DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields (7 page)

"Josh Comeaux."

"You work here every evening, Josh?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sir?" he said, confused.

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

"How about this girl?" I said.

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

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

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

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

"Serve who?"

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

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

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

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

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

"I know you did," I said.

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

"You the owner?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why, yes, he's a friend of mine."

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

"Yes, but he's "

"He's what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I went back outside the sun was setting beyond the trees on the bayou, the sugarcane fields purple in the dusk, the air cool and damp, thick with cigarette smoke and smelling of alcohol that had soaked into tablecloths or had been spilled by the guests on their clothes.

In my absence Father Jimmie had cornered both Castille Lejeune and Merchie Flannigan and was talking heatedly with them, his coat separating on his chest when he raised his arms to make a point, one foot at a slight angle behind the other, in the classic position of a martial artist.

"Let me finish if you would," he said when Merchie Flannigan tried to speak. "You say you're cleaning up the Crudups' property? The place is floating in sludge."

"I'm sure Merchie is doing his best. Why don't you help yourself to the food, Father?" Castille Lejeune said.

He was a trim, nice-looking man, with a lean face and steel gray hair that he combed straight back. He wore a white sports coat and dark blue shirt and a gold and onyx Mason's ring on his marriage finger.

"No, thanks," Father Jimmie said, wagging two fingers as though brushing Castille Lejeune's words from the air. "So let me see if I understand correctly. In 1951 you took a friend to Angola Prison to record Junior Crudup, but you have no idea what happened to Junior later?"

"I was doing a favor for my wife. She was fond of folk music. That was a long time ago," Lejeune answered, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his gaze wandering among his guests.

"But a retired guard, a man named Strunk, says you got Junior pulled off the levee gang."

"I don't remember that. I wouldn't have had that kind of influence," Lejeune said.

"Really? " Father Jimmie said. "You wouldn't throw a fellow a slider, would you?"

The insult to a man of his age and position seemed not to register in Lejeune's face. Instead, his eyes crinkled again. "Have a good time," he said. He placed his hand warmly on Father Jimmie's arm and walked away.

"Let me get you a beer, Father," Merchie Flannigan said.

"Shame on you for what you're doing to those black people in St. James Parish," Father Jimmie said.

Father Jimmie's heart might have been in the right place, but it was embarrassing to listen to him berate Merchie Flannigan in front of others and I didn't wait to hear Merchie's reply. I walked out of the backyard and into the oak trees, then witnessed one of those moments when you realize that each human being's story is much more complex than you could have ever guessed.

Between the horse stables and the bayou was a white-railed, sloping green pasture containing a fish pond and a small dock. A gas lamp mounted on a brass pole burned above the dock, and I could see moths flying into the flame, then dropping like pieces of ash into the water. As I stood among the trees I saw Theodosha watching the same scene, one hand on the fence railing. The electric lights were on in the stables and I could see her face clearly in the illumination, her brow knitted, the muscles in her throat taut, her hand gripped tightly on the rail.

I walked toward her but her attention had been distracted by the strange red reflection of the sun's afterglow on the bayou. A little boy and girl, not older than four or five, climbed through the fence on the opposite side of the fish pond and ran giggling toward the dock. I had no way of knowing the depth of the pond, but a spring board was attached to the end of the dock, which meant the depth was certainly over a child's head.

Theo looked back from the sunset at the pond and saw the children almost the same time as I. She bit her lip and raised her hand as though to warn them off, but she remained outside the fence, frozen, as though an invisible shield prevented her from entering the pasture. The children thumped onto the dock and danced up and down, then bent over the edge of the dock and peered at the fish feeding on the moths dropping from the flame in the gas lamp.

Theodosha heard me walk up behind her. She turned abruptly, startled, her expression one of both fear and shame.

"That water is fairly deep, isn't it?" I said.

"Yes," she said, turning back toward the pond. "Yes, those children shouldn't be out there. Where are their parents?"

I started to climb through the fence.

"No, I'll do that. I'm sorry. I'm " She didn't finish whatever she was going to say. She ducked under the top rail of the fence and ran awkwardly onto the dock, then returned, clasping each of the children by the hand.

The children's faces were hot, angry, a bit frightened, their cheeks pooled with color.

"We didn't know we did anything wrong, Miss Theo," the little boy said.

"You shouldn't go near a lake or pond or the bayou without your mother or father. Don't you ever do this again," Theo said, and shook him.

Both of the children began to cry.

"Hey, you guys, let's get a soft drink," I said.

I took them by the hand and walked them to the drink table and asked the waiter to give each of them a Coca-Cola. Through the trees I saw Theodosha walking rapidly toward the back of her house, her arms clinched across her chest, as though the temperature had dropped thirty degrees.

I decided I'd had enough of the Lejeune family for one evening. I told Father Jimmie I'd say good night to our hosts for both of us and went to find Theodosha inside the house. I didn't have to look far. She was in the den with her father, sitting on a stuffed leather footstool beneath the mounted airplane propeller, her face in her hands. Castille Lejeune stood above her, stroking her hair, his eyes filled with pity.

Neither one of them saw me. I backed out of the doorway and joined Father Jimmie outside.

"Do you know where Merchie is?" I asked.

"He and another man went to the stables. The other guy seems to have his own Zip code," he said.

"Let's go, Father."

"I was too hard on Flannigan?"

"What do I know?" I said.

We got in my pickup truck and headed down the long driveway toward the state road. I thought the bizarre nature of my visit to the plantation home of Castille Lejeune was over. It wasn't. In the glare of flood lamps by a long white, peaked stable, Merchie Flannigan was perched on top of a fence, drinking from a bottle of Cold Duck, while a tall, gray-headed, crew-cropped, angular man in cowboy boots and western-cut slacks was lighting strings of Chinese fire crackers and throwing them in the air while a group of children screamed in delight. In the background, a half-dozen thoroughbred horses raced back and forth across a fenced pasture.