Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"What's with Miss Hip-Slick?" she said.

"She's with N.O.P.D.," I said.

"The hell she is. She's a state trooper. She used to work undercover narcotics in Shreveport. She got into a firefight with some dealers about ten years ago and shot all five of them."

Later, while I was out of the office, Clete Purcel left a message that he had checked into the old motor court on East Main, one that had long served as his field office in southwest Louisiana and his home away from home. The motor court was located inside a massive bower of live oak trees and slash pines on the bayou, and when I drove through the entrance that evening I saw Clete in front of the last cottage, barechested, wearing shorts with dancing elephants on them, flip-flops, and a Marine Corps utility cap, drinking from a bottle of Dixie while he flipped a steak on a naming grill.

"Running down bail skips?" I said.

"No, I just had to get out of the Big Sleazy for a while. Gunner Ar-doin is driving me nuts," he said.

"What's happening with Gunner?"

"He thinks somebody's going to clip him. Maybe he's right. So I..."

"So you what?"

"Gave him my apartment."

"Your apartment? To Gunner Ardoin?"

"His wife skipped town and left his little girl with him. What was I supposed to do? Quit looking at me like that," he said. He picked up a can of diet Dr. Pepper from an ice chest and tossed it at me.

I sat down in a canvas chair, out of the smoke from the grill. Through the trees the sunlight looked like gold foil on the bayou. A tugboat passed, its wake slapping against the bank.

"Ever hear of a button man by the name of Max Coll?" I said.

"A freelance guy out of Miami?"

"That's the one."

"What about him?"

"That black patrolwoman who answered the complaint in Ardoin's kitchen, Clotile Arceneaux? She's an undercover state trooper. She told me this guy Coll tried to kill Father Dolan yesterday," I said.

"Dolan thinks he walks on water. You might tell him the saints died early deaths."

"He's not a listener," I said.

"Yeah, like somebody else I know," Clete said.

I walked down in the trees and watched the boats pass on the bayou while Clete finished grilling his steak. On the opposite bank two black laborers were trenching a waterline while a white man in a straw hat supervised them. When I walked back out of the trees Clete was laying out two plates, paper napkins, and knives and forks on a picnic table.

"I don't want to steal your supper," I said.

"Don't worry about it. My doctor says when I die I'll need a piano crate just to put my cholesterol in," he said.

"I'm trying to find out what happened to a convict in Angola back in the fifties. A guy named Junior Crudup. He went in and never came out," I said.

"Yeah?" Clete said, dividing up his steak, looking at a woman in a bathing suit on the bow of a speedboat.

"Father Jimmie and I were at the house of Castille Lejeune Saturday evening. Lejeune got Crudup off the levee gang back in 1951. But he said he has no memory of it," I said.

"You're talking about stuff that happened a half century ago?" Clete said.

"Crudup's family got swindled out of their property."

Clete plopped a foil-wrapped potato on my plate and sat down. He looked at me for a long time. "So you think this character Lejeune is lying?" he said.