Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "Put both hands out the window and keep them there," I said.

  But there was no response.

  "Mr. Guidry, you will put your hands out the window, or you will be in danger of being shot. Do you hear me?" I said.

  Helen moved past a rain tree and was now at an angle to the front of the Cadillac, her Beretta pointed with two hands straight in front of her.

  Guidry rose from the leather seat, pulling himself erect by hooking his arm over the open window. But in his right hand I saw the nickel-plated surfaces of a revolver.

  "Throw it away!" I shouted. "Now! Don't think about it! Guidry, throw the piece away!"

  Then lightning cracked across the sky, and out of the corner of his vision he saw Helen take up a shooter's position against the trunk of the rain tree. Maybe he was trying to hold the revolver up in the air and step free of the car, beyond the open door, so she could see him fully, but he stumbled out into the field, his right arm pressed against the wound in his side and the white shirt that was sodden with blood.

  But to Helen, looking into the glare of my flashlight, Guidry had become an armed silhouette.

  I yelled or think I yelled, He's already hit, but it was too late. She fired twice, pop, pop, the barrel streaking the darkness. The first round hit him high in the chest, the second in the mouth.

  But Guidry's night in Gethsemane was not over. He stumbled toward the barn, his lower face like a piece of burst fruit, and swung his pistol back in Helen's direction and let off one shot that whined away across the bayou and made a sound like a hammer striking wood.

  She began firing as fast as her finger could pull the trigger, the ejected shells pinging off the trunk of the rain tree, until I came behind her and fitted my hands on both her muscular arms.

  "He's down. It's over," I said.

  "No, he's still there. He let off another round. I saw the flash," she said, her eyes wild, the tendons in her arms jumping as though she were cold.

  "No, Helen."

  She swallowed, breathing hard through her mouth, and wiped the sweat off her nose with her shoulder, never releasing the two-handed grip on the Beretta. I shined the light out across the grass onto the north side of the barn.

  "Oh, shit," she said, almost like a plea.

  "Call it in," I said.

  "Dave, he's lying in the same, I mean like, his arms are out like-"

  "Get on the radio. That's all you have to do. Don't regret anything that happened here tonight. He dealt the play a long time ago."

  "Dave, he's on the left side of where Flynn died. I can't take this stuff. I didn't know the guy was hit. Why didn't you yell at me?"

  "I did. I think I did. Maybe I didn't. He should have thrown away the piece."

  We stood there like that, in the blowing wind and dust and the raindrops that struck our faces like marbles, the vault of sky above us exploding with sound.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE ARGENTINE DWARF WHO CALLED himself Ruben Esteban could not have been more unfortunate in his choice of a hotel.

  Years ago in Lafayette, twenty miles from New Iberia, a severely retarded, truncated man named Chatlin Ardoin had made his living as a newspaper carrier who delivered newspapers to downtown businesses or sold them to train passengers at the Southern Pacific depot. His voice was like clotted rust in a sewer pipe; his arms and legs were stubs on his torso; his face had the expression of baked corn bread under his formless hat. Street kids from the north side baited him; an adman, the nephew of the newspaper's publisher, delighted in calling him Castro, driving him into an emotional rage.

  The two-story clapboard hotel around the corner from the newspaper contained a bar downstairs where newsmen drank after their deadline. It was also full of hookers who worked the trade through the late afternoon and evening, except on Fridays, when the owner, whose name was Norma Jean, served free boiled shrimp for family people in the neighborhood. Every afternoon Chatlin brought Norma Jean a free newspaper, and every afternoon she gave him a frosted schooner of draft beer and a hard-boiled egg. He sat at the end of the bar under the air-conditioning unit, his canvas bag of rolled newspapers piled on the stool next to him, and peeled and ate the egg and drank the beer and stared at the soap operas on the TV with an intensity that made some believe he comprehended far more of the world than his appearance indicated. Norma Jean was thoroughly corrupt and allowed her girls no latitude when it came to pleasing their customers, but like most uneducated and primitive people, she intuitively felt, without finding words for the idea, that the retarded and insane were placed on earth to be cared for by those whose souls might otherwise be forfeit.

