DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields (43 page)

An inmate's jacket is confidential only until the first trusty clerk reads it.

Castille Lejeune became what is known as a short-eyes in the prison population. Other inmates shunned him; the correctional officers became distant and formal in their dealings with him. He was transferred back to Angola after he bit into pieces of broken glass that had been mixed into his food.

Ironically, he was placed in a segregated unit within viewing distance of the levee built by the Red Hat Gang on which Junior Crudup had pulled what Leadbelly called his great, long time.

We couldn't make our homicide case against Merchie Flannigan and he got away with the murder of the daiquiri-store operator. At least legally he did. But Castille Lejeune nailed him from jail by having his lawyers file a wrongful death suit against him, freezing his personal and corporate accounts, then using Donna Parks to bring statutory rape charges against him. Merchie's reputation was ruined and his pipeline business went bust. For a while he ran a welding service, then began hanging out at a bar frequented by Teamsters in Baton Rouge. I ran into him one day by the capitol building, where Huey Long was shot down in 1935.

"Hey, Dave, no hard feelings, huh?" he said.

"Not on my part," I replied.

He smelled of cigarettes and was fat and puffy, sporting a mustache and goatee, driving a junker car that was parked at the curb, a young girl in the passenger seat.

"That's my niece," he said.

"Right," I said.

"Putting together a drilling deal in Iran, can you believe it?"

"That's great, Merch."

"Good seeing you, Dave. I mean that," he said, taking my hand, trying as hard as he could to hold my eyes without averting his. The girl tossed a beer can out of the window as they drove away.

Father Jimmie and I and two employees of a funeral home made up the entire retinue at the graveside ritual for Max Coll in a Catholic cemetery outside Franklin. I felt partly responsible for his death, but had he not died, Castille Lejeune would not have gone down, nor would Castille Lejeune have utilized an opportunity to take Will Guillot off the board. Ultimately I came to think of Max Coll in another fashion. In his way he was a brave man who made his own choices, and it was an arrogance on my part and a disservice to him for me to pretend that somehow I was the designer of his fate.

Father Jimmie went back to his conservative parish in New Orleans and worked as a chaplin at Central Lock-Up. After Alafair returned to college in Portland, I invited both him and Clotile Arceneaux to dinner at a Mexican restaurant off the upper end of St. Charles.

"Pretty slick how you took down Lejeune, searching his property without a warrant," she said.

"It was dumb," I said.

"You never flinched, even though Lejeune had a pistol on you and you thought you didn't have backup," she said.

"Say that again."

"I watched you through a pair of field glasses. An FBI sharpshooter watched Lejeune through a scope on a rifle." She put a forkful of food in her mouth and raised her eyebrows at me.

"Y'all were using me as bait?"

"Got a job for you with the state if you want to start putting away bad guys again."

"I'm out."

She placed her foot on mine under the table and squeezed. "Come see me sometime and we'll talk about it," she said.

"Am I missing something here?" Father Jimmie said.

"Dave likes to pretend he can stop being a police officer. Make him go to confession, Father," she replied.

Clete Purcel spent three months in the St. Mary Parish Prison, paid twenty-thousand dollars in damages to the sheriff's deputies he had busted up with his fists, and upon his discharge moved in with me, saying he was going to start up another PI. office in New Iberia. We fished for sac-a-lait and bass at Henderson Swamp and Bayou Benoit, and Clete tried to appear light-hearted and unaffected by his time in jail. But I knew better. Clete was a natural-born cop and despised the new breed of criminals and literally washed himself in the shower with peroxide when he got out of the bag.

But out on Bayou Benoit, with the spring breezes up and the bream spawning back in the bays, the levee sprinkled with buttercups, we didn't talk about the bad times of the past or the present. I had never looked to the skies for great miracles, and, as St. Augustine once indicated, to watch a vineyard soak up the water in a plowed row and produce a grape that could be translated into wine was all the proof we needed of higher realities. But when Clete and I were deep in the swamp, the lacy green branches of the cypress trees shifting back and forth across the sun, I fell prey to a new temptation as well as hope.

I waited to see a pair of pelicans drift down off the wind stream

their wings extended and pouched beaks bulging, their improbable presence a harbinger of better times. I waited for them daily and sometimes in the flapping of wings overhead I thought I heard Boot-she's voice, reminding me of her promise about the pelicans, only to discover that a white crane or blue heron had been frightened by our outboard and had flown through the cypress trees back onto open water.

But I'm sure one fine day, when I least expect it, the pelicans will return to Bayou Teche, and in the meantime I share my thoughts about them with no one, except perhaps Snuggs and Tripod, who, like me, sleep little and wake before first light.

James Lee Burke is the author of twenty-one previous novels, including twelve featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux. Black Cherry Blues won the Edgar Award in 1989 and Cimarron Rose in 1997. Sunset Limited was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger in 1998. He lives with his wife, Pearl, in Missoula, Montana and New Iberia, Louisiana.