DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields Page 3

  I waited a long time, then touched his forehead with the gun's muzzle and winked at him.

  "I won't. I'd think about my request on those charges, though," I said.

  Just as I eased the hammer back down, his bladder gave way and he shut his eyes in shame and embarrassment. When I looked up I saw a little girl, no older than six or seven, staring at us, horrified, from the kitchen doorway.

  "That's my daughter. I get her one day a week. I've known some cruel guys with a badge, but you take the cake," Gunner said.

  The charges against Clete were dropped by three that afternoon. I drove him from Central Lock-Up to his apartment on St. Ann, where he fell asleep on the couch in front of a televised football game. Fat Sammy Figorelli's home was only three blocks away, over on Ursulines. The temptation was too much.

  Fat Sammy had grown up in the French Quarter, and although he owned homes in Florida and on Lake Pontchartrain, he spent most of his time inside the half city block where the Figorelli family had lived since the 1890s. It seemed Sammy had been elephantine all his life. As a child the balloon tires of his bicycle burst under his weight. His rump wouldn't fit in the desk at the school run by the Ursuline nuns. In high school he got stuck inside his tuba while performing with the marching band at an LSU football game. The paramedics had to scissor off his jacket, smear him with Vaseline, and pry him loose in front of ninety thousand people. In his senior year he mustered up the courage to invite a girl to the Prytania Theater. A gang of Irish kids in the balcony rained down a barrage of water-filled condoms on their heads.

  As an adult he filled his body with laxatives, tried every diet program imaginable, trained at fat farms, sweated to the oldies with Richard Simmons, attended a fire-walker's school run by a celebrity con man in California, almost died from liposuction, and finally had a gastric bypass. The consequence of the latter was a weight loss of 170 pounds in a year's time.

  All of the wrong kind.

  He lost the blubber, but under the blubber was a support system of sinew that hung on his frame like curtains of partially hardened cement. If this was not enough of a problem, Fat Sammy had another one that was equally egregious and beyond the scope of medicine. His head was shaped like a football, his few strands of gold hair brushed like oily wire into his scalp.

  I twisted an iron bell on the grilled door that gave onto a domed archway leading into Fat Sammy's courtyard.

  "Who is it?" a voice said from a speaker inside the gate.

  "It's Dave Robicheaux. I've got a problem," I said.

  "Not with me, you don't."

  "It's about Gunner Ardoin. Open the door."

  "Never heard of him. Come back another time. I'm taking a nap."

  "There're some movie people in New Iberia. They want to work with some local guys who know their way around," I said.

  The speaker box went dead and the gate buzzed open.

  The courtyard was surfaced with soft brick, the flower beds blooming with yellow and purple roses, irises and hibiscus and Hong Kong orchids. Banana and umbrella trees and windmill palms grew along the walls, and the balconies dripped with bougainvillea and passion vine. Fat Sammy lay in a hammock like a beached whale, a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned on his chest, his skin glazed with suntan lotion. A portable stereo and a mirror and a hairbrush sat on a glass-topped table next to him. The stereo was playing "Clair de Lune."

  "Who are these movie people?" he asked.

  "Germans. They're making a documentary. I think you're the man to show them around," I said.

  I pulled up a deep-backed wicker chair and sat down without being asked. He sat up in the hammock and turned down the volume on the stereo, his scalp glistening in the sunshine. He wiped his head with a towel, his eyes neutral, his mouth down-turned at the corners. "Documentary on what?" he asked.

  "Let me clear the decks about something else first. Somebody beat up a priest named Father Jimmie Dolan. It's a lousy thing to happen, Sammy, something no respectable man would be involved in. I thought you'd want to know about it."

  "No, I don't."

  "In the old days elderly people in New Orleans didn't get jack-rolled and their houses didn't get creeped and nobody murdered a child or abused Catholic clergy. If N.O.P.D. couldn't take care of it, we let you guys do it for us."

  His eyes were hooded, like a frog's. "You were kicked off the force, Robicheaux. You don't speak for nobody, at least not around here." He paused, as though reconsidering the tenor of his rhetoric. "Look, this used to be a good city. It ain't no more."

