DR10 - Sunset Limited

  "I'm fixing to butcher a hog, then I got a lady friend coming out to visit. I'd like for y'all to be gone before she gets here. By the way, that man up on the gallery ain't no federal agent."

  "We'll be around, Scruggs. I guarantee it," I said.

  "Yeah, you will. Just like a tumblebug rolling shit balls."

  We started toward the car. Behind me I heard his ax blade splitting a piece of pine with a loud snap, then John Nash called out from the gallery, "Mr. Scruggs, where's that fellow used to sell you cordwood, do your fence work and such, the one looks like he's got clap on his face?"

  "He don't work for me no more," Scruggs said.

  "I bet he don't. Being as he's in a clinic down in Raton with an infected knife wound," John Nash said.

  IN THE BACK SEAT of the car Nash took a notebook from his shirt pocket and folded back several pages.

  "His name's Jubal Breedlove. We think he killed a trucker about six years ago over some dope but we couldn't prove it. I put him in jail a couple of times on drunk charges. Otherwise, his sheet's not remarkable," he said.

  "You found this guy on your own?" I said.

  "I started calling hospitals when you first contacted us. Wait till you see his face. People tend to remember it."

  "Can you get on the cell phone and make sure Breedlove isn't allowed any phone calls in the next few minutes?" I said.

  "I did that early this morning."

  "You're a pretty good cop, Mr. Nash."

  He grinned, then his eyes focused out the window on a snowshoe rabbit that was hopping through grass by an irrigation ditch. "By the way, I told you only what was on his sheet. About twenty years ago a family camping back in the hills was killed in their tents. The man done it was after the daughter. When I ran Jubal Breedlove in on a drunk charge, I found the girl's high school picture in his billfold."

  Less than an hour later we were at the clinic in Raton. Jubal Breedlove lay in a narrow bed in a semi-private room that was divided by a collapsible partition. His face was tentacled with a huge purple-and-straw-berry birthmark, so that his eyes looked squeezed inside a mask. Helen picked up his chart from the foot of the bed and read it.

  "Boxleiter put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, didn't he?" she said.

  "What?" he said.

  "Swede slung your blood all over the apartment. He might as well have written your name on the wall," I said.

  "Swede who? I was robbed and stabbed behind a bar in Clayton," he said.

  "That's why you waited until the wound was infected before you got treatment," I said.

  "I was drunk for three days. I didn't know what planet I was on," he replied. His hair was curly, the color of metal shavings. He tried to concentrate his vision on me and Helen, but his eyes kept shifting to John Nash.

  "Harpo wouldn't let you get medical help down in Louisiana, would he? You going to take the bounce for a guy like that?" I asked.

  "I want a lawyer in here," he said.

  "No, you don't," Nash said, and fitted his hand on Breedlove's jaws and gingerly moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as though examining the function of Breedlove's neck. "Remember me?"

  "No."

  He moved his hand down on Breedlove's chest, flattening it on the panels of gauze that were taped across Breedlove's knife wound.

  "Mr. Nash," I said.

  "Remember the girl in the tent? I sure do." John Nash felt the dressing on Breedlove's chest with his fingertips, then worked the heel of his hand in a slow circle, his eyes fixed on Breedlove's. Breedlove's mouth opened as though his lower Up had been jerked downward on a wire, and involuntarily his hands grabbed at Nash's wrist.

  "Don't be touching me, boy. That'll get you in a lot of trouble," Nash said.

  "Mr. Nash, we need to talk outside a minute," I said.

  "That's not necessary," he replied, and gathered a handful of Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and wiped his palm with it. "Because everything is going to be just fine here. Why, look, the man's eyes glisten with repentance already."

  WE HAD ONE SUSPECT in Trinidad, Colorado, now a second one in New Mexico. I didn't want to think about the amount of paperwork and the bureaucratic legal problems that might lie ahead of us. After we dropped John Nash off at the sheriffs office, we ate lunch in a cafe by the highway. Through the window we could see a storm moving into the mountains and dust lifting out of the trees in a canyon and flattening on the hardpan.

  "What are you thinking about?" Helen asked.

