DR10 - Sunset Limited (8 page)

MONDAY MORNING HELEN SOILEAU came into
my office and sat on
the corner of my desk.

"I was wrong about two things," she said.

"Oh?"

"The mulatto who tried to do Cool Breeze, the guy with the
earring through his nipple? I said maybe I bought his story, he thought
Breeze was somebody else? I checked the visitors' sheet. A lawyer for
the Giacano family visited him the day before."

"You're sure?"

"Whiplash Wineburger. You ever meet him?"

"Whiplash represents other clients, too."

"Pro bono for a mulatto who works in a rice mill?"

"Why would the Giacanos want to do an inside hit on a guy like
Cool Breeze Broussard?"

She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

"Maybe the Feds are squeezing Breeze to bring pressure on the
Giacanos," I said, in answer to my own question.

"To make them cooperate in an investigation of the Triads?"

"Why not?"

"The other thing I was going to tell you? Last night Lila
Terrebonne went into that new zydeco dump on the parish line. She got
into it with the bartender, then pulled a .25 automatic on the bouncer.
A couple of uniforms were the first guys to respond. They got her purse
from her with the gun in it without any problem. Then one of them
brushed against her and she went ape shit.

"Dave, I put my arm around her and walked her out the back
door, into the parking lot, with nobody else around, and she cried like
a kid in my arms… You following me?"

"Yeah, I think so," I said.

"I don't know who did it, but I know what's been done to her,"
she said. She stood up, flexed her back, and inverted the flats of her
hands inside the back of her gunbelt. The skin was tight around her
mouth, her eyes charged with light. My gaze shifted off her face.

"When I was a young woman and finally told people what my
father did to me, nobody believed it," she said. "'Your dad was a great
guy,' they said. 'Your dad was a wonderful parent.'"

"Where is she now?"

"Iberia General. Nobody's pressing charges. I think her old
man already greased the owner of the bar."

"You're a good cop, Helen."

"Better get her some help. The guy who'll pay the bill won't
be the one who did it to her. Too bad it works out that way, huh?"

"What do I know?" I said.

Her eyes held on mine. She had killed two perps in the line of
duty. I think she took no joy in that fact. But neither did she regret
what she had done nor did she grieve over the repressed anger that had
rescinded any equivocation she might have had before she shot them. She
winked at me and went back to her office.

WITH REGULARITY POLITICIANS TALK about
what they call the war
against drugs. I have the sense few of them know anything about it. But
the person who suffers the attrition for the drug trade is real, with
the same soft marmalade-like system of lungs and heart and viscera
inherited from a fish as the rest of us.

In this case her name was Ruby Gravano and she lived in a
low-rent hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, between Lee Circle
and Canal, not far from the French Quarter. The narrow front entrance
was framed by bare lightbulbs, like the entrance to a 1920s movie
theater. But quaint similarities ended there. The interior was
superheated and breathless, unlighted except for the glare from the
airshaft at the end of the hallways. For some reason the walls had been
painted firehouse red with black trim, and now, in the semi-darkness,
they had the dirty glow of a dying furnace.

Ruby Gravano sat in a stuffed chair surrounded by the litter
of her life: splayed tabloid magazines, pizza cartons, used Kleenex, a
coffee cup with a dead roach inside, a half-constructed model of a
spaceship that had been stuck back in the box and stepped on.

Ruby Gravano's hair was long and black and made her thin face
and body look fuller than they were. She wore shorts that were too big
for her and exposed her underwear, and foundation on her thighs and
forearms, and false fingernails and false eyelashes and a bruise like a
fresh tattoo on her left cheek.

"Dave won't jam you up on this, Ruby. We just want a string
that'll lead back to these two guys. They're bad dudes, not the kind
you want in your life, not the kind you want other girls to get mixed
up with. You can help a lot of people here," Clete said.

"We did them in a motel on Airline Highway. They had a pickup
truck with a shell on it. Full of guns and camping gear and shit. They
smelled like mosquito repellent. They always wore their hats. I've seen
hogs eat with better table manners. They're Johns. What else you want
to know?" she said.

