Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "You guys on the job?" he said.

  "No. We're just fishing," I said.

  "Get out of here," he said, still smiling.

  "We fish this spot a lot, Billy. We're both off the clock," Clete said.

  "Oh," Holtzner said, his smile dying.

  "Everything copacetic?" Clete said.

  "Sure," Holtzner said. "Want to come up and watch us shoot a couple of scenes?"

  "We're heading back in a few minutes. Thanks just the same," I said.

  "Sure. My daughter's with me," he said, as though there were a logical connection between her presence and his invitation. "I mean, maybe we'll have a late-night dinner later."

  Neither Clete nor I responded. Holtzner touched the boat pilot on the arm, and the two of them roared back across the bay, their backdraft showering the water's surface with willow leaves.

  "How do you read that?" I said.

  "The guy's on his own, probably for the first time in his life. It must be rough to wake up one morning and realize you're a gutless shit who doesn't deserve his family," Clete said, then bit into his sandwich.

  THE NEXT DAY TWO uniformed city cops and I had to arrest a parolee from Alabama by the swimming pool at City Park. Even with cuffs on, he spit on one cop and kicked the other one in the groin. I pushed him against the side of the cruiser and tried to hold him until I could get the back door open, then the cop who had been spit on Maced him and sprayed me at the same time.

  I spent the next ten minutes rinsing my face and hair in the lavatory inside the recreation building. When I came back outside, wiping the water off my neck with a paper towel, the parolee and the city cops were on their way to the jail and Adrien Glazier was standing by my pickup truck. Out on the drive, among the oak trees, I saw a dark blue waxed car with two men in suits and shades standing by it. Leaves were swirling in eddies around their car.

  "The sheriff told us you were here. How's that stuff feel?" she said.

  "Like somebody holding a match to your skin."

  "We just got a report from Interpol on the dwarf. He's enjoying himself on the Italian Riviera."

  "Glad to hear it," I said.

  "So maybe the shooter who did Ricky Scar left with him."

  "You believe that?" I asked.

  "No. Take a walk with me."

  She didn't wait for a reply. She turned and began walking slowly through the trees toward the bayou and the picnic tables that were set under tin sheds by the waterside.

  "What's going on, Ms. Glazier?" I said.

  "Call me Adrien." She rested her rump against a picnic table and folded her arms across her chest. "Did Cisco Flynn confess his involvement in a homicide to you?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "The guy who got chucked out a hotel window in San Antonio? I understand his head hit a fire hydrant. Did Cisco come seeking absolution at your bait shop?"

  "My memory's not as good as it used to be. Y'all have a tap on his phone or a bug in his house?"

  "We're giving you a free pass on this one. That's because I acted like a pisspot for a while," she said.

  "It's because you know Harpo Scruggs was a federal snitch when he helped crucify Jack Flynn."

  "You should come work for us. I never have any real laughs these days."

  She walked off through the trees toward the two male agents who waited for her, her hips undulating slightly. I caught up with her.

  "What have you got on the dwarfs partner?" I asked.

  "Nothing. Watch your ass, Mr. Robicheaux," she replied.

  "Call me Dave."

  "Not a chance," she said. Then she grinned and made a clicking goodbye sound in her jaw.

  THAT NIGHT I WATCHED the ten o'clock news before going to bed. I looked disinterestedly at some footage about a State Police traffic check, taken outside Jeanerette, until I saw Clete Purcel on the screen, showing his license to a trooper, then being escorted to a cruiser.

  Back in the stew pot, I thought, probably for violating the spirit of his restricted permit, which allowed him to drive only for business purposes.

  But that was Clete, always in trouble, always out of sync with the rest of the world. I knew the trooper was doing his job and Clete had earned his night in the bag, but I had to pause and wonder at the illusionary cell glue that made us feel safe about the society we lived in.

  Archer Terrebonne, who would murder in order to break unions, financed a movie about the travail and privation of plantation workers in the 1940s. The production company helped launder money from the sale of China white. The FBI protected sociopaths like Harpo Scruggs and let his victims pay the tab. Harpo Scruggs worked for the state of Louisiana and murdered prisoners in Angola. The vested interest of government and criminals and respectable people was often the same.

