DR10 - Sunset Limited (7 page)

"
Dave
…"Megan said.

"Give it a break, Megan," I said.

"No… Behind us. The G sent us an escort," she said.

I turned and looked back through the hatch at our wake. Coming
hard right up the trough was a large powerboat, its enamel-white bow
painted with the blue-and-red insignia of the United States Coast
Guard. A helicopter dipped out of the sky behind the Coast Guard boat,
yawing, its downdraft hammering the water.

I entered a channel that led to the boat ramp where my truck
and boat trailer were parked. The helicopter swept past us and landed
in the shell parking area below the levee. The right-hand door opened
and the FBI agent named Adrien Glazier stepped out and walked toward us
while the helicopter's blades were still spinning.

I waded through the shallows onto the concrete ramp.

"You're out of your jurisdiction, so I'm going to save you a
lot of paperwork," she said.

"Oh?"

"We're taking Mr. William Broussard into our custody.
Interstate transportation of stolen property. You want to argue about
it, we can talk about interference with a federal law officer in the
performance of her duty."

Then I saw her eyes focus over my shoulder on Megan, who stood
on the bow of my boat, her hair blowing under her straw hat.

"You take one picture out here and I'll have you in
handcuffs," Adrien Glazier said.

"Broussard's been snakebit. He needs to be in a hospital," I
said.

But she wasn't listening. She and Megan stared at each other
with the bright and intimate recognition of old adversaries who might
have come aborning from another time.

THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCHTIME Clete Purcel
picked me up at the
office in the chartreuse Cadillac convertible that he had bought from a
member of the Giacano crime family in New Orleans, a third-generation
miscreant by the name of Stevie Gee who decided to spot-weld a leak in
the gas tank but got drunk first and forgot to fill the tank with water
before he fired up the welding machine. The scorch marks had faded now
and looked like smoky gray tentacles on the back fenders.

The back seat was loaded with fishing rods, a tackle box that
was three feet long, an ice chest, air cushions, crushed beer cans,
life preservers, crab traps, a hoop net that had been ground up in a
boat propeller, and a tangled trot line whose hooks were ringed with
dried smelt.

Clete wore baggy white pants without a shirt and a powder-blue
porkpie hat, and his skin looked bronzed and oily in the sun. He had
been the best cop I ever knew until his career went south, literally,
all the way to Central America, because of marriage trouble, pills,
booze, hookers, indebtedness to shylocks, and finally a murder warrant
that his fellow officers barely missed serving on him at the New
Orleans airport.

I went inside Victor's on Main Street for a take-out order,
then we crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove past the live
oaks on the lawn of the gray and boarded-up buildings that used to be
Mount Carmel Academy, then through the residential section into City
Park. We sat at a picnic table under a tree, not far from the swimming
pool, where children were cannonballing off the diving board. The sun
had gone behind the clouds and rain rings appeared soundlessly on the
bayou's surface, like bream rising to feed.

"That execution in St. Mary Parish… the two brothers
who got clipped after they raped the black girl? How bad you want the
perps?" he said.

"What do you think?"

"I see it as another parish's grief. As a couple of guys who
got what they had coming."

"The shooters had one of our uniforms."

He set down the pork-chop sandwich he was eating and scratched
the scar that ran through his left eyebrow.

"I'm still running down skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie
Bimstine. Nig went bail for a couple of chippies who work a regular
Murphy game in the Quarter. They're both junkies, runny noses, scabs on
their thighs, mainlining six and seven balloons a day, sound familiar,
scared shitless of detoxing in City Prison, except they're even more
scared of their pimp, who's the guy they have to give up if they're
going to beat the Murphy beef.

"So they ask Nig if they should go to the prosecutor's office
with this story they got off a couple of Johns who acted like
over-the-hill cops. These guys were talking to each other about capping
some brothers out in the Basin. One of the chippies asks if they're
talking about black guys. One duffer laughs and says, 'No, just some
boys who should have kept practicing on colored girls and left white
bread alone.'"

"Where are these guys out of?"

"They said San Antone. But Johns usually lie."

