Sunset Limited (23 page)

She was living in the guest cottage at the back of Cisco’s house, and the French doors were open and the four-o’clocks planted as borders around the trees were dull red in the shade.

“What’s that?” she said.

I lay a paper sack and the hard-edged metal objects inside it on her breakfast table.

“A nine-millimeter Beretta. I’ve made arrangements for somebody to give you instruction at the firing range,” I said.

She slipped the pistol and the unattached magazine out of the sack and pulled back the slide and looked at the empty chamber. She flipped the butterfly safety back and forth.

“You have peculiar attitudes for a policeman,” she said.

“When they deal the play, you take it to them with fire tongs,” I said.

She put the pistol back in the sack and stepped out on the brick patio and looked at the bayou with her hands in the back pockets of her baggy khaki pants.

“I’ll be all right after a while. I’ve been through worse,” she said.

I stepped outside with her. “No, you haven’t,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“It only gets so bad. You go to the edge, then you join a special club. A psychologist once told me only about three percent of the human family belongs to it.”

“I think I’ll pass on the honor.”

“Why’d you come back?”

“I see my father in my sleep.”

“You want the gun?”

“Yes.”

I nodded and turned to go.

“Wait.” She took her eyeglass case out of her shirt pocket and stepped close to me. There was a dark scrape at the corner of her eye, like dirty rouge rubbed into the grain. “Just stand there. You don’t have to do anything,” she said, and put her arms around me and her head on my chest and pressed her stomach flat against me. She wore doeskin moccasins and I could feel the instep of her foot on my ankle.

The top of her head moved under my chin and against my throat and the wetness of her eyes was like an unpracticed kiss streaked on my skin.

RODNEY LOUDERMILK HAD LIVED two weeks on the eighth floor of the old hotel that was not two blocks from the Alamo. The elevator was slow and throbbed in the shaft, the halls smelled bad, the fire escapes leaked rust down the brick sides of the building. But there was a bar and grill downstairs and the view from his window was magnificent. The sky was blue and salmon-colored in the evening, the San Antonio River lighted by sidewalk restaurants and gondolas that passed under the bridges, and he could see the pinkish stone front of the old mission where he often passed himself off as a tour guide and led college girls through the porticoed walkways that were hung with grapevines.

He was blind in one eye from a childhood accident with a BB gun. He wore sideburns and snap-button cowboy shirts with his Montgomery Ward suits. He had been down only once, in Sugarland, on a nickel-and-dime burglary beef that had gone sour because his fall partner, a black man, had dropped a crowbar off the roof through the top of a greenhouse.

But Rodney had learned his lesson: Stay off of roofs and don’t try to turn watermelon pickers into successful house creeps.

The three-bit on Sugarland Farm hadn’t been a wash either. He had picked up a new gig, one that had some dignity to it, that paid better, that didn’t require dealing with fences who took him off at fifteen cents on the dollar. One week off the farm and he did his first hit. It was much easier than he thought. The target was a rancher outside Victoria, a loudmouth fat shit who drove a Cadillac with longhorns for a hood ornament and who kept blubbering, “I’ll give you money, boy. You name the price. Look, my wife’s gonna be back from the store. Don’t hurt her, okay…” then had started to tremble and messed himself like a child.

“That goes to show you, money don’t put no lead in your pencil,” Rodney was fond of telling his friends.

He also said the fat man was so dumb he never guessed his wife had put up the money for the hit. But Rodney let him keep his illusions. Why not? Business was business. You didn’t personalize it, even though the guy was a born mark.

Their grief was their own, he said. They owed money, they stole it, they cheated on their wives. People sought justice in different ways. The state did it with a gurney and a needle, behind a viewing glass, while people watched like they were at an X-rated movie. Man,
that
was sick.

Rodney showered in the small tin stall and put on a fresh long-sleeve shirt, one that covered the tattooed chain of blue stars around his left wrist, then looked at his four suits in the closet and chose one that rippled with light like a sheet of buffed tin. He slipped on a new pair of black cowboy boots and fitted a white cowboy hat on his head, pulling the brim at an angle over his blind eye.

