DR10 - Sunset Limited (29 page)

"So while Ricky's rolling around on the carpet, I eased on
outside and decided to cruise very copacetically out of Baton Rouge
and leave the greaseballs alone for a while."

"Why were state troopers after you? Why were you out by
Spanish Lake instead of on the four-lane?"

His eyes clicked sideways, as though he were seriously
researching the question.

"Ummm, I kept thinking about begging off from the Mouse when
he put his stun gun on snap, crackle, and pop. So out there in the
parking lot were about eight or nine chopped-down Harleys. They
belonged to the same bunch the Gypsy Jokers threatened to kill for
wearing their colors. I still had all my repo tools in the trunk, so I
found the Mouse's car and slim-jimmed the door and fired it up. Then I
propped a board against the gas pedal, pointed it right into the middle
of the Harleys, and dropped it into low.

"I cruised around for five minutes, then did a drive-by and
watched it all from across the street. The bikers were climbing around
on Ricky's car like land crabs, kicking windows out, slashing the seats
and tires, tearing the wires out of the engine. It was perfect, Dave.
When the cops got there, it was even better. The cops were throwing
bikers in a van, Ricky was screaming in the parking lot, his broad
trying to calm him down, Ricky swinging her around by her arm like she
was a stuffed doll, people coming out every door in the restaurant like
the place was on fire. Benny Grogan got sapped across the head with a
baton. Anyway, it'll all cool down in a day or so. Say, you got any of
those sandwiches left?"

"I just can't believe you," I said.

"What'd I do? I just wanted to eat some oysters and have a
little peace and quiet."

"Clete, one day you'll create a mess you won't get out of.
They're going to kill you."

"Scarlotti is a punk and a rodent and belongs under a sewer
grate. Hey, the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide spit in their mouths and
laugh it off, right? Quit worrying. It's only rock 'n' roll."

His eyes were green and bright above the beer bottle while he
drank, his face flushed and dilated with his own heat.

JUST AFTER EIGHT THE next morning the
sheriff came into my
office. He stood at the window and propped his hands on the sill. His
sleeves were rolled to his elbows, his forearms thick and covered with
hair.

"I talked with that FBI woman, Glazier, about Harpo Scruggs.
She's a challenge to whatever degree of civility I normally possess,"
he said.

"What'd she say?"

"She turned to an ice cube. That's what bothers me. He's
supposed to be mixed up with the Dixie Mafia, but there's nothing in
the NCIC computer on him. Why this general lack of interest?"

"Up until now his victims have been low profile, people nobody
cared about," I said.

"That woman hates Megan Flynn. Why's it so personal with her?"

We looked at each other. "Guilt?" I said.

"Over what?"

"Good question."

I walked down to Helen's office, then we both signed out for
New Orleans.

WE DROVE TO NEW Orleans and parked off
Carondelet and walked
over to the Mobil Building on Poydras Street. When we sat down in her
office, she rose from her chair and opened the blinds, as though
wishing to create an extra dimension in the room. Then she sat back
down in a swivel chair and crossed her legs, her shoulders erect inside
her gray suit, her ice-blue eyes fixed on something out in the hallway.
But when I turned around, no one was there.

Then I saw it in her face, the dryness at the corner of the
mouth, the skin that twitched slightly below the eye, the chin lifted
as though to remove a tension in the throat.

"We thought y'all might want to help bring down this guy
Scruggs. He's going back and forth across state lines like a Ping-Pong
ball," I said.

"If you don't have enough grounds for a warrant, why should
we?" she said.

"Every cop who worked with him says he was dirty. Maybe he
even murdered convicts in Angola. But there's no sheet on him
anywhere," I said.

"You're saying somehow that's our fault?"

"No, we're thinking Protected Witness Program or paid federal
informant," Helen said.

"Where do you get your information? You people
think—" she began.

"Scruggs is the kind of guy who would flirt around the edges
of the Klan. Back in the fifties you had guys like that on the
payroll," I said.

"You're talking about events of four decades ago," Adrien
Glazier said.

"What if he was one of the men who murdered Jack Flynn? What
if he committed that murder while he was in the employ of the
government?" I said.

