Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "Ms. Rideau?"

  She didn't reply. A fire truck passed and she never took her eyes off my face.

  "Give us a formal statement on Scruggs, enough to get a warrant for his arrest. That's when your problems start to end," I said.

  "I need money to go out West, somewhere he cain't find me," she said.

  "We don't run a flea market. If you conceal evidence in a criminal investigation, you become an accomplice after the fact. You ever do time?"

  "You a real charmer."

  I looked at my watch.

  "Maybe I'd better go," I said.

  "Harpo Scruggs gonna kill me. I had that box hid all them years for him. Now he gonna kill me over it. That's what y'all ain't hearing."

  "Why does he want the lockbox now?" I asked.

  "Him and me run a house toget'er. Fo' years ago I found out he killed Lavern Viator in Texas. Lavern was the other girl that was in Morgan City when they beat that man wit' chains. So I moved the box to a different place, one he ain't t'ought about."

  "Let's try to be honest here, Jessie. Did you move it because you knew he was blackmailing someone with it and you thought it was valuable?"

  Raindrops were falling out of the sunlight. There were blue tattoos of hearts and dice inside Jessie Rideau's forearms. She stared at the crypts in the cemetery, her eyes recessed, her face like that of a person who knows she will never have any value to anyone other than use.

  "I gonna be wit' them dead people soon," she said.

  "Where'd you do time?"

  "A year in St. John the Baptist. Two years in St. Gabriel."

  "Let us help you."

  "Too late." She pulled the car door shut and started the engine. The exhaust pipe and muffler were rusted out, and smoke billowed from under the car frame.

  "Why does he want the lockbox now?" I said.

  She shot me the finger and gunned the car out into the street, the roar of her engine reverberating through the crypts.

  THERE ARE DAYS THAT are different. They may look the same to everyone else, but on certain mornings you wake and know with absolute certainty you've been chosen as a participant in a historical script, for reasons unknown to you, and your best efforts will not change what has already been written.

  On Wednesday the false dawn was bone-white, just like it had been the day Megan came back to New Iberia, the air brittle, the wood timbers in our house aching with cold. Then hailstones clattered on the tin roof and through the trees and rolled down the slope onto the dirt road. When the sun broke above the horizon the clouds in the eastern sky trembled with a glow like the reflection of a distant forest fire. When I walked down to the dock, the air was still cold, crisscrossed with the flight of robins, more than I had seen in years. I started cleaning the congealed ash from the barbecue pit, then rinsed my hands in an oaken bucket that had been filled with rainwater the night before. But Batist had cleaned a nutria in it for crab bait, and when I poured the water out it was red with blood.

  At the office I called Adrien Glazier in New Orleans.

  "Anything on the Scarlotti shooter?" I said.

  "You figured out he's a French Canadian. You're ahead of us. What's the matter?" she said.

  "Matter? He's going to kill somebody."

  "If it will make you feel better, I already contacted Billy Holtzner and offered him Witness Protection. He goes, 'Where, on an ice floe at the South Pole?' and hangs up."

  "Send some agents over here, Adrien."

  "Holtzner's from Hollywood. He knows the rules. You get what you want when you come across. I told him the G's casting couch is nongender-specific. Try to have a few laughs with this stuff. You worry too much."

  IT BEGAN TO RAIN just after sunset. The light faded in the swamp and the air was freckled with birds, then the rain beat on the dock and the tin roof of the bait shop and filled the rental boats that were chained up by the boat ramp. Batist closed out the cash register and put on his canvas coat and hat.

  "Megan's daddy, the one got nailed to the barn? You know how many black men been killed and nobody ever been brought to cou't for it?" he said.

  "Doesn't make it right," I said.

  "Makes it the way it is," he replied.

  After he had gone I turned off the outside lights so no late customers would come by, then began mopping the floor. The rain on the roof was deafening and I didn't hear the door open behind me, but I felt the cold blow across my back.

  "Put your mop up. I got other work for you," the voice said.

