Dave Robicheaux 13 - Last Car To Elysian Fields by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-01-13T06:00:00+00:00

"Staying with friends in Lafayette."

"You have a lot of regrets in your life, Robicheaux?" she said.

"All drunks do," I replied.

"How do you deal with them?"

"I don't labor over them anymore."

She still looked straight ahead. "I don't want to be a regret in somebody's life," she said.

"Want to meet my cat?" I said.

And that's what we did. I introduced her to Snuggs; then we ate ice cream in the kitchen and I drove her to her motel.

Afterward I went to the cemetery in St. Martinville and sat on the steel bench by Bootsie's tomb and watched the moon rise over the old French church on the bayou.

That night I dreamed I was in New Orleans in an earlier era, riding on a streetcar out to Elysian Fields. The streets were dark, the palm fronds on the neutral ground yellow with blight. No one else was on the car except the motorman. When he turned and looked back at me his eyes were empty sockets, the skin on his face dried and shrunken into little more than gauze on his skull.

Oftentimes police cases are not solved. They simply unravel, by chance and accident. With good luck there will even be an appreciable degree of justice involved, although it often originates from an expected source.

Early the next morning, Saturday, my lawn was white with frost and the bamboo on the side of the house was stiff and hard and rattled like broomsticks in the wind. I put on my sweat suit, ran three miles through City Park, then showered and drove down to Clete's cottage in the motor court.

He sat on the side of his bed in the coldness of the room, sleepy, shivering slightly, wearing only a strap undershirt and pajama bottoms. The wastebasket in his kitchen was stuffed with fast-food containers and beer cans.

"You want to do what?" he said.

"Eat breakfast at McDonald's, then maybe knock down some ducks at Pecan Island," I said.

"I'm busy today," he replied.

"I see."

It was quiet in the room. His eyes lingered on mine. "What's bothering you, big mon?" he said.

I told him about the dream, the motorman with the skeletal face, the darkness outside the streetcar, the yellowed palm fronds that clattered like bone. "You ever have a dream like that?" I said.

"I used to dream I was on a Jolly Green that was going down. But that was in the hospital in Saigon. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a dream."

"I can't shake it," I said.

He got up from the bed and began dressing. "Turn on the heat, will you? It feels like it's thirty below in here," he said.

We ate at the McDonald's on East Main. Outside, the sky was blue, the leaves of the live oak in the adjacent lot flickering in the sunlight. "Can't tempt you into a duck-hunting trip?" I said.

He wiped his mouth with a crumpled napkin and dropped it onto his plate. "That perv I told you about, Bobby Joe Fontenot, the one in the trailer court? I couldn't stop thinking about what he said to me.

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