DR10 - Sunset Limited (17 page)

The clouds in the eastern sky were pink and gray, and the wind
lifted the moss on the dead cypress trunks. Inside the cabin, he
steered the houseboat along the main channel, until he saw a cove back
in the trees where the bream were popping the surface along the edge of
the hyacinths. When he turned into the cove and cut the engine, he
heard an outboard coming hard down the main channel, the throttle full
out, the noise like a chain saw splitting the serenity of the morning.
The driver of the outboard did not slow his boat to prevent his wake
from washing into the cove and disturbing the water for another
fisherman.

Father Mulcahy sat in a canvas chair on the deck and swung the
bobber from his bamboo pole into the hyacinths. Behind him, he heard
the outboard turning in a circle, heading toward him again. He propped
his pole on the rail, put down the sandwich he had just unwrapped from
its wax paper, and walked to the other side of the deck.

The man in the outboard killed his engine and floated in to
the cove, the hyacinths clustering against the bow. He wore
yellow-tinted glasses, and he reached down in the bottom of his boat
and fitted on a smoke-colored Stetson that was sweat-stained across the
base of the crown. When he smiled his dentures were stiff in his mouth,
the flesh of his throat red like a cock's comb. He must have been
sixty-five, but he was tall, his back straight, his eyes keen with
purpose.

"I'm fixing to run out of gas. Can you spare me a half
gallon?" he said.

"Maybe your high speed has something to do with it," Father
Mulcahy said.

"I'll go along with that." Then he reached out for an iron
cleat on the houseboat as though he had already been given permission
to board. Behind the seat was a paper bag stapled across the top and a
one-gallon tin gas can.

"I know you," Father Mulcahy said.

"Not from around here you don't. I'm just a visitor, not
having no luck with the fish."

"I've heard your voice."

The man stood up in his boat and grabbed the handrail and
lowered his face so the brim of his hat shielded it from view.

"I have no gas to give you. It's all in the tank," Father
Mulcahy said.

"I got a siphon. Right here in this bag. A can, too."

The man in the outboard put one cowboy boot on the edge of the
deck and stepped over the rail, drawing a long leg behind him. He stood
in front of the priest, his head tilted slightly as though he were
examining a quarry he had placed under a glass jar.

"Show me where your tank's at. Back around this side?" he
said, indicating the lee side of the cabin, away from the view of
anyone passing on the channel.

"Yes," the priest said. "But there's a lock on it. It's on the
ignition key."

"Let's get it, then, Reverend," the man said.

"You know I'm a minister?" Father Mulcahy said.

The man did not reply. He had not shaved that morning, and
there were gray whiskers among the red and blue veins in his cheeks.
His smile was twisted, one eye squinted behind the lens of his glasses,
as though he were arbitrarily defining the situation in his own mind.

"You came to the rectory… In the rain," the priest
said.

"Could be. But I need you to hep me with this chore. That's
our number one job here."

The man draped his arm across the priest's shoulders and
walked him inside the cabin. He smelled of deodorant and chewing
tobacco, and in spite of his age his arm was thick and meaty, the crook
of it like a yoke on the back of the priest's neck.

"Your soul will be forfeit," the priest said, because he could
think of no other words to use.

"Yeah, I heard that one before. Usually when a preacher was
trying to get me to write a check. The funny thing is, the preacher
never wanted Jesus's name on the check."

Then the man in the hat pulled apart the staples on the paper
bag he had carried on board and took out a velvet curtain rope and a
roll of tape and a plastic bag. He began tying a loop in the end of the
rope, concentrating on his work as though it were an interesting, minor
task in an ordinary day.

The priest turned away from him, toward the window and the sun
breaking through the flooded cypress, his head lowered, his fingers
pinched on his eyelids.

The parishioner's sixteen-gauge pump shotgun was propped just
to the left of the console. Father Mulcahy picked it up and leveled the
barrel at the chest of the man in the Stetson hat and clicked off the
safety.

"Get off this boat," he said.

