DR10 - Sunset Limited (35 page)

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON I left the
office early and worked in
the yard with Alafair. The sun was gold in the trees, and red leaves
drifted out of the branches onto the bayou. We turned on the soak hoses
in the flower beds and spaded out the St. Augustine grass that had
grown through the brick border, and the air, which was unseasonably
cool, smelled of summer, like cut lawns and freshly turned soil and
water from a garden hose, rather than autumn and shortening days.

Lila Terrebonne parked a black Oldsmobile with darkly tinted
windows by the boat ramp and rolled down the driver's window and waved.
Someone whom I couldn't see clearly sat next to her. The trunk was open
and filled with cardboard boxes of chrysanthemums. She got out of the
Oldsmobile and crossed the road and walked into the pecan trees, where
Alafair and I were raking up pecan husks and leaves that had gone black
with water.

Lila wore a pale blue dress and white pumps and a domed straw
hat, one almost like Megan's. For the first time in years her eyes
looked clear, untroubled, even happy.

"I'm having a party tomorrow night. Want to come?" she said.

"I'd better pass, Lila."

"I did a Fifth Step, you know, cleaning house. With an
ex-hooker, can you believe it? It took three hours. I think she wanted
a drink when it was over."

"That's great. I'm happy for you."

Lila looked at Alafair and waited, as though an unstated
expectation among us had not been met.

"Oh, excuse me. I think I'll go inside. Talk on the phone.
Order some drugs," Alafair said.

"You don't need to go, Alf," I said.

"Bye-bye," she said, jittering her fingers at us.

"I've made peace with my father, Dave," Lila said, watching
Alafair walk up the steps of the gallery. Then: "Do you think your
daughter should talk to adults like that?"

"If she feels like it."

Her eyes wandered through the trees, her long lashes blinking
like black wire. "Well, anyway, my father's in the car. He'd like to
shake hands," she said.

"You've brought your—"

"Dave, I've forgiven him for the mistakes he made years ago.
Jack Flynn was in the Communist Party. His friends were union
terrorists. Didn't you do things in war you regretted?"

"
You
've forgiven him? Goodbye, Lila."

"No, he's been good enough to come out here. You're going to
be good enough to face him."

I propped my rake against a tree trunk and picked up two vinyl
bags of leaves and pecan husks and carried them out to the road. I
hoped that somehow Lila would simply drive away with her father.
Instead, he got out of the Oldsmobile and approached me, wearing white
trousers and a blue sports coat with brass buttons.

"I'm willing to shake hands and start over again, Mr.
Robicheaux. I do this out of gratitude for the help you've given my
daughter. She has enormous respect for you," he said.

He extended his hand. It was manicured and small, the
candy-striped French cuff lying neatly across the wrist. It did not
look like a hand that possessed the strength to whip a chain across a
man's back and sunder his bones with nails.

"I'm offering you my hand, sir," he said.

I dropped the two leaf bags on the roadside and wiped my palms
on my khakis, then stepped back into the shade, away from Terrebonne.

"Scruggs is blackmailing you. You need me, or someone like me,
to pop a cap on him and get him out of your life. That's not going to
happen," I said.

He tapped his right hand gingerly on his cheek, as though he
had a toothache.

"I tried. Truly I have. Now, I'll leave you alone, sir," he
said.

"You and your family pretend to gentility, Mr. Terrebonne. But
your ancestor murdered black soldiers under the bluffs at Fort Pillow
and caused the deaths of his twin daughters. You and your father
brought grief to black people like Willie Broussard and his wife and
killed anyone who threatened your power. None of you are what you seem."

He stood in the center of the road, not moving when a car
passed, the dust swirling around him, his face looking at words that
seemed to be marching by in front of his eyes.

"I congratulate you on your sobriety, Mr. Robicheaux. I
suspect for a man such as yourself it was a very difficult
accomplishment," he said, and walked back to the Oldsmobile and got
inside and waited for his daughter.

I turned around and almost collided into Lila.

"I can't believe what you just did. How dare you?" she said.

"Don't you understand what your father has participated in? He
crucified a living human being. Wake up, Lila. He's the definition of
evil."

She struck me across the face.

I stood in the road, with the ashes of leaves blowing around
me, and watched their car disappear down the long tunnel of oaks.

"I hate her," Alafair said behind me.

"Don't give them power, Alf," I replied.

But I felt a great sorrow. Inside all of Lila's alcoholic
madness she had always seen the truth about her father's iniquity. Now,
the restoration of light and the gift of sobriety in her life had
somehow made her morally blind.

I put my arm on Alafair's shoulder, and the two of us walked
into the house.

CISCO FLYNN WAS IN MY office the next
morning. He sat in a
chair in front of my desk, his hands opening and closing on his thighs.

"Out at the dock, when I told you to look at the photos? I was
angry," I said, holding the duplicates of the three photographs from
the buried jar.

"Just give them to me, would you?" he said.

I handed the photographs across the desk to him. He looked at
them slowly, one by one, his face never changing expression. But I saw
a twitch in his cheek under one eye. He lay the photos back on the desk
and straightened himself in the chair.

His voice was dry when he spoke. "You're sure that's
Terrebonne, the dude with the missing finger?"

"Every road we take leads to his front door," I said.

"This guy Scruggs was there, too?"

"Put it in the bank."

He stared out the window at the fronds of a palm tree swelling
in the wind.

"I understand he's back in the area," Cisco said.

"Don't have the wrong kind of thoughts, partner."

"I always thought the worst people I ever met were in
Hollywood. But they're right here."

