DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields Page 5

  "I'll try to remember all this. Thanks for dropping by," I said.

  Sammy looked at me for a long time, his nostrils swelling with air, his small mouth a tight seam, as though he had been talking futilely to either a deaf or stupid man. A delivery truck smelling of donuts or freshly baked bread passed on the street. Fat Sammy watched the truck turn the corner by a huge, redbrick, tree-shaded antebellum home called the Shadows and disappear down a side street.

  "This is a nice town," he said.

  I realized that whatever was really bothering him was probably not within his ability to explain. He watched a blue jay lighting on a bird feeder that hung from an oak limb in the yard. Then, like every mainstream American gangster I had ever known, almost all of whom struggle to hold onto some vestige of respectability, he unknowingly opened a tiny window into a childlike area of his soul.

  "I talked with them German film people who's doing a documentary. They say you told them I used to be on a first-name basis with a Miami guy who helped kill President Kennedy. It's true, you told them people that?" he said.

  "You know the same stories I do, Sammy. They just sound better coming from you. You were born for the screen, partner," I said.

  He seemed to think about my explanation, but showed no indication of wanting to leave my gallery.

  "You care to come inside and have some coffee?" I said.

  "Got any donuts?" he said.

  I opened the door for him and watched his enormous bulk move past me into my house. I could smell an odor like testosterone ironed into his clothes.

  That morning I drove to the high school that the three dead girls had attended up the bayou in the little town of Loreauville. The registrar gave me a copy of the yearbook from the previous year and I found the three girls' photographs among members of the junior class. All three had been either class officers, prom queens, members of the drama club and speech team, or participants in Madrigals. They had been scheduled to graduate in the spring.

  But one of the girls had a different kind of distinction. The driver, Lori Parks, had been on probation for possession of Ecstasy and had been driving with a restricted license for a previous DWI. By late afternoon the forensic chemist at our crime lab had matched a latent print from one of the plastic cups I had picked up two hundred yards from the crash site. The latent belonged to Lori Parks.

  There is no open-container law in the State of Louisiana. It is supposedly illegal to drink and drive in the state, but a vendor can sell mixed drinks at drive-by windows to people in automobiles, provided the container is sealed. Wrapping a piece of plastic around the lid of a daiquiri cup satisfies the statute, and the passengers in the automobile are allowed to open the cups and consume any amount of alcohol they wish as long as they do not give alcohol to the driver.

  If the driver is drinking and sees a state trooper or sheriff's deputy hit his flasher, he only needs to hand his cup to a passenger and instantly he comes into compliance with the law.

  The only person legally liable for any violation of the statutes governing the drive-by window sale of mixed drinks is the clerk who actually makes the sale, never the owner. Sometimes the clerk, who is usually paid no more than minimum wage, is fined or jailed or both for selling to underage customers. But the daiquiri windows remain open seven days and nights a week, positioned on each end of town, thriving on weekends and on all pay days

  Just before I started to drive out to the daiquiri store at the four corners on Loreauville Road, the phone rang on my desk. It was the administrative assistant in the warden's office at Angola Penitentiary, the same man who had hung up on me when I had mentioned the possibility of Junior Crudup being buried under the levee along the Mississippi River.

  "I did some digging around," he said.

  I laughed into the receiver.

  "You think this is funny?" he said.

  "No, sir. I'm sorry."

  "Ever know an old gun hack by the name of Buttermilk Strunk?"

  "Cain't-See to Cain't-See Double-Time Strunk?" I said.

  "That's the man. He was working levee gangs from Camp A in 1951. He says Crudup was a big stripe back then and on the shit list of a couple other gun bulls who wanted to make a Christian out of him, get my meaning?"

  "I think so," I said.

  "They worked him over pretty bad. Strunk says that's about the time a man came to the penitentiary and made recordings of some of the convicts. According to Strunk, this man probably saved Crudup's life."

  "You mean John or Allen Lomax, the folk music collectors?"