"What else do the girls know?"

"They're airheads, Dave. The intellectual one reads the
shopping guide on the toilet. Besides, they're not interested in
dealing anymore. Their pimp decided to plea out, so they're off the
hook."

"Write down their names, will you?"

He took a piece of folded paper from his pants pocket, with
the names of the two women and their addresses already written on it,
and set it on the plank table. He started eating again, his green eyes
smiling at nothing.

"Old lesson from the First District, big mon. When somebody
wastes a couple of shit bags…" He realized I wasn't
listening, that my gaze was focused over his shoulder on the swimming
pool. He turned and stared through the tree trunks, his gaze roving
across the swimmers in the pool, the parents who were walking their
children by the hand to an instruction class a female lifeguard was
putting together in the shallow end. Then his eyes focused on a man who
stood between the wire enclosure and the bathhouse.

The man had a peroxided flattop, a large cranium, like a
person with water on the brain, cheekbones that tapered in an inverted
triangle to his chin, a small mouth full of teeth. He wore white shoes
and pale orange slacks and a beige shirt with the short sleeves rolled
in neat cuffs and the collar turned up on the neck. He pumped a blue
rubber ball in his right palm.

"You know that dude?" Clete said.

"His name's Swede Boxleiter."

"A graduate?"

"Canon City, Colorado. The FBI showed me some photos of a yard
job he did on a guy."

"What's he doing around here?"

Boxleiter wore shades instead of the granny glasses I had seen
in the photos. But there was no doubt about the object of his
attention. The children taking swim lessons were lined up along the
edge of the pool, their swimsuits clinging wetly to their bodies.
Boxleiter snapped the rubber ball off the pavement, ricocheting it
against the bathhouse wall, retrieving it back into his palm as though
it were attached to a magic string.

"Excuse me a minute," I said to Clete.

I walked through the oaks to the pool. The air smelled of
leaves and chlorine and the rain that was sprinkling on the heated
cement. I stood two feet behind Boxleiter, who hung on to the wire mesh
of the fence with one hand while the other kneaded the rubber ball. The
green veins in his forearm were pumped with blood. He chewed gum, and a
lump of cartilage expanded and contracted against the bright slickness
of his jaw.

He felt my eyes on the back of his neck.

"You want something?" he asked.

"We thought we'd welcome you to town. Have you drop by the
department. Maybe meet the sheriff."

He grinned at the corner of his mouth.

"You think you seen me somewhere?"

I continued to stare into his face, not speaking. He removed
his shades, his eyes askance.

"Soooo, what kind of gig are we trying to build here?" he
asked.

"I don't like the way you look at children."

"I'm looking at a swimming pool. But I'll move."

"We nail you on a short-eyes here, we'll flag your jacket and
put you in lockdown with some interesting company. This is Louisiana,
Swede."

He rolled the rubber ball down the back of his forearm, off
his elbow, and caught it in his palm, all in one motion. Then he rolled
it back and forth across the top of his fingers, the gum snapping in
his jaw all the while.

"I went out max time. You got no handle. I got a job, too. In
the movies. I'm not shitting you on that," he said.

"Watch your language, please."

"My language? Wow, I love this town already." Then his face
tilted, disconcerted, his breath drawing through his nose like an
animal catching a scent. "Why's Blimpo staring at me like that?"

I turned and saw Clete Purcel standing behind me. He grinned
and took out his comb and ran it through his sandy hair with both
hands. The skin under his arms was pink with sunburn.

"You think I got a weight problem?" he asked.

"No. 'Cause I don't know you. I don't know what kind of
problem you got."

"Then why'd you call me Blimpo?"

"So maybe I didn't mean anything by it."

"I think you did."

But Boxleiter turned his back on us, his attention fixed on
the deep end of the pool, his right hand opening and closing on the
blue rubber ball. The wind blew lines in his peroxided hair, and his
scalp had the dead gray color of putty. His lips moved silently.

"What'd you say?" Clete asked. When Boxleiter didn't reply,
Clete fitted his hand under Boxleiter's arm and turned him away from
the fence. "You said, 'Blow me, Fatso'?"

