Sunset Limited (18 page)

The woods sloped toward a stagnant pond. Among the palmettos were faint depressions, leaf-strewn, sometimes dotted with mushrooms. Was the slave woman Lavonia, who had poisoned Elijah’s daughters, buried here? Was the pool of black water, dimpled by dragon-flies, part of the swamp she had tried to hide in before she was lynched by her own people?

Why did the story of the exploited and murdered slave woman hang in my mind like a dream that hovers on the edge of sleep?

I heard a footstep in the leaves behind me.

“I didn’t mean to give you a start,” Lila said.

“Oh, hi, Lila. I bet you put the wildflowers on the graves of the children.”

“How did you know?”

“Did your father tell you why I was here?”

“No… He… We don’t always communicate very well.”

“A guy named Harpo Scruggs tried to kill Father Mulcahy.”

The blood drained out of her face.

“We think it’s because of something you told him,” I said.

When she tried to speak, her words were broken, as though she could not form a sentence without using one that had already been spoken by someone else. “I told the priest? That’s what you’re saying?”

“He’s taking your weight. Scruggs was going to suffocate him with a plastic bag.”

“Oh, Dave—” she said, her eyes watering. Then she ran toward the house, her palms raised in the air like a young girl.

WE HAD JUST RETURNED from Mass on Sunday morning when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was Clete.

“I’m at a restaurant in Lafayette with Holtzner and his daughter and her boyfriend,” he said.

“What are you doing in Lafayette?”

“Holtzner’s living here now. He’s on the outs with Cisco. They want to come by,” he said.

“What for?”

“To make some kind of rental offer on your dock.”

“Not interested.”

“Holtzner wants to make his pitch anyway. Dave, the guy’s my meal ticket. How about it?”

An hour later Clete rolled up to the dock in his convertible, with Holtzner beside him and the daughter and boyfriend following in a Lincoln. The four of them strolled down the dock and sat at a spool table under a Cinzano umbrella.

“Ask the waiter to bring everybody a cold beer,” Holtzner said.

“We don’t have waiters. You need to get it yourself,” I said, standing in the sunlight.

“I got it,” Clete said, and went inside the shop.

“We’ll pay you a month’s lease but we’ll be shooting for only two or three days,” Anthony, the boyfriend, said. He wore black glasses, and when he smiled the gap in his front teeth gave his face the imbecilic look of a Halloween pumpkin.

“Thanks anyway,” I said.

”
Thanks
? That’s it?” Holtzner said.

“He thinks we’re California nihilists here to do a culture fuck on the Garden of Eden,” Geraldine, the daughter, said to no one.

“You got the perfect place here for this particular scene. Geri’s right, you think we’re some kind of disease?” Holtzner said.

“You might try up at Henderson Swamp,” I said.

Clete came back out of the bait shop screen carrying a round tray with four sweating long-neck bottles on it. He set them one by one on the spool table, his expression meaningless.

“Talk to him,” Holtzner said to him.

“I don’t mess with Streak’s head,” Clete said.

“I hear you got Cisco’s father on the brain,” Holtzner said to me. “His father’s death doesn’t impress me. My grandfather organized the first garment workers’ local on the Lower East Side. They stuck his hands in a stamp press. Irish cops broke up his wake with clubs, took the ice off his body and put it in their beer. They pissed in my grandmother’s sink.”

“You have to excuse me. I need to get back to work,” I said, and walked toward the bait shop. I could hear the wind ruffling the umbrella in the silence, then Anthony was at my side, grinning, his clothes pungent with a smell like burning sage.

“Don’t go off in a snit, nose out of joint, that sort of thing,” he said.

“I think you have a problem,” I said.

“We’re talking about chemical dependencies now, are we?”

“No, you’re hard of hearing. No offense meant,” I said, and went inside the shop and busied myself in back until all of them were gone except Clete, who remained at the table, sipping from his beer bottle.

“Why’s Holtzner want to get close to you?” he asked.

“You got me.”

“I remembered where I’d seen him. He was promoting USO shows in Nam. Except he was also mixed up with some PX guys who were selling stuff on the black market. It was a big scandal. Holtzner was kicked out of Nam. That’s like being kicked out of Hell… You just going to sit there and not say anything?”

