DR10 - Sunset Limited (21 page)

"What's wrong?" he said, lines breaking across his brow.

I told him of everything that happened at Cisco's house and of
Megan's status at Iberia General. He listened and didn't speak. His
face had the contained, heated intensity of a stainless-steel pan that
had been left on a burner.

Then he said, "She's going to make it?"

"You bet."

"Come inside. I already have coffee on the stove." He turned
away from me and pushed at his nose with his thumb.

"What are you going to do, Clete?"

"Go up to the hospital. What do you think?"

"You know what I mean."

"I'll fix eggs and sausage for both of us. You look like you
got up out of a coffin."

Inside his kitchen I said, "Are you going to answer me?"

"I already heard about you and Helen visiting Ricky Scar. He's
behind this shit, isn't he?"

"Where'd you hear about Scarlotti?"

"Nig Rosewater. He said Ricky went berserk after you left his
office. What'd y'all do to jack him up like that?"

"Don't worry about it. You stay out of New Orleans."

He poured coffee in two cups and put a cinnamon roll in his
mouth and looked out the window at the sun in the pine trees.

"Did you hear me?" I said.

"I got enough to do right here. I caught Swede Boxleiter in
the Terrebonne cemetery last night. I think he was prizing bricks out
of a crypt."

"What for?"

"Maybe he's a ghoul. You know what for. You planted all that
Civil War stuff in his head. I'd love to tell Archer Terrebonne an
ex-con meltdown is digging up his ancestors' bones."

But there was no humor in his face, only a tic at the corner
of one eye. He went into the other room and called Iberia General, then
came back in the kitchen, his eyes filled with private thoughts, and
began beating eggs in a big pink bowl.

"Clete?"

"The Big Sleazy's not your turf anymore, Streak. Why don't you
worry about how this guy Scruggs got off his leash? I thought y'all had
him under surveillance."

"He lost the stakeout at the motel."

"You know the best way to deal with that dude? A big fat one
between the eyes and a throw-down on the corpse."

"You might have your butt in our jail, if that's what it
takes," I said.

He poured hot milk into my coffee cup. "Not even the perps
believe that stuff anymore. You want to go to the hospital with me?" he
said.

"You got it."

"The nurse said she asked for me. How about that? How about
that Megan Flynn?"

I looked at the back of his thick neck and huge shoulders as
he made breakfast and thought of warning NOPD before he arrived in New
Orleans. But I knew that would only give his old enemies in the New
Orleans Police Department a basis to do him even greater harm than
Ricky Scarlotti might.

We drove back up the tree-lined highway to New Iberia in a
corridor of rain.

AT IBERIA GENERAL I sat in the waiting
room while Clete went
in to see Megan first. Five minutes after we arrived I saw Lila
Terrebonne walk down the hall with a spray of carnations wrapped in
green tissue paper. She didn't see me. She paused at the open door to
Megan's room, her eyelids blinking, her back stiff with apprehension.
Then she turned and started hurriedly toward the elevator.

I caught her before she got on.

"You're not going to say hello?" I asked.

I could smell the bourbon on her breath, the cigarette smoke
in her hair and clothes.

"Give these to Megan for me. I'll come back another time," she
said.

"How'd you know she was here?"

"It was on the radio… Dave, get on the elevator with
me." When the elevator door closed, she said, "I've got to get some
help. I've had it."

"Help with what?"

"Booze, craziness… Something that happened to me,
something I've never told anybody about except my father and the priest
at St. Peter's."

"Why don't we sit in my pickup?" I said.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS MY reconstruction of
the story she told me
while the rain slid down the truck's windows and a willow tree by the
bayou blew in the wind like a woman's hair.

She met the two brothers in a bar outside Morgan City. They
were shooting pool, stretching across the table to make difficult
shots, their sleeveless arms wrapped with green-and-red tattoos. They
wore earrings and beards that were trimmed in neat lines along the
jawbone, jeans that were so tight their genitalia were cupped to the
smooth shape of a woman's palm. They sent a drink to her table, and one
to an old man at the bar, and one to an oil-field roughneck who had
used up his tab. But they made no overture toward her.

