Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "You can pretend otherwise, but he's a dangerous man, Cisco."

  "How about the cowboy who went out the window? Would you call him a dangerous man?"

  I didn't answer. We stared at each other across the desk. Then his eyes broke.

  "Good seeing you, Dave. Thanks for giving Megan the gun," he said.

  I watched silently as he opened the office door and went out into the hall.

  I propped my forehead on my fingers and stared at the empty green surface of my desk blotter. Why hadn't I seen it? I had even used the term "aerialist" to the San Antonio homicide investigator.

  I went out the side door of the building and caught Cisco at his car. The day was beautiful, and his suntanned face looked gold and handsome in the cool light.

  "You called the dead man a cowboy," I said.

  He grinned, bemused. "What's the big deal?" he said.

  "Who said anything about how the guy was dressed?"

  "I mean 'cowboy' like 'hit man.' That's what contract killers are called, aren't they?"

  "You and Boxleiter worked this scam together, didn't you?"

  He laughed and shook his head and got in his car and drove out of the lot, then waved from the window just before he disappeared in the traffic.

  THE FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST CALLED me that afternoon.

  "I can give it to you over the phone or talk in person. I'd rather do it in person," he said.

  "Why's that?"

  "Because autopsies can tell us things about human behavior I don't like to know about," he replied.

  An hour later I walked into his office.

  "Let's go outside and sit under the trees. You'll have to excuse my mood. My own work depresses the hell out of me sometimes," he said.

  We sat in metal chairs behind the white-painted brick building that housed his office. The hard-packed earth stayed in shade almost year-round and was green with mold and sloped down to a ragged patch of bamboo on the bayou. Out in the sunlight an empty pirogue that had pulled loose from its mooring turned aimlessly in the current.

  "There're abrasions on the back of her head and scrape marks on her shoulder, like trauma from a fall rather than a direct blow," he said. "Of course, you're more interested in cause of death."

  "I'm interested in all of it."

  "I mean, the abrasions on her skin could have been unrelated to her death. Didn't you say her husband knocked her around before she fled the home?"

  "Yes."

  "I found evidence of water in the lungs. It's a bit complicated, but there's no question about its presence at the time she died."

  "So she was alive when she went into the marsh?"

  "Hear me out. The water came out of a tap, not a swamp or marsh or brackish bay, not unless the latter contains the same chemicals you find in a city water supply."

  "A faucet?"

  "But that's not what killed her." He wore an immaculate white shirt, and his red suspenders hung loosely on his concave chest. He snuffed down in his nose and fixed his glasses. "It was heart failure, maybe brought on by suffocation."

  "I'm not putting it together, Clois."

  "You were in Vietnam. What'd the South Vietnamese do when they got their hands on the Vietcong?"

  "Water poured on a towel?"

  "I think in this case we're talking about a wet towel held down on the face. Maybe she fell, then somebody finished the job. But I'm in a speculative area now."

  The image he had called up out of memory was not one I wanted to think about. I looked at the fractured light on the bayou, a garden blooming with blue and pink hydrangeas on the far bank. But he wasn't finished.

  "She was pregnant. Maybe two months. Does that mean anything?" he said.

  "Yeah, it sure does."

  "You don't look too good."

  "It's a bad story, Doc."

  "They all are."

  TWENTY-TWO

  THAT EVENING CLETE PARKED HIS convertible by the dock and hefted an ice chest up on his shoulder and carried it to a fish-cleaning table by one of the water faucets I had mounted at intervals on a water line that ran the length of the dock's handrail. He poured the ice and at least two dozen sac-a-lait out on the table, put on a pair of cloth gardener's gloves, and started scaling the sac-a-lait with a spoon and splitting open their stomachs and half-mooning the heads at the gills.

  "You catch fish somewhere else and clean them at my dock?" I said.

  "I hate to tell you this, the fishing's a lot better at Henderson. How about I take y'all to the Patio for dinner tonight?"

  "Things aren't real cool at the house right now."

