Sunset Limited (9 page)

We stood under an awning on the back terrace. The sunlight was blinding on the surface of the swimming pool. In the distance a black groundskeeper was using an air blower to scud leaves off the tennis courts.

“You won’t come inside?” Archer said. He glanced at his watch, then looked at a bird in a tree. The ring finger of his left hand was missing, sawed off neatly at the palm, so that the empty space looked like a missing key on a piano.

“Thanks, anyway. I just wanted to see that Lila was all right.”

“Really? Well, that was good of you.”

I noticed his use of the past tense, as though my visit had already ended.

“There’re no charges, but messing with guns in barrooms usually has another conclusion,” I said.

“We’ve already covered this territory with other people, sir,” he said.

“I don’t think quite enough,” I said.

“Is that right?” he replied.

Our eyes locked on each other’s.

“Dave’s just being an old friend, Daddy,” Lila said.

“I’m sure he is. Let me walk you to your cruiser, Mr. Robicheaux.”

”
Daddy
, I mean it, Dave’s always worrying about his AA friends,” she said.

“You’re not in that organization. So he doesn’t need to worry, does he?”

I felt his hand cup me lightly on the arm. But I said goodbye to Lila and didn’t resist. I walked with him around the shady side of the house, past a garden planted with mint and heart-shaped caladiums.

“Is there something you want to tell me, sir?” he asked. He took a swallow from his bourbon glass and I could feel the coldness of the ice on his breath.

“A female detective saved your daughter from a resisting arrest charge,” I said.

“Yes?”

“She thinks Lila has been sexually molested or violated in some way.”

His right eye twitched at the corner, as though an insect had momentarily flown into his vision.

“I’m sure y’all have many theories about human behavior that most of us wouldn’t understand. We appreciate your good intentions. However, I see no need for you to come back,” he said.

“Don’t count on it, sir.”

He wagged his finger back and forth, then walked casually toward the rear of the house, sipping his drink as though I had never been there.

THE SUN WAS WHITE in the sky and the brick drive was dappled with light as bright as gold foil. Through the cruiser’s front window I saw Cisco Flynn walk toward me from a trailer, his palms raised for me to stop.

He leaned down on the window.

“Take a walk with me. I got to keep my eye on this next scene,” he said.

“Got to go, Cisco.”

“It’s about Swede Boxleiter.”

I turned off the ignition and walked with him to a canvas awning that was suspended over a worktable and a half dozen chairs. Next to the awning was a trailer whose air-conditioning unit dripped with moisture like a block of ice.

“Swede’s trying to straighten out. I think he’s going to make it this time. But if he’s ever a problem, give me a call,” Cisco said.

“He’s a mainline recidivist, Cisco. Why are you hooked up with him?”

“When we were in the state home? I would have been anybody’s chops if it hadn’t been for Swede.”

“The Feds say he kills people.”

“The Feds say my sister is a Communist.”

The door to the trailer opened and a woman stepped out on the small porch. But before she could close the door behind her, a voice shouted out, “Goddamnit, I didn’t say you could leave. Now, you listen, hon. I don’t know if the problem is because your brains are between your legs or because you think you’ve got a cute twat, but the next time I tell that pissant to rewrite a scene, you’d better not open your mouth. Now you get the fuck back to work and don’t you ever contradict me in front of other people again.”

Even in the sunlight her face looked refrigerated, bloodless, the lines twisted out of shape with the humiliation that Billy Holtzner bathed her with. He shot an ugly look at Cisco and me, then slammed the door.

I turned to go.

“There’s a lot of stress on a set, Dave. We’re three million over budget already. That’s other people’s money we’re talking about. They get mad about it,” Cisco said.

“I remember that first film you made. The one about the migrant farmworkers. It was sure a fine movie.”

“Yeah, a lot of college professors and 1960s leftovers dug it in a big way.”

“The guy in that trailer is a shithead.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Your old man wasn’t.”

I got into the cruiser and drove through the corridor of trees to the bayou road. In the rearview mirror Cisco Flynn looked like a miniature man trapped inside an elongated box.

THAT NIGHT, AS BOOTSIE and I prepared to go to bed, dry lightning flickered behind the clouds and the pecan tree outside the window was stiffening in the wind.

“Why do you think Jack Flynn was killed?” Bootsie asked.

“Working people around here made thirty-five cents an hour back then. He didn’t have a hard time finding an audience.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“Everyone said it came from the outside. Just like during the Civil Rights era. We always blamed our problems on the outside.”

