Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "She came to say goodbye," I said.

  "That's why she didn't come over to the table," she replied.

  THAT EVENING, WHICH WAS Friday, the sky was purple, the clouds in the west stippled with the sun's last orange light. I raked stream trash out of the coulee and carried it in a washtub to the compost pile, then fed Tripod, our three-legged coon, and put fresh water in his bowl. My neighbor's cane was thick and green and waving in the field, and flights of ducks trailed in long V formations across the sun.

  The phone rang inside, and Bootsie carried the portable out into the yard.

  "We've got the Canadian identified. His name is Jacques Poitier, a real piece of shit," Adrien Glazier said. "Interpol says he's a suspect in at least a dozen assassinations. He's worked the Middle East, Europe, both sides in Latin America. He's gotten away with killing Israelis."

  "We're not up to dealing with guys like this. Send us some help," I said.

  "I'll see what I can do Monday," she said.

  "Contract killers don't keep regular hours."

  "Why do you think I'm making this call?" she said. To feel better, I thought. But I didn't say it.

  THAT EVENING I COULDN'T rest. But I didn't know what it was that bothered me.

  Clete Purcel? His battered chartreuse convertible? Lila Terrebonne?

  I called Clete's cottage.

  "Where's your Caddy?" I asked.

  "Lila's got it. I'm signing the title over to her Monday. Why?"

  "Geraldine Holtzner's been driving it all over the area."

  "Streak, the Terrebonnes might hurt themselves, but they don't get hurt by others. What does it take to make you understand that?"

  "The Canadian shooter is a guy named Jacques Poitier. Ever hear of him?"

  "No. And if he gives me any grief, I'm going to stick a.38 down his pants and blow his Jolly Roger off. Now, let me get some sleep."

  "Megan told you she's going to France?"

  The line was so quiet I thought it had gone dead. Then he said, "She must have called while I was out. When's she going?"

  Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

  THE SET THAT HAD been constructed on the levee at Henderson Swamp was lighted with the haloed brilliance of a phosphorus flare when Lila Terrebonne drove Clete's convertible along the dirt road at the top of the levee, above the long, wind-ruffled bays and islands of willow trees that were turning yellow with the season. The evening was cool, and she wore a sweater over her shoulders, a dark scarf with roses stitched on it tied around her head. She found her father with Billy Holtzner, and the three of them ate dinner on a cardboard table by the water's edge and drank a bottle of nonalcoholic champagne that had been chilled in a silver bucket.

  When she left, she asked a grip to help her fasten down the top on her car. He was the only one to notice the blue Ford that pulled out of a fish camp down the levee and followed her toward the highway. He did not think it significant and did not mention the fact to anyone until later.

  THE MAN IN THE blue Ford followed her through St. Martinville and down the Loreauville road to Cisco Flynn's house. When she turned into Cisco's driveway, a lawn party was in progress and the man in the Ford parked on the swale and opened his hood and appeared to onlookers to be at work on his engine.

  On the patio, behind the house, Lila Terrebonne called Cisco Flynn a lowborn, treacherous sycophant, picked up his own mint julep from the table, and flung it in his face.

  But on the front lawn a jazz combo played atop an elevated platform, and the guests wandered among the citrus and oak trees and the drink tables and the music that seemed to charm the pink softness of the evening into their lives. Megan wore her funny straw hat with an evening dress that clung to her figure like ice water, and was talking to a group of friends, people from New York and overseas, when she noticed the man working on his car.

  She stood between two myrtle bushes, on the edge of the swale, and waited until he seemed to feel her eyes on his back. He straightened up and smiled, but the smile came and went erratically, as though the man thought it into place.

  He wore a form-fitting long-sleeve gold shirt and blue jeans that were so tight they looked painted on his skin. A short-brim fedora with a red feather in the band rested on the fender. His hair was the color of his shirt, waved, and cut long and parted on the side so it combed down over one ear.

  "It's a battery cable. I'll have it started in a minute," he said in a French accent.

  She stared at him without speaking, a champagne glass resting in the fingers of both hands, her chest rising and falling.