  He kept his eyes flat, his face neutral. He washed the spooned fish scales off the board plank. I told him about the autopsy on Ida Broussard.

  When I finished he said, "You like graveyard stories? How about this? I caught Swede Boxleiter going out of the Terrebonne cemetery last night. He'd used a trowel to take the bricks out of the crypt and pry open the casket. He took the rings from the corpse's fingers, and a pair of riding spurs and a silver picture frame that Archer Terrebonne says held a photo of some little girls a slave poisoned.

  "I cuffed Boxleiter to a car bumper and went up to the house and told Terrebonne a ghoul had been in his family crypt. That guy must have Freon in his veins. He didn't say a word. He went down there with a light and lifted the bricks back out and dragged the casket out on the ground and straightened the bones and rags inside and put the stolen stuff back on the corpse, didn't blink an eye. He didn't even look at Boxleiter, like Boxleiter was an insect sitting under a glass jar."

  "What'd you do with Boxleiter?"

  "Fired him this morning."

  "You fired him?"

  "Billy Holtzner tends to delegate authority in some situations. He promised me a two-hundred-buck bonus, then hid in his trailer while I walked Boxleiter off the set. Have you told this Broussard guy his wife was murdered?"

  "He's not home."

  "Dave, I'll say it again. Don't let him come around the set to square a beef, okay?"

  "He's not a bad guy, Clete."

  "Yeah, they've got a lot of that kind on Camp J."

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I sat with Cool Breeze on the gallery of his father's house and told him, in detail, of the pathologist's findings. He had been pushing the swing at an angle with one foot, then he stopped and scratched his hand and looked out at the street.

  "The blow on the back of her head and the marks on her shoulders, could you have done that?" I said.

  "I pushed her down on the steps. But her head didn't hit nothing but the screen."

  "Was the baby yours?"

  "Two months? No, we wasn't… It couldn't be my baby."

  "You know where she went after she left your house, don't you?" I said.

  "I do now."

  "You stay away from Alex Guidry. I want your promise on that, Breeze."

  He pulled on his fingers and stared at the street.

  "I talked with Harpo Scruggs Sunday night," I said. "He's making noise about your testifying against the Giacanos and Ricky Scarlotti."

  "Why ain't you got him in jail?"

  "Sooner or later, they all go down."

  "Ex-cop, ex-prison guard, man killed niggers in Angola for fun? They go down when God call 'em. What you done about Ida, it ain't lost on me. T'ank you."

  Then he went back in the house.

  I ATE LUNCH AT home that day. But Bootsie didn't sit at the kitchen table with me. Behind me, I heard her cleaning the drainboard, putting dishes in the cabinets, straightening canned goods in the cupboard.

  "Boots, in all truth, I don't believe Megan Flynn has any romantic interest in an over-the-hill small-town homicide cop," I said.

  "Really?"

  "When I was a kid, my father was often drunk or in jail and my mother was having affairs with various men. I was alone a lot of the time, and for some reason I didn't understand I was attracted to people who had something wrong with them. There was a big, fat alcoholic nun I always liked, a
nd a half-blind ex-convict who swept out Provost's Bar, and a hooker on Railroad Avenue who used to pay me a dollar to bring a bucket of beer to her crib."

  "So?"

  "A kid from a screwed-up home sees himself in the faces of excoriated people."

  "You're telling me you're Megan Flynn's pet bête noire?"

  "No, I'm just a drunk."

  I heard her moving about in the silence, then she paused behind my chair and let the tips of her fingers rest in my hair.

  "Dave, it's all right to call yourself that at meetings. But you're not a drunk to me. And she'd better not ever call you one either."

  I felt her fingers trail off my neck, then she was gone from the room.

  TWO DAYS LATER HELEN and I took the department boat out on a wide bay off the Atchafalaya River where Cisco Flynn was filming a simulated plane crash. We let the bow of the boat scrape up onto a willow island, then walked out on a platform that the production company had built on pilings over the water. Cisco was talking to three other men, his eyes barely noting our presence.

