DR10 - Sunset Limited (33 page)

"Oh?"

"Because we're not wasting any more time on this bullshit.
You've got some kind of obsession, Robicheaux." He brushed the crumbs
off his clothes and walked to his automobile.

Helen didn't say anything for a long time. Then she lifted a
strand of hair out of her eye and said, "Dave, we've walked every inch
of the field and raked all the ground inside and around the barn. You
want to start over again, that's okay with me, but—"

"Guidry said, 'It was under your feet, you arrogant shithead.'
Whatever he was talking about, it's physical, maybe something we walked
over, something he could pick up and stick in my face."

"We can bring in a Cat and move some serious dirt."

"No, we might destroy whatever is here."

She let out her breath, then began scraping a long divot with
a mattock around the edges of the hardpan.

"You're a loyal friend, Helen," I said.

"Bwana has the keys to the cruiser," she said.

I stood in front of the barn wall and stared at the weathered
wood, the strips of red paint that were flaking like fingernail polish,
the dust-sealed nail holes where Jack Flynn's wrists had been impaled.
Whatever evidence was here had been left by Harpo Scruggs, not Alex
Guidry, I thought. It was something Scruggs knew about, had
deliberately left in place, had even told Guidry about. But why?

To implicate someone else. Just as he had crucified Swede
Boxleiter in this spot to tie Boxleiter's death to Flynn's.

"Helen, if there's anything here, it's right by where Jack
Flynn died," I said.

She rested the mattock by her foot and wiped a smear of mud
off her face with her sleeve.

"If you say so," she said.

"Long day, huh?"

"I had a dream last night. Like I was being pulled back into
history, into stuff I don't want to have anything to do with."

"You told me yourself, we're the good guys."

"When I kept shooting at Guidry? He was already done. I just
couldn't stop. I convinced myself I saw another flash from his weapon.
But I knew better."

"He got what he deserved."

"Yeah? Well, why do I feel the way I do?"

"Because you still have your humanity. It's because you're the
best."

"I want to make this case and lock the file on it. I mean it,
Dave."

She put down her mattock and the two of us began piercing the
hardpan with garden forks, working backward from the barn wall, turning
up the dirt from six inches below the surface. The subsoil was black
and shiny, oozing with water and white worms. Then I saw a coppery
glint and a smooth glass surface wedge out of the mud while Helen was
prizing her fork against a tangle of roots.

"Hold it," I said.

"What is it?"

"A jar. Don't move the fork."

I reached down and lifted a quart-size preserve jar out of the
mud and water. The top was sealed with both rubber and a metal cap. I
squatted down and dipped water out of the hole and rinsed the mud off
the glass.

"An envelope and a newspaper clipping? What's Scruggs doing,
burying a time capsule?" Helen said.

We walked to the cruiser and wiped the jar clean with paper
towels, then set it on the hood and unscrewed the cap. I lifted the
newspaper clipping out with two fingers and spread it on the hood. The
person who had cut it out of the
Times-Picayune
had carefully included the strip at the top of the page which gave the
date, August 8, 1956. The headline on the story read: "Union Organizer
Found Crucified."

Helen turned the jar upside down and pulled the envelope out
of the opening. The glue on the flap was still sealed. I slipped my
pocketknife in the corner of the flap and sliced a neat line across the
top of the envelope and shook three black-and-white photos out on the
hood.

Jack Flynn was still alive in two of them. In one, he was on
his hands and knees while men in black hoods with slits for eyes swung
blurred chains on his back; in the other, a fist clutched his hair,
pulling his head erect so the camera could photograph his destroyed
face. But in the third photo his ordeal had come to an end. His head
lay on his shoulder; his eyes were rolled into his head, his impaled
arms stretched out on the wood of the barn wall. Three men in cloth
hoods were looking back at the camera, one pointing at Flynn as though
indicating a lesson to the viewer.

"This doesn't give us squat," Helen said.

"The man in the middle. Look at the ring finger on his left
hand. It's gone, cut off at the palm," I said.

"You know him?"

"It's Archer Terrebonne. His family didn't just order the
murder. He helped do it."

