Sunset Limited

TWENTY-THREE

HELEN AND I WALKED THROUGH the clumps of banana trees and blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn, where a group of St. Mary Parish plainclothes investigators and uniformed sheriffs deputies and ambulance attendants stood in a shaded area, one that droned with iridescent green flies, looking down at the collapsed and impaled form of Swede Boxleiter. Swede's chest was pitched forward against the nails that held his wrists, his face hidden in shadow, his knees twisted in the dust. Out in the sunlight, the flowers on the rain trees were as bright as arterial blood among the leaves.

"It looks like we got joint jurisdiction on this one," a plainclothes cop said. His name was Thurston Meaux and he had a blond mustache and wore a tweed sports coat with a starched denim shirt and a striped tie. "After the photographer gets here, we'll take him down and send y'all everything we have."

"Was he alive when they nailed him up?" I asked.

"The coroner has to wait on the autopsy. Y'all say he took the head wound in his apartment?" he said.

"That's what it looks like," I replied.

"You found brass?"

"One casing. A.25."

"Why would somebody shoot a guy in Iberia Parish, then nail him to a barn wall in St. Mary?" Meaux said.

"Another guy died here in the same way forty years ago," I said.

"This is where that happened?"

"I think it's a message to someone," I said.

"We already ran this guy. He was a thief and a killer, a suspect in two open homicide cases. I don't see big complexities here."

"If that's the way you're going to play it, you won't get anywhere."

"Come on, Robicheaux. A guy like that is a walking target for half the earth. Where you going?"

Helen and I walked back to our cruiser and drove through the weeds, away from the barn and between two water oaks whose leaves were starting to fall, then back out on the state road.

"I don't get it. What message?" Helen said, driving with one hand, her badge holder still hanging from her shirt pocket.

"If it was just a payback killing, the shooters would have left his body in the apartment. When we met Harpo Scruggs at the barbecue place? He said something about hating rich people. I think he killed Swede and deliberately tied Swede's murder to Jack Flynn's to get even with somebody."

She thought about it.

"Scruggs took the Amtrak to Houston, then flew back to Colorado," she said.

"So he came back. That's the way he operates. He kills people over long distances."

She looked over at me, her eyes studying my expression.

"But something else is bothering you, isn't it?" she said.

"Whoever killed Swede hung him up on the right side of where Jack Flynn died."

She shook a half-formed thought out of her face.

"I like working with you, Streak, but I'm not taking any walks inside your head," she said.

ALEX GUIDRY WAS FURIOUS. He came through the front door of the sheriffs department at eight o'clock Monday morning, not slowing down at the information desk or pausing long enough to knock before entering my office.

"You're getting Ida Broussard's case reopened?" he said.

"You thought there was a statute of limitations on murder?" I replied.

"You took splinters out of my old house and gave them to the St. Mary Parish sheriffs office?" he said incredulously.

"That about sums it up."

"What's this crap about me suffocating her to death?"

I paper-clipped a sheaf of time sheets together and stuck them in a drawer.

"A witness puts you with Ida Broussard right before her death. A forensic pathologist says she was murdered, that water from a tap was forced down her nose and mouth. If you don't like what you're hearing, Mr. Guidry, I suggest you find a lawyer," I said.

"What'd I ever do to you?"

"Sullied our reputation in Iberia Parish. You're a bad cop. You bring discredit on everyone who carries a badge."

"You better get your own lawyer, you sonofabitch. I'm going to twist a two-by-four up your ass," he said.

I picked up my phone and punched the dispatcher's extension.

"Wally, there's a man in my office who needs an escort to his automobile," I said.

Guidry pointed one stiffened finger at me, without speaking, then strode angrily down the hallway. A few minutes later Helen came into my office and sat on the edge of my desk.

"I just saw our ex-jailer in the parking lot. Somebody must have spit on his toast this morning. He couldn't get his car door open and he ended up breaking off his key in the lock."

"Really?" I said.

Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

FOUR HOURS LATER OUR fingerprint man called. The shell casing found on the carpet of Swede Boxleiter's apartment was clean and the apartment contained no identifiable prints other than the victim's. That same afternoon the sheriff called Helen and me into his office.

"I just got off the phone with the sheriffs department in Trinidad, Colorado. Get this. They don't know anything about Harpo Scruggs, except he owns a ranch outside of town," he said.

"Is he there now?" Helen said.

"That's what I asked. This liaison character says, 'Why you interested in him?' So I say, 'Oh, we think he might be torturing and killing people in our area, that sort of thing.'" The sheriff picked up his leather tobacco pouch and flipped it back and forth in his fingers.

"Scruggs is a pro. He does his dirty work a long way from home," I said.

"Yeah, he also crosses state lines to do it. I'm going to call that FBI woman in New Orleans. In the meantime, I want y'all to go to Trinidad and get anything you can on this guy."

