DR10 - Sunset Limited (10 page)

He shook his head sadly. "I got witnesses. I ain't done
anything."

"You want to add 'resisting' to it?" she said.

"Whoa, mama. Take your hands off me… Hey, enough's
enough… Buddy, yeah, you, guy with the mustache, you get this
dyke off me."

She grabbed him by the shoulders and put her shoe behind his
knee. Then he brought his elbow into her breast, hard, raking it across
her as he turned.

She slipped a blackjack from her pants pocket and raised it
over her shoulder and swung it down on his collarbone. It was weighted
with lead, elongated like a darning sock, the spring handle wrapped
with leather. The blow made his shoulder drop as though the tendons had
been severed at the neck.

But he flailed at her just the same, trying to grab her around
the waist. She whipped the blackjack across his head, again and again,
splitting his scalp, wetting the leather cover on the blackjack each
time she swung.

I tried to push him to the ground, out of harm's way, but
another problem was in the making. The two off-duty sheriffs deputies
were pulling their weapons.

I tore my .45 from my belt holster and aimed into their faces.

"Freeze! It's over!… Take your hand off that piece!
Do it! Do it! Do it!"

I saw the confusion and the alarm fix in their eyes, their
bodies stiffening. Then the moment died in their faces. "That's
it… Now, move the crowd back. That's all you've got to
do… That's right," I said, my words like wet glass in my
throat.

Swede Boxleiter moaned and rolled in the dirt among the power
cables, his fingers laced in his hair. Both my hands were still
squeezed tight on the .45's grips, my forearms shining with sweat.

The faces of the onlookers were stunned, stupefied. Billy
Holtzner pushed his way through the crowd, turned in a circle, his
eyebrows climbing on his forehead, and said, "I got to tell you to get
back to work?" Then he walked back toward his trailer, blowing his nose
on a Kleenex, flicking his eyes sideways briefly as though looking at a
minor irritant.

I was left staring into the self-amused gaze of Archer
Terrebonne. Lila stood behind him, her mouth open, her face as white as
cake flour. The backs of my legs were still trembling.

"Do y'all specialize in being public fools, Mr. Robicheaux?"
he asked. He touched at the corner of his mouth, his three-fingered
hand like that of an impaired amphibian.

THE SHERIFF PACED IN his office. He
pulled up the blinds, then
lowered them again. He kept clearing his throat, as though there were
an infection in it.

"This isn't a sheriff's department. I'm the supervisor of a
mental institution," he said.

He took the top off his teakettle, looked inside it, and set
the top down again.

"You know how many faxes I've gotten already on this? The St.
Mary sheriff told me not to put my foot in his parish again. That
sonofabitch actually threatened me," he said.

"Maybe we should have played it differently, but Boxleiter
didn't give us a lot of selection," I said.

"Outside our jurisdiction."

"We told him he wasn't under arrest. There was no
misunderstanding about that," I said.

"I should have used their people to take him down," Helen said.

"Ah, a breakthrough in thought. But I'm suspending you just
the same, at least until I get an IA finding," the sheriff said.

"He threw sweat on her. He hit her in the chest with his
elbow. He got off light," I said.

"A guy with twenty-eight stitches in his head?"

"You told us to pick him up, skipper. That guy would be a
loaded gun anyplace we tried to take him down. You know it, too," I
said.

He crimped his lips together and breathed through his nose.

"I'm madder than hell about this," he said.

The room was silent, the air-conditioning almost frigid. The
sunlight through the slatted blinds was eye-watering.

"All right, forget the suspension and IA stuff. See me before
you go into St. Mary Parish again. In the meantime, you find out why
Cisco Flynn thinks he can bring his pet sewer rats into Iberia
Parish… Helen, you depersonalize your attitude toward the
perps, if that's possible."

"The sewer rats?" I said.

He filled his pipe bowl from a leather pouch and didn't bother
to look up until we were out of the room.

