Sunset Limited

SEVEN

I DROVE BACK TOWARD THE office. As I approached the old Catholic cemetery, I saw a black man with sloping shoulders cross the street in front of me and walk toward Main. I stared at him, dumbfounded. One cheek was bandaged, and his right arm was stiff at his side, as though it pained him.

I pulled abreast of him and said, "I can't believe it."

"Believe what?" Cool Breeze said. He walked bent forward, like he was just about to arrive somewhere. The whitewashed crypts behind him were beaded with moisture the size of quarters.

"You're supposed to be in federal custody."

"They cut me loose."

"Cut you loose? Just like that?"

"I'm going up to Victor's to eat breakfast."

"Get in."

"I don't mean you no disrespect, but I ain't gonna have no more to do with po-licemens for a while."

"You staying with Mout'?"

But he crossed the street and didn't answer.

AT THE OFFICE I called Adrien Glazier in New Orleans.

"What's your game with Cool Breeze Broussard?" I asked.

"Game?"

"He's back in New Iberia. I just saw him."

"We took his deposition. We don't see any point in keeping him in custody," she replied.

I could feel my words binding in my throat.

"What's in y'all's minds? You've burned this guy."

"Burned him?"

"You made him rat out the Giacanos. Do you know what they do to people who snitch them off?"

"Then why don't you put him in custody yourself, Mr. Robicheaux?"

"Because the prosecutor's office dropped charges against him."

"Really? So the same people who complain when we investigate their jail want us to clean up a local mess for them?"

"Don't do this."

"Should we tell Mr. Broussard his friend Mr. Robicheaux would like to see him locked up again? Or will you do that for us?" she said, and hung up.

Helen opened my door and came inside. She studied my face curiously.

"You ready to boogie?" she asked.

SWEDE BOXLEITER HAD TOLD me he had a job in the movies, and that's where we started. Over in St. Mary Parish, on the front lawn of Lila Terrebonne. But we didn't get far. After we had parked the cruiser, we were stopped halfway to the set by a couple of off-duty St. Mary Parish sheriffs deputies with American flags sewn to their sleeves.

"Y'all putting us in an embarrassing situation," the older man said.

"You see that dude there, the one with the tool belt on? His name's Boxleiter. He just finished a five bit in Colorado," I said.

"You got a warrant?"

"Nope."

"Mr. Holtzner don't want nobody on the set ain't got bidness here. That's the way it is."

"Oh yeah? Try this. Either you take the marshmallows out of your mouth or I'll go down to your boss's office and have your ass stuffed in a tree shredder," Helen said.

"Say what you want. You ain't getting on this set," he said.

Just then, Cisco Flynn opened the door of a trailer and stepped out on the short wood porch.

"What's the problem, Dave?" he asked.

"Boxleiter."

"Come in," he said, making cupping motions with his upturned hands, as though he were directing an aircraft on a landing strip.

Helen and I walked toward the open door. Behind him I could see Billy Holtzner combing his hair. His eyes were pale and watery, his lips thick, his face hard-planed like gray rubber molded against bone.

"Dave, we want a good relationship with everybody in the area. If Swede's done something wrong, I want to know about it. Come inside, meet Billy. Let's talk a minute," Cisco said.

But Billy Holtzner's attention had shifted to a woman who was brushing her teeth in a lavatory with the door open.

"Margot, you look just like you do when I come in your mouth," he said.

"Adios," I said, walking away from the trailer with Helen.

Cisco caught up with us and waved away the two security guards.

"What'd Swede do?" he asked.

"Better question: What's he got on you?" I said.

"What have I done that you insult me like this?"

"Mr. Flynn, Boxleiter was hanging around small children at the city pool. Save the bullshit for your local groupies," Helen said.

"All right, I'll talk to him. Let's don't have a scene," Cisco said.

"Just stay out of the way," she said.

Boxleiter was on one knee, stripped to the waist, tightening a socket wrench on a power terminal. His Levi's were powdered with dust, and black power lines spidered out from him in all directions. His torso glistened whitely with sweat, his skin rippling with sinew each time he pumped the wrench. He used his hand to mop the sweat out of one shaved armpit, then wiped his hand on his jeans.

