Sunset Limited (24 page)

AT ONE TIME THE graveyard had sat on dry ground, fringed by persimmon and gum trees, but almost twenty years ago the Atchafalaya had broken a levee and channeled an oxbow through the woods, flooding the grave sites, then had left behind a swampy knob of sediment strung with river trash. One side of the graveyard dipped toward the river, and each year the water cut more deeply under the bank, so that the top layer hung like the edge of a mushroom over the current.

Most of the framed and spiked name tags that served as markers had been knocked down or stepped on and broken by hunters. The dime-store vases and the jelly glasses used for flower jars lay embedded in sediment. The graduation and wedding and birth pictures wrapped in plastic had been washed off the graves on which they had been originally placed and were now spotted with mud, curled and yellowed by the sun so that the faces on them were not only anonymous but stared incongruously out of situations that seemed to have never existed.

The forensic pathologist and a St. Mary Parish deputy and the two black men hired as diggers and the backhoe operator waited.

“You know which one it is?” I asked Cool Breeze.

“That one yonder, wit’ the pipe cross. I welded it myself. The shaft goes down t’ree feet,” he said.

The serrated teeth on the bucket of the backhoe bit into the soft earth and lifted a huge divot of loam and roots and emerald-colored grass from the top of the grave. Cool Breeze’s shoulder brushed against mine, and I could feel the rigidity and muted power in his body, like the tremolo that rises from the boiler room of a ship.

“We can wait on the levee until they’re finished,” I said.

“I got to look,” he said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Cain’t have nobody saying later that ain’t her.”

“Breeze, she’s been in the ground a long time.”

“Don’t matter. I’ll know. What you t’ink I am anyway? Other men can look at my wife, but I’m scared to do it myself?”

“I think you’re a brave man,” I said.

He turned his head and looked at the side of my face.

The backhoe was bright yellow against the islands of willow trees between the graveyard and the main portion of the river. The loam in the grave turned to mud as the bucket on the backhoe dipped closer to the coffin. The day was blue-gold and warm and flowers still bloomed on the levee, but the air smelled of humus, of tree roots torn out of wet soil, of leaves that have gone acidic and brown in dead water. At five feet the two black diggers climbed into the hole with spades and began sculpting the coffin’s shape, pouring water from a two-gallon can on the edges, wiping the surface and corners slick with rags.

They worked a canvas tarp and wood planks under it, then ran ropes tied to chains under the tarp, and we all lifted. The coffin came free more easily than I had expected, rocking almost weightlessly in the bottom of the canvas loop, a missing panel in one side blossoming with muddy fabric.

“Open it up,” Cool Breeze said.

The pathologist looked at me. He wore red suspenders and a straw hat and had a stomach like a small pillow pushed under his belt. I nodded, and one of the diggers prized the lid loose with a blade screwdriver.

I had seen exhumations before. The view of mortality they present to the living is not easily dismissed. Sometimes the coffin fills with hair, the nails, particularly on the bare feet, grow into claws, the face puckers into a gray apple, the burial clothes contain odors that cause people to retch.

That is not what happened to Ida Broussard.

Her white dress had turned brown, like cheesecloth dipped in tea, but her skin had the smooth texture and color of an eggplant and her hair was shiny and black on her shoulders and there was no distortion in her expression.

Cool Breeze’s hand reached out and touched her cheek. Then he walked away from us, without speaking, and stood on the edge of the graveyard and looked out at the river so we could not see his face.

“How do you explain it?” I said to the pathologist.

“An oil company buried some storage tanks around here in the 1930s. Maybe some chemical seepage got in the coffin,” he replied.

He looked back into my eyes. Then he spoke again. “Sometimes I think they wait to tell us something. There’s no need for you to pass on my observation.”

TWENTY-ONE

FRIDAY EVENING BOOTSIE AND I dropped Alafair at the show in Lafayette, then ate dinner at a restaurant on the Vermilion River. But as soon as Alafair was not with us, Bootsie became introspective, almost formal when she spoke, her eyes lingering on objects without seeing them.

“What is it?” I said outside the restaurant.

“I’m just tired,” she replied.

“Maybe we should have stayed home.”

“Maybe we should have.”

