DR10 - Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke
RICKY SCARLOTTI WASN'T HARD to find. I went to the office, called NOPD, then the flower shop he owned at Carrollton and St. Charles.
"You want to chat up Ricky the Mouse with me?" I asked Helen.
"I don't think I'd go near that guy without a full-body condom on," she replied.
"Suit yourself. I'll be back this afternoon."
"Hang on. Let me get my purse."
We signed out an unmarked car and drove across the Atchafalaya Basin and crossed the Mississippi at Baton Rouge and turned south for New Orleans.
"So you're just gonna drop this Harpo Scruggs stuff in his lap?" Helen said.
"You bet. If Ricky thinks someone snitched him off, we'll know about it in a hurry."
"That story about the jazz musician true?" she said.
"I think it is. He just didn't get tagged with it."
The name of the musician is forgotten now, except among those in the 1950s who had believed his talent was the greatest since Bix Beiderbecke's. The melancholy sound of his horn hypnotized audiences at open-air concerts on West Venice beach. His dark hair and eyes and pale skin, the fatal beauty that lived in his face, that was like a white rose opening to black light, made women turn and stare at him on the street. His rendition of "My Funny Valentine" took you into a consideration about mutability and death that left you numb.
But he was a junky and jammed up with LAPD, and when he gave up the names of his suppliers, he had no idea that he was about to deal with Ricky Scarlotti.
Ricky had run a casino in Las Vegas, then a race track in Tijuana, before the Chicago Commission moved him to Los Angeles. Ricky didn't believe in simply killing people. He created living object lessons. He sent two black men to the musician's apartment in Malibu, where they pulled his teeth with pliers and mutilated his mouth. Later, the musician became a pharmaceutical derelict, went to prison in Germany, and died a suicide.
Helen and I drove through the Garden District, past the columned nineteenth-century homes shadowed by oaks whose root systems humped under sidewalks and cracked them upward like baked clay, past the iron green-painted streetcars with red-bordered windows clanging on the neutral ground, past Loyola University and Audubon Park, then to the levee where St. Charles ended and Ricky kept the restaurant, bookstore, and flower shop that supposedly brought him his income.
His second-story office was carpeted with a snow-white rug and filled with glass artworks and polished steel-and-glass furniture. A huge picture window gave onto the river and an enormous palm tree that brushed with the wind against the side of the building.
Ricky's beige pinstripe suit coat hung on the back of his chair. He wore a soft white shirt with a plum-colored tie and suspenders, and even though he was nearing sixty, his large frame still had the powerful muscle structure of a much younger man.
But it was the shape of his head and the appearance of his face that drew your attention. His ears were too large, cupped outward, the face unnaturally rotund, the eyes pouched with permanent dark bags, the eyebrows half-mooned, the black hair like a carefully scissored pelt glued to the skull.
"It's been a long time, Robicheaux. You still off the bottle?" he said.
"We're hearing some stuff that's probably all gas, Ricky. You know a mechanic, a freelancer, by the name of Harpo Scruggs?" I said.
"A guy fixes cars?" he said, and grinned.
"He's supposed to be a serious button man out of New Mexico," I said.
"Who's she? I've seen you around New Orleans someplace, right?" He was looking at Helen now.
"I was a patrolwoman here years ago. I still go to the Jazz and Heritage Festival in the spring. You like jazz?" Helen said.
"No."
"You ought to check it out. Wynton Marsalis is there. Great horn man. You don't like cornet?" she said.
"What is this, Robicheaux?"
"I told you, Ricky. Harpo Scruggs. He tried to kill Willie Broussard, then a priest. My boss is seriously pissed off."
"Tell him that makes two of us, 'cause I don't like out-of-town cops 'fronting me in my own office. I particularly don't like no bride of Frankenstein making an implication about a rumor that was put to rest a long time ago."
"Nobody has shown you any personal disrespect here, Ricky. You need to show the same courtesy to others," I said.
"That's all right. I'll wait outside," Helen said, then paused by the door. She let her eyes drift onto Ricky Scarlotti's face. "Say, come on over to New Iberia sometime. I've got a calico cat that just won't believe you."
She winked, then closed the door behind her.
"I don't provoke no more, Robicheaux. Look, I know about you and Purcel visiting Jimmy Figorelli. What kind of behavior is that? Purcel smashes the guy in the mouth for no reason. Now you're laying off some hillbilly cafone on me."
"I didn't say he was a hillbilly."
"I've heard of him. But I don't put out contracts on priests. What d'you think I am?"
"A vicious, sadistic piece of shit, Ricky."
He opened his desk drawer and removed a stick of gum and peeled it and placed it in his mouth. Then he brushed at the tip of one nostril with his knuckle, huffing air out of his breathing passage. He pushed a button on his desk and turned his back on me and stared out the picture window at the river until I had left the room.
THAT EVENING I DROVE to the city library on East Main. The spreading oaks on the lawn were filled with birds and I could hear the clumps of bamboo rattling in the wind, and fireflies were lighting in the dusk out on the bayou. I went inside the library and found the hardback collection of Megan's photography that had been published three years ago by a New York publishing house.