  "We need to get Breedlove into custody and extradite him back to Louisiana," I said.

  "Fat chance, huh?"

  "I can't see it happening right now."

  "Maybe John Nash will have another interview with him."

  "That guy can cost us the case, Helen."

  "He didn't seem worried. I had the feeling Breedlove knows better than to file complaints about local procedure." When I didn't reply, she said, "Wyatt Earp and his brothers used to operate around here?"

  "After the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral they hunted down some other members of the Clanton gang and blew them into rags. I think this was one of the places on their route."

  "I wonder what kind of salary range they have here," she said.

  I paid the check and got a receipt for our expense account.

  "That story Archer Terrebonne told me about Lila and her cousin firing a gun across a snowfield, about starting an avalanche?" I said.

  "Yeah, you told me," Helen said.

  "You feel like driving to Durango?"

  WE HEADED UP THROUGH Walsenburg, then drove west into the mountains and a rainstorm that turned to snow when we approached Wolf Creek Pass. The juniper and pinyon trees and cinnamon-colored country of the southern Colorado plateau were behind us now, and on each side of the highway the slopes were thick with spruce and fir and pine that glistened with snow that began melting as soon as it touched the canopy.

  At the top of Wolf Creek we pulled into a rest stop and drank coffee from a thermos and looked out on the descending crests of the mountains. The air was cold and gray and smelled like pine needles and wet boulders in a streambed and ice when you chop it out of a wood bucket in the morning.

  "Dave, I don't want to be a pill…" Helen began.

  "About what?"

  "It seems like I remember a story years ago about that avalanche, I mean about Lila's cousin being buried in it and suffocating or freezing to death," she said.

  "Go on."

  "I mean, who's to say the girl wasn't frozen in the shape of a cross? That kind of stuff isn't in an old newspaper article. Maybe we're getting inside our heads too much on this one."

  I couldn't argue with her.

  When we got to the newspaper office in Durango it wasn't hard to find the story about the avalanche back in 1967. It had been featured on the first page, with interviews of the rescuers and photographs of the slide, the lopsided two-story log house, a barn splintered into kindling, cattle whose horns and hooves and ice-crusted bellies protruded from the snow like disembodied images in a cubist painting. Lila had survived because the slide had pushed her into a creekbed whose overhang formed itself into an ice cave where she huddled for two days until a deputy sheriff poked an iron pike through the top and blinded her with sunlight.

  But the cousin died under ten feet of snow. The article made no mention about the condition of the body or its posture in death.

  "It was a good try and a great drive over," Helen said.

  "Maybe we can find some of the guys who were on the search and rescue team," I said.

  "Let it go, Dave."

  I let out my breath and rose from the chair I had been sitting in. My eyes burned and my palms still felt numb from involuntarily tightening my hands on the steering wheel during the drive over Wolf Creek Pass. Outside, the sun was shining on the nineteenth-century brick buildings along the street and I could see the thickly timbered, dark green slopes of the mountains rising up sharply in the background.

  I start
ed to close the large bound volume of 1967 newspapers in front of me. Then, like the gambler who can't leave the table as long as there is one chip left to play, I glanced again at a color photograph of the rescuers on a back page. The men stood in a row, tools in their hands, wearing heavy mackinaws and canvas overalls and stocking caps and cowboy hats with scarves tied around their ears. The snowfield was sunlit, dazzling, the mountains blue-green against a cloudless sky. The men were unsmiling, their clothes flattened against their bodies in the wind, their faces pinched with cold. I read the cutline below the photograph.

  "Where you going?" Helen said.

  I went into the editorial room and returned with a magnifying glass.

  "Look at the man on the far right," I said. "Look at his shoulders, the way he holds himself."

  She took the magnifying glass from my hand and stared through it, moving the depth of focus up and down, then concentrating on the face of a tall man in a wide-brim cowboy hat. Then she read the cutline.

  "It says 'H. Q. Skaggs.' The reporter misspelled it. It's Harpo Scruggs," she said.

  "Archer Terrebonne acted like he knew him only at a distance. I think he called him 'quite a character,' or something like that."

