Sunset Limited (5 page)

“You want to work scrub-down detail and do sweep-up in the shop?” he asked.

“I can do that.”

“You gonna make trouble?”

“Ain’t my style, suh.”

“You can tell any damn lie you want when you get out of here. But if I’m being unfair to you, you tell me to my face right now,” he said.

“People see what they need to.”

Alex Guidry turned his palm up and looked at it and picked at a callus with his thumb. He started to speak, then shook his head in disgust and walked down the corridor, the leather soles of his boots clicking on the floor.

Cool Breeze spent the next day scrubbing stone walls and sidewalks with a wire brush and Ajax, and at five o’clock reported to the maintenance shop to begin sweep-up. He used a long broom to push steel filings, sawdust, and wood chips into tidy piles that he shoveled onto a dustpan and dumped into a trash bin. Behind him a mulatto whose golden skin was spotted with freckles the size of dimes was cutting a design out of a piece of plywood on a jigsaw, the teeth ripping a sound out of the wood like an electrified scream.

Cool Breeze paid no attention to him, until he heard the plywood disengage from the saw. He turned his head out of curiosity just as the mulatto balled his fist and tried to jam a piece of coat-hanger wire, sharpened to a point like an ice pick and driven vertically through the wood handle off a lawn-mower starter rope, through the center of Cool Breeze’s ear and into his brain.

The wire point laid open Cool Breeze’s cheek from the jawbone to the corner of his mouth.

He locked his attacker’s forearm in both bis hands, spun with him in circles, then walked the two of them toward the saw that hummed with an oily light.

“Don’t make me do it, nigger,” he said.

But his attacker would not give up his weapon, and Cool Breeze drove first the coat hanger, then the balled fist and the wood plug gripped inside the palm into the saw blade, so that bone and metal and fingernails and wood splinters all showered into his face at once.

He hid inside the barrel of a cement mixer, where by all odds he should have died. He felt the truck slow at the gate, heard the guards talking outside while they walked the length of the truck with mirrors they held under the frame.

“We got one out on the ground. You ain’t got him in your barrel, have you?” a guard said.

“We sure as hell can find out,” the truck driver said.

Gears and cogs clanged into place, then the truck vibrated and shook and giant steel blades began turning inside the barrel’s blackness, lifting curtains of wet cement into the air like cake dough.

“Get out of here, will you? For some reason that thing puts me in mind of my wife in the bathroom,” the guard said.

Two hours later, on a parish road project south of town, Cool Breeze climbed from inside the cement mixer and lumbered into a cane field like a man wearing a lead suit, his lacerated cheek bleeding like a flag, the cane leaves edged with the sun’s last red light.

“I DON’T BELIEVE IT, Mout’,” I said.

“Man ain’t tried to joog him?”

“That the jailer set it up. He’s already going on suspension. He’d be the first person everyone suspected.”

“‘Cause he done it.”

“Where’s Breeze?”

Mout’ slipped his sack of birdseed over his shoulder and begin flinging handfuls into the air again. The pigeons swirled about his waxed bald head like snow-flakes.

MY PARTNER WAS DETECTIVE Helen Soileau. She wore slacks and men’s shirts to work, seldom smiled or put on makeup, and faced you with one foot cocked at an angle behind the other, in the same way a martial artist strikes a defensive posture. Her face was lumpy, her eyes unrelenting when they fixed on you, and her blond hair seemed molded to her head like a plastic wig. She leaned on my office windowsill with both arms and watched a trusty gardener edging the sidewalk. She wore a nine-millimeter automatic in a hand-tooled black holster and a pair of handcuffs stuck through the back of her gunbelt.

“I met Miss Pisspot of 1962 at the jail this morning,” she said.

“Who?”

“That FBI agent, what’s her name, Glazier. She thinks we set up Cool Breeze Broussard to get clipped in our own jail.”

“What’s your take on it?”

“The mulatto’s a pipehead. He says he thought Breeze was somebody else, a guy who wanted to kill him because he banged the guy’s little sister.”

“You buy it?” I asked.

“A guy who wears earrings through his nipples? Yeah, it’s possible. Do me a favor, will you?” she said.

“What’s up?”

