Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"Somebody shot at me last night."

"I can't imagine why."

"Did you set me up with the Dellacroces?"

She walked past me and pulled the morning paper from the metal delivery receptacle, then started back up the drive toward her house. "Too bad it's Sunday," she said.

"Why's that?"

"The state mental hygiene unit in Lafayette is closed. But if I were you, I'd jump right on it first thing in the morning," she said, opening the paper, not bothering to even glance at me as she spoke..

When I got back home, Father Jimmie was gone, his closet empty. He had left a recording for me on my message machine, its brevity like a shard of glass: "So long, Dave. Thanks for your hospitality. I hope everything works out for you."

There was also a voice message from Donna Parks: "Why don't you answer my goddamn letter, you callous fuck?"

It was going to be a long day.

I tried to eat lunch but had no appetite. As I washed my dishes and put away my uneaten food, I looked through a window and saw Helen Soileau pull into the driveway. She got out of the cruiser and walked to the gallery, wearing faded jeans, boots, and a mackinaw, her jaw set. I opened the door before she could knock.

"I was out of town, so I just got the report on the car sniper," she said, walking past me into the warmth of the living room. "Go over it for me."

I went over each detail with her and also told her I had been to Franklin that morning to look for the compact car I had put three rounds in.

"Anybody from St. Mary Parish contact you?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"Yesterday somebody got past the alarm system at both Castille Lejeune's and Will Guillot's house. In the middle of the afternoon. A real pro. Know who it might be?"

"Max Coll," I said.

"What was he looking for?"

"Evidence they put a hit on him."

"I hate to even ask this question. How would you know this?"

"He called here yesterday. I more or less told him there were two local guys behind the contract on him and they lived in Franklin."

She stood at the ceiling-high living room window and stared out at the street and at the rain dripping through the canopy of live oaks that arched over it, her fists propped on her hips. "Want to tell me your motivation for doing that?" she said.

"I owed him one."

"We don't owe criminals. We break their wheels and put them out of business. We don't make individual judgments on the people we need to arrest."

"I don't see it that way."

"There are a lot of things you don't see," she replied, turning to look directly at me. "I'm pulling your shield, bwana."

I nodded, my expression flat. "It's been that kind of day," I said. I slipped my badge holder out of my pocket and handed it to her. "Coll thinks Theo Flannigan may have been the porn connection to Sammy Figorelli. Maybe she was the shooter in the daiquiri drive-by. In case you want to follow that up."

Helen flipped my badge holder back and forth in her hand while she listened, then she tucked it into her pocket. "Sometimes you break my heart," she said.

I had been suspended before, put on a desk, investigated by Internal Affairs, locked up on at least three occasions, and years ago fired by N.O.P.D. But this time was different. The suspension came not from a career administrator but from my old partner, a woman who had been excoriated as a lesbian and who had never allowed the taunts and odium heaped upon her to diminish either her integrity or the dignity and courage that obviously governed her life.

The fact that it was she who had pulled my plug made me wonder if indeed I hadn't gone way beyond the envelope and become one of those jaundiced and embittered law officers whose careers do not end but flame out in a curlicue of dirty smoke that forever obscures the clarity of their moral vision.

But that kind of thinking is what we call in AA. the paralysis of analysis. In terms of worth it shares commonalities with masturbation, asking a rage-a-holic for advice on spiritual serenity, or listening to your own thoughts while trapped by yourself between floors in a stalled elevator.