DR10 - Sunset Limited (14 page)

"What I heard is the clip went to some guys already got it in
for Broussard. It's nigger trouble, Purcel. What else can I tell you?
Semper
fi
," he said.

"I heard you were in the First Cav at Khe Sanh," I said.

"Yeah, I was on a Jolly Green that took a RPG through the
door. You know what I think all that's worth?"

"You paid dues lowlifes don't. Why not act like it?" I said.

"I got a Purple Heart with a
V
for
valor. If I ever find it
while I'm cleaning out my garage, I'll send it to you," he said.

I could hear Clete breathing beside me, almost feel the oily
heat his skin gave off.

"You know what they say about the First Cav patch, Jimmy. 'The
horse they couldn't ride, the line they couldn't cross, the color that
speaks for itself,'" Clete said.

"Yeah, well, kiss my ass, you Irish prick, and get out of my
store."

"Let's go," I said to Clete.

He stared at me, his face flushed, the skin drawn back against
the eye sockets. Then he followed me outside, where we stood under an
oak and watched one of Jimmy Fig's cabs pick up a young black woman who
carried a red lacquered purse and wore a tank top and a miniskirt and
white fishnet stockings.

"You didn't like what I said?" Clete asked.

"Why get on the guy's outfit? It's not your way."

"You got a point. Let me correct that."

He walked back inside, his hands at his sides, balled into
fists as big as hams.

"Hey, Jimmy, I didn't mean anything about the First Cav. I
just can't take the way you chop onions. It irritates the hell out of
me," he said.

Then he drove his right fist, lifting his shoulder and all his
weight into the blow, right into Jimmy Figorelli's face.

Jimmy held on to the side of the Coca-Cola box, his hand
trembling uncontrollably on his mouth, his eyes dilated with shock, his
fingers shining with blood and bits of teeth.

THREE DAYS LATER IT began to rain, and
it rained through the
Labor Day weekend and into the following week. The bayou by the dock
rose above the cattails and into the canebrake, my rental boats filled
with water, and moccasins crawled into our yard. On Saturday night,
during a downpour, Father James Mulcahy knocked on our front door.

He carried an umbrella and wore a Roman collar and a
rain-flecked gray suit and a gray fedora. When he stepped inside he
tried not to breathe into my face.

"I'm sorry for coming out without calling first," he said.

"We're glad you dropped by. Can I offer you something?" I said.

He touched at his mouth and sat down in a stuffed chair. The
rain was blowing against the gallery, and the tin roof of the bait shop
quivered with light whenever thunder was about to roll across the swamp.

"Would you like a drink, sir?" I asked.

"No, no, that wouldn't be good. Coffee's fine. I have to tell
you about something, Mr. Robicheaux. It bothers me deeply," he said.

His hands were liver-spotted, ridged with blue veins, the skin
as thin as parchment on the bones. Bootsie brought coffee and sugar
and hot milk on a tray from the kitchen. When the priest lifted the cup
to his mouth his eyes seemed to look through the steam at nothing, then
he said, "Do you believe in evil, Mr. Robicheaux? I don't mean the
wicked deeds we sometimes do in a weak moment. I mean evil in the
darkest theological sense."

"I'm not sure, Father. I've seen enough of it in people not to
look for a source outside of ourselves."

"I was a chaplain in Thailand during the Vietnam War. I knew a
young soldier who participated in a massacre. You might have seen the
pictures. The most unforgettable was of a little boy holding his
grandmother's skirts in terror while she begged for their lives. I
spent many hours with that young soldier, but I could never remove the
evil that lived in his dreams."

"I don't understand how—" I began.

He raised his hand. "Listen to me," he said. "There was
another man, a civilian profiteer who lived on the air base. His
corporation made incendiary bombs. I told him the story of the young
soldier who had machine-gunned whole families in a ditch. The
profiteer's rejoinder was to tell me about a strafing gun his company
had patented. In thirty seconds it could tear the sod out of an entire
football field. In that moment I think that man's eyes were the conduit
into the abyss."

Bootsie's face wore no expression, but I saw her look at me,
then back at the priest.

"Please have dinner with us," she said.

