DR10 - Sunset Limited

  "I'd like to take some slivers of wood from them, if you don't mind."

  "What for?"

  "If you see Alex Guidry, you can tell him I was here. You can also tell him I took evidence from your staircase. Mr. Plo, I appreciate your honesty. I think you're a good man."

  He walked across his yard toward the front door, his face harried with his own thoughts, as wrinkled as a turtle's foot. Then he stopped and turned around.

  "Her husband, the one run the li'l sto'? What happened to him?" he asked.

  "He went back to prison," I answered.

  Mr. Plo crimped his mouth and opened his screen door and went inside his house.

  FROM HIS KITCHEN WINDOW Swede Boxleiter could see the bayou through the pecan trees in the yard. It was a perfect evening. A boy was fishing in a green pirogue with a bamboo pole among the lily pads and cattails; the air smelled like rain and flowers; somebody was barbecuing steak on a shady lawn. It was too bad Blimpo nailed him coming out of the graveyard. He liked being with Cisco and Megan again, knocking down good money on a movie set, working out every day, eating seafood and fixing tropical health drinks in the blender. Louisiana had its moments.

  Maybe it was time to shake it. His union card was gold in Hollywood. Besides, in California nobody got in your face because you might be a little singed around the edges. Weirded out, your arms stenciled with tracks, a rap sheet you could wallpaper the White House with? That was the bio for guys who wrote six-figure scripts. But he'd let Cisco call the shot. The problem was, the juice was just too big on this one. Taking down punks like Rodney Loudermilk or that accountant Anthony Whatever wasn't going to get anybody out of Shitsville.

  He loaded the blender with fresh strawberries, bananas, two raw eggs, a peeled orange, and a can of frozen fruit cocktail, and flicked on the switch. Why was that guy from the power company still messing around outside?

  "Hey, you! I told you, disconnect me again, your next job is gonna be on the trash truck!" Swede said.

  "That's my day job already," the utility man replied.

  They sure didn't have any shortage of wise-asses around here, Swede thought. How about Blimpo in his porkpie hat hooking him to a car bumper and going up to the Terrebonne house and bringing this guy back down to the crypt, like Swede's the pervert, a dog on a chain, not this fuck Terrebonne crawling around on his hands and knees, smoothing out the bones and rags in the casket, like he's packing up a rat's nest to mail it somewhere.

  "What are you doing with my slingshot?" Swede said through the window.

  "I stepped on it. I'm sorry," the utility man said.

  "Put it down and get out of here."

  But instead the utility man walked beyond Swede's vision to the door and knocked.

  Swede went into the living room, shirtless and barefoot, and ripped open the door.

  "It's been a bad week. I don't need no more trouble. I pay my bill through the super, so just pack up your shit and—" he said.

  Then they were inside, three of them, and over their shoulders he saw a neighbor painting a steak with sauce on a grill and he wanted to yell out, to send just one indicator of his situation into the waning light, but the door closed quickly behind the men, then the kitchen window, too, and he knew if he could only change two seconds of his life, revise the moment between his conversation with the utility man at the window and the knock on the door, none of this would be happening, that's what two seconds could mean.

  One of them turned on the TV, increasing the volume to an almost deafening level, then slightly lowering it. Were the three men smiling now, as though all four of them were involved in a mutually shameful act? He couldn't tell. He stared at the muzzle of the .25 automatic.

  Man, in the bowl, big time, he thought.

  But a fellow's got to try.

  His shank had a four-inch blade, with a bone-and-brass handle, a brand called Bear Hunter, a real collector's item Cisco had given him. Swede pulled it from his right pocket, ticking the blade's point against the denim fabric, opening the blade automatically as he swung wildly at a man's throat.

  It was a clean cut, right across the top of the chest, slinging blood in a diagonal line across the wall. Swede tried to get the second man with the backswing, perhaps even felt the knife arc into sinew and bone, but a sound like a Chinese firecracker popped inside his head, then he was falling into a black well where he should have been able to lie unmolested, looking up at the circle of peering faces far above him only if he wanted.