"You didn't pump a shell into it. There probably ain't nothing
in the chamber," the man said.

"That could be true. Would you like to find out?"

"You're a feisty old rooster, ain't you?"

"You sicken me, sir."

The man in yellow-tinted glasses reached in his shirt pocket
with his thumb and two fingers and filled his jaw with tobacco.

"Piss on you," he said, and opened the cabin door to go back
outside.

"Leave the bag," the priest said.

THE PRIEST CALLED THE SHERIFF'S office
in St. Martin Parish,
where his encounter with the man in the Stetson had taken place, then
contacted me when he got back to New Iberia. The sheriff and I
interviewed him together at the rectory.

"The bag had a velvet cord and a plastic sack and a roll of
tape in it?" the sheriff said.

"That's right. I left it all with the sheriff in St.
Martinville," Father Mulcahy said. His eyes were flat, as though
discussing his thoughts would only add to the level of degradation he
felt.

"You know why he's after you, don't you, Father?" I said.

"Yes, I believe I do."

"You know what he was going to do, too. It would have probably
been written off as a heart attack. There would have been no rope
burns, nothing to indicate any force or violence," I said.

"You don't have to tell me that, sir," he replied.

"It's time to talk about Lila Terrebonne," I said.

"It's her prerogative to talk with you as much as she wishes.
But not mine," he said.

"Hubris isn't a virtue, Father," I said.

His face flared. "Probably not. But I'll be damned if I'll be
altered by a sonofabitch like the man who climbed on my boat."

"That's one way of looking at it. Here's my card if you want
to put a net over this guy," I said.

When we left, rain that looked like lavender horse tails was
falling across the sun. The sheriff drove the cruiser with the window
down and ashes blew from his pipe onto his shirt. He slapped at them
angrily.

"I want that guy in the hat on a respirator," he said.

"We don't have a crime on that houseboat, skipper. It's not
even in our jurisdiction."

"The intended victim is. That's enough. He's a vulnerable old
man. Remember when you lived through your first combat and thought you
had magic? A dangerous time."

A half hour later a state trooper pulled over a red pickup
truck with a Texas tag on the Iberia-St. Martin Parish line.

THE SHERIFF AND I stood outside the
holding cell and looked at
the man seated on the wood bench against the back wall. His western-cut
pants were ironed with sharp creases, the hard points of his ox-blood
cowboy boots buffed to a smooth glaze like melted plastic. He played
with his Stetson on his index finger.

The sheriff held the man's driver's license cupped in his
palm. He studied the photograph on it, then the man's face.

"You're Harpo Scruggs?" the sheriff asked.

"I was when I got up this morning."

"You're from New Mexico?"

"Deming. I got a chili pepper farm there. The truck's a
rental, if that's what's on your mind."

"You're supposed to be dead," the sheriff said.

"You talking about that fire down in Juarez? Yeah, I heard
about that. But it wasn't me."

His accent was peckerwood, the Acadian inflections, if they
had ever existed, weaned out of it.

"You terrorize elderly clergymen, do you?" I said.

"I asked the man for a can of gas. He pointed a shotgun at me."

"You mind going into a lineup?" the sheriff asked.

Harpo Scruggs looked at his fingernails.

"Yeah, I do. What's the charge?" he said.

"We'll find one," the sheriff said.

"I don't think y'all got a popcorn fart in a windstorm," he
said.

He was right. We called Mout' Broussard's home and got no
answer. Neither could we find the USL student who had witnessed the
execution of the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin. The father
of the two brothers was drunk and contradictory about what he had seen
and heard when his sons were lured out of the house.

It was 8 p.m. The sheriff sat in his swivel chair and tapped
his fingers on his jawbone.

"Call Juarez, Mexico, and see if they've still got a warrant,"
he said.

"I already did. It was like having a conversation with
impaired people in a bowling alley."

"Sometimes I hate this job," he said, and picked up a key ring
off his desk blotter.