  When I didn't speak he took a breath and started over. "This is the way it is. I make movies. I build houses. I'm developing shopping centers in Mississippi and Texas. You want to know who's running New Orleans? Flip over a rock. Welfare pukes hustling bazooka and blacks and South American spies and bikers muleing brown skag out of Florida. Nothing against the blacks or the spies. They're making it just like we did. But I wouldn't be in a room with none of them people unless I was encased in a full-body condom."

  "Who did the job on Father Dolan?"

  His eyes were pale blue, almost without color, his expression like that of a man who had never learned to smile. "Somebody saying it's on me? This guy Ardoin you mentioned?"

  I looked at a strip of pink cloud above the courtyard. "You're the man in New Orleans," I said.

  "Yeah, every whore in the city tells me the same thing. I wonder why. I ever jerk you around, Robicheaux?" he said.

  "Not to my knowledge."

  "Then I ain't going to now. That means I didn't have nothing to do with hurting a priest, and what I might know about it is my own business."

  "I'm a little disappointed, Sammy. Within certain parameters you were always straight up," I said. I got up to go.

  He brushed at his nose, his pale blue eyes burrowing into my face. "You lied your way in here? About them movie people?" he said.

  "That was on the square." I handed him a business card that had been given to me by a member of a visiting German television crew the previous week. "These guys are doing a story on the New Orleans connection to the assassination of President Kennedy. They believe it got set up here and in Miami."

  "You saying I " His voice broke in his throat. "I voted for John Kennedy."

  "I'm saying nothing had better happen to Father Dolan again."

  Fat Sammy rose from the hammock, wheezing in his chest, like an angry behemoth that couldn't find its legs. I had forgotten how tall he was. He picked up a glass of iced tea from the table gargled with it, and spit it in the flower bed.

  "You own your soul?" he asked.

  "What?"

  "If so, count yourself a lucky man. Now get the fuck out of here," he said.

  I ate dinner with Clete at a small restaurant up the street from the French Market, then shook hands with him and told him I had better head back for New Iberia. I watched him walk across Jackson Square and pass the cathedral, pigeons napping in the shadows around his feet, and disappear down Pirates Alley. I started to get into my truck, but instead, for reasons I couldn't explain, I sat down on one of the iron benches by Andrew Jackson's equestrian statue, and listened to a black man playing a bottleneck guitar.

  It was the burnt-out end of a long day and a longer weekend. The wind was cold off the river, the light cold and mauve colored between the buildings that framed the square, the air tinged with the smell of gas from the trees and flower beds. The black man worked the glass bottleneck up and down the frets of his guitar and sang, "Oh Lord, my time ain't long. Rubber-tired hack coming down the road, burial-ground bound."

  An N.O.P.D. cruiser pulled to the curb on Decatur. A black woman in uniform got out and fixed her cap, adjusted the baton on her belt, and walked toward me. She positioned herself between me and the sun, like an exclamation point against a fiery crack in the sky. I picked at my nails and didn't return her stare.

  "Can't stay out of town?" she said.

  "I have an addictive personality," I replied.

  She sat down
on the corner of the bench. "You got a bad jacket for a cop, Robicheaux."

  "Who the hell are you?" I said.

  "Clotile Arceneaux. See," she said, lifting her brass name tag with her thumb. "Your friend, Father Dolan? He's an amateur, and they're going to take his legs off yours, too, you keep messing in what you're not supposed to be messing in."

  "I'm not big on telling other people what to do. I ask they show me the same courtesy," I said.

  The baton on her hip kept banging against the bench. She slid it out of the ring that held it and bounced it between her legs on the cement. Her pursed lips looked like a tiny red rose in the gloom. I

  thought she would speak again, but she didn't. The sun went down behind the buildings in the square and the wind gusted off the levee, smelling of rain and fish-kill in the swamps.

  "Can I buy you coffee, officer?" I said.

  "Your friend is off the hook on the assault beef. Time for you to go home, Robicheaux," she said.

