Sunset Limited (36 page)

THAT EVENING I SAW Clete’s chartreuse convertible coming down the dirt road toward the dock, with Geraldine Holtzner behind the wheel, almost unrecognizable in a scarf and dark glasses, and Clete padding along behind the car, in scarlet trunks, rotted T-shirt, and tennis shoes that looked like pancakes on his feet.

Geraldine Holtzner braked to a stop by the boat ramp and Clete opened the passenger door and took a bottle of diet Pepsi out of the cooler and wiped the ice off with his palm. He breathed through his mouth, sweat streaming out of his hair and down his chest.

“You trying to have a heart attack?” I said.

“I haven’t had a drink or a cigarette in two days. I feel great. You want some fried chicken?” he said.

“They pulled your license altogether?” I said.

“Big time,” he said.

“Clete—” I said.

“So beautiful women drive me around now. Right, Geri?”

She didn’t respond. Instead, she stared at me from behind her dark glasses, her mouth pursed into a button. “Why are you so hard on my father?” she said.

I looked at Clete, then down the road, in the shadows, where a man in a ribbed undershirt was taking a fishing rod and tackle box out of his car trunk.

“I’d better get back to work,” I said.

“I’ll take a shower in the back of the bait shop and we’ll go to a movie or something. How about it, Geri?” Clete said.

“Why not?” she said.

“I’d better pass,” I said.

“I’ve got a case of 12-Step PMS today, you know, piss, moan, and snivel. Don’t be a sorehead,” Geraldine said.

“Come back later. We’ll take a boat ride,” I said.

“I can’t figure what Megan sees in you,” Geraldine said.

I went back down the dock to the bait shop, then turned and watched Clete padding along behind the convertible, like a trained bear, the dust puffing around his dirty tennis shoes.

A FEW MINUTES LATER I walked up to the house and ate supper in the kitchen with Alafair and Bootsie. The phone rang on the counter. I picked it up.

“Dave, this probably don’t mean nothing, but a man was axing about Clete right after you went up to eat,” Batist said.

“Which man?”

“He was fishing on the bank, then he come in the shop and bought a candy bar and started talking French. Then he ax in English who own that convertible that was going down the road. I tole him the only convertible I seen out there was for Clete Purcel. Then he ax if the woman driving it wasn’t in the movies.

“I tole him I couldn’t see through walls, no, so I didn’t have no idea who was driving it. He give me a dol’ar tip and gone back out and drove away in a blue car.”

“What kind of French did he speak?” I asked.

“I didn’t t’ink about it. It didn’t sound no different from us.”

“I’ll mention it to Clete. But don’t worry about it.”

“One other t’ing. He only had an undershirt on. He had a red-and-green tattoo on his shoulder. It look like a, what you call them t’ings, they got them down in Mexico, it ain’t a crawfish, it’s a—”

“Scorpion?” I said.

I CALLED CLETE AT his cottage outside Jeanerette.

“The Scarlotti shooter may be following you. Watch for a blond guy, maybe a French Canadian—” I began.

“Guy with a tattoo on his shoulder, driving a blue Ford?” Clete said.

“That’s the guy.”

“Geri and I stopped at a convenience store and I saw him do a U-turn down the street and park in some trees. I strolled on down toward a pay phone, but he knew I’d made him.”

“You get his tag number?” I asked.

“No, there was mud on it.”

“Can you get hold of Holtzner?”

“If I have to. The guy’s wiring is starting to spark. I smelled crack in his trailer today.”

“Where’s Geraldine?”

“Where’s any hype? In her own universe. That broad’s crazy, Dave. After I told her we were being followed by the guy with the tattoo, she accused me of setting her up. Every woman I meet is either unattainable or nuts… Anyway, I’ll try to find Holtzner for you.”

An hour later he called me back.

“Holtzner just fired me,” he said.

“Why?”

“I got him on his cell phone and told him the Canadian dude was in town. He went into a rage. He asked me why I didn’t take down this guy when I had the chance. I go, ‘Take down, like cap the guy?’

“He goes, ‘
What
, an ex-cop kicked off the police force for killing a federal witness has got qualms?’

“I say, ‘Yeah, as a matter of fact I do.’

“He goes, ‘Then sign your own paychecks, Rhino Boy.’

”
Rhino Boy
? How’d I ever get mixed up with these guys, Dave?”

