DR10 - Sunset Limited (38 page)

We crossed through the back yard, past a collapsed privy and a
cistern, with a brick foundation, that had caved outward into
disjointed slats. The barn still had its roof, and through the rain I
could hear hogs snuffing inside it. A tree of lightning burst across
the sky and Scruggs jerked his face toward the light as though loud
doors had been thrown back on their hinges behind him.

He saw me watching him and pointed the revolver at my face.

"I told you to walk ahead of me!" he said.

We went through the rear door of the house into a gutted
kitchen that was illuminated by the soft glow of a light at the bottom
of a basement stairs.

"Where is Jessie Rideau?" I said.

Lightning crashed into a piney woods at the back of the
property.

"Keep asking questions and I'll see you spend some time with
her," he said, and pointed at the basement stairs with the barrel of
the gun.

I walked down the wood steps into the basement, where a
rechargeable Coleman lantern burned on the cement floor. The air was
damp and cool, like the air inside a cave, and smelled of water and
stone and the nests of small animals. Behind an old wooden icebox, the
kind with an insert at the top for a block of tonged ice, I saw a
woman's shoe and the sole of a bare foot. I walked around the side of
the icebox and knelt down by the woman's side and felt her throat.

"You sonofabitch," I said to Scruggs.

"Her heart give out. She was old. It wasn't my fault," Scruggs
said. Then he sat down in a wood chair, as though all his strength had
drained through the bottoms of his feet. He stared at me dully from
under the brim of his hat and wet his lips and swallowed before he
spoke again.

"Yonder's what you want," he said.

In the corner, amidst a pile of bricks and broken mortar and
plaster that had been prized from the wall with a crowbar, was a steel
box that had probably been used to contain dynamite caps at one time.
The lid was bradded and painted silver and heavy in my hand when I
lifted it back on its hinges. Inside the box were a pair of handcuffs,
two lengths of chain, a bath towel flattened inside a plastic bag, and
a big hammer whose handle was almost black, as though stove soot and
grease had been rubbed into the grain.

"Terrebonne's prints are gonna be on that hammer. The print
will hold in blood just like in ink. Forensic man done told me that,"
Scruggs said.

"You've had your hands all over it. So have the women," I
replied.

"The towel's got Flynn's blood all over it. So do them chains.
You just got to get the right lab man to lift Terrebonne's prints."

His voice was deep in his throat, full of phlegm, his tongue
thick against his dentures. He kept straightening his shoulders, as
though resisting an unseen weight that was pushing them forward.

I removed the towel from the plastic bag and unfolded it. It
was stiff and crusted, the fibers as pointed and hard as young thorns.
I looked at the image in the center of the cloth, the black lines and
smears that could have been a brow, a chin, a set of jawbones, eye
sockets, even hair that had been soaked with blood.

"Do you have any idea of what you've been part of? Don't any
of you understand what you've done?" I said to him.

"Flynn stirred everybody up. I know what I done. I was doing a
job. That's the way it was back then."

"What do you see on the towel, Scruggs?"

"Dried blood. I done told you that. You carry all this to a
lab. You gonna do that or not?"

He breathed through his mouth, his eyes seeming to focus on an
insect an inch from the bridge of his nose. A terrible odor rose from
his clothes.

"I'm going for the paramedics now," I said.

"A .45 ball went all the way through my intestines. I ain't
gonna live wired to machines. Tell Terrebonne I expect I'll see him.
Tell him Hell don't have no lemonade springs."

He fitted the Ruger's barrel under the top of his dentures and
pulled the trigger. The round exited from the crown of his head and
patterned the plaster on the brick wall with a single red streak. His
head hung back on his wide shoulders, his eyes staring sightlessly at
the ceiling. A puff of smoke, like a dirty feather, drifted out of his
mouth.

TWO DAYS LATER THE SKY was blue
outside my office, a balmy
wind clattering the palm trees on the lawn. Clete stood at the window,
his porkpie hat on his head, his hands on his hips, surveying the
street and the perfection of the afternoon. He turned and propped his
huge arms on my desk and stared down into my face.

"Blow it off. Prints or no prints, rich guys don't do time,"
he said.

"I want to have that hammer sent to an FBI lab," I said.

