Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "What's the matter, you don't want to see the wreckage your gal leaves in her wake?"

  She pulled the elastic cord loose from the cardboard satchel and spilled half the contents on a spool table. She lifted up a glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of Megan addressing a crowd of Latin peasants from the bed of a produce truck. Megan was leaning forward, her small hands balled into fists, her mouth wide with her oration.

  "Here's another picture taken a few days later. If you look closely, you'll recognize some of the dead people in the ditch. They were in the crowd that listened to Megan Flynn. Where was she when this happened? At the Hilton in Mexico City."

  "You really hate her, don't you?"

  I heard her take a breath, like a person who has stepped into fouled air.

  "No, I don't hate her, sir. I hate what she does. Other people die so she can feel good about herself," she said.

  I sifted through the photos and news clippings with my fingers. I picked up one that had been taken from the Denver Post and glued on a piece of cardboard backing. Adrien Glazier was two inches away from my skin. I could smell perspiration and body powder in her clothes. The news article was about thirteen-year-old Megan Flynn winning first prize in the Post's essay contest. The photo showed her sitting in a chair, her hands folded demurely in her lap, her essay medal worn proudly on her chest.

  "Not bad for a kid in a state orphanage. I guess that's the Megan I always remember. Maybe that's why I still think of her as one of the most admirable people I've ever known. Thanks for coming by," I said, and walked up the slope through the oak and pecan trees on my lawn, and on into my lighted house, where my daughter and wife waited supper for me.

  MONDAY MORNING HELEN SOILEAU came into my office and sat on the corner of my desk.

  "I was wrong about two things," she said.

  "Oh?"

  "The mulatto who tried to do Cool Breeze, the guy with the earring through his nipple? I said maybe I bought his story, he thought Breeze was somebody else? I checked the visitors' sheet. A lawyer for the Giacano family visited him the day before."

  "You're sure?"

  "Whiplash Wineburger. You ever meet him?"

  "Whiplash represents other clients, too."

  "Pro bono for a mulatto who works in a rice mill?"

  "Why would the Giacanos want to do an inside hit on a guy like Cool Breeze Broussard?"

  She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

  "Maybe the Feds are squeezing Breeze to bring pressure on the Giacanos," I said, in answer to my own question.

  "To make them cooperate in an investigation of the Triads?"

  "Why not?"

  "The other thing I was going to tell you? Last night Lila Terrebonne went into that new zydeco dump on the parish line. She got into it with the bartender, then pulled a.25 automatic on the bouncer. A couple of uniforms were the first guys to respond. They got her purse from her with the gun in it without any problem. Then one of them brushed against her and she went ape shit.

  "Dave, I put my arm around her and walked her out the back door, into the parking lot, with nobody else around, and she cried like a kid in my arms… You following me?"

  "Yeah, I think so," I said.

  "I don't know who did it, but I know what's been done to her," she said. She stood up, flexed her back, and inverted the flats of her hands inside the back of her gunbelt. The skin was tight around her mouth, her eyes charged with light. My gaze shifted off her face.

  "When I was a young woman and finally told people what my father did to me, nobody believed it," she said. "'Your dad was a great guy,' they said. 'Your dad was a wonderful parent.'"

  "Where is she now?"

  "Iberia General. Nobody's pressing charges. I think her old man already greased the owner of the bar."

  "You're a good cop, Helen."

  "Better get her some help. The guy who'll pay the bill won't be the one who did it to her. Too bad it works out that way, huh?"

  "What do I know?" I said.

  Her eyes held on mine. She had killed two perps in the line of duty. I think she took no joy in that fact. But neither did she regret what she had done nor did she grieve over the repressed anger that had rescinded any equivocation she might have had before she shot them. She winked at me and went back to her office.

  SIX

  WITH REGULARITY POLITICIANS TALK about what they call the war against drugs. I have the sense few of them know anything about it. But the person who suffers the attrition for the drug trade is real, with the same soft marmalade-like system of lungs and heart and viscera inherited from a fish as the rest of us.

