Last Car to Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 8

On Saturday morning I drove with Clete to New Orleans to check out his apartment, which he had loaned to Gunner Ardoin and his little girl. We crossed the Atchafalaya on the arched steel bridge at Morgan City, the docked shrimp boats and old brick buildings and tile roofs and palm-dotted streets of the town spread out below us in the sunshine. Then we drove into rain that seemed to blow out of the cane fields like purple smoke, and by the time we approached the giant bridge spanning the Mississippi, Clete's Cadillac was shaking in the wind, the fabric in the top denting with hailstones.

We drove into the French Quarter and parked in front of his apartment on St. Ann. He ran through the rain and went upstairs into his apartment. A few minutes later he was back in the car, his brow knitted.

"Gunner taking care of the place?" I said.

"Yeah, everything looks fine," he said.

"What's wrong?" I said.

"He left a message on the machine. He said an Irish guy was asking around in the neighborhood a couple of days ago. A weird-looking dude with little ears. Gunner thought maybe this guy had business with me."

"Max Coll?" I said.

"Yeah. I think Gunner's got it wrong, though. Coll doesn't have any reason to be interested in me. Gunner might get himself popped."

"Where's Gunner now?"

"He didn't say. How do I get involved in crap like this?"

"Let's have a talk with Fat Sammy."

"I can't stand that guy. He looks like a blimp after all the air has gone out of it."

"There're worse guys in the life."

"Oh, I forgot, he gives discounts to the meth whores who work in his porn films," he said.

He fired up the Caddy, the rust-eaten muffler roaring against the asphalt, and we drove in the rain to Fat Sammy's house on Ursulines.

I rang the iron bell at the entrance.

"Who is it?" Sammy's voice said from the speaker inside the archway.

"Dave Robicheaux," I replied.

He buzzed open the gate and we walked through the flooded courtyard to the door of his house, which he had already unbolted and left ajar. I had not told Sammy that Clete was with me. When we stepped inside the living room he was lying on the floor, dressed in purple gym trunks and a strap undershirt, watching an opera on cable TV while he curled dumbbells into his chest. His massive legs were as white and hairless as a baby's, his pale blue eyes looking at us upside down.

"What's the haps, Sammy?" Clete said.

"Who said you could come in here, Purcel?" Fat Sammy asked.

Clete looked at me. "I'll wait in the car," he said.

"Clete's my friend, Sammy."

Sammy set down the dumbbells and got to his feet, his lungs wheezing. The living room was dark, the windows covered with thick velvet curtains. Through a side door I could see two men, neither of whom I recognized, shooting pool. Sammy looked down from his great height at both me and Clete.

"So you want to watch some opera?" he asked. He spread his feet and began touching his toes.

"You know a guy named Max Coll?" I said.

"Do I know him? No. Do I know who he is? Yeah, he works out of Miami 'cause it's suppose to be an open city there. Here's the short version. You want somebody clipped, there's guys in Little Havana who work for a service. You want it done right, you ask for this Irish character. Except some people say he's a wacko."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Clete staring intently through the side doorway at the two men shooting pool.

"Wacko how?" I said.

"I don't know, 'cause I don't keep company with them kind of people," Sammy said. "Look, what I hear is the wacko screwed up a job in New Orleans and stiffed the wrong people. That means if he goes back to Miami he might float up in a barrel. Now, we done with this?"

"The guy in there with the patent-leather hair? Is that Frank Dellacroce?" Clete asked.

"What about it?" Sammy said.

"Nothing. I thought he was down on a murder beef in Texas. Maybe George W. slipped up during his days as chief needle injector," Clete said.

Sammy's eyes looked at nothing while he scratched at his cheek with three fingers. "Come back another time, Robicheaux," he said.

Outside, rain was sluicing off the rooftops while Clete and I ran for his Cadillac. We got inside and slammed the doors. "Why do you always have to start up the garbage grinder?" I said.