"I want you to put your shirt on and take a ride with us," I said.

He looked up at us, smiling, squinting into the sun. "You don't have a warrant. If you did, you'd have already told me," he said.

"It's a social invitation. One you really don't want to turn down," Helen said.

He studied her, amused. Dust swirled out of the dirt street that had been spread on the set. The sky was cloudless, the air moist and as tangible as flame against the skin. Boxleiter rose to his feet. People on the set had stopped work and were watching now.

"I got a union book. I'm like anybody else here. I don't have to go anywhere," he said.

"Suit yourself. We'll catch you later," I said.

"I get it. You'll roust me when I get home tonight. It don't bother me. Long as it's legal," he said.

Helen's cheeks were flushed, the back of her neck damp in the heat. I touched her wrist and nodded toward the cruiser. Just as she turned to go with me, I saw Boxleiter draw one stiff finger up his rib cage, collecting a thick dollop of sweat. He flicked it at her back.

Her hand went to her cheek, her face darkening with surprise and insult, like a person in a crowd who cannot believe the nature of an injury she has just received.

"You're under arrest for assaulting a police officer. Put your hands behind you," she said.

He grinned and scratched at an insect bite high up on his shoulder.

"Is there something wrong with the words I use? Turn around," she said.

He shook his head sadly. "I got witnesses. I ain't done anything."

"You want to add 'resisting' to it?" she said.

"Whoa, mama. Take your hands off me… Hey, enough's enough… Buddy, yeah, you, guy with the mustache, you get this dyke off me."

She grabbed him by the shoulders and put her shoe behind his knee. Then he brought his elbow into her breast, hard, raking it across her as he turned.

She slipped a blackjack from her pants pocket and raised it over her shoulder and swung it down on his collarbone. It was weighted with lead, elongated like a darning sock, the spring handle wrapped with leather. The blow made his shoulder drop as though the tendons had been severed at the neck.

But he flailed at her just the same, trying to grab her around the waist. She whipped the blackjack across his head, again and again, splitting his scalp, wetting the leather cover on the blackjack each time she swung.

I tried to push him to the ground, out of harm's way, but another problem was in the making. The two off-duty sheriffs deputies were pulling their weapons.

I tore my.45 from my belt holster and aimed into their faces.

"Freeze! It's over!… Take your hand off that piece! Do it! Do it! Do it!"

I saw the confusion and the alarm fix in their eyes, their bodies stiffening. Then the moment died in their faces. "That's it… Now, move the crowd back. That's all you've got to do… That's right," I said, my words like wet glass in my throat.

Swede Boxleiter moaned and rolled in the dirt among the power cables, his fingers laced in his hair. Both my hands were still squeezed tight on the.45's grips, my forearms shining with sweat.

The faces of the onlookers were stunned, stupefied. Billy Holtzner pushed his way through the crowd, turned in a circle, his eyebrows climbing on his forehead, and said, "I got to tell you to get back to work?" Then he walked back toward his trailer, blowing his nose on a Kleenex, flicking his eyes sideways briefly as though looking at a minor irritant.

I was left staring into the self-amused gaze of Archer Terrebonne. Lila stood behind him, her mouth open, her face as white as cake flour. The backs of my legs were still trembling.

"Do y'all specialize in being public fools, Mr. Robicheaux?" he asked. He touched at the corner of his mouth, his three-fingered hand like that of an impaired amphibian.

THE SHERIFF PACED IN his office. He pulled up the blinds, then lowered them again. He kept clearing his throat, as though there were an infection in it.

"This isn't a sheriff's department. I'm the supervisor of a mental institution," he said.

He took the top off his teakettle, looked inside it, and set the top down again.

"You know how many faxes I've gotten already on this? The St. Mary sheriff told me not to put my foot in his parish again. That sonofabitch actually threatened me," he said.

