Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

Helen and I and a plainclothes from the St. Mary sheriff's office served the warrant on him in front of his guests, who included, among at least a dozen others, Theo and Merchie Flannigan. Lejeune tried to feign an amused dismay and the good cheer of the professional bon vivant, but Theo imposed no such restraints on herself.

She wore a low-cut white evening dress and a necklace of red stones around her throat. Her skin was flushed with either the challenge of the moment or the glass of bourbon and crushed ice with a sprig of mint she had been drinking. She placed her small fists on her hips, as a drill instructor might, and turned her face up into mine. "You're an idiot," she said.

"Excuse me, madam, but you need to sit down and stay out of this," Helen said.

"And you need to work on your sexual-identity problems before you lecture other people in their homes," Theo said.

Helen gazed through the trees at the bayou and the deserted shacks that had once housed prison inmates, her breasts hard-looking as softballs against her shirt. She reread the warrant to herself, seemingly indifferent to Theo's insult. Then she lifted her eyes into Theo's. "Repeat what you just said."

"You have no business here," Theo said.

"Where do you think the burial site is?" Helen said to me, ignoring Theo.

"On a line between here and what would have been the front gate of the prison camp. I'd put it pretty close to that pond inside the fenced area," I said.

Lejeune raised his hands. "Listen to me," he said. "I don't know anything about this man Junior Crudup or whatever his name is. My wife befriended the convicts who worked out their sentences on our farm. She was a kind, gentle, decent person. How in God's name can you accuse us of hiding the remains of a murdered man on our property?"

Helen walked out into the yard. "Take out that fence and start in a circle. Drain the pond if you have to," she said to the two heavy-equipment operators.

Helen went back to her cruiser and I began walking down the slope toward the old work camp. Inside the evening shade of the trees I could hear the conversation and tinkle of glasses resume among Lejeune's guests on the patio.

"Dave, stop," Theo said, catching my arm.

She'd just had her hair cut and it was thick and even and shiny on the whiteness of her shoulders. The bourbon and smell of ice and mint on her breath touched my face like the tracings of a kiss.

"Your father commissioned a murder," I said.

"You have it all backwards," she said.

"Then why are you afraid to go down to the pond?"

"For reasons you don't understand."

"You can tell the jury that at your father's trial."

&

nbsp; "Why do you hate him so much?"

"Because he's a sonofabitch."

"I'll remember you said that to the day I die."

"Go back home, Theo. Your guests are waiting."

"I can't believe I slept with you. I want to peel my skin off."

Perhaps her response was justified, but at that moment I didn't care one way or another. Down below, the bulldozer and front-end loader were tearing apart a white-rail fence and a sloping green pasture, looking for the bones of a man who had been beaten to death so a cancer-ridden prison guard could keep his pension and a cuckolded husband his pride.

The heavy-equipment operators worked, by gasoline-powered light until midnight, blading away the grass and topsoil, pushing it into water-beaded, black-green mounds. They came back at sunrise and started in again, scooping huge amounts of wet clay and feeder roots from the oak trees onto Lejeune's lawn, trenching a drainage into his fish pond, smashing his dock into kindling. By noon the entire landscape between the trees in his backyard and the cluster of cabins by the bayou was an ecological disaster, water oozing from the substrata, perch and catfish fighting for survival in small pools, a cow's ribs arching out of the clay like a woman's comb.

A half dozen uniformed deputies in rubber boots raked and probed for hours but found no sign of a human burial. By Wednesday afternoon the excavation area had become a giant, water-filled pit. Since the previous day I had slept three hours. My eyes stung, my jaws were like sandpaper, and a stale, clammy odor rose from my clothes. The heavy-equipment operators shut down their machines and waited. Helen shook her head and the operators climbed down and began packing up.

"We're in the Dumpster, bwana," Helen said.

"That body was here. He moved it," I said.

"Ride back with me. You look like a car wreck," she said.