Her eyes tried to look casual. “Lila Terrebonne is sloshed at the country club. The skipper wants me to drive her back to Jeanerette.”

“No, thanks.”

“I could never relate to Lila. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because she threw up in my lap once. I’m talking about your AA buddy here.”

“She didn’t call me for help, Helen. If she had, it’d be different.”

“If she starts her shit with me, she’s going into the drunk tank. I don’t care if her grandfather was a U.S. senator or not.”

She went out to the parking lot. I sat behind my desk for a moment, then pinged a paper clip in the wastebasket and flagged down her cruiser before she got to the street.

LILA HAD A POINTED face and milky green eyes and yellow hair that was bleached the color of white gold by the sun. She was lighthearted about her profligate life, undaunted by hangovers or trysts with married men, laughing in a husky voice in nightclubs about the compulsions that every two or three years placed her in a hospital or treatment center. She would dry out and by order of the court attend AA meetings for a few weeks, working a crossword puzzle in the newspaper while others talked of the razor wire wrapped around their souls, or staring out the window with a benign expression that showed no trace of desire, remorse, impatience, or resignation, just temporary abeyance, like a person waiting for the hands on an invisible clock to reach an appointed time.

From her adolescent years to the present, I did not remember a time in her life when she was not the subject of rumor or scandal. She was sent off by her parents to the Sorbonne, where she failed her examinations and returned to attend USL with blue-collar kids who could not even afford to go to LSU in Baton Rouge. The night of her senior prom, members of the football team glued her photograph on the rubber machine in Provost’s Bar.

When Helen and I entered the clubhouse she was by herself at a back table, her head wreathed in smoke from her ashtray, her unfilled glass at the ends of her fingertips. The other tables were filled with golfers and bridge players, their eyes careful never to light on Lila and the pitiful attempt at dignity she tried to impose on her situation. The white barman and the young black waiter who circulated among the tables had long since refused to look in her direction or hear her order for another drink. When someone opened the front door, the glare of sunlight struck her face like a slap.

“You want to take a ride, Lila?” I said.

“Oh, Dave, how are you? They didn’t call you again, did they?”

“We were in the neighborhood. I’m going to get a membership here one day.”

“The same day you join the Republican Party. You’re such a riot. Would you help me up? I think I twisted my ankle,” she said.

She slipped her arm in mine and walked with me through the tables, then stopped at the bar and took two ten-dollar bills from her purse. She put them carefully on the bar top.

“Nate, this is for you and that nice young black man. It’s always a pleasure to see you all again,” she said.

“Come back, Miss Lila. Anytime,” the barman said, his eyes shifting off her face.

Outside, she breathed the wind and sunshine as though she had just entered a different biosphere. She blinked and swallowed and made a muted noise like she had a toothache.

“Please drive me out on the highway and drop me wherever people break furniture and throw bottles through glass windows,” she said.

“How about home, instead?” I asked.

“Dave, you are a total drag.”

“Better appreciate who your friends are, ma’am,” Helen said.

“Do I know you?” Lila said.

“Yeah, I had the honor of cleaning up your—”

“Helen, let’s get Miss Lila home and head back for the office.”

“Oh, by all means. Yes, indeedy,” Helen said.

WE DROVE SOUTH ALONG Bayou Teche toward Jeanerette, where Lila lived in a plantation home whose bricks had been dug from clay pits and baked in a kiln by slaves in the year 1791. During the Depression her grandfather, a U.S. senator, used dollar-a-day labor to move the home brick by brick on flatboats up the bayou from its original site on the Chitimacha Indian Reservation. Today, it was surrounded by a fourteen-acre lawn, live oak and palm trees, a sky-blue swimming pool, tennis courts, gazebos hung with orange passion vine, two stucco guest cottages, a flagstone patio and fountain, and gardens that bloomed with Mexicali roses.