"Maybe we should have played it differently, but Boxleiter didn't give us a lot of selection," I said.

"Outside our jurisdiction."

"We told him he wasn't under arrest. There was no misunderstanding about that," I said.

"I should have used their people to take him down," Helen said.

"Ah, a breakthrough in thought. But I'm suspending you just the same, at least until I get an IA finding," the sheriff said.

"He threw sweat on her. He hit her in the chest with his elbow. He got off light," I said.

"A guy with twenty-eight stitches in his head?"

"You told us to pick him up, skipper. That guy would be a loaded gun anyplace we tried to take him down. You know it, too," I said.

He crimped his lips together and breathed through his nose.

"I'm madder than hell about this," he said.

The room was silent, the air-conditioning almost frigid. The sunlight through the slatted blinds was eye-watering.

"All right, forget the suspension and IA stuff. See me before you go into St. Mary Parish again. In the meantime, you find out why Cisco Flynn thinks he can bring his pet sewer rats into Iberia Parish… Helen, you depersonalize your attitude toward the perps, if that's possible."

"The sewer rats?" I said.

He filled his pipe bowl from a leather pouch and didn't bother to look up until we were out of the room.

THAT EVENING CLETE PURCEL parked his Cadillac convertible under the shade trees in front of my house and walked down to the bait shop. He wore a summer suit and a lavender shirt with a white tie. He went to the cooler and opened a bottle of strawberry soda.

"What, I look funny or something?" he said.

"You look sharp."

He drank out of the pop bottle and watched a boat out on the bayou.

"I'll treat y'all to dinner at the Patio in Loreauville," he said.

"I'd better work."

He nodded, then looked at the newscast on the television set that sat above the counter.

"Thought I'd ask," he said.

"Who you going to dinner with?"

"Megan Flynn."

"Another time."

He sat down at the counter and drank from his soda. He drew a finger through a wet ring on the wood.

"I'm only supposed to go out with strippers and junkies?" he said.

"Did I say anything?"

"You hide your feelings like a cat in a spin dryer."

"So she's stand-up. But why's she back in New Iberia? We're Paris on the Teche?"

"She was born here. Her brother has a house here."

"Yeah, he's carrying weight for a psychopath, too. Why you think that is, Clete? Because Cisco likes to rehabilitate shank artists?"

"I hear Helen beat the shit out of Boxleiter with a slapjack. Maybe he's got the message and he'll get out of town."

I mopped down the counter and tossed the rag on top of a case of empty beer bottles.

"You won't change your mind?" he said.

"Come back tomorrow. We'll entertain the bass."

He made a clicking sound with his mouth and walked out the door and into the twilight.

AFTER SUPPER I DROVE over to Mout' Broussard's house on the west side of town. Cool Breeze came out on the gallery and sat down on the swing. He had removed the bandage from his cheek, and the wound he had gotten at the jail looked like a long piece of pink string inset in his skin.

"Doctor said I ain't gonna have no scar."

"You going to hang around town?" I asked.

"Ain't got no pressing bidness nowheres else."

"They used you, Breeze."

"I got Alex Guidry fired, ain't I?"

"Does it make you feel better?"

He looked at bis hands. They were wide, big-boned, lustrous with callus.

"What you want here?" he asked.

"The old man who made your wife cook for him, Harpo Delahoussey? Did he have a son?"

"What people done tole you over in St. Mary Parish?"

"They say he didn't."

He shook his head noncommittally.

"You don't remember?" I said.

"I don't care. It ain't my bidness."

"A guy named Harpo may have executed a couple of kids out in the Basin," I said.

"Those dagos in New Orleans? You know what they do to a black man snitch them off? I'm suppose to worry about some guy blowing away some po'-white trash raped a black girl?"

"When those men took away your wife twenty years ago, you couldn't do anything about it. Same kind of guys are still out there, Breeze. They function only because we allow them to."

"I promised Mout' to go crabbing with him in the morning. I best be getting my sleep," he said.

But when I got into my truck and looked back at him, he was still in the swing, staring at his hands, his massive shoulders slumped like a bag of crushed rock.

