DR10 - Sunset Limited (36 page)

"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.

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 karate 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.