Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "You know I'm a minister?" Father Mulcahy said.

  The man did not reply. He had not shaved that morning, and there were gray whiskers among the red and blue veins in his cheeks. His smile was twisted, one eye squinted behind the lens of his glasses, as though he were arbitrarily defining the situation in his own mind.

  "You came to the rectory… In the rain," the priest said.

  "Could be. But I need you to hep me with this chore. That's our number one job here."

  The man draped his arm across the priest's shoulders and walked him inside the cabin. He smelled of deodorant and chewing tobacco, and in spite of his age his arm was thick and meaty, the crook of it like a yoke on the back of the priest's neck.

  "Your soul will be forfeit," the priest said, because he could think of no other words to use.

  "Yeah, I heard that one before. Usually when a preacher was trying to get me to write a check. The funny thing is, the preacher never wanted Jesus's name on the check."

  Then the man in the hat pulled apart the staples on the paper bag he had carried on board and took out a velvet curtain rope and a roll of tape and a plastic bag. He began tying a loop in the end of the rope, concentrating on his work as though it were an interesting, minor task in an ordinary day.

  The priest turned away from him, toward the window and the sun breaking through the flooded cypress, his head lowered, his fingers pinched on his eyelids.

  The parishioner's sixteen-gauge pump shotgun was propped just to the left of the console. Father Mulcahy picked it up and leveled the barrel at the chest of the man in the Stetson hat and clicked off the safety.

  "Get off this boat," he said.

  "You didn't pump a shell into it. There probably ain't nothing in the chamber," the man said.

  "That could be true. Would you like to find out?"

  "You're a feisty old rooster, ain't you?"

  "You sicken me, sir."

  The man in yellow-tinted glasses reached in his shirt pocket with his thumb and two fingers and filled his jaw with tobacco.

  "Piss on you," he said, and opened the cabin door to go back outside.

  "Leave the bag," the priest said.

  FIFTEEN

  THE PRIEST CALLED THE SHERIFF'S office in St. Martin Parish, where his encounter with the man in the Stetson had taken place, then contacted me when he got back to New Iberia. The sheriff and I interviewed him together at the rectory.

  "The bag had a velvet cord and a plastic sack and a roll of tape in it?" the sheriff said.

  "That's right. I left it all with the sheriff in St. Martinville," Father Mulcahy said. His eyes were flat, as though discussing his thoughts would only add to the level of degradation he felt.

  "You know why he's after you, don't you, Father?" I said.

  "Yes, I believe I do."

  "You know what he was going to do, too. It would have probably been written off as a heart attack. There would have been no rope burns, nothing to indicate any force or violence," I said.

  "You don't have to tell me that, sir," he replied.

  "It's time to talk about Lila Terrebonne," I said.

  "It's her prerogative to talk with you as much as she wishes. But not mine," he said.

  "Hubris isn't a virtue, Father," I said.

  His face flared. "Probably not. But I'll be damned if I'll be altered by a sonofabitch like the man who climbed on my boat."

  "That's one way of looking at it. Here's my card if you want to put a net over this guy," I said.

  When we left, rain that looked like lavender horse tails was falling across the sun. The sheriff drove the cruiser with the window down and ashes blew from his pipe onto his shirt. He slapped at them angrily.

  "I want that guy in the hat on a respirator," he said.

  "We don't have a crime on that houseboat, skipper. It's not even in our jurisdiction."

  "The intended victim is. That's enough. He's a vulnerable old man. Remember when you lived through your first combat and thought you had magic? A dangerous time."

  A half hour later a state trooper pulled over a red pickup truck with a Texas tag on the Iberia-St. Martin Parish line.

  THE SHERIFF AND I stood outside the holding cell and looked at the man seated on the wood bench against the back wall. His western-cut pants were ironed with sharp creases, the hard points of his ox-blood cowboy boots buffed to a smooth glaze like melted plastic. He played with his Stetson on his index finger.

  The sheriff held the man's driver's license cupped in his palm. He studied the photograph on it, then the man's face.

  "You're Harpo Scruggs?" the sheriff asked.

  "I was when I got up this morning."

  "You're from New Mexico?"

  "Deming. I got a chili pepper farm there. The truck's a rental, if that's what's on your mind."

  "You're supposed to be dead," the sheriff said.

  "You talking about that fire down in Juarez? Yeah, I heard about that. But it wasn't me."

  His accent was peckerwood, the Acadian inflections, if they had ever existed, weaned out of it.

  "You terrorize elderly clergymen, do you?" I said.

  "I asked the man for a can of gas. He pointed a shotgun at me."

  "You mind going into a lineup?" the sheriff asked.

  Harpo Scruggs looked at his fingernails.

  "Yeah, I do. What's the charge?" he said.

  "We'll find one," the sheriff said.

  "I don't think y'all got a popcorn fart in a windstorm," he said.

  He was right. We called Mout' Broussard's home and got no answer. Neither could we find the USL student who had witnessed the execution of the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin. The father of the two brothers was drunk and contradictory about what he had seen and heard when his sons were lured out of the house.

  It was 8 p.m. The sheriff sat in his swivel chair and tapped his fingers on his jawbone.

  "Call Juarez, Mexico, and see if they've still got a warrant," he said.

  "I already did. It was like having a conversation with impaired people in a bowling alley."

  "Sometimes I hate this job," he said, and picked up a key ring off his desk blotter.