"Forget it. If the St. Landry Parish guys couldn't lift them,
nobody else is going to either. You even told Scruggs he was firing in
the well."

"Look, Clete, you mean well, but—"

"The prints aren't what's bothering you. It's that damn towel."

"I saw the face on it. Those cops in Opelousas acted like I
was drunk. Even the skipper down the hall."

"So fuck 'em," Clete said.

"I've got to get back to work. Where's your car?"

"Dave, you saw that face on the towel because you believe. You
expect guys with jock rash of the brain to understand what you're
talking about?"

"Where's your car, Clete?"

"I'm selling it," he said. He was sitting on the corner of my
desk now, his upper arms scaling with dried sun blisters. I could smell
salt water and sun lotion on his skin. "Leave Terrebonne alone. The
guy's got juice all the way to Washington. You'll never touch him."

"He's going down."

"Not because of anything we do." He tapped his knuckles on the
desk. "There's my ride."

Through the window I saw his convertible pull up to the curb.
A woman in a scarf and dark glasses was behind the wheel.

"Who's driving?" I asked.

"Lila Terrebonne. I'll call you later."

AT NOON I MET Bootsie in City Park for
lunch. We spread a
checkered cloth on a table under a tin shed by the bayou and set out
the silverware and salt and pepper shakers and a thermos of iced tea
and a platter of cold cuts and stuffed eggs. The camellias were
starting to bloom, and across the bayou we could see the bamboo and
flowers and the live oaks in the yard of The Shadows.

I could almost forget about the events of the last few days.

Until I saw Megan Flynn park her car on the drive that wound
through the park and stand by it, looking in our direction.

Bootsie saw her, too.

"I don't know why she's here," I said.

"Invite her over and find out," Bootsie said.

"That's what I have office hours for."

"You want me to do it?"

I set down the stack of plastic cups I was unwrapping and
walked across the grass to the spreading oak Megan stood under.

"I didn't know you were with anyone. I wanted to thank you for
all you've done and say goodbye," she said.

"Where are you going?"

"Paris. Rivages, my French publisher, wants me to do a
collection on the Spaniards who fled into the Midi after the Spanish
Civil War. By the way, I thought you'd like to know Cisco walked out on
the film. It's probably going to bankrupt him."

"Cisco's stand-up."

"Billy Holtzner doesn't have the talent to finish it by
himself. His backers are going to be very upset."

"That composite I gave you of the Canadian hit man, you and
Cisco have no idea who he is?"

"No, we'd tell you."

We looked at each other in the silence. Leaves gusted from
around the trunks of the trees onto the drive. Her gaze shifted briefly
to Bootsie, who sat at the picnic table with her back to us.

"I'm flying out tomorrow afternoon with some friends. I don't
guess I'll see you for some time," she said, and extended her hand. It
felt small and cool inside mine.

I watched her get in her car, drawing her long khaki-clad legs
and sandaled feet in after her, her dull red hair thick on the back of
her neck.

Is this the way it all ends? I thought. Megan goes back to
Europe, Clete eats aspirins for his hangovers and labors through all
the sweaty legal mechanisms of the court system to get his driver's
license back, the parish buries Harpo Scruggs in a potter's field, and
Archer Terrebonne fixes another drink and plays tennis at his club with
his daughter.

I walked back to the tin shed and sat down next to Bootsie.

"She came to say goodbye," I said.

"That's why she didn't come over to the table," she replied.

THAT EVENING, WHICH WAS Friday, the
sky was purple, the clouds
in the west stippled with the sun's last orange light. I raked stream
trash out of the coulee and carried it in a washtub to the compost
pile, then fed Tripod, our three-legged coon, and put fresh water in
his bowl. My neighbor's cane was thick and green and waving in the
field, and flights of ducks trailed in long V formations across the sun.

The phone rang inside, and Bootsie carried the portable out
into the yard.

"We've got the Canadian identified. His name is Jacques
Poitier, a real piece of shit," Adrien Glazier said. "Interpol says
he's a suspect in at least a dozen assassinations. He's worked the
Middle East, Europe, both sides in Latin America. He's gotten away with
killing Israelis."

"We're not up to dealing with guys like this. Send us some
help," I said.

