DR10 - Sunset Limited (20 page)

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."

"Tell him that makes two of us, 'cause I don't like
out-of-town cops 'fronting me in my own office. I particularly don't
like no bride of Frankenstein making an implication about a rumor that
was put to rest a long time ago."

"Nobody has shown you any personal disrespect here, Ricky. You
need to show the same courtesy to others," I said.

"That's all right. I'll wait outside," Helen said, then paused
by the door. She let her eyes drift onto Ricky Scarlotti's face. "Say,
come on over to New Iberia sometime. I've got a calico cat that just
won't believe you."

She winked, then closed the door behind her.

"I don't provoke no more, Robicheaux. Look, I know about you
and Purcel visiting Jimmy Figorelli. What kind of behavior is that?
Purcel smashes the guy in the mouth for no reason. Now you're laying
off some hillbilly
cafone
on me."

"I didn't say he was a hillbilly."

"I've heard of him. But I don't put out contracts on priests.
What d'you think I am?"

"A vicious, sadistic piece of shit, Ricky."

He opened his desk drawer and removed a stick of gum and
peeled it and placed it in his mouth. Then he brushed at the tip of one
nostril with his knuckle, huffing air out of his breathing passage. He
pushed a button on his desk and turned his back on me and stared out
the picture window at the river until I had left the room.

THAT EVENING I DROVE to the city
library on East Main. The
spreading oaks on the lawn were filled with birds and I could hear the
clumps of bamboo rattling in the wind, and fireflies were lighting in
the dusk out on the bayou. I went inside the library and found the
hardback collection of Megan's photography that had been published
three years ago by a New York publishing house.

What could I learn from it? Maybe nothing. Maybe I only wanted
to put off seeing her that evening, which I knew I had to do, even
though I knew I was breaking an AA tenet by injecting myself into other
people's relationships. But you don't let a friend like Clete Purcel
swing in the gibbet.

The photographs in her collection were stunning. Her great
talent was her ability to isolate the humanity and suffering of
individuals who lived in our midst but who nevertheless
remained invisible to most passersby. Native Americans on reservations,
migrant farmworkers, mentally impaired people who sought heat from
steam grates, they looked at the camera with the hollow eyes of
Holocaust victims and made the viewer wonder what country or era the
photograph had been taken in, because surely it could not have been our
own.

Then I turned a page and looked at a black-and-white photo
taken on a reservation in South Dakota. It showed four FBI agents in
windbreakers taking two Indian men into custody. The Indians were on
their knees, their fingers laced behind their heads. An AR-15 rifle lay
in the dust by an automobile whose windows and doors were perforated
with bullet holes.

The cutline said the men were members of the American Indian
Movement. No explanation was given for their arrest. One of the agents
was a woman whose face was turned angrily toward the camera. The face
was that of the New Orleans agent Adrien Glazier.

I drove out to Cisco's place on the Loreauville road and
parked by the gallery. No one answered the bell, and I walked down by
the bayou and saw her writing a letter under the light in the gazebo,
the late sun burning like a flare beyond the willow trees across the
water. She didn't see or hear me, and in her solitude she seemed to
possess all the self-contained and tranquil beauty of a woman who had
never let the authority of another define her.

Her horn-rimmed glasses gave her a studious look that her
careless and eccentric dress belied. I felt guilty watching her without
her knowledge, but in that moment I also realized what it was that
attracted men to her.

She was one of those women we instinctively know are braver
and more resilient than we are, more long-suffering and more willing to
be broken for the sake of principle. You wanted to feel tender toward
Megan, but you knew your feelings were vain and presumptuous. She had a
lion's heart and did not need a protector.

"Oh, Dave. I didn't hear you come up on me," she said,
removing her glasses.

"I was down at the library looking at your work. Who were
those Indians Adrien Glazier was taking down?"

"One of them supposedly murdered two FBI agents. Amnesty
International thinks he's innocent."

"There were some other photos in there you took of Mexican
children in a ruined church around Trinidad, Colorado."

"Those were migrant kids whose folks had run off. The church
was built by John D. Rockefeller after his goons murdered the families
of striking miners up the road at Ludlow."

"I mention it because Swede Boxleiter told me a hit man named
Harpo Scruggs had a ranch around there."

"He should know. He and Cisco were placed in a foster home in
Trinidad. The husband was a pederast. He raped Swede until he bled
inside. Swede took it so the guy wouldn't start on Cisco next."

I sat down on the top step of the gazebo and tossed a pebble
into the bayou.

"Clete's my longtime friend, Megan. He says he needs this
security job with Cisco's company. I don't think that's why he's
staying here," I said.

She started to speak but gave it up.

"Even though he says otherwise, I don't think he understands
the nature of y'all's relationship," I said.

"Is he drinking?"

"Not now, but he will."

She rested her cheek on her hand and gazed at the bayou.

"What I did was rotten," she said. "I wake up every morning
and feel like a bloody sod. I just wish I could undo it."

