Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

He lived a bachelor's life in a freshly painted bungalow out in the country, enclosed by sugarcane fields, cedar trees, flower beds and vegetable gardens tended by a trusty from the parish stockade. The radical priest's accusation that he was on a pad still rankled him. Dale Louviere never accepted a bribe from anyone; he didn't have to. He took care of his own side of the street and the other things took care of themselves. A mortgage or car loan was approved upon application; his drinks were put on a tab at local bars but he was not expected to ever pay the tab a land developer gave him forty-yard-line tickets to LSU's home games whenever he wanted them; and at Christmastime cellophane-wrapped baskets of candy, fruit, and wine were delivered to his door.

The people who owned the sugar mills, drilled the oil wells, and governed the parish's affairs paid most of the taxes didn't they? They gave other people jobs. The parish would be a giant rural slum without them. So a civil servant had to pay attention to the needs of rich people who could locate elsewhere anytime they chose.

Anything wrong with that?

Early the same morning Father Jimmie Dolan was to be arraigned, Dale Louviere rose at first light, put on his warm-up suit, and drank coffee and smoked a cigarette at the kitchen table, waiting for the chill to go out of the room. Through the front window he saw a Honda pass on the state road, then return, going in the opposite direction.

He washed his cup and saucer in the sink, put his spare set of house and car keys around his neck on a braided lanyard, and began his early-morning aerobic walk down the state road. Two hundred yards from his bungalow he crossed a wood bridge over a coulee and entered a long, cleared slash between two unharvested cane fields. The rain had quit temporarily, but fog hung like smoke in the cane and the thatch under his feet was sodden and mud coated, squishing each time he took a step, soaking the bottoms of his sweat pants.

One of his shoes went down ankle-deep in water. Bad day for aerobics, he thought.

He heard a car stop on the road. When he looked behind him he saw the Honda again, and a priest with a map spread across his steering wheel, rolling down his window now, his face expressing his obvious need for directions. But secretly Dale Louviere neither liked nor trusted the clergy, and off the clock he gave them no time. He pretended to tie his shoe until he heard the sound of the Honda's engine thinning in the distance.

It started to sprinkle again and Dale Louviere headed home, walking fast along the edge of the road, through ground fog that welled out of the ditches, his arms pumping the way he had learned in an aerobics class. He wondered if he would ever successfully quit smoking. He had tried many times, but within three days he would be so irritable and agitated his colleagues would toss cigarettes on his desk blotter by way of suggestion. Now the best he could do was pump the smoke out of his lungs and the nicotine out of his blood with a hard,

early-morning walk that left his head spinning and his nervous system screaming for another cigarette.

Fortunately he had stuffed a pack in his jacket pocket. Just as he fished one

out he saw the Honda coming in his direction again. The driver pulled alongside Dale Louviere and rolled down the window with the electric motor. He wore a golfer's cap pulled down on one eye, and had a tight face and small ears, like a fighter who had spent too many years in the ring. A road map was crumpled on the dashboard. His black suit and rabat were dry, his shoulders narrow, his hands round and pink on the steering wheel.

"Could you be directing me back to Highway 90, sir?" the priest said.

"Go to the four corners and turn left," Louviere said.

The priest screwed his head about, his eyebrows raised into half-moons. "That simple? I must have made a complete circle. I think the bishop served too much of the grog last night."

But instead of driving away he started fiddling with his map, running his finger along a line that marked Highway 90, peering down the road, then through the back window again. Dale Louviere thought he heard a knocking sound in the trunk.

"What's that?" he asked.

The priest clucked his tongue. "I'm afraid I ran over a dog. I'm taking him to a veterinary if I can find one," he said. "Turn at the crossroads, you say?"

"Correct. You can't get lost. Got it now?" Louviere said impatiently. He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke lovingly into his lungs.

"I don't see that on this map," the priest said.

"Look, it's not that hard. You see the state road here " He held his cigarette to one side and leaned in the window.

That was as far as he got. The priest grabbed the lanyard around Louviere's neck and rolled up the window on his throat, trapping his head at the top of the glass like a man caught in an inverted guillotine.

He pressed down on the accelerator and drove his car down the road and into Louviere's driveway, while Louviere held onto the door handle and tried to extend his body like a crane's to keep from being decapitated.

"Be a good fellow and toggle along as best you can. We'll have you safe and snug in your digs before you know it," the priest said. "Oops, a little bump there. Hang on."

Dale Louviere felt his head being torn loose from his torso as he tripped over his feet, fighting to find purchase. The Honda moved past the side of his house, his gardens and flower beds and across the thin, wintergreen stretch of grass that comprised his backyard, into a paint less cypress barn left over from an earlier time.

The priest lowered the window glass and Dale Louviere fell backward into a smell of rotted straw, hard-packed, damp earth, and horse manure that powdered into dust. The priest cut the engine on the car and got out, a .45 automatic hanging from his right hand. "I have nothing against coppers. Except those who are no better than me and pretend otherwise. On which side of the line would a fellow like you fall, sir?" he said.

Again Dale Louviere heard a kicking sound in the Honda's trunk but could not think of anything except the violent pounding in his own chest.

At 10:55 A.M." while Father Jimmie Dolan sat in a St. Mary Parish courtroom, cuffed to a wrist chain with a collection of drunks, pipe heads prostitutes, and wife batterers, the prosecutor's office received a call from Dale Louviere. He indicated he was resigning his job and, for personal reasons, moving to an undisclosed city out of state. He also said there was no substance to the charges against Father James Dolan and that his colleague, Cash Money Mouton, who had made the arrest in the public rest room, would confirm the same, provided he could be found.

Clotile Arceneaux, Father Jimmie, and I walked out the front door of the courthouse together. The rain had stopped and the town looked washed and clean, the trees green against the grayness of the day, the ebb and flow of the traffic on a wet street somehow an indicator of the world's normalcy.

"What happened in there?" Father Jimmie said.

"I wouldn't worry about it," I said.