DR10 - Sunset Limited (25 page)

"Clete Purcel?"

"If that's his name. You can tell them I didn't have nothing
to do with hurting that woman."

"Tell them yourself."

"All this trouble we been having? It can end in one of two
ways. That black boy, Broussard, don't testify against the dagos in New
Orleans and some people gets paid back the money they're owed.

"The other way it ends is I get complete immunity as a
government witness, all my real estate is sold and the proceeds are put
in bearer bonds. Not one dollar of it gets touched by the IRS. Then I
retire down in Guatemala. Y'all decide."

"Who the hell do you think you are?" I said.

A black man brought a bottle of Dixie beer on a metal tray to
the table. Scruggs tipped him a quarter and wiped the lip of the bottle
with his palm.

"I'm the man got something you want, son. Or you wouldn't be
sitting here," he replied.

"You took money from Ricky Scarlotti, then fucked up
everything you touched. Now you've got both the Mob and a crazoid like
Boxleiter on your case," I said.

He drank out of the beer and looked into the pine trees,
sucking his false teeth, his expression flat. But I saw the muted
change in his eyes, the way heat glows when the wind puffs ash off a
coal.

"You ain't so different from me," he said. "You want to bring
them rich people down. I can smell it in you, boy. A poor man's got
hate in his glands. It don't wash out. That's why nigras stink the way
they do."

"You've caused a lot of trouble and pain for people around
here. So we've decided in your case it should be a two-way street. I'd
hoped you'd provoke a situation here."

"You got a hideaway on your ankle?"

"My partner has your face in the crosshairs of a scoped
.30-06. She'd looked forward to this evening with great anticipation,
sir. Enjoy your beer. We'll catch you down the road."

I walked out to the parking lot and waited for Helen to pull
my truck around from the other side of the motel. I didn't look behind
me, but I could feel his eyes on my back, watching. When Helen drew to
a stop in front of me, the scoped, bolt-action rifle on the gun rack,
the dust drifting off the tires, she cocked one finger like a pistol
and aimed it out the window at Harpo Scruggs.

TUESDAY MORNING THE SHERIFF called me
into his office.

"I just got the surveillance report on Scruggs," he said. "He
took the Amtrak to Houston, spent the night in a Mexican hot pillow
joint, then flew to Trinidad, Colorado."

"He'll be back."

"I think I finally figured out something about wars. A few
people start them and the rest of us fight them. I'm talking about all
these people who use our area for a bidet. I think this state is
becoming a mental asylum, I really do." Something outside the window
caught his attention. "Ah, my morning wouldn't be complete without it.
Cisco Flynn just walked in the front door."

FIVE MINUTES LATER CISCO sat down in
front of my desk.

"You got anything on these guys who attacked Megan?" he asked.

"Yeah. One of them is dead."

"Did you clear Swede on that deal?"

"You mean did I check out his alibi? He created a memorable
moment at the theater. Water flowed out of the men's room into the
lobby. At about five in the afternoon."

"From what I understand, that should put him home free."

"It might."

I watched his face. His reddish-brown eyes smiled at nothing.

"Megan felt bad that maybe she made a suspect out of Swede,"
he said.

"You can pretend otherwise, but he's a dangerous man, Cisco."

"How about the cowboy who went out the window? Would you call
him a dangerous man?"

I didn't answer. We stared at each other across the desk. Then
his eyes broke.

"Good seeing you, Dave. Thanks for giving Megan the gun," he
said.

I watched silently as he opened the office door and went out
into the hall.

I propped my forehead on my fingers and stared at the empty
green surface of my desk blotter. Why hadn't I seen it? I had even used
the term "aerialist" to the San Antonio homicide investigator.

I went out the side door of the building and caught Cisco at
his car. The day was beautiful, and his suntanned face looked gold and
handsome in the cool light.

"You called the dead man a cowboy," I said.

He grinned, bemused. "What's the big deal?" he said.

"Who said anything about how the guy was dressed?"

"I mean 'cowboy' like 'hit man.' That's what contract killers
are called, aren't they?"