  "Why would they have him at their cabin in Colorado? The Terrebonnes don't let people like Scruggs use their indoor plumbing," she said. She stared at me blankly, then said, as though putting her thoughts on index cards, "He did scut work for them? He's had something on them? Scruggs could be blackmailing Archer Terrebonne?"

  "They're joined at the hip."

  "Is there a Xerox machine out there?" she asked.

  * * *

  TWENTY-FOUR

  WE GOT BACK TO NEW Iberia late the next day. I went to the office before going home, but the sheriff had already gone. In my mailbox he had left a note that read: "Let's talk tomorrow about Scruggs and the Feds."

  That evening Bootsie and Alafair and I went to a restaurant, then I worked late at the dock with Batist. The moon was up and the water in the bayou looked yellow and high, swirling with mud, between the deep shadows of the cypress and willow trees along the banks.

  I heard a car coming too fast on the dirt road, then saw Clete Purcel's convertible stop in front of the boat ramp, a plume of dust drifting across the canvas top. But rather than park by the ramp, he cut his lights and backed into my drive, so that the car tag was not visible from the road.

  I went back into the bait shop and poured a cup of coffee. He walked down the dock, looking back over his shoulder, his print shirt hanging out of his slacks. He grinned broadly when he came through the door.

  "Beautiful night. I thought I might get up early in the morning and do some fishing," he said.

  "The weather's right," I said.

  "How was Colorado?" he asked, then opened the screen door and looked back outside.

  I started to pour him a cup of coffee, but he reached in the cooler and twisted the top off a beer and drank it at the end of the counter so he could see the far end of the dock.

  "You mind if I sleep here tonight? I don't feel like driving back to Jeanerette," he said.

  "What have you done, Clete?"

  He ticked the center of his forehead with one fingernail and looked into space.

  "A couple of state troopers almost got me by Spanish Lake. I'm not supposed to be driving except for business purposes," he said.

  "Why would they be after you?"

  "This movie gig is creeping me out. I went up to Ralph & Kacoo's in Baton Rouge," he said. "All right, here it is. But I didn't start it. I was eating oysters on the half-shell and having a draft at the bar when Benny Grogan comes up to me—you know, Ricky the Mouse's bodyguard, the one with platinum hair, the wrestler and part-time bone smoker.

  "He touches me on the arm, then steps away like I'm going to swing on him or something. He says, 'We got a problem, Purcel. Ricky's stinking drunk in a back room.'

  "I say, 'No, we don't got a problem. You got a problem.'

  "He goes, 'Look, he's got some upscale gash in there he's trying to impress, so everything's gonna be cool. Long as maybe you go somewhere else. I'll pay your tab. Here's a hundred bucks. You're our guest somewhere else tonight.'

  "I say, 'Benny, you want to wear food on your face again, just put your hand on my arm one more time.'

  "He shrugs his shoulders and walks off and I thought that'd be the end of it. I was going to leave anyway, right after I took a leak. So I'm in the men's room, and they've got this big trough filled with ice in it, and of course people have been pissing in it all night, and I'm unzipping my pants and reading the newspaper that's under a glass up on the wall and I hear the door bang open behind me and some guy walking like the deck is tilting under his feet.

  "He goes, 'I got something for you, Purcel. They say it hits your guts like an iron hook.'

  "I'm not kidding you, Dave, I didn't think Ricky Scar could make my heart seize up, but that's what happened when I looked at what was in his hand. You ever see the current thread between the prongs on a stun gun? I go, 'Dumb move, Ricky. I was just leaving. I consider our troubles over.'

  "He goes, 'I'm gonna enjoy this.'

  "Just then this biker pushes open the door and brushes by Ricky like this is your normal, everyday rest-room situation. When Ricky turned his head I nailed him. It was a beaut, Dave, right in the eye. The stun gun went sailing under the stalls and Ricky fell backward in the trough. This plumber's helper was in the corner, one of these big, industrial-strength jobs for blowing out major toilet blockage. I jammed it over Ricky's face and shoved him down in the ice and held him under till I thought he might be more reasonable, but he kept kicking and flailing and frothing at the mouth and I couldn't let go.