“Lots of people ask themselves that question,” I said.

THE EX-PROSTITUTE NAMED JESSIE Rideau, who claimed to have been present when Jack Flynn was kidnapped, called Helen Soileau’s extension the next day. Helen had the call transferred to my office.

“Come talk to us, Ms. Rideau,” I said.

“You giving out free coffee in lockup?” she said.

“We want to put Harpo Scruggs away. You help us, we help you.”

“Gee, where I heard that before?” I could hear her breath flattening on the receiver, as though she were trying to blow the heat out of a burn. “You ain’t gonna say nothing?”

“I’ll meet you somewhere else.”

“St. Peter’s Cemetery in ten minutes.”

“How will I recognize you?” I asked.

“I’m the one that’s not dead.”

I parked my truck behind the cathedral and walked over to the old cemetery, which was filled with brick-and-plaster crypts that had settled at broken angles into the earth. She sat on the seat of her paint-blistered gas-guzzler, the door open, her feet splayed on the curb, her head hanging out in the sunlight as I approached her. She had coppery hair that looked like it had been waved with an iron, and brown skin and freckles like a spray of dull pennies on her face and neck. Her shoulders were wide, her breasts like watermelons inside her blue cotton shirt, her turquoise eyes fastened on me, as though she had no means of defending herself against the world once it escaped her vision.

“Ms. Rideau?”

She didn’t reply. A fire truck passed and she never took her eyes off my face.

“Give us a formal statement on Scruggs, enough to get a warrant for his arrest. That’s when your problems start to end,” I said.

“I need money to go out West, somewhere he cain’t find me,” she said.

“We don’t run a flea market. If you conceal evidence in a criminal investigation, you become an accomplice after the fact. You ever do time?”

“You a real charmer.”

I looked at my watch.

“Maybe I’d better go,” I said.

“Harpo Scruggs gonna kill me. I had that box hid all them years for him. Now he gonna kill me over it. That’s what y’all ain’t hearing.”

“Why does he want the lockbox now?” I asked.

“Him and me run a house toget’er. Fo’ years ago I found out he killed Lavern Viator in Texas. Lavern was the other girl that was in Morgan City when they beat that man wit’ chains. So I moved the box to a different place, one he ain’t t’ought about.”

“Let’s try to be honest here, Jessie. Did you move it because you knew he was blackmailing someone with it and you thought it was valuable?”

Raindrops were falling out of the sunlight. There were blue tattoos of hearts and dice inside Jessie Rideau’s forearms. She stared at the crypts in the cemetery, her eyes recessed, her face like that of a person who knows she will never have any value to anyone other than use.

“I gonna be wit’ them dead people soon,” she said.

“Where’d you do time?”

“A year in St. John the Baptist. Two years in St. Gabriel.”

“Let us help you.”

“Too late.” She pulled the car door shut and started the engine. The exhaust pipe and muffler were rusted out, and smoke billowed from under the car frame.

“Why does he want the lockbox now?” I said.

She shot me the finger and gunned the car out into the street, the roar of her engine reverberating through the crypts.

THERE ARE DAYS THAT are different. They may look the same to everyone else, but on certain mornings you wake and know with absolute certainty you’ve been chosen as a participant in a historical script, for reasons unknown to you, and your best efforts will not change what has already been written.

On Wednesday the false dawn was bone-white, just like it had been the day Megan came back to New Iberia, the air brittle, the wood timbers in our house aching with cold. Then hailstones clattered on the tin roof and through the trees and rolled down the slope onto the dirt road. When the sun broke above the horizon the clouds in the eastern sky trembled with a glow like the reflection of a distant forest fire. When I walked down to the dock, the air was still cold, crisscrossed with the flight of robins, more than I had seen in years. I started cleaning the congealed ash from the barbecue pit, then rinsed my hands in an oaken bucket that had been filled with rainwater the night before. But Batist had cleaned a nutria in it for crab bait, and when I poured the water out it was red with blood.

At the office I called Adrien Glazier in New Orleans.

“Anything on the Scarlotti shooter?” I said.

“You figured out he’s a French Canadian. You’re ahead of us. What’s the matter?” she said.

“Matter? He’s going to kill somebody.”

