Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"You care to come inside and have some coffee?" I said.

"Got any donuts?" he said.

I opened the door for him and watched his enormous bulk move past me into my house. I could smell an odor like testosterone ironed into his clothes.

That morning I drove to the high school that the three dead girls had attended up the bayou in the little town of Loreauville. The registrar gave me a copy of the yearbook from the previous year and I found the three girls' photographs among members of the junior class. All three had been either class officers, prom queens, members of the drama club and speech team, or participants in Madrigals. They had been scheduled to graduate in the spring.

But one of the girls had a different kind of distinction. The driver, Lori Parks, had been on probation for possession of Ecstasy and had been driving with a restricted license for a previous DWI. By late afternoon the forensic chemist at our crime lab had matched a latent print from one of the plastic cups I had picked up two hundred yards from the crash site. The latent belonged to Lori Parks.

There is no open-container law in the State of Louisiana. It is supposedly illegal to drink and drive in the state, but a vendor can sell mixed drinks at drive-by windows to people in automobiles, provided the container is sealed. Wrapping a piece of plastic around the lid of a daiquiri cup satisfies the statute, and the passengers in the automobile are allowed to open the cups and consume any amount of alcohol they wish as long as they do not give alcohol to the driver.

If the driver is drinking and sees a state trooper or sheriff's deputy hit his flasher, he only needs to hand his cup to a passenger and instantly he comes into compliance with the law.

The only person legally liable for any violation of the statutes governing the drive-by window sale of mixed drinks is the clerk who actually makes the sale, never the owner. Sometimes the clerk, who is usually paid no more than minimum wage, is fined or jailed or both for selling to underage customers. But the daiquiri windows remain open seven days and nights a week, positioned on each end of town, thriving on weekends and on all pay days

Just before I started to drive out to the daiquiri store at the four corners on Loreauville Road, the phone rang on my desk. It was the administrative assistant in the warden's office at Angola Penitentiary, the same man who had hung up on me when I had mentioned the possibility of Junior Crudup being buried under the levee along the Mississippi River.

"I did some digging around," he said.

I laughed into the receiver.

"You think this is funny?" he said.

"No, sir. I'm sorry."

"Ever know an old gun hack by the name of Buttermilk Strunk?"

"Cain't-See to Cain't-See Double-Time Strunk?" I said.

"That's the man. He was working levee gangs from Camp A in 1951. He says Crudup was a big stripe back then and on the shit list of a couple other gun bulls who wanted to make a Christian out of him, get my meaning?"

"I think so," I said.

"They worked him over pretty bad. Strunk says that's about the time a man came to the penitentiary and made recordings of some of the convicts. According to Strunk, this man probably saved Crudup's life."

"You mean John or Allen Lomax, the folk music collectors?"

"No, this guy lives in Franklin. You ought to know him. He only owns about half the goddamn state."

"Who are we talking about?" I said, my impatience growing.

"Castille Lejeune. Strunk says Lejeune came to Angola with a man from a record company and got Crudup pulled off the levee gang. He doesn't know what happened to him after that.. .. You still there?"

"Castille Lejeune saved the life of a black convict? I'm having a hard time putting this together."

"Why's that?"

"He's supposed to be a sonofabitch."

"Remind me not to waste my time on bullshit like this again," the administrative assistant said.

That night my old enemy was back. According to his friends, Audie Murphy fashioned a bedroom out of his garage in the hills overlooking Los Angeles and slept separately from his wife, a loaded army-issue .45 under his pillow. After World War II he had become convinced that, before he could sleep a full night again, he would have to spend five days in peacetime for every day he had spent on the firing line. For him that meant twenty years of sleeplessness.

I couldn't offer my limited experience in Vietnam as the raison d'etre for my insomnia. I drank before I went there and I drank more when I came back. Now I did not drink at all and my nocturnal hours were still filled with the same visitors and feelings; they simply took on different shapes and faces.

The night seemed alive with sound the clatter of red squirrels on the roof, a dredge boat out on the bayou, a brief rain shower that swept across the trees in the yard. When I finally fell asleep I dreamed of my dead wife Bootsie and Father Jimmie Dolan and the three girls who had died in a burning automobile and of a Negro convict who had been ground up in a system that loathed courage in a black man.

What were the dreams really about? An imperfect world, I suspect, one over which death and injustice often seemed to hold dominion. But what kind of fool would surrender his sleep over a condition he could not change?