She watched them across the top of her gin ricky, the tawdry
grace of their movements around the pool table, the lack of attention
they showed anything except the skill of their game, the shots they
speared into leather side pockets like junior high school kids.

Then one of them noticed her watching. He proffered the cue
stick to her, smiling. She rose from her chair, her skin warm with gin,
and wrapped her fingers around the cue's thickness, smiling back into
the young man's face, seeing him glance away shyly, his cheeks color
around the edges of his beard.

They played nine ball. Her father had taught her how to play
billiards when she was a young girl. She could walk a cue ball down the
rail, put reverse English on it and not leave an opponent an open shot,
make a soft bank shot and drop the money balls—the one and
the six and the nine—into the pocket with a tap that was no
more than a whisper.

The two brothers shook their heads in dismay. She bought them
each a bottle of beer and a gin ricky for herself. She played another
game and beat them again. She noticed they didn't use profanity in her
presence, that they stopped speaking in mid-sentence if she wished to
interrupt, that they grinned boyishly and looked away if she let her
eyes linger more than a few seconds on theirs.

They told her they built board roads for an oil company, they
had been in the reformatory after their mother had deserted the family,
they had been in the Gulf War, in a tank, one that'd had its treads
blown off by an Iraqi artillery shell. She knew they were lying, but
she didn't care. She felt a sense of sexual power and control that made
her nipples hard, her eyes warm with toleration and acceptance.

When she walked to the ladies' room, the backs of her thighs
taut with her high heels, she could see her reflection in the bar
mirror and she knew that every man in the room was looking at the
movement of her hips, the upward angle of her chin, the grace in her
carriage that their own women would never possess.

The brothers did not try to pick her up. In fact, when the bar
started to close, their conversation turned to the transmission on
their truck, a stuck gear they couldn't free, their worry they could
not make it the two miles to their father's fish camp. Rain streamed
down the neon-lighted window in front.

She offered to follow them home. When they accepted, she
experienced a strange taste in her throat, like copper pennies, like
the wearing off of alcohol and the beginnings of a different kind of
chemical reality. She looked at the faces of the brothers, the grins
that looked incised in clay, and started to reconsider.

Then the bartender beckoned to her.

"Lady, taxicabs run all night. A phone call's a quarter. If
they ain't got it, they can use mine free," he said.

"There's no problem. But thanks very much just the same. Thank
you, truly. You're very nice," she replied, and hung her purse from her
shoulder and let one of the brothers hold a newspaper over her head
while they ran for her automobile.

They did it to her in an open-air tractor shed by a green
field of sugarcane in the middle of an electric storm. One held her
wrists while the other brother climbed between her legs on top of a
worktable. After he came his body went limp and his head fell on her
breast. His mouth was wet and she could feel it leaving a pattern on
her blouse. Then he rose from her and put on his blue jeans and lit a
cigarette before clasping her wrists so his brother, who simply
unzipped his jeans without taking them off, could mount her.

When she thought it was over, when she believed there was
nothing else they could take from her, she sat up on the worktable with
her clothes crumpled in her lap. Then she watched one brother shake his
head and extend his soiled hand toward her face, covering it like a
surgeon's assistant pressing an ether mask on a patient, forcing her
back down on the table, then turning her over, his hand shifting to the
back of her neck, crushing her mouth into the wood planks.

She saw a bolt of lightning explode in the fork of a hardwood
tree, saw it split the wood apart and tear the grain right through the
heart of the trunk. Deep in her mind she thought she remembered a green
felt pool table and a boyish figure shoving a cue like a spear through
his bridged fingers.

LILA'S FACE WAS TURNED slightly toward
the passenger window
when she finished her story.

"Your father had them killed?" I said.

"I
didn't say that. Not at all."

"It's what happened, though, isn't it?"

"Maybe I had them killed. It's what they deserved. I'm glad
they're dead."