All you had to do was stand at the entrance to the Alamo and people came up and asked you questions. Clothes didn’t make the person. Clothes
were
the person, he told people. You ever see a gun bull mounted on horseback without a hat and shades? You ever see a construction boss on a job without a clipboard and hard hat and a pocketful of ballpoints? You ever see a hooker that
ain’t
made up to look like your own personal pinball machine?

Rodney conducted tours, gave directions around the city, walked tourists to their hotels so they wouldn’t be mugged by what he called “local undesirables we’re fixing to get rid of.”

A buddy, a guy he’d celled with at Sugarland, asked him what he got out of it.

“Nothing. That’s the point, boy. They got nothing I want.”

Which wasn’t true. But how did you explain to a pipehead that walking normals around, making them apprehensive one moment, relieving their fears another, watching them hang on his words about the cremation of the Texan dead on the banks of the river (an account he had memorized from a brochure) gave him a rush like a freight train loaded with Colombian pink roaring through the center of his head?

Or popping a cap on a slobbering fat man who thought he could bribe Rodney Loudermilk.

It was dusk when Rodney came back from showing two elderly nuns where Davy Crockett had been either bayoneted to death or captured against the barracks wall and later tortured. They both had seemed a little pale at the details he used to describe the event. In fact, they had the ingratitude to tell him they didn’t need an escort back to their hotel, like he had BO or something. Oh, well. He had more important things on his mind. Like this deal over in Louisiana. He’d told his buddy, the pipehead, he didn’t get into a new career so he could go back to strong-arm and B&E bullshit. That whole scene on the bayou had made him depressed in ways he couldn’t explain, like somebody had stolen something from him.

She hadn’t been afraid. When they’re afraid, it proves they got it coming. When they’re not afraid, it’s like they’re spitting in your face. Yeah, that was it. You can’t pop them unless they’re afraid, or they take part of you with them. Now he was renting space in his head to a hide (that’s what he called women) he shouldn’t even be thinking about. He had given her power, and he wanted to go back and correct the images that had left him confused and irritable and not the person he was when he gave guided tours in his western clothes.

He looked at the slip of paper he had made a note on when this crazy deal started. It read:
Meet H.S. in New Iberia. Educate a commonist?
A commonist? Republicans live in rich houses, not commonists. Any dumb shit knows that. Why had he gotten into this? He crumpled up the note in his palm and bounced it off the rim of the wastebasket and called the grill for a steak and baked potato, heavy on the cream and melted butter, and a green salad and a bottle of champale.

It was dusk and a purple haze hung on the rooftops when a man stepped out of a hallway window onto a fire escape, then eased one foot out on a ledge and worked his way across the brick side of the building, oblivious to the stares of two winos down in the alley eight floors below. When the ledge ended, he paused for only a moment, then with the agility of a cat, he hopped across empty space onto another ledge and entered another window.

Rodney Loudermilk had just forked a piece of steak into his mouth when the visitor seized him from behind and dragged him out of his chair, locking arms and wrists under Rodney’s rib cage, lifting him into the air and simultaneously carrying him to the window, whose curtains swelled with the evening breeze. Rodney probably tried to scream and strike out with the fork that was in his hand, but a piece of meat was lodged like a stone in his throat and the arms of his visitor seemed to be cracking his ribs like sticks.

Then there was a rush of air and noise and he was out above the city, among clouds and rooftops and faces inside windows that blurred past him. He concentrated his vision on the dusky purple stretch of sky that was racing away from him, just like things had always raced away from him. It was funny how one gig led to another, then in seconds the rounded, cast-iron, lug-bolted dome of an ancient fire hydrant rose out of the cement and came at your head faster than a BB traveling toward the eye.

THE ACCOUNT OF RODNEY Loudermilk’s death was given us over the phone by a San Antonio homicide investigator named Cecil Hardin, who had found the crumpled piece of notepaper by the wastebasket in Loudermilk’s hotel room. He also read us the statements he had taken from the two witnesses in the alley and played a taped recording of an interview with Loudermilk’s pipehead friend.

“You got any idea who H.S. is?” Hardin asked.

“We’ve had trouble around here with an ex-cop by the name of Harpo Scruggs,” I said.