  I straightened up and looked into the seamed, rain-streaked face of Harpo Scruggs.

  THIRTY-TWO

  HIS FACE WAS BLOODLESS, SHRIVELED like a prune, glistening under the drenched brim of his hat. His raincoat dripped water in a circle on the floor. A blue-black.22 Ruger revolver, with ivory grips, on full cock, hung from his right hand.

  "I got a magnum cylinder in it. The round will go through both sides of your skull," he said.

  "What do you want, Scruggs?"

  "Fix me some coffee and milk in one of them big glasses yonder." He pointed with one finger. "Put about four spoons of honey in it."

  "Have you lost your mind?"

  He propped the heel of his hand against the counter for support. The movement caused him to pucker his mouth and exhale his breath. It touched my face, like the raw odor from a broken drain line.

  "You're listing," I said.

  "Fix the coffee like I told you."

  A moment later he picked up the glass with his left hand and drank from it steadily until it was almost empty. He set the glass on the counter and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. His whiskers made a scraping sound against his skin.

  "We're going to Opelousas. You're gonna drive. You try to hurt me, I'll kill you. Then I'll come back and kill your wife and child. A man like me don't give it no thought," he said.

  "Why me, Scruggs?"

  "'Cause you got an obsession over the man we stretched out on that barn wall. You gonna do right, no matter who you got to mess up. It ain't a compliment."

  WE TOOK HIS PICKUP truck to the four-lane and headed north toward Lafayette and Opelousas. He didn't use the passenger seat belt but instead sat canted sideways with his right leg pushed out in front of him. His raincoat was unbuttoned and I could see the folds of a dark towel that were tied with rope across his side.

  "You leaking pretty bad?" I said.

  "Hope that I ain't. I'll pop one into your brisket 'fore I go under."

  "I'm not your problem. We both know that."

  With his left hand he took a candy bar from the dashboard and tore the paper with his dentures and began to eat the candy, swallowing as though he hadn't eaten in days. He held the revolver with his other hand, the barrel and cylinder resting across his thigh, pointed at my kidney.

  The rain swept in sheets against the windshield. We passed through north Lafayette, the small, wood, galleried houses on each side of us whipped by the rain. Outside the city the country was dark green and sodden and there were thick stands of hardwoods on both sides of the four-lane and by the exit to Grand Coteau I saw emergency flares burning on the road and the flashers of emergency vehicles. A state trooper stood by an overturned semi, waving the traffic on with his flashlight.

  "Was you ever a street cop?" Scruggs said.

  "NOPD," I said.

  "I was a gun bull at Angola, city cop, and road-gang hack, too. I done it all. I got no quarrel with you, Robicheaux."

  "You want me to bring down Archer Terrebonne, don't you?"

  "When I was a gun bull at Angola? That was in the days of the Red Hat House. The lights would go down all over the system and ole Sparky would make fire jump off their tailbone. There was this white boy from Mississippi put a piece of glass in my food once. A year later he cut up two other convicts for stealing a deck of cards from his cell. Guess who got to walk him into the Red Hat House?

  "Lightning was crawling all over the sky that night and the current didn't work right. That boy w
as jolting in the straps for two minutes. The smell made them reporters hold handkerchiefs to their mouths. They was falling over themselves to get outside. I laughed till I couldn't hardly stand up."

  "What's the point?"

  "I'm gonna have my pound of flesh from Archer Terrebonne. You gonna be the man cut it out for me."

  He straightened his tall frame inside his raincoat, his face draining with the effort. He saw me watching him and raised the barrel of the Ruger slightly, so that it was aimed upward at my armpit. He put his hand on the towel tied across his side and looked at it, then wiped his hand on his pants.

  "Terrebonne paid my partner to shoot my liver out. I didn't think my partner would turn on me. I'll be damned if you can trust anybody these days," he said.

  "The man who helped you kill the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?"

