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Last Car to Elysian Fields By James Lee Burke
Synopsis:
Following his superb historical novel White Doves Morning, America’s
most acclaimed crime writer winner of the CWA Gold Dagger and twice
winner of the Edgar Award returns to Louisiana and Dave Robicheaux.
James Lee Burke is in top form in his latest page-turner steeped in the
lush, unsettling atmosphere that his readers have come to expect. This
time, Burke’s renowned Louisiana cop returns to the Big Easy in a
spellbinding tale of conspiracy, passion, and murder. A rainy
late-summer night finds Robicheaux in a New Orleans bar, about to
confront the man who may have savagely assaulted his friend, Father
Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest who’s always at the centre of
controversy. But things in a Burke novel are rarely what they seem,
and soon Robicheaux is back in New Iberia, probing a car crash that
killed three teenage girls. A grief-crazed father and a maniacal,
complex assassin are just a few of the characters Robicheaux meets as
he is drawn deeper into a viper’s nest of sordid secrets and escalating
violence that sets him up for a confrontation that echoes down the
lonely corridors of his own unresolved past.
A masterful exploration of the troubled side of human nature and the
dark corners of the heart, and peopled by familiar characters such as
PI. Clete Purcel and Robicheaux’s old flame, the now-married Theodosia
Lejeune, Last Car to Elysian Fields is vintage Burke a moody,
hard-hitting novel that goes the limit in its provocative blend of
human drama and relentless noir suspense.
Also by James Lee Burke
Half of Paradise
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Lay Down My Sword and Shield
Two for Texas
The Convict
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
The Neon Rain
Heaven’s Prisoners
Black Cherry Blues
A Morning for Flamingos
A Stained White Radiance
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead
Dixie City Jam
Burning Angel
Cadillac Jukebox
Cimarron Rose
Sunset Limited
Heartwood Purple Cane Road
Bitterroot
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
White Doves at Morning
James Lee Burke
LAST CAR TO ELYSIAN FIELDS
ORION
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Orion, an imprint of the
Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
Copyright 2003 James Lee Burke
The moral right of James Lee Burke to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, ecSS -chanical, photocopying, recording, permission of both the
copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
ISBN 0 75285 652 9 (hardback) 0 75285 653 7 (trade paperback)
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St. Ives plc
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to
actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane London, we2H 9EA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Leslie Blanchard at the Iberia Parish Library and
Vaun Stevens and Don Spritzer at the Missoula Public Library for their
friendship and generous help over the years.
Last Car to Elysian Fields
By
James Lee Burke
Chapter 1.
The first week after Labor Day, after a summer of hot wind and drought
that left the cane fields dust blown and spider webbed with cracks,
rain showers once more danced across the wetlands, the temperature
dropped twenty degrees, and the sky turned the hard flawless blue of an
inverted ceramic bowl. In the evenings I sat on the back steps of a
rented shotgun house on Bayou Teche and watched the boats passing in
the twilight and listened to the Sunset Limited blowing down the line.
Just as the light went out of the sky the moon would rise like an
orange planet above the oaks that covered my rented backyard, then I
would go inside and fix supper for myself and eat alone at the kitchen
table.
But in my heart the autumnal odor of gas on the wind, the gold and dark
green of the trees, and the flame-lit edges of the leaves were less a
sign of Indian summer than a prelude to winter rains and the short,
gray days of December and January, when smoke would plume from stubble
fires in the cane fields and the sun would be only a yellow vapor in
the west.
Years ago, in both New Orleans and New Iberia, the tannic hint of
winter and the amber cast of the shrinking days gave me the raison
d’etre I needed to drink in any saloon that would allow me inside its
doors. I was not one of those valiant, alcoholic souls who tries to
drink with a self-imposed discipline and a modicum of dignity, either.
I went at it full-bore, knocking back Beam or Black Jack straight-up in
sawdust bars where I didn’t have to make comparisons, with a
long-necked Jax or Regal on the side that would take away the after
taste and fill my mouth with golden needles. Each time I tilted the
shotglass to my lips I saw in my mind’s eye a simian figure feeding a
fire inside a primeval cave and I felt no regret that I shared his
enterprise.
Now I went to meetings and didn’t drink anymore, but I had a way of
putting myself inside bars, usually ones that took me back to the
Louisiana in which I had grown up. One of my favorites of years past
was Goldie Bierbaum’s place on Magazine in New Orleans. A green
colonnade extended over the sidewalk, and the rusted screen doors still
had painted on them the vague images and lettering of Depression-era
coffee and bread advertisements. The lighting was bad, the wood floor
scrubbed colorless with bleach, the railed bar interspersed with jars
of pickles and hard-boiled eggs above and cuspidors down below. And
Goldie himself was a jewel out of the past, a seventy-year-old
flat-chested ex-prizefighter who had fought Cleveland Williams and
Eddie Machen.
It was night and raining hard on the colonnade and tin roof of the
building. I sat at the far end of the bar, away from the door, with a
demitasse of coffee and a saucer and tiny spoon in front of me. Through
the front window I could see Clete Purcel parked in his lavender
Cadillac convertible, a fedora shadowing his face in the glow of the
streetlight. A man came in and removed his raincoat and sat down on
the other end of the bar. He was young, built like a weight-lifter
whose physique was earned rather than created with steroids. He wore
his brown hair shaved on the sides, with curls hanging down the back of
his neck. His eyebrows were half-moons, his face impish, cartoonlike,
as though it were drawn with a charcoal pencil.
Goldie poured him a shot and a draft chaser, then set the whiskey
bottle back on the counter against the wall and pretended to read the
newspaper. The man finished his drink and walked the length of the bar
to the men’s room in back. His eyes looked straight ahead and showed
no interest in me as he passed.
“That’s the guy,” Goldie said, leaning close to me.
“You’re sure? No mistake?” I said.
“He comes in three nights a week for a shot and a beer, sometimes a
catfish po’boy. I heard him talking about it on the payphone back
there. Maybe he’s not the guy who hurt your friend, but how many guys
in New Orleans are gonna be talking about breaking the spokes on a
Catholic priest?”
I heard the men’s room door open again and footsteps walk past me to
the opposite end of the bar. Goldie’s eyes became veiled, impossible
to read. The top of his head looked like an alabaster bowling ball
with blue lines in it.
