Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "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 t
hought and ring y'all later on it," he said, and started to reach down to retrieve his ball from the cup.

  Helen put her hand on his shoulder.

  "Not a time to be a wise-ass, sir," she said.

  Guidry's golf companions looked away into the distance, their eyes fixed on the dazzling blue stretch of sky above the tree line.

  Fifteen minutes later we sat down in a windowless interview room. In the back seat of the cruiser he had been silent, morose, his face dark with anger when he looked at us. I saw the sheriff at the end of the hall just before I closed the door to the room.

  "Y'all got some damn nerve," Guidry said.

  "Someone told us you're buds with an ex-Angola gun bull by the name of Harpo Scruggs," I said.

  "I know him. So what?" he replied.

  "You see him recently?" Helen asked. She wore slacks and sat with one haunch on the corner of the desk.

  "No."

  "Sure?" I said.

  "He's the nephew of a lawman I worked with twenty years ago. We grew up in the same town."

  "You didn't answer me," I said.

  "I don't have to."

  "The lawman you worked with was Harpo Delahoussey. Y'all put the squeeze on Cool Breeze Broussard over some moonshine whiskey. That's not all you did either," I said.

  His eyes looked steadily into mine, heated, searching for the implied meaning in my words.

  "Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a priest Friday morning," Helen said.

  "Arrest him, then."

  "How do you know we haven't?" I asked.

  "I don't. It's none of my business. I was fired from my job, thanks to your friend Willie Broussard," he said.

  "Everyone else told us Scruggs was dead. But you know he's alive. Why's that?" Helen said.

  He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his mouth, saying something in disgust against his hand at the same time.

  "Say that again," Helen said.

  "I said you damn queer, you leave me alone," he replied.

  I placed my hand on top of Helen's before she could rise from the table. "You were in the sack with Cool Breeze's wife. I think you contributed to her suicide and helped ruin her husband's life. Does it give you any sense of shame at all, sir?" I said.

  "It's called changing your luck. You're notorious for it, so lose the attitude, fucko," Helen said.

  "I tell you what, when you're dead from AIDS or some other disease you people pass around, I'm going to dig up your grave and piss in your mouth," he said to her.

  Helen stood up and massaged the back of her neck. "Dave, would you leave me and Mr. Guidry alone a minute?" she said.

  BUT WHATEVER SHE DID or said after I left the room, it didn't work. Guidry walked past the dispatcher, used the phone to call a friend for a ride, and calmly sipped from a can of Coca-Cola until a yellow Cadillac with tinted windows pulled to the curb in front.

  Helen and I watched him get in on the passenger side, roll down the window, and toss the empty can on our lawn.

  "What bwana say now?" Helen said.

  "Time to use local resources."

  THAT EVENING CLETE PICKED me up in his convertible in front of the house and we headed up the road toward St. Martinville.

  "You call Swede Boxleiter a 'local resource'?" he said.

  "Why not?"

  "That's like calling shit a bathroom ornament."

  "You want to go or not?"

  "The guy's got electrodes in his temples. Even Holtzner walks around him. Are you listening?"

  "You think he did the number on this accountant, Anthony Pollock?"

  He thought about it. The wind blew a crooked part in his sandy hair.

  "Could he do it? In a blink. Did he have motive? You got me, 'cause I don't know what these dudes are up to," he said. "Megan told me something about Cisco having a fine career ahead of him, then taking money from some guys in the Orient."

  "Have you seen her?"

  He turned his face toward me. It was flat and red in the sun's last light, his green eyes as bold as a slap. He looked at the road again.

  "We're friends. I mean, she's got her own life. We're different kinds of people, you know. I'm cool about it." He inserted a Lucky Strike in his mouth.

  "Clete, I'm-"

  He pulled the cigarette off his lip without lighting it and threw it into the wind.

  "What'd the Dodgers do last night?" he said.

  WE PULLED INTO THE driveway of the cinder-block triplex where Swede Boxleiter lived and found him in back, stripped to the waist, shooting marbles with a slingshot at the squirrels in a pecan tree.

  He pointed his finger at me.

  "I got a bone to pick with you," he said.

  "Oh?"

  "Two Lafayette homicide roaches just left here. They said you told them to question me."

  "Really?" I said.

  "They threw me up against the car in front of my landlord. One guy kicked me in both ankles. He put his hand in my crotch with little kids watching."