  "The biker says, 'The dude try to cop your stick or something?'

  "I go, 'Find a guy named Benny Grogan in the back rooms. Tell him Clete needs some help. He'll give you fifty bucks.'

  "The biker goes, 'Benny Grogan gives head, not money. You're on your own, Jack.'

  "That's when Benny comes through the door and sticks a .38 behind my ear. He says, 'Get out of town, Purcel. Next time, your brains are coming out your nose.'

  "I didn't argue, mon. I almost made the front door when I hear the Mouse come roaring out of the can and charge down the hallway at me, streaming ice and piss and toilet paper that was stuck all over his feet.

  "Except a bunch of people in a side dining room fling open this oak door, it must be three inches thick with wrought iron over this thick yellow glass panel in it, and they slam it right into the Mouse's face, you could hear the metal actually ding off his skull.

  "So while Ricky's rolling around on the carpet, I eased on outside and decided to cruise very copacetically out of Baton Rouge and leave the greaseballs alone for a while."

  "Why were state troopers after you? Why were you out by Spanish Lake instead of on the four-lane?"

  His eyes clicked sideways, as though he were seriously researching the question.

  "Ummm, I kept thinking about begging off from the Mouse when he put his stun gun on snap, crackle, and pop. So out there in the parking lot were about eight or nine chopped-down Harleys. They belonged to the same bunch the Gypsy Jokers threatened to kill for wearing their colors. I still had all my repo tools in the trunk, so I found the Mouse's car and slim-jimmed the door and fired it up. Then I propped a board against the gas pedal, pointed it right into the middle of the Harleys, and dropped it into low.

  "I cruised around for five minutes, then did a drive-by and watched it all from across the street. The bikers were climbing around on Ricky's car like land crabs, kicking windows out, slashing the seats and tires, tearing the wires out of the engine. It was perfect, Dave. When the cops got there, it was even better. The cops were throwing bikers in a van, Ricky was screaming in the parking lot, his broad trying to calm him down, Ricky swinging her around by her arm like she was a stuffed doll, people coming out every door in the restaurant like the place was on fire. Benny Grogan got s
apped across the head with a baton. Anyway, it'll all cool down in a day or so. Say, you got any of those sandwiches left?"

  "I just can't believe you," I said.

  "What'd I do? I just wanted to eat some oysters and have a little peace and quiet."

  "Clete, one day you'll create a mess you won't get out of. They're going to kill you."

  "Scarlotti is a punk and a rodent and belongs under a sewer grate. Hey, the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide spit in their mouths and laugh it off, right? Quit worrying. It's only rock 'n' roll."

  His eyes were green and bright above the beer bottle while he drank, his face flushed and dilated with his own heat.

  JUST AFTER EIGHT THE next morning the sheriff came into my office. He stood at the window and propped his hands on the sill. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, his forearms thick and covered with hair.

  "I talked with that FBI woman, Glazier, about Harpo Scruggs. She's a challenge to whatever degree of civility I normally possess," he said.

  "What'd she say?"

  "She turned to an ice cube. That's what bothers me. He's supposed to be mixed up with the Dixie Mafia, but there's nothing in the NCIC computer on him. Why this general lack of interest?"

  "Up until now his victims have been low profile, people nobody cared about," I said.

  "That woman hates Megan Flynn. Why's it so personal with her?"

  We looked at each other. "Guilt?" I said.

  "Over what?"

  "Good question."

  I walked down to Helen's office, then we both signed out for New Orleans.

  WE DROVE TO NEW Orleans and parked off Carondelet and walked over to the Mobil Building on Poydras Street. When we sat down in her office, she rose from her chair and opened the blinds, as though wishing to create an extra dimension in the room. Then she sat back down in a swivel chair and crossed her legs, her shoulders erect inside her gray suit, her ice-blue eyes fixed on something out in the hallway. But when I turned around, no one was there.

  Then I saw it in her face, the dryness at the corner of the mouth, the skin that twitched slightly below the eye, the chin lifted as though to remove a tension in the throat.