Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"Hello?" he repeated.

"Oh hello, Father. Sorry. I couldn't get the bloody door closed on the booth," a voice said.

"It's you again, is it?"

"Father, you've put me seriously in the shitter."

"I think you need counseling, my friend."

"Sir, you're a prelate and hence I believe a man of honor. Can you give me your word you won't continue to interfere in certain enterprises that are fully legitimate and doing little if any harm to anyone?"

Father Jimmie shuffled some papers around on his desk, then picked up a page torn off a note pad. "Your name is Max Coll?" he said.

"The coppers must have paid you a visit." .

"Are you on Canal or St. Charles?"

There was a pause, then Max Coll said, "Now, how would you be knowing where I am?"

"There's only one streetcar line in operation today. It runs only on those two streets. So that means you're not too far away from me."

"You're a mighty intelligent man. But I need to "

"You stay out of my church."

"Sir?"

"You heard me. If you ever bring a weapon into my confessional again, I'll tear you apart."

"Excuse me for saying this, Father, but that is a fucking mean-spirited statement for a Christian minister to make."

"Be thankful I don't have my hands on you," Father Jimmie said, and hung up.

Then he stood motionlessly by his desk, his heart hammering against his chest.

Chapter 6.

That same evening, Leon Hebert, the daiquiri-store operator who had fired Josh Comeaux, had to handle the window by himself because Josh's replacement had called in sick. Hebert didn't like to work alone, at least not at night. He was a cautious man, both with money and people, and had made his living over the years on the soiled edges of society wherever he had gone. If there was any group of people he understood in this world, it was his clientele.

After he was discharged from the United States Navy, he had owned a liquor store on South Central Avenue in Los Angeles. The profits were huge and, except for the insurance, the overhead minimal. He accepted food stamps, welfare grocery orders, and even Bureau of Public Assistance bus tokens in place of money. After 2:00 A.M. he and a hired man would drive a panel truck down to East Fifth Street and sell eighty-nine-cent bottles of fortified wine, called short dogs, for two dollars apiece to the desperate souls who could not wait for the bars to open at 6:00 A.M.

But Leon Hebert learned there was a downside to running a business in a ghetto. On a warm summer night a white L.A. patrolman tried to hook up a drunk driver and force him into the back of a cruiser. In five minutes bricks, bottles, and chunks of curb stone were being flung into the traffic on Century Boulevard. This was in the era before the Crips and Bloods, but their predecessors the Gladiators, Choppers, Eastside Purple Hearts, Clanton 14, and the Aranas rose to the occasion and strung fires all over the south and east sides of Los Angeles.

A Molotov cocktail crashed through the window bars and front glass of Leon Hebert's store. The inventory went up like gasoline.

In the riot only two groups of white-owned businesses were spared: funeral homes and the offices of bail bondsmen. The lesson was not lost on Leon. When he got back to New Iberia, his birthplace, he sold burial insurance to people of color, collecting their half-dollar and seventy-five-cent premiums weekly, wending his way without fear through every back-of-town slum in south Louisiana.

Then he discovered the fast lane to prosperity was still available. He didn't have to go into the ghetto to sell his wares, either. The ghetto dwellers came to him, inside a shady grove on the four-lane, their gas-guzzlers smoking at his drive-by window, his ice-packed daiquiris, sweet and cold, ready to go at five bucks a pop.

He should have felt good about his situation, he told himself. He'd saved every cent he'd made peddling burial insurance and put it in a

surefire franchise that gave him 60 percent of the profits. He made people happy, didn't he? Why did these damn kids from Loreauville get themselves killed with his cups in their car? And how about Josh Comeaux telling the physician, what was his name, Dr. Parks, teenagers were always served at Leon's drive-by?

Mondays were slow and Leon thought about closing up early. What was it that was bothering him? The doctor? The sheriff's detective who got in his face? He looked out the service window into the dusk and saw blue-collar families leaving a barbecue-and-po'boy place on the corner of the short span of asphalt that joined the east-bound and westbound highways, between which he operated his store. The evening was warm and fireflies floated in the oak trees. He watched the people from the barbecue place getting into their cars and pickups, their children bouncing up and down on the seats. For just a moment he wanted to join them and free himself from whatever presence it was that seemed to cling to his skin like road film.

Three spoiled brats from Loreauville run themselves off the road into a telephone pole and he's in the toilet. There was no justice, he told himself.

A junker car filled with black men pulled to the window and Leon removed six plastic-sealed daiquiris from the ice compartment of his giant refrigerator and handed them one by one through the driver's window.