“If it will make you feel better, I already contacted Billy Holtzner and offered him Witness Protection. He goes, ‘Where, on an ice floe at the South Pole?’ and hangs up.”

“Send some agents over here, Adrien.”

“Holtzner’s from Hollywood. He knows the rules. You get what you want when you come across. I told him the G’s casting couch is nongender-specific. Try to have a few laughs with this stuff. You worry too much.”

IT BEGAN TO RAIN just after sunset. The light faded in the swamp and the air was freckled with birds, then the rain beat on the dock and the tin roof of the bait shop and filled the rental boats that were chained up by the boat ramp. Batist closed out the cash register and put on his canvas coat and hat.

“Megan’s daddy, the one got nailed to the barn? You know how many black men been killed and nobody ever been brought to cou’t for it?” he said.

“Doesn’t make it right,” I said.

“Makes it the way it is,” he replied.

After he had gone I turned off the outside lights so no late customers would come by, then began mopping the floor. The rain on the roof was deafening and I didn’t hear the door open behind me, but I felt the cold blow across my back.

“Put your mop up. I got other work for you,” the voice said.

I straightened up and looked into the seamed, rain-streaked face of Harpo Scruggs.

THIRTY-TWO

HIS FACE WAS BLOODLESS, SHRIVELED like a prune, glistening under the drenched brim of his hat. His raincoat dripped water in a circle on the floor. A blue-black .22 Ruger revolver, with ivory grips, on full cock, hung from his right hand.

“I got a magnum cylinder in it. The round will go through both sides of your skull,” he said.

“What do you want, Scruggs?”

“Fix me some coffee and milk in one of them big glasses yonder.” He pointed with one finger. “Put about four spoons of honey in it.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

He propped the heel of his hand against the counter for support. The movement caused him to pucker his mouth and exhale his breath. It touched my face, like the raw odor from a broken drain line.

“You’re listing,” I said.

“Fix the coffee like I told you.”

A moment later he picked up the glass with his left hand and drank from it steadily until it was almost empty. He set the glass on the counter and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. His whiskers made a scraping sound against his skin.

“We’re going to Opelousas. You’re gonna drive. You try to hurt me, I’ll kill you. Then I’ll come back and kill your wife and child. A man like me don’t give it no thought,” he said.

“Why me, Scruggs?”

“‘Cause you got an obsession over the man we stretched out on that barn wall. You gonna do right, no matter who you got to mess up. It ain’t a compliment.”

WE TOOK HIS PICKUP truck to the four-lane and headed north toward Lafayette and Opelousas. He didn’t use the passenger seat belt but instead sat canted sideways with his right leg pushed out in front of him. His raincoat was unbuttoned and I could see the folds of a dark towel that were tied with rope across his side.

“You leaking pretty bad?” I said.

“Hope that I ain’t. I’ll pop one into your brisket ‘fore I go under.”

“I’m not your problem. We both know that.”

With his left hand he took a candy bar from the dashboard and tore the paper with his dentures and began to eat the candy, swallowing as though he hadn’t eaten in days. He held the revolver with his other hand, the barrel and cylinder resting across his thigh, pointed at my kidney.

The rain swept in sheets against the windshield. We passed through north Lafayette, the small, wood, galleried houses on each side of us whipped by the rain. Outside the city the country was dark green and sodden and there were thick stands of hardwoods on both sides of the four-lane and by the exit to Grand Coteau I saw emergency flares burning on the road and the flashers of emergency vehicles. A state trooper stood by an overturned semi, waving the traffic on with his flashlight.

“Was you ever a street cop?” Scruggs said.

“NOPD,” I said.

“I was a gun bull at Angola, city cop, and road-gang hack, too. I done it all. I got no quarrel with you, Robicheaux.”

“You want me to bring down Archer Terrebonne, don’t you?”

“When I was a gun bull at Angola? That was in the days of the Red Hat House. The lights would go down all over the system and ole Sparky would make fire jump off their tailbone. There was this white boy from Mississippi put a piece of glass in my food once. A year later he cut up two other convicts for stealing a deck of cards from his cell. Guess who got to walk him into the Red Hat House?

“Lightning was crawling all over the sky that night and the current didn’t work right. That boy was jolting in the straps for two minutes. The smell made them reporters hold handkerchiefs to their mouths. They was falling over themselves to get outside. I laughed till I couldn’t hardly stand up.”