"I think it's all right to feel that way," I said.

"What are you going to do with what I've told you?"

"Take you home or to a treatment center in Lafayette."

"I don't want to go into treatment again. If I can't do it
with meetings and working the program, I can't do it at all."

"Why don't we go to a meeting after work? Then you go every
day for ninety days."

"I feel like everything inside me is coming to an end. I can't
describe it."

"It's called 'a world destruction fantasy.' It's bad stuff.
Your heart races, you can't breathe, you feel like a piano wire is
wrapped around your forehead. Psychologists say we remember the birth
experience."

She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, then cracked
the window as though my words had drawn the oxygen out of the air.

"Lila, I've got to ask you something else. Why were you
talking about a Hanged Man?"

"I don't remember that. Not at all. That's in the Tarot, isn't
it? I don't know anything about that."

"I see."

Her skin had gone white under her caked makeup, her
eyelashes stiff and black and wide around her milky green eyes.

I WALKED THROUGH THE rain into the
hospital and rode up in the
elevator with Lila's tissue-wrapped spray of carnations in my hand.
Helen Soileau was in the waiting room.

"You get anything?" I asked.

"Not much. She says she thinks there were three guys. They
sounded like hicks. One guy was running things," she replied.

"That's got to be Harpo Scruggs."

"I think we're going about this the wrong way. Cut off the
head and the body dies."

"Where's the head?"

"Beats me," she said.

"Where's Purcel?"

"He's still in there."

I walked to the open door, then turned away. Clete was sitting
on the side of Megan's bed, leaning down toward her face, his big arms
and shoulders forming a tent over her. Her right hand rested on the
back of his neck. Her fingers stroked his uncut hair.

THE SKY CLEARED THAT night, and
Alafair and Bootsie and I
cooked out in the back yard. I had told the sheriff about my
conversation with Lila Terrebonne, but his response was predictable. We
had established possible motivation for the execution of the two
brothers. But that was all we had done. There was no evidence to link
Archer Terrebonne, Lila's father, to the homicide. Second, the murders
still remained outside our jurisdiction and our only vested interest in
solving them was the fact that one of the shooters wore an Iberia
Parish deputy sheriffs uniform.

I went with Lila to an AA meeting that night, then returned
home.

"Clete called. He's in New Orleans. He said for you not to
worry. What'd he mean?" Bootsie said.

RICKY SCARLOTTI ATE BREAKFAST THE next
morning with two of his
men in his restaurant by St. Charles and Carrollton. It was a fine
morning, smelling of the wet sidewalks and the breeze off the river.
The fronds of the palm trees on the neutral ground were pale green and
lifting in the wind against a ceramic-blue sky; the streetcar was
loading with passengers by the levee, the conductor's bell clanging. No
one seemed to take notice of a chartreuse Cadillac convertible that
turned off St. Charles and parked in front of the flower shop, nor of
the man in the powder-blue porkpie hat and seersucker pants and
Hawaiian shirt who sat behind the steering wheel with a huge plastic
seal-top coffee mug in his hand.

The man in the porkpie hat inserted a dime in the parking
meter and looked with interest at the display of flowers an elderly
woman was setting out on the sidewalk under a canvas awning. He talked
a moment with the woman, then entered the restaurant and stopped by the
hot bar and wrapped a cold cloth around the handle of a heavy cast-iron
skillet filled with chipped beef. He made his way unobtrusively between
the checker-cloth-covered tables toward the rear of the restaurant,
where Ricky Scarlotti had just patted his mouth with a napkin and had
touched the wrist of one of the men at his side and nodded in the
direction of the approaching figure in the porkpie hat.

The man at Ricky Scarlotti's side had platinum hair and a
chemical tan. He put down his fork and got to his feet and stood
flat-footed like a sentinel in front of Ricky Scarlotti's table. His
name was Benny Grogan and he had been a professional wrestler before he
had become a male escort for a notorious and rich Garden District
homosexual. NOPD believed he had also been the backup shooter on at
least two hits for the Calucci brothers.