  In this case her name was Ruby Gravano and she lived in a low-rent hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, between Lee Circle and Canal, not far from the French Quarter. The narrow front entrance was framed by bare lightbulbs, like the entrance to a 1920s movie theater. But quaint similarities ended there. The interior was superheated and breathless, unlighted except for the glare from the airshaft at the end of the hallways. For some reason the walls had been painted firehouse red with black trim, and now, in the semi-darkness, they had the dirty glow of a dying furnace.

  Ruby Gravano sat in a stuffed chair surrounded by the litter of her life: splayed tabloid magazines, pizza cartons, used Kleenex, a coffee cup with a dead roach inside, a half-constructed model of a spaceship that had been stuck back in the box and stepped on.

  Ruby Gravano's hair was long and black and made her thin face and body look fuller than they were. She wore shorts that were too big for her and exposed her underwear, and foundation on her thighs and forearms, and false fingernails and false eyelashes and a bruise like a fresh tattoo on her left cheek.

  "Dave won't jam you up on this, Ruby. We just want a string that'll lead back to these two guys. They're bad dudes, not the kind you want in your life, not the kind you want other girls to get mixed up with. You can help a lot of people here," Clete said.

  "We did them in a motel on Airline Highway. They had a pickup truck with a shell on it. Full of guns and camping gear and shit. They smelled like mosquito repellent. They always wore their hats. I've seen hogs eat with better table manners. They're Johns. What else you want to know?" she said.

  "Why'd you think they might be cops?" I asked.

  "Who else carries mug shots around?"

  "Beg your pardon?" I said.

  "The guy I did, he was undressing and he finds these two mug shots in his shirt pocket. So he burns them in an ashtray and that's when his friend says something about capping two brothers."

  "Wait a minute. You were all in the same room?" Clete said.

  "They didn't want to pay for two rooms. Besides, they wanted to trade off. Connie does splits, but I wouldn't go along. One of those creeps is sickening enough. Why don't you bug Connie about this stuff?"

  "Because she blew town," Clete said.

  She sniffed and wiped her nose with her wrist. "Look, I'm not feeling too good. Y'all got what you need?" she said.

  "Did they use a credit card to pay for the room?" I asked.

  "It's a trick pad. My manager pays the owner. Look, believe it or not, I got another life besides this shit. How about it?"

  She tried to look boldly into my face, but her eyes broke and she picked up the crushed model of a spaceship from its box on the floor and held it in her lap and studied it resentfully.

  "Who hit you, Ruby?" I asked.

  "A guy."

  "You have a kid?"

  "A little boy. He's nine. I bought him this, but it got rough in here last night."

  "These cops, duffers, whatever they were, they had to have names," I said.

  "Not real ones."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The one who burned the pictures, the other guy called him Harpo. I go, 'Like that guy in old TV movies who's a dummy and is always honking a horn?' The guy called Harpo goes, 'That's right, darlin', and right now I'm gonna honk your horn.'"

  She tried to fit the plastic parts of the mode
l back together. Her right cheek was pinched while she tried to focus, and the bruise on it knotted together like a cluster of blue grapes. "I can't fix this. I should have put it up in the closet. He's coming over with my aunt," she said. She pushed hard on a plastic part and it slid sharply across the back of her hand.

  "How old a man was Harpo?" I asked.

  "Like sixty, when they start acting like they're your father and Robert Redford at the same time. He has hair all over his back… I got to go to the bathroom. I'm gonna be in there a while. Look, you want to stay, maybe you can fix this. It's been a deeply fucked-up day."

  "Where'd you buy it?" I asked.

  "K amp;B's. Or maybe at the Jackson Brewery, you know, that mall that used to be the Jax brewery… No, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Brewery." She bit a hangnail.

  Clete and I drove to a K amp;B drugstore up St. Charles. It was raining, and the wind blew the mist out of the trees that arched over the streetcar tracks. The green-and-purple neon on the drugstore looked like scrolled candy in the rain.

  "Harpo was the name of the cop who took Cool Breeze Broussard's wife away from him," I said.

