DR10 - Sunset Limited (24 page)

"You got any idea who H.S. is?" Hardin asked.

"We've had trouble around here with an ex-cop by the name of
Harpo Scruggs," I said.

"You think he's connected to Loudermilk's death?" he asked.

"The killer was an aerialist? My vote would go to another
local, Swede Boxleiter. He's a suspect in a murder in Lafayette Parish."

"What are y'all running over there, a school for criminals?
Forget I said that. Spell the name, please." Then he said, "What's the
deal on this guy Boxleiter?"

"He's a psychopath with loyalties," I said.

"You a comedian, sir?"

I DROVE UP THE Loreauville road to
Cisco's house.

Megan was reading a book in a rocking chair on the gallery.

"Do you know where Swede was on Sunday?" I asked.

"He was here, at least in the morning. Why?"

"Just a little research. Does the name Rodney Loudermilk mean
anything to you?"

"No. Who is he?"

"A guy with sideburns, blind in one eye?"

She shook her head.

"Did you tell Swede anything about your attackers, how they
looked, what they said?"

"Nothing I didn't tell you. I was asleep when they broke in.
They wound tape around my eyes."

I scratched the back of my neck. "Maybe Swede's not our man."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Dave."

"Sunday evening somebody canceled out a contract killer in a
San Antonio hotel. He was probably one of the men who broke into your
house."

She closed the book in her lap and looked out into the yard.
"I told Swede about the blue stars on a man's wrist," she said.

"What?"

"One of them had a string of stars tattooed on his wrist. I
told that to one of your deputies. He wrote it down."

"If he did, the sheriff and I never saw it."

"What difference does it make?"

"The guy in San Antonio, he was thrown out an eighth-floor
window by somebody who knows how to leap across window ledges. He had a
chain of blue stars tattooed around his left wrist."

She tried to hide the knowledge in her eyes. She took her
glasses off and put them back on again.

"Swede was here that morning. He ate breakfast with us. I
mean, everything about him was normal," she said, then turned her face
toward me.

"Normal? You're talking about Boxleiter? Good try, Meg."

HELEN AND I DROVE to the movie set on
the Terrebonne lawn.

"Sunday? I was at Cisco's. Then I was home. Then I went to a
movie," Swede said. He dropped down from the back of a flatbed truck,
his tool belt clattering on his hips. His gaze went up and down Helen's
body. "We're not getting into that blackjack routine again, are we?"

"Which movie?" I asked.

"
Sense and Sensibility
. Ask at the
theater. The guy'll remember me 'cause he says I plugged up the toilet."

"Sounds good to me. What about you, Helen?" I said.

"Yeah, I always figured him for a fan of British novels," she
said.

"What am I supposed to have done?"

"Tossed a guy out a window in San Antonio. His head hit a fire
hydrant at a hundred twenty miles per. Big mess," I said.

"Yeah? Who is this fucking guy I supposedly killed?"

"Would you try not to use profanity?" I said.

"Sorry. I forgot, Louisiana is an open-air church. I got a
question for you. Why is it guys like me are always getting rousted
whenever some barf bag gets marched off with the Hallelujah Chorus?
Does Ricky the Mouse do time? Is Harpo Scruggs sitting in your jail? Of
course not. You turned him loose. If guys like me weren't around, you'd
be out of a job." He pulled a screwdriver from his belt and began
tapping it across his palm, rolling his eyes, chewing gum, rotating his
head on his neck. "Is this over? I got to get to work."

"We might turn out to be your best friends, Swede," I said.

"Yeah, shit goes great with frozen yogurt, too," he said, and
walked away from us, his bare triangular back arched forward like that
of a man in search of an adversary.

"You going to let him slide like that?" Helen said.

"Sometimes the meltdowns have their point of view."

"Just coincidence he stops up a toilet in a theater on the day
he needs an alibi?"

"Let's go to the airport."

BUT IF SWEDE TOOK a plane to San
Antonio or rented one, we
could find no record of it.