"Our travel budget is pretty thin, skipper," I said.

"I already talked to the Parish Council. They feel the same way I do. You keep crows out of a cornfield by tying a few dead ones on your fence wire. That's a metaphor."

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING our plane made a wide circle over the Texas panhandle, then we dropped through clouds that were pooled with fire in the sunrise and came in over biscuit-colored hills dotted with juniper and pine and pinyon trees and landed at a small windblown airport outside Raton, New Mexico.

The country to the south was as flat as a skillet, hazed with dust in the early light, the monotony of the landscape broken by an occasional mesa. But immediately north of Raton the land lifted into dry, pinyon-covered, steep-sided hills that rose higher and higher into a mountainous plateau where the old mining town of Trinidad, once home to the Earps and Doc Holliday, had bloomed in the nineteenth century.

We rented a car and drove up Raton Pass through canyons that were still deep in shadow, the sage on the hillsides silvered with dew. On the left, high up on a grade, I saw a roofless church, with a facade like that of a Spanish mission, among the ruins and slag heaps of an abandoned mining community.

"That church was in one of Megan's photographs. She said it was built by John D. Rockefeller as a PR effort after the Ludlow massacre," I said.

Helen drove with one hand on the steering wheel. She looked over at me with feigned interest in her eyes.

"Yeah?" she said, chewing gum.

I started to say something about the children and women who were suffocated in a cellar under a burning tent when the Colorado militia broke a miners' strike at Ludlow in 1914.

"Go on with your story," she said.

"Nothing."

"You know history, Streak. But it's still the good guys against the shit bags. We're the good guys."

She put her other hand on the wheel and looked at me and grinned, her mouth chewing, her bare upper arms round and tight against the short sleeves of her shirt.

We reached the top of the grade and came out into a wide valley, with big mountains in the west and the old brick and quarried rock buildings of Trinidad off to the right, on streets that climbed into the hills. The town was still partially in shadow, the wooded crests of the hills glowing like splinters of black-green glass against the early sun.

We checked in with the sheriffs department and were assigned an elderly plainclothes detective named John Nash as an escort out to Harpo Scruggs's ranch. He sat in the back seat of our rental car, a short-brim Stetson cocked on the side of his head, a pleasant look on his face as he watched the landscape go by.

"Scruggs never came to y'all's attention, huh?" I said.

"Can't say that he did," he replied.

"Just an ordinary guy in the community?"

"If he's what you say, I guess we should have taken better note of him." His face was sun-browned, his eyes as blue as a butane flame, webbed with tiny lines at the corners when he smiled. He looked back out the window.

"This definitely seems like a laid-back place, yes-siree," Helen said, her eyes glancing sideways at me. She turned off the state highway onto a dirt road that wound through an arroyo layered with exposed rock.

"What do you plan to do with this fellow?" John Nash said.

"You had a shooting around here in a while?" Helen said.

John Nash smiled to himself and stared out the window again. Then he said, "That's it yonder, set back against that hill. It's a real nice spot here. Not a soul around. A Mexican drug smuggler pulled a gun on me down by that creek once. I killed him deader than hell."

Helen and I both turned around and looked at John Nash as though for the first time.

Harpo Scruggs's ranch was rail-fenced and covered with sage, bordered on the far side by low bills and a creek that was lined with aspens. The house was gingerbread late Victorian, gabled and paintless, surrounded on four sides by a handrailed gallery. We could see a tall figure splitting firewood on a stump by the barn. Our tires thumped across the cattle guard. John Nash leaned forward with his arms on the back of my seat.

"Mr. Robicheaux, you're not hoping for our friend out there to do something rash, are you?" he said.

"You're an interesting man, Mr. Nash," I said.

"I get told that a lot," he replied.

We stopped the car on the edge of the dirt yard and got out. The air smelled like wet sage and wood smoke and manure and horses when there's frost on their coats and they steam in the sun. Scruggs paused in his work and stared at us from under the flop brim of an Australian bush hat. Then he stood another chunk of firewood on its edge and split it in half.

We walked toward him through the side yard. Coffee cans planted with violets and pansies were placed at even intervals along the edge of the gallery. For some reason John Nash separated himself from us and stepped up on the gallery and propped his hands on the rail and watched us as though he were a spectator.

"Nice place," I said to Scruggs.

"Who's that man up on my gallery?" he said.

"My boss man's brought the Feds into it, Scruggs. Crossing state lines. Big mistake," I said.

"Here's the rest of it. Ricky Scar is seriously pissed because a poor-white-trash peckerwood took his money and then smeared shit all over southwest Louisiana," Helen said.

"Plus you tied a current homicide to one that was committed forty years ago," I said.