  Home, I thought, and looked at her curiously, as though the word would not register in my mind.

  Chapter 3.

  On Monday I left the department at mid-morning and checked out a history of Louisiana blues music and swamp pop from the city library and began reading it in my office. It was raining outside, and through my window I could see a freight train, the boxcars shiny with water, wobbling down the old Southern Pacific tracks through the black section of town. The longtime sheriff", an ex-marine who had marched out of the Chosin Reservoir, had retired and been replaced by my old partner, Helen Soileau.

  I saw her stop in the corridor outside my office and bite her lip, her hands on her hips. She tapped on the door, then opened it without waiting for me to tell her to come in.

  "Got a minute?" she asked.

  "Sure."

  "A couple of N.O.P.D. plainclothes picked up a prisoner this morning. They said you and Clete bent a pornographic actor out of shape. They thought it was funny."

  "Pornographic actor?" I said vaguely.

  "Ardoin was his name."

  "Clete flattened a coffeepot against the side of the guy's head, but it wasn't a big deal," I said.

  She had the muscular build of a man and blond hair that she cut short, tapering it on the sides and neck so that it looked like the freshly cropped mane on a pony. She wore slacks and a white, short-sleeve shirt, a badge holder hooked on her belt. She sucked in her cheeks and watched a raindrop run down the window glass above my head.

  "Not a big deal? Interrogating people outside your jurisdiction, banging them in the head with a coffeepot? Dave, I never thought I'd be in this situation," she said.

  "Which one is that?"

  She leaned on the windowsill and looked at the lights of the freight caboose disappearing between a green jungle on each side of the tracks.

  "You and Cletus work it out, but I don't want anybody, that means anybody, dragging N.O.P.D."s dogshit into this department. I don't want to be the dartboard for those wise-asses, either. We straight on this?" she said.

  "I hear you."

  "Good."

  "Remember an R&B guitarist named Junior Crudup?" I asked.

  "No."

  "He went into Angola and never came out. I think his granddaughter got swindled out of her land over in St. James Parish. I think Merchie Flannigan is mixed up in it."

  She straightened her back, then looked at me for a long moment. But whatever she had planned to say seemed to go out of her eyes. She grinned, shaking her head, and walked out into the corridor.

  I followed her outside.

  "What was that about?" I asked.

  "Nothing. Absolutely nothing," she said. "Streak, you're just too much. God protect me from my own sins."

  Then she laughed out loud and walked away.

  Monday night I listened to two ancient .78 recordings made by Junior Crudup in the 1940s. As with Leadbelly, the double-strung bass strings on his guitar were tuned an octave apart, but you could hear Blind Lemon and Robert Johnson in his style as well. His voice was haunting. No, that's not the right word. It drifted above the notes like a moan.

  There are some stories that are just too awful to hear, the kind that people press on you after AA. meetings or in late-hour bars, and later you cannot rid yourself of. This is one of them.

  Oldtime recidivists always maintained that the worst joints in the country were in Arkansas. Places like Huntsville and Eastham in the Texas penal system came in a close second, primarily because of the furious pace at which the convicts were worked and the punishment barrels they were forced to stand on throughout the night, dirty and unfed, if a gun hack decided they were dogging it in the cotton field.

  But Angola Pen could lay claims that few other penitentiaries could match. During Reconstruction Angola became the model for the rental convict system, one emulated throughout the postbellum South, not only as a replacement for slave labor but as a far more cost-efficient and profitable successor to it. Literally thousands of Louisiana convicts died of exposure, malnutrition, and beatings with the black Betty. Each of the camps made use of wood stocks that were right out of medieval Europe. The scandals at Angola received national notoriety in the 1950s when convicts began slashing the tendons in their ankles rather than stack time on what was called the Red Hat Gang.

  I drove up Bayou Teche to Loreauville, where the black man to whom I had sold my boat and bait business now lived with his daughter on a small plot of land not far from town. His house was set back in the shadows, on the bayou's edge, the tin roof almost entirely covered by the overhang of pecan and oak trees. I parked my pickup truck in the trees and walked up to the gallery, where he sat in a wood rocker, a jelly glass filled with iced coffee in his massive hand.

