Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  AT IBERIA GENERAL I sat in the waiting room while Clete went in to see Megan first. Five minutes after we arrived I saw Lila Terrebonne walk down the hall with a spray of carnations wrapped in green tissue paper. She didn't see me. She paused at the open door to Megan's room, her eyelids blinking, her back stiff with apprehension. Then she turned and started hurriedly toward the elevator.

  I caught her before she got on.

  "You're not going to say hello?" I asked.

  I could smell the bourbon on her breath, the cigarette smoke in her hair and clothes.

  "Give these to Megan for me. I'll come back another time," she said.

  "How'd you know she was here?"

  "It was on the radio… Dave, get on the elevator with me." When the elevator door closed, she said, "I've got to get some help. I've had it."

  "Help with what?"

  "Booze, craziness… Something that happened to me, something I've never told anybody about except my father and the priest at St. Peter's."

  "Why don't we sit in my pickup?" I said.

  WHAT FOLLOWS IS MY reconstruction of the story she told me while the rain slid down the truck's windows and a willow tree by the bayou blew in the wind like a woman's hair.

  She met the two brothers in a bar outside Morgan City. They were shooting pool, stretching across the table to make difficult shots, their sleeveless arms wrapped with green-and-red tattoos. They wore earrings and beards that were trimmed in neat lines along the jawbone, jeans that were so tight their genitalia were cupped to the smooth shape of a woman's palm. They sent a drink to her table, and one to an old man at the bar, and one to an oil-field roughneck who had used up his tab. But they made no overture toward her.

  She watched them across the top of her gin ricky, the tawdry grace of their movements around the pool table, the lack of attention they showed anything except the skill of their game, the shots they speared into leather side pockets like junior high school kids.

  Then one of them noticed her watching. He proffered the cue stick to her, smiling. She rose from her chair, her skin warm with gin, and wrapped her fingers around the cue's thickness, smiling back into the young man's face, seeing him glance away shyly, his cheeks color around the edges of his beard.

  They played nine ball. Her father had taught her how to play billiards when she was a young girl. She could walk a cue ball down the rail, put reverse English on it and not leave an opponent an open shot, make a soft bank shot and drop the money balls-the one and the six and the nine-into the pocket with a tap that was no more than a whisper.

  The two brothers shook their heads in dismay. She bought them each a bottle of beer and a gin ricky for herself. She played another game and beat them again. She noticed they didn't use profanity in her presence, that they stopped speaking in mid-sentence if she wished to interrupt, that they grinned boyishly and looked away if she let her eyes linger more than a few seconds on theirs.

  They told her they built board roads for an oil company, they had been in the reformatory after their mother had deserted the family, they had been in the Gulf War, in a tank, one that'd had its treads blown off by an Iraqi artillery shell. She knew they were lying, but she didn't care. She felt a sense of sexual power and control that made her nipples hard, her eyes warm with toleration and acceptance.

  When she walked to the ladies' room, the backs of her thighs taut with her high heels, she could see her reflection in the bar mirror and she knew that every man in the room was looking at the movement of her hips, the upward angle of her chin, the grace in her carriage that their own women would never possess.

  The brothers did not try to pick her up. In fact, when the bar started to close, their conversation turned to the transmission on their truck, a stuck gear they couldn't free, their worry they could not make it the two miles to their father's fish camp. Rain streamed down the neon-lighted window in front.

  She offered to follow them home. When they accepted, she experienced a strange taste in her throat, like copper pennies, like the wearing off of alcohol and the beginnings of a different kind of chemical reality. She looked at the faces of the brothers, the grins that looked incised in clay, and started to reconsider.

  Then the bartender beckoned to her.

  "Lady, taxicabs run all night. A phone call's a quarter. If they ain't got it, they can use mine free," he said.

  "There's no problem. But thanks very much just the same. Thank you, truly. You're very nice," she replied, and hung her purse from her shoulder and let one of the brothers hold a newspaper over her head while they ran for her automobile.