That night the air was thick and close and smelled of
chrysanthemums and gas, then the sky filled with lightning and swirls
of black rain that turned to hail and clattered and bounced like
mothballs on the tin roof of the bait shop.

Two days later I drove to St. Mary Parish with Cool Breeze
Broussard to watch the exhumation of his wife's body from a graveyard
that was being eaten daily by the Atchafalaya River.

AT ONE TIME THE graveyard had sat on
dry ground, fringed by
persimmon and gum trees, but almost twenty years ago the Atchafalaya
had broken a levee and channeled an oxbow through the woods, flooding
the grave sites, then had left behind a swampy knob of sediment strung
with river trash. One side of the graveyard dipped toward the river,
and each year the water cut more deeply under the bank, so that the top
layer hung like the edge of a mushroom over the current.

Most of the framed and spiked name tags that served as markers
had been knocked down or stepped on and broken by hunters. The
dime-store vases and the jelly glasses used for flower jars lay
embedded in sediment. The graduation and wedding and birth pictures
wrapped in plastic had been washed off the graves on which they had
been originally placed and were now spotted with mud, curled and
yellowed by the sun so that the faces on them were not only anonymous
but stared incongruously out of situations that seemed to have never
existed.

The forensic pathologist and a St. Mary Parish deputy and the
two black men hired as diggers and the backhoe operator waited.

"You know which one it is?" I asked Cool Breeze.

"That one yonder, wit' the pipe cross. I welded it myself. The
shaft goes down t'ree feet," he said.

The serrated teeth on the bucket of the backhoe bit into the
soft earth and lifted a huge divot of loam and roots and
emerald-colored grass from the top of the grave. Cool Breeze's shoulder
brushed against mine, and I could feel the rigidity and muted power in
his body, like the tremolo that rises from the boiler room of a ship.

"We can wait on the levee until they're finished," I said.

"I got to look," he said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"Cain't have nobody saying later that ain't her."

"Breeze, she's been in the ground a long time."

"Don't matter. I'll know. What you t'ink I am anyway? Other
men can look at my wife, but I'm scared to do it myself?"

"I think you're a brave man," I said.

He turned his head and looked at the side of my face.

The backhoe was bright yellow against the islands of willow
trees between the graveyard and the main portion of the river. The loam
in the grave turned to mud as the bucket on the backhoe dipped closer
to the coffin. The day was blue-gold and warm and flowers still bloomed
on the levee, but the air smelled of humus, of tree roots torn out of
wet soil, of leaves that have gone acidic and brown in dead water. At
five feet the two black diggers climbed into the hole with spades and
began sculpting the coffin's shape, pouring water from a two-gallon can
on the edges, wiping the surface and corners slick with rags.

They worked a canvas tarp and wood planks under it, then ran
ropes tied to chains under the tarp, and we all lifted. The coffin came
free more easily than I had expected, rocking almost weightlessly in
the bottom of the canvas loop, a missing panel in one side blossoming
with muddy fabric.

"Open it up," Cool Breeze said.

The pathologist looked at me. He wore red suspenders and a
straw hat and had a stomach like a small pillow pushed under his belt.
I nodded, and one of the diggers prized the lid loose with a blade
screwdriver.

I had seen exhumations before. The view of mortality they
present to the living is not easily dismissed. Sometimes the coffin
fills with hair, the nails, particularly on the bare feet, grow into
claws, the face puckers into a gray apple, the burial clothes contain
odors that cause people to retch.

That is not what happened to Ida Broussard.

Her white dress had turned brown, like cheesecloth dipped in
tea, but her skin had the smooth texture and color of an eggplant and
her hair was shiny and black on her shoulders and there was no
distortion in her expression.

Cool Breeze's hand reached out and touched her cheek. Then he
walked away from us, without speaking, and stood on the edge of the
graveyard and looked out at the river so we could not see his face.

"How do you explain it?" I said to the pathologist.

"An oil company buried some storage tanks around here in the
1930s. Maybe some chemical seepage got in the coffin," he replied.

He looked back into my eyes. Then he spoke again. "Sometimes I
think they wait to tell us something. There's no need for you to pass
on my observation."