  In my scrapbook I had an inscribed photograph that Clete had given me when we were both in uniform at NOPD. It had been taken by an Associated Press photographer at night on a Swift Boat in Vietnam, somewhere up the Mekong, in the middle of a firefight. Clete was behind a pair of twin fifties, wearing a steel pot and a flack vest with no shirt, his youthful face lighted by a flare, tracers floating away into the darkness like segmented neon.

  I could almost hear him singing, "I got a freaky old lady name of Cocaine Katie."

  I thought about calling the jail in Jeanerette, but I knew he would be back on the street in the morning, nothing learned, deeper in debt to a bondsman, trying to sweep the snakes and spiders back in their baskets with vodka and grapefruit juice.

  He made me think of my father, Aldous, whom people in the oil field always called Big Al Robicheaux, as though it were one name. It took seven Lafayette cops in Anders Pool Room to put him in jail. The fight wrecked the pool room from one end to the other. They hit him with batons, broke chairs on his shoulders and back, and finally got his mother to talk him into submission so they didn't have to kill him.

  But jails and poverty and baton-swinging cops never broke his spirit. It took my mother's infidelities to do that. The Amtrak still ran on the old Southern Pacific roadbed that had carried my mother out to Hollywood in 1946, made up of the same cars from the original Sunset Limited she had ridden in, perhaps with the same desert scenes painted on the walls. Sometimes when I would see the Amtrak crossing through winter fields of burned cane stubble, I would wonder what my mother felt when she stepped down on the platform at Union Station in Los Angeles, her pillbox hat slanted on her head, her purse clenched in her small hand. Did she believe the shining air and the orange trees and the blue outline of the San Gabriel Mountains had been created especially for her, to be discovered in exactly this moment, in a train station that echoed like a cathedral? Did she walk into the green roll of the Pacific and feel the water balloon her dress out from her thighs and fill her with a sexual pleasure that no man ever gave her?

  What's the point?

  Hitler and George Orwell already said it. History books are written by and about the Terrebonnes of this world, not jarheads up the Mekong or people who die in oil-well blowouts or illiterate Cajun women who believe the locomotive whistle on the Sunset Limited calls for them.

  THIRTY-ONE

  ADRIEN GLAZIER CALLED Monday morning from New Orleans.

  "You remember a hooker by the name of Ruby Gravano?" she asked.

  "She gave us the first solid lead on Harpo Scruggs. She had an autistic son named Nick," I said.

  "That's the one."

  "We put her on the train to Houston. She was getting out of the life."

  "Her career change must have been short-lived. She was selling out of her pants again Saturday night. We think she tricked the shooter in the Ricky Scar gig. Unlucky girl."

  "What happened?"

  "Her pimp is a peckerwood named Beeler Grissum. Know him?"

  "Yeah, he's a Murphy artist who works the Quarter and Airline Highway."

  "He worked the wrong dude this time. He and Ruby Gravano tried to set up the outraged-boyfriend skit. The john broke Grissum's neck with a k
arate kick. Ruby told NOPD she'd seen the John a week or so ago with a dwarf. So they thought maybe he was the shooter on the Scarlotti hit and they called us."

  "Who's the john?"

  "All she could say was he has a Canadian passport, blond or gold hair, and a green-and-red scorpion tattooed on his left shoulder. We'll send the composite through, but it looks generic-egg-shaped head, elongated eyes, sideburns, fedora with a feather in it. I'm starting to think all these guys had the same mother."

  "Where's Ruby now?"

  "At Charity."

  "What'd he do to her?"

  "You don't want to know."

  A FEW MINUTES LATER the composite came through the fax machine and I took it out to Cisco Flynn's place on the Loreauville road. When no one answered the door, I walked around the side of the house toward the patio in back. I could hear the voices of both Cisco and Billy Holtzner, arguing furiously.

  "You got a taste, then you put your whole face in the trough. Now you swim for the shore with the rats," Holtzner said.

  "You ripped them off, Billy. I'm not taking the fall," Cisco said.

  "This fine house, this fantasy you got about being a southern gentleman, where you think it all comes from? You made your money off of me."