  A beer and a hard-boiled egg wasn't a bad price for holding on to a bit of your humanity.

  Fifteen years ago, during a hurricane, Chatlin was run over by a truck on the highway. The newspaper office was moved; the Southern Pacific depot across from the hotel was demolished and replaced by a post office; and Norma Jean's quasi-brothel became an ordinary hotel with a dark, cheerless bar for late-night drinkers.

  Ordinary until Ruben Esteban checked into the hotel, then came down to the bar at midnight, the hard surfaces of his face glowing like corn bread under the neon. Esteban climbed on top of a stool, his Panama hat wobbling on his head. Norma Jean took one look at him and began screaming that Chatlin Ardoin had escaped from the grave.

  Early Wednesday morning Helen and I were at the Lafayette Parish Jail. It was raining hard outside and the corridors were streaked with wet footprints. The homicide detective named Daigle took us up in the elevator. His face was scarred indistinctly and had the rounded, puffed quality of a steroid user's, his black hair clipped short across the top of his forehead. His collar was too tight for him and he kept pulling at it with two fingers, as though he had a rash.

  "You smoked a guy and you're not on the desk?" he said to Helen.

  "The guy already had a hole in him," I said. "He also shot at a police officer. He also happened to put a round through someone's bedroom wall."

  "Convenient," Daigle said.

  Helen looked at me.

  "What's Esteban charged with?" I asked.

  "Disturbing the peace, resisting. Somebody accidentally knocked him off the barstool when Norma Jean started yelling about dead people. The dwarf got off the floor and went for the guy's crotch. The uniform would have cut him loose, except he remembered y'all's bulletin. He said getting cuffs on him was like trying to pick up a scorpion," Daigle said. "What's the deal on him, again?"

  "He sexually mutilated political prisoners for the Argentine Junta. They were buds with the Gipper," I said.

  "The what?" he said.

  Ruben Esteban sat on a wood bench by himself in the back of a holding cell, his Panama hat just touching the tops of his jug ears. His face was triangular in shape, dull yellow in hue, the eyes set at an oblique angle to his nose.

  "What are you doing around here, podna?" I said.

  "I'm a chef. I come here to study the food," he answered. His voice sounded metallic, as though it came out of a resonator in his throat.

  "You have three different passports," I said.

  "That's for my cousins. We're a-how you call it?-we're a team. We cook all over the world," Esteban said.

  "We know who you are. Stay out of Iberia Parish," Helen said.

  "Why?" he asked.

  "We have an ordinance against people who are short and ugly," she replied.

  His face was wooden, impossible to read, the eyes hazing over under the brim of his hat. He touched an incisor tooth and looked at the saliva on the ball of his finger.

  "Governments have protected you in the past. That won't happen here. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Esteban?" I said.

  "Me cago en la puta de tu madre," he answered, his eyes focused on the backs of his square, thick hands, his mouth curling back in neither a sneer nor a grimace but a disfigurement like the expression in a corpse's face when the lips wrinkle away from the teeth.

  "What'd he say?" Daigle asked. />
  "He probably doesn't have a lot of sentiment about Mother's Day," I said.

  "That's not all he don't have. He's got a tube in his pants. No penis," Daigle said, and started giggling.

  Outside, it was still raining hard when Helen and I got in our cruiser.

  "What'd Daigle do before he was a cop?" Helen asked.

  "Bill collector and barroom bouncer, I think."

  "I would have never guessed," she said.

  Ruben Esteban paid his fine that afternoon and was released.

  THAT NIGHT I SAT in the small office that I had fashioned out of a storage room in the back of the bait shop. Spread on my desk were xeroxed copies of the investigator's report on the shooting and death of Alex Guidry, the coroner's report, and the crime scene photos taken in front of the barn. The coroner stated that Guidry had already been hit in the rib cage with a round from a.357 magnum before Helen had ever discharged her weapon. Also, the internal damage was massive and probably would have proved fatal even if Helen had not peppered him with her nine-millimeter.

