Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "If you don't have enough grounds for a warrant, why should we?" she said.

  "Every cop who worked with him says he was dirty. Maybe he even murdered convicts in Angola. But there's no sheet on him anywhere," I said.

  "You're saying somehow that's our fault?"

  "No, we're thinking Protected Witness Program or paid federal informant," Helen said.

  "Where do you get your information? You people think-" she began.

  "Scruggs is the kind of guy who would flirt around the edges of the Klan. Back in the fifties you had guys like that on the payroll," I said.

  "You're talking about events of four decades ago," Adrien Glazier said.

  "What if he was one of the men who murdered Jack Flynn? What if he committed that murder while he was in the employ of the government?" I said.

  "You're not going to interrogate me in my own office, Mr. Robicheaux."

  We stared mutely at each other, her eyes watching the recognition grow in mine.

  "That's it, isn't it? You know Scruggs killed Megan Flynn's father. You've known it all along. That's why you bear her all this resentment."

  "You'll either leave now or I'll have you removed from the building," she said.

  "Here's a Kleenex. Your eyes look a little wet, ma'am. I can relate to your situation. I used to work for the NOPD and had to lie and cover up for male bozos all the time," Helen said.

  WE DROVE INTO THE Quarter and had beignets and coffee and hot milk at the Cafe du Monde. While Helen bought some pralines for her nephew, I walked across the street into Jackson Square, past the sidewalk artists who had set up their easels along the piked fence that surrounded the park, past the front of St. Louis Cathedral where a string band was playing, and over to a small bookstore on Toulouse.

  Everyone in AA knows that his survival as a wet drunk was due partly to the fact that most people fear the insane and leave them alone. But those who are cursed with the gift of Cassandra often have the same fate imposed upon them. Gus Vitelli was a slight, bony Sicilian ex-horse trainer and professional bouree player whose left leg had been withered by polio and who had probably read almost every book in the New Orleans library system. He was obsessed with what he called "untold history," and his bookstore was filled with material on conspiracies of every kind.

  He told anyone who would listen that the main players in the assassinations of both John Kennedy and Martin Luther King came from the New Orleans area. Some of the names he offered were those of Italian gangsters. But if the Mob was bothered by his accusations, they didn't show it. Gus Vitelli had long ago been dismissed in New Orleans as a crank.

  The problem was that Gus was a reasonable and intelligent man. At least in my view.

  He was wearing a T-shirt that exclaimed "I Know Jack Shit," and wrote prices on used books while I told him the story about the murder of Jack Flynn and the possible involvement of an FBI informant.

  "It wouldn't surprise me that it got covered up. Hoover wasn't any friend of pinkos and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade," he said. He walked to a display table and began arranging a pile of paperback books, his left leg seeming to collapse and then spring tight again with each step. "I got a CIA manual here that was written to teach the Honduran army how to torture people. Look at the publication date, 1983. You think people are gonna believe that?" He flipped the manual at me.

  "Gus, have you heard anything about a hit on a black guy named Willie Broussard?"

  "Something involving the Giacanos or Ricky Scarlotti?"

  "You got it."

  "Nothing about a hit. But the word is Ricky Scar's sweating ball bearings 'cause he might have to give up some Asian guys. The truth is, I'm not interested. People like Ricky give all Italians a bad name. My greatgrandfather sold bananas and pies out of a wagon. He raised thirteen kids like that. He got hung from a street-lamp in 1890 when the police commissioner was killed."

  I thanked him for his time and started to leave.

  "The guy who was crucified against the barn wall?" he said. "The reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is they think 'conspiracy' means everybody's on the same program. That's not how it works. Everybody's got a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebody's wife."

  I HAD WORRIED THAT Cool Breeze Broussard might go after Alex Guidry. But I had not thought about his father.

  Mout' and two of his Hmong business partners bounced their stake truck loaded with cut flowers into the parking lot of the New Iberia Country Club. Mout' climbed down from the cab and asked the golf pro where he could find Alex Guidry. It was windy and bright, and Mout' wore a suit coat and a small rainbow-colored umbrella that clamped on his head like an elevated hat.