  "That's him. Or was. I wouldn't eat no pigs that was butchered around here for a while… Take that exit yonder."

  We drove for three miles through farmland, then followed a dirt road through pine trees, past a pond that was green with algae and covered with dead hyacinths, to a two-story yellow frame house whose yard was filled with the litter of dead pecan trees. The windows had been nailed over with plywood, the gallery stacked with hay bales that had rotted.

  "You recognize it?" he asked.

  "It was a brothel," I said.

  "The governor of Lou'sana used to get laid there. Walk ahead of me."

  We crossed through the back yard, past a collapsed privy and a cistern, with a brick foundation, that had caved outward into disjointed slats. The barn still had its roof, and through the rain I could hear hogs snuffing inside it. A tree of lightning burst across the sky and Scruggs jerked his face toward the light as though loud doors had been thrown back on their hinges behind him.

  He saw me watching him and pointed the revolver at my face.

  "I told you to walk ahead of me!" he said.

  We went through the rear door of the house into a gutted kitchen that was illuminated by the soft glow of a light at the bottom of a basement stairs.

  "Where is Jessie Rideau?" I said.

  Lightning crashed into a piney woods at the back of the property.

  "Keep asking questions and I'll see you spend some time with her," he said, and pointed at the basement stairs with the barrel of the gun.

  I walked down the wood steps into the basement, where a rechargeable Coleman lantern burned on the cement floor. The air was damp and cool, like the air inside a cave, and smelled of water and stone and the nests of small animals. Behind an old wooden icebox, the kind with an insert at the top for a block of tonged ice, I saw a woman's shoe and the sole of a bare foot. I walked around the side of the icebox and knelt down by the woman's side and felt her throat.

  "You sonofabitch," I said to Scruggs.

  "Her heart give out. She was old. It wasn't my fault," Scruggs said. Then he sat down in a wood chair, as though all his strength had drained through the bottoms of his feet. He stared at me dully from under the brim of his hat and wet his lips and swallowed before he spoke again.

  "Yonder's what you want," he said.

  In the corner, amidst a pile of bricks and broken mortar and plaster that had been prized from the wall with a crowbar, was a steel box that had probably been used to contain dynamite caps at one time. The lid was bradded and painted silver and heavy in my hand when I lifted it back on its hinges. Inside the box were a pair of handcuffs, two lengths of chain, a bath towel flattened inside a plastic bag, and a big hammer whose handle was almost black, as though stove soot and grease had been rubbed into the grain.

  "Terrebonne's prints are gonna be on that hammer. The print will hold in blood just like in ink. Forensic man done told me that," Scruggs said.

  "You've had your hands all over it. So have the women," I replied.

  "The towel's got Flynn's blood all over it. So do them chains. You just got to get the right lab man to lift Terrebonne's prints."

  His voice was deep in his throat, full of phlegm, his tongue thick against his dentures. He kept straightening his shoulders, as though resisting an unseen weight that was pushing them forward.

  I removed the towel from the plastic bag and unfolded it. It was stiff and crusted, the fibers as pointed and hard as young thorns. I looked at the image in the center of the cloth, the black lines and smears that could have been a brow, a chin, a set of jawbones, eye sockets, even hair that had been soaked with blood.

  "Do you have any idea of what you've been part of? Don't any of you understand what you've done?" I said to him.

  "Flynn stirred everybody up. I know what I done. I was doing a job. That's the way it was back then."

  "What do you see on the towel, Scruggs?"

  "Dried blood. I done told you that. You carry all this to a lab. You gonna do that or not?"

  He breathed through his mouth, his eyes seeming to focus on an insect an inch from the bridge of his nose. A terrible odor rose from his clothes.

  "I'm going for the paramedics now," I said.

  "A.45 ball went all the way through my intestines. I ain't gonna live wired to machines. Tell Terrebonne I expect I'll see him. Tell him Hell don't have no lemonade springs."