"Why'd you think they might be cops?" I asked.

"Who else carries mug shots around?"

"Beg your pardon?" I said.

"The guy I did, he was undressing and he finds these two mug
shots in his shirt pocket. So he burns them in an ashtray and that's
when his friend says something about capping two brothers."

"Wait a minute. You were all in the same room?" Clete said.

"They didn't want to pay for two rooms. Besides, they wanted
to trade off. Connie does splits, but I wouldn't go along. One of those
creeps is sickening enough. Why don't you bug Connie about this stuff?"

"Because she blew town," Clete said.

She sniffed and wiped her nose with her wrist. "Look, I'm not
feeling too good. Y'all got what you need?" she said.

"Did they use a credit card to pay for the room?" I asked.

"It's a trick pad. My manager pays the owner. Look, believe it
or not, I got another life besides this shit. How about it?"

She tried to look boldly into my face, but her eyes broke and
she picked up the crushed model of a spaceship from its box on the
floor and held it in her lap and studied it resentfully.

"Who hit you, Ruby?" I asked.

"A guy."

"You have a kid?"

"A little boy. He's nine. I bought him this, but it got rough
in here last night."

"These cops, duffers, whatever they were, they had to have
names," I said.

"Not real ones."

"What do you mean?"

"The one who burned the pictures, the other guy called him
Harpo. I go, 'Like that guy in old TV movies who's a dummy and is
always honking a horn?' The guy called Harpo goes, 'That's right,
darlin', and right now I'm gonna honk
your
horn.'"

She tried to fit the plastic parts of the model back together.
Her right cheek was pinched while she tried to focus, and the bruise on
it knotted together like a cluster of blue grapes. "I can't fix this. I
should have put it up in the closet. He's coming over with my aunt,"
she said. She pushed hard on a plastic part and it slid sharply across
the back of her hand.

"How old a man was Harpo?" I asked.

"Like sixty, when they start acting like they're your father
and Robert Redford at the same time. He has hair all over his
back… I got to go to the bathroom. I'm gonna be in there a
while. Look, you want to stay, maybe you can fix this. It's been a
deeply fucked-up day."

"Where'd you buy it?" I asked.

"K&B's. Or maybe at the Jackson Brewery, you know,
that mall that used to be the Jax brewery… No, I'm pretty
sure it wasn't the Brewery." She bit a hangnail.

Clete and I drove to a K&B drugstore up St. Charles.
It was raining, and the wind blew the mist out of the trees that arched
over the streetcar tracks. The green-and-purple neon on the drugstore
looked like scrolled candy in the rain.

"Harpo was the name of the cop who took Cool Breeze
Broussard's wife away from him," I said.

"That was twenty years ago. It can't be the same guy, can it?"

"No, it's unlikely."

"I think all these people deserve each other, Streak."

"So why are we buying a toy for Ruby Gravano's son?"

"I seldom take my own advice. Sound like anybody else you
know, big mon?"

ON WEDNESDAY I DROVE a cruiser down
the old bayou road toward
Jeanerette and Lila Terrebonne's home. As I neared the enormous lawn
and the oak-lined driveway, I saw the production crew at work on the
set that had been constructed to look like the quarters on a
corporation farm, and I kept driving south, toward Franklin and the
place where my father and I had discovered a crucifixion.

Why?

Maybe because the past is never really dead, at least not as
long as you deny its existence. Maybe because I knew that somehow the
death of Cisco and Megan Flynn's father was about to come back into our
lives.

The barn was still there, two hundred yards from the Teche,
hemmed in by banana trees and blackberry bushes. The roof was cratered
with a huge hole, the walls leaning in on themselves, the red paint
nothing more than thin strips that hadn't yet been weathered away by
wind and sun.

I walked through the blackberry bushes to the north side of
the barn. The nail holes were sealed over with dust from the cane
fields and water expansion in the wood, but I could still feel their
edges with the tips of my fingers and, in my mind's eye, see the
outline of the man whose tormented face and broken body and
blood-creased brow greeted my father and me on that fiery dawn in 1956.

