DR10 - Sunset Limited (37 page)

"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.

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."

"What's the point?"

"I'm gonna have my pound of flesh from Archer Terrebonne. You
gonna be the man cut it out for me."

He straightened his tall frame inside his raincoat, his face
draining with the effort. He saw me watching him and raised the barrel
of the Ruger slightly, so that it was aimed upward at my armpit. He put
his hand on the towel tied across his side and looked at it, then wiped
his hand on his pants.

"Terrebonne paid my partner to shoot my liver out. I didn't
think my partner would turn on me. I'll be damned if you can trust
anybody these days," he said.

"The man who helped you kill the two brothers out in the
Atchafalaya Basin?"

"That's him. Or was. I wouldn't eat no pigs that was butchered
around here for a while… Take that exit yonder."

We drove for three miles through farmland, then followed a
dirt road through pine trees, past a pond that was green with algae and
covered with dead hyacinths, to a two-story yellow frame house whose
yard was filled with the litter of dead pecan trees. The windows had
been nailed over with plywood, the gallery stacked with hay bales that
had rotted.

"You recognize it?" he asked.

"It was a brothel," I said.

"The governor of Lou'sana used to get laid there. Walk ahead
of me."