"Evil doesn't have a zip code, Cisco." He picked up the photos
and looked at them again. Then he set them down and propped his elbows
on my desk and rested his forehead on his fingers. I thought he was
going to speak, then I realized he was weeping.

AT NOON, WHEN I was on my way to
lunch, Helen caught up with
me in the parking lot.

"Hang on, Streak. I just got a call from some woman named
Jessie Rideau. She says she was in the hotel in Morgan City the night
Jack Flynn was kidnapped," she said.

"Why's she calling us now?"

We both got in my truck. I started the engine. Helen looked
straight ahead, as though trying to rethink a problem she couldn't
quite define.

"She says she and another woman were prostitutes who worked
out of the bar downstairs. She says Harpo Scruggs made the other woman,
someone named Lavern Viator, hide a lockbox for him."

"A lockbox? Where's the Viator woman?"

"She joined a cult in Texas and asked Rideau to keep the
lockbox. Rideau thinks Scruggs killed her. Now he wants the box."

"Why doesn't she give it to him?"

"She's afraid he'll kill her after he gets it."

"Tell her to come in."

"She doesn't trust us either."

I parked the truck in front of the cafeteria on Main Street.
The drawbridge was up on Bayou Teche and a shrimp boat was passing
through the pilings.

"Let's talk about it inside," I said.

"I can't eat. Before Rideau got panicky and hung up on me, she
said the killers were shooting craps in the room next to Jack Flynn.
They waited till he was by himself, then dragged him down a back stairs
and tied him to a post on a dock and whipped him with chains. She said
that's all that was supposed to happen. Except Scruggs told the others
the night was just beginning. He made the Viator woman come with them.
She held Jack Flynn's head in a towel so the blood wouldn't get on the
seat."

Helen pressed at her temple with two fingers.

"What is it?" I said.

"Rideau said you can see Flynn's face on the towel. Isn't that
some bullshit? She said there're chains and a hammer and handcuffs in
the box, too. I got to boogie, boss man. The next time this broad
calls, I'm transferring her to your extension," she said.

I SPENT THE REST of the day with the
paperwork that my file
drawer seemed to procreate from the time I closed it in the afternoon
until I opened it in the morning. The paperwork all concerned the Pool,
that comic Greek chorus of miscreants who are always in the wings,
upstaging our most tragic moments, flatulent, burping, snickering,
catcalling at the audience. It has been my long-held belief as a police
officer that Hamlet and Ophelia might command our respect and
admiration, but Sir Toby Belch and his minions usually consume most of
our energies.

Here are just a few random case file entries in the lives of
Pool members during a one-month period.

A pipehead tries to smoke Drāno crystals in a hookah.
After he
recovers from destroying several thousand brain cells in his head, he
dials 911 and dimes his dealer for selling him bad dope.

A man steals a blank headstone from a funeral home, engraves
his mother's name on it, and places it in his back yard. When
confronted with the theft, he explains that his wife poured his
mother's ashes down the sink and the man wished to put a marker over
the septic tank where his mother now resides.

A woman who has fought with her common-law husband for ten
years reports that her TV remote control triggered the electronically
operated door on the garage and crushed his skull.

Two cousins break into the back of a liquor store, then can't
start their car. They flee on foot, then report their car as stolen.
It's a good plan. Except they don't bother to change their shoes. The
liquor store's floor had been freshly painted and the cousins track the
paint all over our floors when they file their stolen car report.

THAT EVENING CLETE AND I filled a bait
bucket with shiners and
took my outboard to Henderson Swamp and fished for sac-a-lait. The sun
was dull red in the west, molten and misshaped as though it were
dissolving in its own heat among the strips of lavender cloud that
clung to the horizon. We crossed a wide bay, then let the boat drift in
the lee of an island that was heavily wooded with willow and cypress
trees. The mosquitoes were thick in the shadows of the trees, and you
could see bream feeding among the lily pads and smell an odor like fish
roe in the water.

I looked across the bay at the levee, where there was a
paintless, tin-roofed house that had not been there three weeks ago.

"Where'd that come from?" I said.

"Billy Holtzner just built it. It's part of the movie," Clete
said.

"You're kidding. That guy's like a disease spreading itself
across the state."

"Check it out."

I reached into the rucksack where I had packed our sandwiches
and a thermos of coffee and my World War II Japanese field glasses. I
adjusted the focus on the glasses and saw Billy Holtzner and his
daughter talking with a half dozen people on the gallery of the house.

"Aren't you supposed to be out there with them?" I asked Clete.

"They work what they call a twelve-hour turnaround. Anyway, I
go off the clock at five. Then he's got some other guys to boss around.
They'll be out there to one or two in the morning. Dave, I'm going to
do my job, but I think that guy's dead meat."

"Why?"

"You remember guys in Nam you knew were going to get it?
Walking fuckups who stunk of fear and were always trying to hang on to
you? Holtzner's got that same stink on him. It's on his breath, in his
clothes, I don't even like looking at him."

A few drops of rain dimpled the water, then the sac-a-lait
started biting. Unlike bream or bass, they would take the shiner
straight down, pulling the bobber with a steady tension into the
water's darkness. They would fight hard, pumping away from the boat,
until they broke the surface, when they would turn on their side and
give it up.

We layered them with crushed ice in the cooler, then I took
our ham-and-onion sandwiches and coffee thermos out of the rucksack and
lay them on the cooler's top. In the distance, by the newly constructed
movie set, I saw two figures get on an airboat and roar across the bay
toward us.

The noise of the engine and fan was deafening, the wake a
long, flat depression that swirled with mud. The pilot cut the engine
and let the airboat float into the lee of the island. Billy Holtzner
sat next to him, a blue baseball cap on his head. He was smiling.

"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.