  But they rolled him inside a rug and carried him to a place where he knew he did not want to go. He'd screwed up, no denying it, and they'd unzipped his package. But it should have been over. Why were they doing this? They were lifting him again now, out of a car trunk, over the top of the bumper, carrying him across grass, through a fence gate that creaked on a hinge, unrolling him now in the dirt, under a sky bursting with stars.

  One of his eyes didn't work and the other was filmed with blood. But he felt their hands raising him up, molding him to a cruciform design that was foreign to his life, that should not have been his, stretching out his arms against wood. He remembered pictures from a Sunday school teacher's book, a dust-blown hill and a darkening sky and helmeted soldiers whose faces were set with purpose, whose fists clutched spikes and hammers, whose cloaks were the color of their work.

  Hadn't a woman been there in the pictures, too, one who pressed a cloth against a condemned man's face? Would she do that for him, too? He wondered these things as he turned his head to the side and heard steel ring on steel and saw his hand convulse as though it belonged to someone else.

  * * *

  TWENTY-THREE

  HELEN AND I WALKED THROUGH the clumps of banana trees and blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn, where a group of St. Mary Parish plainclothes investigators and uniformed sheriffs deputies and ambulance attendants stood in a shaded area, one that droned with iridescent green flies, looking down at the collapsed and impaled form of Swede Boxleiter. Swede's chest was pitched forward against the nails that held his wrists, his face hidden in shadow, his knees twisted in the dust. Out in the sunlight, the flowers on the rain trees were as bright as arterial blood among the leaves.

  "It looks like we got joint jurisdiction on this one," a plainclothes cop said. His name was Thurston Meaux and he had a blond mustache and wore a tweed sports coat with a starched denim shirt and a striped tie. "After the photographer gets here, we'll take him down and send y'all everything we have."

  "Was he alive when they nailed him up?" I asked.

  "The coroner has to wait on the autopsy. Y'all say he took the head wound in his apartment?" he said.

  "That's what it looks like," I replied.

  "You found brass?"

  "One casing. A .25."

  "Why would somebody shoot a guy in Iberia Parish, then nail him to a barn wall in St. Mary?" Meaux said.

  "Another guy died here in the same way forty years ago," I said.

  "This is where that happened?"

  "I think it's a message to someone," I said.

  "We already ran this guy. He was a thief and a killer, a suspect in two open homicide cases. I don't see big complexities here."

  "If that's the way you're going to play it, you won't get anywhere."

  "Come on, Robicheaux. A guy like that is a walking target for half the earth. Where you going?"

  Helen and I walked back to our cruiser and drove through the weeds, away from the barn and between two water oaks whose leaves were starting to fall, then back out on the state road.

  "I don't get it. What message?" Helen said, driving with one hand, her badge holder still hanging from her shirt pocket.

  "If it was just a payback killing, the shooters would have left his body in the apartment. When we met Harpo Scruggs at the barbecue place? He said something about hating rich people. I think he killed Swede and deliberately tied Swede's murder to Jack Flynn's to get even with somebody."

  She thought about it.
r />   "Scruggs took the Amtrak to Houston, then flew back to Colorado," she said.

  "So he came back. That's the way he operates. He kills people over long distances."

  She looked over at me, her eyes studying my expression.

  "But something else is bothering you, isn't it?" she said.

  "Whoever killed Swede hung him up on the right side of where Jack Flynn died."

  She shook a half-formed thought out of her face.

  "I like working with you, Streak, but I'm not taking any walks inside your head," she said.

  ALEX GUIDRY WAS FURIOUS. He came through the front door of the sheriffs department at eight o'clock Monday morning, not slowing down at the information desk or pausing long enough to knock before entering my office.

  "You're getting Ida Broussard's case reopened?" he said.

  "You thought there was a statute of limitations on murder?" I replied.

  "You took splinters out of my old house and gave them to the St. Mary Parish sheriffs office?" he said incredulously.

  "That about sums it up."