"Oh, I've intruded enough. I really haven't made my point
either. Last night in the middle of the storm a truck stopped outside
the rectory. I thought it was a parishioner. When I opened the door a
man in a slouch hat and raincoat was standing there. I've never felt
the presence of evil so strongly in my life. I was convinced he was
there to kill me. I think he would have done it if the housekeeper and
Father Lemoyne hadn't walked up behind me.

"He pointed his arm at me and said, 'Don't you break the
seal.' Then he got back in his truck and drove away with the lights
off."

"You mean divulge the content of a confession?" I asked.

"He was talking about the Terrebonne woman. I'm sure of it.
But what she told me wasn't under the seal," he replied.

"You want to tell me about Lila, Father?" I said.

"No, it wouldn't be proper. A confidence is a confidence.
Also, she wasn't entirely coherent and I might do her a great
disservice," he said. But his face clouded, and it was obvious his own
words did little to reassure him.

"This man in the truck, Father? If his name is Harpo, we want
to be very careful of him," I said.

"His eyes," the priest said.

"Sir?"

"They were like the profiteer's. Without moral light. A man
like that speaking of the confessional seal. It offends something in me
in a way I can't describe."

"Have dinner with us," I said.

"Yes, that's very kind of you. Your home seems to have a great
warmth to it. From outside it truly looked like a haven in the storm.
Could I have that drink after all?"

He sat at the table with a glass of cream sherry, his eyes
abstract, feigning attention, like those of people who realize that
momentary refuge and the sharing of fear with others will not relieve
them of the fact that death may indeed have taken up residence inside
them.

MONDAY MORNING I DROVE down Bayou
Teche through Jeanerette
into the little town of Franklin and talked to the chief of police. He
was a very light mulatto in his early forties who wore sideburns and a
gold ring in his ear and a lacquered-brim cap on the back of his head.

"A man name of Harpo? There used to be a Harpo Delahoussey. He
was a sheriff's deputy, did security at the Terrebonne cannery," the
police chief said.

"That's not the one. This guy was maybe his nephew. He was a
Franklin police officer. People called him Little Harpo," I said.

He fiddled with a pencil and gazed out the window. It was
still raining, and a black man rode a bicycle down the sidewalk, his
body framed against the smoky neon of a bar across the street.

"When I was a kid there was a cop round here name of H. Q.
Scruggs." He wet his lips. "When he come into the quarters we knew to
call him Mr. H.Q. Not Officer. That wasn't enough for this gentleman.
But I remember white folks calling him Harpo sometimes. As I recall,
he'd been a guard up at Angola, too. If you want to talk about him,
I'll give you the name and address of a man might hep you."

"You don't care to talk about him?"

He laid the pencil flat on his desk blotter. "I don't like to
even remember him. Fortunately today I don't have to," he said.

CLEM MADDUX SAT ON his gallery,
smoking a cigarette, in a
swayback deer-hide chair lined with a quilt for extra padding. One of
his legs was amputated at the torso, the other above the knee. His
girth was huge, his stomach pressing in staggered layers against the
oversized ink-dark blue jeans he wore. His skin was as pink and
unblemished as a baby's, but around his neck goiters hung from his
flesh like a necklace of duck's eggs.

"You staring at me, Mr. Robicheaux?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"It's Buerger's Disease. Smoking worsens it. But I got
diabetes and cancer of the prostate, too. I got diseases that'll
outlive the one that kills me," he said, then laughed and wiped spittle
off his lips with his wrist.

"You were a gun bull at Angola with Harpo Scruggs?"

"No, I was head of farm machinery. I didn't carry a weapon.
Harpo was a tower guard, then a shotgun guard on horseback. That must
have been forty years ago."

"What kind of hack was he?"

"Piss-poor in my opinion. How far back you go?"

"You talking about the Red Hat gang and the men buried under
the levee?"

"There was this old fart used to come off a corn-whiskey drunk
meaner than a razor in your shoe. He'd single out a boy from his gang
and tell him to start running. Harpo asked to get in on it."

"Asked to kill someone?"