  "That was twenty years ago. It can't be the same guy, can it?"

  "No, it's unlikely."

  "I think all these people deserve each other, Streak."

  "So why are we buying a toy for Ruby Gravano's son?"

  "I seldom take my own advice. Sound like anybody else you know, big mon?"

  ON WEDNESDAY I DROVE a cruiser down the old bayou road toward Jeanerette and Lila Terrebonne's home. As I neared the enormous lawn and the oak-lined driveway, I saw the production crew at work on the set that had been constructed to look like the quarters on a corporation farm, and I kept driving south, toward Franklin and the place where my father and I had discovered a crucifixion.

  Why?

  Maybe because the past is never really dead, at least not as long as you deny its existence. Maybe because I knew that somehow the death of Cisco and Megan Flynn's father was about to come back into our lives.

  The barn was still there, two hundred yards from the Teche, hemmed in by banana trees and blackberry bushes. The roof was cratered with a huge hole, the walls leaning in on themselves, the red paint nothing more than thin strips that hadn't yet been weathered away by wind and sun.

  I walked through the blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn. The nail holes were sealed over with dust from the cane fields and water expansion in the wood, but I could still feel their edges with the tips of my fingers and, in my mind's eye, see the outline of the man whose tormented face and broken body and blood-creased brow greeted my father and me on that fiery dawn in 1956.

  No grass grew around the area where Jack Flynn died. (But there was no sunlight there, I told myself, only green flies buzzing in the shade, and the earth was hardpan and probably poisoned by herbicides that had been spilled on the ground.) Wild rain trees, bursting with bloodred flowers, stood in the field, and the blackberries on the bushes were fat and moist with their own juices when I touched them. I wondered at the degree of innocence that allowed us to think of Golgotha as an incident trapped inside history. I wiped the sweat off my face with a handkerchief and unbuttoned my shirt and stepped out of the shade into the wind, but it brought no relief from the heat.

  I drove back up the bayou to the Terrebonne home and turned into the brick drive and parked by the carriage house. Lila was ebullient, her milky green eyes free of any remorse or memory of pulling a gun in a bar and being handcuffed to a bed in Iberia General Hospital. But like all people who are driven by a self-centered fear, she talked constantly, controlling the environment around her with words, filling in any silent space that might allow someone to ask the wrong question.

  Her father, Archer Terrebonne, was another matter. He had the same eyes as his daughter, and the same white-gold hair, but there was no lack of confidence in either his laconic speech or the way he folded his arms across his narrow chest while he held a glass of shaved ice and bourbon and sliced oranges. In fact, his money gave him the kind of confidence that overrode any unpleasant reflection he might see in a mirror or the eyes of others. When you dealt with Archer Terrebonne, you simply accepted the fact that his gaze was too direct and personal, his skin too pale for the season, his mouth too red, his presence too close, as though there were a chemical defect in his physiology that he wore as an ornament and imposed upon others.

  We stood under an awning on the back terrace. The sunlight was blinding on the surface of the swimming pool. In the distance a black groundskeeper was using an air blower to scud leaves off the tennis courts.

  "You won't come inside?" Archer said. He glanced at his watch, then looked at a bird in a tree. The ring finger of his left hand was missing, sawed off neatly at the palm, so that the empty space looked like a missing key on a piano.

  "Thanks, anyway. I just wanted to see that Lila was all right."

  "Really? Well, that was good of you."

  I noticed his use of the past tense, as though my visit had already ended.

  "There're no charges, but messing with guns in barrooms usually has another conclusion," I said.

  "We've already covered this territory with other people, sir," he said.

  "I don't think quite enough," I said.

  "Is that right?" he replied.

  Our eyes locked on each other's.

  "Dave's just being an old friend, Daddy," Lila said.

  "I'm sure he is. Let me walk you to your cruiser, Mr. Robicheaux."

  "Daddy, I mean it, Dave's always worrying about his AA friends," she said.

  "You're not in that organization. So he doesn't need to worry, does he?"