"You're not going to interrogate me in my own office, Mr.
Robicheaux."

We stared mutely at each other, her eyes watching the
recognition grow in mine.

"That's it, isn't it? You
know
Scruggs
killed Megan Flynn's father. You've known it all along. That's why you
bear her all this resentment."

"You'll either leave now or I'll have you removed from the
building," she said.

"Here's a Kleenex. Your eyes look a little wet, ma'am. I can
relate to your situation. I used to work for the NOPD and had to lie
and
cover up for male bozos all the time," Helen said.

WE DROVE INTO THE Quarter and had
beignets and coffee and hot
milk at the Cafe du Monde. While Helen bought some pralines for her
nephew, I walked across the street into Jackson Square, past the
sidewalk artists who had set up their easels along the piked fence that
surrounded the park, past the front of St. Louis Cathedral where a
string band was playing, and over to a small bookstore on Toulouse.

Everyone in AA knows that his survival as a wet drunk was due
partly to the fact that most people fear the insane and leave them
alone. But those who are cursed with the gift of Cassandra often have
the same fate imposed upon them. Gus Vitelli was a slight, bony
Sicilian ex-horse trainer and professional bouree player whose left leg
had been withered by polio and who had probably read almost every book
in the New Orleans library system. He was obsessed with what he called
"untold history," and his bookstore was filled with material on
conspiracies of every kind.

He told anyone who would listen that the main players in the
assassinations of both John Kennedy and Martin Luther King came from
the New Orleans area. Some of the names he offered were those of
Italian gangsters. But if the Mob was bothered by his accusations,
they didn't show it. Gus Vitelli had long ago been dismissed in New
Orleans as a crank.

The problem was that Gus was a reasonable and intelligent man.
At least in my view.

He was wearing a T-shirt that exclaimed "I Know Jack Shit,"
and wrote prices on used books while I told him the story about the
murder of Jack Flynn and the possible involvement of an FBI informant.

"It wouldn't surprise me that it got covered up. Hoover wasn't
any friend of pinkos and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade," he said. He
walked to a display table and began arranging a pile of paperback
books, his left leg seeming to collapse and then spring tight again
with each step. "I got a CIA manual here that was written to teach the
Honduran army how to torture people. Look at the publication date,
1983. You think people are gonna believe that?" He flipped the manual
at me.

"Gus, have you heard anything about a hit on a black guy named
Willie Broussard?"

"Something involving the Giacanos or Ricky Scarlotti?"

"You got it."

"Nothing about a hit. But the word is Ricky Scar's sweating
ball bearings 'cause he might have to give up some Asian guys. The
truth is, I'm not interested. People like Ricky give all Italians a bad
name. My greatgrandfather sold bananas and pies out of a wagon. He
raised thirteen kids like that. He got hung from a street-lamp in 1890
when the police commissioner was killed."

I thanked him for his time and started to leave.

"The guy who was crucified against the barn wall?" he said.
"The reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is they think
'conspiracy' means everybody's on the same program. That's not how it
works. Everybody's got a different program. They just all want the same
guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw
somebody's wife."

I HAD WORRIED THAT Cool Breeze
Broussard might go after Alex
Guidry. But I had not thought about his father.

Mout' and two of his Hmong business partners bounced their
stake truck loaded with cut flowers into the parking lot of the New
Iberia Country Club. Mout' climbed down from the cab and asked the golf
pro where he could find Alex Guidry. It was windy and bright, and Mout'
wore a suit coat and a small rainbow-colored umbrella that clamped on
his head like an elevated hat.

He began walking down the fairway, his haystack body bent
forward, his brogans rising and falling as though he were stepping over
plowed rows in a field, a cigar stub in the side of his mouth, his face
expressionless.

He passed a weeping willow that was turning gold with the
season, and a sycamore whose leaves looked like flame, then stopped at
a polite distance from the green and waited until Alex Guidry and his
three friends had putted into the cup.

"Mr. Guidry, suh?" Mout' said.

Guidry glanced at him, then turned his back and studied the
next fairway.

"Mr. Guidry, I got to talk wit' you about my boy," Mout' said.

