DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields (12 page)

Max waited until the vestibule was empty, then darted up the side stairs into the choir area. Ah, that was easy enough, he thought, looking down on the half dozen or so old people praying in the pews. Through a side window he saw lightning leap above the adjacent rooftops, illuminating the fire escape and the alleyway down below. Max did not like lightning. It brought back memories and catechism lessons he saw no point in reliving. He blew his nose softly, unbuttoned his raincoat, and unsnapped the carbine from the sling under his armpit. When he sat down in a chair among a pile of hymnals in the corner he unconsciously glanced upward at the celestial paintings on the ceiling, then quickly shifted his attention back to the nave of the church before he got lost in troubling thoughts that would be of no help in concluding the business at hand.

He surveyed the marble pillars, the tapestry-draped banisters on the balconies, the apse over the altar, the hand-carved pulpit. The place looked like it had been transported from the Middle Ages and dropped from a hundred-thousand feet into the middle of a slum, he thought. Even the parishioners could have been street beggars out of the fifteenth century. All the place needed was Quasimodo swinging on the bells. What was the matter with these people? Hadn't they heard of modern times? And how about this Father Dolan, threatening him with physical violence over the telephone? Now, that was a sad state of affairs, an Irish-American priest berating a man who had worked in the service of the IRA. Pitiful, Max thought.

"What are you doing, Mister?" a little boy's voice said.

Oh shite, he thought.

"Are you here for choir practice?" the child said. He was not over nine or ten and wore long pants and a white shirt with a tie. His hair was wet and freshly combed, his nails pink and trimmed.

Max closed his raincoat, covering his carbine. "Choir practice? Not exactly," he said.

"Then what are you doing?"

"Examining the roof for rain leaks. I work for the bishop."

"How come you're all wet?"

"I told you. Now get lost."

"I'm here with my mother for Father Jimmie's choir practice. I don't have to do what you say."

"Now, you listen, you malignant pygmy " Max said.

"Screw you," the little boy said.

Max coughed violently into his palm. His head was splitting, his nose running. "Here's five dollars. Go buy yourself a hot chocolate," he said.

"Screw you twice," the little boy said.

"How would you like your dork stuffed in a light socket?" Max said.

"Make it ten bucks," the little boy said.

"What?"

The little boy peered over the balcony. "Here comes Father Dolan now. Ten bucks or I start screaming," he said.

Max shoved the money in the boy's hands and watched him run down the stairs. The little bastard, he thought. I hope the vendor pours Liquid Drano in his hot chocolate.

Then Max heard footsteps, many of them, clopping up the wooden stairs. Either this is not happening or I'm being fucked with a garden rake, he thought.

He jerked open the window on the fire escape and climbed outside into rain that was now mixed with hail, closing the window halfway behind him. The icy pellets pounded his head, scalded his face, and slid down his coat collar inside his clothes. And if that wasn't enough, a bolt of lightning crashed into the alley, filling the air with the stench of sulphur and scorched electrical wiring. Jesus God, why was this being visited upon him? Then he looked down below and realized there were no steps below the fire escape, only rusted fastenings in the stone wall where a steel extension had once been in place. He was trapped like a rain-soaked parrot on a perch in an electrical storm, while inside the church Father Dolan's parishioners were dry and warm, passing out hymnals to one another.

Well, maybe it was time to spread the discomfort around a little bit, forget neat and tidy and simply splatter the good father's porridge and be on his way, Max thought. Why not? Click off the safety, burn the whole magazine if need be, then haul ass right through the choir and on downstairs into the street. Father Dolan's singing parishioners would be too busy climbing under the furniture or shaking the crab cakes out of their drawers to worry about describing Max Coll to the authorities.

He knelt down in a shooting position on the fire escape, squinted into the carbine's scope, and saw the priest's magnified face swim into the crosshairs. In fact, the magnification of the priest's head was so great Max could not make out detail but see only hair and skin and perhaps just a touch of beard stubble. The hail clattered and danced like mothballs on the steel mesh of the fire escape, stinging the backs of Max's hands, drumming softly on his cap.

