Sunset Limited (19 page)

Helen put her hand on his shoulder.

“Not a time to be a wise-ass, sir,” she said.

Guidry’s golf companions looked away into the distance, their eyes fixed on the dazzling blue stretch of sky above the tree line.

Fifteen minutes later we sat down in a windowless interview room. In the back seat of the cruiser he had been silent, morose, his face dark with anger when he looked at us. I saw the sheriff at the end of the hall just before I closed the door to the room.

“Y’all got some damn nerve,” Guidry said.

“Someone told us you’re buds with an ex-Angola gun bull by the name of Harpo Scruggs,” I said.

“I know him. So what?” he replied.

“You see him recently?” Helen asked. She wore slacks and sat with one haunch on the corner of the desk.

“No.”

“Sure?” I said.

“He’s the nephew of a lawman I worked with twenty years ago. We grew up in the same town.”

“You didn’t answer me,” I said.

“I don’t have to.”

“The lawman you worked with was Harpo Delahoussey. Y’all put the squeeze on Cool Breeze Broussard over some moonshine whiskey. That’s not all you did either,” I said.

His eyes looked steadily into mine, heated, searching for the implied meaning in my words.

“Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a priest Friday morning,” Helen said.

“Arrest him, then.”

“How do you know we haven’t?” I asked.

“I don’t. It’s none of my business. I was fired from my job, thanks to your friend Willie Broussard,” he said.

“Everyone else told us Scruggs was dead. But you know he’s alive. Why’s that?” Helen said.

He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his mouth, saying something in disgust against his hand at the same time.

“Say that again,” Helen said.

“I said you damn queer, you leave me alone,” he replied.

I placed my hand on top of Helen’s before she could rise from the table. “You were in the sack with Cool Breeze’s wife. I think you contributed to her suicide and helped ruin her husband’s life. Does it give you any sense of shame at all, sir?” I said.

“It’s called changing your luck. You’re notorious for it, so lose the attitude, fucko,” Helen said.

“I tell you what, when you’re dead from AIDS or some other disease you people pass around, I’m going to dig up your grave and piss in your mouth,” he said to her.

Helen stood up and massaged the back of her neck. “Dave, would you leave me and Mr. Guidry alone a minute?” she said.

BUT WHATEVER SHE DID or said after I left the room, it didn’t work. Guidry walked past the dispatcher, used the phone to call a friend for a ride, and calmly sipped from a can of Coca-Cola until a yellow Cadillac with tinted windows pulled to the curb in front.

Helen and I watched him get in on the passenger side, roll down the window, and toss the empty can on our lawn.

“What bwana say now?” Helen said.

“Time to use local resources.”

THAT EVENING CLETE PICKED me up in his convertible in front of the house and we headed up the road toward St. Martinville.

“You call Swede Boxleiter a ‘local resource’?” he said.

“Why not?”

“That’s like calling shit a bathroom ornament.”

“You want to go or not?”

“The guy’s got electrodes in his temples. Even Holtzner walks around him. Are you listening?”

“You think he did the number on this accountant, Anthony Pollock?”

He thought about it. The wind blew a crooked part in his sandy hair.

”
Could
he do it? In a blink. Did he have motive? You got me, ‘cause I don’t know what these dudes are up to,” he said. “Megan told me something about Cisco having a fine career ahead of him, then taking money from some guys in the Orient.”

“Have you seen her?”

He turned his face toward me. It was flat and red in the sun’s last light, his green eyes as bold as a slap. He looked at the road again.

“We’re friends. I mean, she’s got her own life. We’re different kinds of people, you know. I’m cool about it.” He inserted a Lucky Strike in his mouth.

“Clete, I’m—”

He pulled the cigarette off his lip without lighting it and threw it into the wind.

“What’d the Dodgers do last night?” he said.

WE PULLED INTO THE driveway of the cinder-block triplex where Swede Boxleiter lived and found him in back, stripped to the waist, shooting marbles with a slingshot at the squirrels in a pecan tree.

He pointed his finger at me.

“I got a bone to pick with you,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Two Lafayette homicide roaches just left here. They said you told them to question me.”

“Really?” I said.