"Dave, there's no face to go with the hand. It's not a felony
to have a missing finger. Look at me. A step at a time and all that
jazz, right? You listening, Streak?"

IT WAS AN HOUR LATER. Terrebonne had
not been at his home, but
a maid had told us where to find him. I parked the cruiser under the
oaks in front of the restaurant up the highway and cut the engine. The
water dripping out of the trees steamed on the hood.

"Dave, don't do this," Helen said.

"He's in Iberia Parish now. I'm not going to have these
pictures lost in a St. Mary Parish evidence locker."

"We get them copied, then do it by the numbers."

"He'll skate."

"You know a lot of rich guys working soybeans in Angola?
That's the way it is."

"Not this time."

I went inside the foyer, where people waited in leather chairs
for an available table. I opened my badge on the maître d'.

"Archer Terrebonne is here with a party," I said.

The maître d's eyes locked on mine, then
shifted to Helen, who
stood behind me.

"Is there a problem?" he asked.

"Not yet," I said.

"I see. Follow me, please."

We walked through the main dining room to a long table at the
rear, where Terrebonne was seated with a dozen other people. The
waiters had just taken away their shrimp cocktails and were now serving
the gumbo off of a linen-covered cart.

Terrebonne wiped his mouth with a napkin, then waited for a
woman in a robin's-egg-blue suit to stop talking before he shifted his
eyes to me.

"What burning issue do you bring us tonight, Mr. Robicheaux?"
he asked.

"Harpo Scruggs pissed in your shoe," I said.

"Sir, would you not—" the maître
d' began.

"You did your job. Beat it," Helen said.

I lay the three photographs down on the tablecloth.

"That's you in the middle, Mr. Terrebonne. You chain-whipped
Jack Flynn and hammered nails through his wrists and ankles, then let
your daughter carry your guilt. You truly turn my stomach, sir," I said.

"And you're way beyond anything I'll tolerate," he said.

"Get up," I said.

"What?"

"Better do what he says," Helen said behind me.

Terrebonne turned to a silver-haired man on his right. "John,
would you call the mayor's home, please?" he said.

"You're under arrest, Mr. Terrebonne. The mayor's not going to
help you," I said.

"I'm not going anywhere with you, sir. You put your hand on my
person again and I'll sue you for battery," he said, then calmly began
talking to the woman in a robin's-egg-blue suit on his left.

Maybe it was the long day, or the fact the photos had allowed
me to actually see the ordeal of Jack Flynn, one that time had made an
abstraction, or maybe I simply possessed a long-buried animus toward
Archer Terrebonne and the imperious and self-satisfied arrogance that
he and his kind represented. But long ago I had learned that anger, my
old enemy, had many catalysts and they all led ultimately to one
consequence, an eruption of torn red-and-black color behind the eyes,
an alcoholic blackout without booze, then an adrenaline surge that left
me trembling, out of control, and possessed of a destructive capability
that later filled me with shame.

I grabbed him by the back of his belt and hoisted him out of
the chair, pushed him facedown on the table, into his food, and cuffed
his wrists behind him, hard, ratcheting the curved steel tongues deep
into the locks, crimping the veins like green string. Then I walked him
ahead of me, out the foyer, into the parking area, pushing past a group
of people who stared at us openmouthed. Terrebonne tried to speak, but
I got the back door of the cruiser open and shoved him inside, cutting
his scalp on the jamb.

When I slammed the door I turned around and was looking into
the face of the woman in the robin's-egg-blue suit.

"You manhandle a sixty-three-year-old man like that? My, you
must be proud. I'm so pleased we have policemen of your stature
protecting us from ourselves," she said.

THE SHERIFF CALLED ME into his office
early the next morning.
He rubbed the balls of his fingers back and forth on his forehead, as
though the skin were burned, and looked at a spot six inches in front
of his face.

"I don't know where to begin," he said.

"Terrebonne was kicked loose?"

"Two hours after you put him in the cage. I've had calls from
a judge, three state legislators, and a U.S. congressman. You locked
him in the cage with a drag queen and a drunk with vomit all over his
clothes?"