  "So I'm supposed to give it back because you burned the wrong guys? That's the way they do business in the garment district?"

  Then I heard their feet shuffling, a piece of iron furniture scrape on brick, a slap, like a hand hitting a body, and Cisco's voice saying, "Don't embarrass yourself on top of it, Billy."

  A moment later Holtzner came around the back corner of the house, walking fast, his face heated, his stare twisted with his own thoughts. I held up the composite drawing in front of him.

  "You know this guy?" I asked.

  "No."

  "The FBI thinks he's a contract assassin."

  Holtzner's eyes were dilated, red along the rims, his skin filmed with an iridescent shine, a faint body odor emanating from his clothes, like a man who feels he's about to slide down a razor blade.

  "So you bring it out to Cisco Flynn's house? Who you think is the target for these assholes?" he said.

  "I see. You are."

  "You got me made for a coward. It doesn't bother me. I don't care what happens to me anymore. But my daughter never harmed anybody except herself. All pinhead back there has to do is mortgage his house and we can make a down payment on our debt. I'm talking about my daughter's life here. Am I getting through to you?"

  "You have a very unpleasant way of talking to people, Mr. Holtzner," I said.

  "Go fuck yourself," he said, and walked across the lawn to his automobile, which he had parked under a shade tree.

  I followed him and propped both my hands on the edge of his open window just as he turned the ignition.

  He looked up abruptly into my face. His leaded eyelids made me think of a frog's.

  "Your daughter's been threatened? Explicitly?" I said.

  "Explicitly? I can always spot a thinker," he said. He dropped the car into reverse and spun two black tracks across the grass to the driveway.

  I went back up on the gallery and knocked again. But Megan came to the door instead of Cisco. She stepped outside without inviting me in, a brown paper bag in her hand.

  "I'm returning your pistol," she said.

  "I think you should hang on to it for a while."

  "Why'd you show Cisco those photos of my father?"

  "He came to my office. He asked to see them."

  "Take the gun. It's unloaded," she said. She pushed the bag into my hands.

  "You're worried he might go after Archer Terrebonne?"

  "You shouldn't have shown him those photos. Sometimes you're unaware of the influence you have over others, Dave."

  "I tell you what. I'm going to get all the distance I can between me and you and Cisco. How's that?"

  She stepped closer to me, her face tilted up into mine. I could feel her breath on my skin. For a moment I thought she was being flirtatious, deliberately confrontational. Then I saw the moisture in her eyes.

  "You've never read the weather right with me. Not on anything. It's not Cisco who might do something to Archer Terrebonne," she said. She continued to stare into my face. There were broken veins in the whites of her eyes, like pieces of red thread.

  THAT EVENING I SAW Clete's chartreuse convertible coming down the dirt road toward the dock, with Geraldine Holtzner behind the wheel, almost unrecognizable in a scarf and dark glasses, and Clete padding along behind the car, in scarlet trunks, rotted T-shirt, and tennis shoes that looked like pancakes on his feet.

  Geraldine Holtzner braked to a stop by the boat ramp and Clete opened the passenger door and took a bottle of diet Pepsi out of the cooler and wiped the ice off with his palm. He breathed through his mouth, sweat streaming out of his hair and down his chest.

  "You trying to have a heart attack?" I said.

  "I haven't had a drink or a cigarette in two days. I feel great. You want some fried chicken?" he said.

  "They pulled your license altogether?" I said.

  "Big time," he said.

  "Clete-" I said.

  "So beautiful women drive me around now. Right, Geri?"

  She didn't respond. Instead, she stared at me from behind her dark glasses, her mouth pursed into a button. "Why are you so hard on my father?" she said.

  I looked at Clete, then down the road, in the shadows, where a man in a ribbed undershirt was taking a fishing rod and tackle box out of his car trunk.

  "I'd better get back to work," I said.

  "I'll take a shower in the back of the bait shop and we'll go to a movie or something. How about it, Geri?" Clete said.

  "Why not?" she said.

  "I'd better pass," I said.

  "I've got a case of 12-Step PMS today, you know, piss, moan, and snivel. Don't be a sorehead," Geraldine said.