  They did it to her in an open-air tractor shed by a green field of sugarcane in the middle of an electric storm. One held her wrists while the other brother climbed between her legs on top of a worktable. After he came his body went limp and his head fell on her breast. His mouth was wet and she could feel it leaving a pattern on her blouse. Then he rose from her and put on his blue jeans and lit a cigarette before clasping her wrists so his brother, who simply unzipped his jeans without taking them off, could mount her.

  When she thought it was over, when she believed there was nothing else they could take from her, she sat up on the worktable with her clothes crumpled in her lap. Then she watched one brother shake his head and extend his soiled hand toward her face, covering it like a surgeon's assistant pressing an ether mask on a patient, forcing her back down on the table, then turning her over, his hand shifting to the back of her neck, crushing her mouth into the wood planks.

  She saw a bolt of lightning explode in the fork of a hardwood tree, saw it split the wood apart and tear the grain right through the heart of the trunk. Deep in her mind she thought she remembered a green felt pool table and a boyish figure shoving a cue like a spear through his bridged fingers.

  LILA'S FACE WAS TURNED slightly toward the passenger window when she finished her story.

  "Your father had them killed?" I said.

  "I didn't say that. Not at all."

  "It's what happened, though, isn't it?"

  "Maybe I had them killed. It's what they deserved. I'm glad they're dead."

  "I think it's all right to feel that way," I said.

  "What are you going to do with what I've told you?"

  "Take you home or to a treatment center in Lafayette."

  "I don't want to go into treatment again. If I can't do it with meetings and working the program, I can't do it at all."

  "Why don't we go to a meeting after work? Then you go every day for ninety days."

  "I feel like everything inside me is coming to an end. I can't describe it."

  "It's called 'a world destruction fantasy.' It's bad stuff. Your heart races, you can't breathe, you feel like a piano wire is wrapped around your forehead. Psychologists say we remember the birth experience."

  She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, then cracked the window as though my words had drawn the oxygen out of the air.

  "Lila, I've got to ask you something else. Why were you talking about a Hanged Man?"

  "I don't remember that. Not at all. That's in the Tarot, isn't it? I don't know anything about that."

  "I see."

  Her skin had gone white under her caked makeup, her eyelashes stiff and black and wide around her milky green eyes.

  I WALKED THROUGH THE rain into the hospital and rode up in the elevator with Lila's tissue-wrapped spray of carnations in my hand. Helen Soileau was in the waiting room.

  "You get anything?" I asked.

  "Not much. She says she thinks there were three guys. They sounded like hicks. One guy was running things," she replied.

  "That's got to be Harpo Scruggs."

  "I think we're going about this the wrong way. Cut off the head and the body dies."

  "Where's the head?"

  "Beats me," she said.

  "Where's Purcel?"

  "He's still in there."

  I walked to the open door, then turned away. Clete was sitting on the side of Megan
's bed, leaning down toward her face, his big arms and shoulders forming a tent over her. Her right hand rested on the back of his neck. Her fingers stroked his uncut hair.

  THE SKY CLEARED THAT night, and Alafair and Bootsie and I cooked out in the back yard. I had told the sheriff about my conversation with Lila Terrebonne, but his response was predictable. We had established possible motivation for the execution of the two brothers. But that was all we had done. There was no evidence to link Archer Terrebonne, Lila's father, to the homicide. Second, the murders still remained outside our jurisdiction and our only vested interest in solving them was the fact that one of the shooters wore an Iberia Parish deputy sheriffs uniform.

  I went with Lila to an AA meeting that night, then returned home.

  "Clete called. He's in New Orleans. He said for you not to worry. What'd he mean?" Bootsie said.

  EIGHTEEN

  RICKY SCARLOTTI ATE BREAKFAST THE next morning with two of his men in his restaurant by St. Charles and Carrollton. It was a fine morning, smelling of the wet sidewalks and the breeze off the river. The fronds of the palm trees on the neutral ground were pale green and lifting in the wind against a ceramic-blue sky; the streetcar was loading with passengers by the levee, the conductor's bell clanging. No one seemed to take notice of a chartreuse Cadillac convertible that turned off St. Charles and parked in front of the flower shop, nor of the man in the powder-blue porkpie hat and seersucker pants and Hawaiian shirt who sat behind the steering wheel with a huge plastic seal-top coffee mug in his hand.