"That grease ball shooting pool put his infant daughter in the refrigerator and held a gun to his wife's head while he did it. You think Sammy is on the square? I think he's a fat douche bag who should have been blown out of his socks years ago."

"You don't listen, Clete. It's hopeless. You'll never change."

"Neither will you, Dave. You'd like to splatter every one of these shitheads, but you won't admit it. Bootsie's death is eating your lunch. You talk about getting honest at meets? Why don't you stop stoking up your own fires?"

We drove over to Decatur in silence, wrapped in anger, with no destination, the sky as gray as dirty wash. Rainwater was spouting from the sewer grates, the guttural roar of the ruptured muffler vibrating through the Cadillac's frame.

"If you want to attack me, Clete, do it. But don't drag my wife's death into it," I said.

"I'm finished talking about it. Live your own life," he replied.

At the traffic light in front of the Cafe du Monde I got out of the car, slammed the door behind me, and ran through the rain to the pavilion. When I looked back over my shoulder Clete was gone and Jackson Square looked as cold and stark as a black-and-white photograph taken in the dead of winter.

I ordered coffee and hot milk and a plate of beignets, but couldn't eat. I walked the streets in the rain, keeping under the balconies, threading through the tourists carrying street-sale ten-dollar umbrellas. I looked through steam-coated windows of cafes and bars where people were watching Saturday-afternoon football on television. On Dauphine I went into a bar that was packed with gay men, all of them shouting in unison to punctuate the gyrations of a famous transvestite dancing on the stage. The bartender wore a pencil-line mustache and earrings and a black leather cap and leather vest without a shirt. He stared at me across the bar.

"You have coffee?" I asked.

"This look like a Starbucks?" he replied in a New England accent.

"Give me a soda with a lime twist," I said.

He fixed my drink and set it on the bar. He smiled to himself, but not offensively.

"On the job?" he said.

"No, not on the job," I said.

"No problem, sir," he said.

I closed my eyes as I drank down the soda and lime in the glass. I could have sworn I tasted the traces of bourbon in the ice. I used the rest room and walked back out on the street, my skin and clothes reeking of cigarette smoke, my head buzzing with sounds like an electric wire popping in a rain puddle.

I lost track of time. It stopped raining toward evening and a wet fog settled on the French Quarter and drifted like colored smoke off the neon lights over the clubs. Bourbon Street, which was closed at night to automobile traffic, became filled with college boys drinking beer out of plastic cups, conventioneers and tourists strung with cameras peering into strip joints that featured both topless and bottomless performances, and black kids tap dancing like minstrel caricatures or running a shuck that begins, "Bet you five dollars I can tell you where you got your shoes at."

I walked along the river where bums sat on stone benches with sack-wrapped bottles of fortified wine between their thighs. I turned up Esplanade and walked all the way to the ragged edge of the Quarter at Rampart, past a hallelujah mission with a neon cross above its door, past Louis Armstrong Park, a place no white person in his right mind enters either day or night, over to Basin Street and the long-white wall that fronted St. Louis Cemetery. Through the gates I could see row upon row of whitewashed crypts and stone crosses, framed against the sodium lamps of the Iberville Project that burned in the fog with the incandescence of pistol flares.

I sat down on a bus bench next to a huge man with a wild beard and head of black hair. He wore a suit that looked like it had been pulled from a garbage can, a tie knotted like a garrote in the collar of his flannel shirt. His skin was so grimed with dirt it was hard to tell his race. His eyes made me think of the renegade Russian priest Rasputin.

"You got any money?" he said.

"What do you need it for?" I answered.

"Something to eat. Maybe a drink or two."

I found four dollars and seventy-three cents in my pocket and gave it to him. He clenched it in his hand but remained seated on the bench. "I got me a dry place in one of the tombs. The mission is all full on Saturday nights," he said.

I nodded. A group of tourists were walking by, talking among themselves about either A Streetcar Named Desire, the play by Tennessee Williams, or the original streetcar itself, which today sits like an immobile and disconnected anachronism on a cement pad down by the river.

