Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux, #13)

by James Lee Burke

Long before Hispanic and black caricatures acted out self-created roles as gangsters on MTV, white street gangs in New Orleans fought with chains, steel pipes, and zip guns over urban territory that a self-respecting Bedouin wouldn’t live in.

“In the old days elderly people in New Orleans didn’t get jack-rolled and their houses didn’t get creeped and nobody murdered a child or abused Catholic clergy. If N.O.P.D. couldn’t take care of it, we let you guys do it for us.” His eyes were hooded, like a frog’s. “You were kicked off the force, Robicheaux. You don’t speak for nobody, at least not around here.” He paused, as though reconsidering the tenor of his rhetoric. “Look, this used to be a good city. It ain’t no more.”

You want to know who’s running New Orleans? Flip over a rock. Welfare pukes hustling bazooka and blacks and South American spics and bikers muleing brown skag out of Florida.

Monday night I listened to two ancient .78 recordings made by Junior Crudup in the 1940s. As with Leadbelly, the double-strung bass strings on his guitar were tuned an octave apart, but you could hear Blind Lemon and Robert Johnson in his style as well. His voice was haunting. No, that’s not the right word. It drifted above the notes like a moan.

Father Dolan’s got enemies all over New Orleans. He’s trying to shut down drive-by daiquiri windows and trash incinerators and these guys who been dumping sludge out in the river parishes. He told the Times-Picayune these right-to-life people were committing a sin by putting these women’s pictures and names on the Internet.”

Bootsie’s crypt was located by the bayou, and standing next to it I could look downstream and see on the opposite bank the ancient French church and the Evangeline Oak where she and I had first kissed as teenagers and the stars overhead had swirled like diamonds inside a barrel of black water.

There are times as a law officer when you wish you did not have to look into the soul of another, even a grieving victim’s.

Hadn’t they heard of modern times? And how about this Father Dolan, threatening him with physical violence over the telephone? Now, that was a sad state of affairs, an Irish-American priest berating a man who had worked in the service of the IRA. Pitiful, Max thought.

“Are you there, Father? Excuse me if I sound strange, but I have a broken nose, a mouth that looks like a smashed plum, and a tooth knocked out of my head. All done by a Catholic priest,” the voice said.

It was pointless to argue with Clete. He was the best investigative cop I ever knew, his blue-collar instincts for deception and hypocrisy and flimflam always on target.

Clete was Clete, a human moving violation, out of sync with both lawful and criminal society, no more capable of changing his course than a steel wrecking ball can alter its direction after it’s been set in motion.