  I felt his hand cup me lightly on the arm. But I said goodbye to Lila and didn't resist. I walked with him around the shady side of the house, past a garden planted with mint and heart-shaped caladiums.

  "Is there something you want to tell me, sir?" he asked. He took a swallow from his bourbon glass and I could feel the coldness of the ice on his breath.

  "A female detective saved your daughter from a resisting arrest charge," I said.

  "Yes?"

  "She thinks Lila has been sexually molested or violated in some way."

  His right eye twitched at the corner, as though an insect had momentarily flown into his vision.

  "I'm sure y'all have many theories about human behavior that most of us wouldn't understand. We appreciate your good intentions. However, I see no need for you to come back," he said.

  "Don't count on it, sir."

  He wagged his finger back and forth, then walked casually toward the rear of the house, sipping his drink as though I had never been there.

  THE SUN WAS WHITE in the sky and the brick drive was dappled with light as bright as gold foil. Through the cruiser's front window I saw Cisco Flynn walk toward me from a trailer, his palms raised for me to stop.

  He leaned down on the window.

  "Take a walk with me. I got to keep my eye on this next scene," he said.

  "Got to go, Cisco."

  "It's about Swede Boxleiter."

  I turned off the ignition and walked with him to a canvas awning that was suspended over a worktable and a half dozen chairs. Next to the awning was a trailer whose air-conditioning unit dripped with moisture like a block of ice.

  "Swede's trying to straighten out. I think he's going to make it this time. But if he's ever a problem, give me a call," Cisco said.

  "He's a mainline recidivist, Cisco. Why are you hooked up with him?"

  "When we were in the state home? I would have been anybody's chops if it hadn't been for Swede."

  "The Feds say he kills people."

  "The Feds say my sister is a Communist."

  The door to the trailer opened and a woman stepped out on the small porch. But before she could close the door behind her, a voice shouted out, "Goddamnit, I didn't say you could leave. Now, you listen, hon. I don't know if the problem is because your brains are between your leg
s or because you think you've got a cute twat, but the next time I tell that pissant to rewrite a scene, you'd better not open your mouth. Now you get the fuck back to work and don't you ever contradict me in front of other people again."

  Even in the sunlight her face looked refrigerated, bloodless, the lines twisted out of shape with the humiliation that Billy Holtzner bathed her with. He shot an ugly look at Cisco and me, then slammed the door.

  I turned to go.

  "There's a lot of stress on a set, Dave. We're three million over budget already. That's other people's money we're talking about. They get mad about it," Cisco said.

  "I remember that first film you made. The one about the migrant farmworkers. It was sure a fine movie."

  "Yeah, a lot of college professors and 1960s leftovers dug it in a big way."

  "The guy in that trailer is a shithead."

  "Aren't we all?"

  "Your old man wasn't."

  I got into the cruiser and drove through the corridor of trees to the bayou road. In the rearview mirror Cisco Flynn looked like a miniature man trapped inside an elongated box.

  THAT NIGHT, AS BOOTSIE and I prepared to go to bed, dry lightning flickered behind the clouds and the pecan tree outside the window was stiffening in the wind.

  "Why do you think Jack Flynn was killed?" Bootsie asked.

  "Working people around here made thirty-five cents an hour back then. He didn't have a hard time finding an audience."

  "Who do you think did it?"

  "Everyone said it came from the outside. Just like during the Civil Rights era. We always blamed our problems on the outside."

  She turned out the light and we lay down on top of the sheets. Her skin felt cool and warm at the same time, the way sunlight does in the fall.

  "The Flynns are trouble, Dave."

  "Maybe."

  "No, no maybe about it. Jack Flynn might have been a good man. But I always heard he didn't become a radical until his family got wiped out in the Depression."

  "He fought in the Lincoln Brigade. He was at the battle of Madrid."

  "Good night," she said.

  She turned toward the far wall. When I spread my hand on her back I could feel her breath rise and fall in her lungs. She looked at me over her shoulder, then rolled over and fit herself inside my arms.