But we were about to witness a bizarre spectacle when we turned onto the property and drove through the tunnel of oaks toward the front portico, the kind of rare event that leaves you sickened and ashamed for your fellow human beings. A movie set consisting of paintless shacks and a general store with a wide gallery set up on cinder blocks, put together from weathered cypress and rusted tin roofs and Jax beer and Hadacol signs to look like the quarters on a 1940s corporation farm, had been constructed on the lawn, a dirt road laid out and sprinkled with hoses in front of the galleries. Perhaps two dozen people milled around on the set, unorganized, mostly at loose ends, their bodies shiny with sweat. Sitting in the shade of a live oak tree by a table stacked with catered food was the director, Billy Holtzner, and next to him, cool and relaxed in yellow slacks and white silk shirt, was his friend and business partner, Cisco Flynn.

“Have you ever seen three monkeys try to fuck a football? I’d like to eighty-six the whole bunch but my father has a yen for a certain item. It tends to come in pink panties,” Lila said from the back seat.

“We’ll drop you at the porch, Lila. As far as I’m concerned, your car broke down and we gave you a lift home,” I said.

“Oh, stop it. Both of you get down and have something to eat,” she said. Her face had cleared in the way a storm can blow out of a sky and leave it empty of clouds and full of carrion birds. I saw her tongue touch her bottom lip.

“Do you need assistance getting inside?” Helen said.

“Assistance? That’s a lovely word. No, right here will do just fine. My, hasn’t this all been pleasant?” Lila said, and got out and sent a black gardener into the house for a shaker of martinis.

Helen started to shift into reverse, then stopped, dumbfounded, at what we realized was taking place under the live oak tree.

Billy Holtzner had summoned all his people around him. He wore khaki shorts with flap pockets and Roman sandals with lavender socks and a crisp print shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his flaccid arms.

Except for the grizzled line of beard that grew along his jawline and chin, his body seemed to have no hair, as though it had been shaved with a woman’s razor. His workmen and actors and grips and writers and camera people and female assistants stood with wide grins on their faces, some hiding their fear, others rising on the balls of their feet to get a better look, while he singled out one individual, then another, saying, “Have you been a good boy? We’ve been hearing certain rumors again. Come on now, don’t be shy. You know where you have to put it.”

Then a grown man, someone who probably had a wife or girlfriend or children or who had fought in a war or who at one time had believed his life was worthy of respect and love, inserted his nose between Billy Holtzner’s index and ring fingers and let him twist it back and forth.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it? Oh, oh, I see somebody trying to sneak off there. Oh,
Johnny
…” Holtzner said.

“These guys are out of a special basement, aren’t they?” Helen said.

Cisco Flynn walked toward the cruiser, his face good-natured, his eyes earnest with explanation.

“Have a good life, Cisco,” I said out the window, then to Helen, “Hit it.”

“You don’t got to me tell me, boss man,” she replied, her head looking back over her shoulder as she steered, the dark green shadows of oak leaves cascading over the windshield.

FOUR

THAT NIGHT THE MOON WAS yellow above the swamp. I walked down to the dock to help Batist, the black man who worked for me, fold up the Cinzano umbrellas on our spool tables and close up the bait shop. There was a rain ring around the moon, and I pulled back the awning that covered the dock, then went inside just as the phone rang on the counter.

“Mout’ called me. His son wants to come in,” the voice said.

“Stay out of police business, Megan.”

“Do I frighten you? Is that the problem here?”

“No, I suspect the problem is use.”

“Try this: he’s fifteen miles out in the Atchafalaya Basin and snakebit. That’s not metaphor. He stuck his arm in a nest of them. Why don’t you deliver a message through Mout’ and tell him just to go fuck himself?”

After I hung up I nicked off the outside flood lamps. Under the moon’s yellow light the dead trees in the swamp looked like twists of paper and wax that could burst into flame with the touch of a single match.

AT DAWN THE WIND was out of the south, moist and warm and checkered with rain, when I headed the cabin cruiser across a long, flat bay bordered on both sides by flooded cypress trees that turned to green lace when the wind bent their branches. Cranes rose out of the trees against a pink sky, and to the south storm clouds were piled over the Gulf and the air smelled like salt water and brass drying in the sun. Megan stood next to the wheel, a thermos cup full of coffee in her hand. Her straw hat, which had a round dome and a purple band on it, was crushed over her eyes. To get my attention, she clasped my wrist with her thumb and forefinger.

“The inlet past that oil platform. There’s a rag tied in a bush,” she said.