DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

hard the walls shook.
    "You mad at my door?" I said.
    "I need to straighten you out about a certain issue," he said.
    I stepped outside, barefoot, still unshaved, dressed only in a T-shirt and khakis. He wore a rust-colored shirt and brown knit necktie and knife-creased slacks. He stood a half-head taller than I, his porcine face shiny with cologne.
    "A little early, isn't it?" I said.
    "I get up at four every morning. I think sleep sucks," he said.
    "I see. Then you wake up other people. Makes sense."
    "What?" he said.
    "Why are you here, Sammy?"
    "I got this punk Gunner Ardoin calling me up, telling me he didn't rat me out, that he's got a little girl, that he can't afford to lose work 'cause he's in the hospital."
    "Why tell me about it?" I asked.
    "Thanks to you and that animal Purcel, my name is getting drug into all this."
    "Into what?"
    "Stories about a priest getting bashed. I don't want to hear my name coming up no more in regard to Father Jimmie Dolan. This guy is a world-class pain in the ass and I got nothing to do with him. What kind of priest punches out the owner of a health salon, anyway?"
    "I hadn't heard that one."
    "He probably left it out of his homily."
    "I'll try to remember all this. Thanks for dropping by," I said.
    Sammy looked at me for a long time, his nostrils swelling with air, his small mouth a tight seam, as though he had been talking futilely to either a deaf or stupid man. A delivery truck smelling of donuts or freshly baked bread passed on the street. Fat Sammy watched the truck turn the corner by a huge, redbrick, tree-shaded antebellum home called the Shadows and disappear down a side street.
    "This is a nice town," he said.
    I realized that whatever was really bothering him was probably not within his ability to explain. He watched a blue jay lighting on a bird feeder that hung from an oak limb in the yard. Then, like every mainstream American gangster I had ever known, almost all of whom struggle to hold onto some vestige of respectability, he unknowingly opened a tiny window into a childlike area of his soul.
    "I talked with them German film people who's doing a documentary. They say you told them I used to be on a first-name basis with a Miami guy who helped kill President Kennedy. It's true, you told them people that?" he said.
    "You know the same stories I do, Sammy. They just sound better coming from you. You were born for the screen, partner," I said.
    He seemed to think about my explanation, but showed no indication of wanting to leave my gallery.
    "You care to come inside and have some coffee?" I said.
    "Got any donuts?" he said.
    I opened the door for him and watched his enormous bulk move past me into my house. I could smell an odor like testosterone ironed into his clothes.
    That morning I drove to the high school that the three dead girls had attended up the bayou in the little town of Loreauville. The registrar gave me a copy of the yearbook from the previous year and I found the three girls' photographs among members of the junior class. All three had been either class officers, prom queens, members of the drama club and speech team, or participants in Madrigals. They had been scheduled to graduate in the spring.
    But one of the girls had a different kind of distinction. The driver, Lori Parks, had been on probation for possession of Ecstasy and had been driving with a restricted license for a previous DWI. By late afternoon the forensic chemist at our crime lab had matched a latent print from one of the plastic cups I had picked up two hundred yards from the crash site. The latent belonged to Lori Parks.
    There is no open-container law in the State of Louisiana. It is supposedly illegal to drink and drive in the state, but a vendor can sell mixed drinks at drive-by windows to people in automobiles, provided the container is sealed. Wrapping a piece of plastic around the lid of a daiquiri cup satisfies the statute, and the passengers in the automobile are allowed to open the