Sunset Limited (27 page)

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 sheriff’s 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 sheriff’s 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.