No grass grew around the area where Jack Flynn died. (But
there was no sunlight there, I told myself, only green flies buzzing in
the shade, and the earth was hardpan and probably poisoned by
herbicides that had been spilled on the ground.) Wild rain trees,
bursting with bloodred flowers, stood in the field, and the
blackberries on the bushes were fat and moist with their own juices
when I touched them. I wondered at the degree of innocence that allowed
us to think of Golgotha as an incident trapped inside history. I wiped
the sweat off my face with a handkerchief and unbuttoned my shirt and
stepped out of the shade into the wind, but it brought no relief from
the heat.

I drove back up the bayou to the Terrebonne home and turned
into the brick drive and parked by the carriage house. Lila was
ebullient, her milky green eyes free of any remorse or memory of
pulling a gun in a bar and being handcuffed to a bed in Iberia General
Hospital. But like all people who are driven by a self-centered fear,
she talked constantly, controlling the environment around her with
words, filling in any silent space that might allow someone to ask the
wrong question.

Her father, Archer Terrebonne, was another matter. He had the
same eyes as his daughter, and the same white-gold hair, but there was
no lack of confidence in either his laconic speech or the way he folded
his arms across his narrow chest while he held a glass of shaved ice
and bourbon and sliced oranges. In fact, his money gave him the kind of
confidence that overrode any unpleasant reflection he might see in a
mirror or the eyes of others. When you dealt with Archer Terrebonne,
you simply accepted the fact that his gaze was too direct and personal,
his skin too pale for the season, his mouth too red, his presence too
close, as though there were a chemical defect in his physiology that he
wore as an ornament and imposed upon others.

We stood under an awning on the back terrace. The sunlight was
blinding on the surface of the swimming pool. In the distance a black
groundskeeper was using an air blower to scud leaves off the tennis
courts.

"You won't come inside?" Archer said. He glanced at his watch,
then looked at a bird in a tree. The ring finger of his left hand was
missing, sawed off neatly at the palm, so that the empty space looked
like a missing key on a piano.

"Thanks, anyway. I just wanted to see that Lila was all right."

"Really? Well, that was good of you."

I noticed his use of the past tense, as though my visit had
already ended.

"There're no charges, but messing with guns in barrooms
usually has another conclusion," I said.

"We've already covered this territory with other people, sir,"
he said.

"I don't think quite enough," I said.

"Is that right?" he replied.

Our eyes locked on each other's.

"Dave's just being an old friend, Daddy," Lila said.

"I'm sure he is. Let me walk you to your cruiser, Mr.
Robicheaux."

"
Daddy
, I mean it, Dave's always worrying
about his AA friends," she said.

"You're not in that organization. So he doesn't need to worry,
does he?"

I felt his hand cup me lightly on the arm. But I said goodbye
to Lila and didn't resist. I walked with him around the shady side of
the house, past a garden planted with mint and heart-shaped caladiums.

"Is there something you want to tell me, sir?" he asked. He
took a swallow from his bourbon glass and I could feel the coldness of
the ice on his breath.

"A female detective saved your daughter from a resisting
arrest charge," I said.

"Yes?"

"She thinks Lila has been sexually molested or violated in
some way."

His right eye twitched at the corner, as though an insect had
momentarily flown into his vision.

"I'm sure y'all have many theories about human behavior that
most of us wouldn't understand. We appreciate your good intentions.
However, I see no need for you to come back," he said.

"Don't count on it, sir."

He wagged his finger back and forth, then walked casually
toward the rear of the house, sipping his drink as though I had never
been there.

THE SUN WAS WHITE in the sky and the
brick drive was dappled
with light as bright as gold foil. Through the cruiser's front window I
saw Cisco Flynn walk toward me from a trailer, his palms raised for me
to stop.

He leaned down on the window.

"Take a walk with me. I got to keep my eye on this next
scene," he said.

"Got to go, Cisco."

"It's about Swede Boxleiter."

I turned off the ignition and walked with him to a canvas
awning that was suspended over a worktable and a half dozen chairs.
Next to the awning was a trailer whose air-conditioning unit dripped
with moisture like a block of ice.