DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields (31 page)

"It's a fiefdom. They think it's the year 1300 down there."

I heard him laugh. "A fiefdom? With serfs in iron collars and that sort of thing? That's an interesting observation. I see," he said.

No, you don't, Jimmie, I thought. But martyrs and saints fly low with the angels, colliding with telephone poles and the sides of buildings, and consider harm's way their natural environment. Who was I to contend with them?

Max Coll didn't like gambling; he loved it and all the adrenaline rush and glittering ambiance that went with it, as passionately as a man could love a woman or a religion. All men had a vice, his father used to say. It was recognition of our moral frailty that allowed us to retain our humanity, he said. The man who wasn't tempted by drink or women or betting the ponies could easily set himself on a level above Christ, and hence become guilty of the most pernicious of the seven deadly sins, namely arrogance and pride.

Max had always remembered his father's words. Drink robbed a man of his intelligence and his organs; women gave a man satiation for only a little while, and memory of it immediately rekindled lust for and dependence on more of the same.

But gambling gave a man control, allowed him to choose his battleground and make use of his knowledge about both people and mathematics. The losses were only monetary ones, and since gambling was never about money, what difference did the loss make, particularly for a single fellow whose occupation was a bloody affair that should allow for a sybaritic excursion once in a while?

He was discriminating in the games he played. The slots, video poker, and electronic keno were created for natural-born losers. Jai alai was fun and fast, but what reasonable person would bet on players who all came from the same part of Spain and were related to one another? With the ponies you could dope out the morning line, study the track conditions and the animals in the paddock, and have a fair chance at the windows. Craps was for show boats roulette for Cote d'Azur faggots, and dog tracks everywhere strictly for the dogs.

Not to say he didn't bet ball games, boxing matches, and national elections. In fact, Max once bet a window washer on the thirty-first floor of a Chicago hotel that he could climb out on the sill and clean the window faster than the professional washer. He not only won the wager, he enjoyed the experience so much he washed four more windows out of goodwill.

But the game that got Max in trouble was blackjack, the one game that gave the casino player a running chance at beating the house. Max's memory bank was almost like a computer's, and even when going up against a houseman dealing out of a five-deck shoe, Max's ability to count cards and to successfully stay put or risk another hit was uncanny.

Max's weakness at the blackjack table was his inability to put principles ahead of personalities. He didn't resent losing to a machine or to corrupt jai alai players wanting to keep their family members out of the tomato patch. Max did not like to lose to individuals, particularly stolid and dispassionate people who were paid by the hour and could not wait to get off work. To count cards until his brain was bleeding, then have a joyless clod turn up a blackjack on him out of sheer luck made the scalp recede on his skull.

He would retaliate by playing multiple hands, progressively increasing his bets, doubling up on splits, until he was broke, exhausted, and depressed, staring out the window at the ragged edges of dawn in

Vegas or Reno or Atlantic City, wondering if he could get the casino manager to open a credit line for him.

Max depressed was Max out of control. He would telephone sports books all over the country and lay down fifty thousand dollars in bets without blinking an eye. Then he would dress in a pair of pressed pink pajamas and lie spreadeagled on his back in the center of his hotel bed, the world spinning around him, his heartbeat decreasing, a strange serenity washing through him, as though he had descended to the bottom of a vortex and was no longer at its mercy or required to control it.

Usually his sports-book binges were harmless and his wins canceled out his losses. But contrary to all his wisdom he went in heavy on an insider tip at the jai alai front on in Dania and took a bath for a hundred large he couldn't pay. Not only was the sports book in Miami unsympathetic with Max's financial situation, they sold his debt to shylocks who informed him the vig was four thousand a week, none of which applied to the principle.

Or he could take out a Catholic priest.

So he had come to Louisiana on a gray, rain-swept, cold day, trudging through flooded streets floating with garbage, himself no different in aspect than a poor sod on his way to work in the peat bogs. But there had been an upside to it all. He'd found out he didn't have it in him to shoot a priest, which meant perhaps part of his soul was still intact. Secondly, he had discovered a new identity and gambling ambiance.