  The man in the porkpie hat inserted a dime in the parking meter and looked with interest at the display of flowers an elderly woman was setting out on the sidewalk under a canvas awning. He talked a moment with the woman, then entered the restaurant and stopped by the hot bar and wrapped a cold cloth around the handle of a heavy cast-iron skillet filled with chipped beef. He made his way unobtrusively between the checker-cloth-covered tables toward the rear of the restaurant, where Ricky Scarlotti had just patted his mouth with a napkin and had touched the wrist of one of the men at his side and nodded in the direction of the approaching figure in the porkpie hat.

  The man at Ricky Scarlotti's side had platinum hair and a chemical tan. He put down his fork and got to his feet and stood flat-footed like a sentinel in front of Ricky Scarlotti's table. His name was Benny Grogan and he had been a professional wrestler before he had become a male escort for a notorious and rich Garden District homosexual. NOPD believed he had also been the backup shooter on at least two hits for the Calucci brothers.

  "I hope you're here for the brunch, Purcel," he said.

  "Not your gig, Benny. Get off the clock," Clete said.

  "Come on, make an appointment. Don't do this. Hey, you deaf?" Then Benny Grogan reached out and hooked his fingers on the back of Clete's shirt collar as Clete brushed past him.

  Clete flung the chipped beef into Benny Grogan's face. It was scalding hot and it matted his skin like a papier-mâché mask with slits for the eyes. Benny's mouth was wide with shock and pain and an unintelligible sound that rose out of his chest like fingernails grating on a blackboard. Then Clete whipped the bottom of the skillet with both hands across the side of Benny's head, and backswung it into the face of the man who was trying to rise from his chair on the other side of Ricky Scarlotti, the cast-iron cusp ringing against bone, bursting the nose, knocking him backward on the floor.

  Ricky Scarlotti was on his feet now, his mouth twisted, his finger raised at Clete. But he never got the chance to speak.

  "I brought you some of your own, Ricky," Clete said.

  He jammed a pair of vise grips into Ricky Scarlotti's scrotum and locked down the handles. Ricky Scarlotti's hands grabbed impotently at Clete's wrists while his head reared toward the ceiling.

  Clete began backing toward the front door, pulling Ricky Scarlotti with him.

  "Work with me on this. You can do it, Mouse. That a boy. Step lively now. Coming through here, gangway for the Mouse!" Clete said, pushing chairs and tables out of the way with his buttocks.

  Out on the street he unhooked Scarlotti from the vise grips and bounced him off the side of a parked car, then slapped his face with his open hand, once, twice, then a third time, so hard the inside of Scarlotti's mouth bled.

  "I'm not carrying, Mouse. Free shot," Clete said, his hands palm up at his sides now.

  But Scarlotti was paralyzed, his mouth hanging open, his lips like red Jell-O. Clete grabbed him by his collar and the back of his belt and flung him to the sidewalk, then picked him up, pushed him forward, and flung him down again, over and over, working his way down the sidewalk, clattering garbage cans along the cement. People stared from automobiles, the streetcar, and door fronts but no one intervened. Then, like a man who knows his rage can never be satiated, Clete lost it. He drove Scarlotti's head into a parking meter, smashing it repeatedly against the metal and glass. A woman across the street screamed hysterically and people began blowing car horns. Clete spun Scarlotti around by his bloodied shirtfront and threw him across a laddered display of flowers under the canvas awning.

  "Tell these people why this is happening, Ricky. Tell them how you had a guy's teeth torn out, how you had a woman blindfolded and beaten and held underwater," Clete said, advancing toward him, his shoes crunching through the scattered potting soil.