The disheveled man stood up and began waving his arms at them. "That streetcar didn't go out to Desire," he yelled. "It went out to Elysian Fields. It was the last car that still run out to Elysian Fields. All these streets here was Storyville. It was full of colored whorehouses and women who killed themselves with morphine. Hey, don't you go in them crypts! The kids from the Iberville Project climb over the wall and bust people like you in the head. Are you listening to me? This ain't New Orleans. You're standing in the city of the dead. You just don't know it yet."

The tourists walked quickly up the street toward Canal, their faces ashen.

A minute later Clete Purcel's Cadillac came around the corner, oil smoke leaking from under the frame, a hubcap rolling loose across the asphalt, like a paean to the disorder in his life. He pushed open the passenger door.

"Want to go back to New Iberia?" he said.

"Why not?" I said, and got inside. I looked through the back window at the silhouette of the disheveled man receding behind us.

"Sorry I got on your case. But I think Fat Sammy has been putting the slide on you," Clete said.

"Maybe he has."

"No maybe about it, Streak. Every ounce of meth going into the projects has Sammy's greasy prints all over it. He makes me think of a giant snail trailing slime all over the city."

"You're one in a million, Cletus."

He looked at me uncertainly, a pocket of air in one cheek, then roared up the ramp onto I-10. We poured it on all the way back to New Iberia, like two over-the-hill low riders who no longer look at calendars or watch the faces of clocks.

On Monday morning Mack Bertrand called me from the lab and said the shoes we had removed from Dr. Parks's house were not the source of the leather scrapings found under the fingernails of the dead daiquiri vendor, Leon Hebert. A few minutes later Helen came into my office and I told her of the lab's findings.

"So where does that leave us?" she said.

"A revenge killing of some kind. The daiquiri cup stuffed down the victim's throat indicates a high level of rage. Dr. Parks had motivation."

"You don't sound convinced," she said.

"Parks has so much anger I doubt he'd deny killing the man if he did it."

"How about this guy Guillot?"

"He's a poster child for obnoxiousness. But why would he shoot someone and throw the weapon, registered in his name, on the side of the road?"

"We're talking about middle-class people, Streak. Career perps are predictable. Dagwood and Blondie aren't."

Beautiful.

But I believed there were other factors at work in this case that were more complex than a simple act of vengeance. It was too much for coincidence that Castille Lejeune's corporation owned the daiquiri store where Leon Hebert had been murdered and that the murder weapon belonged to Will Guillot, one of his employees.

But Helen was right. We were dealing with middle-class people who didn't have the proclivities and personal associations of career criminals, most of whom were basket cases who left a paper trail through the system from birth to the grave.

Why had Theodosha Flannigan been afraid to climb through the fence surrounding the fish pond on her father's property? Why did Castille Lejeune say he had no memory of using his influence to get Junior Crudup off the levee gang at Angola? People denied evil deeds, not good ones.

And how about the suicide of Theodosha's psychiatrist? If she was his regular patient, why wasn't her case file in his records?

I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union's impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin's leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative.

So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing?

After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup.

She looked thoughtfully into space. She had a round face and wore glasses with pink frames and parted her hair down the middle. "I have a history of blues and swamp pop here. That might be helpful," she said.

"I've already used that. This guy disappeared from Angola about 1951. There's no record anywhere of what happened to him."

"Wait here a minute," she said.

I watched her moving around in the stacks, sliding a book off a shelf here and there, then clicking on a computer keyboard. A few minutes later she waved for me to join her at a back table, where she had spread open several books that contained mention of Junior Crudup.

"I looked at those already, I'm afraid," I said.

"Well, there's a photographic collection in Washington, D.C." that might be worth looking at," she said.

"Pardon?"

"In the forties and fifties a photographer who once worked with Walker Evans photographed convicts all over the South. He had a penchant for black musicians. He tracked some of their careers for decades. There are hundreds of photographs in his collection."