Guidry pulled his golf cart off the far slope of the green.
But his friends had not moved and were looking at his back now.

"Mr. Guidry, I know you got power round here. But my boy ain't
coming after you. Suh, please don't walk away," Mout' said.

"Does somebody have a cell phone?" Guidry asked his friends.

"Alex, we can go over here and have a smoke," one of them said.

"I didn't join this club to have an old nigger follow me
around the golf course," Guidry replied.

"Suh, my boy blamed himself twenty years for Ida's death. I
just want you to talk wit' me for five minutes. I apologize to these
gentlemen here," Mout' said.

Guidry began walking toward the next tee, his golf cart
rattling behind him.

For the next hour Mout' followed him, perspiration leaking out
of the leather brace that held his umbrella hat in place, the sun
lighting the pink-and-white discoloration that afflicted one side of
his face.

Finally Guidry sliced a ball into the rough, speared his club
angrily into his golf bag, walked to the clubhouse, and went into the
bar.

It took Mout' twenty minutes to cover the same amount of
ground and he was sweating and breathing heavily when he came inside
the bar. He stood in the center of the room, amid the felt-covered card
tables and click of poker chips and muted conversation, and removed his
umbrella hat and fixed his blue, cataract-frosted eyes on Guidry's face.

Guidry kept signaling the manager with one finger.

"Mr. Robicheaux say you held a wet towel over Ida's nose and
mout' and made her heart stop. He gonna prove it, so that mean my boy
don't have to do nothing, he ain't no threat to you," Mout' said.

"Somebody get this guy out of here," Guidry said.

"I'm going, suh. You can tell these people here anyt'ing you
want. But I knowed you when you was buying black girls for t'ree
dol'ars over on Hopkins. So you ain't had to go after Ida. You ain't
had to take my boy's wife, suh."

The room was totally quiet. Alex Guidry's face burned like a
red lamp. Mout' Broussard walked back outside, his body bent forward at
the middle, his expression as blank as the grated door on a woodstove.

LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON I RECEIVED a
call from John Nash in
Trinidad.

"Our friend Jubal Breedlove checked out of the clinic in Raton
and is nowhere to be found," he said.

"Did he hook up with Scruggs?" I asked.

"It's my feeling he probably did."

The line was silent.

"Why do you feel that, Mr. Nash?" I asked.

"His car's at his house. His clothes seem undisturbed. He
didn't make a withdrawal from his bank account. What does that suggest
to you, Mr. Robicheaux?"

"Breedlove's under a pile of rock?"

"Didn't Vikings put a dog at the foot of a dead warrior?" he
asked.

"Excuse me?"

"I was thinking about the family he murdered in the
campground. The father put up a terrific fight to protect his daughter.
I hope Breedlove's under a pile of rock by that campground."

AFTER WORK I HAD to go after a boat a
drunk smashed into a
stump and left with a wrenched propeller on a sandbar. I tilted the
engine's housing into the stern of the boat and was about to slide the
hull back into the water when I saw why the drunk had waded through the
shallows to dry land and walked back to his car: the aluminum bottom
had a gash in it like a twisted smile.

I wedged a float cushion into the leak so I could pull the
boat across the bayou into the reeds and return with a boat trailer to
pick it up. Behind me I heard an outboard come around the corner and
then slow when the man in the stern saw me standing among the flooded
willows.

"I hope you don't mind my coming out here. The Afro-American
man said it would be all right," Billy Holtzner said.

"You're talking about Batist?"

"Yes, I think that's his name. He seems like a good fellow."

He cut his engine and let his boat scrape up on the sandbar.
When he walked forward the boat rocked under him and he automatically
stooped over to grab the gunnels. He grinned foolishly.

"I'm not very good at boats," he said.

My experience has been that the physical and emotional
transformation that eventually comes aborning in every bully never
takes but one form. The catalyst is fear and its effects are like a
flame on candle wax. The sneer around the mouth and the contempt and
disdain in the eyes melt away and are replaced by a self-effacing
smile, a confession of an inconsequential weakness, and a saccharine
affectation of goodwill in the voice. The disingenuousness is like oil
exuded from the skin; there's an actual stink in the clothes.