"The real mystery is why the Mob would hire a used-up old fart who thinks bedding hookers will stop his Johnson from dribbling in the toilet bowl three times a night. That Mexican hot pillow joint you visited in Houston? The girl said she wanted to scrub herself down with peroxide," Helen said. When Scruggs stared at her, she nodded affirmatively, her face dramatically sincere.

Scruggs leaned the handle of his ax against the stump and bit a small chew off a plug of tobacco, his shoulders and long back held erect inside his sun-faded shirt. He turned his face away and spit in the dirt, then rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist.

"You born in New Iberia, Robicheaux?" he asked.

"That's right."

"You think with what I know of past events, bodies buried in the levee at Angola, troublesome people killed in St. Mary Parish, I'm going down in a state court?"

"Times have changed, Scruggs," I said.

He hefted the ax in one hand and began splitting a chunk of wood into long white strips for kindling, his lips glazed with a brown residue from the tobacco in his jaw. Then he said, "If y'all going down to Deming to hurt my name there, it won't do you no good. I've lived a good life in the West. It ain't never been dirtied by nigra trouble and rich people that thinks they can make white men into nigras, too."

"You were one of the men who killed Jack Flynn, weren't you?" I said.

"I'm fixing to butcher a hog, then I got a lady friend coming out to visit. I'd like for y'all to be gone before she gets here. By the way, that man up on the gallery ain't no federal agent."

"We'll be around, Scruggs. I guarantee it," I said.

"Yeah, you will. Just like a tumblebug rolling shit balls."

We started toward the car. Behind me I heard his ax blade splitting a piece of pine with a loud snap, then John Nash called out from the gallery, "Mr. Scruggs, where's that fellow used to sell you cordwood, do your fence work and such, the one looks like he's got clap on his face?"

"He don't work for me no more," Scruggs said.

"I bet he don't. Being as he's in a clinic down in Raton with an infected knife wound," John Nash said.

IN THE BACK SEAT of the car Nash took a notebook from his shirt pocket and folded back several pages.

"His name's Jubal Breedlove. We think he killed a trucker about six years ago over some dope but we couldn't prove it. I put him in jail a couple of times on drunk charges. Otherwise, his sheet's not remarkable," he said.

"You found this guy on your own?" I said.

"I started calling hospitals when you first contacted us. Wait till you see his face. People tend to remember it."

"Can you get on the cell phone and make sure Breedlove isn't allowed any phone calls in the next few minutes?" I said.

"I did that early this morning."

"You're a pretty good cop, Mr. Nash."

He grinned, then his eyes focused out the window on a snowshoe rabbit that was hopping through grass by an irrigation ditch. "By the way, I told you only what was on his sheet. About twenty years ago a family camping back in the hills was killed in their tents. The man done it was after the daughter. When I ran Jubal Breedlove in on a drunk charge, I found the girl's high school picture in his billfold."

Less than an hour later we were at the clinic in Raton. Jubal Breedlove lay in a narrow bed in a semi-private room that was divided by a collapsible partition. His face was tentacled with a huge purple-and-straw-berry birthmark, so that his eyes looked squeezed inside a mask. Helen picked up his chart from the foot of the bed and read it.

"Boxleiter put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, didn't he?" she said.

"What?" he said.

"Swede slung your blood all over the apartment. He might as well have written your name on the wall," I said.

"Swede who? I was robbed and stabbed behind a bar in Clayton," he said.

"That's why you waited until the wound was infected before you got treatment," I said.

"I was drunk for three days. I didn't know what planet I was on," he replied. His hair was curly, the color of metal shavings. He tried to concentrate his vision on me and Helen, but his eyes kept shifting to John Nash.

"Harpo wouldn't let you get medical help down in Louisiana, would he? You going to take the bounce for a guy like that?" I asked.

"I want a lawyer in here," he said.

"No, you don't," Nash said, and fitted his hand on Breedlove's jaws and gingerly moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as though examining the function of Breedlove's neck. "Remember me?"

"No."

He moved his hand down on Breedlove's chest, flattening it on the panels of gauze that were taped across Breedlove's knife wound.

"Mr. Nash," I said.

"Remember the girl in the tent? I sure do." John Nash felt the dressing on Breedlove's chest with his fingertips, then worked the heel of his hand in a slow circle, his eyes fixed on Breedlove's. Breedlove's mouth opened as though his lower Up had been jerked downward on a wire, and involuntarily his hands grabbed at Nash's wrist.

"Don't be touching me, boy. That'll get you in a lot of trouble," Nash said.

"Mr. Nash, we need to talk outside a minute," I said.

"That's not necessary," he replied, and gathered a handful of Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and wiped his palm with it. "Because everything is going to be just fine here. Why, look, the man's eyes glisten with repentance already."