She turned out the light and we lay down on top of the sheets. Her skin felt cool and warm at the same time, the way sunlight does in the fall.

“The Flynns are trouble, Dave.”

“Maybe.”

“No, no maybe about it. Jack Flynn might have been a good man. But I always heard he didn’t become a radical until his family got wiped out in the Depression.”

“He fought in the Lincoln Brigade. He was at the battle of Madrid.”

“Good night,” she said.

She turned toward the far wall. When I spread my hand on her back I could feel her breath rise and fall in her lungs. She looked at me over her shoulder, then rolled over and fit herself inside my arms.

“Dave?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Trust me on this. Megan needs you for some reason she’s not telling you about. If she can’t get to you directly, she’ll go through Clete.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“He called tonight and asked if I knew where she was. She’d left a message on his answering machine.”

“Megan Flynn and Clete Purcel?”

I WOKE AT SUNRISE the next morning and drove through the leafy shadows on East Main and then five miles up the old highway to Spanish Lake. I was troubled not only by Bootsie’s words but also by my own misgivings about the Flynns. Why was Megan so interested in the plight of Cool Breeze Broussard? There was enough injustice in the world without coming back to New Iberia to find it. And why would her brother Cisco front points for an obvious psychopath like Swede Boxleiter?

I parked my truck on a side road and poured a cup of coffee from my thermos. Through the pines I could see the sun glimmering on the water and the tips of the flooded grass waving in the shallows. The area around the lake had been the site of a failed Spanish colony in the 1790s. In 1836 two Irish immigrants who had survived the Goliad Massacre during the Texas Revolution, Devon Flynn and William Burke, cleared and drained the acreage along the lake and built farmhouses out of cypress trees that were rooted in the water like boulders. Later the train stop there became known as Burke’s Station.

Megan and Cisco’s ancestor had been one of those Texas soldiers who had surrendered to the Mexican army with the expectation of boarding a prison ship bound for New Orleans, and instead had been marched down a road on Palm Sunday and told by their Mexican captors to kneel in front of the firing squads that were forming into position from two directions. Over 350 men and boys were shot, bayoneted, and clubbed to death. Many of the survivors owed their lives to a prostitute who ran from one Mexican officer to the next, begging for the lives of the Texans. Her name and fate were lost to history, but those who escaped into the woods that day called her the Angel of Goliad.

I wondered if Cisco ever thought about his ancestor’s story as material for a film.

The old Flynn house still stood by the lake, but it was covered by a white-brick veneer now and the old gallery had been replaced by a circular stone porch with white pillars. But probably most important to Megan and Cisco was the simple fact that it and its terraced gardens and gnarled live oaks and lakeside gazebo and boathouse all belonged to someone else.

Their father was bombed by the Luftwaffe and shot at by the Japanese on Guadalcanal and murdered in Louisiana. Were they bitter, did they bear us a level of resentment we could only guess at? Did they bring their success back here like a beast on a chain? I didn’t want to answer my own question.

The wind ruffled the lake and the longleaf pine boughs above my truck. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the sheriff’s cruiser pull in behind me. He opened my passenger door and got inside.

“How’d you know I was out here?” I asked.

“A state trooper saw you and wondered what you were doing.”

“I got up a little early today.”

“That’s the old Flynn place, isn’t it?”

“We used to dig for Confederate artifacts here. Camp Pratt was right back in those trees.”

“The Flynns bother me, too, Dave. I don’t like Cisco bringing this Boxleiter character into our midst. Why don’t both of them stay in Colorado?”

“That’s what we did to Megan and Cisco the first time. Let a friend of their dad dump them in Colorado.”

“You’d better define your feelings about that pair. I got Boxleiter’s sheet. What kind of person would bring a man like that into his community?”

“We did some serious damage to those kids, Sheriff.”

”
We
? You know what your problem is, Dave? You’re just like Jack Flynn.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t like rich people. You think we’re in a class war. Not everybody with money is a sonofabitch.”

He blew out his breath, then the heat went out of his face. He took his pipe from his shirt pocket and clicked it on the window jamb.

“Helen said you think Boxleiter might be a pedophile,” he said.

“Yeah, if I had to bet, I’d say he’s a real candidate.”

“Pick him up.”

“What for?”

“Think of something. Take Helen with you. She can be very creative.”

Idle words that I would try to erase from my memory later.

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 sheriff’s 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.