Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"What kind?"

"While my eyes were taped shut a guy urinated in my face. I think Fat Sammy Figorelli knows who he is."

"Say all that again?"

I did, this time in detail. She was quiet a long time. "What do you want from me?" she said.

"Help me jam up Sammy Fig."

"Can't do it."

"Why not?"

"We think Fat Sammy might be talking to us soon."

"As an informant?"

"Think FBI and Witness Protection."

"These guys were going to burn my kite, on film, one frame at a time. I'm not too interested in hearing about federal needs right now."

"Too bad. Stay in New Iberia, Robicheaux. That's not just a cautionary statement, either," she said.

That evening I took Clete to dinner at the Patio in Loreauville. After we ate we walked to the iron bridge over Bayou Teche and stared down at the water. The sky was crimson, full of birds, the air heavy with the smell of the sugar mills grinding cane. In the distance I heard a boat horn blowing on the water.

"I'm worried about you, noble mon," Clete said.

"You shouldn't."

"You fool lots of people. But you never fool your old podjo. Tell me I'm wrong."

I couldn't, so I changed the subject. "Fat Sammy knows who put the hit on me," I said.

"I told you he was a grease bag."

"I need to put the squeeze on him. N.O.P.D. was no help."

"You mean the black broad, what's-her-name, Clotile Whatever?"

"She's got her own problems."

"Save the St. Francis of Assisi routine for another time. What's today?"

"Wednesday," I said.

Clete put a stick of gum in his mouth and looked at the shadows the trees made on the bayou's surface. "You really want to put a freight train up Sammy's cheeks?"

"I couldn't have said it better."

"Remember Janet Gish? Used to be a dancer out on Airline?" he said.

"What about her?"

"She was Gunner Ardoin's co star in one of Fat Sammy's films. You like Italian opera?"

During the next two days Clete made several phone calls to New Orleans and was mysterious about all of them. But taciturnity in Clete, at least with me, usually meant he was working on a scheme that was so outrageous no sane person would involve himself in it. No one who reviewed Clete's record could doubt his creativeness when it came to spreading mayhem and chaos wherever he went. He not only shot a federal witness to death in a hog lot, he filled a New Orleans' gangster's vintage convertible with cement, destroyed a half-million-dollar home out on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth grader, pinned a hit man on the floor of the Greyhound depot's men's room and poured the contents of a liquid soap container down his throat,

dropped a Teamster steward off a fourth-floor hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool, handcuffed a U.S. congressman to a fire hydrant on St. Charles, cuffed a dirty cop to the conveyor chain in a car-wash and hot-wax machine, and was believed to have put sand in the fuel tank of an airplane that crashed and exploded in the mountains of western Montana, stringing die spruce trees with the remains of several Galveston and Las Vegas mobsters.