Wearing Father Dolan's black suit and rabat and collar, he had entered a bingo parlor on an Indian reservation in south-central Louisiana and had suddenly found himself a celebrity. People smiled at him, shook his hand, offered him their chairs at the tables patted him affectionately, brought him beer and sandwiches from the cafe. He began to feel like a mascot being trundled from hand to hand by five hundred people. In fact, he was pinched and pulled and squeezed so many times and places he couldn't concentrate on his bingo board and finally gave it up.

Then he was asked to stand on the stage and call out the bingo numbers. Why not? he thought. It was a grand evening. The weather had turned balmy again; palm trees strung with colored lights were rustling in the breeze outside the windows; the faces of the people around him were warm and filled with goodwill. Maybe his clerical role was a bit cosmetic, but it was still a fine way to be.

Then at 10:00 P.M. he went into the bar and ordered a cup of coffee and sat down to watch the nightly news.

The lead story was the arrest of one Father James Dolaji, charged with sexual solicitation in a public rest room that was located close by a children's playground.

The arresting officer, Dale Louviere, was interviewed on camera. "We had this area under surveillance because of previous complaints," he said.

"Regarding the children?" the reporter asked.

"Yes, that's exactly correct," Louviere replied.

"Regarding this particular suspect?" the reporter asked.

"I'm not at liberty to say that. We're currently involved in a deep background investigation," Louviere replied.

If I ever saw a bull carrying around its own china shop, Max thought. Oh well, it was the good father's cross to bear, not Max's. Maybe Father Dolan would have a little more empathy for professional criminals now that he'd gotten himself jammed up by coppers on a pad, Max told himself.

He finished his coffee and went back to the bingo game. But the fun was gone and the clothes on his body suddenly felt foreign on his skin, superheated, sticky, smelling of the priest.

He found himself biting his knuckle, oblivious to the stares around him. What was it that bothered him? The priest was a hardhead, determined to see himself buggered with a posthole digger. Max had nothing to do with it, no obligations to him.

Wrong, he thought, lowering his eyes, staring into his lap.

He had set out to murder an innocent, decent man, something he had prided himself on never having done. In addition, the priest had bested him at every turn; that thought didn't go down well, either. In fact, all of Max's thoughts were like thongs on a flag rum whipping down on his head.

It was depressing.

He walked outside into the wind and the sweep of stars overhead and the glow of Christmas lights strung around palm trees and started up his rental Honda. He removed a .45 automatic wrapped in an oily cloth from under the seat and set it beside him. As he drove down the two-lane road toward the interstate, he rested his right hand on the .45 and felt his heart rate decrease and his breath grow quiet in his chest.

Then he looked up through the windshield at the stars and for the first time in years found himself addressing an ancient deity with whom he had once had a relationship.

Sir, if you're going to drop problems of conscience on a man like me at this time in his career, he prayed, would you mind doing so in a gentler manner so I don't have to feel Vm being crunched inside the iron maiden? I would very much appreciate it. Thank you. Amen.

It rained the next morning and Jimmie Dolan was still in jail, waiting to be arraigned at 11:00 A.M. I had just sat down at my desk when I saw an unmarked vehicle of the kind used by N.O.P.D. pull to the curb and Clotile Arceneaux, wearing Levis, a knit sweater, and blue-jean jacket, get out and run through the rain to the courthouse entrance, her hand raised in front of her brow.

She came into my office, out of breath, her denim jacket streaked with rainwater. She sat down without being invited and said, "Wow! You're a hard man to catch!"

"I don't follow you," I said.

"I left three messages yesterday afternoon," she said.

"I was in Franklin. Father Dolan is in jail," I replied.

"Yeah, I know all about it. Guy really walks into wrecking balls, doesn't he? Look, what have you got on the death of Sammy Fig-orelli?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"He was killed with a .22. He probably knew the shooter. That's about it," I said.

I could see her anger at losing months of work rekindling itself in her face. She bit a thumbnail and looked at the rain hitting on the window, then looked back at me. "I came here for another reason as well. In fact, I'm off work today," she said.

