Sunset Limited (32 page)

What was under my feet? Where? By the barn? Out in the field where Guidry was hit with the .357?

Then I saw Megan Flynn’s automobile park by the boat ramp and Megan run down the dock toward the bait shop with an umbrella over her head.

She came inside, breathless, shaking water out of her hair. Unconsciously, I looked up the slope through the trees at the lighted gallery and living room of my house.

“Wet night to be out,” I said.

She sat down at the counter and blotted her face with a paper napkin.

“I got a call from Adrien Glazier. She told me about this guy Ruben Esteban,” she said.

Not bad, Adrien, I thought.

“This guy’s record is for real, Dave. I heard about him when I covered the Falklands War,” she said.

“He was in custody on a misdemeanor in Lafayette this morning. He doesn’t blend into the wallpaper easily.”

“We should feel better? Why do you think the Triads sent a walking horror show here?”

Megan wasn’t one to whom you gave facile assurances.

“We don’t know who his partner is. While we’re watching Esteban, the other guy’s peddling an icecream cart down Main Street,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, and dried the back of her neck with another napkin. Her skin seemed paler, her mouth and her hair a darker shade of red under the overhead light. I glanced away from her eyes.

“You and Cisco want a cruiser to park by your house?” I asked.

“I have a bad feeling about Clete. I can’t shake it,” she said.

“Clete?” I said.

“Geri Holtzner is driving his car all around town. Look, nobody is going to hurt Billy Holtzner. You don’t kill the people who owe you money. You hurt the people around them. These guys put bombs in people’s automobiles.”

“I’ll talk to him about it.”

“I already have. He doesn’t listen. I hate myself for involving him in this,” she said.

“I left my Roman collar up at the house, Meg.”

“I forgot. Swinging dicks talk in deep voices and never apologize for their mistakes.”

“Why do you turn every situation into an adversarial one?” I asked.

She raised her chin and tilted her head slightly. Her mouth reminded me of a red flower turning toward light.

Bootsie opened the screen door and came in holding a raincoat over her head.

“Oh, excuse me. I didn’t mean to walk into the middle of something,” she said. She shook her raincoat and wiped the water off it with her hand. “My, what a mess I’m making.”

THE NEXT AFTERNOON WE executed a search warrant on the property where Alex Guidry was shot. The sky was braided with thick gray and metallic-blue clouds, and the air smelled like rain and wood pulp and smoke from a trash fire.

Thurston Meaux, the St. Mary Parish plainclothes, came out of the barn with a rake in his hand.

“I found two used rubbers, four pop bottles, a horseshoe, and a dead snake. That any help to y’all?” he said.

“Pretty clever,” I said.

“Maybe Alex Guidry was just setting you up, podna. Maybe you’re lucky somebody popped him first. Maybe there was never anything here,” Meaux said.

“Tell me, Thurston, why is it nobody wants to talk about the murder of Jack Flynn?”

“It was a different time. My grandfather did some things in the Klan, up in nort’ Louisiana. He’s an old man now. It’s gonna change the past to punish him now?”

I started to reply but instead just walked away. It was easy for me to be righteous at the expense of another. The real problem was I didn’t have any idea what we were looking for. The yellow crime scene tape formed a triangle from the barn to the spot where Guidry’s Cadillac had been parked. Inside the triangle we found old shotgun and .22 shells, pig bones, a plowshare that groundwater had turned into rusty lace, the stone base of a mule-operated cane grinder overgrown with morning glory vine. A deputy sheriff swung his metal detector over a desiccated oak stump and got a hot reading. We splintered the stump apart and found a fan-shaped ax head, one that had been hand-forged, in the heart of the wood.

At four o’clock the uniformed deputies left. The sun came out and I watched Thurston Meaux sit down on a crate in the lee of the barn and eat a sandwich, let the wax paper blow away in the wind, then pull the tab on a soda can and drop it in the dirt.

“You’re contaminating the crime scene,” I said.

“Wrong,” he replied.

“Oh?”

“Because we’re not wasting any more time on this bullshit. You’ve got some kind of obsession, Robicheaux.” He brushed the crumbs off his clothes and walked to his automobile.