"I'll see what I can do Monday," she said.

"Contract killers don't keep regular hours."

"Why do you think I'm making this call?" she said. To feel
better, I thought. But I didn't say it.

THAT EVENING I COULDN'T rest. But I
didn't know what it was
that bothered me.

Clete Purcel? His battered chartreuse convertible? Lila
Terrebonne?

I called Clete's cottage.

"Where's your Caddy?" I asked.

"Lila's got it. I'm signing the title over to her Monday. Why?"

"Geraldine Holtzner's been driving it all over the area."

"Streak, the Terrebonnes might hurt themselves, but they don't
get hurt by others. What does it take to make you understand that?"

"The Canadian shooter is a guy named Jacques Poitier. Ever
hear of him?"

"No. And if he gives me any grief, I'm going to stick a .38
down his pants and blow his Jolly Roger off. Now, let me get some
sleep."

"Megan told you she's going to France?"

The line was so quiet I thought it had gone dead. Then he
said, "She must have called while I was out. When's she going?"

Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

THE SET THAT HAD been constructed on
the levee at Henderson
Swamp was lighted with the haloed brilliance of a phosphorus flare when
Lila Terrebonne drove Clete's convertible along the dirt road at the
top of the levee, above the long, wind-ruffled bays and islands of
willow trees that were turning yellow with the season. The evening was
cool, and she wore a sweater over her shoulders, a dark scarf with
roses stitched on it tied around her head. She found her father with
Billy Holtzner, and the three of them ate dinner on a cardboard table
by the water's edge and drank a bottle of nonalcoholic champagne that
had been chilled in a silver bucket.

When she left, she asked a grip to help her fasten down the
top on her car. He was the only one to notice the blue Ford that pulled
out of a fish camp down the levee and followed her toward the highway.
He did not think it significant and did not mention the fact to anyone
until later.

THE MAN IN THE blue Ford followed her
through St. Martinville
and down the Loreauville road to Cisco Flynn's house. When she turned
into Cisco's driveway, a lawn party was in progress and the man in the
Ford parked on the swale and opened his hood and appeared to onlookers
to be at work on his engine.

On the patio, behind the house, Lila Terrebonne called Cisco
Flynn a lowborn, treacherous sycophant, picked up his own mint julep
from the table, and flung it in his face.

But on the front lawn a jazz combo played atop an elevated
platform, and the guests wandered among the citrus and oak trees and
the drink tables and the music that seemed to charm the pink softness
of the evening into their lives. Megan wore her funny straw hat with an
evening dress that clung to her figure like ice water, and was talking
to a group of friends, people from New York and overseas, when she
noticed the man working on his car.

She stood between two myrtle bushes, on the edge of the swale,
and waited until he seemed to feel her eyes on his back. He
straightened up and smiled, but the smile came and went erratically, as
though the man thought it into place.

He wore a form-fitting long-sleeve gold shirt and blue jeans
that were so tight they looked painted on his skin. A short-brim fedora
with a red feather in the band rested on the fender. His hair was the
color of his shirt, waved, and cut long and parted on the side so it
combed down over one ear.

"It's a battery cable. I'll have it started in a minute," he
said in a French accent.

She stared at him without speaking, a champagne glass resting
in the fingers of both hands, her chest rising and falling.

"I am a big fan of American movies. I saw a lady turn in here.
Isn't she the daughter of a famous Hollywood director?" he said.

"I'm not sure who you mean," Megan said.

"She was driving a Cadillac, a convertible," he said, and
waited. Then he smiled, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. "Ah, I'm
right, aren't I? Her father is William Holtzner. I love all his films.
He is wonderful," the man said.

She stepped backward, once, twice, three times, the myrtle
bushes brushing against her bare arms, then stood silently among her
friends. She looked back at the man with gold hair only after he had
restarted his car and driven down the road. Five minutes later Lila
Terrebonne backed the Cadillac down the drive, hooking one wheel over
the slab into a freshly watered flower bed, then shifted into low out
on the road and floored the accelerator toward New Iberia. Her radio
was blaring with rock 'n' roll from the 1960s, her face energized with
vindication inside the black scarf, stitched with roses, that was tied
tightly around her head.