  He began walking down the fairway, his haystack body bent forward, his brogans rising and falling as though he were stepping over plowed rows in a field, a cigar stub in the side of his mouth, his face expressionless.

  He passed a weeping willow that was turning gold with the season, and a sycamore whose leaves looked like flame, then stopped at a polite distance from the green and waited until Alex Guidry and his three friends had putted into the cup.

  "Mr. Guidry, suh?" Mout' said.

  Guidry glanced at him, then turned his back and studied the next fairway.

  "Mr. Guidry, I got to talk wit' you about my boy," Mout' said.

  Guidry pulled his golf cart off the far slope of the green. But his friends had not moved and were looking at his back now.

  "Mr. Guidry, I know you got power round here. But my boy ain't coming after you. Suh, please don't walk away," Mout' said.

  "Does somebody have a cell phone?" Guidry asked his friends.

  "Alex, we can go over here and have a smoke," one of them said.

  "I didn't join this club to have an old nigger follow me around the golf course," Guidry replied.

  "Suh, my boy blamed himself twenty years for Ida's death. I just want you to talk wit' me for five minutes. I apologize to these gentlemen here," Mout' said.

  Guidry began walking toward the next tee, his golf cart rattling behind him.

  For the next hour Mout' followed him, perspiration leaking out of the leather brace that held his umbrella hat in place, the sun lighting the pink-and-white discoloration that afflicted one side of his face.

  Finally Guidry sliced a ball into the rough, speared his club angrily into his golf bag, walked to the clubhouse, and went into the bar.

  It took Mout' twenty minutes to cover the same amount of ground and he was sweating and breathing heavily when he came inside the bar. He stood in the center of the room, amid the felt-covered card tables and click of poker chips and muted conversation, and removed his umbrella hat and fixed his blue, cataract-frosted eyes on Guidry's face.

  Guidry kept signaling the manager with one finger.

  "Mr. Robicheaux say you held a wet towel over Ida's nose and mout' and made her heart stop. He gonna prove it, so that mean my boy don't have to do nothing, he ain't no threat to you," Mout' said.

  "Somebody get this guy out of here," Guidry said.

  "I'm going, suh. You can tell these people here anyt'ing you want. But I knowed you when you was buying black girls for t'ree dol'ars over on Hopkins. So you ain't had to go after Ida. You ain't had to take my boy's wife, suh."

  The room was totally quiet. Alex Guidry's face burned like a red lamp. Mout' Broussard walked back outside, his body bent forward at the middle, his expression as blank as the grated door on a woodstove.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON I RECEIVED a call from John Nash in Trinidad.

  "Our friend Jubal Breedlove checked out of the clinic in Raton and is nowhere to be found," he said.

  "Did he hook up with Scruggs?" I asked.

  "It's my feeling he probably did."

  The line was silent.

  "Why do you feel that, Mr. Nash?" I asked.

  "His car's at his house. His clothes seem undisturbed. He didn't
make a withdrawal from his bank account. What does that suggest to you, Mr. Robicheaux?"

  "Breedlove's under a pile of rock?"

  "Didn't Vikings put a dog at the foot of a dead warrior?" he asked.

  "Excuse me?"

  "I was thinking about the family he murdered in the campground. The father put up a terrific fight to protect his daughter. I hope Breedlove's under a pile of rock by that campground."

  AFTER WORK I HAD to go after a boat a drunk smashed into a stump and left with a wrenched propeller on a sandbar. I tilted the engine's housing into the stern of the boat and was about to slide the hull back into the water when I saw why the drunk had waded through the shallows to dry land and walked back to his car: the aluminum bottom had a gash in it like a twisted smile.

  I wedged a float cushion into the leak so I could pull the boat across the bayou into the reeds and return with a boat trailer to pick it up. Behind me I heard an outboard come around the corner and then slow when the man in the stern saw me standing among the flooded willows.

  "I hope you don't mind my coming out here. The Afro-American man said it would be all right," Billy Holtzner said.