  "What's this crap about me suffocating her to death?"

  I paper-clipped a sheaf of time sheets together and stuck them in a drawer.

  "A witness puts you with Ida Broussard right before her death. A forensic pathologist says she was murdered, that water from a tap was forced down her nose and mouth. If you don't like what you're hearing, Mr. Guidry, I suggest you find a lawyer," I said.

  "What'd I ever do to you?"

  "Sullied our reputation in Iberia Parish. You're a bad cop. You bring discredit on everyone who carries a badge."

  "You better get your own lawyer, you sonofabitch. I'm going to twist a two-by-four up your ass," he said.

  I picked up my phone and punched the dispatcher's extension.

  "Wally, there's a man in my office who needs an escort to his automobile," I said.

  Guidry pointed one stiffened finger at me, without speaking, then strode angrily down the hallway. A few minutes later Helen came into my office and sat on the edge of my desk.

  "I just saw our ex-jailer in the parking lot. Somebody must have spit on his toast this morning. He couldn't get his car door open and he ended up breaking off his key in the lock."

  "Really?" I said.

  Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

  FOUR HOURS LATER OUR fingerprint man called. The shell casing found on the carpet of Swede Boxleiter's apartment was clean and the apartment contained no identifiable prints other than the victim's. That same afternoon the sheriff called Helen and me into his office.

  "I just got off the phone with the sheriffs department in Trinidad, Colorado. Get this. They don't know anything about Harpo Scruggs, except he owns a ranch outside of town," he said.

  "Is he there now?" Helen said.

  "That's what I asked. This liaison character says, 'Why you interested in him?' So I say, 'Oh, we think he might be torturing and killing people in our area, that sort of thing.'" The sheriff picked up his leather tobacco pouch and flipped it back and forth in his fingers.

  "Scruggs is a pro. He does his dirty work a long way from home," I said.

  "Yeah, he also crosses state lines to do it. I'm going to call that FBI woman in New Orleans. In the meantime, I want y'all to go to Trinidad and get anything you can on this guy."

  "Our travel budget is pretty thin, skipper," I said.

  "I already talked to the Parish Council. They feel the same way I do. You keep crows out of a cornfield by tying a few dead ones on your fence wire. That's a metaphor."

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING our plane made a wide circle over the Texas panhandle, then we dropped through clouds that were pooled with fire in the sunrise and came in over biscuit-colored hills dotted with juniper and pine and pinyon trees and landed at a small windblown airport outside Raton, New Mexico.

  The country to the south was as flat as a skillet, hazed with dust in the early light, the monotony of the landscape broken by an occasional mesa. But immediately north of Raton the land lifted into dry, pinyon-covered, steep-sided hills that rose higher and higher into a mountainous plateau where the old mining town of Trinidad, once home to the Earps and Doc Holliday, had bloomed in the nineteenth century.

  We rented a car and drove up Raton Pass through canyons that were still deep in shadow, the sage on the hillsides silvered with dew. On the left, high up on a grade, I saw a roofless church, with a facade like that of a Spanish mission, among the ruins and slag heaps of an abandoned mining community.

  "That church was in one of Megan's photographs. She said it was built by John D. Rockefeller as a PR effort after the Ludlow massacre," I said.

  Helen drove with one hand on the steering wheel. She looked over at me with feigned interest in her eyes.

  "Yeah?" she said, chewing gum.

  I started to say something about the children and women who were suffocated in a cellar under a burning tent when the Colorado militia broke a miners' strike at Ludlow in 1914.

  "Go on with your story," she said.

  "Nothing."

  "You know history, Streak. But it's still the good guys against the shit bags. We're the good guys."

  She put her other hand on the wheel and looked at me and grinned, her mouth chewing, her bare upper arms round and tight against the short sleeves of her shirt.

  We reached the top of the grade and came out into a wide valley, with big mountains in the west and the old brick and quarried rock buildings of Trinidad off to the right, on streets that climbed into the hills. The town was still partially in shadow, the wooded crests of the hills glowing like splinters of black-green glass against the early sun.