“I’m sorry about your wife. It was last year?” he said.
I nodded.
“It was lupus?” he said.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I replied.
“You doin’ all right?”
“Sure,” I said, avoiding his eyes.
“Don’t get in no trouble, like we used to do in the old days.”
“Not a chance,” I said.
“Hey, my po’boy ready?” the man at the end of the bar asked.
The man made a call on the payphone, then ate his sandwich and bounced
pool balls off the rails on the pool table. The mirror behind the bar
was oxidized an oily green and yellow, like the color of lubricant
floating in water, and between the liquor bottles lined along the
mirror I could see the man looking at the back of my head.
I turned on the bar stool and grinned at him. He waited for me to
speak. But I didn’t.
“I know you?” he said.
“Maybe. I used to live in New Orleans. I don’t anymore,” I said.
He spun the cue ball down the rail into the pocket, his eyes lowered.
“So you want to shoot some nine ball?” he said.
“I’d be poor competition.”
He didn’t raise his eyes or look at me again. He finished his beer and
sandwich at the bar, then put on his coat and stood at the screen door,
looking at the mist blowing under the colonnade and at the cars passing
in the neon-streaked wetness in front of Goldie’s bar. Clete Purcel
fired up his Cadillac and rattled down the street, turning at the end
of the block.
The man with the impish face and curls that hung on the back of his
neck stepped outside and breathed the air like a man out for a walk,
then got into a Honda and drove up Magazine toward the Garden District.
A moment later Clete Purcel pulled around the block and picked me up.
“Can you catch him?” I asked.
“I don’t have to. That’s Gunner Ardoin. He lives in a dump off
Tchoupitoulas,” he said.
“Gunner? He’s a button man?”
“No, he’s been in two or three of Fat Sammy Figorelli’s porn films. He
mules crystal in the projects, too.”
“Would he bust up a priest?” I asked.
Clete looked massive behind the steering wheel, his upper arms like
big, cured hams inside his tropical shirt. His hair was sandy, cut
short like a little boy’s. A diagonal scar ran through his left
eyebrow.
“Gunner?” he said. “It doesn’t sound like him. But a guy who
performs oral sex for a hometown audience? Who knows?”
We caught up with the Honda at Napoleon Avenue, then followed it
through a dilapidated neighborhood of narrow streets and shotgun houses
to Tchoupitoulas. The driver turned on a side street and parked under
a live oak in front of a darkened cottage. He walked up a shell
driveway and entered the back door with a key and turned on a light
inside.
Clete circled the block, then parked four houses up the street from
Gunner Ardoin’s place and cut the engine. He studied my face.
“You look a little wired,” he said.
“Not me,” I said.
The rain on the windshield made rippling shadows on his face and arms.
“I made my peace with N.O.P.D.,” he said.
“Really?”
“Most of the guys who did us dirt are gone. I let it be known I’m not
in the O.K. Corral business anymore. It makes life a lot easier,” he
said.
Through the overhang of the trees I could see the Mississippi levee at
the foot of the street and fog billowing up from the other side. Boat
lights were shining inside the fog so that the fog looked like
electrified steam rising off the water.
“Are you coming?” I asked.
He pulled an unlit cigarette from his mouth and threw it out the
window. “Why not?” he said.
We walked up Gunner Ardoin’s driveway, past a garbage can overflowing
with shrimp husks. Banana trees grew against the side of the house and
the leaves were slick and green and denting in the rainwater that slid
off the roof. I jerked the back screen off the latch and went into
Gunner Ardoin’s kitchen.
“You beat up Catholic priests, do you?” I said.
“What?” he said, turning from the sink with a metal coffeepot in his
hand. He wore draw-string, tin-colored workout pants and a ribbed
undershirt. His skin was white, clean of jailhouse art, his underarms
shaved. A weight set rested on the floor behind him.
“Lose the innocent monkey face, Gunner. You used a steel pipe on a
priest name of Jimmie Dolan,” Clete said.
Gunner set the coffeepot down on the counter. He studied both of us
briefly, then lowered his eyes and folded his arms on his chest, his
back resting against the sink. His nipples looked like small brown
dimes through the fabric of his undershirt. “Do what you have to do,”
he said.
“Better rethink that statement,” Clete said.
But Gunner only stared at the floor, his elbows cupped in his palms.
Clete looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“My name’s Dave Robicheaux. I’m a homicide detective with the Iberia
Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said, opening my badge holder. “But my
visit here is personal.”
“I didn’t beat up a priest. You think I did, then I’m probably in the
shitter. I can’t change that.” He began picking at the calluses on
his palm.
“You get that at a twelve-step session up at Angola?” Clete said.
Gunner Ardoin looked at nothing and suppressed a yawn.
“You raised Catholic?” I said.
He nodded, without lifting his eyes.
“You’re not bothered by somebody hospitalizing a priest, breaking his
bones, a decent man who never harmed anyone?” I said.
“I don’t know him. You say he’s a good guy, maybe he is. There’s a
lot of priests out there are good guys, right?” he said.
Then, like all career recidivists and fulltime smart-asses, he couldn’t
resist the temptation to show his contempt for the world of normal
people. He turned his face away from me, but I saw one eye glimmer
with mirth, a grin tug slightly at the corner of his mouth. “Maybe
they kept the altar boys away from him,” he said.
I stepped closer to him, my right hand balling. But Clete pushed me
aside. He picked up the metal coffeepot from the counter and smashed
it almost flat against the side of Gunner Ardoin’s head, then threw him
in a chair. Gunner folded his arms across his chest, a torn grin on
his mouth, blood trickling from his scalp.
“Have at it, fellows. I made both y’all back on Napoleon. I dialed
911 soon as I came in. My lawyer loves guys like you,” he said.
Through the front window I saw the emergency flasher on an N.O.P.D.
cruiser pull to the curb under the live oak tree that grew in Gunner
Ardoin’s front yard. A lone black female officer slipped her baton
into the ring on her belt and walked uncertainly toward the gallery,
her radio squawking incoherently in the rain.
