DR10 - Sunset Limited (11 page)

"Guests?"

"Billy Holtzner's daughter and her boyfriend."

I looked out the French doors again. I saw a glassy reflection
between the fingers of the man's right hand.

"Introduce me."

"It's Sunday. They're just getting up."

"Yeah, I can see."

"Hey, wait a minute."

But I opened the French doors and stepped outside. The man
with the ponytail, who looked Malaysian or Indonesian, cupped the
candle stub melted to the table, popping the waxy base loose, and held
it behind his thigh. Holtzner's daughter had eyes that didn't fit her
fried hair. They were a soapy blue, mindless, as devoid of reason as a
drowsy cat's when small creatures run across its vision.

A flat, partially zippered leather case rested on a metal
chair between her and her boyfriend.

"How y'all doing?" I asked.

Their smiles were self-indulgent rather than warm, their faces
suffused by a chemical pleasure that was working in their skin like
flame inside tallow. The woman lowered her wrist into her lap and the
sunlight fell like a spray of yellow coins on the small red swelling
inside her forearm.

"The officer from the set," the man said.

"It is," the woman said, leaning sideways in her chair to see
behind me. "Is that blond lady here? The one with the blackjack. I mean
that guy's head. Yuck."

"We're not in trouble, are we?" the man said. He smiled. The
gap in his front teeth was large enough to insert a kitchen match in.

"You from the U.K.?" I said.

"Just the accent. I travel on a French passport," he said,
smiling. He removed a pair of dark glasses from his shirt pocket and
put them on.

"Y'all need any medical attention here?"

"No, not today, I don't think," the man said.

"Sure? Because I can run y'all down to Iberia General. It's no
trouble."

"That's very kind of you, but we'll pass," the man said.

"What's he talking about?" the woman said.

"Being helpful, that sort of thing, welcoming us to the
neighborhood," the man said.

"Hospital?" She scratched her back by rubbing it against her
chair. "Did anybody ever tell you you look like Johnny Wadd?"

"Not really."

"He died of AIDS. He was very underrated as an artist. Because
he did porno, if that's what you want to call it." Then her face went
out of focus, as though her own words had presented a question inside
herself.

"Dave, can I see you?" Cisco said softly behind me.

I left Billy Holtzner's daughter and the man with the ponytail
without saying goodbye. But they never noticed, their heads bent toward
each other as they laughed over a private joke.

Cisco walked with me through the shade trees to my truck. He
had slipped on a golf shirt with his gym shorts, and he kept pulling
the cloth away from the dampness of his skin.

"I don't have choices about what people around me do
sometimes," he said.

"Choose not to have them here, Cisco."

"I work in a bowl of piranhas. You think Billy Holtzner is off
the wall? He twists noses. I can introduce you to people who blow
heads."

"I didn't have probable cause on your friends. But they
shouldn't take too much for granted."

"How many cops on a pad have you covered for? How many times
have you seen a guy popped and a throw-down put on his body?"

"See you, Cisco."

"What am I supposed to feel, Dave? Like I just got visited by
St. Francis of Assisi? In your ear."

I walked to my truck and didn't look back at him. I heard the
woman braying loudly in the back yard.

WHEN I WENT DOWN to the bait shop to
open up Monday morning,
Cool Breeze Broussard was waiting for me at a spool table, the Cinzano
umbrella ruffling over his head. The early sun was dark red through the
trunks of the cypresses.

"It gonna be another hot one," he said.

"What's the haps, Breeze?"

"I got to talk… No, out here. I like to talk in the
open space… How much of what I tell you other people got to
learn about?"

"That depends."

He made a pained face and looked at the redness of the sun
through the trees.

"I went to New Orleans Saturday. A guy up Magazine, Jimmy Fig,
Tommy Figorelli's brother, the guy the Giacanos sawed up and hung in
pieces from a ceiling fan? I figured Jimmy didn't have no love for the
Giacanos 'cause of his brother, and, besides, me and Jimmy was in the
Block together at Angola, see. So I t'ought he was the right man to
sell me a cold piece," Cool Breeze said.

"You're buying unregistered guns?" I said.

