DR10 - Sunset Limited (39 page)

THE MAN NAMED JACQUES Poitier caught
up with her on the
two-lane road that paralleled Bayou Teche, only one mile from her home.
Witnesses said she tried to outrun him, swerving back and forth across
the highway, blowing her horn, waving desperately at a group of blacks
on the side of the road. Others said he passed her and they heard a
gunshot. But we found no evidence of the latter, only a thread-worn
tire that had exploded on the rim before the Cadillac skidded sideways,
showering sparks off the pavement, into an oncoming dump truck loaded
with condemned asbestos.

IF THERE WAS ANY DRAMA at the crime
scene later, it was not in
our search for evidence or even in the removal of Lila's body from
under the crushed roof of the Cadillac. Archer Terrebonne arrived at
the scene twenty minutes after the crash, and was joined a few minutes
later by Billy Holtzner. Terrebonne immediately took charge, as though
his very presence and the slip-on half-top boots and red flannel shirt
and quilted hunting vest and visor cap he wore gave him a level of
authority that none of the firemen or paramedics or sheriffs deputies
possessed.

They all did his bidding or sought sanction or at a minimum
gave an explanation to him for whatever they did. It was extraordinary
to behold. His attorney and family physician were there; also a U.S.
congressman and a well-known movie actor. Terrebonne wore his grief
like a patrician who had become a man of the people. A
three-hundred-pound St. Mary Parish deputy, his mouth full of Red Man,
stood next to me, his eyes fixed admiringly on Terrebonne.

"That ole boy is one brave sonofabuck, ain't he?" he said.

The paramedics covered Lila's body with a sheet and wheeled it
on the gurney to the back of an ambulance, the strobe lights of TV
cameras flowing with it, passing across Terrebonne's and Holtzner's
stoic faces.

Helen Soileau and I walked through the crowd until we were a
few feet from Terrebonne. Red flares burned along the shoulder of the
road, and mist clung to the bayou and the oak trunks along the bank.
The air was cold, but my face felt hot and moist with humidity. His
eyes never registered our presence, as though we were moths outside a
glass jar, looking in upon a pure white flame.

"Your daughter's death is on you, Terrebonne. You didn't
intend for it to happen, but you helped bring the people here who
killed her," I said.

A woman gasped; the scattered conversation around us died.

"You hope this will destroy me, don't you?" he replied.

"Harpo Scruggs said to tell you he'd be expecting you soon. I
think he knew what he was talking about," I said.

"Don't you talk to him like that," Holtzner said, rising on
the balls of his feet, his face dilating with the opportunity that had
presented itself. "I'll tell you something else, too. Me and my new
co-director are finishing our picture. And it's going to be dedicated
to Lila Terrebonne. You can take your dirty mouth out of here."

Helen stepped toward him, her finger lifted toward his face.

"He's a gentleman. I'm not. Smart of again and see what
happens," she said.

We walked to our cruiser, past the crushed, upside-down shell
of Clete's Cadillac, the eyes of reporters and cops and passersby
riveted on the sides of our faces.

I heard a voice behind me, one I didn't recognize, yell out,
"You're the bottom of the barrel, Robicheaux."

Then others applauded him.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Helen and I
began re-creating Lila
Terrebonne's odyssey from the movie set on the levee, where she had
dinner with her father and Billy Holtzner, to the moment she must have
realized her peril and tried to outrun the contract assassin named
Jacques Poitier. We interviewed the stage grip who saw the blue Ford
pull out of the fish camp and follow her back down the levee; an
attendant at a filling station in St. Martinville, where she stopped
for gasoline; and everyone we could find from the Flynns' lawn party.

The New York and overseas friends of Megan and Cisco were
cooperative and humble to a fault, in large part because they never
sensed the implications of what they told us. But after talking with
three guests from the lawn party, I had no doubt as to what transpired
during the encounter between Megan and the French Canadian named
Poitier.