I slept that night on Clete’s couch in his small apartment above his
PI. office on St. Ann. The sky was clear and pink at sunrise, the
streets in the Quarter puddled with water, the bougainvillea on Clete’s
balcony as bright as drops of blood. I shaved and dressed while Clete
was still asleep and walked past St. Louis Cathedral and through
Jackson Square to the Cafe du Monde, where I met Father Jimmie Dolan at
a table under the pavilion.
Although we had been friends and had bass fished together for two
decades, he remained in many ways a mysterious man, at least to me.
Some said he was a closet drunk who had done time in a juvenile
reformatory; others said he was gay and well known among the homosexual
community in New Orleans, although women were obviously drawn to him.
He had crewcut, blond good looks and the wide shoulders and tall, trim
physique of the wide-end receiver he had been at a Winchester,
Kentucky, high school. He didn’t talk politics but he got into trouble
regularly with authority on almost all levels, including six months in
a federal prison for trespassing on the School of the Americas property
at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
It had been three months since he had been waylaid in an alley behind
his church rectory and methodically beaten from his neck to the soles
of his feet by someone wielding a pipe with an iron bonnet screwed down
on the business end.
“Clete Purcel and I rousted a guy named Gunner Ardoin last night. I
think maybe he’s the guy who attacked you,” I said.
Father Jimmie had just bitten into a beignet and his mouth was smeared
with powdered sugar. He wore a tiny sapphire in his left ear-lobe. His
eyes were a deep green, thoughtful, his skin tan. He shook his head.
“That’s Phil Ardoin. Wrong guy,” he said.
“He said he didn’t know you.”
“I coached his high school basketball team.”
“Why would he lie?”
“With Phil it’s a way of life.”
An N.O.P.D. cruiser pulled to the curb out on Decatur and a black
female officer got out and fixed her cap on her head. She looked like
she was constructed of twigs, her sky blue shirt too large on her
frame, her pursed lips layered with red lipstick. Last night Clete had
said she reminded him of a black swizzle stick with a cherry stuck on
the end.
She threaded her way through the tables until she was abreast of ours.
The brass name tag on her shirt said C. ARCENEAUX.
“I thought I should give you a heads-up,” she said.
“How’s that?” I asked.
She looked off abstractly at the traffic on the street and at the
artists setting up their easels under the trees in Jackson Square.
“Take a walk with me,” she said.
I followed her down to a shady spot at the foot of the Mississippi
levee. “I tried to talk to the other man, what’s his name, Purcel, but
he seemed more interested in riding his exercise bike,” she said.
“He has blood pressure problems,” I said.
“Maybe more like a thinking problem,” she replied, looking idly down
the street.
“Can I help you with something?” I asked.
“Gunner Ardoin is filing an assault charge against you and your friend.
I think maybe he’s got a civil suit in mind. If I was you, I’d take
care of it.”
“Take care of it?” I said.
Her eyes squinted into the distance, as though the subject at hand had
already slipped out of her frame of reference. Her hair was black and
thick and cut short on her neck, her eyes a liquid brown.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“Don’t like people who mule crystal into the projects.”
“You work both the night and the morning watch?”
“I’m just up from meter maid. Low in standing, know what I mean, but
somebody got to do it. Tell the priest to spend more time with his
prayers,” she said, and started to walk back to her cruiser.
“What’s your first name?” I asked.
“Clotile,” she said.
Back at the table I watched her drive away into the traffic, the
lacquered brim of her cap low on her forehead. Meter maid, my ass, I
thought.
“Ever hear of Junior Crudup?” Father Jimmie asked.
“The blues man? Sure,” I said.
“What do you know about him?”
“He died in Angola,” I said.
“No, he disappeared in Angola. Went in and never came out. No record
at all of what happened to him,” Father Jimmie said. “I’d like for you
to meet his family.”
“Got to get back to New Iberia.”
“It’s Saturday,” he said.
“Nope,” I said.
“Junior’s granddaughter owns a twelve-string guitar she thinks might
have belonged to Leadbelly. Maybe you could take a look at it. Unless
you just really don’t have the time?” he said.
I followed Father Jimmie in my pickup truck into St. James Parish,
which lies on a ninety-mile corridor between Baton Rouge and New
Orleans that environmentalists have named Toxic Alley. We drove down a
state road south of the Mississippi levee through miles of sugarcane
and on through a community of narrow, elongated shacks that had been
built in the late nineteenth century. At the crossroads, or what in
south Louisiana is called a four-corners, was a ramshackle nightclub,
an abandoned company store with a high, tin-roofed gallery, a drive-by
daiquiri stand, and a solitary oil storage tank that was streaked with
corrosion at the seams, next to which someone had planted a tomato
garden.
Most of the people who lived at the four-corners were black. The rain
ditches and the weeds along the roadside were layered with bottles of
beer and pop cans and trash from fast-food restaurants. The people who
sat on the galleries of the shacks were either old or infirm or
children. I watched a car filled with teenagers run a stop sign and
fling a quart beer bottle on the side of the road, ten feet from where
an elderly woman was picking up litter from her lawn and placing it in
a vinyl bag.
Then we were out in the countryside again and the sky was as blue as a
robin’s egg, the sugarcane bending in the wind as far as the eye could
see, egrets perched like white sculptures on the backs of cattle in a
roadside pasture. But inside the loveliness of the day was another
element, discordant and invasive, the metallic reek of natural gas,
perhaps from a wellhead or a leaking connection at a pump station. Then
the wind shifted and it was gone and the sky was speckled with birds
rising from a pecan orchard and from the south I could smell the brassy
odor of a storm that was building over the Gulf.
I looked at my watch. No more than one hour with Father Jimmie
friends, I told myself. I wanted to get back to New Iberia and forget
about the previous night and the trouble with Gunner Ardoin.
Maybe it was time to let Father Jimmie take care of his own problems, I
thought. Some people loved adversity, got high on it daily, and
secretly despised those who would take it from them. That trait didn’t
necessarily go away because of a Roman collar.
The state road made a bend and suddenly the endless rows of sugarcane
ended. The fields were uncultivated now, empty of livestock, dotted
with what looked like settling ponds. The Crudup family lived down a
dirt lane in a white frame house with a wraparound veranda hung with
baskets of flowers. Three hundred yards behind the house was a woods
bordered with trees that were gray with dead leaves and the scales of
air vines, as though the treeline had been matted with premature
winterkill.
