Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"Yes, suh, I sure did," he answered.

"From whom?"

"My wife. She tole me to bring home a loaf of bread."

On the way to the country club Clete was still grinning.

"Why is all this funny?" I said.

"I miss the Mob. Shaking up a bunch of Kiwanians just doesn't cut it."

"You're too much, Cletus."

In that mood we pulled into the tree-bowered entrance of a small tennis and golf club outside the city limits. It wasn't hard to find Castille Lejeune. He and his friends were having drinks under a pavilion and driving golf balls on a lighted practice range dotted in the distance with moss-hung live oaks that smoked in the mist. The range looked hand clipped, immaculate, with neither a leaf nor windblown scrap of paper on it.

The pavilion seemed as isolated and disconnected from the outside world as the golf range was from the trash-strewn roads beyond the hedges that bordered the club. Deferential black waiters brought Lejeune and his friends their buttered rum drinks on silver trays; a Wurlitzer jukebox next to the bar played Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey recordings; a rotund, cherry-cheeked man was speaking affectionat

ely about "an old nigger" who had worked for his family, as though the waiters would take no offense at his language.

We locked the truck, with the twelve-gauge inside, and walked past the clay tennis courts, all of them deserted, the wind screens rattling in the breeze, just as Castille Lejeune whacked a ball off a tee and sent it downrange in a high, beautiful arc. The people at theta bles or teeing up from wire buckets filled with golf balls showed no recognition of our presence. Lejeune positioned himself, swung his driver back, and once again lifted the ball surgically off the tee, high into the darkness, a testimony to his health, the power in his wrists and shoulders, and the maturity and skill he brought to his game.

Clete used a toothpick to spear a peeled shrimp from a large bowl of crushed ice on the bar, dipping it in hot sauce, inserting it in his mouth. His badge holder was stuck in his belt, mine in the breast pocket of my sports coat. But still no one looked at us.

"Give me a Jack straight up with a beer back," he said to the bartender.

"Right away, suh," the bartender replied.

"That's a joke," Clete said.

Lejeune's friends were not people who had to contend with the world. They may not have owned it, nor would they take any part of it through the grave, but while they were alive they could lay rental claims on a very large portion of it.

"Mr. Lejeune, we'd like for you to come with us to the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said.

"Why should I do that, Mr. Robicheaux?" he replied, addressing the ball on his tee, his feet spread, his thighs flexed tightly.

"We need you to answer some questions about the murder of Dr. Samuel Bernstine and the fact Will Guillot has been blackmailing you about your molestation of your daughter when she was a child," I said.

In the silence I could hear leaves scraping across the surface of the tennis court. Lejeune seemed to gaze at an isolated thought in the center of his mind, then he sighted downrange and smacked the ball in a straight line, like a rifle shot, so that it did not strike earth again until it was almost to the oak trees smoking in the electric lights.

"You need to talk to my attorney, Mr. Robicheaux, not to me," he said.

"Did you hear what I said? We're investigating a homicide, the second one that happens to be connected with your name. We don't call attorneys to make appointments," I said.

He turned and dropped his driver in an upended leather golf bag.

He wore a silk scarf around his neck, as an aviator might, the ends tucked inside a sweater with small brown buttons on it. In the corner of my eye I saw two security guards walking from the club's main building and a man at the bar punching in numbers on a cell phone.

Lejeune began chatting with a woman seated at a table as though I were not there. Then I started to lose it.

"You had Junior Crudup beaten to death," I said. "You turned your daughter's childhood into a sexual nightmare. You sell liquor to drunk drivers and probably dope and porn in New Orleans. You think you're going to walk away from all this?"

"Mr. Robicheaux, I don't know if you're a vindictive man, or simply well-meaning and incompetent. The truth is probably somewhere in between. But you need to leave, sir, to let this thing go and give yourself some peace," he replied.

His detachment and his pose as a chivalric and charitable patriarch were magnificent. As Clete had always said, some people have no handles on them. Castille Lejeune was obviously one of them, and I felt like a fool.

Then Clete, who all night had been the advocate of reason and restraint, stepped forward, his thick arm and shoulder knocking against mine. "You were a fighter pilot in the Crotch?" he said.

"In the what}'" Lejeune said.