  He fitted the Ruger's barrel under the top of his dentures and pulled the trigger. The round exited from the crown of his head and patterned the plaster on the brick wall with a single red streak. His head hung back on his wide shoulders, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. A puff of smoke, like a dirty feather, drifted out of his mouth.

  THIRTY-THREE

  TWO DAYS LATER THE SKY was blue outside my office, a balmy wind clattering the palm trees on the lawn. Clete stood at the window, his porkpie hat on his head, his hands on his hips, surveying the street and the perfection of the afternoon. He turned and propped his huge arms on my desk and stared down into my face.

  "Blow it off. Prints or no prints, rich guys don't do time," he said.

  "I want to have that hammer sent to an FBI lab," I said.

  "Forget it. If the St. Landry Parish guys couldn't lift them, nobody else is going to either. You even told Scruggs he was firing in the well."

  "Look, Clete, you mean well, but-"

  "The prints aren't what's bothering you. It's that damn towel."

  "I saw the face on it. Those cops in Opelousas acted like I was drunk. Even the skipper down the hall."

  "So fuck 'em," Clete said.

  "I've got to get back to work. Where's your car?"

  "Dave, you saw that face on the towel because you believe. You expect guys with jock rash of the brain to understand what you're talking about?"

  "Where's your car, Clete?"

  "I'm selling it," he said. He was sitting on the corner of my desk now, his upper arms scaling with dried sun blisters. I could smell salt water and sun lotion on his skin. "Leave Terrebonne alone. The guy's got juice all the way to Washington. You'll never touch him."

  "He's going down."

  "Not because of anything we do." He tapped his knuckles on the desk. "There's my ride."

  Through the window I saw his convertible pull up to the curb. A woman in a scarf and dark glasses was behind the wheel.

  "Who's driving?" I asked.

  "Lila Terrebonne. I'll call you later."

  AT NOON I MET Bootsie in City Park for lunch. We spread a checkered cloth on a table under a tin shed by the bayou and set out the silverware and salt and pepper shakers and a thermos of iced tea and a platter of cold cuts and stuffed eggs. The camellias were starting to bloom, and across the bayou we could see the bamboo and flowers and the live oaks in the yard of The Shadows.

  I could almost forget about the events of the last few days.

  Until I saw Megan Flynn park her car on the drive that wound through the park and stand by it, looking in our direction.

  Bootsie saw her, too.

  "I don't know why she's here," I said.

  "Invite her over and find out," Bootsie said.
r />   "That's what I have office hours for."

  "You want me to do it?"

  I set down the stack of plastic cups I was unwrapping and walked across the grass to the spreading oak Megan stood under.

  "I didn't know you were with anyone. I wanted to thank you for all you've done and say goodbye," she said.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Paris. Rivages, my French publisher, wants me to do a collection on the Spaniards who fled into the Midi after the Spanish Civil War. By the way, I thought you'd like to know Cisco walked out on the film. It's probably going to bankrupt him."

  "Cisco's stand-up."

  "Billy Holtzner doesn't have the talent to finish it by himself. His backers are going to be very upset."

  "That composite I gave you of the Canadian hit man, you and Cisco have no idea who he is?"

  "No, we'd tell you."

  We looked at each other in the silence. Leaves gusted from around the trunks of the trees onto the drive. Her gaze shifted briefly to Bootsie, who sat at the picnic table with her back to us.

  "I'm flying out tomorrow afternoon with some friends. I don't guess I'll see you for some time," she said, and extended her hand. It felt small and cool inside mine.

  I watched her get in her car, drawing her long khaki-clad legs and sandaled feet in after her, her dull red hair thick on the back of her neck.

  Is this the way it all ends? I thought. Megan goes back to Europe, Clete eats aspirins for his hangovers and labors through all the sweaty legal mechanisms of the court system to get his driver's license back, the parish buries Harpo Scruggs in a potter's field, and Archer Terrebonne fixes another drink and plays tennis at his club with his daughter.

  I walked back to the tin shed and sat down next to Bootsie.