WE HAD ONE SUSPECT in Trinidad, Colorado, now a second one in New Mexico. I didn't want to think about the amount of paperwork and the bureaucratic legal problems that might lie ahead of us. After we dropped John Nash off at the sheriffs office, we ate lunch in a cafe by the highway. Through the window we could see a storm moving into the mountains and dust lifting out of the trees in a canyon and flattening on the hardpan.

"What are you thinking about?" Helen asked.

"We need to get Breedlove into custody and extradite him back to Louisiana," I said.

"Fat chance, huh?"

"I can't see it happening right now."

"Maybe John Nash will have another interview with him."

"That guy can cost us the case, Helen."

"He didn't seem worried. I had the feeling Breedlove knows better than to file complaints about local procedure." When I didn't reply, she said, "Wyatt Earp and his brothers used to operate around here?"

"After the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral they hunted down some other members of the Clanton gang and blew them into rags. I think this was one of the places on their route."

"I wonder what kind of salary range they have here," she said.

I paid the check and got a receipt for our expense account.

"That story Archer Terrebonne told me about Lila and her cousin firing a gun across a snowfield, about starting an avalanche?" I said.

"Yeah, you told me," Helen said.

"You feel like driving to Durango?"

WE HEADED UP THROUGH Walsenburg, then drove west into the mountains and a rainstorm that turned to snow when we approached Wolf Creek Pass. The juniper and pinyon trees and cinnamon-colored country of the southern Colorado plateau were behind us now, and on each side of the highway the slopes were thick with spruce and fir and pine that glistened with snow that began melting as soon as it touched the canopy.

At the top of Wolf Creek we pulled into a rest stop and drank coffee from a thermos and looked out on the descending crests of the mountains. The air was cold and gray and smelled like pine needles and wet boulders in a streambed and ice when you chop it out of a wood bucket in the morning.

"Dave, I don't want to be a pill…" Helen began.

"About what?"

"It seems like I remember a story years ago about that avalanche, I mean about Lila's cousin being buried in it and suffocating or freezing to death," she said.

"Go on."

"I mean, who's to say the girl wasn't frozen in the shape of a cross? That kind of stuff isn't in an old newspaper article. Maybe we're getting inside our heads too much on this one."

I couldn't argue with her.

When we got to the newspaper office in Durango it wasn't hard to find the story about the avalanche back in 1967. It had been featured on the first page, with interviews of the rescuers and photographs of the slide, the lopsided two-story log house, a barn splintered into kindling, cattle whose horns and hooves and ice-crusted bellies protruded from the snow like disembodied images in a cubist painting. Lila had survived because the slide had pushed her into a creekbed whose overhang formed itself into an ice cave where she huddled for two days until a deputy sheriff poked an iron pike through the top and blinded her with sunlight.

But the cousin died under ten feet of snow. The article made no mention about the condition of the body or its posture in death.

"It was a good try and a great drive over," Helen said.

"Maybe we can find some of the guys who were on the search and rescue team," I said.

"Let it go, Dave."

I let out my breath and rose from the chair I had been sitting in. My eyes burned and my palms still felt numb from involuntarily tightening my hands on the steering wheel during the drive over Wolf Creek Pass. Outside, the sun was shining on the nineteenth-century brick buildings along the street and I could see the thickly timbered, dark green slopes of the mountains rising up sharply in the background.

I started to close the large bound volume of 1967 newspapers in front of me. Then, like the gambler who can't leave the table as long as there is one chip left to play, I glanced again at a color photograph of the rescuers on a back page. The men stood in a row, tools in their hands, wearing heavy mackinaws and canvas overalls and stocking caps and cowboy hats with scarves tied around their ears. The snowfield was sunlit, dazzling, the mountains blue-green against a cloudless sky. The men were unsmiling, their clothes flattened against their bodies in the wind, their faces pinched with cold. I read the cutline below the photograph.

"Where you going?" Helen said.

I went into the editorial room and returned with a magnifying glass.

"Look at the man on the far right," I said. "Look at his shoulders, the way he holds himself."

She took the magnifying glass from my hand and stared through it, moving the depth of focus up and down, then concentrating on the face of a tall man in a wide-brim cowboy hat. Then she read the cutline.

"It says 'H. Q. Skaggs.' The reporter misspelled it. It's Harpo Scruggs," she said.

"Archer Terrebonne acted like he knew him only at a distance. I think he called him 'quite a character,' or something like that."

"Why would they have him at their cabin in Colorado? The Terrebonnes don't let people like Scruggs use their indoor plumbing," she said. She stared at me blankly, then said, as though putting her thoughts on index cards, "He did scut work for them? He's had something on them? Scruggs could be blackmailing Archer Terrebonne?"

"They're joined at the hip."

"Is there a Xerox machine out there?" she asked.