Helen didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she lifted a strand of hair out of her eye and said, “Dave, we’ve walked every inch of the field and raked all the ground inside and around the barn. You want to start over again, that’s okay with me, but—”

“Guidry said, ‘It was under your feet, you arrogant shithead.’ Whatever he was talking about, it’s physical, maybe something we walked over, something he could pick up and stick in my face.”

“We can bring in a Cat and move some serious dirt.”

“No, we might destroy whatever is here.”

She let out her breath, then began scraping a long divot with a mattock around the edges of the hardpan.

“You’re a loyal friend, Helen,” I said.

“Bwana has the keys to the cruiser,” she said.

I stood in front of the barn wall and stared at the weathered wood, the strips of red paint that were flaking like fingernail polish, the dust-sealed nail holes where Jack Flynn’s wrists had been impaled. Whatever evidence was here had been left by Harpo Scruggs, not Alex Guidry, I thought. It was something Scruggs knew about, had deliberately left in place, had even told Guidry about. But why?

To implicate someone else. Just as he had crucified Swede Boxleiter in this spot to tie Boxleiter’s death to Flynn’s.

“Helen, if there’s anything here, it’s right by where Jack Flynn died,” I said.

She rested the mattock by her foot and wiped a smear of mud off her face with her sleeve.

“If you say so,” she said.

“Long day, huh?”

“I had a dream last night. Like I was being pulled back into history, into stuff I don’t want to have anything to do with.”

“You told me yourself, we’re the good guys.”

“When I kept shooting at Guidry? He was already done. I just couldn’t stop. I convinced myself I saw another flash from his weapon. But I knew better.”

“He got what he deserved.”

“Yeah? Well, why do I feel the way I do?”

“Because you still have your humanity. It’s because you’re the best.”

“I want to make this case and lock the file on it. I mean it, Dave.”

She put down her mattock and the two of us began piercing the hardpan with garden forks, working backward from the barn wall, turning up the dirt from six inches below the surface. The subsoil was black and shiny, oozing with water and white worms. Then I saw a coppery glint and a smooth glass surface wedge out of the mud while Helen was prizing her fork against a tangle of roots.

“Hold it,” I said.

“What is it?”

“A jar. Don’t move the fork.”

I reached down and lifted a quart-size preserve jar out of the mud and water. The top was sealed with both rubber and a metal cap. I squatted down and dipped water out of the hole and rinsed the mud off the glass.

“An envelope and a newspaper clipping? What’s Scruggs doing, burying a time capsule?” Helen said.

We walked to the cruiser and wiped the jar clean with paper towels, then set it on the hood and unscrewed the cap. I lifted the newspaper clipping out with two fingers and spread it on the hood. The person who had cut it out of the
Times-Picayune
had carefully included the strip at the top of the page which gave the date, August 8, 1956. The headline on the story read: “Union Organizer Found Crucified.”

Helen turned the jar upside down and pulled the envelope out of the opening. The glue on the flap was still sealed. I slipped my pocketknife in the corner of the flap and sliced a neat line across the top of the envelope and shook three black-and-white photos out on the hood.

Jack Flynn was still alive in two of them. In one, he was on his hands and knees while men in black hoods with slits for eyes swung blurred chains on his back; in the other, a fist clutched his hair, pulling his head erect so the camera could photograph his destroyed face. But in the third photo his ordeal had come to an end. His head lay on his shoulder; his eyes were rolled into his head, his impaled arms stretched out on the wood of the barn wall. Three men in cloth hoods were looking back at the camera, one pointing at Flynn as though indicating a lesson to the viewer.

“This doesn’t give us squat,” Helen said.

“The man in the middle. Look at the ring finger on his left hand. It’s gone, cut off at the palm,” I said.

“You know him?”

“It’s Archer Terrebonne. His family didn’t just order the murder. He helped do it.”

“Dave, there’s no face to go with the hand. It’s not a felony to have a missing finger. Look at me. A step at a time and all that jazz, right? You listening, Streak?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

IT WAS AN HOUR LATER. Terrebonne had not been at his home, but a maid had told us where to find him. I parked the cruiser under the oaks in front of the restaurant up the highway and cut the engine. The water dripping out of the trees steamed on the hood.

“Dave, don’t do this,” Helen said.