“Yeah, don’t get caught driving with beer on your breath.”

Clete pushed his glasses up on his head and drank from his bottle, one eye squinted shut.

THAT NIGHT, IN A Lafayette apartment building on a tree-and-fern-covered embankment that overlooked the river, the accountant named Anthony mounted the staircase to the second-story landing and walked through a brick passageway toward his door. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, and blue strings of smoke from barbecue grills floated through the palm and banana fronds that shadowed the terrace. Anthony carried a grocery sack filled with items from a delicatessen, probably obscuring his vision, as evidently he never saw the figure that waited for him behind a potted orange tree.

The knife must have struck as fast as a snake’s head, in the neck, under the heart, through the breastbone, because the coroner said Anthony was probably dead before the jar of pickled calf brains in his sack shattered on the floor.

SIXTEEN

HELEN SOILEAU AND I MET Ruby Gravano and her nine-year-old boy at the Amtrak station in Lafayette Monday afternoon. The boy was a strange-looking child, with his mother’s narrow face and black hair but with eyes that were set unnaturally far apart, as though they had been pasted on the skin. She held the boy, whose name was Nick, by one hand and her suitcase by the other.

“Is this gonna take long? Because I’m not feeling real good right now,” she said.

“There’s a female deputy in that cruiser over there, Ruby. She’s going to take Nick for some ice cream, then we’ll finish with business and take y’all to a bed-and-breakfast in New Iberia. Tomorrow you’ll be back on your way,” I said.

“Did you get the money bumped up? Houston’s a lot more expensive than New Orleans. My mother said I can stay a week free, but then I got to pay her rent,” she said.

“Three hundred is all we could do,” I said.

Her forehead wrinkled. Then she said, “I don’t feel too comfortable standing out here. I don’t know how I got talked into this.” She looked up and down the platform and fumbled in her bag for a pair of dark glasses.

“You wanted a clean slate in Houston. You were talking about a treatment program. Your idea, not ours, Ruby,” Helen said.

The little boy’s head rotated like a gourd on a stem as he watched the disappearing train, the people walking to their cars with their luggage, a track crew repairing a switch.

“He’s autistic. This is all new to him. Don’t look at him like that. I hate this shit,” Ruby said, and pulled on the boy’s hand as though she were about to leave us, then stopped when she realized she had no place to go except our unmarked vehicle, and in reality she didn’t even know where that was.

We put Nick in the cruiser with the woman deputy, then drove to Four Corners and parked across the street from a sprawling red-and-white motel that looked like a refurbished eighteenth-century Spanish fortress.

“How do you know he’s in the room?” Ruby said.

“One of our people has been watching him. In five minutes he’s going to get a phone call. Somebody’s going to tell him smoke is coming out of his truck. All you have to do is look through the binoculars and tell us if that’s the john you tricked on Airline Highway,” I said.

“You really got a nice way of saying it,” she replied.

“Ruby, cut the crap. The guy in that room tried to kill a priest Friday morning. What do you think he’ll do to you if he remembers he showed you mug shots of two guys he capped out in the Basin?” Helen said.

Ruby lowered her chin and bit her lip. Her long hair made a screen around her narrow face.

“It’s not fair,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“Connie picked those guys up. But she doesn’t get stuck with any of it. You got a candy bar or something? I feel sick. They wouldn’t turn down the air-conditioning on the train.”

She sniffed deep in her nose, then wiped her nostrils hard with a Kleenex, pushing her face out of shape.

Helen looked through the front window at one of our people in a phone booth on the corner.

“It’s going down, Ruby. Pick up the binoculars,” she said.

Ruby held the binoculars to her eyes and stared at the door to the room rented by Harpo Scruggs. Then she shifted them to an adjacent area in the parking lot. Her lips parted slightly on her teeth.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Nothing. What are you talking about?” I said.

“That’s not the guy with the mug shots. I don’t know that guy’s name. We didn’t ball him either,” she said.

“Take the oatmeal out of your mouth,” Helen said.

I removed the binoculars from her hands and placed them to my eyes.