  "Dave was trying to clear you as a suspect. These guys probably got the wrong signal, Swede," Clete said.

  He pulled back the leather pouch on the slingshot, nests of veins popping in his neck, and fired a scarlet marble into the pecan limbs.

  "I want to run a historical situation by you. Then you tell me what's wrong with the story," I said.

  "What's the game?" he asked.

  "No game. You're con-wise. You see stuff other people don't. This is just for fun, okay?"

  He held the handle of the slingshot and whipped the leather pouch and lengths of rubber tubing in a circle, watching them gain speed.

  "A plantation owner is in the sack with one of his slave women. He goes off to the Civil War, comes back home, finds his place trashed by the Yankees, and all his slaves set free. There's not enough food for everybody, so he tells the slave woman she has to leave. You with me?"

  "Makes sense, yeah," Swede said.

  "The slave woman puts poison in the food of the plantation owner's children, thinking they'll only get sick and she'll be asked to care for them. Except they die. The other black people on the plantation are terrified. So they hang the slave woman before they're all punished," I said.

  Swede stopped twirling the slingshot. "It's bullshit," he said.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "You said the blacks were already freed. Why are they gonna commit a murder for the white dude and end up hung by Yankees themselves? The white guy, the one getting his stick dipped, he did her."

  "You're a beaut, Swede," I said.

  "This is some kind of grift, right?"

  "Here's what it is," Clete said. "Dave thinks you're getting set up. You know how it works sometimes. The locals can't clear a case and they look around for a guy with a heavy sheet."

  "We've got a shooter or two on the loose, Swede," I said. "Some guys smoked two white boys out in the Basin, then tried to clip a black guy by the name of Willie Broussard. I hate to see you go down for it."

  "I can see you'd be broke up," he said.

  "Ever hear of a dude named Harpo Scruggs?" I asked.

  "No."

  "Too bad. You might have to take his weight. See you around. Thanks for the help with that historical story," I said.

  Clete and I walked back to the convertible. The air felt warm and moist, and the sky was purple above the sugarcane across the road. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Swede watching us from the middle of the drive, stretching the rubber tubes on his slingshot, his face jigsawed with thought.

  WE STOPPED AT A filling station for gas down the road. The owner had turned on the outside lights and the oak tree that grew next to the building was filled with black-green shadows against the sky. Clete walked across the street and bought a sno'ball from a small wooden stand and ate it while I put in the gas.

  "What was that plantation story about?" he asked.

  "I had the same problem with it as Boxleiter. Except it's been bothering me because it reminded me of the story Cool Breeze told me about hi
s wife's suicide."

  "You lost me, big mon," Clete said.

  "She was found in freezing water with an anchor chain wrapped around her. When they want to leave a lot of guilt behind, they use shotguns or go off rooftops."

  "I'd leave it alone, Dave."

  "Breeze has lived for twenty years with her death on his conscience."

  "There's another script, too. Maybe he did her," Clete said. He bit into his sno'ball and held his eyes on mine.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Batist telephoned the house from the dock.

  "There's a man down here want to see you, Dave," he said.

  "What's he look like?"

  "Like somebody stuck his jaws in a vise and busted all the bones. That ain't the half of it. While I'm mopping off the tables, he walks round on his hands."

  I finished my coffee and walked down the slope through the trees. The air was cool and gray with the mist off the water, and molded pecan husks broke under my shoes.

  "What's up, Swede?" I said.

  He sat at a spool table, eating a chili dog with a fork from a paper plate.

  "You asked about this guy Harpo Scruggs. He's an old fart, works out of New Mexico and Trinidad, Colorado. He freelances, but if he's doing a job around here, the juice is coming out of New Orleans."

  "Yeah?"

  "Something else. If Scruggs tried to clip a guy and blew it but he's still hanging around, it means he's working for Ricky the Mouse."

  "Ricky Scarlotti?"

  "There's two things you don't do with Ricky. You don't blow hits and you don't ever call him the Mouse. You know the story about the horn player?"

  "Yes."

  "That's his style."

  "Would he have a priest killed?"

  "That don't sound right."

  "You ever have your IQ tested, Swede?"

  "No, people who bone you five days a week don't give IQ tests."

  "You're quite a guy anyway. You shank Anthony Pollock?"

  "I was playing chess with Cisco. Check it out, my man. And don't send any more cops to my place. Believe it or not, I don't like some polyester geek getting his hand on my crank."