DR10 - Sunset Limited (27 page)

HELEN AND I WALKED THROUGH the clumps
of banana trees and
blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn, where a group of St.
Mary Parish plainclothes investigators and uniformed sheriffs deputies
and ambulance attendants stood in a shaded area, one that droned with
iridescent green flies, looking down at the collapsed and impaled form
of Swede Boxleiter. Swede's chest was pitched forward against the nails
that held his wrists, his face hidden in shadow, his knees twisted in
the dust. Out in the sunlight, the flowers on the rain trees were as
bright as arterial blood among the leaves.

"It looks like we got joint jurisdiction on this one," a
plainclothes cop said. His name was Thurston Meaux and he had a blond
mustache and wore a tweed sports coat with a starched denim shirt and a
striped tie. "After the photographer gets here, we'll take him down and
send y'all everything we have."

"Was he alive when they nailed him up?" I asked.

"The coroner has to wait on the autopsy. Y'all say he took the
head wound in his apartment?" he said.

"That's what it looks like," I replied.

"You found brass?"

"One casing. A .25."

"Why would somebody shoot a guy in Iberia Parish, then nail
him to a barn wall in St. Mary?" Meaux said.

"Another guy died here in the same way forty years ago," I
said.

"This is where that happened?"

"I think it's a message to someone," I said.

"We already ran this guy. He was a thief and a killer, a
suspect in two open homicide cases. I don't see big complexities here."

"If that's the way you're going to play it, you won't get
anywhere."

"Come on, Robicheaux. A guy like that is a walking target for
half the earth. Where you going?"

Helen and I walked back to our cruiser and drove through the
weeds, away from the barn and between two water oaks whose leaves were
starting to fall, then back out on the state road.

"I don't get it. What message?" Helen said, driving with one
hand, her badge holder still hanging from her shirt pocket.

"If it was just a payback killing, the shooters would have
left his body in the apartment. When we met Harpo Scruggs at the
barbecue place? He said something about hating rich people. I think he
killed Swede and deliberately tied Swede's murder to Jack Flynn's to
get even with somebody."

She thought about it.

"Scruggs took the Amtrak to Houston, then flew back to
Colorado," she said.

"So he came back. That's the way he operates. He kills people
over long distances."

She looked over at me, her eyes studying my expression.

"But something else is bothering you, isn't it?" she said.

"Whoever killed Swede hung him up on the right side of where
Jack Flynn died."

She shook a half-formed thought out of her face.

"I like working with you, Streak, but I'm not taking any walks
inside your head," she said.

ALEX GUIDRY WAS FURIOUS. He came
through the front door of
the sheriffs department at eight o'clock Monday morning, not slowing
down at the information desk or pausing long enough to knock before
entering my office.

"You're getting Ida Broussard's case reopened?" he said.

"You thought there was a statute of limitations on murder?" I
replied.

"You took splinters out of my old house and gave them to the
St. Mary Parish sheriffs office?" he said incredulously.

"That about sums it up."

"What's this crap about me suffocating her to death?"

I paper-clipped a sheaf of time sheets together and stuck them
in a drawer.

"A witness puts you with Ida Broussard right before her death.
A forensic pathologist says she was murdered, that water from a tap
was forced down her nose and mouth. If you don't like what you're
hearing, Mr. Guidry, I suggest you find a lawyer," I said.

"What'd I ever do to you?"

"Sullied our reputation in Iberia Parish. You're a bad cop.
You bring discredit on everyone who carries a badge."

"You better get your own lawyer, you sonofabitch. I'm going to
twist a two-by-four up your ass," he said.

I picked up my phone and punched the dispatcher's extension.

"Wally, there's a man in my office who needs an escort to his
automobile," I said.

Guidry pointed one stiffened finger at me, without speaking,
then strode angrily down the hallway. A few minutes later Helen came
into my office and sat on the edge of my desk.

"I just saw our ex-jailer in the parking lot. Somebody must
have spit on his toast this morning. He couldn't get his car door open
and he ended up breaking off his key in the lock."

"Really?" I said.

Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

FOUR HOURS LATER OUR fingerprint man
called. The shell casing
found on the carpet of Swede Boxleiter's apartment was clean and the
apartment contained no identifiable prints other than the victim's.
That same afternoon the sheriff called Helen and me into his office.

"I just got off the phone with the sheriffs department in
Trinidad, Colorado. Get this. They don't know anything about Harpo
Scruggs, except he owns a ranch outside of town," he said.

"Is he there now?" Helen said.

"That's what I asked. This liaison character says, 'Why you
interested in him?' So I say, 'Oh, we think he might be torturing and
killing people in our area, that sort of thing.'" The sheriff picked up
his leather tobacco pouch and flipped it back and forth in his fingers.

"Scruggs is a pro. He does his dirty work a long way from
home," I said.

"Yeah, he also crosses state lines to do it. I'm going to call
that FBI woman in New Orleans. In the meantime, I want y'all to go to
Trinidad and get anything you can on this guy."

"Our travel budget is pretty thin, skipper," I said.

"I already talked to the Parish Council. They feel the same
way I do. You keep crows out of a cornfield by tying a few dead ones on
your fence wire. That's a metaphor."

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING our plane made
a wide circle over the
Texas panhandle, then we dropped through clouds that were pooled with
fire in the sunrise and came in over biscuit-colored hills dotted with
juniper and pine and pinyon trees and landed at a small windblown
airport outside Raton, New Mexico.

The country to the south was as flat as a skillet, hazed with
dust in the early light, the monotony of the landscape broken by an
occasional mesa. But immediately north of Raton the land lifted into
dry, pinyon-covered, steep-sided hills that rose higher and higher into
a mountainous plateau where the old mining town of Trinidad, once home
to the Earps and Doc Holliday, had bloomed in the nineteenth century.

We rented a car and drove up Raton Pass through canyons that
were still deep in shadow, the sage on the hillsides silvered with dew.
On the left, high up on a grade, I saw a roofless church, with a facade
like that of a Spanish mission, among the ruins and slag heaps of an
abandoned mining community.

"That church was in one of Megan's photographs. She said it
was built by John D. Rockefeller as a PR effort after the Ludlow
massacre," I said.

Helen drove with one hand on the steering wheel. She looked
over at me with feigned interest in her eyes.

"Yeah?" she said, chewing gum.

I started to say something about the children and women who
were suffocated in a cellar under a burning tent when the Colorado
militia broke a miners' strike at Ludlow in 1914.

"Go on with your story," she said.

"Nothing."

"You know history, Streak. But it's still the good guys
against the shit bags. We're the good guys."

She put her other hand on the wheel and looked at me and
grinned, her mouth chewing, her bare upper arms round and tight against
the short sleeves of her shirt.

We reached the top of the grade and came out into a wide
valley, with big mountains in the west and the old brick and quarried
rock buildings of Trinidad off to the right, on streets that climbed
into the hills. The town was still partially in shadow, the wooded
crests of the hills glowing like splinters of black-green glass against
the early sun.

We checked in with the sheriffs department and were assigned
an elderly plainclothes detective named John Nash as an escort out to
Harpo Scruggs's ranch. He sat in the back seat of our rental car, a
short-brim Stetson cocked on the side of his head, a pleasant look on
his face as he watched the landscape go by.

"Scruggs never came to y'all's attention, huh?" I said.

"Can't say that he did," he replied.

"Just an ordinary guy in the community?"

"If he's what you say, I guess we should have taken better
note of him." His face was sun-browned, his eyes as blue as a butane
flame, webbed with tiny lines at the corners when he smiled. He looked
back out the window.

"This definitely seems like a laid-back place, yes-siree,"
Helen said, her eyes glancing sideways at me. She turned off the state
highway onto a dirt road that wound through an arroyo layered with
exposed rock.

"What do you plan to do with this fellow?" John Nash said.

"You had a shooting around here in a while?" Helen said.