“You think he’s connected to Loudermilk’s death?” he asked.

“The killer was an aerialist? My vote would go to another local, Swede Boxleiter. He’s a suspect in a murder in Lafayette Parish.”

“What are y’all running over there, a school for criminals? Forget I said that. Spell the name, please.” Then he said, “What’s the deal on this guy Boxleiter?”

“He’s a psychopath with loyalties,” I said.

“You a comedian, sir?”

I DROVE UP THE Loreauville road to Cisco’s house.

Megan was reading a book in a rocking chair on the gallery.

“Do you know where Swede was on Sunday?” I asked.

“He was here, at least in the morning. Why?”

“Just a little research. Does the name Rodney Loudermilk mean anything to you?”

“No. Who is he?”

“A guy with sideburns, blind in one eye?”

She shook her head.

“Did you tell Swede anything about your attackers, how they looked, what they said?”

“Nothing I didn’t tell you. I was asleep when they broke in. They wound tape around my eyes.”

I scratched the back of my neck. “Maybe Swede’s not our man.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dave.”

“Sunday evening somebody canceled out a contract killer in a San Antonio hotel. He was probably one of the men who broke into your house.”

She closed the book in her lap and looked out into the yard. “I told Swede about the blue stars on a man’s wrist,” she said.

“What?”

“One of them had a string of stars tattooed on his wrist. I told that to one of your deputies. He wrote it down.”

“If he did, the sheriff and I never saw it.”

“What difference does it make?”

“The guy in San Antonio, he was thrown out an eighth-floor window by somebody who knows how to leap across window ledges. He had a chain of blue stars tattooed around his left wrist.”

She tried to hide the knowledge in her eyes. She took her glasses off and put them back on again.

“Swede was here that morning. He ate breakfast with us. I mean, everything about him was normal,” she said, then turned her face toward me.

“Normal? You’re talking about Boxleiter? Good try, Meg.”

HELEN AND I DROVE to the movie set on the Terrebonne lawn.

“Sunday? I was at Cisco’s. Then I was home. Then I went to a movie,” Swede said. He dropped down from the back of a flatbed truck, his tool belt clattering on his hips. His gaze went up and down Helen’s body. “We’re not getting into that blackjack routine again, are we?”

“Which movie?” I asked.

”
Sense and Sensibility
. Ask at the theater. The guy’ll remember me ‘cause he says I plugged up the toilet.”

“Sounds good to me. What about you, Helen?” I said.

“Yeah, I always figured him for a fan of British novels,” she said.

“What am I supposed to have done?”

“Tossed a guy out a window in San Antonio. His head hit a fire hydrant at a hundred twenty miles per. Big mess,” I said.

“Yeah? Who is this fucking guy I supposedly killed?”

“Would you try not to use profanity?” I said.

“Sorry. I forgot, Louisiana is an open-air church. I got a question for you. Why is it guys like me are always getting rousted whenever some barf bag gets marched off with the Hallelujah Chorus? Does Ricky the Mouse do time? Is Harpo Scruggs sitting in your jail? Of course not. You turned him loose. If guys like me weren’t around, you’d be out of a job.” He pulled a screwdriver from his belt and began tapping it across his palm, rolling his eyes, chewing gum, rotating his head on his neck. “Is this over? I got to get to work.”

“We might turn out to be your best friends, Swede,” I said.

“Yeah, shit goes great with frozen yogurt, too,” he said, and walked away from us, his bare triangular back arched forward like that of a man in search of an adversary.

“You going to let him slide like that?” Helen said.

“Sometimes the meltdowns have their point of view.”

“Just coincidence he stops up a toilet in a theater on the day he needs an alibi?”

“Let’s go to the airport.”

BUT IF SWEDE TOOK a plane to San Antonio or rented one, we could find no record of it.

That night the air was thick and close and smelled of chrysanthemums and gas, then the sky filled with lightning and swirls of black rain that turned to hail and clattered and bounced like mothballs on the tin roof of the bait shop.

Two days later I drove to St. Mary Parish with Cool Breeze Broussard to watch the exhumation of his wife’s body from a graveyard that was being eaten daily by the Atchafalaya River.