Helen and I finished the last interview at a bed-and-breakfast
across from The Shadows at three o'clock that afternoon. It was warm
and the trees were speckled with sunlight, and a few raindrops were
clicking on the bamboo in front of The Shadows and drying as soon as
they struck the sidewalks.

"Megan's plane leaves at three-thirty from Acadiana Regional.
See if you can get a hold of Judge Mouton at his club," I said.

"A warrant? We might be on shaky ground. There has to be
intent, right?"

"Megan never did anything in her life without intending to."

OUR SMALL LOCAL AIRPORT had been built
on the site of the old
U.S. Navy air base outside of town. As I drove down the state road
toward the hangars and maze of runways, under a partially blue sky that
was starting to seal with rain clouds, my heart was beating in a way
that it shouldn't, my hands sweating black prints on the steering wheel.

Then I saw her, with three other people, standing by a hangar,
her luggage next to her, while a Learjet taxied around the far side of
a parking area filled with helicopters. She wore her straw hat and a
pink dress with straps and lace around the hem, and when the wind began
gusting she held her hat to her head with one hand in a way that made
me think of a 1920s flapper.

She saw me walking toward her, like someone she recognized
from a dream, then her eyes fixed on mine and the smile went out of her
face and she glanced briefly toward the horizon, as though the wind and
the churning treetops held a message for her.

I looked at my watch. It was 3:25. The door to the Lear opened
and a man in a white jacket and dark blue pants lowered the steps to
the tarmac. Her friends picked up their luggage and drifted toward the
door, glancing discreetly in her direction, unsure of the situation.

"Jacques Poitier stopped his car on the swale in front of your
party. Your guests heard you talking to him," I said.

"He said his car was broken. He was working on it," she
replied.

"He asked you if the woman driving Clete's Cadillac was
Holtzner's daughter."

She was silent, her hair ruffling thickly on her neck. She
looked at the open door of the plane and the attendant who waited for
her.

"You let him think it was Geraldine Holtzner," I said.

"I didn't tell him anything, Dave."

"You knew who he was. I gave you the composite drawing."

"They're waiting for me."

"Why'd you do it, Meg?"

"I'm sorry for Lila Terrebonne. I'm not sorry for her father."

"She didn't deserve what happened to her."

"Neither did my father. I'm going now, unless you're arresting
me. I don't think you can either. If I did anything wrong, it was a sin
of omission. That's not a crime."

"You've already talked to a lawyer," I said, almost in
amazement.

She leaned down and picked up her suitcase and shoulder bag.
When she did, her hat blew off her head and bounced end over end across
the tarmac. I ran after it, like a high school boy would, then walked
back to her, brushing it off, and placed it in her hands.

"I won't let this rest. You've contributed to the death of an
innocent person. Just like the black guy who died in your lens years
ago. Somebody else has paid your tab. Don't come back to New Iberia,
Meg," I said.

Her eyes held on mine and I saw a great sadness sweep through
her face, like that of a child watching a balloon break loose from its
string and float away suddenly on the wind.

THAT AFTERNOON THE WIND DROPPED and
there was a red tint like
dye in the clouds, and the water was high and brown in the bayou, the
cypress and willows thick with robins. It should have been a good
afternoon for business at the bait shop and dock, but it wasn't. The
parking area was empty; there was no whine of boat engines out on the
water, and the sound of my footsteps on the planks in the dock echoed
off the bayou as though I were walking under a glass dome. A drunk who
had given Batist trouble earlier that day had broken the guardrail on
the dock and fallen to the ramp below. I got some lumber and hand tools
and an electric saw from the tin shed behind the house to repair the
gap in the rail, and Alafair clipped Tripod's chain on his collar and
walked him down to the dock with me. I heard the front screen door bang
behind us, and I turned and saw Bootsie on the gallery. She waved, then
went down into the flower bed with a trowel and a plastic bucket and
began working on her knees.