"What is it?"

"You already have breakfast?" she said.

"No," I lied.

"It's on me," she said.

"Your accent seems to come and go."

"See, I knew you were a smart man." She smiled, her mouth pressed into a small flower.

We got a take-out order at Victor's Cafeteria on Main and drove across the bayou to a giant crab-boil pavilion next to an exhibition hall where, believe it or not, Harry James, Buddy Rich, Willie Smith, and Duke Ellington's arranger, Juan Tizol, performed during the 1950s. The camellias along the bayou were in bloom and looked like red paper flowers inside the grayness of the day, and a tug was moving a huge iron barge loaded with dredged mud through the drawbridge up by Burke Street.

"So what's the haps?" I said.

"I came down on you pretty hard when you and Purcel scared Fat Sammy out of town," she replied.

"Your feelings were understandable."

There was a fried-egg-and-ham sandwich on French bread in her Styrofoam container but she hadn't touched it. "I talked to Purcel. He told me about your wife's death," she said.

I raised my chin to straighten my collar and looked at the tug moving the barge down the bayou.

"So what I'm saying is "

"Got it. You don't need to explain."

"How about shutting up a minute? My husband was killed in Iraq in '91. He was in a tank. The army said he died instantly but I don't believe them," she said.

"I'm sorry."

"For a long time I thought I saw him at a football game or in a bar or in a crowd at a department store. That ever happen to you?"

"No."

"You're lucky. What I'm saying, Robicheaux, is I think you're a good cop and you don't need another cop yelling at you." She picked up her sandwich and took a bite out of it. I heard the tug blowing its whistle at the next drawbridge.

"It's Friday. You want to hang around town, maybe catch dinner and go to a movie?" I said.

"What's playing?" she asked.

"Really hadn't checked it out."

"Father Dolan's being arraigned at eleven," she said.

"I thought you'd cut loose of Father Jimmie's problems."

"A girl's got to do something for kicks," she said, and watched me over the top of her cup while she drank her coffee.

Dale Louviere liked being a city police officer, especially since he had been promoted to plainclothes and given his own office, a travel account, and membership in two civic clubs. The pay was nothing to brag about, but good things happened if a man did his job and accorded people respect and made sure he was available to serve in whatever capacity he was needed.

Anything wrong with that? he asked himself.

He lived a bachelor's life in a freshly painted bungalow out in the country, enclosed by sugarcane fields, cedar trees, flower beds and vegetable gardens tended by a trusty from the parish stockade. The radical priest's accusation that he was on a pad still rankled him. Dale Louviere never accepted a bribe from anyone; he didn't have to. He took care of his own side of the street and the other things took care of themselves. A mortgage or car loan was approved upon application; his drinks were put on a tab at local bars but he was not expected to ever pay the tab a land developer gave him forty-yard-line tickets to LSU's home games whenever he wanted them; and at Christmastime cellophane-wrapped baskets of candy, fruit, and wine were delivered to his door.

The people who owned the sugar mills, drilled the oil wells, and governed the parish's affairs paid most of the taxes didn't they? They gave other people jobs. The parish would be a giant rural slum without them. So a civil servant had to pay attention to the needs of rich people who could locate elsewhere anytime they chose.

Anything wrong with that?

Early the same morning Father Jimmie Dolan was to be arraigned, Dale Louviere rose at first light, put on his warm-up suit, and drank coffee and smoked a cigarette at the kitchen table, waiting for the chill to go out of the room. Through the front window he saw a Honda pass on the state road, then return, going in the opposite direction.

He washed his cup and saucer in the sink, put his spare set of house and car keys around his neck on a braided lanyard, and began his early-morning aerobic walk down the state road. Two hundred yards from his bungalow he crossed a wood bridge over a coulee and entered a long, cleared slash between two unharvested cane fields. The rain had quit temporarily, but fog hung like smoke in the cane and the thatch under his feet was sodden and mud coated, squishing each time he took a step, soaking the bottoms of his sweat pants.