Father Jimmie had set the hook when he had mentioned Lead-belly’s name,
but I knew as we drove down the road toward the neat white house back
dropped by a poisoned woods that this trip was not about the recidivist
convict who wrote “Goodnight Irene” and “The Midnight Special” and who
today is almost forgotten.
In fact, I wondered if I, like Father Jimmie, could not wait to fill my
day with adversity in the way I had once filled it with Jim Beam and a
glass of Jax with strings of foam running down the sides.
When I cut my engine in front of the house, I took a Dr. Pepper from
the cooler on the seat and raked the ice off the can and drank it empty
before stepping out onto the yard.
Chapter 2.
Junior Crudup’s granddaughter had a face like a goldfish, light skin
that was dusted with freckles, and glasses that turned her eyes into
watery brown orbs. She sat in a stuffed chair, fanning herself with a
magazine, her rings of fat bulging against her dress, waiting for me to
finish examining the Stella guitar that had lain propped in a corner of
her attic for thirty years. The strings were gone, the tuning keys
stiff with rust, the sound hole coated with cobweb. I turned the
guitar on its belly and looked at three words that were scratched into
the back of the neck: Huddle Love Sarie.
“Leadbelly’s real name was Huddie Ledbetter. His wife was named
Sarie,” I said.
Junior Crudup’s granddaughter looked through a side window at two
children playing on a rope swing that was suspended from a pecan tree.
Her name was Doris. She kept straightening her shoulders, as though a
great weight were pressing on her lungs. “How much it wort’?” she
asked.
“I couldn’t say,” I replied.
“Four or five songs were in the bottom of the guitar case, each with
Junior’s signature,” Father Jimmie said.
“Yeah, what they wort’?” Doris Crudup asked.
“You’d have to ask somebody else,” I said.
She gave Father Jimmie a look, then got up from her chair and took my
coffee cup into the kitchen, although I had not finished drinking the
coffee in it.
“Her husband died three years ago. Last month the social worker cut
off her welfare,” Father Jimmie said.
“Why?”
“The social worker felt like it. That’s the way it works. Take a walk
with me,” he said.
“I need to get back home.”
“You have time for this,” he said.
We went outside, into the sunlit, rain-washed loveliness of the fall
afternoon. The pecan tree in the side yard puffed with wind and a
yellow dog rolled on its back in the dirt while the children swung back
and forth above it on their rope swing. But as I followed Father
Jimmie down an incline toward the woods in back I could feel the
topography changing under my feet, as though I were walking on a
sponge.
“What’s that smell?” I said.
“You tell me.” He tore a handful of grass from the soil and held the
roots up to my nose. “They truck it in from all over the South.
Doris’s lungs are as much good to her as rotted cork. People around
here carry buckets in their cars because of their children’s constant
diarrhea.”
I held onto the trunk of a withered persimmon tree and looked at the
soles of my shoes. They were slick with a black-green substance, as
though I had walked across a factory floor. We crossed a board plank
spanning a rain ditch. The water was covered with an iridescent sheen
that seemed to be rising in chains of bubbles from the bottom of the
ditch. Perhaps twenty settling ponds, layered over with loose dirt,
were strung along the edge of the woods, each of them crusted with a
dried viscous material that looked like an orange scab.
“Is this Doris’s property?” I said.
“It belonged to her grandfather. But twenty years ago Doris’s cousin
made his “X’ on a bill of sale that had Junior’s name typed on it. The
cousin and the waste management company that bought the land both claim
he’s the Junior Crudup of record and Doris is out of luck.”
“I’m not following you.”
“No one knows what happened to the real Junior Crudup. He went into
Angola and never came out. There’s no documentation on his death or of
his release. Figure that one out.”
“I don’t want to.”
Father Jimmie studied my face. “These people here don’t have many
friends,” he said.
I slipped the flats of my hands in my back pockets and scuffed at the
ground with one shoe, like a third-base coach who had run out of
signals.
“Think I’ll pass,” I said.
“Suit yourself.”
Father Jimmie picked up a small stone and side-armed it into the woods.
I heard it clatter among the tree trunks. Birds should have risen from
the canopy into the sky, but there was no movement inside the tree
limbs.
“Who owns this waste management company?” I asked.
“A guy named Merchie Flannigan.”
“Jumpin’ Merchie Flannigan? From New Iberia?” I said.
“One and the same. How’d he get that name, anyway?” Father Jimmie
said.
“Think of rooftops,” I said.
As I drove back to New Iberia, through Morgan City, and down East Main
to my rented house on Bayou Teche, I tried not to think anymore of
Father Jimmie and the black people in St. James Parish whose community
had become a petro-chemical dumping ground. As sad as their story was,
in the state of Louisiana it wasn’t exceptional. In fact, on
television, the current governor had threatened to investigate the tax
status of some young Tulane lawyers who had filed suit against several
waste management companies on the basis of environmental racism. The
old plantation oligarchy was gone. But its successors did business in
the same fashion with baseball bats.
I fixed an early supper and ate it on an ancient green picnic table in
the backyard. Across the bayou kids were playing tag football in City
Park and smoke from meat fires hung in the trees. In the deepening
shadows I thought I could hear voices inside my head: my adopted
daughter, Alafair, away at Reed College; my deceased wife Bootsie; and
a black man named Batist, to whom I had sold my bait and boat rental
business south of town. I didn’t do well on Saturday afternoons. In
fact, I wasn’t doing well on any afternoon.
On some weekends I drove out to the dock and bait shop to see him. We’d
fish the swamp for bass and sac-a-lait, then head home at sunset, the
cypress trees riffling like green lace in the wind, the water back in
the coves bloodred in the sun’s afterglow. But across the road and up
the incline from the dock were the burned remains of the house my
father had built out of notched and pegged timbers during the
Depression, the home where I had lived with my wife and daughter, and I
had a hard time looking at it without feeling an indescribable sense of
loss and anger.
The inspector from the fire department called it “electrical failure.”
I wished I could accept the loss in terms as clinical as those. But
the truth was I had trusted the electrical rewiring on my home to a
fellow AA. member, one who had stopped attending meetings. He filled
the walls with cheap switches that he did not screw-wrap and inserted
fourteen-gauge wire into twelve-gauge receptacles. The fire started
inside the bedroom wall and burned the house to the ground in less than
an hour.