  "No, tell him to do it again," he said. "The plane's got to come in lower, right out of the sun, right across those trees. I'll do it with him if necessary. When the plane blows smoke, I want it to bleed into that red sun. Okay, everybody cool?"

  It was impressive to watch him. Cisco used authority in a way that made others feel they shared in it. He was one of their own, obviously egalitarian in his attitudes, but he could take others across a line they wouldn't cross by themselves.

  He turned to me and Helen.

  "Watch the magic of Hollywood at work," he said. "This scene is going to take four days and a quarter of a million dollars to shoot. The plane comes in blowing black smoke, then we film a model crashing in a pond. We've got a tail section mounted on a mechanical arm that draws the wreckage underwater like a sinking plane, then we do the rescue dive in the LSU swimming pool. It edits down to two minutes of screen time. What d'you think about that?"

  "I ran you through the National Crime Information Center. You and Swede Boxleiter took down a liquor store when you were seventeen," I said.

  "Boy, the miracle of computers," he said. He glanced out at a boat that was moored in the center of the bay. It was the kind used for swamp tours, wide across the beam, domed with green Plexiglas, its white hull gleaming.

  "Where were you Sunday evening, Cisco?" I said.

  "Rented a pontoon plane and took a ride out on the Gulf."

  "I have to pass on relevant information about you to a homicide investigator in San Antonio."

  "So why tell me about it?"

  "I try to do things in the daylight, at least when it involves people I used to trust."

  "He's saying you're being treated better than you deserve," Helen said.

  "The guy who soared on gilded wings out the hotel window? I think the Jersey Bounce was too easy. You saying I did it? Who cares?" Cisco replied.

  "Rough words," I said.

  "Yeah?" He picked up a pair of field glasses from a table and tossed them at me. "Check out the guys who are on that boat. That's reality out there. I wish it would go away, but I'm stuck with it. So give me a break on the wiseacre remarks."

  I focused the glasses through an open window on a linen-covered table where Billy Holtzner and his daughter and two Asian men were eating.

  "The two Chinese are the bean counters. When the arithmetic doesn't come out right, they count the numbers a second time on your fingers. Except your fingers aren't on your hands anymore," he said.

  "I'd get into a new line of work," I said.

  "Dave, I respect you and I don't want you to take this wrong. But don't bother me again without a warrant and in the meantime kiss my royal ass," Cisco said.

  "You only try to get men to kiss your ass?" Helen said.

  He walked away from us, both of his hands held in the air, as though surrendering to an irrational world, just as a twin-engine amphibian roared across the swamp at treetop level, a pipe in the stern blowing curds of black smoke across the sun.

  THAT EVENING I JOGGED to the drawbridge on the dirt road while heat lightning veined the clouds and fireflies glowed and faded like wet matches above the bayou's surface. Then I did three sets each of push-ups, barbell curls, dead lifts, and military presses in the back yard, showered, and went to bed early.

  On the edge of sleep I heard rain in the trees and Bootsie undressing in the bathroom, then I felt her weight next to me on the bed. She turned on her side so that her stomach and breasts were pressed against me, and put one leg across mine and her hand on my chest.

  "You're drawn to people who have problems. My problem is I don't like other women making overtures to my husband," she said.

  "I think that's a problem I can live with," I replied.

  She raised her knee and hit me with it. Then her hand touched me and she lifted her nightgown and sat on my thighs and leaned over me and looked into my face.

  Outside the window, I could see the hard, thick contours of an oak limb, wrapped with moonlight, glistening with rain.

  THE NEXT DAY WAS Saturday. At false dawn I woke from a dream that lingered behind my eyes like cobweb. The dream was about Megan Flynn, and although I knew it did not signify unfaithfulness, it disturbed me just as badly, like a vapor that congeals around the heart.

  In the dream she stood on a stretch of yellow hardpan, a treeless purple mountain at her back. The sky was brass, glowing with heat and dust. She walked toward me in her funny hat, her khaki clothes printed with dust, a tasseled red shawl draped around her shoulders.