THAT EVENING CLETE PURCEL parked his
Cadillac convertible
under the shade trees in front of my house and walked down to the bait
shop. He wore a summer suit and a lavender shirt with a white tie. He
went to the cooler and opened a bottle of strawberry soda.

"What, I look funny or something?" he said.

"You look sharp."

He drank out of the pop bottle and watched a boat out on the
bayou.

"I'll treat y'all to dinner at the Patio in Loreauville," he
said.

"I'd better work."

He nodded, then looked at the newscast on the television set
that sat above the counter.

"Thought I'd ask," he said.

"Who you going to dinner with?"

"Megan Flynn."

"Another time."

He sat down at the counter and drank from his soda. He drew a
finger through a wet ring on the wood.

"I'm only supposed to go out with strippers and junkies?" he
said.

"Did I say anything?"

"You hide your feelings like a cat in a spin dryer."

"So she's stand-up. But why's she back in New Iberia? We're
Paris on the Teche?"

"She was born here. Her brother has a house here."

"Yeah, he's carrying weight for a psychopath, too. Why you
think that is, Clete? Because Cisco likes to rehabilitate shank
artists?"

"I hear Helen beat the shit out of Boxleiter with a slapjack.
Maybe he's got the message and he'll get out of town."

I mopped down the counter and tossed the rag on top of a case
of empty beer bottles.

"You won't change your mind?" he said.

"Come back tomorrow. We'll entertain the bass."

He made a clicking sound with his mouth and walked out the
door and into the twilight.

AFTER SUPPER I DROVE over to Mout'
Broussard's house on the
west side of town. Cool Breeze came out on the gallery and sat down on
the swing. He had removed the bandage from his cheek, and the wound he
had gotten at the jail looked like a long piece of pink string inset in
his skin.

"Doctor said I ain't gonna have no scar."

"You going to hang around town?" I asked.

"Ain't got no pressing bidness nowheres else."

"They used you, Breeze."

"I got Alex Guidry fired, ain't I?"

"Does it make you feel better?"

He looked at bis hands. They were wide, big-boned, lustrous
with callus.

"What you want here?" he asked.

"The old man who made your wife cook for him, Harpo
Delahoussey? Did he have a son?"

"What people done tole you over in St. Mary Parish?"

"They say he didn't."

He shook his head noncommittally.

"You don't remember?" I said.

"I don't care. It ain't my bidness."

"A guy named Harpo may have executed a couple of kids out in
the Basin," I said.

"Those dagos in New Orleans? You know what they do to a black
man snitch them off? I'm suppose to worry about some guy blowing away
some po'-white trash raped a black girl?"

"When those men took away your wife twenty years ago, you
couldn't do anything about it. Same kind of guys are still out there,
Breeze. They function only because we allow them to."

"I promised Mout' to go crabbing with him in the morning. I
best be getting my sleep," he said.

But when I got into my truck and looked back at him, he was
still in the swing, staring at his hands, his massive shoulders slumped
like a bag of crushed rock.

IT WAS HOT AND dry Friday night, with
a threat of rain that
never came. Out over the Gulf, the clouds would vein and pulse with
lightning, then the thunder would ripple across the wetlands with a
sound like damp cardboard tearing. In the middle of the night I put my
hands inside Bootsie's nightgown and felt her body's heat against my
palms, like the warmth in a lampshade. Her eyes opened and looked into
mine, then she touched my hardness with her fingertips, her hand
gradually rounding itself, her mouth on my cheek, then on my lips. She
rolled on her back, her hand never leaving me, and waited for me to
enter her.

She came before I did, both of her hands pushing hard into the
small of my back, her knees gathered around my thighs, then she came a
second time, with me, her stomach rolling under me, her voice muted and
moist in my ear.

She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running. She
walked toward me out of the light, touching her face with a towel, then
lay on top of the sheet and put her head on my chest. The ends of her
hair were wet and the spinning blades of the window fan made shadows on
her skin.

"What's worrying you?" she asked.

"Nothing."

She kicked me in the calf.

"Clete Purcel. I think he's going to be hurt," I said.