"You and Boxleiter worked this scam together, didn't you?"

He laughed and shook his head and got in his car and drove out
of the lot, then waved from the window just before he disappeared in
the traffic.

THE FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST CALLED me
that afternoon.

"I can give it to you over the phone or talk in person. I'd
rather do it in person," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Because autopsies can tell us things about human behavior I
don't like to know about," he replied.

An hour later I walked into his office.

"Let's go outside and sit under the trees. You'll have to
excuse my mood. My own work depresses the hell out of me sometimes," he
said.

We sat in metal chairs behind the white-painted brick building
that housed his office. The hard-packed earth stayed in shade almost
year-round and was green with mold and sloped down to a ragged patch of
bamboo on the bayou. Out in the sunlight an empty pirogue that had
pulled loose from its mooring turned aimlessly in the current.

"There're abrasions on the back of her head and scrape marks
on her shoulder, like trauma from a fall rather than a direct blow," he
said. "Of course, you're more interested in cause of death."

"I'm interested in all of it."

"I mean, the abrasions on her skin could have been unrelated
to her death. Didn't you say her husband knocked her around before she
fled the home?"

"Yes."

"I found evidence of water in the lungs. It's a bit
complicated, but there's no question about its presence at the time she
died."

"So she was alive when she went into the marsh?"

"Hear me out. The water came out of a tap, not a swamp or
marsh or brackish bay, not unless the latter contains the same
chemicals you find in a city water supply."

"A faucet?"

"But that's not what killed her." He wore an immaculate white
shirt, and his red suspenders hung loosely on his concave chest. He
snuffed down in his nose and fixed his glasses. "It was heart failure,
maybe brought on by suffocation."

"I'm not putting it together, Clois."

"You were in Vietnam. What'd the South Vietnamese do when they
got their hands on the Vietcong?"

"Water poured on a towel?"

"I think in this case we're talking about a wet towel held
down on the face. Maybe she fell, then somebody finished the job. But
I'm in a speculative area now."

The image he had called up out of memory was not one I wanted
to think about. I looked at the fractured light on the bayou, a garden
blooming with blue and pink hydrangeas on the far bank. But he wasn't
finished.

"She was pregnant. Maybe two months. Does that mean anything?"
he said.

"Yeah, it sure does."

"You don't look too good."

"It's a bad story, Doc."

"They all are."

THAT EVENING CLETE PARKED HIS
convertible by the dock and
hefted an ice chest up on his shoulder and carried it to a
fish-cleaning table by one of the water faucets I had mounted at
intervals on a water line that ran the length of the dock's handrail.
He poured the ice and at least two dozen sac-a-lait out on the table,
put on a pair of cloth gardener's gloves, and started scaling the
sac-a-lait with a spoon and splitting open their stomachs and
half-mooning the heads at the gills.

"You catch fish somewhere else and clean them at my dock?" I
said.

"I hate to tell you this, the fishing's a lot better at
Henderson. How about I take y'all to the Patio for dinner tonight?"

"Things aren't real cool at the house right now."

He kept his eyes flat, his face neutral. He washed the spooned
fish scales off the board plank. I told him about the autopsy on Ida
Broussard.

When I finished he said, "You like graveyard stories? How
about this? I caught Swede Boxleiter going out of the Terrebonne
cemetery last night. He'd used a trowel to take the bricks out of the
crypt and pry open the casket. He took the rings from the corpse's
fingers, and a pair of riding spurs and a silver picture frame that
Archer Terrebonne says held a photo of some little girls a slave
poisoned.

"I cuffed Boxleiter to a car bumper and went up to the house
and told Terrebonne a ghoul had been in his family crypt. That guy must
have Freon in his veins. He didn't say a word. He went down there with
a light and lifted the bricks back out and dragged the casket out on
the ground and straightened the bones and rags inside and put the
stolen stuff back on the corpse, didn't blink an eye. He didn't even
look at Boxleiter, like Boxleiter was an insect sitting under a glass
jar."

"What'd you do with Boxleiter?"