What could I learn from it? Maybe nothing. Maybe I only wanted to put off seeing her that evening, which I knew I had to do, even though I knew I was breaking an AA tenet by injecting myself into other people's relationships. But you don't let a friend like Clete Purcel swing in the gibbet.
The photographs in her collection were stunning. Her great talent was her ability to isolate the humanity and suffering of individuals who lived in our midst but who nevertheless remained invisible to most passersby. Native Americans on reservations, migrant farmworkers, mentally impaired people who sought heat from steam grates, they looked at the camera with the hollow eyes of Holocaust victims and made the viewer wonder what country or era the photograph had been taken in, because surely it could not have been our own.
Then I turned a page and looked at a black-and-white photo taken on a reservation in South Dakota. It showed four FBI agents in windbreakers taking two Indian men into custody. The Indians were on their knees, their fingers laced behind their heads. An AR-15 rifle lay in the dust by an automobile whose windows and doors were perforated with bullet holes.
The cutline said the men were members of the American Indian Movement. No explanation was given for their arrest. One of the agents was a woman whose face was turned angrily toward the camera. The face was that of the New Orleans agent Adrien Glazier.
I drove out to Cisco's place on the Loreauville road and parked by the gallery. No one answered the bell, and I walked down by the bayou and saw her writing a letter under the light in the gazebo, the late sun burning like a flare beyond the willow trees across the water. She didn't see or hear me, and in her solitude she seemed to possess all the self-contained and tranquil beauty of a woman who had never let the authority of another define her.
Her horn-rimmed glasses gave her a studious look that her careless and eccentric dress belied. I felt guilty watching her without her knowledge, but in that moment I also realized what it was that attracted men to her.
She was one of those women we instinctively know are braver and more resilient than we are, more long-suffering and more willing to be broken for the sake of principle. You wanted to feel tender toward Megan, but you knew your feelings were vain and presumptuous. She had a lion's heart and did not need a protector.
"Oh, Dave. I didn't hear you come up on me," she said, removin
"I was down at the library looking at your work. Who were those Indians Adrien Glazier was taking down?"
"One of them supposedly murdered two FBI agents. Amnesty International thinks he's innocent."
"There were some other photos in there you took of Mexican children in a ruined church around Trinidad, Colorado."
"Those were migrant kids whose folks had run off. The church was built by John D. Rockefeller after his goons murdered the families of striking miners up the road at Ludlow."
"I mention it because Swede Boxleiter told me a hit man named Harpo Scruggs had a ranch around there."
"He should know. He and Cisco were placed in a foster home in Trinidad. The husband was a pederast. He raped Swede until he bled inside. Swede took it so the guy wouldn't start on Cisco next."
I sat down on the top step of the gazebo and tossed a pebble into the bayou.
"Clete's my longtime friend, Megan. He says he needs this security job with Cisco's company. I don't think that's why he's staying here," I said.
She started to speak but gave it up.
"Even though he says otherwise, I don't think he understands the nature of y'all's relationship," I said.
"Is he drinking?"
"Not now, but he will."
She rested her cheek on her hand and gazed at the bayou.
"What I did was rotten," she said. "I wake up every morning and feel like a bloody sod. I just wish I could undo it."
"Talk to him again."
"You want Cisco and me out of his life. That's the real agenda, isn't it?"
"The best cop New Orleans ever had has become a grunt for Billy Holtzner."
"He can walk out of that situation anytime he wants. How about my brother? Anthony Pollock worked for some nasty people in Hong Kong. Who do you think they're going to blame for his death?"
"To tell you the truth, it's a long way from Bayou Teche. I don't really care."
She folded her letter and put away her pen and walked up the green bank toward the house, her silhouette surrounded by the tracings of fireflies.
CISCO FILMED LATE THAT night and did not return home until after 2 a.m. The intruders came sometime between midnight and then. They were big, heavy men, booted, sure of themselves and unrelenting in their purpose. They churned and destroyed the flower beds, where they disabled the alarm system, and slipped a looped wire through a window jamb and released the catch from inside. Each went through the opening with one muscular thrust, because hardly any dirt was scuffed into the bricks below the jamb.
They knew where she slept, and unlike the men who admired Megan for her strength, these men despised her for it. Their hands fell upon her in her sleep, wrenched her from the bed, bound her eyes, hurled her through the door and out onto the patio and down the slope to the bayou. When she pulled at the tape on her eyes, they slapped her to her knees.
But while they forced her face into the water, none of them saw the small memo recorder attached to a key ring she held clenched in her palm. Even while her mouth and nostrils filled with mud and her lungs burned for air as though acid had been poured in them, she tried to keep her finger pressed on the "record" button.
Then she felt the bayou grow as warm as blood around her neck just as a veined, yellow bubble burst in the center of her mind, and she knew she was safe from the hands and fists and booted feet of the men who had always lived on the edge of her camera's lens.
* * *
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 Rick
"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.