The carbine was loaded with soft-nose rounds and two of them impacting inside the priest's face would undoubtedly blow the back of his head into the wall like pieces from a broken watermelon. Max ground his molars, breathed hard through his nose, and felt his finger tighten inside the trigger guard. Squeeze it off, he told himself. Do it, do it, do it.

But he froze again, his hands trembling, just as they had trembled inside the confessional.

He was disgusted with himself. As he started to get to his feet, the silencer on the muzzle of the carbine scraped against the window glass. Suddenly he was not only looking straight into the priest's face, the priest was actually charging toward him.

There was no place to run. The priest jerked the window open, ripped the carbine from Max's hands, then gripped the stock with both hands and drove the steel-plated butt into Max's mouth. Max felt his lip burst like a grape against his teeth, then the guardrail behind him peeled from its fastenings. In the wink of an eye he was plunging backward through space, his arms outspread, preparing himself for the impact on the brick-paved alley below.

Instead, he crashed into the middle of an opened Dumpster loaded to the gunnels with rotten produce and the leftovers from a parish shrimp boil. He stared upward from the garbage like a crucified man, right into the angry face of Father Dolan, who peered down at him from the edge of the broken fire escape. Max extracted himself from the softness of garbage that seemed to be sucking him into its maw and began pulling himself over the side of the Dumpster.

"Don't forget this," he heard Father Dolan call.

Max looked up in time to see his carbine plummeting through the rain and hail, just before it bounced off his uplifted face.

On Thursday morning I took the four-lane into Franklin, then checked in with the St. Mary Parish Sheriff's Department and was given directions to the home of William Guillot. It was a lovely old Victorian house, located in a tree-covered, residential neighborhood, one of deep green lawns and hydrangeas and impatiens blooming in the shade and wide galleries hung with porch swings. But the gardener told me Guillot wasn't there and I could probably find him at the subdivision he was building not far from the four-lane.

It wasn't hard to find. Five hundred yards from the road, where two tin-roofed farmhouses had once stood amidst cedars and poplar trees, bulldozers had scoured a thirty-acre wound in the earth for the construction of houses that looked as if they had been designed by a man with delirium tremens. At the entrance to the subdivision-in-progress a workman was spreading kerosene on a huge pile of oaks and slash pines that had been recently lopped into segments with chainsaws.

I parked my cruiser in a cul-du-sac flanked by three framed structures that several electricians were wiring. The man I had seen throwing firecrackers in the air by Castille Lejeune's horse barns was talking with a truncated, moon-faced workman in a yellow hard hat.

When the workman saw me, he turned his face away, mounted the steps of a framed structure, and busied himself with a nest of wiring hanging from the back of a breaker box.

William Guillot wore shined cowboy boots and dark blue western slacks with high pockets and a gray snap-button shirt. He seemed to be one of those men to whom age was an asset and maturity a source of power and confidence. His skin was grainy, his profile rugged; in fact, he had all the handsome characteristics of the archetypical western horseman, except for a purple birthmark that was like dye that had leaked from his hairline into the corner of his left eye.

"Help you?" he said.

"My name's Dave Robicheaux. I'm a detective with the Iberia Sheriff's Department. Are you William R. Guillot?" I said, my gaze wandering from him to the electrician in the yellow hard hat.

"Call me Will. What can I do for you?" he said.

"Where were you Monday night, Mr. Guillot?"

"At my fish camp. Down at Pecan Island."

"Anybody with you?"

"Maybe. What is this?"

"We're in possession of a revolver that's registered in your name. It's a single-action Colt .38. You own a weapon like that, sir?"

His hazel eyes fixed on mine and never blinked. "Say that again."

I repeated my statement.

"Yes, I do own one. But it's at my house," he said.

"Not anymore."

"Bullshit," he said, half smiling.

"I think we'd better take a ride to your house and check it out."

"If you haven't noticed, I'm building a subdivision."

"You an architect?"

"No."

"The revolver registered in your name is part of a homicide investigation, Mr. Guillot. If I were you, I'd get my priorities straight."

