DR10 - Sunset Limited (32 page)

But Guidry's night in Gethsemane was not over. He stumbled
toward the barn, his lower face like a piece of burst fruit, and swung
his pistol back in Helen's direction and let off one shot that whined
away across the bayou and made a sound like a hammer striking wood.

She began firing as fast as her finger could pull the trigger,
the ejected shells pinging off the trunk of the rain tree, until I came
behind her and fitted my hands on both her muscular arms.

"He's down. It's over," I said.

"No, he's still there. He let off another round. I saw the
flash," she said, her eyes wild, the tendons in her arms jumping as
though she were cold.

"No, Helen."

She swallowed, breathing hard through her mouth, and wiped the
sweat off her nose with her shoulder, never releasing the two-handed
grip on the Beretta. I shined the light out across the grass onto the
north side of the barn.

"Oh, shit," she said, almost like a plea.

"Call it in," I said.

"Dave, he's lying in the same, I mean like, his arms are out
like—"

"Get on the radio. That's all you have to do. Don't regret
anything that happened here tonight. He dealt the play a long time ago."

"Dave, he's on the left side of where Flynn died. I can't take
this stuff. I didn't know the guy was hit. Why didn't you yell at me?"

"I did. I think I did. Maybe I didn't. He should have thrown
away the piece."

We stood there like that, in the blowing wind and dust and the
raindrops that struck our faces like marbles, the vault of sky above us
exploding with sound.

THE ARGENTINE DWARF WHO CALLED himself
Ruben Esteban could not
have been more unfortunate in his choice of a hotel.

Years ago in Lafayette, twenty miles from New Iberia, a
severely retarded, truncated man named Chatlin Ardoin had made his
living as a newspaper carrier who delivered newspapers to downtown
businesses or sold them to train passengers at the Southern Pacific
depot. His voice was like clotted rust in a sewer pipe; his arms and
legs were stubs on his torso; his face had the expression of baked corn
bread under his formless hat. Street kids from the north side baited
him; an adman, the nephew of the newspaper's publisher, delighted in
calling him Castro, driving him into an emotional rage.

The two-story clapboard hotel around the corner from the
newspaper contained a bar downstairs where newsmen drank after their
deadline. It was also full of hookers who worked the trade through the
late afternoon and evening, except on Fridays, when the owner, whose
name was Norma Jean, served free boiled shrimp for family people in the
neighborhood. Every afternoon Chatlin brought Norma Jean a free
newspaper, and every afternoon she gave him a frosted schooner of draft
beer and a hard-boiled egg. He sat at the end of the bar under the
air-conditioning unit, his canvas bag of rolled newspapers piled on the
stool next to him, and peeled and ate the egg and drank the beer and
stared at the soap operas on the TV with an intensity that made some
believe he comprehended far more of the world than his appearance
indicated. Norma Jean was thoroughly corrupt and allowed her girls no
latitude when it came to pleasing their customers, but like most
uneducated and primitive people, she intuitively felt, without finding
words for the idea, that the retarded and insane were placed on earth
to be cared for by those whose souls might otherwise be forfeit.

A beer and a hard-boiled egg wasn't a bad price for holding on
to a bit of your humanity.

Fifteen years ago, during a hurricane, Chatlin was run over by
a truck on the highway. The newspaper office was moved; the Southern
Pacific depot across from the hotel was demolished and replaced by a
post office; and Norma Jean's quasi-brothel became an ordinary hotel
with a dark, cheerless bar for late-night drinkers.

Ordinary until Ruben Esteban checked into the hotel, then came
down to the bar at midnight, the hard surfaces of his face glowing like
corn bread under the neon. Esteban climbed on top of a stool, his
Panama hat wobbling on his head. Norma Jean took one look at him and
began screaming that Chatlin Ardoin had escaped from the grave.

Early Wednesday morning Helen and I were at the Lafayette
Parish Jail. It was raining hard outside and the corridors were
streaked with wet footprints. The homicide detective named Daigle took
us up in the elevator. His face was scarred indistinctly and had the
rounded, puffed quality of a steroid user's, his black hair clipped
short across the top of his forehead. His collar was too tight for him
and he kept pulling at it with two fingers, as though he had a rash.

