DR13 - Last Car to Elysian Fields by James Lee Burke Page B

maroon polo shirt and casual slacks that accentuated the flatness of his stomach and the graceful line of his hips.
    "I'd like to see the owners of these drive-by daiquiri stores run through a tree shredder. But you're taking out your anger on the wrong person, Dr. Parks," I said.
    "I moved my family here from Memphis. We thought small-town America wouldn't have drugs and political officials on the take and bastards who sell children booze to kill themselves with. I've been a stupid man."
    He took his position on the tee, lifted his golf club with perfect form, and whipped it viciously into the ball.
    "Don't add to your grief, sir," I said.
    He turned and faced me. "You have any idea of what it might have been like inside that car?" he said.
    "The tox screen showed traces of marijuana in Lori's blood," I said.
    "So what?"
    "Maybe Josh Comeaux is a victim, too."
    "I must have done something wrong in a former life," he said.
    "Pardon?"
    "My daughter was burned alive and the cop who should be kicking somebody's ass is a goddamn titty-sucking liberal. You need to leave my property."
    I took my sunglasses out of their case, then replaced them and stuck the case back in my shirt pocket. The wind was cold blowing out of the trees and I could smell the heavy odor of the bayou in the shadows. The skin under Dr. Parks's right eye seemed to twitch uncontrollably.
    "Are you hard of hearing?" he asked.
    "The judge will probably go light on Josh's bond. That means he'll probably be back home in a day or so. Axe we clear on the implication, sir?" I said.
    "That I'd better not hurt him?"
    He waited for an answer but I didn't give him one. I fitted on my sunglasses and walked back to the cruiser, my shoes crunching through the leaves the doctor had raked into piles, only to see them blown apart by the wind. The doctor's wife emerged from the front door, wearing a house robe and slippers, a drink in her hand, the makeup on her face like a theatrical mask.
    "You think I care about that boy? You think that's what this is about? Where are your brains, man?" the doctor shouted after me.
    The following evening I ate supper in the backyard, then went to the old cemetery by the drawbridge in St. Martinville where Bootsie was buried. The air was cold and smelled of distant rain, the sky yellow with dust blown from the fields. Several of the houses bordering the cemetery had signs on the galleries announcing TOMB PAINT FOR SALE. In south Louisiana we bury the dead on top of the ground and it's a tradition to whitewash the crypts of family members on All Saints Day. But it wasn't November yet. Or was it? I had to look at the calendar window on my watch to assure myself the month was still October.
    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.
    I removed the three roses I had placed in a vase two nights previous and washed and refilled the vase under a tap by the gravel path that led through the cemetery. Then I put three fresh roses in the vase and set it in front of the marble marker that was cemented into the front of Bootsie's crypt. The roses were yellow, the petals edged with pink, the stems wrapped in green tissue paper by a young clerk at the Winn-Dixie store in New Iberia. When he handed me the roses I was struck by the bloom of youth on his face, the clarity of purpose in his eyes. "I bet these are for a special lady," he had said.
    I sat on a metal bench with a ventilated backrest for a long time and drank a bottle of carbonated water I had brought from home. Then the wind came up and scattered the leaves from a swamp maple on the bayou's surface, and inside the sound of the wind I thought I heard a loon calling.
    I finished the bottle of carbonated water, screwed the top back on, and pitched the