"You want to hear me or not?… So he go, 'Willie, in
your line of work, you don't need no cold piece.'

"I go, 'This ain't for work. I got in bad wit' some local
guys, maybe you heard. But I ain't got no money right now, so I need
you to front me the piece.'

"He say, 'You feeling some heat from somewhere, Breeze?' And
he say it wit' this smart-ass grin on his face.

"I say, 'Yeah, wit' the same dudes who freeze-wrapped your
brother's parts in his own butcher shop. I hear they drank eggnog while
he was spinning round over their heads.'

"He say, 'Well, my brother had some sexual problems that got
him into trouble. But it ain't Italians you got to worry about. The
word is some peckerwoods got a contract to do a black blabbermouth in
New Iberia. I just didn't know who it was.'

"I say, 'Blabbermouth, huh?'

"He go, 'You was ripping off the Giacanos and selling their
own VCRs back to them? Then you snitch them off and come to New Orleans
figuring somebody's gonna front you a piece? Breeze, nothing racial
meant, but you people ought to stick to pimping and dealing rock'."

"Who are these peckerwoods?" I asked.

"When I tole you the story about me and Ida, about how she
wrapped that chain round her t'roat and drowned herself, I left
somet'ing out."

"Oh?"

"A year after Ida died, I was working at the Terrebonne
cannery, putting up sweet potatoes. Harpo Delahoussey run the security
there for Mr. Terrebonne. We come to the end of the season and the
cannery shut down, just like it do every winter, and everybody got laid
off. So we went on down to the unemployment office and filed for
unemployment insurance. Shouldn't have been no problem.

"Except three weeks go by and the state sends us a notice we
ain't qualified for no checks 'cause we cannery workers, and 'cause the
cannery ain't open, we ain't available to work.

"I went on down to see Mr. Terrebonne, but I never got past
Harpo Delahoussey. He's sitting there at a big desk wit' his foot in
the wastebasket, sticking a po'boy sandwich in his mout'. He go, 'It's
been explained to you, Willie. Now, you don't want wait round here till
next season, you go on down to New Orleans, get you a job, try to stay
out of trouble for a while. But don't you come round here bothering Mr.
Terrebonne. He been good to y'all.'

"'Bout a week later they was a big fire at the cannery. You
could smell sweet potatoes burning all the way down to Morgan City.
Harpo Delahoussey jumped out a second-story window wit' his clothes on
fire. He'da died if he hadn't landed in a mud puddle."

"You set it?"

"Harpo Delahoussey had a nephew wit' his name. He use to be a
city po-liceman in Franklin. Everybody called him Li'l Harpo."

"You think this is one of the peckerwoods?"

"Why else I'm telling you all this? Look, I ain't running no
more."

"I think you're living inside your head too much, Breeze. The
Giacanos use mechanics out of Miami or Houston."

"Jimmy Fig tole me I was a dumb nigger ought to be pimping and
selling crack. What you saying ain't no different. I feel bad I come
here."

He got up and walked down the dock toward his truck. He passed
two white fishermen who were just arriving, their rods and tackle boxes
gripped solidly in their hands. They walked around him, then glanced
over their shoulders at his back.

"That boy looks like his old lady just cut him off," one of
them said to me, grinning.

"We're not open yet," I said, and went inside the bait shop
and latched the screen behind me.

YOU READ THE JACKET ON a man like
Swede Boxleiter and dismiss
him as one of those genetically defective creatures for whom
psychologists don't have explanations and let it go at that.

Then he does or says something that doesn't fit the pattern,
and you go home from work with boards in your head.

Early Monday morning I called Cisco Flynn's home number and
got his answering service. An hour later he returned my call.

"Why do you want Swede's address? Leave him alone," he said.

"He's blackmailing you, isn't he?"

"I remember now. You fought Golden Gloves. Too many shots to
the head, Dave."

"Maybe Helen Soileau and I should drop by the set again and
talk to him there."