"Where is everybody?" Alafair said out on the dock.

"I think a lot of people went to the USL game today," I
replied.

"There's no sound. It makes my ears pop."

"How about opening up a couple of cans of Dr Pepper?" I said.

She went inside the bait shop, but did not come back out right
away. I heard the cash register drawer open and knew the subterfuge
that was at work, one that she used to mask her charity, as though
somehow it were a vice. She would pay for the fried pie she took from
the counter, then cradle Tripod in one arm and hand-feed it to him
whether he wanted it or not, while his thick, ringed tail flipped in
the air like a spring.

I tried to concentrate on repairing the rail on the dock and
not see the thoughts that were as bright and jagged as shards of glass
in the center of my mind. I kept touching my brow and temple with my
arm, as though I were wiping off sweat, but that wasn't my trouble. I
could feel a band of pressure tightening across the side of my head,
just as I had felt it on night trails in Vietnam or when Bedcheck
Charlie was cutting through our wire.

What was it that bothered me? The presence of men like Archer
Terrebonne in our midst? But why should I worry about his kind? They
had always been with us, scheming, buying our leaders, deceiving the
masses. No, it was Megan, and Megan, and Megan, and her betrayal of
everything I thought she represented: Joe Hill, the Wobblies, the
strikers murdered at Ludlow, Colorado, Woody Guthrie, Dorothy Day, all
those faceless working people whom historians and academics and
liberals alike treat with indifference.

I ran the electric saw through a two-by-four and ground the
blade across a nail. The board seemed to explode, the saw leaping from
my hand, splinters embedding in my skin like needles. I stepped
backward from the saw, which continued to spin by my foot, then ripped
the cord loose from the socket in the bait-shop wall.

"You all right, Dave?" Alafair said through the screen.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, holding the back of my right hand.

Through the trees next to the bayou I saw a mud-splattered
stake truck loaded with boxes of chrysanthemums coming down the road.
The truck pulled at an angle across the boat ramp, and Mout' Broussard
got out on the passenger's side and a tiny Hmong woman in a conical
straw hat with a face like a withered apple got down from the other.
Mout' put a long stick across his shoulders, and the woman loaded
wire-bailed baskets of flowers on each end of it, then picked up a
basket herself and followed him down the dock.

"You sell these for us, we gonna give you half, you," Mout'
said.

"I don't seem to have much business today, Mout'," I said.

"Season's almost over. I'm fixing to give them away," he said.

"Put them under the eave. We'll give it a try," I said.

He and the woman lay the flowers in yellow and brown and
purple clumps against the bait-shop wall.

Mout' wore a suit coat with his overalls and was sweating
inside his clothes. He wiped his face with a red handkerchief.

"You doing all right?" he said to me.

"Sure," I said.

"That's real good. Way it should be," he said. He replaced the
long stick across his shoulders and extended his arms on it and walked
with the Hmong woman toward the truck, their bodies lit by the glow of
the sun through the trees.

Why look for the fires that burn in western skies? I thought.
The excoriated symbol of difference was always within our ken. You
didn't have to see far to find it—an elderly black man who
took pride in the fact he shined Huey Long's and Harry James's shoes or
a misplaced and wizened Hmong woman who had fought the Communists in
Laos for the French and the CIA and now grew flowers for Cajuns in
Louisiana. The story was ongoing, the players changing only in name. I
believe Jack Flynn understood that and probably forgave his children
when they didn't.

I sat on a bench by the water faucet and tried to pick the
wood splinters out of the backs of my hands. The wind came up and the
robins filled the air with a sound that was almost deafening, their
wings fluttering above my head, their breasts the color of dried blood.

"Are we still going to the show tonight?" Alafair said.

"You better believe it, you," I said, and winked.

She flipped Tripod up on her shoulder like a sack of meal, and
the three of us went up the slope to find Bootsie.

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