IT WAS HOT AND dry Friday night, with a threat of rain that never came. Out over the Gulf, the clouds would vein and pulse with lightning, then the thunder would ripple across the wetlands with a sound like damp cardboard tearing. In the middle of the night I put my hands inside Bootsie's nightgown and felt her body's heat against my palms, like the warmth in a lampshade. Her eyes opened and looked into mine, then she touched my hardness with her fingertips, her hand gradually rounding itself, her mouth on my cheek, then on my lips. She rolled on her back, her hand never leaving me, and waited for me to enter her.

She came before I did, both of her hands pushing hard into the small of my back, her knees gathered around my thighs, then she came a second time, with me, her stomach rolling under me, her voice muted and moist in my ear.

She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running. She walked toward me out of the light, touching her face with a towel, then lay on top of the sheet and put her head on my chest. The ends of her hair were wet and the spinning blades of the window fan made shadows on her skin.

"What's worrying you?" she asked.

"Nothing."

She kicked me in the calf.

"Clete Purcel. I think he's going to be hurt," I said.

"Advice about love and money. Give it to anyone except friends."

"You're right. You were about Megan, too. I'd thought better of her."

She ran her fingernails through my hair and rested one ankle across mine.

SUNDAY MORNING I WOKE at dawn and went down to the bait shop to help Batist open up. I was never sure of his age, but he had been a teenager during World War II when he had worked for Mr. Antoine, one of Louisiana's last surviving Confederate veterans, at Mr. Antoine's blacksmith shop in a big red barn out on West Main. Mr. Antoine had willed Batist a plot of land and a small cypress home on the bayou, and over the years Batist had truck farmed there, augmented his income by trapping and fishing with my father, buried two wives, and raised five children, all of whom graduated from high school. He was illiterate and sometimes contentious, and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans in one direction and Lake Charles in the other, but I never knew a more loyal or decent person.

We started the fire in the barbecue pit, which was fashioned from a split oil drum with handles and hinges welded on it, laid out our chickens and sausage links on the grill for our midday customers, and closed down the lid to let the meat smoke for at least three hours.

Batist wore a pair of bell-bottomed dungarees and a white T-shirt with the sleeves razored off. His upper arms bunched like cantaloupes when he moved a spool table to hose down the dock under it.

"I forgot to tell you. That fella Cool Breeze was by here last night," he said.

"What did he want?"

"I ain't ax him."

I expected him to say more but he didn't. He didn't like people of color who had jail records, primarily because he believed they were used by whites as an excuse to treat all black people unfairly.

"Does he want me to call him?" I asked.

"I know that story about his wife, Dave. Maybe it wasn't all his fault, but he sat by while them white men ruined that po' girl. I feel sorry for him, me, but when a man got a grief like that against hisself, there ain't nothing you can do for him."

I looked up Mout's name in the telephone book and dialed the number. While the phone rang Batist lit a cigar and opened the screen on the window and flicked the match into the water.

"No one home," I said after I hung up.

"I ain't gonna say no more."

He drew in on his cigar, his face turned into the breeze that blew through the screen.

BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR AND I went to Mass, then I dropped them off at home and drove to Cisco Flynn's house on the Loreauville road. He answered the door in a terry-cloth bathrobe that he wore over a pair of scarlet gym shorts.

"Too early?" I said.

"No, I was about to do a workout. Come in," he said, opening the door wide. "Look, if you're here to apologize about that stuff on the set-"

"I'm not."

"Oh."

"The sheriff wants to know why the city of New Iberia is hosting a mainline con like your friend Boxleiter."

We were in the living room now, by the collection of photographs that had made Megan famous.

"You were never in a state home, Dave. How would you like to be seven years old and forced to get up out of bed in the middle of the night and suck somebody's cock? Think you could handle that?"

"I think your friend is a depraved and violent man."

"He's violent? Y'all put him in the hospital over a drop of sweat."

