Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"No

t sure."

"I am. You wanted to provoke a confrontation and blow pieces of Castille Lejeune all over the golf tee."

"That's a little strong."

I thought she was going to give it to me but she didn't. "As far as you know, Guillot didn't try to call Lejeune after you went to Guillot's house?" she said.

"When we went to Lejeune's house, the man cleaning up said nobody had called except his wife. She wanted him to pick up a loaf of bread."

"Maybe Lejeune is not the guy we should be after."

"He's the guy."

"I think I'm going to do something more rewarding today, like have a conversation with a pile of bricks," she said.

"Did you just hear something on the line?"

"Hear what?"

"A friend in New Orleans said I probably have a federal tap on my phone."

"Have a nice weekend, Dave."

Clete was in serious trouble and would not be able to bond out of jail until he was arraigned Monday morning. The impersonation beef was a gray area. A person does not have to specifically claim to be a police officer in order to be guilty of impersonating one. He simply has to give the impression of being one. But Clete had licensed PI. status and ironically, as an employee of a bail bond service, possessed legal powers that no law officer did, namely, he could cross state lines and even break into residences without a warrant to arrest a bail skip who was a fugitive from a court proceeding.

The assault-and-battery beef was another matter. With luck and some finesse, an expensive, politically connected lawyer could probably get the charge kicked down to resisting. But it wasn't going to be easy. Clete's reputation for violence, destruction of property, and general anarchy was scorched into the landscape all the way across southern Louisiana. His enemies had longed for the day he would load the gun for them. Now I had helped him do it.

I went to Baron's Health Club, worked out with free weights, then sat for a half hour in the steam room. When I came back outside it was still raining, harder than before, litter floating in the ditches that bordered the streets. I went to an afternoon AA. meeting above the Methodist church by the railroad tracks and listened to a man talk about nightmares he still had from the Vietnam War. His face was seamed, unshaved, his body flaccid, his clothes mismatched. He had been eighty-sixed out of every bar in the parish and he had been put out of two V.A. alcoholic treatment programs. He began to talk about a massacre of innocent persons inside a free-fire zone.

I couldn't listen to it. I left the meeting and drove home. When I pulled into the driveway my yard was flooded halfway to the gallery and Theodosha Flannigan was waiting for me by the door, a rain-spotted scarf tied on her head, her face filled with consternation. Snuggs was turning in circles around her ankles.

"I know all about last night," she said.

"Not a good day for it, Theo," I said, unlocking the door.

I went in the house without inviting her inside, but she followed me anyway, Snuggs racing past us toward the food bowl in the kitchen.

"My father didn't molest me. It was a black man. That's why I was seeing Dr. Bernstine," she said.

"Don't do this, Theo."

"When I was a little girl a black convict got in our house and hurt me. He was killed running down toward the bayou."

"Killed by whom?"

"A prison guard. He worked at the labor camp. He and the other guards buried him in back. I saw the bones when the fish pond was dug. They were sticking out of the dirt in a front-end loader."

"You've been fed a lie."

"It's the truth. I went over every detail of it with my father."

"Bernstine told you your father raped or molested you, didn't he?"

"It doesn't matter. I know what happened."

"When you first told me about Bernstine's death, you said you thought you had something to do with it."