwana," Helen said.

"That body was here. He moved it," I said.

"Ride back with me. You look like a car wreck," she said.

"He's not going to get away with it. I'm going to fry that bastard."

"You probably will. Even if you have to take everybody down with you. You might give that some thought," she said.

I opened and closed my mouth and felt my ears popping, the horizon tilting slightly, a buzzing sound inside my head, as though my old companion the malarial mosquito was having its way with me again.

Helen cupped her hand around my upper arm and kneaded the muscles in it. "Come on, Loot, give a girl a lift," she said.

"What? What did you say?" I said.

She looked at me strangely, her eyes filled with a mixture of pity and sadness.

Not far away, just outside the little town of Jeanerette, Clete Purcel drove down a back road past three antebellum homes that were so stunning in appearance, the tree-shaded lots they sat on so perfect in arboreal and floral arrangement, they looked like Hollywood movie fabrications rather than homes that people of enormous wealth actually lived in. He turned at the green, embanked property corner of the last house in the row, crossed a steel bridge over the Teche, and passed, within fifty yards of the last antebellum home, a rural slum composed of rusted trailers, desiccated sheds, and junker cars that could have been replicated from a photograph taken in Bangladesh.

He removed a pair of binoculars from his glove box and went inside a cafe from which his line of sight allowed him to see the trailer slum that spilled haphazardly to the edge of the bayou. It had not been a good day for Clete. Early that morning he had picked up a bail skip for Wee Willie Bimstine in Opelousas and was about to transport him back to New Orleans, when the skip began jerking against the D-ring anchored on the floor of the Caddy, his face twisted with visceral pain, threatening to soil himself and the convertible if he wasn't allowed to use the bathroom. Clete cuffed him to a pipe next to the toilet in a filling station and waited outside. In less than two minutes the skip managed to put seventy-five cents in a sexual-enhancement dispenser, smear his wrist with a desensitizing lubricant, slip the cuff, and escape out a window.

Score one for the meltdowns, Clete thought.

A half hour later a woman did a hit-and-run on his convertible in a church parking lot; the investigating traffic officer gave him a citation for an expired inspection sticker; and while Clete argued the situation a flock of robins lit in a tree above his car, the top of which was down, and defecated all over the seats and upholstery.

He drank coffee and focused his binoculars on a trailer that was broken in the center and had vinyl garbage bags taped across the windows It was the home of the skip's one-time fall partner, an Angola parolee who had been down twice for sexual battery against children. There was no movement inside the trailer, but next door a woman in faded jeans, tennis shoes without socks, and peroxided hair that was waved on only one side walked down to the school-bus stop and waited for her child. Then she escorted the child, a boy of about eight, back home and closed the door behind her.

A moment later she reemerged with a tall, equestrian-looking man who had a hard, flat stomach and a purple birthmark that seeped from his hairline to the corner of his eye. They kissed on the mouth and the man put on a yellow hard hat and got into a waiting car driven by another man wearing an identical hard hat. The two men parked in front of the cafe and came in and sat down in the booth next to Clete's.

"Kid come home a little soon?" the driver of the car, a truncated, moon-faced man, said.

The man with the birthmark didn't reply but instead snapped his fingers repeatedly for the waitress's attention. After she took the order and went away, he said, "This guy Robicheaux is a walking hemorrhoid. You should see the old man's property. It looks like a bombing zone."

"Tell me about it," the other man replied. His blond hair was combed straight back from a receding hairline, and he kept leaning forward, reverentially, each time the other man spoke. But the man with the birthmark was silent now, not interested in whatever the blond man had intended to say. The blond man, who wore a pair of electrician's wire snips in a leather case on his belt, tried again. "His house was so dried out a popcorn fart could have set it on fire but he blames me for it. He tried to screw me with the Better Business Bureau and get my license pulled."

But the man with the birthmark, whom Clete had now connected with the name Will Guillot, only sipped his coffee and looked out the window at the bayou and the antebellum home on the far side of the steel bridge.