"Is he still alive?"

"No, he died twenty years or so ago."

"How do we get a hold of the collection?"

"All the ones he took of Crudup or of Louisiana prisons are downloading and printing right now. You need anything else?"

The photographs were stunning, shot with grainy black-and-white film in Jim Crow jails and work camps, when the convicts still wore stripes and the hacks carried lead-weighted walking canes and made no attempt to hide the spiritual cancer that lived in their faces. Nor was there any attempt to hide the level of severity and privation that characterized the lives of the prisoners in the photographs. In each photo the camera caught an image or a detail that left no doubt in the viewer's mind about what he was seeing: a wheeled cage tiered with bunks parked inside a swamp; a convict sitting in the bottom of a wood sweatbox, a forced grin on his face, a waste bucket by his foot; a work gang assembled at morning-bell count, while in the background two men tried to balance themselves barefoot atop a case of empty pop bottles; a mounted gun bull in a cowboy hat framed against a boiling sun, his arm pointed, yelling a command at a convict pulling a fourteen-foot cotton sack behind him.

It was called stacking time on the hard road.

But in each of the photographs the reference librarian had downloaded, Junior Crudup was obviously the odd piece in the puzzle box, regardless of his surroundings. In a ditch with a dozen other convicts, he was the only light-skinned man, the only one with an etched mustache, and the only one to look directly into the camera. His eyes were clear, his face marked by neither resentment nor grandiosity. I suspected he was one of those for whom the gun bulls did not have a category, which would not have been good news for Junior Crudup.

But some of the photographs were taken outside of prison. One showed him with Leadbelly, the two of them laughing at a joke in front of what appeared to be a practice session of Cab Calloway's orchestra. Another showed him at a crowded table in a supper club, a beautiful black woman in a pillbox hat and polka-dot organdy dress, with an orchid pinned to her shoulder, seated next to him. Everyone in the picture was grinning at the camera, except Junior Crudup. He was dressed in a tuxedo, his tie pulled loose, a cigarette trailing a line of smoke from between two fingers. There was a half grin on his mouth, his eyes focused on a neutral spot, as though he were not entirely connected to the environment around him.

I got a manilla envelope from the reference librarian and began slipping the printouts of the photos inside it. Then a detail in the last photo caught my eye and made me pull it back out. The photo was far less dramatic than the others and showed eight or nine convicts in denims, not stripes, plowing under cane stubble with mules in a sugarcane field that sloped down to a bayou.

An obese white man in a straw hat, with a dough like face and a shotgun propped on his thigh, was watching them from atop his horse. Junior was staring up at the gun bull a hoe at an odd angle over his shoulder, his face puzzled, as though he had just been told something that made no sense. It was wintertime and the bayou was low, the roots of the cypress trees exposed along the banks. A stump fire was burning on the edge of the field, the smoke drifting like a dirty smudge across the sun. Across the bayou, on the edge of the picture, was the back of a Victorian home that had obviously been built to resemble a steamboat.

The home of Castille Lejeune.

A half hour later I rang the bell on his front porch, without having called or gone through his corporate office in Lafayette. "I thought you might be interested in this photo. According to the cut line on it, it was taken in 1953," I said when he opened the door.

His eyes dropped to the photo briefly but he did not take it from my hand. "Mr. Robicheaux, how nice of you to drop by," he said.

"That's Junior Crudup in the picture, Mr. Lejeune. That's your house in the background."

He wore slacks and a tie and a blue sweater with buttons on it. His eyes fixed on mine, twinkling. "I'm sure what you say is true. But the burning issue here seems to escape me."

"You said you had no memory of getting Crudup off the levee gang. But here he is, harrowing your sugarcane field across the bayou from your house."

He tried to suppress a laugh. "Let's see if I understand. You've driven out here to talk to me about a photo taken of convicts almost fifty years ago?"