"Advice about love and money. Give it to anyone except
friends."

"You're right. You were about Megan, too. I'd thought better
of her."

She ran her fingernails through my hair and rested one ankle
across mine.

SUNDAY MORNING I WOKE at dawn and went
down to the bait shop
to help Batist open up. I was never sure of his age, but he had been a
teenager during World War II when he had worked for Mr. Antoine, one of
Louisiana's last surviving Confederate veterans, at Mr. Antoine's
blacksmith shop in a big red barn out on West Main. Mr. Antoine had
willed Batist a plot of land and a small cypress home on the bayou, and
over the years Batist had truck farmed there, augmented his income by
trapping and fishing with my father, buried two wives, and raised five
children, all of whom graduated from high school. He was illiterate and
sometimes contentious, and had never traveled farther from home than
New Orleans in one direction and Lake Charles in the other, but I never
knew a more loyal or decent person.

We started the fire in the barbecue pit, which was fashioned
from a split oil drum with handles and hinges welded on it, laid out
our chickens and sausage links on the grill for our midday customers,
and closed down the lid to let the meat smoke for at least three hours.

Batist wore a pair of bell-bottomed dungarees and a white
T-shirt with the sleeves razored off. His upper arms bunched like
cantaloupes when he moved a spool table to hose down the dock under it.

"I forgot to tell you. That fella Cool Breeze was by here last
night," he said.

"What did he want?"

"I ain't ax him."

I expected him to say more but he didn't. He didn't like
people of color who had jail records, primarily because he believed
they were used by whites as an excuse to treat all black people
unfairly.

"Does he want me to call him?" I asked.

"I know that story about his wife, Dave. Maybe it wasn't all
his fault, but he sat by while them white men ruined that po' girl. I
feel sorry for him, me, but when a man got a grief like that against
hisself, there ain't nothing you can do for him."

I looked up Mout's name in the telephone book and dialed the
number. While the phone rang Batist lit a cigar and opened the screen
on the window and flicked the match into the water.

"No one home," I said after I hung up.

"I ain't gonna say no more."

He drew in on his cigar, his face turned into the breeze that
blew through the screen.

BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR AND I went to
Mass, then I dropped them
off at home and drove to Cisco Flynn's house on the Loreauville road.
He answered the door in a terry-cloth bathrobe that he wore over a pair
of scarlet gym shorts.

"Too early?" I said.

"No, I was about to do a workout. Come in," he said, opening
the door wide. "Look, if you're here to apologize about that stuff on
the set—"

"I'm not."

"Oh."

"The sheriff wants to know why the city of New Iberia is
hosting a mainline con like your friend Boxleiter."

We were in the living room now, by the collection of
photographs that had made Megan famous.

"You were never in a state home, Dave. How would you like to
be seven years old and forced to get up out of bed in the middle of the
night and suck somebody's cock? Think you could handle that?"

"I think your friend is a depraved and violent man."

"
He's
violent? Y'all put him in the
hospital over a drop of sweat."

Through the French doors I could see two dark-skinned people
sitting at a glass table under a tree in the back yard. The man was
big, slightly overweight, with a space between his front teeth and a
ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades. The woman wore shorts
and a tank top and had brownish-red hair that reminded me of
tumbleweed. They were pouring orange juice into glasses from a clear
pitcher. A yellow candle stub was melted to the table.

"Something bothered me the last time I was here. These photos
that were in
Life
magazine? Y'all caught the kill
from inside the drainpipe, just as the bullet hit the black guy in the
neck?"

"That's right."

"What were you doing in the pipe? How'd you know the guy was
coming out at that particular place?"

"We made an arrangement to meet him, that's all."

"How'd the cops know he was going to be there?"

"I told you. He raped a high school girl. They had an
all-points out on him."

"Somehow that doesn't hang together for me," I said.

"You think we set it up? We were
inside
the pipe. Bullets were ricocheting and sparking all around us. What's
the use? I've got some guests. Is there anything else?"