  "I am a big fan of American movies. I saw a lady turn in here. Isn't she the daughter of a famous Hollywood director?" he said.

  "I'm not sure who you mean," Megan said.

  "She was driving a Cadillac, a convertible," he said, and waited. Then he smiled, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. "Ah, I'm right, aren't I? Her father is William Holtzner. I love all his films. He is wonderful," the man said.

  She stepped backward, once, twice, three times, the myrtle bushes brushing against her bare arms, then stood silently among her friends. She looked back at the man with gold hair only after he had restarted his car and driven down the road. Five minutes later Lila Terrebonne backed the Cadillac down the drive, hooking one wheel over the slab into a freshly watered flower bed, then shifted into low out on the road and floored the accelerator toward New Iberia. Her radio was blaring with rock 'n' roll from the 1960s, her face energized with vindication inside the black scarf, stitched with roses, that was tied tightly around her head.

  THE MAN NAMED JACQUES Poitier caught up with her on the two-lane road that paralleled Bayou Teche, only one mile from her home. Witnesses said she tried to outrun him, swerving back and forth across the highway, blowing her horn, waving desperately at a group of blacks on the side of the road. Others said he passed her and they heard a gunshot. But we found no evidence of the latter, only a thread-worn tire that had exploded on the rim before the Cadillac skidded sideways, showering sparks off the pavement, into an oncoming dump truck loaded with condemned asbestos.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  IF THERE WAS ANY DRAMA at the crime scene later, it was not in our search for evidence or even in the removal of Lila's body from under the crushed roof of the Cadillac. Archer Terrebonne arrived at the scene twenty minutes after the crash, and was joined a few minutes later by Billy Holtzner. Terrebonne immediately took charge, as though his very presence and the slip-on half-top boots and red flannel shirt and quilted hunting vest and visor cap he wore gave him a level of authority that none of the firemen or paramedics or sheriffs deputies possessed.

  They all did his bidding or sought sanction or at a minimum gave an explanation to him for whatever they did. It was extraordinary to behold. His attorney and family physician were there; also a U.S. congressman and a well-known movie actor. Terrebonne wore his grief like a patrician who had become a man of the people. A three-hundred-pound St. Mary Parish deputy, his mouth full of Red Man, stood next to me, his eyes fixed admiringly on Terrebonne.

  "That ole boy is one brave sonofabuck, ain't he?" he said.

  The paramedics covered Lila's body with a sheet and wheeled it on the gurney to the back of an ambulance, the strobe lights of TV cameras flowing with it, passing across Terrebonne's and Holtzner's stoic faces.

  Helen Soileau and I walked through the crowd until we were a few feet from Terrebonne. Red flares burned along the shoulder of the road, and mist clung to the bayou and the oak trunks along the bank. The air was cold, but my face felt hot and moist with humidity. His eyes never registered our presence, as though we were moths outside a glass jar, looking in upon a pure white flame.

  "Your daughter's death is on you, Terrebonne. You didn't intend for it to happen, but you helped bring the people here who killed her," I said.

  A woman gasped; the scattered conversation around us died.

  "You hope this will destroy me, don't you?" he replied.

  "Harpo Scruggs
said to tell you he'd be expecting you soon. I think he knew what he was talking about," I said.

  "Don't you talk to him like that," Holtzner said, rising on the balls of his feet, his face dilating with the opportunity that had presented itself. "I'll tell you something else, too. Me and my new co-director are finishing our picture. And it's going to be dedicated to Lila Terrebonne. You can take your dirty mouth out of here."

  Helen stepped toward him, her finger lifted toward his face.

  "He's a gentleman. I'm not. Smart of again and see what happens," she said.

  We walked to our cruiser, past the crushed, upside-down shell of Clete's Cadillac, the eyes of reporters and cops and passersby riveted on the sides of our faces.

  I heard a voice behind me, one I didn't recognize, yell out, "You're the bottom of the barrel, Robicheaux."