"Fired him this morning."

"
You
fired him?"

"Billy Holtzner tends to delegate authority in some
situations. He promised me a two-hundred-buck bonus, then hid in his
trailer while I walked Boxleiter off the set. Have you told this
Broussard guy his wife was murdered?"

"He's not home."

"Dave, I'll say it again. Don't let him come around the set to
square a beef, okay?"

"He's not a bad guy, Clete."

"Yeah, they've got a lot of that kind on Camp J."

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I sat with Cool
Breeze on the gallery
of his father's house and told him, in detail, of the pathologist's
findings. He had been pushing the swing at an angle with one foot, then
he stopped and scratched his hand and looked out at the street.

"The blow on the back of her head and the marks on her
shoulders, could you have done that?" I said.

"I pushed her down on the steps. But her head didn't hit
nothing but the screen."

"Was the baby yours?"

"Two months? No, we wasn't… It couldn't be my baby."

"You know where she went after she left your house, don't
you?" I said.

"I do now."

"You stay away from Alex Guidry. I want your promise on that,
Breeze."

He pulled on his fingers and stared at the street.

"I talked with Harpo Scruggs Sunday night," I said. "He's
making noise about your testifying against the Giacanos and Ricky
Scarlotti."

"Why ain't you got him in jail?"

"Sooner or later, they all go down."

"Ex-cop, ex-prison guard, man killed niggers in Angola for
fun? They go down when God call 'em. What you done about Ida, it ain't
lost on me. T'ank you."

Then he went back in the house.

I ATE LUNCH AT home that day. But
Bootsie didn't sit at the
kitchen table with me. Behind me, I heard her cleaning the drainboard,
putting dishes in the cabinets, straightening canned goods in the
cupboard.

"Boots, in all truth, I don't believe Megan Flynn has any
romantic interest in an over-the-hill small-town homicide cop," I said.

"Really?"

"When I was a kid, my father was often drunk or in jail and my
mother was having affairs with various men. I was alone a lot of the
time, and for some reason I didn't understand I was attracted to people
who had something wrong with them. There was a big, fat alcoholic nun I
always liked, and a half-blind ex-convict who swept out Provost's Bar,
and a hooker on Railroad Avenue who used to pay me a dollar to bring a
bucket of beer to her crib."

"So?"

"A kid from a screwed-up home sees himself in the faces of
excoriated people."

"You're telling me you're Megan Flynn's pet bête
noire?"

"No, I'm just a drunk."

I heard her moving about in the silence, then she paused
behind my chair and let the tips of her fingers rest in my hair.

"Dave, it's all right to call yourself that at meetings. But
you're not a drunk to me. And she'd better not ever call you one
either."

I felt her fingers trail off my neck, then she was gone from
the room.

TWO DAYS LATER HELEN and I took the
department boat out on a
wide bay off the Atchafalaya River where Cisco Flynn was filming a
simulated plane crash. We let the bow of the boat scrape up onto a
willow island, then walked out on a platform that the production
company had built on pilings over the water. Cisco was talking to three
other men, his eyes barely noting our presence.

"No, tell him to do it again," he said. "The plane's got to
come in lower, right out of the sun, right across those trees. I'll do
it with him if necessary. When the plane blows smoke, I want it to
bleed into that red sun. Okay, everybody cool?"

It was impressive to watch him. Cisco used authority in a way
that made others feel they shared in it. He was one of their own,
obviously egalitarian in his attitudes, but he could take others across
a line they wouldn't cross by themselves.

He turned to me and Helen.

"Watch the magic of Hollywood at work," he said. "This scene
is going to take four days and a quarter of a million dollars to shoot.
The plane comes in blowing black smoke, then we film a model crashing
in a pond. We've got a tail section mounted on a mechanical arm that
draws the wreckage underwater like a sinking plane, then we do the
rescue dive in the LSU swimming pool. It edits down to two minutes of
screen time. What d'you think about that?"

"I ran you through the National Crime Information Center. You
and Swede Boxleiter took down a liquor store when you were seventeen,"
I said.