  One photo showed the bloody interior of Guidry's Cadillac and a bullet hole in the stereo system and another in the far door, including a blood splatter on the leather door panel, indicating the original shooter had fired at least twice and the fatal round had hit Guidry while he was seated in the car.

  Another photo showed tire tracks in the grass that were not the Cadillac's.

  Two rounds had been discharged from Guidry's.38, one at Helen, the other probably at the unknown assailant.

  The photo of Guidry, like most crime scene photography, was stark in its black and white contrasts. His back lay propped against the barn wall, his spine curving against the wood and the earth. His hands and lower legs were sheathed in blood, his shattered mouth hanging open, narrowing his face like a tormented figure in a Goya painting.

  The flood lamps were on outside the bait shop, and the rain was blowing in sheets on the bayou. The water had overflowed the banks, and the branches of the willows were trailing in the current. The body of a dead possum floated by under the window, its stomach yellow and swollen in the electric glare, the claws of feeding blue-point crabs affixed to its fur. I kept thinking of Guidry's words to me in our last telephone conversation: It was under your feet the whole time and you never saw it.

  What was under my feet? Where? By the barn? Out in the field where Guidry was hit with the.357?

  Then I saw Megan Flynn's automobile park by the boat ramp and Megan run down the dock toward the bait shop with an umbrella over her head.

  She came inside, breathless, shaking water out of her hair. Unconsciously, I looked up the slope through the trees at the lighted gallery and living room of my house.

  "Wet night to be out," I said.

  She sat down at the counter and blotted her face with a paper napkin.

  "I got a call from Adrien Glazier. She told me about this guy Ruben Esteban," she said.

  Not bad, Adrien, I thought.

  "This guy's record is for real, Dave. I heard about him when I covered the Falklands War," she said.

  "He was in custody on a misdemeanor in Lafayette this morning. He doesn't blend into the wallpaper easily."

  "We should feel better? Why do you think the Triads sent a walking horror show here?"

  Megan wasn't one to whom you gave facile assurances.

  "We don't know who his partner is. While we're watching Esteban, the other guy's peddling an icecream cart down Main Street," I said.

  "Thank you," she said, and dried the back of her neck with another napkin. Her skin seemed paler, her mouth and her hair a darker shade of red under the overhead light. I glanced away from her eyes.

  "You and Cisco want a cruiser to park by your house?" I asked.

  "I have a bad feeling about Clete. I can't shake it," she said.

  "Clete?" I said.

  "Geri Holtzner is driving his car all around town. Look, nobody is going to hurt Billy Holtzner. You don't kill the people who owe you money. You hurt the people around them. These guys put bombs in people's automobiles."

  "I'll talk to him about it."

  "I already have. He doesn't listen. I hate myself for involving him in this," she said.

  "I left my Roman collar up at the house, Meg."

  "I forgot. Swinging dicks talk in deep voices and never apologize for their mistakes."

  "Why do you turn every situation into an adversarial one?" I asked.

  She raised her chin and tilted her head slightly. Her mouth reminded me of a red flower turning toward light.

  Bootsie opened the screen door and came in holding a raincoat over her head.

  "Oh, excuse me. I didn't mean to walk into the middle of something," she said. She shook her raincoat and wiped the water off it with her hand. "My, what a mess I'm making."

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON WE executed a search warrant on the property where Alex Guidry was shot. The sky was braided with thick gray and metallic-blue clouds, and the air smelled like rain and wood pulp and smoke from a trash fire.

  Thurston Meaux, the St. Mary Parish plainclothes, came out of the barn with a rake in his hand.

  "I found two used rubbers, four pop bottles, a horseshoe, and a dead snake. That any help to y'all?" he said.

  "Pretty clever," I said.

  "Maybe Alex Guidry was just setting you up, podna. Maybe you're lucky somebody popped him first. Maybe there was never anything here," Meaux said.

  "Tell me, Thurston, why is it nobody wants to talk about the murder of Jack Flynn?"