After Alafair went to bed, we were alone in the kitchen. The moon was up and the trees outside were full of shadows when the wind blew.

“Whatever it is, just say it, Boots.”

“She was at the dock today. She said she couldn’t find you at your office. She didn’t bother to come up to the house. Of course, she’s probably just shy.”

“She?”

“You know who. She finds any excuse she can to come out here. She said she wanted to thank you for the shooting lessons you arranged for her. You didn’t want to give them to her yourself?”

“Those guys almost killed her. They might pull it off the next time.”

“Maybe it’s her own fault.”

“That’s a rough thing to say, Boots.”

“She hides behind adversity and uses it to manipulate other people.”

“I’ll ask her not to come here again.”

“Not on my account, please.”

“I give up,” I said, and went out into the yard.

The cane in my neighbor’s field was green and dented with channels like rivers when the wind blew, and beyond his tree line I could see lightning fork without sound out of the sky. Through the kitchen window I heard Bootsie clattering dishes into the dishwasher. She slammed the washer door shut, the cups and silverware rattling in the rack. I heard the washer start to hum, then her shadow went past the window and disappeared from view and the overhead light went off and the kitchen and the yard were dark.

WE WANTED HARPO SCRUGGS. But we had nothing to charge him with. He knew it, too. He called the dock on Sunday afternoon.

“I want to meet, talk this thing out, bring it to an end,” he said.

“It’s not a seller’s market, Scruggs.”

“What you got is your dick in your hand. I can clean the barn for you. There’s an old nigra runs a barbecue joint next to a motel on State Road 70 north of Morgan City. Nine o’clock,” he said, and hung up.

I went outside the bait shop and hosed down a rental boat a fisherman had just returned, then went back inside without chaining it up and called Helen Soileau at her home.

“You want to do backup on a meet with Harpo Scruggs?” I said.

“Make him come in.”

“We don’t have enough to charge him.”

“There’s still the college kid, the witness who saw the two brothers executed in the Basin.”

“His family says he’s on a walking tour of Tibet.”

“He killed Mout’s dog. Vermilion Parish can charge him with endangering.”

“Mout’ says he never got a good look at the guy’s face.”

“Dave, we need to work this guy. He doesn’t bring the Feds into it, he doesn’t plead out. We fit his head in a steel vise.”

“So take a ride with me. I want you to bring a scoped rifle.”

She was silent a moment. Then she said, “Tell the old man.”

THE BARBECUE PLACE WAS a rambling, tin-roofed red building, with white trim and screen porches, set back in a grove of pines. Next door was a cinder-block motel that had been painted purple and fringed with Christmas lights that never came down. Through the screen on a side porch I saw Harpo Scruggs standing at the bar, a booted foot on the rail, his tall frame bent forward, his Stetson at an angle on his freshly barbered head. He wore a long-sleeve blue shirt with pink polka dots and an Indian-stitched belt and gray western slacks that flowed like water over the crook in his knee. He tilted back a shot glass of whiskey and sipped from a glass of beer.

I stood by a plank table at the edge of the clearing so he could see me. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and opened the screen door and lit the cigarette with a Zippo as he walked toward me.

“You got anybody with you?” he asked.

“You see anyone?”

He sat down at the plank table and smoked his cigarette, his elbows on the wood. The clouds above the pines were black and maroon in the sun’s afterglow. He tipped his ashes carefully over the edge of the table so they wouldn’t blow back on his shirt.

“I heard about a man got throwed out a window. I think one of two men done it. Swede Boxleiter or that bucket of whale sperm got hisself kicked off the New Orleans police force,” he said.

“Clete Purcel?”

“If that’s his name. You can tell them I didn’t have nothing to do with hurting that woman.”

“Tell them yourself.”

“All this trouble we been having? It can end in one of two ways. That black boy, Broussard, don’t testify against the dagos in New Orleans and some people gets paid back the money they’re owed.

“The other way it ends is I get complete immunity as a government witness, all my real estate is sold and the proceeds are put in bearer bonds. Not one dollar of it gets touched by the IRS. Then I retire down in Guatemala. Y’all decide.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” I said.