I went into the house and looked up Merchie Flannigan’s name in the
directory. I had known his parents in both New Orleans and New Iberia,
but I’d never had reason to take official notice of Merchie until I was
a patrolman near the Iberville Welfare Project off Basin Street, back
in the days when cops still rang their batons off street curbs to
signal one another and white kids would take your head off with
water-filled garbage cans dropped from a five-story rooftop.
Long before Hispanic and black caricatures acted out self-created roles
as gangsters on MTVj white street gangs in New Orleans fought with
chains, steel pipes, and zip guns over urban territory that a
self-respecting Bedouin wouldn’t live in. During the 1950s, the
territorial war was between the Cats and the Frats. Frats lived
uptown, in the Garden District and along St. Charles Avenue. Cats
lived in the Irish Channel, or downtown or in the projects or out by
the Industrial Canal. Cats were usually Irish or Italian or a mixture
of both, parochial school bust-outs who rolled drunks and homosexuals
and group-stomped their adversaries, giving no quarter and asking for
none in return.
In a back-alley, chain-swinging rumble, their ferocity and raw physical
courage could probably be compared only to that of their historical
cousins in Southie, the Five Points, and Hell’s Kitchen. Along Bourbon
Street, after twelve on Saturday nights, the Dixieland bands would pack
up their instruments and be replaced by rock ‘n’ roll groups that
played until sunrise. The kids spilling out the front doors of Sharkey
Bonnano’s Dream Room, drinking paper cup beer and smoking cigarettes on
the sidewalks, their motorcycle caps and leather jackets rippling with
neon, made most tourists wet their pants.
But Jumpin’ Merchie Flannigan could not be easily categorized as a
blue-collar street kid who had made good in the larger world. In fact,
I always had suspicions that Jumpin’ Merchie joined a gang for reasons
very different from his friends in the Iberville. Unlike most of them,
he was not only streetwise but good in school and naturally
intelligent. Merchie’s problem really wasn’t Merchie. It was his
parents.
In New Iberia Merchie’s father was thought of as a decent but weak and
ineffectual man whose rundown religious store was almost an extension
of its owner’s personality. Many nights a sympathetic police officer
would take Mr. Flannigan out the back door of the Frederic Hotel bar
and drive him to his house by the railroad tracks. Merchie’s mother
tried to compensate for the father’s failure by constantly treating
Merchie as a vulnerable child, protecting him, making him wear short
pants at school until he was in the fifth grade, denying him entry into
a world that to her was as unloving as her marriage. But I always felt
her protectiveness was of a selfish kind, and in reality she was not
only sentimental rather than loving, she could also be terribly
cruel.
After the family moved to New Orleans and took up life in the
Iberville, Merchie became known as a mama’s boy who was anybody’s
punching bag or hard-up pump. But at age fifteen, he threw a black kid
from the Gird Town Deuces off a fire escape onto the cab of a passing
produce truck, then outraced a half dozen cops across a series of
rooftops, finally leaping out into space, plummeting two stories
through the ceiling of a massage parlor.
His newly acquired nickname cost him a broken leg and a one-bit in the
Louisiana reformatory, but Jumpin’ Merchie Flannigan came back to Canal
Street and the Iberville Project with magic painted on him.
When I called him at home he was gregarious and ingratiating, and said
he wanted to see me. In fact, he said it with such sincerity that I
believed him.
His home, of which he was very proud, was a gray architectural
monstrosity designed to look like a medieval castle, inside acres of
pecan and live oak trees, all of it in an unzoned area that mixed pipe
yards and welding shops with thoroughbred horse barns and red-clay
tennis courts.
He greeted me in the front yard, athletic, trim, wearing pleated tan
slacks, half-top, slip-on boots, and a polo shirt, his long hair so
blond it was almost white, a V-shaped receded area at the part the only
sign of age I could see in him. The yard was covered in shadow now,
the chrysanthemums denting in the wind, the sky veined with
electricity. In the midst of it all Merchie seemed to glow not so much
with health and prosperity as confidence that God was truly in His
heaven and there was justice in the world for a kid from the
Iberville.
He meshed his fingers, as though making a tent, then pointed the tips
at me.
“You were out at the Crudup farm in St. James Parish today,” he
said.
“Who told you?” I asked.
“I’m trying to clean up the place,” he replied.
“Think it might take a hydrogen bomb?”
“So give me the gen on it,” he said.
“The Crudup woman says she was cheated out of the title.”
“Look, Dave, I bought the property three years ago at a bankruptcy
sale. I’ll check into it. How about some trust here?”
It was hard to stay mad at Merchie. I knew people in the oil business
who were openly ecstatic at the prospect of Mideastern wars or subzero
winters in the northern United States, but Merchie had never been one
of them.
“Been out of town?” I said.
“Yeah, Afghanistan. You believe it?”
“Shooting at the Taliban?”
He smiled with his eyes but didn’t reply.
“The woman in St. James Parish? Her grandfather was Junior Crudup,” I
said.
“AnR&Bguy?”
“Yeah, one of the early ones. He did time with Leadbelly. He played
with Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner,” I said. But I could see him
losing interest in the subject. “I’d better go. Your place looks
nice. Give me some feedback later on the Crudup situation, will you?”
I said.
“My favorite police officer,” I heard a woman say.
The voice of Theodosha Flannigan was like a melancholy recording out of
the past, the kind that carries fond memories but also some that are
better forgotten. She was a member of the Lejeune family in Franklin,
down the Teche, people whose wealth and lawn parties were legendary in
southwest Louisiana, and she still used their name rather than
Merchie’s. She was tall, darkly beautiful, with hollow cheeks and long
legs like a model’s, her southern accent exaggerated, her jeans and
tied-up black hair and convertible automobiles an affectation that
belied the conservative and oligarchical roots she came from.
But in spite of her corn bread accent and the pleasure she seemed to
take in portraying herself as an irreverent and neurotic southern
woman, she had another side, one she never engaged in conversation
about. She had written two successful screenplays and a trilogy of
crime novels containing elements that were undeniably lyrical. Although
her novels had never won an Edgar award, her talent was arguably
enormous.
“How you doin’, Theo?” I said.
“Stay for coffee or a cold drink?” she said.