Through the French doors I could see two dark-skinned people sitting at a glass table under a tree in the back yard. The man was big, slightly overweight, with a space between his front teeth and a ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades. The woman wore shorts and a tank top and had brownish-red hair that reminded me of tumbleweed. They were pouring orange juice into glasses from a clear pitcher. A yellow candle stub was melted to the table.

"Something bothered me the last time I was here. These photos that were in Life magazine? Y'all caught the kill from inside the drainpipe, just as the bullet hit the black guy in the neck?"

"That's right."

"What were you doing in the pipe? How'd you know the guy was coming out at that particular place?"

"We made an arrangement to meet him, that's all."

"How'd the cops know he was going to be there?"

"I told you. He raped a high school girl. They had an all-points out on him."

"Somehow that doesn't hang together for me," I said.

"You think we set it up? We were inside the pipe. Bullets were ricocheting and sparking all around us. What's the use? I've got some guests. Is there anything else?"

"Guests?"

"Billy Holtzner's daughter and her boyfriend."

I looked out the French doors again. I saw a glassy reflection between the fingers of the man's right hand.

"Introduce me."

"It's Sunday. They're just getting up."

"Yeah, I can see."

"Hey, wait a minute."

But I opened the French doors and stepped outside. The man with the ponytail, who looked Malaysian or Indonesian, cupped the candle stub melted to the table, popping the waxy base loose, and held it behind his thigh. Holtzner's daughter had eyes that didn't fit her fried hair. They were a soapy blue, mindless, as devoid of reason as a drowsy cat's when small creatures run across its vision.

A flat, partially zippered leather case rested on a metal chair between her and her boyfriend.

"How y'all doing?" I asked.

Their smiles were self-indulgent rather than warm, their faces suffused by a chemical pleasure that was working in their skin like flame inside tallow. The woman lowered her wrist into her lap and the sunlight fell like a spray of yellow coins on the small red swelling inside her forearm.

"The officer from the set," the man said.

"It is," the woman said, leaning sideways in her chair to see behind me. "Is that blond lady here? The one with the blackjack. I mean that guy's head. Yuck."

"We're not in trouble, are we?" the man said. He smiled. The gap in his front teeth was large enough to insert a kitchen match in.

"You from the U.K.?" I said.

"Just the accent. I travel on a French passport," he said, smiling. He removed a pair of dark glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on.

"Y'all need any medical attention here?"

"No, not today, I don't think," the man said.

"Sure? Because I can run y'all down to Iberia General. It's no trouble."

"That's very kind of you, but we'll pass," the man said.

"What's he talking about?" the woman said.

"Being helpful, that sort of thing, welcoming us to the neighborhood," the man said.

"Hospital?" She scratched her back by rubbing it against her chair. "Did anybody ever tell you you look like Johnny Wadd?"

"Not really."

"He died of AIDS. He was very underrated as an artist. Because he did porno, if that's what you want to call it." Then her face went out of focus, as though her own words had presented a question inside herself.

"Dave, can I see you?" Cisco said softly behind me.

I left Billy Holtzner's daughter and the man with the ponytail without saying goodbye. But they never noticed, their heads bent toward each other as they laughed over a private joke.

Cisco walked with me through the shade trees to my truck. He had slipped on a golf shirt with his gym shorts, and he kept pulling the cloth away from the dampness of his skin.

"I don't have choices about what people around me do sometimes," he said.

"Choose not to have them here, Cisco."

"I work in a bowl of piranhas. You think Billy Holtzner is off the wall? He twists noses. I can introduce you to people who blow heads."

"I didn't have probable cause on your friends. But they shouldn't take too much for granted."

"How many cops on a pad have you covered for? How many times have you seen a guy popped and a throw-down put on his body?"

"See you, Cisco."

"What am I supposed to feel, Dave? Like I just got visited by St. Francis of Assisi? In your ear."

I walked to my truck and didn't look back at him. I heard the woman braying loudly in the back yard.

WHEN I WENT DOWN to the bait shop to open up Monday morning, Cool Breeze Broussard was waiting for me at a spool table, the Cinzano umbrella ruffling over his head. The early sun was dark red through the trunks of the cypresses.