"You think he sent that doctor to your house?" the moon-faced man said.

"Probably."

"You're a mean machine, Will."

"Nope."

"The guy came at you with a sawed-off shotgun?"

"He thought he could go into a man's house and kick ass. He lost. End of story," Will Guillot said.

"Pow!" his friend said.

Both men became silent, eating slices of apple pie, drinking their coffee, picking their teeth. Clete went to the rest room, then waited for his check. The men in the other booth were talking about football now. Go home, he thought. You don't need any more bad luck today.

He looked out the window and saw the child of Will Guillot's girlfriend playing on a swing set, a cheap one that was probably bought at Wal-Mart. The skip's fall partner, the sex predator, pulled up next door, talked to the boy briefly, tousling his hair, then went inside his trailer.

Clete paid his check and started toward the door. He paused, thinking to himself, then reset his porkpie hat and walked back to Will Guillot's table. He grinned without speaking, his Hawaiian shirt partially unbuttoned on his chest, his eyes flicking sideways as though he did not know how to introduce himself.

"Help you?" Guillot said.

"You guys were in the Crotch?" Clete said.

"The what?" the blond man said.

"I heard you say something about a 'mean machine," so I thought you were talking about Mother Green's Mean Machine. See, jar-heads call "

"Yeah, I know all about that. What can I do for you?" Guillot said.

Clete cleaned an ear with one finger, looking sideways again as he did it, his face filling with thought. "I think I know who you are," he said.

"You do?" Guillot said.

"You popped a doctor from Loreauville in your driveway. Guy was some kind of weirded-out Vietnam vet, right? That's some kind of irony, huh? Guy probably had a thousand AK rounds shot at him, then loses his Kool-Aid and gets smoked in the suburbs."

Guillot looked across the table at his friend and tapped his fingernail on the cover of his wristwatch. The two men started to get up.

"Whoa," Clete said.

"Whoa, what?" Guillot said.

"The lady up there in the trailer, the one you're banging? She's got a little boy. The guy next door happens to be a sex predator. So while you're getting your twanger taken care of, the freak who was just patting her kid on the head is figuring out ways to sodomize him. My suggestion is you take your mind off your dick long enough to move the lady and her son out of that shithole before the kid's life is ruined. Can you relate to that?"

"You've got some fucking nerve," Guillot said.

The owner of the cafe had come from behind the counter and was standing behind Clete now, resolute, his feet planted, his thumb raised in the air.

"Out," he said.

"No problem," Clete said. He pulled two one-dollar bills from a brass money clip and dropped them on his table.

But outside Clete could not give it up, standing by his car door, flipping his keys back and forth, his face growing darker. He watched Will Guillot and the electrical subcontractor with him get in their car. "Hold on a minute," he said.

"Get a life, queer bait," Will Guillot said from the passenger window as his car rolled past Clete.

Clete watched the two men cross the steel bridge over the Teche and turn down the tree-shaded back road that led past the row of antebellum homes. In his mind's eye he saw himself running them off the road, strolling back to their car, his blackjack in his side pocket, moving the situation on up to the full-tilt boogie. Why not? he thought. The day couldn't get any worse than it was already.

He got into his Caddy, slammed the door, and turned the ignition. He heard a dry, clicking sound, then nothing. The battery was as dead as a butcher block.

It took an hour for a filling station a half block away to send a truck that gave him a quick-start. He sat behind the wheel, revving the engine to charge the battery, oil smoke pouring from under the frame,

bird-shit smears on his clothes, all immediate hope of squaring the beef with Will Guillot gone.

He looked through the windshield at the trailer slum by the bayou and the parolee who was now drinking a can of beer on his steps and talking to the little boy from next door.

Clete retrieved a pair of leather work gloves from under the seat and put them in his pocket, then dropped the Caddy into low gear and rolled into the trailer slum, gravel and oyster shells ticking softly under his tires.

"You Bobby Joe Fontenot?" he said.

