Sunset Limited

SEVENTEEN

THE TAPE ON THE SMALL recorder had only a twenty-second capacity. Most of the voices were muffled and inaudible, but there were words, whole sentences, sawed out of the darkness that portrayed Megan's tormenters better than any photograph could:

"Hold her, damnit! This is one bitch been asking for it a long time. You cain't get her head down, get out of the way."

"She's bucking. When they buck, they're fixing to go under. Better pull her up unless we're going all the way."

"Let her get a breath, then give it to her again. Ain't nothing like the power of memory to make a good woman, son."

It was 2:30 a.m. now and the ambulance had already left with Megan for Iberia General. The light from the flashers on our parked cruisers was like a blue, white, and red net on the trees and the bayou's surface and the back of the house. Cisco paced back and forth on the lawn, his eyes large, his face dilated in the glare.

Behind him I could see the sheriff squatted under the open window with a flashlight, peeling back the ruined flowers with one hand.

"You know who did it, don't you?" I said to Cisco.

"If I did, I'd have a gun down somebody's mouth," he replied.

"Give the swinging dick act a break, Cisco."

"I can't tell you who, I can only tell you why. It's payback for Anthony."

"Walk down to the water with me," I said, and cupped one hand on his elbow.

We went down the slope to the bayou, where the mudbank had been imprinted at the water's edge by Megan's bare knees and sliced by heavy boots that had fought for purchase while she struggled with at least three men. An oak tree sheltered us from the view of the sheriff and the uniformed deputies in the yard.

"Don't you lie to me. With these guys payback means dead. They want something. What is it?" I said.

"Billy Holtzner embezzled three-quarters of a million out of the budget by working a scam on our insurance coverage. But he put it on me. Anthony worked for the money people in Hong Kong. He believed what Billy told him. He started twisting my dials and ended up with big leaks in his arteries."

"Swede?"

"We were playing chess for a lot of the evening. I don't know if he did it or not. Swede's protective. Anthony was a prick."

"Protective? The victim was a prick? Great attitude."

"It's complicated. There's a lot of big finance involved. You're not going to understand it." He saw the look on my face. "I'm in wrong with some bad guys. The studio's going to file bankruptcy. They want to gut my picture and inflate its value on paper to liquidate their debts."

The current in the bayou was dead, hazed over with insects, and there was no air under the trees. He wiped his face with his hand.

"I'm telling the truth, Dave. I didn't think they'd go after Megan. Maybe there's something else involved. About my father, maybe. I don't understand it all either… Where you going?" he said.

"To find Clete Purcel."

"What for?"

"To talk to him before he hears about this from someone else."

"You coming to the hospital?" he asked, his fingers opened in front of him as though the words of another could be caught and held as physical guarantees.

IT WAS STILL DARK when I parked my truck by the stucco cottage Clete had rented outside Jeanerette. I pushed back the seat and slept through a rain shower and did not wake until dawn. When I woke, the rain had stopped and the air was heavy with mist, and I saw Clete at his mailbox in a robe, the Morning Advocate under his arm, staring curiously at my truck. I got out and walked toward him.

"What's wrong?" he said, lines breaking across his brow.

I told him of everything that happened at Cisco's house and of Megan's status at Iberia General. He listened and didn't speak. His face had the contained, heated intensity of a stainless-steel pan that had been left on a burner.

Then he said, "She's going to make it?"

"You bet."

"Come inside. I already have coffee on the stove." He turned away from me and pushed at his nose with his thumb.

"What are you going to do, Clete?"

"Go up to the hospital. What do you think?"

"You know what I mean."

"I'll fix eggs and sausage for both of us. You look like you got up out of a coffin."

Inside his kitchen I said, "Are you going to answer me?"

"I already heard about you and Helen visiting Ricky Scar. He's behind this shit, isn't he?"

"Where'd you hear about Scarlotti?"

"Nig Rosewater. He said Ricky went berserk after you left his office. What'd y'all do to jack him up like that?"

"Don't worry about it. You stay out of New Orleans."

He poured coffee in two cups and put a cinnamon roll in his mouth and looked out the window at the sun in the pine trees.

"Did you hear me?" I said.

"I got enough to do right here. I caught Swede Boxleiter in the Terrebonne cemetery last night. I think he was prizing bricks out of a crypt."

"What for?"

"Maybe he's a ghoul. You know what for. You planted all that Civil War stuff in his head. I'd love to tell Archer Terrebonne an ex-con meltdown is digging up his ancestors' bones."

But there was no humor in his face, only a tic at the corner of one eye. He went into the other room and called Iberia General, then came back in the kitchen, his eyes filled with private thoughts, and began beating eggs in a big pink bowl.

"Clete?"

"The Big Sleazy's not your turf anymore, Streak. Why don't you worry about how this guy Scruggs got off his leash? I thought y'all had him under surveillance."

"He lost the stakeout at the motel."

"You know the best way to deal with that dude? A big fat one between the eyes and a throw-down on the corpse."

"You might have your butt in our jail, if that's what it takes," I said.

He poured hot milk into my coffee cup. "Not even the perps believe that stuff anymore. You want to go to the hospital with me?" he said.

"You got it."

"The nurse said she asked for me. How about that? How about that Megan Flynn?"

I looked at the back of his thick neck and huge shoulders as he made breakfast and thought of warning NOPD before he arrived in New Orleans. But I knew that would only give his old enemies in the New Orleans Police Department a basis to do him even greater harm than Ricky Scarlotti might.

We drove back up the tree-lined highway to New Iberia in a corridor of rain.

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.