Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"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.