DR10 - Sunset Limited (18 page)

"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
grandmother'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.

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.

"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."