  "No, this guy lives in Franklin. You ought to know him. He only owns about half the goddamn state."

  "Who are we talking about?" I said, my impatience growing.

  "Castille Lejeune. Strunk says Lejeune came to Angola with a man from a record company and got Crudup pulled off the levee gang. He doesn't know what happened to him after that.. .. You still there?"

  "Castille Lejeune saved the life of a black convict? I'm having a hard time putting this together."

  "Why's that?"

  "He's supposed to be a sonofabitch."

  "Remind me not to waste my time on bullshit like this again," the administrative assistant said.

  That night my old enemy was back. According to his friends, Audie Murphy fashioned a bedroom out of his garage in the hills overlooking Los Angeles and slept separately from his wife, a loaded army-issue .45 under his pillow. After World War II he had become convinced that, before he could sleep a full night again, he would have to spend five days in peacetime for every day he had spent on the firing line. For him that meant twenty years of sleeplessness.

  I couldn't offer my limited experience in Vietnam as the raison d'etre for my insomnia. I drank before I went there and I drank more when I came back. Now I did not drink at all and my nocturnal hours were still filled with the same visitors and feelings; they simply took on different shapes and faces.

  The night seemed alive with sound the clatter of red squirrels on the roof, a dredge boat out on the bayou, a brief rain shower that swept across the trees in the yard. When I finally fell asleep I dreamed of my dead wife Bootsie and Father Jimmie Dolan and the three girls who had died in a burning automobile and of a Negro convict who had been ground up in a system that loathed courage in a black man.

  What were the dreams really about? An imperfect world, I suspect, one over which death and injustice often seemed to hold dominion. But what kind of fool would surrender his sleep over a condition he could not change?

  Sleeping with a .45 did not bring Audie Murphy peace of mind, nor did gambling away millions in Las Vegas. I had slept with firearms, too, and invested substantial sums of money in the parimutuel industry at racetracks all over the country, but I was no more successful in my attempt at redress with the world than he was. That said, I did have an answer for insomnia, one that was surefire and one that Murphy evidently did not try. But just the thought of its coming back into my life made sweat pop on my forehead.

  When I went to the office in the morning a faxed message was waiting for me from the Department of Public Safety and Corrections in Baton Rouge. Since there was no record of Junior Crudup's discharge from Angola or his death while on the farm, it was the department contention he had served his full sentence and gone out "max time," which meant he would have been released without parole stipulations or supervision sometime in 1958.

  It was pure blather.

  I called Father Jimmie Dolan at his rectory in New Orleans and was told he was working in the garden. Fat Sammy had said Father Jimmie was a global-size pain in the ass. The archdiocese must have felt the same. He had been assigned to an ancient, downtown church in a dirty, dilapidated neighborhood off Canal, where Mass was still said in Latin, women in the pews covered their heads, and communicants knelt at the altar rail when they received the Eucharist, as though the 1960s reforms of Vatican II had never taken place.

  Last year, when I remarked to Father Jimmie on the obvious bad judgment if not pun
itive intention on the part of the diocese in placing a minister such as himself in a parish with an anachronistic mindset, he replied, "Some people can't accept change. So the church lets a few wall themselves up in a mausoleum and pretend the past is still alive. Know anybody else who has that kind of problem?"

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "They're not bad guys," he said, grinning from ear to ear.

  My mind came back to the present and I heard Father Jimmie scrape the phone receiver off a hard surface.

  "Fat Sammy Figorelli says you punched out the owner of a health salon," I said.

  "Not exactly."

  "How 'not exactly'?"

  "The guy we're talking about runs a massage parlor and escort service. He forced a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl from our parish to give a blowjob to one of his customers. Is this why you called?"

  "The Department of Corrections says Junior Crudup's last sentence was up in 1958. They say he wasn't paroled and he didn't die inside the prison, so he must have gone out max time in '58."

  "He was probably killed and buried on the farm. But I doubt if we'll ever know."

  "There's more. An old time gun bull says a man by the name of

  Castille Lejeune got Junior off the levee gang around 1951. But that's where the trail ends."