“They threw me up against the car in front of my landlord. One guy kicked me in both ankles. He put his hand in my crotch with little kids watching.”

“Dave was trying to clear you as a suspect. These guys probably got the wrong signal, Swede,” Clete said.

He pulled back the leather pouch on the slingshot, nests of veins popping in his neck, and fired a scarlet marble into the pecan limbs.

“I want to run a historical situation by you. Then you tell me what’s wrong with the story,” I said.

“What’s the game?” he asked.

“No game. You’re con-wise. You see stuff other people don’t. This is just for fun, okay?”

He held the handle of the slingshot and whipped the leather pouch and lengths of rubber tubing in a circle, watching them gain speed.

“A plantation owner is in the sack with one of his slave women. He goes off to the Civil War, comes back home, finds his place trashed by the Yankees, and all his slaves set free. There’s not enough food for everybody, so he tells the slave woman she has to leave. You with me?”

“Makes sense, yeah,” Swede said.

“The slave woman puts poison in the food of the plantation owner’s children, thinking they’ll only get sick and she’ll be asked to care for them. Except they die. The other black people on the plantation are terrified. So they hang the slave woman before they’re all punished,” I said.

Swede stopped twirling the slingshot. “It’s bullshit,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“You said the blacks were already freed. Why are they gonna commit a murder for the white dude and end up hung by Yankees themselves? The white guy, the one getting his stick dipped, he did her.”

“You’re a beaut, Swede,” I said.

“This is some kind of grift, right?”

“Here’s what it is,” Clete said. “Dave thinks you’re getting set up. You know how it works sometimes. The locals can’t clear a case and they look around for a guy with a heavy sheet.”

“We’ve got a shooter or two on the loose, Swede,” I said. “Some guys smoked two white boys out in the Basin, then tried to clip a black guy by the name of Willie Broussard. I hate to see you go down for it.”

“I can see you’d be broke up,” he said.

“Ever hear of a dude named Harpo Scruggs?” I asked.

“No.”

“Too bad. You might have to take his weight. See you around. Thanks for the help with that historical story,” I said.

Clete and I walked back to the convertible. The air felt warm and moist, and the sky was purple above the sugarcane across the road. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Swede watching us from the middle of the drive, stretching the rubber tubes on his slingshot, his face jigsawed with thought.

WE STOPPED AT A filling station for gas down the road. The owner had turned on the outside lights and the oak tree that grew next to the building was filled with black-green shadows against the sky. Clete walked across the street and bought a sno’ball from a small wooden stand and ate it while I put in the gas.

“What was that plantation story about?” he asked.

“I had the same problem with it as Boxleiter. Except it’s been bothering me because it reminded me of the story Cool Breeze told me about his wife’s suicide.”

“You lost me, big mon,” Clete said.

“She was found in freezing water with an anchor chain wrapped around her. When they want to leave a lot of guilt behind, they use shotguns or go off rooftops.”

“I’d leave it alone, Dave.”

“Breeze has lived for twenty years with her death on his conscience.”

“There’s another script, too. Maybe he did her,” Clete said. He bit into his sno’ball and held his eyes on mine.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Batist telephoned the house from the dock.

“There’s a man down here want to see you, Dave,” he said.

“What’s he look like?”

“Like somebody stuck his jaws in a vise and busted all the bones. That ain’t the half of it. While I’m mopping off the tables, he walks round on his hands.”

I finished my coffee and walked down the slope through the trees. The air was cool and gray with the mist off the water, and molded pecan husks broke under my shoes.

“What’s up, Swede?” I said.

He sat at a spool table, eating a chili dog with a fork from a paper plate.

“You asked about this guy Harpo Scruggs. He’s an old fart, works out of New Mexico and Trinidad, Colorado. He freelances, but if he’s doing a job around here, the juice is coming out of New Orleans.”

“Yeah?”

“Something else. If Scruggs tried to clip a guy and blew it but he’s still hanging around, it means he’s working for Ricky the Mouse.”

“Ricky Scarlotti?”

“There’s two things you don’t do with Ricky. You don’t blow hits and you don’t ever call him the Mouse. You know the story about the horn player?”

“Yes.”

“That’s his style.”

“Would he have a priest killed?”