  Scarlotti dragged himself backward, his nose bleeding from both nostrils. But the elderly woman who had set the flowers out on the walk ran from the restaurant door and knelt beside him with her arms stretched across his chest, as though she were preventing him from rising. She screamed in Italian at Clete, her eyes serpentine and liquid.

  Benny Grogan, the ex-wrestler, touched Clete on the elbow. Pieces of chipped beef still clung to his platinum hair. He held a ball-peen hammer in his hand, but he tossed it onto a sack of peat moss. For some reason, the elderly woman stopped screaming, as though a curtain had descended on a stage.

  "You see a percentage in this, Purcel?" Benny Grogan said.

  Clete looked at the elderly woman squatted by her son.

  "You should go to church today, burn a candle, Mouse," he said.

  He got in his convertible and drove to the corner, his tailpipe billowing white smoke, and turned down a shady side street toward St. Charles. He took his seal-top coffee mug off the dashboard and drank from it.

  NINETEEN

  IT WAS EARLY SATURDAY MORNING and Clete was changing a tire in my drive while he talked, spinning a lug wrench on a nut, his love handles wedging over his belt.

  "So I took River Road and barrel-assed across the Huey Long and said goodbye to New Orleans for a while," he said. He squinted up at me and waited. "What?" he said.

  "Scarlotti is a small player in this, Clete," I said.

  "That's why you and Helen were pounding on his cage?" He got to his feet and threw his tools in the trunk. "I've got to get some new tires. I blew one coming off the bridge. What d'you mean, small player? That pisses me off, Dave."

  "I think he and the Giacano family put the hit on Cool Breeze because he ratted them out to the Feds. But if you wanted to get even for Megan, you probably beat up on the wrong guy."

  "The greaseballs are taking orders, even though they've run the action in New Orleans for a hundred years? Man, I learn something every day. Did you read that article in the Star about Hitler hiding out in Israel?"

  His face was serious a moment, then he stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and the smile came back in his eyes and he twirled his porkpie hat on his finger while he looked at me, then at the sunrise behind the flooded cypresses.

  I HELPED BATIST AT the bait shop, then drove to Cool Breeze's house on the west side of town and was told by a neighbor he was out at Mout's flower farm.

  Mout' and a Hmong family from Laos farmed three acres of zinnias and chrysanthemums in the middle of a sugarcane plantation on the St. Martinville road, and each fall, when football season began, they cut and dug wagonloads of flowers that they sold to florists i
n Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I drove across a cattle guard and down a white shale road until I saw a row of poplars that was planted as a windbreak and Cool Breeze hoeing weeds out in the sunlight while his father sat in the shade reading a newspaper by a card table with a pitcher of lemonade on it.

  I parked my truck and walked down the rows of chrysanthemums. The wind was blowing and the field rippled with streaks of brown and gold and purple color.

  "I never figured you to take up farming, Breeze," I said.

  "I give up on some t'ings. So my father made this li'l job for me, that's all," he said.

  "Beg your pardon?"

  "Getting even wit' people, t'ings like that. I ain't giving nobody reason to put me back in jail."

  "You know what an exhumation order is?" I asked.

  As with many people of color, he treated questions from white men as traps and didn't indicate an answer one way or another. He stooped over and jerked a weed and its root system out of the soil.

  "I want to have a pathologist examine your wife's remains. I don't believe she committed suicide," I said.

  He stopped work and rested his hands on the hoe handle. His hands looked like gnarled rocks around the wood. Then he put one hand inside the top of his shirt and rubbed his skin, his eyes never leaving mine.

  "Say again?"

  "I checked with the coroner's office in St. Mary Parish. No autopsy was done on Ida's body. It simply went down as a suicide."

  "What you telling me?"

  "I don't think she took her life."

  "Didn't nobody have reason to kill her. Unless you saying I… Wait a minute, you trying to-"

  "You're not a killer, Breeze. You're just a guy who got used by some very bad white people."

  He started working the hoe between the plants again, his breath coming hard in his chest, his brow creased like an old leather glove. The wind was cool blowing across the field, but drops of sweat as big as marbles slid off his neck. He stopped his work again and faced me, his eyes wet.