“You know me, always on the run,” I said.
She curled her fingers around the limb of a mimosa tree and propped one
moccasin-clad foot against the trunk. Her breasts rose and fell
against her blouse.
“How about diet Dr. Pepper on the rocks, with cherries in it?” she
said.
Don’t hang around. Get away now, I heard a voice inside me say.
“I’m just about to fix some sherbet with strawberries. We’d love to
have you join us, Dave,” Merchie said.
“Sounds swell,” I said, and dropped my eyes, wondering at the price I
was willing to pay in order not to be alone.
On the way into the backyard Theodosha touched my arm. “I’m sorry
about your loss. I hope you’re doing all right these days,” she
said.
But I had no memory of her sending a sympathy card when Boot-she
died.
I went to an early Mass the next morning, then bought a copy of the
Times-Picayune and drank coffee at the picnic table in the backyard and
read the newspaper. I read three paragraphs into an article about an
errant bomb falling into a community of mud brick huts in Afghanistan,
then closed the paper and watched a group of children throwing a red
Frisbee back and forth under the oak trees in the park. A speedboat
full of teenagers roared down the bayou, swirling a trough back and
forth between both banks, splintering the air with a deafening sound. I
heard my portable phone tinkle softly by my thigh.
The operator asked if I would accept a collect call from Clete
Purcel.
“Yes,” I said.
“Streak, I’m in the zoo,” Clete shouted.
In the background I could hear voices echoing down stone corridors or
inside cavernous rooms.
“What did you say?”
“I’m in Central Lock-Up. They busted me for assaulting Gunner
Ardoin. I feel like I’ve been arrested for spraying Lysol on a toilet
bowl.”
“Why haven’t you bonded out?” I asked.
“Nig and Willie aren’t answering my calls.”
I tried to make sense out of what he was saying. For years Clete had
chased down bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. He
should have been out of jail with a signature.
I started to speak, but he cut me off. “Gunner is a grunt for Fat
Sammy Fig, and Fat Sammy is connected up with every major league piece
of shit in Louisiana. I think Nig and Willie don’t want trouble with
the wrong people. Arraignment isn’t until Tuesday morning. Been down
to Central Lock-Up lately?”
I took the four-lane through Morgan City into New Orleans. But I
didn’t go directly to the jail. Instead, I drove up St. Charles
Avenue, then over toward Tchoupitoulas and parked in front of Gunner
Ardoin’s cottage. His Honda was in the driveway. I walked down to a
corner store and bought a quart of chocolate milk and a prepackaged ham
sandwich and sat down on Gunner’s front steps and began eating the
sandwich while children roller-skated past me under the trees.
I heard someone open the door behind me.
“What the fuck you think you’re doin’?” Gunner’s voice said.
“Oh, hi. I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said.
“What?” he said. He was bare chested and barefoot, and wore only a
pair of pajama bottoms string-tied under his navel. The breeze blew
from the back of the cottage through the open door. “What?” he
repeated.
“Toking up kind of early today?”
“So call the DEA.”
“Father Jimmie Dolan was your basketball coach. Why did you say you
didn’t know him?”
‘”Cause I can’t remember every guy I knew in high school with a whistle
hanging out of his mouth.”
“Father Jimmie says it wasn’t you who attacked him, Gunner. But I
think somebody told you to bust him up, and you pieced off the job to
somebody else. Probably because you still have qualms.”
“Is this because I filed on your friend?”
“No, it’s because you’re a shit bag and you’re going to drop those
charges or I’ll be back here tonight and jam a chainsaw up your ass.”
“Look, man ” he began.
“No, you look,” I said, rising to my feet, shoving him backward through
the door into the living room. “Fat Sammy is behind the job on Father
Jimmie ?”
“No,” he said.
I shoved him again. He tripped over a footstool and fell backward on
the floor. I pulled back my sports coat and removed my .45 from its
clip-on holster and squatted next to him. I pulled back the slide and
chambered a round, then pointed the muzzle at his face.
“Look at my eyes and tell me I won’t do it,” I said.
I saw the breath seize in his throat and the blood go out of his
cheeks. He stretched his head back, turning his face sideways, away
from the .45.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Please.”
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.
“See, Junior run the first year he was on the farm. Gunbull put a half
cup of birdshot in his back, but he whipped a mule into the water and
held onto its tail till it swum him all the way acrost the Miss’sippi,”
Hogman said, flinging a board into the fire, the sparks fanning across
the bayou’s surface. “A young white doctor on the other side picked
the shot out of his back and tole Junior he had a choice he’d give
Junior ten dollars and forget he was there or the doctor would carry
him on back to the penitentiary.
“Junior said, “They’ll whup me with the black Betty if I go back.”
“The doctor say, “No, they ain’t. I’m gonna make sure they ain’t.”
“The doctor carried him on back to the farm and tole the warden he was
gonna come see Junior every mont’, and if Junior was whupped, the
doctor was gonna have the warden’s job.
“When Junior come out of the infirmary, they sent him to the Red Hat
Gang. There was two captains running the Red Hat Gang then, the
Latiolais brothers. First day they tole Junior they knowed they
couldn’t whup him, but by God they was gonna kill him.
“See, there was several tings special about the Red Hat Gang. Everybody
wore black-and-white stripes and straw hats that was painted red. But
didn’t nobody walk. From cain’t-see to cain’t-see, it was double-time,
hit-it-and-git-it, roll, nigger, roll.
“The Latiolais brothers was both drunkards. One of them might drink
corn liquor under a tree and take a nap, then wake up and point his
finger at a man and say, “Take off, boy.” The next ting you’d hear was
that shotgun popping.
“If a man fell out under the sun, he’d get put on an anthill. If a man
was dogging it on the wheelbarrow, the captain would say, “I need me a
big wet rock.” There was a mess of rocks piled up down in the
shallows, see. A convict would have to find a big one, a twenty-five
pounder maybe, wet it down, and run it back up the slope to the captain
befo’ it was dry. Course, the faster the convict run, the quicker the
rock got dried.
“So one day the captain tole Junior he was dogging it and he better get
his ass down on the river and bring the captain the biggest wet rock he
could find. Now, them rocks was a good half mile away and the captain
knowed Junior was gonna be one wore-out nigger by the end of the day.