  Ten minutes later the sheriff and I watched Harpo Scruggs walk into the parking lot a free man. He wore a shirt with purple and red flowers on it, and it swelled with the breeze and made his frame look even larger than it was. He fitted on his hat and slanted the brim over his eyes, took a small bag of cookies from his pocket and bit into one of them gingerly with his false teeth. He lifted his face into the breeze and looked with expectation at the sunset.

  "See if you can get Lila Terrebonne in my office tomorrow morning," the sheriff said.

  Harpo Scruggs's truck drove up the street toward the cemetery. A moment later Helen Soileau's unmarked car pulled into the traffic behind him.

  THAT NIGHT BOOTSIE AND I fixed ham and onion sandwiches and dirty rice and iced tea at the drainboard and ate on the breakfast table. Through the hallway I could see the moss in the oak trees glowing against the lights on the dock.

  "You look tired," Bootsie said. "Not really."

  "Who's this man Scruggs working for?"

  "The New Orleans Mob. The Dixie Mafia. Who knows?"

  "The Mob letting one of their own kill a priest?"

  "You should have been a cop, Boots."

  "There's something you're not saying."

  "I keep feeling all this stuff goes back to Jack Flynn's murder."

  "The Flynns again." She rose from the table and put her plate in the sink and looked through the window into the darkness at the foot of our property. "Why always the Flynns?" she said.

  I didn't have an adequate answer, not even for myself when I lay next to Bootsie later in the darkness, the window fan drawing the night air across our bed. Jack Flynn had fought at the battle of Madrid and at Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal; he was not one to be easily undone by company goons hired to break a farmworkers' strike. But the killers had kidnapped him ou
t of a hotel room in Morgan City, beaten him with chains, impaled his broken body with nails as a lesson in terror to any poor white or black person who thought he could relieve his plight by joining a union. To this day not one suspect had been in custody, not one participant had spoken carelessly in a bar or brothel.

  The Klan always prided itself on its secrecy, the arcane and clandestine nature of its rituals, the loyalty of its members to one another. But someone always came forward, out of either guilt or avarice, and told of the crimes they committed in groups, under cover of darkness, against their unarmed and defenseless victims.

  But Jack Flynn's murderers had probably not only been protected, they had been more afraid of the people they served than Louisiana or federal law.

  Jack Flynn's death was at the center of our current problems because we had never dealt with our past, I thought. And in not doing so, we had allowed his crucifixion to become a collective act.

  I propped myself up on the mattress with one elbow and touched Bootsie's hair. She was sound asleep and did not wake. Her eyelids looked like rose petals in the moon's glow.

  EARLY SATURDAY MORNING I turned into the Terrebonne grounds and drove down the oak-lined drive toward the house. The movie set was empty, except for a bored security guard and Swede Boxleiter, who was crouched atop a plank building, firing a nail gun into the tin roof.

  I stood under the portico of the main house and rang the chimes. The day had already turned warm, but it was cool in the shade and the air smelled of damp brick and four-o'clock flowers and the mint that grew under the water faucets. Archer Terrebonne answered the door in yellow-and-white tennis clothes, a moist towel draped around his neck.

  "Lila's not available right now, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

  "I'd very much like to talk to her, sir."

  "She's showering. Then we're going to a brunch. Would you like to leave a message?"

  "The sheriff would appreciate her coming to his office to talk about her conversation with Father James Mulcahy."

  "Y'all do business in an extraordinary fashion. Her discussions with a minister are the subject of a legal inquiry?"

  "This man was almost killed because he's too honorable to divulge something your daughter told him."

  "Good day, Mr. Robicheaux," Terrebonne said, and closed the door in my face.

  I drove back through the corridor of trees, my face tight with anger. I started to turn out onto the service road, then stopped the truck and walked out to the movie set.

  "How's it hangin', Swede?" I said.

  He fired the nail gun through the tin roof into a joist and pursed his mouth into an inquisitive cone.

  "Where's Clete Purcel?" I asked.

  "Gone for the day. You look like somebody pissed in your underwear."

  "You know the layout of this property?"

  "I run power cables all over it."

  "Where's the family cemetery?"

  "Back in those trees."

  He pointed at an oak grove and a group of whitewashed brick crypts with an iron fence around it. The grass within the fence was freshly mowed and clipped at the base of the bricks.

  "You know of another burial area?" I asked.

  "Way in back, a spot full of briars and palmettos. Holtzner says that's where the slaves were planted. Got to watch out for it so the local blacks don't get their ovaries fired up. What's the gig, man? Let me in on it."

  I walked to the iron fence around the Terrebonne cemetery. The marble tablet that sealed the opening to the patriarch's crypt was cracked across the face from settlement of the bricks into the softness of the soil, but I could still make out the eroded, moss-stained calligraphy scrolled by a stone mason's chisel: Elijah Boethius Terrebonne, 1831-1878, soldier for Jefferson Davis, loving father and husband, now brother to the Lord.

  Next to Elijah's crypt was a much smaller one in which his twin girls were entombed. A clutch of wild-flowers, tied at the stems with a rubber band, was propped against its face. There were no other flowers in the cemetery.

  I walked toward the back of the Terrebonne estate, along the edge of a coulee that marked the property line, beyond the movie set and trailers and sky-blue swimming pool and guest cottages and tennis courts to a woods that was deep in shade, layered with leaves, the tree branches wrapped with morning glory vines and cobweb.

  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 grandmo
ther'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.