“That don’t sound right.”

“You ever have your IQ tested, Swede?”

“No, people who bone you five days a week don’t give IQ tests.”

“You’re quite a guy anyway. You shank Anthony Pollock?”

“I was playing chess with Cisco. Check it out, my man. And don’t send any more cops to my place. Believe it or not, I don’t like some polyester geek getting his hand on my crank.”

He rolled up his dirty paper plate and napkin, dropped them in a trash barrel, and walked down the dock to his car, snapping his fingers as though he were listening to a private radio broadcast.

RICKY SCARLOTTI WASN’T HARD to find. I went to the office, called NOPD, then the flower shop he owned at Carrollton and St. Charles.

“You want to chat up Ricky the Mouse with me?” I asked Helen.

“I don’t think I’d go near that guy without a full-body condom on,” she replied.

“Suit yourself. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

“Hang on. Let me get my purse.”

We signed out an unmarked car and drove across the Atchafalaya Basin and crossed the Mississippi at Baton Rouge and turned south for New Orleans.

“So you’re just gonna drop this Harpo Scruggs stuff in his lap?” Helen said.

“You bet. If Ricky thinks someone snitched him off, we’ll know about it in a hurry.”

“That story about the jazz musician true?” she said.

“I think it is. He just didn’t get tagged with it.”

The name of the musician is forgotten now, except among those in the 1950s who had believed his talent was the greatest since Bix Beiderbecke’s. The melancholy sound of his horn hypnotized audiences at open-air concerts on West Venice beach. His dark hair and eyes and pale skin, the fatal beauty that lived in his face, that was like a white rose opening to black light, made women turn and stare at him on the street. His rendition of “My Funny Valentine” took you into a consideration about mutability and death that left you numb.

But he was a junky and jammed up with LAPD, and when he gave up the names of his suppliers, he had no idea that he was about to deal with Ricky Scarlotti.

Ricky had run a casino in Las Vegas, then a race track in Tijuana, before the Chicago Commission moved him to Los Angeles. Ricky didn’t believe in simply killing people. He created living object lessons. He sent two black men to the musician’s apartment in Malibu, where they pulled his teeth with pliers and mutilated his mouth. Later, the musician became a pharmaceutical derelict, went to prison in Germany, and died a suicide.

Helen and I drove through the Garden District, past the columned nineteenth-century homes shadowed by oaks whose root systems humped under sidewalks and cracked them upward like baked clay, past the iron green-painted streetcars with red-bordered windows clanging on the neutral ground, past Loyola University and Audubon Park, then to the levee where St. Charles ended and Ricky kept the restaurant, bookstore, and flower shop that supposedly brought him his income.

His second-story office was carpeted with a snow-white rug and filled with glass artworks and polished steel-and-glass furniture. A huge picture window gave onto the river and an enormous palm tree that brushed with the wind against the side of the building.

Ricky’s beige pinstripe suit coat hung on the back of his chair. He wore a soft white shirt with a plum-colored tie and suspenders, and even though he was nearing sixty, his large frame still had the powerful muscle structure of a much younger man.

But it was the shape of his head and the appearance of his face that drew your attention. His ears were too large, cupped outward, the face unnaturally rotund, the eyes pouched with permanent dark bags, the eyebrows half-mooned, the black hair like a carefully scissored pelt glued to the skull.

“It’s been a long time, Robicheaux. You still off the bottle?” he said.

“We’re hearing some stuff that’s probably all gas, Ricky. You know a mechanic, a freelancer, by the name of Harpo Scruggs?” I said.

“A guy fixes cars?” he said, and grinned.

“He’s supposed to be a serious button man out of New Mexico,” I said.

“Who’s she? I’ve seen you around New Orleans someplace, right?” He was looking at Helen now.

“I was a patrolwoman here years ago. I still go to the Jazz and Heritage Festival in the spring. You like jazz?” Helen said.

“No.”

“You ought to check it out. Wynton Marsalis is there. Great horn man. You don’t like cornet?” she said.

“What is this, Robicheaux?”

“I told you, Ricky. Harpo Scruggs. He tried to kill Willie Broussard, then a priest. My boss is seriously pissed off.”