"Homicide?" he said, genuinely surprised.

"You own a brown pickup truck?"

"I don't. The company does. What about it?"

But I was looking at the back of the electrician who had walked away, and was not listening to William Guillot anymore.

"Did you hear me? What the hell is going on? Why are you staring at my electrician like that?"

"Is he your subcontractor?"

"What about it?"

"He installed defective wiring in the walls of my house. It burned to the ground," I said.

Guillot's eyes narrowed and dropped briefly to my person, as though he were filing away my inventory in a private compartment. "Follow me to my house," he said.

Twenty minutes later I stood in his home office, the sunlight breaking through a pecan tree by the side window, while he searched his desk, a wall safe, and the drawers of a gun cabinet. "It's gone," he said.

"You have a break-in recently?"

"Six or seven months ago."

"You reported it?"

"Yeah, but I didn't miss the .38. Why would somebody steal only the .3 8 and none of my other guns?"

"Write down the names of the person or persons you were with Monday night."

"Maybe I don't want to do that."

"I see. Maybe you can work through that problem in a jail cell."

He wrote a woman's name and address and telephone number on the top page of a scratch pad and handed it to me. "My wife and I are separated. Her lawyer is trying to clean my clock. This isn't information that will help my situation," he said.

"It's not our intention to compromise your privacy," I said.

But his eyes grew heated, as though he were remembering an unfinished, angry thought. "Back there at the house site, you made a serious accusation about my electrician. Did you file charges against him?" he said.

"In New Iberia we have no inspection system outside the city limits. Also, in Louisiana an electrical contractor has no liability one year after the work is done. You like building homes in Louisiana, Mr. Guillot?"

"I think you've got an ax to grind, Mr. Robicheaux. Let me say this up front. When I get pushed, I push back."

"Really?"

"Yeah, really," he said.

I tossed my business card on his desk. "Give me a call when I can be of service," I said.

That same afternoon the phone rang on the desk in Father Jimmie Dolan's office. He stared at the phone as it rang four times, then listened to the voice that came through the speaker on the message machine.

"Are you there, Father? Excuse me if I sound strange, but I have a broken nose, a mouth that looks like a smashed plum, and a tooth knocked out of my head. All done by a Catholic priest," the voice said.

In the background Father Jimmie could hear piano music and the sounds of street traffic.

"I know you're listening, Father. Would you please have the courtesy to pick up the fucking phone," the voice said.

"What is it this time?" Father Jimmie said.

"Because of you I'm up to my bottom lip in Shite's Creek and the motorboat is about to go roaring by."

"Could you do something about your language, please?"

"My language?" Coll said, his voice like a nail being pried out of dry wood. "I took ten thousand dollars up front for the whack on you. Now I have to pay it back or prepare to go through life with no thumbs."

"Then return it."

"I lost it at the dog track."

"Change your way, Coll."

"Sir, please don't be talking to me like that. I'm miserable enough."

"I called the police on you yesterday. If you won't worry about your soul, you might give some thought to what New Orleans' finest will do to you."

"If there's a trace on your line, it won't help. I'm on a cell."

"You're close by the little alcove in the French Market. I know the pianist who plays there. She's playing her theme song, "Down Yonder," right now."

"You leave a man no dignity. Can you help with the ten thousand? Maybe I could borrow it from one of your charities?"

"I'm hanging up now. I don't want you to contact me again."

"Oh, sir, don't do this to me. Don't fucking do this to a man who "

"Who what?"

"Maybe wants to remember who he used to be."

Father Jimmie replaced the receiver in the phone cradle, the plastic surface as warm as human tissue against his palm, his hand trembling for reasons he couldn't readily explain.

Early the next morning I drove to Abbeville and interviewed Gretchen Peltier, the woman whose name had been given to me by Will Guillot as his alibi witness. She was middle-aged, slightly overweight, her hair dyed a deep black to hide the white roots. She worked as a secretary for an insurance agency and her hands trembled on the desktop when I asked her about her whereabouts Monday night. Her employer was inside a glass-windowed office, his door closed.