  "Castille Lejeune, in Franklin? That's Theodosha Flannigan's father. She's married to Merchie Flannigan."

  "How'd you know that?" I said.

  "She used to live in New Orleans. She was one of our parishioners. Can we have a talk with Mr. Lejeune?"

  "I don't like to get too close to Theodosha."

  There was a beat, then he said, "Oh, I see."

  Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

  That afternoon I went to each drive-by daiquiri store in New Iberia. Each of the stores used the same type of blue plastic cups that I had picked up near the accident scene, the same type lids, the same type sealing wrap. I showed each of the clerks working the window the yearbook photographs of the three girls killed on Loreauville Road. Each clerk looked at them blankly and shook his head. At the first three stores I believed the denials given me by the clerks. At the fourth my experience was different.

  The store was a boxlike, plywood structure, painted white, located inside an oak grove just outside the city limits. I parked my cruiser in the trees and waited in the shade while the clerk, a kid probably not much over legal age himself, serviced three drive-by customers. Then I walked to the window, which had a flap on it propped up by a stick. I opened my badge on him.

  "What's your name?" I said.

  "Josh Comeaux."

  "You work here every evening, Josh?"

  "Yes, sir. Unless I have a basketball game. Then Mr. Hebert lets me off," he answered.

  I flipped the high school yearbook open to a marked page and showed him pictures of two of the dead girls.

  "You know either one of these girls?" I asked.

  "No, sir, I can't say I do," he said. He wore khakis and a starched, print shirt, the short sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his upper arms.

  His hair was black, combed back with gel, boxed on the neck, his skin tanned.

  "Can't or won't?" I said, and smiled at him.

  "Sir?" he said, confused.

  I turned to another marked page in the yearbook and showed him a picture of Lori Parks.

  "How about this girl?" I said.

  He shook his head, his eyes flat. "No, sir. Don't know her. I guess I'm not much help on this. These girls do something wrong?"

  "You seem out of breath. You all right?" I said.

  "I'm fine," he said, and tried to smile.

  "What time did you serve her?" I asked.

  "Serve who?"

  "Lori Parks," I said, tapping the picture of the driver.

  "I haven't said I did that. I haven't said no such thing. No, sir."

  "The autopsy on this girl indicates she was alive when the gasoline tank on her car exploded. She was seventeen years old. I think you're in a world of shit, partner."

  He swallowed and looked at the smoke hanging in the trees from a barbecue joint. He opened his mouth to speak, but a middle-aged, balding man who wore a cowboy vest and a string tie and hillbilly sideburns that looked like grease pencil cupped his hand on the boy's shoulder and glared at me through the service window.

  "You saying we served somebody under age?" he asked.

  "I know you did," I said.

  "Every young person who comes by this window has to show ID. That's the rule. No exceptions," he said.

  "You the owner?" I said.

  He ignored my question and addressed his clerk. "You serve anybody who looked like a minor yesterday?"

  "No, sir, not me. I checked everybody," the clerk said.

  "That's what I thought," the man in the vest said. "We're closed."

  "How did you know the problem sale was yesterday?" I asked.

  He pulled out the support stick from under the window flap and let it slam shut in my face.

  While I had spent the afternoon questioning the employees of New Iberia's drive-by daiquiri stores, an unusual man was completing his journey on the Sunset Limited from Miami into New Orleans. He had small ears that were tight against his scalp, narrow shoulders, white skin, lips that were the color of raw liver, and emerald green eyes that possessed the rare quality of seeming infinitely interested in what other people were saying. He sat in the lounge car, wearing a seersucker suit and pink dress shirt with a plum-colored tie and ruby stick pin, sipping from a glass of soda and ice and lime slices while the countryside rolled by. An elderly Catholic nun in a black habit sat down next to him and opened a book and began reading from it. She soon became conscious that the man was watching her.

  "Could I help you with something?" she asked.