  "You're talking about Batist?"

  "Yes, I think that's his name. He seems like a good fellow."

  He cut his engine and let his boat scrape up on the sandbar. When he walked forward the boat rocked under him and he automatically stooped over to grab the gunnels. He grinned foolishly.

  "I'm not very good at boats," he said.

  My experience has been that the physical and emotional transformation that eventually comes aborning in every bully never takes but one form. The catalyst is fear and its effects are like a flame on candle wax. The sneer around the mouth and the contempt and disdain in the eyes melt away and are replaced by a self-effacing smile, a confession of an inconsequential weakness, and a saccharine affectation of goodwill in the voice. The disingenuousness is like oil exuded from the skin; there's an actual stink in the clothes.

  "What can I do for you?" I said.

  He stood on the sandbar in rolled denim shorts and tennis shoes without socks and a thick white shirt sewn with a half dozen pockets. He looked back down the bayou, listening to the drone of an outboard engine, his soft face pink in the sunset.

  "Some men might try to hurt my daughter," he said.

  "I think your concern is for yourself, Mr. Holtzner."

  When he swallowed, his mouth made an audible click.

  "They've told me I either pay them money I don't have or they'll hurt Geri. These men take off heads. I mean that literally," he said.

  "Come down to my office and make a report."

  "What if they find out?" he asked.

  I had turned to chain the damaged hull to the back of my outboard. I straightened up and looked into his face. The air itself seemed fouled by his words, his self-revelation hanging in the dead space between us like a dirty flag. His eyes went away from me.

  "You can call me during office hours. Whatever you tell me will be treated confidentially," I said.

  He sat down in his boat and began pushing it awkwardly off the sandbar by shoving a paddle into the mud.

  "Did we meet somewhere before?" he asked.

  "No. Why?"

  "Your hostility. You don't hide it well."

  He tried to crank his engine, then gave it up and drifted with the current toward the dock, his shoulders bent, the hands that had twisted noses splayed on his flaccid thighs, his chest indented as though it had been stuck with a small cannonball.

  I DIDN'T LIKE BILLY Holtzner or the group he represented. But in truth some of my feelings had nothing to do with his or their behavior.

  In the summer of 1946 my father was in the Lafayette Parish Prison for punching out a policeman who tried to cuff him in Antlers Pool Room. That was the same summer my mother met a corporal from Fort Polk named Hank Clausson.

  "He was at Omaha Beach, Davy. That's when our people was fighting Hitler and run the Nazis out of Europe. He got all kind of medals he gonna show you," she said.

  Hank was lean and tall, his face sun-browned, his uniform always starched and pressed and his shoes and brass shined. I didn't know he was sleeping over until I walked in on him in the bathroom one morning and caught him shaving in his underwear. The back of his right shoulder was welted with a terrible red scar, as though someone had dug at the flesh with a spoon. He shook his safety razor in the stoppered lavatory water and drew another swath under his chin.

  "You need to get in here?" he asked.

  "No," I said.

  "That's where a German stuck a bayonet in me. That was so kids like you didn't end up in an oven," he said, and crimped his lips together and scraped the razor under one nostril.

  He put a single drop of hair tonic on his palms and rubbed them together, then rubbed the oil into his scalp and drew his comb back through his short-cropped hair, his knees bending slightly so he could see his face fully in the mirror.

  Hank took my mother and me to the beer garden and bowling alley out on the end of East Main. We sat at a plank table in a grove of oak trees that were painted white around the trunks and hung with speakers that played recorded dance music. My mother wore a blue skirt that was too small for her and a white blouse and a pillbox hat with an organdy veil pinned up on top. She was heavy-breasted and thick-bodied, and her sexuality and her innocence about it seemed to burst from her clothes when she jitterbugged, or, even a moment later, slow-danced with Hank, her face hot and breathless, while his fingers slipped down the small of her back and kneaded her rump.

  "Hank's in a union for stagehands in the movie business, Davy. Maybe we going out to Hollywood and start a new life there," she said.