"It was a colored boy from Laurel Hill. He'd sassed the field
boss at morning count. When the food truck come out to the levee at
noon, Harpo pulled the colored boy out of the line and told him he
wasn't eating no lunch till he finished sawing a stump out of the river
bottom. Harpo walked him off into some gum trees by the water, then I
seen the boy starting off on his own, looking back uncertain-like while
Harpo was telling him something. Then I heard it,
pow, pow
,
both barrels. Double-ought bucks, from not more than eight or ten feet."

Maddux tossed his cigarette over the railing into the flower
bed.

"What happened to Scruggs?" I asked.

"He done a little of this, a little of that, I guess."

"That's a little vague, cap."

"He road-ganged in Texas a while, then bought into a couple of
whorehouses. What do you care anyway? The sonofabitch is probably
squatting on the coals."

"He's squatting—"

"He got burned up with a Mexican chippy in Juarez fifteen
years ago. Wasn't nothing left of him except a bag of ash and some
teeth. Damn, son, y'all ought to update and get you some computers."

TWO DAYS LATER I SAT at my desk,
sifting through the Gypsy
fortune-telling deck called the Tarot. I had bought the deck at a store
in Lafayette, but the instruction book that accompanied it dealt more
with the meaning of the cards than with the origins of their
iconography. Regardless, it would be impossible for anyone educated in
a traditional Catholic school not to recognize the historical
associations of the imagery in the Hanged Man.

The phone on my desk buzzed.

"Clete Purcel and Megan Flynn just pulled up," the sheriff
said.

"Yeah?"

"Get him out of here."

"Skipper—"

He hung up.

A moment later Clete tapped on my glass and opened the door,
then paused and looked back down the hall, his face perplexed.

"What happened, the John overflow in the waiting room again?"
he said.

"Why's that?"

"A pall is hanging over the place every time I walk in. What
do those guys do for kicks, watch snuff films? In fact, I asked the
dispatcher that. Definitely no sense of humor."

He sat down and looked around my office, grinned at me for no
reason, straightened his back, flexed his arms, bounced his palms up
and down on the chair.

"Megan's with you?" I said.

"How'd you know that?"

"Uh, I think the sheriff saw y'all from his window."

"The sheriff? I get it. He told you to roll out the welcome
wagon." His eyes roved merrily over my face. "How about we treat you to
lunch at Lagniappe Too?"

"I'm buried."

"Megan gave you her drill instructor impersonation the other
day?"

"It's very convincing."

He beat out a staccato with his hands on the chair arms.

"Will you stop that and tell me what's on your mind?" I said.

"This cat Billy Holtzner. I've seen him somewhere. Like from
Vietnam."

"Holtzner?"

"So we had nasty little marshmallows over there, too. Anyway,
I go, 'Were you in the Crotch?' He says, 'The Crotch?' I say, 'Yeah,
the Marine Corps. Were you around Da Nang?' What kind of answer do I
get? He sucks his teeth and goes back to his clipboard like I'm not
there."

He waited for me to speak. When I didn't he said, "
What
?"

"I hate to see you mixed up with them."

"See you later, Streak."

"I'm coming with you," I said, and stuck the Hanged Man in my
shirt pocket.

WE ATE LUNCH AT Lagniappe Too, just
down from The Shadows.
Megan sat by the window with her hat on. Her hair was curved on her
cheeks, and her mouth looked small and red when she took a piece of
food off her fork. The light through the window seemed to frame her
silhouette against the green wall of bamboo that grew in front of The
Shadows. She saw me staring at her.

"Is something troubling you, Dave?" she asked.

"You know Lila Terrebonne?"

"The senator's granddaughter?"

"She comes to our attention on occasion. The other day we had
to pick her up at the church, sitting by herself under a crucifix. Out
of nowhere she asked me about the Hanged Man in the Tarot."

I slipped the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the
tablecloth by Megan's plate.

"Why tell me?" she said.

"Does it mean something to you?"

I saw Clete lower his fork into his plate, felt his eyes fix
on the side of my face.

"A man hanging upside down from a tree. The tree forms a
cross," Megan said.

"The figure becomes Peter the Apostle, as well as Christ and
St. Sebastian. Sebastian was tied to a tree and shot with darts by his
fellow Roman soldiers. Peter asked to be executed upside down. You
notice, the figure makes a cross with his legs in the act of dying?" I
said.