  Then others applauded him.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Helen and I began re-creating Lila Terrebonne's odyssey from the movie set on the levee, where she had dinner with her father and Billy Holtzner, to the moment she must have realized her peril and tried to outrun the contract assassin named Jacques Poitier. We interviewed the stage grip who saw the blue Ford pull out of the fish camp and follow her back down the levee; an attendant at a filling station in St. Martinville, where she stopped for gasoline; and everyone we could find from the Flynns' lawn party.

  The New York and overseas friends of Megan and Cisco were cooperative and humble to a fault, in large part because they never sensed the implications of what they told us. But after talking with three guests from the lawn party, I had no doubt as to what transpired during the encounter between Megan and the French Canadian named Poitier.

  Helen and I finished the last interview at a bed-and-breakfast across from The Shadows at three o'clock that afternoon. It was warm and the trees were speckled with sunlight, and a few raindrops were clicking on the bamboo in front of The Shadows and drying as soon as they struck the sidewalks.

  "Megan's plane leaves at three-thirty from Acadiana Regional. See if you can get a hold of Judge Mouton at his club," I said.

  "A warrant? We might be on shaky ground. There has to be intent, right?"

  "Megan never did anything in her life without intending to."

  OUR SMALL LOCAL AIRPORT had been built on the site of the old U.S. Navy air base outside of town. As I drove down the state road toward the hangars and maze of runways, under a partially blue sky that was starting to seal with rain clouds, my heart was beating in a way that it shouldn't, my hands sweating black prints on the steering wheel.

  Then I saw her, with three other people, standing by a hangar, her luggage next to her, while a Learjet taxied around the far side of a parking area filled with helicopters. She wore her straw hat and a pink dress with straps and lace around the hem, and when the wind began gusting she held her hat to her head with one hand in a way that made me think of a 1920s flapper.

  She saw me walking toward her, like someone she recognized from a dream, then her eyes fixed on mine and the smile went out of her face and she glanced briefly toward the horizon, as though the wind and the churning treetops held a message for her.

  I looked at my watch. It was 3:25. The door to the Lear opened and a man in a white jacket and dark blue pants lowered the steps to the tarmac. Her friends picked up their luggage and drifted toward the door, glancing discreetly in her direction, unsure of the situation.

  "Jacques Poitier stopped his car on the swale in front of your party. Your guests heard you talking to him," I said.

  "He said his car was broken. He was working on it," she replied.

  "He asked you if the woman driving Clete's Cadillac was Holtzner's daughter."

  She was silent, her hair ruffling thickly on her neck. She looked at the open door of the plane and the attendant who waited for her.

  "You let him think it was Geraldine Holtzner," I said.

  "I didn't tell him anything, Dave."

  "You knew who he was. I gave you the composite drawing."

  "They're waiting for me."

  "Why'd you do it, Meg?"

  "I'm sorry for Lila Terrebonne. I'm not sorry for her father."

  "She didn't deserve what happened to her."

  "Neither did my father. I'm going now, unless you're arresting me. I don't think you can either. If I did anything wrong, it was a sin of omission. That's not a crime."

  "You've already talked to a lawyer," I said, almost in amazement.

  She leaned down and picked up her suitcase and shoulder bag. When she did, her hat blew off her head and bounced end over end across the tarmac. I ran after it, like a high school boy would, then walked back to her, brushing it off, and placed it in her hands.

  "I won't let this rest. You've contributed to the death of an innocent person. Just like the black guy who died in your lens years ago. Somebody else has paid your tab. Don't come back to New Iberia, Meg," I said.

  Her eyes held on mine and I saw a great sadness sweep through her face, like that of a child watching a balloon break loose from its string and float away suddenly on the wind.