  The loudspeakers in the trees were playing "One O'clock Jump," and through the windows in the bar I could see couples jitterbugging, spinning, flinging each other back and forth. Hank tipped his bottle of Jax beer to his lips and took a light sip, his eyes focused on nothing. But when a blond woman in a flowered dress and purple hat walked across his gaze, I saw his eyes touch on her body like a feather, then go empty again.

  "But maybe you gonna have to stay with your aunt just a little while," my mother said. "Then I'm gonna send for you. You gonna ride the Sunset Limited to Hollywood, you."

  My mother went inside the bowling alley to use the rest room. The trees were glowing with the white flood lamps mounted on the branches, the air roaring with the music of Benny Goodman's orchestra. The blond woman in the flowered dress and purple hat walked to our table, a small glass of beer in one hand. The butt of her cigarette was thick with lipstick.

  "How's the war hero?" she said.

  He took another sip from his bottle of Jax and picked up a package of Lucky Strikes from the table and removed a cigarette gingerly by the tip and placed it in his mouth, never looking at the woman.

  "My phone number's the same as it was last week. I hope nothing's been hard in your life," she said.

  "Maybe I'll call you sometime," he replied.

  "No need to call. You can come whenever you want," she said. When she grinned there was a red smear on her teeth.

  "I'll keep it in mind," he said.

  She winked and walked away, the cleft in her buttocks visible through the thinness of her dress. Hank opened a penknife and began cleaning his nails.

  "You got something to say?" he asked me.

  "No, sir."

  "That woman there is a whore. You know what a whore is, Davy?"

  "No." There was a glaze of starch on his khaki thigh. I could smell an odor like heat and soap and sweat that came from inside his shirt.

  "It means she's not fit to sit down with your mother," he said. "So I don't want you talking about what you just heard. If you do, you'd best be gone when I come over."

  Three days later my aunt and I stood on the platform at the train station and watched my mother and Hank climb aboard the Sunset Limited. They disappeared through the vestibule, then she came back and hugged me one more t
ime.

  "Davy, it ain't gonna be long. They got the ocean out there and movie stars and palm trees everywhere. You gonna love it, you," she said. Then Hank pulled her hand, and the two of them went into the observation car, their faces opaque now, like people totally removed from anything recognizable in their lives. Behind my mother's head I could see mural paintings of mesas and flaming sunsets.

  But she didn't send for me, nor did she write or call. Three months later a priest telephoned collect from Indio, California, and asked my father if he could wire money for my mother's bus ticket back to New Iberia.

  For years I dreamed of moonscape and skeletal trees along a railroad bed where white wolves with red mouths lived among the branches. When the Sunset Limited screamed down the track, the wolves did not run. They ate their young. I never discussed the dream with anyone.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A PSYCHOLOGIST WOULD PROBABLY agree that unless a person is a sociopath, stuffed guilt can fill him with a level of neurotic anxiety that is like waiting for a headsman in a cloth hood to appear at the prison door.

  I didn't know if Alex Guidry was a sociopath or not, but on Monday Helen and I began tightening a couple of dials on his head.

  We parked the cruiser at the entrance to his home and watched him walk from his bunkerlike brick house to the garage and open the garage door, simultaneously looking in our direction. He drove down the long shell drive to the parish road and slowed by the cruiser, rolling down his window on its electric motor. But Helen and I continued talking to each other as though he were not there. Then we made a U-turn and followed him to the finance company his wife's family owned in town, his eyes watching us in the rearview mirror.

  Decades back the wife's father had made his way through the plantation quarters every Saturday morning, collecting the half-dollar payments on burial policies that people of color would give up food, even prostitute themselves, in order to maintain. The caskets they were buried in were made out of plywood and cardboard and crepe paper, wrapped in dyed cheesecloth and draped with huge satin bows. The plots were in Jim Crow cemeteries and the headstones had all the dignity of Hallmark cards. But as gaudy and cheap and sad as it all was, the spaded hole in the ground and the plastic flowers and the satin ribbons that decorated the piled dirt did not mark the entrance to the next world but the only level of accomplishment the dead could achieve in this one.