The man on the steps was relaxed, smoking a cigarette with his beer, barefoot in the sunshine, his arms flecked with blue tattoos done by an needle improvised from the guts of a ballpoint pen. He wore imitation black leather pants and a tie-dyed strap undershirt, his black hair scalped on the sides and braided into a matador's pigtail in back.

"I'm gonna take a guess. Casting director from, what's that TV show called, Survivor?" he said, squinting against the sunlight.

Clete grinned and got out of the Caddy, opening his badge holder briefly. "Looking for your friend who jumped his bond with Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater," he said. "Slipped his cuffs this morning and left me with shit on my nose."

"Haven't seen him."

"Mind if I look inside?"

"Get yourself a beer. It's in the icebox."

"Thanks," Clete said, and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

Clete stepped inside. The garbage can in the small kitchen was overflowing, the counters covered with pizza and fried-chicken cartons. A television set was playing without sound, the VCR under it lighted, a cassette pushed halfway into the loading slot. Clete shoved the cassette all the way into the unit with his thumb and waited for the video image to transfer to the screen. Then he clicked off the set and the figures on the screen shrank to a small dot. He slipped on his work gloves and called through the screen door: "Did you know you have a gas leak in your stove?"

Bobby Joe stepped inside the trailer, sniffing at the air. Clete drove his fist into Fontenot's stomach, burying it to the wrist, so deep he actually felt bone. Then he kicked the wood door shut, flung him headlong into a wall, and pulled a shelf filled with carnival midway ceramics down on top of him. He ripped the cassette from the VCR and bounced it off Bobby Joe's face, then rooted in the refrigerator's freezer compartment and pulled out a box of Popsicles and threw them in Bobby Joe's face, too.

"You get the kids in here with cartoons and ice cream?" he said.

Bobby Joe tried to raise himself up against the wall, spittle running from the corner of his mouth. "I'm in treatment. Ask my P.O.," he said hoarsely.

Clete opened and closed his huge hands, breathing hard, his cheeks pooled with color. He lifted Bobby Joe by his shirt and belt and threw him into the narrow bathroom at the back of the trailer. Bobby Joe grabbed the side of the lavatory and tried to raise himself up again, his face bewildered.

"What did your P.O. tell you about putting your hands on little kids, asshole?" Clete said.

"I ain't put "

Clete locked one hand on the back of Bobby Joe's neck and drove his head down on the toilet bowl, smashing his mouth against the rim, plunging his head into the water, scouring the bottom of the bowl with his face. It should have been enough but he was beyond controlling it now or even trying. He slammed the toilet seat down on Bobby Joe's neck and head, then grabbed the top of the shower stall and mounted the toilet, crushing the seat down on Bobby Joe's head, tap dancing on it like an elephant on hallucinogens while Bobby Joe's legs thrashed on the linoleum.

Outside he heard children playing and through the top of the window he saw a little girl chasing after a Frisbee that sailed above her head, and like a man descending from an electrical storm high up on a mountain he stepped back down on the floor and pulled Bobby Joe from the toilet bowl, dripping with water and blood.

He tossed a towel in Bobby Joe's face and leaned back against the wall, out of breath, his fists still knotting. "I'm going to make regular checks on the kid next door," he said. "If I find out you've been near him, you'll wish you were a bar of soap back in "Gola. The same goes if you dime me. Maybe you think you got a bad deal here today, but pervs don't get slack.”

"You fat fuck," Bobby Joe said, pressing the towel to the blood that ran off his chin, looking at it in disbelief, his words muffled, his mouth still trembling. "You like family values? That kid's mother used to be an army whore over by Folk Polk. I'm gonna find out your name. If I ever offend with a kid again, I'm gonna say it each time I poke him. How's that, asshole?"

When Clete got back to the motor court, he stayed under the shower until the hot water tank went empty, burned his clothes in a barbecue pit, drank a quart of whiskey-laced eggnog, and still could not feel clean.