Boxleiter slipped the ball in his pocket and looked out into
the trees, his hands on his hips.

"It's a nice day. I'm gonna buy me a sno'ball. I love the
spearmint sno'balls they sell in this park. You guys want one?" he said.

We watched him walk away through the trees, the leaves
crunching under his feet like pecan shells, toward a cold drink stand
and ice machine a black man had set up under a candy-striped umbrella.

"Like the boy says, he doesn't come with handles," Clete said.

THAT AFTERNOON THE SHERIFF called me
into his office. He was
watering his window plants with a hand-painted teakettle, smoking his
pipe at the same time. His body was slatted with light through the
blinds, and beyond the blinds I could see the whitewashed crypts in the
old Catholic cemetery.

"I got a call from Alex Guidry. You reported him to the Humane
Society?" he said.

"He keeps his dogs penned on a filthy concrete slab without
shade."

"He claims you're harassing him."

"What did the Humane Society say?"

"They gave him a warning and told him they'd be back. Watch
your back with this character, Dave."

"That's it?"

"No. The other problem is your calls to the FBI in New
Orleans. They're off our backs for a while. Why stir them up?"

"Cool Breeze should be in our custody. We're letting the Feds
twist him to avoid a civil suit over the abuse of prisoners in our
jail."

"He's a four-time loser, Dave. He's not a victim. He fed a guy
into an electric saw."

"I don't think it's right."

"Tell that to people when we have to pass a parish sales tax
to pay off a class action suit, particularly one that will make a bunch
of convicts rich. I take that back. Tell it to that female FBI agent.
She was here while you were out to lunch. I really enjoyed the half
hour I spent listening to her."

"Adrien Glazier was here?"

IT WAS FRIDAY, AND when I drove home
that evening I should
have been beginning a fine weekend. Instead, she was waiting for me on
the dock, a cardboard satchel balanced on the railing under her hand. I
parked the car in the drive and walked down to meet her. She looked hot
in her pink suit, her ice-blue eyes filmed from the heat or the dust on
the road.

"You've got Breeze in lockdown and everybody around here
scared. What else do you want, Ms. Glazier?"

"It's Special Agent Gla—"

"Yeah, I know."

"You and Megan Flynn are taking this to the media, aren't you?"

"No. At least I'm not."

"Then why do both of you keep calling the Bureau?"

"Because I'm being denied access to a prisoner who escaped
from our jail, that's why."

She stared hard into my face, as though searching for the
right dials, her back teeth grinding softly, then said, "I want you to
look at a few more photos."

"No."

"What's the matter, you don't want to see the wreckage your
gal leaves in her wake?"

She pulled the elastic cord loose from the cardboard satchel
and spilled half the contents on a spool table. She lifted up a glossy
eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of Megan addressing a crowd of Latin
peasants from the bed of a produce truck. Megan was leaning forward,
her small hands balled into fists, her mouth wide with her oration.

"Here's another picture taken a few days later. If you look
closely, you'll recognize some of the dead people in the ditch. They
were in the crowd that listened to Megan Flynn. Where was she when this
happened? At the Hilton in Mexico City."

"You really hate her, don't you?"

I heard her take a breath, like a person who has stepped into
fouled air.

"No, I don't hate her, sir. I hate what she does. Other people
die so she can feel good about herself," she said.

I sifted through the photos and news clippings with my
fingers. I picked up one that had been taken from the
Denver
Post
and glued on a piece of cardboard backing. Adrien
Glazier was two inches away from my skin. I could smell perspiration
and body powder in her clothes. The news article was about
thirteen-year-old Megan Flynn winning first prize in the
Post's
essay contest. The photo showed her sitting in a chair, her hands
folded demurely in her lap, her essay medal worn proudly on her chest.

"Not bad for a kid in a state orphanage. I guess that's the
Megan I always remember. Maybe that's why I still think of her as one
of the most admirable people I've ever known. Thanks for coming by," I
said, and walked up the slope through the oak and pecan trees on my
lawn, and on into my lighted house, where my daughter and wife waited
supper for me.