  We checked in with the sheriffs department and were assigned an elderly plainclothes detective named John Nash as an escort out to Harpo Scruggs's ranch. He sat in the back seat of our rental car, a short-brim Stetson cocked on the side of his head, a pleasant look on his face as he watched the landscape go by.

  "Scruggs never came to y'all's attention, huh?" I said.

  "Can't say that he did," he replied.

  "Just an ordinary guy in the community?"

  "If he's what you say, I guess we should have taken better note of him." His face was sun-browned, his eyes as blue as a butane flame, webbed with tiny lines at the corners when he smiled. He looked back out the window.

  "This definitely seems like a laid-back place, yes-siree," Helen said, her eyes glancing sideways at me. She turned off the state highway onto a dirt road that wound through an arroyo layered with exposed rock.

  "What do you plan to do with this fellow?" John Nash said.

  "You had a shooting around here in a while?" Helen said.

  John Nash smiled to himself and stared out the window again. Then he said, "That's it yonder, set back against that hill. It's a real nice spot here. Not a soul around. A Mexican drug smuggler pulled a gun on me down by that creek once. I killed him deader than hell."

  Helen and I both turned around and looked at John Nash as though for the first time.

  Harpo Scruggs's ranch was rail-fenced and covered with sage, bordered on the far side by low bills and a creek that was lined with aspens. The house was gingerbread late Victorian, gabled and paintless, surrounded on four sides by a handrailed gallery. We could see a tall figure splitting firewood on a stump by the barn. Our tires thumped across the cattle guard. John Nash leaned forward with his arms on the back of my seat.

  "Mr. Robicheaux, you're not hoping for our friend out there to do something rash, are you?" he said.

  "You're an interesting man, Mr. Nash," I said.

  "I get told that a lot," he replied.

  We stopped the car on the edge of the dirt yard and got out. The air smelled like wet sage and wood smoke and manure and horses when there's frost on their coats and they steam in the sun. Scruggs paused in his work and stared at us from under the flop brim of an Australian bush hat. Then he stood another chunk of firewood on its edge and split it in half.

  We walked
toward him through the side yard. Coffee cans planted with violets and pansies were placed at even intervals along the edge of the gallery. For some reason John Nash separated himself from us and stepped up on the gallery and propped his hands on the rail and watched us as though he were a spectator.

  "Nice place," I said to Scruggs.

  "Who's that man up on my gallery?" he said.

  "My boss man's brought the Feds into it, Scruggs. Crossing state lines. Big mistake," I said.

  "Here's the rest of it. Ricky Scar is seriously pissed because a poor-white-trash peckerwood took his money and then smeared shit all over southwest Louisiana," Helen said.

  "Plus you tied a current homicide to one that was committed forty years ago," I said.

  "The real mystery is why the Mob would hire a used-up old fart who thinks bedding hookers will stop his Johnson from dribbling in the toilet bowl three times a night. That Mexican hot pillow joint you visited in Houston? The girl said she wanted to scrub herself down with peroxide," Helen said. When Scruggs stared at her, she nodded affirmatively, her face dramatically sincere.

  Scruggs leaned the handle of his ax against the stump and bit a small chew off a plug of tobacco, his shoulders and long back held erect inside his sun-faded shirt. He turned his face away and spit in the dirt, then rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist.

  "You born in New Iberia, Robicheaux?" he asked.

  "That's right."

  "You think with what I know of past events, bodies buried in the levee at Angola, troublesome people killed in St. Mary Parish, I'm going down in a state court?"

  "Times have changed, Scruggs," I said.

  He hefted the ax in one hand and began splitting a chunk of wood into long white strips for kindling, his lips glazed with a brown residue from the tobacco in his jaw. Then he said, "If y'all going down to Deming to hurt my name there, it won't do you no good. I've lived a good life in the West. It ain't never been dirtied by nigra trouble and rich people that thinks they can make white men into nigras, too."

  "You were one of the men who killed Jack Flynn, weren't you?" I said.