A black man brought a bottle of Dixie beer on a metal tray to the table. Scruggs tipped him a quarter and wiped the lip of the bottle with his palm.

“I’m the man got something you want, son. Or you wouldn’t be sitting here,” he replied.

“You took money from Ricky Scarlotti, then fucked up everything you touched. Now you’ve got both the Mob and a crazoid like Boxleiter on your case,” I said.

He drank out of the beer and looked into the pine trees, sucking his false teeth, his expression flat. But I saw the muted change in his eyes, the way heat glows when the wind puffs ash off a coal.

“You ain’t so different from me,” he said. “You want to bring them rich people down. I can smell it in you, boy. A poor man’s got hate in his glands. It don’t wash out. That’s why nigras stink the way they do.”

“You’ve caused a lot of trouble and pain for people around here. So we’ve decided in your case it should be a two-way street. I’d hoped you’d provoke a situation here.”

“You got a hideaway on your ankle?”

“My partner has your face in the crosshairs of a scoped .30-06. She’d looked forward to this evening with great anticipation, sir. Enjoy your beer. We’ll catch you down the road.”

I walked out to the parking lot and waited for Helen to pull my truck around from the other side of the motel. I didn’t look behind me, but I could feel his eyes on my back, watching. When Helen drew to a stop in front of me, the scoped, bolt-action rifle on the gun rack, the dust drifting off the tires, she cocked one finger like a pistol and aimed it out the window at Harpo Scruggs.

TUESDAY MORNING THE SHERIFF called me into his office.

“I just got the surveillance report on Scruggs,” he said. “He took the Amtrak to Houston, spent the night in a Mexican hot pillow joint, then flew to Trinidad, Colorado.”

“He’ll be back.”

“I think I finally figured out something about wars. A few people start them and the rest of us fight them. I’m talking about all these people who use our area for a bidet. I think this state is becoming a mental asylum, I really do.” Something outside the window caught his attention. “Ah, my morning wouldn’t be complete without it. Cisco Flynn just walked in the front door.”

FIVE MINUTES LATER CISCO sat down in front of my desk.

“You got anything on these guys who attacked Megan?” he asked.

“Yeah. One of them is dead.”

“Did you clear Swede on that deal?”

“You mean did I check out his alibi? He created a memorable moment at the theater. Water flowed out of the men’s room into the lobby. At about five in the afternoon.”

“From what I understand, that should put him home free.”

“It might.”

I watched his face. His reddish-brown eyes smiled at nothing.

“Megan felt bad that maybe she made a suspect out of Swede,” he said.

“You can pretend otherwise, but he’s a dangerous man, Cisco.”

“How about the cowboy who went out the window? Would you call him a dangerous man?”

I didn’t answer. We stared at each other across the desk. Then his eyes broke.

“Good seeing you, Dave. Thanks for giving Megan the gun,” he said.

I watched silently as he opened the office door and went out into the hall.

I propped my forehead on my fingers and stared at the empty green surface of my desk blotter. Why hadn’t I seen it? I had even used the term “aerialist” to the San Antonio homicide investigator.

I went out the side door of the building and caught Cisco at his car. The day was beautiful, and his suntanned face looked gold and handsome in the cool light.

“You called the dead man a cowboy,” I said.

He grinned, bemused. “What’s the big deal?” he said.

“Who said anything about how the guy was dressed?”

“I mean ‘cowboy’ like ‘hit man.’ That’s what contract killers are called, aren’t they?”

“You and Boxleiter worked this scam together, didn’t you?”

He laughed and shook his head and got in his car and drove out of the lot, then waved from the window just before he disappeared in the traffic.

THE FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST CALLED me that afternoon.

“I can give it to you over the phone or talk in person. I’d rather do it in person,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because autopsies can tell us things about human behavior I don’t like to know about,” he replied.

An hour later I walked into his office.

“Let’s go outside and sit under the trees. You’ll have to excuse my mood. My own work depresses the hell out of me sometimes,” he said.

We sat in metal chairs behind the white-painted brick building that housed his office. The hard-packed earth stayed in shade almost year-round and was green with mold and sloped down to a ragged patch of bamboo on the bayou. Out in the sunlight an empty pirogue that had pulled loose from its mooring turned aimlessly in the current.