“He’s in Iberia Parish now. I’m not going to have these pictures lost in a St. Mary Parish evidence locker.”

“We get them copied, then do it by the numbers.”

“He’ll skate.”

“You know a lot of rich guys working soybeans in Angola? That’s the way it is.”

“Not this time.”

I went inside the foyer, where people waited in leather chairs for an available table. I opened my badge on the maître d’.

“Archer Terrebonne is here with a party,” I said.

The maître d’s eyes locked on mine, then shifted to Helen, who stood behind me.

“Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“I see. Follow me, please.”

We walked through the main dining room to a long table at the rear, where Terrebonne was seated with a dozen other people. The waiters had just taken away their shrimp cocktails and were now serving the gumbo off of a linen-covered cart.

Terrebonne wiped his mouth with a napkin, then waited for a woman in a robin’s-egg-blue suit to stop talking before he shifted his eyes to me.

“What burning issue do you bring us tonight, Mr. Robicheaux?” he asked.

“Harpo Scruggs pissed in your shoe,” I said.

“Sir, would you not—” the maître d’ began.

“You did your job. Beat it,” Helen said.

I lay the three photographs down on the tablecloth.

“That’s you in the middle, Mr. Terrebonne. You chain-whipped Jack Flynn and hammered nails through his wrists and ankles, then let your daughter carry your guilt. You truly turn my stomach, sir,” I said.

“And you’re way beyond anything I’ll tolerate,” he said.

“Get up,” I said.

“What?”

“Better do what he says,” Helen said behind me.

Terrebonne turned to a silver-haired man on his right. “John, would you call the mayor’s home, please?” he said.

“You’re under arrest, Mr. Terrebonne. The mayor’s not going to help you,” I said.

“I’m not going anywhere with you, sir. You put your hand on my person again and I’ll sue you for battery,” he said, then calmly began talking to the woman in a robin’s-egg-blue suit on his left.

Maybe it was the long day, or the fact the photos had allowed me to actually see the ordeal of Jack Flynn, one that time had made an abstraction, or maybe I simply possessed a long-buried animus toward Archer Terrebonne and the imperious and self-satisfied arrogance that he and his kind represented. But long ago I had learned that anger, my old enemy, had many catalysts and they all led ultimately to one consequence, an eruption of torn red-and-black color behind the eyes, an alcoholic blackout without booze, then an adrenaline surge that left me trembling, out of control, and possessed of a destructive capability that later filled me with shame.

I grabbed him by the back of his belt and hoisted him out of the chair, pushed him facedown on the table, into his food, and cuffed his wrists behind him, hard, ratcheting the curved steel tongues deep into the locks, crimping the veins like green string. Then I walked him ahead of me, out the foyer, into the parking area, pushing past a group of people who stared at us openmouthed. Terrebonne tried to speak, but I got the back door of the cruiser open and shoved him inside, cutting his scalp on the jamb.

When I slammed the door I turned around and was looking into the face of the woman in the robin’s-egg-blue suit.

“You manhandle a sixty-three-year-old man like that? My, you must be proud. I’m so pleased we have policemen of your stature protecting us from ourselves,” she said.

THE SHERIFF CALLED ME into his office early the next morning. He rubbed the balls of his fingers back and forth on his forehead, as though the skin were burned, and looked at a spot six inches in front of his face.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he said.

“Terrebonne was kicked loose?”

“Two hours after you put him in the cage. I’ve had calls from a judge, three state legislators, and a U.S. congressman. You locked him in the cage with a drag queen and a drunk with vomit all over his clothes?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“I bet. He says he’s going to sue.”

“Let him. He’s obstructed and lied in the course of a murder investigation. He’s dirty from the jump, skipper. Put that photo and his daughter in front of a grand jury and see what happens.”

“You’re really out to burn his grits, aren’t you?”

“You don’t think he deserves it?” I said.

“The homicide was in St. Mary Parish. Dave, this guy had to have stitches in his head. Do you know what his lawyers are going to do with that?”

“We’ve been going after the wrong guys. Cut off the snake’s head and the body dies,” I said.

“I called my insurance agent about an umbrella policy this morning, you know, the kind that protects you against losing your house and everything you own. I’ll give you his number.”