  "It was a different time. My grandfather did some things in the Klan, up in nort' Louisiana. He's an old man now. It's gonna change the past to punish him now?"

  I started to reply but instead just walked away. It was easy for me to be righteous at the expense of another. The real problem was I didn't have any idea what we were looking for. The yellow crime scene tape formed a triangle from the barn to the spot where Guidry's Cadillac had been parked. Inside the triangle we found old shotgun and.22 shells, pig bones, a plowshare that groundwater had turned into rusty lace, the stone base of a mule-operated cane grinder overgrown with morning glory vine. A deputy sheriff swung his metal detector over a desiccated oak stump and got a hot reading. We splintered the stump apart and found a fan-shaped ax head, one that had been hand-forged, in the heart of the wood.

  At four o'clock the uniformed deputies left. The sun came out and I watched Thurston Meaux sit down on a crate in the lee of the barn and eat a sandwich, let the wax paper blow away in the wind, then pull the tab on a soda can and drop it in the dirt.

  "You're contaminating the crime scene," I said.

  "Wrong," he replied.

  "Oh?"

  "Because we're not wasting any more time on this bullshit. You've got some kind of obsession, Robicheaux." He brushed the crumbs off his clothes and walked to his automobile.

  Helen didn't say anything for a long time. Then she lifted a strand of hair out of her eye and said, "Dave, we've walked every inch of the field and raked all the ground inside and around the barn. You want to start over again, that's okay with me, but-"

  "Guidry said, 'It was under your feet, you arrogant shithead.' Whatever he was talking about, it's physical, maybe something we walked over, something he could pick up and stick in my face."

  "We can bring in a Cat and move some serious dirt."

  "No, we might destroy whatever is here."

  She let out her breath, then began scraping a long divot with a mattock around the edges of the hardpan.

  "You're a loyal friend, Helen," I said.

  "Bwana has the keys to the cruiser," she said.

  I stood in front of the barn wall and stared at the weathered wood, the strips of red paint that were flaking like fingernail polish, the dust-sealed nail holes where Jack Flynn's wrists had been impaled. Whatever evidence was here had been left by Harpo Scruggs, not Alex Guidry, I thought. It was something Scruggs knew about, had deliberately left in place, had even told Guidry abo
ut. But why?

  To implicate someone else. Just as he had crucified Swede Boxleiter in this spot to tie Boxleiter's death to Flynn's.

  "Helen, if there's anything here, it's right by where Jack Flynn died," I said.

  She rested the mattock by her foot and wiped a smear of mud off her face with her sleeve.

  "If you say so," she said.

  "Long day, huh?"

  "I had a dream last night. Like I was being pulled back into history, into stuff I don't want to have anything to do with."

  "You told me yourself, we're the good guys."

  "When I kept shooting at Guidry? He was already done. I just couldn't stop. I convinced myself I saw another flash from his weapon. But I knew better."

  "He got what he deserved."

  "Yeah? Well, why do I feel the way I do?"

  "Because you still have your humanity. It's because you're the best."

  "I want to make this case and lock the file on it. I mean it, Dave."

  She put down her mattock and the two of us began piercing the hardpan with garden forks, working backward from the barn wall, turning up the dirt from six inches below the surface. The subsoil was black and shiny, oozing with water and white worms. Then I saw a coppery glint and a smooth glass surface wedge out of the mud while Helen was prizing her fork against a tangle of roots.

  "Hold it," I said.

  "What is it?"

  "A jar. Don't move the fork."

  I reached down and lifted a quart-size preserve jar out of the mud and water. The top was sealed with both rubber and a metal cap. I squatted down and dipped water out of the hole and rinsed the mud off the glass.

  "An envelope and a newspaper clipping? What's Scruggs doing, burying a time capsule?" Helen said.

  We walked to the cruiser and wiped the jar clean with paper towels, then set it on the hood and unscrewed the cap. I lifted the newspaper clipping out with two fingers and spread it on the hood. The person who had cut it out of the Times-Picayune had carefully included the strip at the top of the page which gave the date, August 8, 1956. The headline on the story read: "Union Organizer Found Crucified."