Ten minutes later the sheriff and I watched Harpo Scruggs walk
into the parking lot a free man. He wore a shirt with purple and red
flowers on it, and it swelled with the breeze and made his frame look
even larger than it was. He fitted on his hat and slanted the brim over
his eyes, took a small bag of cookies from his pocket and bit into one
of them gingerly with his false teeth. He lifted his face into the
breeze and looked with expectation at the sunset.

"See if you can get Lila Terrebonne in my office tomorrow
morning," the sheriff said.

Harpo Scruggs's truck drove up the street toward the cemetery.
A moment later Helen Soileau's unmarked car pulled into the traffic
behind him.

THAT NIGHT BOOTSIE AND I fixed ham and
onion sandwiches and
dirty rice and iced tea at the drainboard and ate on the breakfast
table. Through the hallway I could see the moss in the oak trees
glowing against the lights on the dock.

"You look tired," Bootsie said. "Not really."

"Who's this man Scruggs working for?"

"The New Orleans Mob. The Dixie Mafia. Who knows?"

"The Mob letting one of their own kill a priest?"

"You should have been a cop, Boots."

"There's something you're not saying."

"I keep feeling all this stuff goes back to Jack Flynn's
murder."

"The Flynns again." She rose from the table and put her plate
in the sink and looked through the window into the darkness at the foot
of our property. "Why always the Flynns?" she said.

I didn't have an adequate answer, not even for myself when I
lay next to Bootsie later in the darkness, the window fan drawing the
night air across our bed. Jack Flynn had fought at the battle of Madrid
and at Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal; he was not one to be easily
undone by company goons hired to break a farmworkers' strike. But the
killers had kidnapped him out of a hotel room in Morgan City, beaten
him with chains, impaled his broken body with nails as a lesson in
terror to any poor white or black person who thought he could relieve
his plight by joining a union. To this day not one suspect had been in
custody, not one participant had spoken carelessly in a bar or brothel.

The Klan always prided itself on its secrecy, the arcane and
clandestine nature of its rituals, the loyalty of its members to one
another. But someone always came forward, out of either guilt or
avarice, and told of the crimes they committed in groups, under cover
of darkness, against their unarmed and defenseless victims.

But Jack Flynn's murderers had probably not only been
protected, they had been more afraid of the people they served than
Louisiana or federal law.

Jack Flynn's death was at the center of our current problems
because we had never dealt with our past, I thought. And in not doing
so, we had allowed his crucifixion to become a collective act.

I propped myself up on the mattress with one elbow and touched
Bootsie's hair. She was sound asleep and did not wake. Her eyelids
looked like rose petals in the moon's glow.

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING I turned into
the Terrebonne grounds
and drove down the oak-lined drive toward the house. The movie set was
empty, except for a bored security guard and Swede Boxleiter, who was
crouched atop a plank building, firing a nail gun into the tin roof.

I stood under the portico of the main house and rang the
chimes. The day had already turned warm, but it was cool in the shade
and the air smelled of damp brick and four-o'clock flowers and the mint
that grew under the water faucets. Archer Terrebonne answered the door
in yellow-and-white tennis clothes, a moist towel draped around his
neck.

"Lila's not available right now, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

"I'd very much like to talk to her, sir."

"She's showering. Then we're going to a brunch. Would you like
to leave a message?"

"The sheriff would appreciate her coming to his office to talk
about her conversation with Father James Mulcahy."

"Y'all do business in an extraordinary fashion. Her
discussions with a minister are the subject of a legal inquiry?"

"This man was almost killed because he's too honorable to
divulge something your daughter told him."

"Good day, Mr. Robicheaux," Terrebonne said, and closed the
door in my face.

I drove back through the corridor of trees, my face tight with
anger. I started to turn out onto the service road, then stopped the
truck and walked out to the movie set.

"How's it hangin', Swede?" I said.

He fired the nail gun through the tin roof into a joist and
pursed his mouth into an inquisitive cone.

"Where's Clete Purcel?" I asked.

"Gone for the day. You look like somebody pissed in your
underwear."

"You know the layout of this property?"