"You smoked a guy and you're not on the desk?" he said to
Helen.

"The guy already had a hole in him," I said. "He also shot at
a police officer. He also happened to put a round through someone's
bedroom wall."

"Convenient," Daigle said.

Helen looked at me.

"What's Esteban charged with?" I asked.

"Disturbing the peace, resisting. Somebody accidentally
knocked him off the barstool when Norma Jean started yelling about dead
people. The dwarf got off the floor and went for the guy's crotch. The
uniform would have cut him loose, except he remembered y'all's
bulletin. He said getting cuffs on him was like trying to pick up a
scorpion," Daigle said. "What's the deal on him, again?"

"He sexually mutilated political prisoners for the Argentine
Junta. They were buds with the Gipper," I said.

"The what?" he said.

Ruben Esteban sat on a wood bench by himself in the back of a
holding cell, his Panama hat just touching the tops of his jug ears.
His face was triangular in shape, dull yellow in hue, the eyes set at
an oblique angle to his nose.

"What are you doing around here, podna?" I said.

"I'm a chef. I come here to study the food," he answered. His
voice sounded metallic, as though it came out of a resonator in his
throat.

"You have three different passports," I said.

"That's for my cousins. We're a—how you call
it?—we're a team. We cook all over the world," Esteban said.

"We know who you are. Stay out of Iberia Parish," Helen said.

"Why?" he asked.

"We have an ordinance against people who are short and ugly,"
she replied.

His face was wooden, impossible to read, the eyes hazing over
under the brim of his hat. He touched an incisor tooth and looked at
the saliva on the ball of his finger.

"Governments have protected you in the past. That won't happen
here. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Esteban?" I said.

"
Me cago en la puta de tu madre
," he
answered, his eyes focused on the backs of his square, thick hands, his
mouth curling back in neither a sneer nor a grimace but a disfigurement
like the expression in a corpse's face when the lips wrinkle away from
the teeth.

"What'd he say?" Daigle asked.

"He probably doesn't have a lot of sentiment about Mother's
Day," I said.

"That's not all he don't have. He's got a tube in his pants.
No penis," Daigle said, and started giggling.

Outside, it was still raining hard when Helen and I got in our
cruiser.

"What'd Daigle do before he was a cop?" Helen asked.

"Bill collector and barroom bouncer, I think."

"I would have never guessed," she said.

Ruben Esteban paid his fine that afternoon and was released.

THAT NIGHT I SAT in the small office
that I had fashioned out
of a storage room in the back of the bait shop. Spread on my desk were
xeroxed copies of the investigator's report on the shooting and death
of Alex Guidry, the coroner's report, and the crime scene photos taken
in front of the barn. The coroner stated that Guidry had already been
hit in the rib cage with a round from a .357 magnum before Helen had
ever discharged her weapon. Also, the internal damage was massive and
probably would have proved fatal even if Helen had not peppered him
with her nine-millimeter.

One photo showed the bloody interior of Guidry's Cadillac and
a bullet hole in the stereo system and another in the far door,
including a blood splatter on the leather door panel, indicating the
original shooter had fired at least twice and the fatal round had hit
Guidry while he was seated in the car.

Another photo showed tire tracks in the grass that were not
the Cadillac's.

Two rounds had been discharged from Guidry's .38, one at
Helen, the other probably at the unknown assailant.

The photo of Guidry, like most crime scene photography, was
stark in its black and white contrasts. His back lay propped against
the barn wall, his spine curving against the wood and the earth. His
hands and lower legs were sheathed in blood, his shattered mouth
hanging open, narrowing his face like a tormented figure in a Goya
painting.

The flood lamps were on outside the bait shop, and the rain
was blowing in sheets on the bayou. The water had overflowed the banks,
and the branches of the willows were trailing in the current. The body
of a dead possum floated by under the window, its stomach yellow and
swollen in the electric glare, the claws of feeding blue-point crabs
affixed to its fur. I kept thinking of Guidry's words to me in our last
telephone conversation:
It was under your feet the whole
time and you never saw it
.