“Except Junior toted the rock on up the slope, then when the captain
wasn’t looking, he ducked behind some gum trees and pissed all over it.
Then he holds up the rock to the captain and says, “This wet enough for
you, boss?”
“The captain touches the rock and looks at his hand and smells it. He
cain’t believe what Junior just done. Everybody on the Red Hat Gang
started laughing. They was trying to hide it, looking at the ground
and each other, but they just couldn’t hold it inside. It was so funny
they thought for a minute even the captain would laugh. They was sure
wrong about that.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Hogman wore a strap undershirt that hung like rags on his body. His
eyes took on a melancholy cast.
“The captain took Junior to the sweatbox on Camp A. It was an iron box
no bigger than a coffin, standing straight up on a concrete pad. They
kept that boy in there seven days, in the middle of summer, no way to
go to the bat’ room except a bucket between his legs,” he said.
“What became of Junior?” I asked.
“Don’t know. He was in and out of “Gola a couple of times. Maybe they
buried him in the levee. I reckon there’s hundreds in that levee. I
don’t study on it no mo’,” he said.
His eyes seemed to focus on nothing, his forehead glistening in the
firelight.
Early the next morning I picked up my mail in my pigeon hole at the
department and sorted through it at my desk. In it was an invitation,
written in a beautiful hand on silver-embossed stationery.
Dear Dave,
Can you come to Fox Run Saturday afternoon? It’s lawn tennis and
drinks and probably a few self-satisfied people talking about their
money. In fact, it’s probably going to be a drag. But that’s life on
the bayou, right? Merchie and I do want to see you. Call me. Please.
It’s been a long time.
Until then, Theodosha
A long time since what? I thought.
But I knew the answer, and the memory was one I tried to push out of my
mind. I dropped the invitation into a drawer and glanced out the
window at a car with two men in it, pulling to the curb in front of the
courthouse. The driver wore a black suit and a Roman collar. His
passenger twisted his head about, his face bloodless, like someone on
his way to the scaffold.
Two minutes later the pair of them were at my door.
“Phil came to the church and made his reconciliation,” Father Jimmie
said, closing the door behind him. “If you don’t mind, he’d like to
talk over some things with you. Maybe in private.”
Gunner Ardoin, whom Father Jimmie referred to as Phil, looked at me
briefly, then out the window at a trusty mowing the grass.
“You want to tell me something, Gunner?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” he replied.
Father Jimmie nodded and left the room. I told Gunner to take a seat
in front of my desk. He breathed through his mouth, as though he were
inside a walk-in freezer.
“I’m doing this for Father Dolan,” he said.
“You’re doing it to save your ass,” I said.
His eyes didn’t look at me but his face hardened.
“You went to confession?” I said.
“They call it reconciliation now. But, yeah, I went,” he said.
“So who put the contract on Father Jimmie?”
“I got a phone call. From a guy named Ray. He don’t have another
name. He just said I was supposed to take care of Father Dolan. When
I got a delivery to make, Ray is the guy who calls me. I told Ray I
didn’t do stuff like that. He says I do it or I find a new source of
income. So .I called up a guy. He rolls queers in the Quarter and at
some sleaze joints on Airline. For a hundred bucks he does other kinds
of work, too.”
“Do you have any idea what you did to a decent and fine man?”
“You want the guy’s name?”
“No, I want Ray’s last name and I want the guy Ray works for.”
“Man, you don’t understand. Father Dolan’s got enemies all over New
Orleans. He’s trying to shut down drive-by daiquiri windows and trash
incinerators and these guys who been dumping sludge out in the river
parishes. He told the Times-Picayune these right-to-life people were
committing a sin by putting these women’s pictures and names on the
Internet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“These anti-abortion nutcases. They take pictures of women going into
abortion clinics, then put the pictures and the women’s names and
addresses on the Internet. Father Dolan spoke up about it, a Catholic
priest. How many enemies does one guy need?”
“Our time is about up, Gunner,” I said.
“The queer-bait from the Quarter was supposed to scare Father Dolan,
not go ape shit with a pipe. Hey, are you listening? It’s on the
street I snitched off Sammy Fig. You must have given up my name to Fat
Sammy.”
“Sammy says he never heard of you. You shouldn’t have anything to
worry about.”
“I knew it.” His face turned gray. He wiped his mouth and looked at
the trusty gardener clipping a hedge outside the window. “Why you
staring at me like that?” he said.
“I think you’re using the seal of the confessional to keep Father Dolan
from testifying against you.”
“Maybe that was true at first. But I’m still sorry for what I done.
He’s a good guy. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
I glanced at my watch. “We’re done here. So long, Gunner,” I said.
He rose from his chair and walked to the door, then stopped, his
shoulders slightly stooped, his impish features waiting in
anticipation, as though an act of mercy might still be extended to
him.
“What is it?” I said.
“Call Sammy Fig. Tell him I didn’t rat him out.”
“What’s Ray’s last name?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Adios,”I said.
I went back to reading my morning mail. When I looked up again, he was
gone. A moment later Father Jimmie stuck his head in the door, his
disappointment obvious.
“You couldn’t help Phil out?” he asked.
The next day I called the warden’s office at Angola Penitentiary and
asked an administrative assistant to do a records search under the name
of Clarence “Junior” Crudup.
“When was he here?” the assistant asked.
“In the forties or fifties.”
“Our records don’t go back that far. You’ll have to go through Baton
Rouge for that.”
“This guy went in but didn’t come out.”
“Say again?”
“He was never released. No one knows what happened to him.”
“Try Point Lookout.”
“The cemetery?”
“Nobody gets lost in here. They either go out through the front gate
or they get planted in the gum trees.”
“How about under the levee?”
He hung up on me.
At noon I walked past the whitewashed and crumbling brick crypts in St.
Peter’s Cemetery to Main Street and ate lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria,
then returned to the office just as the sun went behind a bank of
thunderheads and the wind came up hard in the south and began blowing
the trees along the train tracks. There were two telephone messages
from Theodosha Flannigan in my mailbox. I dropped them both in the
dispatcher’s wastebasket.
At 4:00 P.M.” in the middle of a downpour, I saw her black Lexus pull
to the curb in front of the courthouse. She popped open an umbrella
and raced for the front of the building, water splashing on her calves
and the bottom of her pink skirt.
