Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

And that's what we did. I introduced her to Snuggs; then we ate ice cream in the kitchen and I drove her to her motel.

Afterward I went to the cemetery in St. Martinville and sat on the steel bench by Bootsie's tomb and watched the moon rise over the old French church on the bayou.

That night I dreamed I was in New Orleans in an earlier era, riding on a streetcar out to Elysian Fields. The streets were dark, the palm fronds on the neutral ground yellow with blight. No one else was on the car except the motorman. When he turned and looked back at me his eyes were empty sockets, the skin on his face dried and shrunken into little more than gauze on his skull.

Oftentimes police cases are not solved. They simply unravel, by chance and accident. With good luck there will even be an appreciable degree of justice involved, although it often originates from an expected source.

Early the next morning, Saturday, my lawn was white with frost and the bamboo on the side of the house was stiff and hard and rattled like broomsticks in the wind. I put on my sweat suit, ran three miles through City Park, then showered and drove down to Clete's cottage in the motor court.

He sat on the side of his bed in the coldness of the room, sleepy, shivering slightly, wearing only a strap undershirt and pajama bottoms. The wastebasket in his kitchen was stuffed with fast-food containers and beer cans.

"You want to do what?" he said.

"Eat breakfast at McDonald's, then maybe knock down some ducks at Pecan Island," I said.

"I'm busy today," he replied.

"I see."

It was quiet in the room. His eyes lingered on mine. "What's bothering you, big mon?" he said.

I told him about the dream, the motorman with the skeletal face, the darkness outside the streetcar, the yellowed palm fronds that clattered like bone. "You ever have a dream like that?" I said.

"I used to dream I was on a Jolly Green that was going down. But that was in the hospital in Saigon. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a dream."

"I can't shake it," I said.

He got up from the bed and began dressing. "Turn on the heat, will you? It feels like it's thirty below in here," he said.

We ate at the McDonald's on East Main. Outside, the sky was blue, the leaves of the live oak in the adjacent lot flickering in the sunlight. "Can't tempt you into a duck-hunting trip?" I said.

He wiped his mouth with a crumpled napkin and dropped it onto his plate. "That perv I told you about, Bobby Joe Fontenot, the one in the trailer court? I couldn't stop thinking about what he said to me."

"Said what?"

"That if he re offended he was going to use my name every time he stuck it to a little kid. So I called the perv's P.O. Guess what? The P.O. is on vacation. So I told the guy handling his case file about the little boy in the trailer next door. He did everything except yawn in my ear."

"Call Social Services," I said.

"I already did. I think that kid is shark meat."

He gathered up the trash from both our meals and stuffed them angrily into a bin.

"Take it easy, Cletus," I said.

"Screw the ducks. Time to spit in the punch bowl," he said.

The mother of the little boy in the trailer court was named Katie Goltz. She sat with us in her tiny living room, still not connecting the reasons we were there, even though Clete mentioned he had been chasing down a bail skip who was the fall partner of Bobby Joe Fon-tenot, a convicted sex predator living next door.

She wore no lipstick, old jeans, Indian moccasins, and a colorless pullover. Her hair was cut short, and had probably been brown before it was peroxided and waved on one side to resemble a 1940s leading lady's.

"Where's your son?" Clete said.

"At the strip mall," she replied.

Clete nodded. "He went with some friends?" he asked.

"Bobby Joe took him. To buy him a comic book for helping clean his trailer," she said.