“The guy out there in the parking lot. He came to the diner where the guy named Harpo and the other John were eating with us. He talks like a coon-ass. They went outside together, then he drove off,” she said.

“You never told us this,” I said.

“Why should I? You were asking about Johns.” I put the binoculars back to my eyes and watched Alex Guidry, the fired Iberia Parish jailer who had cuckolded Cool Breeze Broussard, knock on empty space just as Harpo Scruggs ripped open the door and charged outside, barefoot and in his undershirt and western-cut trousers, expecting to see a burning truck.

LATER THE SAME AFTERNOON, when the sheriff was in my office, two Lafayette homicide detectives walked in and told us they were picking up Cool Breeze Broussard. They were both dressed in sport clothes, their muscles swollen with steroids. One of them, whose name was Daigle, lit a cigarette and kept searching with his eyes for an ashtray to put the burnt match in.

“Y’all want to go out to his house with us?” he asked, and dropped the match in the wastebasket.

“I don’t,” I said.

He studied me. “You got some kind of objection, something not getting said here?” he asked.

“I don’t see how you make Broussard for this guy’s, what’s his name, Anthony Pollock’s murder,” I replied.

“He’s got a hard-on for the Terrebonne family. There’s a good possibility he started the fire on their movie set. He’s a four-time loser. He shanked a guy on Camp J. He mangled a guy on an electric saw in your own jail. You want me to go on?” Daigle said.

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” I said.

“Well, fuck me,” he said.

“Don’t use that language in here, sir,” the sheriff said.

“What?” Daigle said.

“The victim was an addict. He had overseas involvements. He didn’t have any connection with Cool Breeze. I think you guys have found an easy dart-board,” I said.

“We made up all that stuff on Broussard’s sheet?” the other detective said.

“The victim was stabbed in the throat, heart, and kidney and was dead before he hit the floor. It sounds like a professional yard job,” I said.

“A yard job?” Daigle said.

“Talk to a guy by the name of Swede Boxleiter. He’s on lend-lease from Canon City,” I said.

“Swede who?” Daigle said, taking a puff off his cigarette with three fingers crimped on the paper.

The sheriff scratched his eyebrow.

“Get out of here,” he said to the detectives.

A FEW MINUTES LATER the sheriff and I watched through the window as they got into their car.

“At least Pollock had the decency to get himself killed in Lafayette Parish,” the sheriff said. “What’s the status on Harpo Scruggs?”

“Helen said a chippy came to his room in a taxi. She’s still in there.”

“What’s Alex Guidry’s tie-in to this guy?”

“It has something to do with the Terrebonnes. Everything in St. Mary Parish does. That’s where they’re both from.”

“Bring him in.”

“What for?”

“Tell him he’s cruel to animals. Tell him his golf game stinks. Tell him I’m just in a real pissed-off mood.”

TUESDAY MORNING HELEN AND I drove down Main, then crossed the iron drawbridge close by the New Iberia Country Club.

“You don’t think this will tip our surveillance on Harpo Scruggs?” she said.

“Not if we do it right.”

“When those two brothers were executed out in the Basin? One of the shooters had on a department uniform. It could have come from Guidry.”

“Maybe Guidry was in it,” I said.

“Nope, he stays behind the lines. He makes the system work for him.”

“You know him outside the job?” I asked.

“He arrested my maid out on a highway at night when he was a deputy in St. Mary Parish. She’s never told anyone what he did to her.”

Helen and I parked the cruiser in front of the country club and walked past the swimming pool, then under a spreading oak to a practice green where Alex Guidry was putting with a woman and another man. He wore light brown slacks and two-tone golf shoes and a maroon polo shirt; his mahogany tan and thick salt-and-pepper hair gave him the look of a man in the prime of his life. He registered our presence in the corner of his eye but never lost his concentration. He bent his knees slightly and tapped the ball with a plop into the cup.

“The sheriff has invited you to come down to the department,” I said.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“We need your help with a friend of yours. It won’t take long,” Helen said.

The red flag on the golf pin popped in the wind. Leaves drifted out of the pecan trees and live oaks along the fairway and scudded across the freshly mowed grass.

“I’ll give it some thought and ring y’all later on it,” he said, and started to reach down to retrieve his ball from the cup.