John Nash smiled to himself and stared out the window again.
Then he said, "That's it yonder, set back against that hill. It's a
real nice spot here. Not a soul around. A Mexican drug smuggler pulled
a gun on me down by that creek once. I killed him deader than hell."

Helen and I both turned around and looked at John Nash as
though for the first time.

Harpo Scruggs's ranch was rail-fenced and covered with sage,
bordered on the far side by low bills and a creek that was lined with
aspens. The house was gingerbread late Victorian, gabled and paintless,
surrounded on four sides by a handrailed gallery. We could see a tall
figure splitting firewood on a stump by the barn. Our tires thumped
across the cattle guard. John Nash leaned forward with his arms on the
back of my seat.

"Mr. Robicheaux, you're not hoping for our friend out there to
do something rash, are you?" he said.

"You're an interesting man, Mr. Nash," I said.

"I get told that a lot," he replied.

We stopped the car on the edge of the dirt yard and got out.
The air smelled like wet sage and wood smoke and manure and horses when
there's frost on their coats and they steam in the sun. Scruggs paused
in his work and stared at us from under the flop brim of an Australian
bush hat. Then he stood another chunk of firewood on its edge and split
it in half.

We walked toward him through the side yard. Coffee cans
planted with violets and pansies were placed at even intervals along
the edge of the gallery. For some reason John Nash separated himself
from us and stepped up on the gallery and propped his hands on the rail
and watched us as though he were a spectator.

"Nice place," I said to Scruggs.

"Who's that man up on my gallery?" he said.

"My boss man's brought the Feds into it, Scruggs. Crossing
state lines. Big mistake," I said.

"Here's the rest of it. Ricky Scar is seriously pissed because
a poor-white-trash peckerwood took his money and then smeared shit all
over southwest Louisiana," Helen said.

"Plus you tied a current homicide to one that was committed
forty years ago," I said.

"The real mystery is why the Mob would hire a used-up old fart
who thinks bedding hookers will stop his Johnson from dribbling in the
toilet bowl three times a night. That Mexican hot pillow joint you
visited in Houston? The girl said she wanted to scrub herself down with
peroxide," Helen said. When Scruggs stared at her, she nodded
affirmatively, her face dramatically sincere.

Scruggs leaned the handle of his ax against the stump and bit
a small chew off a plug of tobacco, his shoulders and long back held
erect inside his sun-faded shirt. He turned his face away and spit in
the dirt, then rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist.

"You born in New Iberia, Robicheaux?" he asked.

"That's right."

"You think with what I know of past events, bodies buried in
the levee at Angola, troublesome people killed in St. Mary Parish, I'm
going down in a state court?"

"Times have changed, Scruggs," I said.

He hefted the ax in one hand and began splitting a chunk of
wood into long white strips for kindling, his lips glazed with a brown
residue from the tobacco in his jaw. Then he said, "If y'all going down
to Deming to hurt my name there, it won't do you no good. I've lived a
good life in the West. It ain't never been dirtied by nigra trouble and
rich people that thinks they can make white men into nigras, too."

"You were one of the men who killed Jack Flynn, weren't you?"
I said.

"I'm fixing to butcher a hog, then I got a lady friend coming
out to visit. I'd like for y'all to be gone before she gets here. By
the way, that man up on the gallery ain't no federal agent."

"We'll be around, Scruggs. I guarantee it," I said.

"Yeah, you will. Just like a tumblebug rolling shit balls."

We started toward the car. Behind me I heard his ax blade
splitting a piece of pine with a loud snap, then John Nash called out
from the gallery, "Mr. Scruggs, where's that fellow used to sell you
cordwood, do your fence work and such, the one looks like he's got clap
on his face?"

"He don't work for me no more," Scruggs said.

"I bet he don't. Being as he's in a clinic down in Raton with
an infected knife wound," John Nash said.

IN THE BACK SEAT of the car Nash took
a notebook from his
shirt pocket and folded back several pages.

"His name's Jubal Breedlove. We think he killed a trucker
about six years ago over some dope but we couldn't prove it. I put him
in jail a couple of times on drunk charges. Otherwise, his sheet's not
remarkable," he said.