  But the red around her shoulders was not cloth. The wound in her throat had drained her face of blood, drenching her shirt, tasseling the ends of her fingers.

  I went down to the dock and soaked a towel in the melted ice at the bottom of the cooler and held it to my eyes.

  It was just a dream, I told myself. But the feeling that went with it, that was like toxin injected into the muscle tissue, wouldn't go away. I had known it in Vietnam, when I knew someone's death was at hand, mine or someone for whom I was responsible, and it had taken everything in me to climb aboard a slick that was headed up-country, trying to hide the fear in my eyes, the dryness in my mouth, the rancid odor that rose from my armpits.

  But that had been the war. Since then I'd had the dream and the feelings that went with it only once-in my own house, the night my wife Annie was murdered.

  TWENTY YEARS AGO ALEX Guidry had owned a steel-gray two-story frame house outside Franklin, with a staircase on the side and a second-floor screened porch where he slept in the hot months. Or at least this is what the current owner, an elderly man named Plo Castile, told me. His skin was amber, wizened, as hairless as a manikin's, and his eyes had the blue rheumy tint of oysters.

  "I bought this property fo'teen years ago from Mr. Alex. He give me a good price, 'cause I already owned the house next do'," he said. "He slept right out yonder on that porch, at least when it wasn't cold, 'cause he rented rooms sometimes to oil-field people."

  The yard was neat, with two palm trees in it, and flowers were planted around the latticework at the base of the main house and in a garden by a paintless barn and around a stucco building with a tin roof elevated above the walls.

  "Is that a washhouse?" I said.

  "Yes, suh, he had a couple of maids done laundry for them oil-field people. Mr. Alex was a good bidness-man."

  "You remember a black woman named Ida Broussard, Mr. Plo?"

  He nodded. "Her husband was the one been in Angola. He run a li'l sto'." His eyes looked at a cane field beyond the barbed-wire fence.

  "She come around here?"

  He took a package of tobacco and cigarette papers out of his shirt pocket. "Been a long time, suh."

  "You seem like an honest man. I believe Ida Broussard was murdered. Did she come around here?"

  He made a sound, as though a slight irritation had flared in his throat.

  "Suh, you mean they was a murder here, that's what
you saying?" But he already knew the answer, and his eyes looked into space and he forgot what he was doing with the package of tobacco and cigarette papers. He shook his head sadly. "I wish you ain't come here wit' this. I seen a fight. Yeah, they ain't no denying that. I seen it."

  "A fight?"

  "It was dark. I was working in my garage. She drove a truck into the yard and gone up the back stairs. I could tell it was Ida Broussard 'cause Mr. Alex had the floodlight on. But, see, it was cold wet'er then and he wasn't sleeping on the porch, so she started banging on the do' and yelling he better come out.

  "I seen only one light go on. All them oil-field renters was gone, they was working seven-and-seven offshore back then. I didn't want to hear no kind of trouble like that. I didn't want my wife to hear it either. So I went in my house and turned on the TV.

  "But the fighting stopped, and I seen the inside light go out, then the floodlight, too. I t'ought: Well, he ain't married, white people, colored people, they been doing t'ings together at night they don't do in the day for a long time now, it ain't my bidness. Later on, I seen her truck go down the road."

  "You never told anyone this?"

  "No, suh. I didn't have no reason to."

  "After she was found dead in the swamp?"

  "He was a policeman. You t'ink them other policemen didn't know he was carrying on wit' a colored woman, they had to wait for me to tell them about it?"

  "Can I see the washhouse?"

  The inside was cool and dank and smelled of cement and water. Duckboards covered the floor, and a tin washtub sat under a water spigot that extended from a vertical pipe in one wall. I placed my palm against the roughness of the stucco and wondered if Ida Broussard's cries or strangled breath had been absorbed into the dampness of these same walls.

  "I boil crabs out here now and do the washing in my machine," Mr. Plo said.

  "Are those wood stairs out there the same ones that were on the building twenty years ago?" I asked.

  "I painted them. But they're the same."

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