FRIDAY EVENING BOOTSIE AND I dropped
Alafair at the show in
Lafayette, then ate dinner at a restaurant on the Vermilion River. But
as soon as Alafair was not with us, Bootsie became introspective,
almost formal when she spoke, her eyes lingering on objects without
seeing them.

"What is it?" I said outside the restaurant.

"I'm just tired," she replied.

"Maybe we should have stayed home."

"Maybe we should have."

After Alafair went to bed, we were alone in the kitchen. The
moon was up and the trees outside were full of shadows when the wind
blew.

"Whatever it is, just say it, Boots."

"She was at the dock today. She said she couldn't find you at
your office. She didn't bother to come up to the house. Of course,
she's probably just shy."

"She?"

"You know who. She finds any excuse she can to come out here.
She said she wanted to thank you for the shooting lessons you arranged
for her. You didn't want to give them to her yourself?"

"Those guys almost killed her. They might pull it off the next
time."

"Maybe it's her own fault."

"That's a rough thing to say, Boots."

"She hides behind adversity and uses it to manipulate other
people."

"I'll ask her not to come here again."

"Not on my account, please."

"I give up," I said, and went out into the yard.

The cane in my neighbor's field was green and dented with
channels like rivers when the wind blew, and beyond his tree line I
could see lightning fork without sound out of the sky. Through the
kitchen window I heard Bootsie clattering dishes into the dishwasher.
She slammed the washer door shut, the cups and silverware rattling in
the rack. I heard the washer start to hum, then her shadow went past
the window and disappeared from view and the overhead light went off
and the kitchen and the yard were dark.

WE WANTED HARPO SCRUGGS. But we had
nothing to charge him
with. He knew it, too. He called the dock on Sunday afternoon.

"I want to meet, talk this thing out, bring it to an end," he
said.

"It's not a seller's market, Scruggs."

"What you got is your dick in your hand. I can clean the barn
for you. There's an old nigra runs a barbecue joint next to a motel on
State Road 70 north of Morgan City. Nine o'clock," he said, and hung up.

I went outside the bait shop and hosed down a rental boat a
fisherman had just returned, then went back inside without chaining it
up and called Helen Soileau at her home.

"You want to do backup on a meet with Harpo Scruggs?" I said.

"Make him come in."

"We don't have enough to charge him."

"There's still the college kid, the witness who saw the two
brothers executed in the Basin."

"His family says he's on a walking tour of Tibet."

"He killed Mout's dog. Vermilion Parish can charge him with
endangering."

"Mout' says he never got a good look at the guy's face."

"Dave, we need to work this guy. He doesn't bring the Feds
into it, he doesn't plead out. We fit his head in a steel vise."

"So take a ride with me. I want you to bring a scoped rifle."

She was silent a moment. Then she said, "Tell the old man."

THE BARBECUE PLACE WAS a rambling,
tin-roofed red building,
with white trim and screen porches, set back in a grove of pines. Next
door was a cinder-block motel that had been painted purple and fringed
with Christmas lights that never came down. Through the screen on a
side porch I saw Harpo Scruggs standing at the bar, a booted foot on
the rail, his tall frame bent forward, his Stetson at an angle on his
freshly barbered head. He wore a long-sleeve blue shirt with pink polka
dots and an Indian-stitched belt and gray western slacks that flowed
like water over the crook in his knee. He tilted back a shot glass of
whiskey and sipped from a glass of beer.

I stood by a plank table at the edge of the clearing so he
could see me. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and opened the
screen door and lit the cigarette with a Zippo as he walked toward me.

"You got anybody with you?" he asked.

"You see anyone?"

He sat down at the plank table and smoked his cigarette, his
elbows on the wood. The clouds above the pines were black and maroon in
the sun's afterglow. He tipped his ashes carefully over the edge of the
table so they wouldn't blow back on his shirt.

"I heard about a man got throwed out a window. I think one of
two men done it. Swede Boxleiter or that bucket of whale sperm got
hisself kicked off the New Orleans police force," he said.