"It gonna be another hot one," he said.

"What's the haps, Breeze?"

"I got to talk… No, out here. I like to talk in the open space… How much of what I tell you other people got to learn about?"

"That depends."

He made a pained face and looked at the redness of the sun through the trees.

"I went to New Orleans Saturday. A guy up Magazine, Jimmy Fig, Tommy Figorelli's brother, the guy the Giacanos sawed up and hung in pieces from a ceiling fan? I figured Jimmy didn't have no love for the Giacanos 'cause of his brother, and, besides, me and Jimmy was in the Block together at Angola, see. So I t'ought he was the right man to sell me a cold piece," Cool Breeze said.

"You're buying unregistered guns?" I said.

"You want to hear me or not?… So he go, 'Willie, in your line of work, you don't need no cold piece.'

"I go, 'This ain't for work. I got in bad wit' some local guys, maybe you heard. But I ain't got no money right now, so I need you to front me the piece.'

"He say, 'You feeling some heat from somewhere, Breeze?' And he say it wit' this smart-ass grin on his face.

"I say, 'Yeah, wit' the same dudes who freeze-wrapped your brother's parts in his own butcher shop. I hear they drank eggnog while he was spinning round over their heads.'

"He say, 'Well, my brother had some sexual problems that got him into trouble. But it ain't Italians you got to worry about. The word is some peckerwoods got a contract to do a black blabbermouth in New Iberia. I just didn't know who it was.'

"I say, 'Blabbermouth, huh?'

"He go, 'You was ripping off the Giacanos and selling their own VCRs back to them? Then you snitch them off and come to New Orleans figuring somebody's gonna front you a piece? Breeze, nothing racial meant, but you people ought to stick to pimping and dealing rock'."

"Who are these peckerwoods?" I asked.

"When I tole you the story about me and Ida, about how she wrapped that chain round her t'roat and drowned herself, I left somet'ing out."

"Oh?"

"A year after Ida died, I was working at the Terrebonne cannery, putting up sweet potatoes. Harpo Delahoussey run the security there for Mr. Terrebonne. We come to the end of the season and the cannery shut down, just like it do every winter, and everybody got laid off. So we went on down to the unemployment office and filed for unemployment insurance. Shouldn't have been no problem.

"Except three weeks go by and the state sends us a notice we ain't qualified for no checks 'cause we cannery workers, and 'cause the cannery ain't open, we ain't available to work.

"I went on down to see Mr. Terrebonne, but I never got past Harpo Delahoussey. He's sitting there at a big desk wit' his foot in the wastebasket, sticking a po'boy sandwich in his mout'. He go, 'It's been explained to you, Willie. Now, you don't want wait round here till next season, you go on down to New Orleans, get you a job, try to stay out of trouble for a while. But don't you come round here bothering Mr. Terrebonne. He been good to y'all.'

"'Bout a week later they was a big fire at the cannery. You could smell sweet potatoes burning all the way down to Morgan City. Harpo Delahoussey jumped out a second-story window wit' his clothes on fire. He'da died if he hadn't landed in a mud puddle."

"You set it?"

"Harpo Delahoussey had a nephew wit' his name. He use to be a city po-liceman in Franklin. Everybody called him Li'l Harpo."

"You think this is one of the peckerwoods?"

"Why else I'm telling you all this? Look, I ain't running no more."

"I think you're living inside your head too much, Breeze. The Giacanos use mechanics out of Miami or Houston."

"Jimmy Fig tole me I was a dumb nigger ought to be pimping and selling crack. What you saying ain't no different. I feel bad I come here."

He got up and walked down the dock toward his truck. He passed two white fishermen who were just arriving, their rods and tackle boxes gripped solidly in their hands. They walked around him, then glanced over their shoulders at his back.

"That boy looks like his old lady just cut him off," one of them said to me, grinning.

"We're not open yet," I said, and went inside the bait shop and latched the screen behind me.