"I didn't notice."

"I bet. He says he's going to sue."

"Let him. He's obstructed and lied in the course of a murder
investigation. He's dirty from the jump, skipper. Put that photo and
his daughter in front of a grand jury and see what happens."

"You're really out to burn his grits, aren't you?"

"You don't think he deserves it?" I said.

"The homicide was in St. Mary Parish. Dave, this guy had to
have stitches in his head. Do you know what his lawyers are going to do
with that?"

"We've been going after the wrong guys. Cut off the snake's
head and the body dies," I said.

"I called my insurance agent about an umbrella policy this
morning, you know, the kind that protects you against losing your house
and everything you own. I'll give you his number."

"Terrebonne skates?"

The sheriff picked up a pink memo slip in the fingers of each
hand and let them flutter back to his ink blotter.

"You've figured it out," he said.

LATE THAT AFTERNOON, JUST as the sun
dipped over the trees,
Cisco Flynn walked down the dock where I was cleaning the barbecue pit,
and sat on the railing and watched me work.

"Megan thinks she caused some trouble between you and your
wife," he said.

"She's right," I said.

"She's sorry about it."

"Look, Cisco, I'm kind of tired of y'all's explanations about
various things. What's the expression, 'Get a life'?"

"That guy who got thrown out the hotel window in San Antonio?
Swede did it, but I helped set up the transportation and the alibi at
the movie theater."

"Why tell me?"

"He's dead, but he was a good guy. I'm not laying off
something I did on a friend."

"You got problems with your conscience about the hotel flyer,
go to San Antone and turn yourself in."

"What's with you, man?"

"Archer Terrebonne, the guy who has money in your picture,
killed your father. Come down to the office and check out the photos. I
made copies before I turned the originals over to St. Mary Parish. The
downside of the story is I can't touch him."

His face looked empty, insentient, as though he were winded,
his lips moving without sound. He blinked and swallowed. "Archer
Terrebonne? No, there's something wrong. He's been a guest in my home.
What are you saying?" he said.

I went inside the bait shop and didn't come back out until he
was gone.

THAT NIGHT THE MOON was down and
leaves were blowing in the
darkness outside, rattling against the trunks of the oak and pecan
trees. When I went into the bedroom the light was off and Bootsie was
sitting in front of her dresser in her panties and a T-shirt, looking
out the window into the darkness.

"You eighty-sixed Cisco?" she said.

"Not exactly. I just didn't feel like talking to him anymore."

"Was this over Megan?"

"When she comes out here, we have trouble," I said.

The breeze ginned the blades in the window fan and I could
hear leaves blowing against the screen.

"It's not her fault, it's mine," Bootsie said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"You take on other people's burdens, Dave. It's just the way
you are. That's why you're the man I married."

I put my hand on her shoulder. She looked at our reflection in
the dresser mirror and stood up, still facing the mirror. I slipped my
arms around her waist, under her breasts, and put my face in her hair.
Her body felt muscular and hard against mine. I moved my hand down her
stomach, and she arched her head back against mine and clasped the back
of my neck. Her stiffening breasts, the smoothness of her stomach and
the taper of her hips, the hardness of her thighs, the tendons in her
back, the power in her upper arms, when I embraced all these things
with touch and mind and eye, it was like watching myself become one
with an alabaster figure who had been infused with the veined warmth of
a new rose.

Then I was between her thighs on top of the sheet and I could
hear a sound in my head like wind in a conch shell and feel her press
me deeper inside, as though both of us were drawing deeper into a cave
beneath the sea, and I knew that concerns over winged chariots and
mutability and death should have no place among the quick, even when
autumn thudded softly against the window screen.

IN VIETNAM I HAD anxieties about
toe-poppers and booby-trapped
105 duds that made the skin tighten around my temples and the blood
veins dilate in my brain, so that during my waking hours I constantly
experienced an unrelieved pressure band along one side of my head, just
as though I were wearing a hat. But the visitor who stayed on in my
nightmares, long after the war, was a pajama-clad sapper by the name of
Bedcheck Charlie.