Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"I have an addictive personality," I replied.

She sat down

on the corner of the bench. "You got a bad jacket for a cop, Robicheaux."

"Who the hell are you?" I said.

"Clotile Arceneaux. See," she said, lifting her brass name tag with her thumb. "Your friend, Father Dolan? He's an amateur, and they're going to take his legs off yours, too, you keep messing in what you're not supposed to be messing in."

"I'm not big on telling other people what to do. I ask they show me the same courtesy," I said.

The baton on her hip kept banging against the bench. She slid it out of the ring that held it and bounced it between her legs on the cement. Her pursed lips looked like a tiny red rose in the gloom. I

thought she would speak again, but she didn't. The sun went down behind the buildings in the square and the wind gusted off the levee, smelling of rain and fish-kill in the swamps.

"Can I buy you coffee, officer?" I said.

"Your friend is off the hook on the assault beef. Time for you to go home, Robicheaux," she said.

Home, I thought, and looked at her curiously, as though the word would not register in my mind.

Chapter 3.

On Monday I left the department at mid-morning and checked out a history of Louisiana blues music and swamp pop from the city library and began reading it in my office. It was raining outside, and through my window I could see a freight train, the boxcars shiny with water, wobbling down the old Southern Pacific tracks through the black section of town. The longtime sheriff", an ex-marine who had marched out of the Chosin Reservoir, had retired and been replaced by my old partner, Helen Soileau.

I saw her stop in the corridor outside my office and bite her lip, her hands on her hips. She tapped on the door, then opened it without waiting for me to tell her to come in.

"Got a minute?" she asked.

"Sure."

"A couple of N.O.P.D. plainclothes picked up a prisoner this morning. They said you and Clete bent a pornographic actor out of shape. They thought it was funny."

"Pornographic actor?" I said vaguely.

"Ardoin was his name."

"Clete flattened a coffeepot against the side of the guy's head, but it wasn't a big deal," I said.

She had the muscular build of a man and blond hair that she cut short, tapering it on the sides and neck so that it looked like the freshly cropped mane on a pony. She wore slacks and a white, short-sleeve shirt, a badge holder hooked on her belt. She sucked in her cheeks and watched a raindrop run down the window glass above my head.

"Not a big deal? Interrogating people outside your jurisdiction, banging them in the head with a coffeepot? Dave, I never thought I'd be in this situation," she said.

"Which one is that?"

She leaned on the windowsill and looked at the lights of the freight caboose disappearing between a green jungle on each side of the tracks.

"You and Cletus work it out, but I don't want anybody, that means anybody, dragging N.O.P.D."s dogshit into this department. I don't want to be the dartboard for those wise-asses, either. We straight on this?" she said.

"I hear you."

"Good."

"Remember an R&B guitarist named Junior Crudup?" I asked.

"No."

"He went into Angola and never came out. I think his granddaughter got swindled out of her land over in St. James Parish. I think Merchie Flannigan is mixed up in it."