BOXLEITER LIVED IN A triplex built of
green cinder blocks
outside St. Martinville. When I turned into his drive he was throwing a
golf ball against the cement steps on the side of the building,
ricocheting it off two surfaces before he retrieved it out of the air
again, his hand as fast as a snake's head,
click-click,
click-click, click-click
. He wore blue Everlast boxing
trunks and a gauzy see-through black shirt and white high-top gym shoes
and leather gloves without fingers and a white bill cap that covered
his shaved and stitched head like an inverted cook pan. He glanced at
me over his shoulder, then began throwing the ball again.

"The Man," he said. The back yard had no grass and lay in deep
shade, and beyond the tree trunks the bayou shimmered in the sunlight.

"I thought we'd hear from you," I said.

"How's that?"

"Civil suit, brutality charges, that kind of stuff."

"Can't ever tell."

"Give the golf game a break a minute, will you?"

His eyes smiled at nothing, then he flipped the ball out into
the yard and waited, his sunken cheeks and small mouth like those of a
curious fish.

"I couldn't figure the hold you had on Cisco," I said. "But
it's that photo that began Megan's career, the one of the black man
getting nailed in the storm drain, isn't it? You told the cops where he
was coming out. Her big break was based on a fraud that cost a guy his
life."

He cleaned an ear with his little finger, his eyes as empty of
thought as glass.

"Cisco is my friend. I wouldn't hurt him for any reason in the
world. Somebody try to hurt him, I'll cut them into steaks."

"Is that right?"

"You want to play some handball?"

"Handball?"

"Yeah, against the garage."

"No, I—"

"Tell the dyke I got no beef. I just didn't like the roust in
front of all them people."

"Tell the dyke? You're an unusual man, Swede."

"I heard about you. You were in Vietnam. Anything on my sheet
you probably did in spades."

Then, as though I were no longer there, he did a handstand in
the yard and walked on stiffened arms through the shade, the bottoms of
his gym shoes extended out like the shoulders of a man with no head.

CLETE PURCEL SAT IN the bow of the
outboard and drained the
foam out of a long-necked bottle of beer. He cast his Rapala between
two willow trees and retrieved it back toward him, the sides of the
lure flashing just below the surface. The sun was low on the western
horizon and the canopy overhead was lit with fire, the water
motionless, the mosquitoes starting to form in clouds over the islands
of algae that extended out from the flooded cypress trunks.

A bass rose from the silt, thick-backed, the black-green
dorsal fin glistening when it broke the water, and knocked the Rapala
into the air without taking the treble hook. Clete set his rod on the
bow and slapped the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on
his palm.

"So this guy Cool Breeze is telling you a couple of crackers
got the whack on him? One of them is maybe the guy who did these two
brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?" he said.

"Yeah, that's about it."

"But you don't buy it?"

"When did the Giacanos start using over-the-hill peckerwoods
for button men?"

"I wouldn't mark it off, mon. This greaseball in Igor's was
complaining to me about how the Giacano family is falling apart, how
they've lost their self-respect and they're running low-rent action
like porno joints and dope in the projects. I say, 'Yeah, it's a shame.
The world's really going to hell,' and he says, 'You telling me,
Purcel? It's so bad we got a serious problem with somebody, we got to
outsource.'

"I say, 'Outsource?'

"He goes, 'Yeah, niggers from the Desire, Vietnamese
lice-heads, crackers who spit Red Man in Styrofoam cups at the dinner
table.'

"It's the Dixie Mafia, Dave. There's a nest of them over on
the Mississippi coast."

I drew the paddle through the water and let the boat glide
into a cove that was freckled with sunlight. I cast a popping bug with
yellow feathers and red eyes on the edge of the hyacinths. A solitary
blue heron lifted on extended wings out of the grass and flew through
an
opening in the trees, dimpling the water with its feet.

"But you didn't bring me out here to talk about wise guy
bullshit, did you?" Clete said.

I watched a cottonmouth extend its body out of the water,
curling around a low branch on a flooded willow, then pull itself
completely into the leaves.

"I don't know how to say it," I said.

"I'll clear it up for both of us. I like her. Maybe we got
something going. That rubs you the wrong way?"

"A guy gets involved, he doesn't see things straight
sometimes," I said.

"'Involved,' like in the sack? You're asking me if I'm in the
sack with Megan?"

"You're my friend. You carried me down a fire escape when that
kid opened up on us with a .22. Something stinks about the Flynn
family."