Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"This is my husband, Junior. He'd love to hear you sing "Goodnight, Irene,"" she said.

Lejeune's legs were crossed. He wore socks with his sandals and seemed to be studying the points of his toes.

"Huddie Ledbetter done it a lot better than I can," Junior replied. He shifted his weight and felt the belly of the guitar scrape hollowly against his belt buckle.

"Then play something of your own choosing," Castille Lejeune said, his gaze still fixed on the end of his foot.

"Suh, I ain't all that good," Junior said. His eyes met Lejeune's briefly, then slipped away.

"You uncomfortable for some reason?" Lejeune asked,

"No, suh."

"Then play. Please," Lejeune said.

He sang "Dig My Grave with a Silver Spade," running quickly through the verses, leaving out the treble string improvisations he usually ran high up on the guitar's neck. When he finished he looked at nothing, the guitar strap biting into the back of his neck. He could smell the exhaled smoke from Lejeune's cigarette drifting into his face.

"You seem to be a man of considerable accomplishment. How is it you spent so many years in jail?" Lejeune said.

"Don't rightly know, suh. Guess some niggers just ain't that smart," Junior replied.

He heard the guard's shoes crunch on the gravel drive, as though the guard were experiencing a tension he had to run through the bottoms of his feet into the ground. But Lejeune seemed to take no notice of any sardonic content in Junior's remark.

"Maybe you should have joined the military and found a career for yourself that didn't get you into trouble," Lejeune said.

"I served in the United States Navy, suh. Under another name, but in the navy just the same."

"You were a Stewart?"

"No, suh. I was a munitions loader. I loaded munitions right next to Harry Belafonte."

"Who?"

"He's a singer, suh."

"Obviously my knowledge of poplar music isn't very extensive," Lejeune said, and smiled self-indulgently at his wife.

Why had Junior just told Lejeune of his military record or the fact he had known Harry Belafonte? It was like nipping a piece of gold through a sewer grate. At that moment he hated Lejeune more than any human being he'd ever met.

"Would you like something to eat before you go?" Lejeune said. He held up a crystal plate on which a thick ring of crushed ice was embedded with peeled shrimp.

"No, thank you, suh."

"I insist," Lejeune said. He used a fork to scrape a pile of shrimp and ice on a paper plate, then inserted a toothpick in a shrimp and handed the plate to Junior. "Go back yonder and sit in the shade and eat these."

Junior looked at the yard, the absence of chairs or scrolled-iron benches on the grass or even a glider hanging from an oak limb. "Where, suh?" he said.

"Behind the carriage house. There's a box you can sit on. Enjoy your snack and then Mr. Posey will take you back to the camp," Lejeune said.

"You sit right here at the table I'm going to get you some gumbo and a Coca-Cola from the house," Miss Andrea said. "Did you hear me? Put your guitar in the chair and sit down."

"I think Mr. Crudup knows where he should eat," her husband said.

"Castille, if you weren't so miserably stupid and insensitive, I think I'd shoot you," she replied. Then she added "God!" and went inside the house.

Lejeune got up from his chair and walked to the driveway, where he talked quietly with the guard, Jackson Posey. Junior Crudup felt as though he were sliding to the bottom of a dark well from which he would never emerge.

Jackson Posey did not drive the pickup truck directly back to the work camp. Instead, he crossed the bayou on the drawbridge and parked between a sugarcane field and a persimmon grove, out of sight of either the Lejeune home or the camp. He breathed hard through his nose, his mouth a tightly crimped line.