DR10 - Sunset Limited (19 page)

"What's Alex Guidry's tie-in to this guy?"

"It has something to do with the Terrebonnes. Everything in
St. Mary Parish does. That's where they're both from."

"Bring him in."

"What for?"

"Tell him he's cruel to animals. Tell him his golf game
stinks. Tell him I'm just in a real pissed-off mood."

TUESDAY MORNING HELEN AND I drove down
Main, then crossed the
iron drawbridge close by the New Iberia Country Club.

"You don't think this will tip our surveillance on Harpo
Scruggs?" she said.

"Not if we do it right."

"When those two brothers were executed out in the Basin? One
of the shooters had on a department uniform. It could have come from
Guidry."

"Maybe Guidry was in it," I said.

"Nope, he stays behind the lines. He makes the system work for
him."

"You know him outside the job?" I asked.

"He arrested my maid out on a highway at night when he was a
deputy in St. Mary Parish. She's never told anyone what he did to her."

Helen and I parked the cruiser in front of the country club
and walked past the swimming pool, then under a spreading oak to a
practice green where Alex Guidry was putting with a woman and another
man. He wore light brown slacks and two-tone golf shoes and a maroon
polo shirt; his mahogany tan and thick salt-and-pepper hair gave him
the look of a man in the prime of his life. He registered our presence
in the corner of his eye but never lost his concentration. He bent his
knees slightly and tapped the ball with a plop into the cup.

"The sheriff has invited you to come down to the department,"
I said.

"No, thank you," he said.

"We need your help with a friend of yours. It won't take
long," Helen said.

The red flag on the golf pin popped in the wind. Leaves
drifted out of the pecan trees and live oaks along the fairway and
scudded across the freshly mowed grass.

"I'll give it some thought and ring y'all later on it," he
said, and started to reach down to retrieve his ball from the cup.

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.