  "Come back later. We'll take a boat ride," I said.

  "I can't figure what Megan sees in you," Geraldine said.

  I went back down the dock to the bait shop, then turned and watched Clete padding along behind the convertible, like a trained bear, the dust puffing around his dirty tennis shoes.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER I walked up to the house and ate supper in the kitchen with Alafair and Bootsie. The phone rang on the counter. I picked it up.

  "Dave, this probably don't mean nothing, but a man was axing about Clete right after you went up to eat," Batist said.

  "Which man?"

  "He was fishing on the bank, then he come in the shop and bought a candy bar and started talking French. Then he ax in English who own that convertible that was going down the road. I tole him the only convertible I seen out there was for Clete Purcel. Then he ax if the woman driving it wasn't in the movies.

  "I tole him I couldn't see through walls, no, so I didn't have no idea who was driving it. He give me a dol'ar tip and gone back out and drove away in a blue car."

  "What kind of French did he speak?" I asked.

  "I didn't t'ink about it. It didn't sound no different from us."

  "I'll mention it to Clete. But don't worry about it."

  "One other t'ing. He only had an undershirt on. He had a red-and-green tattoo on his shoulder. It look like a, what you call them t'ings, they got them down in Mexico, it ain't a crawfish, it's a-"

  "Scorpion?" I said.

  I CALLED CLETE AT his cottage outside Jeanerette.

  "The Scarlotti shooter may be following you. Watch for a blond guy, maybe a French Canadian-" I began.

  "Guy with a tattoo on his shoulder, driving a blue Ford?" Clete said.

  "That's the guy."

  "Geri and I stopped at a convenience store and I saw him do a U-turn down the street and park in some trees. I strolled on down toward a pay phone, but he knew I'd made him."

  "You get his tag number?" I asked.

  "No, there was mud on it."

  "Can you get hold of Holtzner?"

  "If I have
to. The guy's wiring is starting to spark. I smelled crack in his trailer today."

  "Where's Geraldine?"

  "Where's any hype? In her own universe. That broad's crazy, Dave. After I told her we were being followed by the guy with the tattoo, she accused me of setting her up. Every woman I meet is either unattainable or nuts… Anyway, I'll try to find Holtzner for you."

  An hour later he called me back.

  "Holtzner just fired me," he said.

  "Why?"

  "I got him on his cell phone and told him the Canadian dude was in town. He went into a rage. He asked me why I didn't take down this guy when I had the chance. I go, 'Take down, like cap the guy?'

  "He goes, 'What, an ex-cop kicked off the police force for killing a federal witness has got qualms?'

  "I say, 'Yeah, as a matter of fact I do.'

  "He goes, 'Then sign your own paychecks, Rhino Boy.'

  "Rhino Boy? How'd I ever get mixed up with these guys, Dave?"

  "Lots of people ask themselves that question," I said.

  THE EX-PROSTITUTE NAMED JESSIE Rideau, who claimed to have been present when Jack Flynn was kidnapped, called Helen Soileau's extension the next day. Helen had the call transferred to my office.

  "Come talk to us, Ms. Rideau," I said.

  "You giving out free coffee in lockup?" she said.

  "We want to put Harpo Scruggs away. You help us, we help you."

  "Gee, where I heard that before?" I could hear her breath flattening on the receiver, as though she were trying to blow the heat out of a burn. "You ain't gonna say nothing?"

  "I'll meet you somewhere else."

  "St. Peter's Cemetery in ten minutes."

  "How will I recognize you?" I asked.

  "I'm the one that's not dead."

  I parked my truck behind the cathedral and walked over to the old cemetery, which was filled with brick-and-plaster crypts that had settled at broken angles into the earth. She sat on the seat of her paint-blistered gas-guzzler, the door open, her feet splayed on the curb, her head hanging out in the sunlight as I approached her. She had coppery hair that looked like it had been waved with an iron, and brown skin and freckles like a spray of dull pennies on her face and neck. Her shoulders were wide, her breasts like watermelons inside her blue cotton shirt, her turquoise eyes fastened on me, as though she had no means of defending herself against the world once it escaped her vision.