  "You're reading The Catholic Imagination by Father Andrew Gree-ley. A fine book it is," the man said.

  "I just started it. But, yes, it seems to be. Are you from Ireland?"

  He considered his reply. "Umm, not anymore," he said. "Are you going to New Orleans, Sister?"

  "Yes, I live there. But my parents came from Waterford, in the south of Ireland."

  But he didn't seem to take note of her parents' origins. His eyes were so green, his stare so invasive, she found herself averting his gaze.

  "Would you be knowing a Father James Dolan in New Orleans?" the man asked.

  "Why, yes, he's a friend of mine."

  "I understand he's a lovely man. Works in a parish where they still say a traditional Mass, does he?"

  "Yes, but he's "

  "He's what?"

  "He's not a traditional man. Excuse me, but you're staring at me."

  "I am? Oh, I beg your pardon, Sister. But you remind me of a mother superior who ran the orphanage where I once lived. What a darling' sack of potatoes she was. She used to make me fold my hands like I was about to pray, then whack the shite out of me with a ruler. She was good at pulling hair and giving us the Indian burn, too. Have you done the same to a few tykes?"

  He drank from his glass of ice and soda and lime, an innocuous light in his eyes. "Not running off, are you? You forgot your book. Here, I'll bring it to you," he said.

  But she rushed through the vestibule into the next car, the big wood beads of her fifteen-decade rosary clattering on her hip, the whoosh of the doors like wind howling in a tunnel.

  On Saturday afternoon Father Jimmie and I went together to the Flannigan lawn party at Fox Run, down Bayou Teche, in St. Mary Parish. The home had been constructed during the early Victorian era to resemble a steamboat, with porches shaped like the fantail and captain's bridge on a ship and cupolas and balconies on the upper stories that gave a spectacular view of the grounds, the antebellum homes on the opposite side of the bayou, and the sugarcane fields that seemed to recede over the rim of the earth.

  Live oaks draped with moss arched over the roof of the house, and palm trees grew in their shade to the second-story windows. A visitor to the lawn part
y could ride either western or English saddle around a white-fenced track by the horse stables, or play tennis on either a grass or red-clay court. The buffet tables groaned with food that had been prepared at Galatoire's and Antoine's in New Orleans. The drink table was a drunkard's dream.

  The guests included the state insurance commissioner, who was under a federal grand jury indictment and would later become the third state insurance commissioner in a row to go to prison; petrochemical executives from Oklahoma and Texas whose wives' voices rose above all others; two New York book editors and a film director from Home Box Office; an ex-player from the National Football League who rented himself out as a professional celebrity; career military officers and their wives who had retired to the Sunbelt; the former governor's mistress whose evening gown looked like pink champagne poured on her skin; and state legislators who had once been barbers and plumbers and who genuinely believed they shared a common bond with their host and his friends.

  Father Jimmie had worn his Roman collar, and the consequence was that he and I stood like an island in the middle of the lawn party while people swirled around us, deferential and polite, touching us affectionately if need be but avoiding the eye contact that would take them away from all the rewards a gathering at Castille Lejeune's could offer.

  After a half hour I wished I had not come. I went inside the house to use the bathroom, but someone was already inside. A black drink waiter in the kitchen directed me to another bathroom, deeper in the house, one I had to find by cutting through a small library and den filled with fine guns and Korean War-era memorabilia.

  A steel airplane propeller was mounted on the wall, and under it was a framed color photograph of Castille Lejeune and a famous American baseball player, both of them dressed in Marine Corps tropicals, standing in front of two vintage Grumman Hellcat fighter planes parked on a runway flanged by Quonset huts and palm trees. In another photo Lejeune stood at attention in his dress uniform while President Harry Truman pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on his coat.

  But the photos that caught my eye were not those of Castille Lejeune's career as a Marine Corps pilot. A picture taken at his wedding showed him and his young wife, in her bridal gown, standing on the steps of a church. She was tall, dark featured, and absolutely beautiful. She also looked like the twin of her daughter, Theodosha.