  EPILOGUE

  THAT AFTERNOON THE WIND DROPPED and there was a red tint like dye in the clouds, and the water was high and brown in the bayou, the cypress and willows thick with robins. It should have been a good afternoon for business at the bait shop and dock, but it wasn't. The parking area was empty; there was no whine of boat engines out on the water, and the sound of my footsteps on the planks in the dock echoed off the bayou as though I were walking under a glass dome. A drunk who had given Batist trouble earlier that day had broken the guardrail on the dock and fallen to the ramp below. I got some lumber and hand tools and an electric saw from the tin shed behind the house to repair the gap in the rail, and Alafair clipped Tripod's chain on his collar and walked him down to the dock with me. I heard the front screen door bang behind us, and I turned and saw Bootsie on the gallery. She waved, then went down into the flower bed with a trowel and a plastic bucket and began working on her knees.

  "Where is everybody?" Alafair said out on the dock.

  "I think a lot of people went to the USL game today," I replied.

  "There's no sound. It makes my ears pop."

  "How about opening up a couple of cans of Dr Pepper?" I said.

  She went inside the bait shop, but did not come back out right away. I heard the cash register drawer open and knew the subterfuge that was at work, one that she used to mask her charity, as though somehow it were a vice. She would pay for the fried pie she took from the counter, then cradle Tripod in one arm and hand-feed it to him whether he wanted it or not, while his thick, ringed tail flipped in the air like a spring.

  I tried to concentrate on repairing the rail on the dock and not see the thoughts that were as bright and jagged as shards of glass in the center of my mind. I kept touching my brow and temple with my arm, as though I were wiping off sweat, but that wasn't my trouble. I could feel a band of pressure tightening across the side of my head, just as I had felt it on night trails in Vietnam or when Bedcheck Charlie was cutting through our wire.

  What was it that bothered me? The presence of men like Archer Terrebonne in our midst? But why should I worry about his kind? They had always been with us, scheming, buying our leaders, deceiving the masses. No, it was Megan, and Megan, and Megan, and her betrayal of everything I thought she represented: Joe Hill, the Wobblies, the strikers murdered at Ludlow, Colorado, Woody Guthrie, Dorothy Day, all those faceless working people whom historians and academics and liberals alike treat with indifference.

  I ran the electric saw through a two-by-four and ground the blade across a nail. The board seemed to explode, the saw leaping from my hand, splinters embedding in my skin like needles. I stepped backward from the saw, which continued to spin by my foot, then ripped the cord loose from the socket in the bait-shop wall.

  "You all right, Dave?" Alafair said through the screen.

  "Yeah, I'm fine," I said, holding the back of my right h
and.

  Through the trees next to the bayou I saw a mud-splattered stake truck loaded with boxes of chrysanthemums coming down the road. The truck pulled at an angle across the boat ramp, and Mout' Broussard got out on the passenger's side and a tiny Hmong woman in a conical straw hat with a face like a withered apple got down from the other. Mout' put a long stick across his shoulders, and the woman loaded wire-bailed baskets of flowers on each end of it, then picked up a basket herself and followed him down the dock.

  "You sell these for us, we gonna give you half, you," Mout' said.

  "I don't seem to have much business today, Mout'," I said.

  "Season's almost over. I'm fixing to give them away," he said.

  "Put them under the eave. We'll give it a try," I said.

  He and the woman lay the flowers in yellow and brown and purple clumps against the bait-shop wall.

  Mout' wore a suit coat with his overalls and was sweating inside his clothes. He wiped his face with a red handkerchief.

  "You doing all right?" he said to me.

  "Sure," I said.

  "That's real good. Way it should be," he said. He replaced the long stick across his shoulders and extended his arms on it and walked with the Hmong woman toward the truck, their bodies lit by the glow of the sun through the trees.

  Why look for the fires that burn in western skies? I thought. The excoriated symbol of difference was always within our ken. You didn't have to see far to find it-an elderly black man who took pride in the fact he shined Huey Long's and Harry James's shoes or a misplaced and wizened Hmong woman who had fought the Communists in Laos for the French and the CIA and now grew flowers for Cajuns in Louisiana. The story was ongoing, the players changing only in name. I believe Jack Flynn understood that and probably forgave his children when they didn't.

  I sat on a bench by the water faucet and tried to pick the wood splinters out of the backs of my hands. The wind came up and the robins filled the air with a sound that was almost deafening, their wings fluttering above my head, their breasts the color of dried blood.