I went out into the corridor to meet her, feigning a confidence that
masked my desire to avoid seeing her again.
“Did you get my invitation?” she said, her face and hair bright with
rain.
“Yes, thanks for sending it,” I replied.
“I called earlier. A couple of times.”
Two deputies at the water cooler were looking at us, their eyes
traveling the length of her figure.
“Come on in the office, Theo. It’s been a little busy today,” I
said.
I closed the door behind us. “If you can’t come Saturday, I
understand. I need to talk to you about something else, though,” she
said.
“Oh?”
“I’ve got a problem. It comes in bottles. Not just booze. Six months
ago I started using again. My psychiatrist gave me the keys to the
candy store,” she said.
Her voice was wired, the whites of her eyes threaded with tiny veins.
She let out a breath in a ragged sigh. Her breath smelled like whiskey
and mint leaves, and not from the previous night. “Can I sit down?”
she asked.
“Yes, I’m sorry. Please,” I said, and looked over my shoulder at Helen
Soileau passing in the corridor.
“Dave, I have little men with drills and saws working in my head all
day. Sometimes in the middle of the night, too,” Theodosha said.
“There’s a meeting tonight at Solomon House, across from old New Iberia
High,” I said.
“I’ve been in treatment twice. I was in analysis for seven years. I
get a year of sobriety, then things start happening in my head again.
My most recent psychiatrist shot himself last week. In Lafayette, in
Girard Park, while his kids were playing on the swings. I keep
thinking I had something to do with it.”
“Where’s Merchie in all this?”
“He makes excuses for me. He doesn’t complain. I couldn’t ask for
more. You know, he’s not entirely normal himself.” She took a
handkerchief from her purse and blotted the moisture from her eyes. “I
don’t know what I’m doing here. Merchie’s bothered because you think
he’s dumping oil waste around poor people’s homes. He looks up to you.
Can’t you come out to Fox Run Saturday?”
“I’m kind of jammed up these days.”
“How long were you drunk?”
“Fifteen years, more or less.”
“You didn’t want to drink when your wife died?”
“No,” I said, my eyes leaving hers.
“I don’t know how anybody stays sober. I feel dirty all over.”
“Why?”
“Who cares? Some people are born messed up,” she said. “I’m sorry for
coming in here like this. I’m going to find a dark, hermetically
sealed, air-conditioned lounge and dissolve myself inside a vodka
collins.”
“Some people just ride out the hangover. Today can be the first inning
in a new ballgame.”
“Good try,” she said, rising from her chair.
I thought she was about to leave. Instead, she fixed her gaze on me,
waiting. Her hair had the black-purplish sheen of silk, the tips damp
and curled around her throat.
“Is there something else?” I asked.
“What about Saturday?” Her face softened as she waited for an
answer.
Chapte
4.
That evening, at twilight, a Buick carrying three teenage girls roared
around a curve on Loreauville Road, passed a truck, caromed off a
roadside mailbox, then righted itself and slowed behind a school bus as
someone in the backseat flung a box of fast-food trash and plastic cups
and straws out the window. The truck driver, a religious man who kept
a holy medal suspended from a tiny chain on his rearview mirror, would
say later he thought the girls had settled down and would probably
follow the church bus at a reasonable speed into Loreauville, five
miles up Bayou Teche.
Instead, the driver crossed the double-yellow stripe again, into
oncoming traffic, then tried to cut in front of the church bus when she
realized safe harbor would never again be hers.
Helen Soileau, four uniformed deputies, two ambulances, and a firetruck
were already at the accident scene when I arrived. The girls were
still inside the Buick. The telephone pole they had hit was cut in
half at the base and the downed wires were hanging in an oak tree. The
Buick had slid on its roof farther down the embankment, splintering a
white fence before coming to rest by the side of a fish pond, where the
gas tank had exploded and burned with heat so intense the water in the
pond boiled.
“You run the tag yet?” I said.
“It’s registered to a physician in Loreauville. The baby-sitter says
he and his wife are playing golf. I left a message at the country
club,” Helen said.
She wore her shield on a black cord around her neck. The wind shifted,
blowing across the barns and pastures of the horse farm where the Buick
had burned. But the odor the wind carried was not of horses and
alfalfa. Helen held a wadded-up piece of Kleenex to her nose,
snuffing, as though she had a cold. Two firemen used the jaws-of-life
to pry apart the window on the driver’s side of the Buick, then began
pulling the remains of the driver out on the grass.
“The bus driver says the Buick was swinging all over the road?” I
asked.
“Yep, they were having a grand time of it. Life on the bayou in 2002,”
Helen said.
The water oaks along the Teche had already lost their leaves and their
branches looked skeletal against the flattened, red glow of the sun on
the western horizon. A spruce green Lincoln with two people in the
front seat approached us from the direction of Loreauville, slowing in
the dusk, pulling onto the shoulder. The driver got out, looking over
the top of his automobile at the scene taking place by the fish pond,
his face stenciled with a sadness that no cop, at least no decent one,
ever wishes to deal with.
I reached through the open window of Helen’s cruiser and picked up a
pair of polyethylene gloves and a vinyl garbage bag.
“Where you going?” she said.
“Litter patrol,” I replied.
I walked back along the road for two hundred yards or so, past a line
of cedar trees that bordered another horse farm, then crossed the road
to the opposite embankment where a spray of freshly thrown trash
bloomed in the grass. I picked up chicken bones, half-eaten dinner
rolls, soiled paper napkins, a splattered container of mashed potatoes
and gravy, three blue plastic cups, three lids and straws, and broken
pieces of a plastic wrap that had been used to seal the lids on the
cups.
There were still grains of ice in the cups, along with the unmistakable
smell of sugar, lemon juice, and rum. I found a paper sack and placed
the cups and lids in it, then deposited the sack in the garbage bag.
When I got back to the accident scene, Helen was talking to the father
and mother of the girl who had driven the Buick. The father’s face was
dilated with rage as he pointed his finger at the drivers of both the
truck and the church bus, both of whom had said his daughter was
speeding and crossing the double-yellow stripe.
“Maybe you boxed her off, too. Why would she go off the left-hand
embankment unless you wouldn’t let her back in line? Answer me that,
goddammit,” he said.
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