"Talk to him again."

"You want Cisco and me out of his life. That's the real
agenda, isn't it?"

"The best cop New Orleans ever had has become a grunt for
Billy Holtzner."

"He can walk out of that situation anytime he wants. How about
my brother? Anthony Pollock worked for some nasty people in Hong Kong.
Who do you think they're going to blame for his death?"

"To tell you the truth, it's a long way from Bayou Teche. I
don't really care."

She folded her letter and put away her pen and walked up the
green bank toward the house, her silhouette surrounded by the tracings
of fireflies.

CISCO FILMED LATE THAT night and did
not return home until
after 2 a.m. The intruders came sometime between midnight and then.
They were big, heavy men, booted, sure of themselves and unrelenting in
their purpose. They churned and destroyed the flower beds, where they
disabled the alarm system, and slipped a looped wire through a window
jamb and released the catch from inside. Each went through the opening
with one muscular thrust, because hardly any dirt was scuffed into the
bricks below the jamb.

They knew where she slept, and unlike the men who admired
Megan for her strength, these men despised her for it. Their hands fell
upon her in her sleep, wrenched her from the bed, bound her eyes,
hurled her through the door and out onto the patio and down the slope
to the bayou. When she pulled at the tape on her eyes, they slapped her
to her knees.

But while they forced her face into the water, none of them
saw the small memo recorder attached to a key ring she held clenched in
her palm. Even while her mouth and nostrils filled with mud and her
lungs burned for air as though acid had been poured in them, she tried
to keep her finger pressed on the "record" button.

Then she felt the bayou grow as warm as blood around her neck
just as a veined, yellow bubble burst in the center of her mind, and
she knew she was safe from the hands and fists and booted feet of the
men who had always lived on the edge of her camera's lens.

THE TAPE ON THE SMALL recorder had
only a twenty-second
capacity. Most of the voices were muffled and inaudible, but there were
words, whole sentences, sawed out of the darkness that portrayed
Megan's tormenters better than any photograph could:

"Hold her, damnit! This is one bitch been asking for it a long
time. You cain't get her head down, get out of the way."

"She's bucking. When they buck, they're fixing to go under.
Better pull her up unless we're going all the way."

"Let her get a breath, then give it to her again. Ain't
nothing like the power of memory to make a good woman, son."

It was 2:30 a.m. now and the ambulance had already left with
Megan for Iberia General. The light from the flashers on our parked
cruisers was like a blue, white, and red net on the trees and the
bayou's surface and the back of the house. Cisco paced back and forth
on the lawn, his eyes large, his face dilated in the glare.

Behind him I could see the sheriff squatted under the open
window with a flashlight, peeling back the ruined flowers with one hand.

"You know who did it, don't you?" I said to Cisco.

"If I did, I'd have a gun down somebody's mouth," he replied.

"Give the swinging dick act a break, Cisco."

"I can't tell you who, I can only tell you why. It's payback
for Anthony."

"Walk down to the water with me," I said, and cupped one hand
on his elbow.

We went down the slope to the bayou, where the mudbank had
been imprinted at the water's edge by Megan's bare knees and sliced by
heavy boots that had fought for purchase while she struggled with at
least three men. An oak tree sheltered us from the view of the sheriff
and the uniformed deputies in the yard.

"Don't you lie to me. With these guys payback means dead. They
want something. What is it?" I said.

"Billy Holtzner embezzled three-quarters of a million out of
the budget by working a scam on our insurance coverage. But he put it
on me. Anthony worked for the money people in Hong Kong. He believed
what Billy told him. He started twisting my dials and ended up with big
leaks in his arteries."

"Swede?"

"We were playing chess for a lot of the evening. I don't know
if he did it or not. Swede's protective. Anthony was a prick."

"Protective? The victim was a prick? Great attitude."

"It's complicated. There's a lot of big finance involved.
You're not going to understand it." He saw the look on my face. "I'm in
wrong with some bad guys. The studio's going to file bankruptcy. They
want to gut my picture and inflate its value on paper to liquidate
their debts."

The current in the bayou was dead, hazed over with insects,
and there was no air under the trees. He wiped his face with his hand.

"I'm telling the truth, Dave. I didn't think they'd go after
Megan. Maybe there's something else involved. About my father, maybe. I
don't understand it all either… Where you going?" he said.

"To find Clete Purcel."

"What for?"

"To talk to him before he hears about this from someone else."

"You coming to the hospital?" he asked, his fingers opened in
front of him as though the words of another could be caught and held as
physical guarantees.

IT WAS STILL DARK when I parked my
truck by the stucco cottage
Clete had rented outside Jeanerette. I pushed back the seat and slept
through a rain shower and did not wake until dawn. When I woke, the
rain had stopped and the air was heavy with mist, and I saw Clete at
his mailbox in a robe, the
Morning Advocate
under
his arm, staring curiously at my truck. I got out and walked toward him.