What was under my feet? Where? By the barn? Out in the field
where Guidry was hit with the .357?

Then I saw Megan Flynn's automobile park by the boat ramp and
Megan run down the dock toward the bait shop with an umbrella over her
head.

She came inside, breathless, shaking water out of her hair.
Unconsciously, I looked up the slope through the trees at the lighted
gallery and living room of my house.

"Wet night to be out," I said.

She sat down at the counter and blotted her face with a paper
napkin.

"I got a call from Adrien Glazier. She told me about this guy
Ruben Esteban," she said.

Not bad, Adrien, I thought.

"This guy's record is for real, Dave. I heard about him when I
covered the Falklands War," she said.

"He was in custody on a misdemeanor in Lafayette this morning.
He doesn't blend into the wallpaper easily."

"We should feel better? Why do you think the Triads sent a
walking horror show here?"

Megan wasn't one to whom you gave facile assurances.

"We don't know who his partner is. While we're watching
Esteban, the other guy's peddling an icecream cart down Main Street," I
said.

"Thank you," she said, and dried the back of her neck with
another napkin. Her skin seemed paler, her mouth and her hair a darker
shade of red under the overhead light. I glanced away from her eyes.

"You and Cisco want a cruiser to park by your house?" I asked.

"I have a bad feeling about Clete. I can't shake it," she said.

"Clete?" I said.

"Geri Holtzner is driving his car all around town. Look,
nobody is going to hurt Billy Holtzner. You don't kill the people who
owe you money. You hurt the people around them. These guys put bombs in
people's automobiles."

"I'll talk to him about it."

"I already have. He doesn't listen. I hate myself for
involving him in this," she said.

"I left my Roman collar up at the house, Meg."

"I forgot. Swinging dicks talk in deep voices and never
apologize for their mistakes."

"Why do you turn every situation into an adversarial one?" I
asked.

She raised her chin and tilted her head slightly. Her mouth
reminded me of a red flower turning toward light.

Bootsie opened the screen door and came in holding a raincoat
over her head.

"Oh, excuse me. I didn't mean to walk into the middle of
something," she said. She shook her raincoat and wiped the water off it
with her hand. "My, what a mess I'm making."

THE NEXT AFTERNOON WE executed a
search warrant on the
property where Alex Guidry was shot. The sky was braided with thick
gray and metallic-blue clouds, and the air smelled like rain and wood
pulp and smoke from a trash fire.

Thurston Meaux, the St. Mary Parish plainclothes, came out of
the barn with a rake in his hand.

"I found two used rubbers, four pop bottles, a horseshoe, and
a dead snake. That any help to y'all?" he said.

"Pretty clever," I said.

"Maybe Alex Guidry was just setting you up, podna. Maybe
you're lucky somebody popped him first. Maybe there was never anything
here," Meaux said.

"Tell me, Thurston, why is it nobody wants to talk about the
murder of Jack Flynn?"

"It was a different time. My grandfather did some things in
the Klan, up in nort' Louisiana. He's an old man now. It's gonna change
the past to punish him now?"

I started to reply but instead just walked away. It was easy
for me to be righteous at the expense of another. The real problem was
I didn't have any idea what we were looking for. The yellow crime scene
tape formed a triangle from the barn to the spot where Guidry's
Cadillac had been parked. Inside the triangle we found old shotgun and
.22 shells, pig bones, a plowshare that groundwater had turned into
rusty lace, the stone base of a mule-operated cane grinder overgrown
with morning glory vine. A deputy sheriff swung his metal detector over
a desiccated oak stump and got a hot reading. We splintered the stump
apart and found a fan-shaped ax head, one that had been hand-forged, in
the heart of the wood.

At four o'clock the uniformed deputies left. The sun came out
and I watched Thurston Meaux sit down on a crate in the lee of the barn
and eat a sandwich, let the wax paper blow away in the wind, then pull
the tab on a soda can and drop it in the dirt.

"You're contaminating the crime scene," I said.

"Wrong," he replied.