"Did you rent convict labor back then, Mr. Lejeune?"

"The people who ran my family's agricultural interests might have. I don't remember." He looked at his wristwatch and raised his eyebrows. "Oh heavens, I'm supposed to leave for New Orleans shortly."

His patrician insouciance, his disingenuousness and contempt for the truth were part of a lifelong attitude on which there were no handles. I could feel words breaking loose in my throat that I didn't want to say. "You received the Distinguished Flying Cross from Harry Truman, did you?"

"Do you wish me to confirm what you already know, or do you wish to ask me a meaningful question?" he said, his eyes gazing benignly out on the flowers and palm and oak trees in his yard.

I could feel my left hand opening and closing against my thigh, the veins tightening in the side of my head. Don't get into this, I heard a voice say in the back of my mind. "I met Audie Murphy once. It was a great honor," I said.

"I'm happy to hear that," he said.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Lejeune," I said.

He made no reply. Even though I had managed to control my anger I felt like a fool, one of that great army of salaried public servants who were treated by the very rich as doormen and security guards. I got in my cruiser and began backing down the long, shaded driveway to the state road, the sun flashing through the canopy like the reflection off a heliograph. When I reached the entrance to the state road I had to wait for a long line of cane trucks to pass, the wagon beds swaying heavily with the enormous loads they carried. In the meantime Castille Lejeune had gotten into his Oldsmobile and was driving toward me.

I got out of the cruiser and walked to his car, then waited for him to roll down the window. "I'm sorry, I forgot to leave you a business card," I said, and placed it on his dashboard. "I think something real bad happened to Junior Crudup. Please be advised there's no statute of limitation on murder in the state of Louisiana, Mr. Lejeune. By the way, it was an honor to meet Audie Murphy because he seemed to be both a patriot and a straight-up guy who didn't try to get by on bullshit."

On Tuesday morning Helen called me into her office. "I just got off the phone with Castille Lejeune's attorney. He says you made a nasty accusation yesterday at Lejeune's house," she said.

"News to me."

"You think you can jam a guy like Castille Lejeune?"

"He's lying about Junior Crudup."

"The R&B convict again?"

"Right."

"How about we concentrate on crimes in this century? Starting with the homicide at the daiquiri store."

"No matter what avenue we take, I think it's going to lead back to Lejeune."

"Maybe because you want it to."

"Say again?"

"You hate rich people, Dave. You can't wait to get into it with them."

"No, I just don't like liars."

"Can you do me a favor?"

"What?"

"Go somewhere else. Now."

That afternoon Father Jimmie Dolan was at a basketball practice in a Catholic high school gymnasium not far from his church, when his cell phone rang inside his gym bag. "Father Dolan," he said into the receiver.

"I need only a quick word. Don't be hanging up on me now," the caller said.

"How did you get this number?"

"Told the secretary at the rectory I was your grandfather. I need something from you."

"What could I possibly have that you want?"

"I was paid to take out this fellow Ardoin. But I'm not going to do it."

"You didn't answer my question. What is it you want?"

"There's an open contract on me, Father. That means I'm anybody's fuck. But they messed with the wrong fellow, you get my drift?"

"No, and I don't want to."

"I'm going to loosen some people's earthly ties."

Father Jimmie stared listlessly across the gym at the boys who were taking turns laying up shots under the basket. He had a sore throat and fever and wanted nothing else in life at that moment except a glass of whiskey and a warm bed to lie down in.

"You know what I'm asking from you, don't you?" Max Coll said.

"I think you want absolution for your sins, Max. But you can't have it. Not over the phone, certainly. And perhaps never, not unless you give up your violent ways."

The cell phone was silent.

"Did you hear me?" Father Jimmie said.

"I think I've misjudged you. Under it all you're a hard-nosed bastard of a kind I remember only too well, one whose cassock and collar come before his humanity. Shite if you're not a disappointment to me."

The transmission went dead. Father Jimmie's cheek stung as though it had been slapped.