  His name was Batist, and he was both older than he would concede and yet indifferent to what the world thought of him. He had worked most of his life as a farmer, a muskrat trapper and commercial fisherman with my father, and as a packer in several canneries. He could not read or write, but he was nonetheless one of the most insightful people I had ever known.

  A fat, three-footed raccoon named Tripod was eating out of a pet bowl on the steps.

  "What's the haps, "Pod?" I said to the raccoon, scooping him up in my arms.

  Batist's whiskers were white against his cheeks. He removed a cigar from the pocket of his denim shirt and slipped it into his jaw but didn't light it.

  "You ain't come to see me this weekend," he said.

  "I had to take care of some business in New Orleans," I said. "Years ago, you knew Junior Crudup, didn't you?"

  He raised his eyebrows. "Oh yeah, ain't no doubt about that," he replied.

  "What happened to him?"

  "What always happened to his kind back then. Trouble wherever he went."

  "Want to be a little more specific?"

  "Back in them days there was fo' kinds of black folks. There was people of color, there was Negroes, and there was colored people. Under all them others was niggers."

  "Crudup was in the last category?"

  "Wrong about that. Junior Crudup was a man of color. Called his-self a Creole. He wore an ox-blood Stetson, two-tone shoes, and a shirt and suit that was always pressed. Used to have a cherry red electric guitar he'd carry to all the dances. If a man could be pretty, that was Junior."

  "How'd he end up in Angola?"

  "Didn't fit. Not in white people's world, not in black people's world. Junior had his own way. Didn't take his hat off to nobody. He'd walk five miles befo' he'd sit in the back of the bus. Back in them days, a black man like that wasn't gonna have a long run."

  Tripod was struggling in my arms and kicking at me with his feet. I set him down and looked at the fireflies lighting in the trees. The air was cool and breathless, the surface of the bayou layered with steam. An electrically powered boat hung with lanterns was passing through the corridor of oaks that lined the banks. Batist's attitudes on race were not conventional ones. He never saw himself as a victim, nor did he ever act as
the apologist for black men who were forced into lives of crime, but by the same token he never told less than the truth about the world in which he'd grown up. So far I could not determine where he stood on Junior Crudup.

  "It started at a dance at the beginning of the Depression," he said.

  "Junior was about t'irteen or fo'teen years old, working in a band for a black man had the most beautiful voice you ever heard. They was playing in a white juke by Ville Platte, on a real hot night, the place burning up inside. The singer, the man wit' the beautiful voice, he was playing the piano and singing at the same time, sweat pouring down his face. A white woman come off the dance flo' and patted her handkerchief on his brow. That's all she done. That's all she had to do.

  "After the juke closed up, five white men drunk on moonshine caught the singer out on the road and beat him till he couldn't get off the ground. But that wasn't enough for them, no. They was in an old Ford, one wit' them narrow tires, and they run the tire right acrost his t'roat and busted his windpipe. Man never sung again and died in the asylum. Junior seen it all, right there on the side of the road, and couldn't do nothing about it. I don't t'ink there was a person in the whole round world he trusted after that."

  "Why'd he go to the joint, Batist?"

  "Got caught sleeping wit' a white man's wife. That was 1934 or '35. But you want to know what happened in there, we got to talk to Hogman."

  "Batist, I'd really like to keep this simple."

  "They put Junior Crudup on the Red Hat Gang. Every nigger in Lou'sana feared that name, Dave. The ones come off it wasn't never the same."

  Hogman Patin was a big, powerful man, an ex-con musician who had done time at the old camps in Angola with Robert Pete Williams, Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Git-and-Go Welch. His arms were coal black and laced with pink scars from a half dozen knife beefs inside the prison system. Now he ran a cafe in St. Martinville, appeared once a year at the International Music Festival in Lafayette, and sold scenic postcards with his signature on them for a dollar a piece. Batist and I sat with him in his side yard, a mile up the bayou, while he threw scrap wood on a fire and told us about Junior Crudup and the Red Hat Gang.