"Sunset Limited" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)FIVE THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCHTIME Clete Purcel picked me up at the office in the chartreuse Cadillac convertible that he had bought from a member of the Giacano crime family in New Orleans, a third-generation miscreant by the name of Stevie Gee who decided to spot-weld a leak in the gas tank but got drunk first and forgot to fill the tank with water before he fired up the welding machine. The scorch marks had faded now and looked like smoky gray tentacles on the back fenders. The back seat was loaded with fishing rods, a tackle box that was three feet long, an ice chest, air cushions, crushed beer cans, life preservers, crab traps, a hoop net that had been ground up in a boat propeller, and a tangled trot line whose hooks were ringed with dried smelt. Clete wore baggy white pants without a shirt and a powder-blue porkpie hat, and his skin looked bronzed and oily in the sun. He had been the best cop I ever knew until his career went south, literally, all the way to Central America, because of marriage trouble, pills, booze, hookers, indebtedness to shylocks, and finally a murder warrant that his fellow officers barely missed serving on him at the New Orleans airport. I went inside Victor's on Main Street for a take-out order, then we crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove past the live oaks on the lawn of the gray and boarded-up buildings that used to be Mount Carmel Academy, then through the residential section into City Park. We sat at a picnic table under a tree, not far from the swimming pool, where children were cannonballing off the diving board. The sun had gone behind the clouds and rain rings appeared soundlessly on the bayou's surface, like bream rising to feed. "That execution in St. Mary Parish… the two brothers who got clipped after they raped the black girl? How bad you want the perps?" he said. "What do you think?" "I see it as another parish's grief. As a couple of guys who got what they had coming." "The shooters had one of our uniforms." He set down the pork-chop sandwich he was eating and scratched the scar that ran through his left eyebrow. "I'm still running down skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. Nig went bail for a couple of chippies who work a regular Murphy game in the Quarter. They're both junkies, runny noses, scabs on their thighs, mainlining six and seven balloons a day, sound familiar, scared shitless of detoxing in City Prison, except they're even more scared of their pimp, who's the guy they have to give up if they're going to beat the Murphy beef. "So they ask Nig if they should go to the prosecutor's office with this story they got off a couple of Johns who acted like over-the-hill cops. These guys were talking to each other about capping some brothers out in the Basin. One of the chippies asks if they're talking about black guys. One duffer laughs and says, 'No, just some boys who should have kept practicing on colored girls and left white bread alone.'" "Where are these guys out of?" "They said San Antone. But Johns usually lie." "What else do the girls know?" "They're airheads, Dave. The intellectual one reads the shopping guide on the toilet. Besides, they're not interested in dealing anymore. Their pimp decided to plea out, so they're off the hook." "Write down their names, will you?" He took a piece of folded paper from his pants pocket, with the names of the two women and their addresses already written on it, and set it on the plank table. He started eating again, his green eyes smiling at nothing. "Old lesson from the First District, big mon. When somebody wastes a couple of shit bags…" He realized I wasn't listening, that my gaze was focused over his shoulder on the swimming pool. He turned and stared through the tree trunks, his gaze roving across the swimmers in the pool, the parents who were walking their children by the hand to an instruction class a female lifeguard was putting together in the shallow end. Then his eyes focused on a man who stood between the wire enclosure and the bathhouse. The man had a peroxided flattop, a large cranium, like a person with water on the brain, cheekbones that tapered in an inverted triangle to his chin, a small mouth full of teeth. He wore white shoes and pale orange slacks and a beige shirt with the short sleeves rolled in neat cuffs and the collar turned up on the neck. He pumped a blue rubber ball in his right palm. "You know that dude?" Clete said. "His name's Swede Boxleiter." "A graduate?" "Canon City, Colorado. The FBI showed me some photos of a yard job he did on a guy." "What's he doing around here?" Boxleiter wore shades instead of the granny glasses I had seen in the photos. But there was no doubt about the object of his attention. The children taking swim lessons were lined up along the edge of the pool, their swimsuits clinging wetly to their bodies. Boxleiter snapped the rubber ball off the pavement, ricocheting it against the bathhouse wall, retrieving it back into his palm as though it were attached to a magic string. "Excuse me a minute," I said to Clete. I walked through the oaks to the pool. The air smelled of leaves and chlorine and the rain that was sprinkling on the heated cement. I stood two feet behind Boxleiter, who hung on to the wire mesh of the fence with one hand while the other kneaded the rubber ball. The green veins in his forearm were pumped with blood. He chewed gum, and a lump of cartilage expanded and contracted against the bright slickness of his jaw. He felt my eyes on the back of his neck. "You want something?" he asked. "We thought we'd welcome you to town. Have you drop by the department. Maybe meet the sheriff." He grinned at the corner of his mouth. "You think you seen me somewhere?" I continued to stare into his face, not speaking. He removed his shades, his eyes askance. "Soooo, what kind of gig are we trying to build here?" he asked. "I don't like the way you look at children." "I'm looking at a swimming pool. But I'll move." "We nail you on a short-eyes here, we'll flag your jacket and put you in lockdown with some interesting company. This is Louisiana, Swede." He rolled the rubber ball down the back of his forearm, off his elbow, and caught it in his palm, all in one motion. Then he rolled it back and forth across the top of his fingers, the gum snapping in his jaw all the while. "I went out max time. You got no handle. I got a job, too. In the movies. I'm not shitting you on that," he said. "Watch your language, please." "My language? Wow, I love this town already." Then his face tilted, disconcerted, his breath drawing through his nose like an animal catching a scent. "Why's Blimpo staring at me like that?" I turned and saw Clete Purcel standing behind me. He grinned and took out his comb and ran it through his sandy hair with both hands. The skin under his arms was pink with sunburn. "You think I got a weight problem?" he asked. "No. 'Cause I don't know you. I don't know what kind of problem you got." "Then why'd you call me Blimpo?" "So maybe I didn't mean anything by it." "I think you did." But Boxleiter turned his back on us, his attention fixed on the deep end of the pool, his right hand opening and closing on the blue rubber ball. The wind blew lines in his peroxided hair, and his scalp had the dead gray color of putty. His lips moved silently. "What'd you say?" Clete asked. When Boxleiter didn't reply, Clete fitted his hand under Boxleiter's arm and turned him away from the fence. "You said, 'Blow me, Fatso'?" Boxleiter slipped the ball in his pocket and looked out into the trees, his hands on his hips. "It's a nice day. I'm gonna buy me a sno'ball. I love the spearmint sno'balls they sell in this park. You guys want one?" he said. We watched him walk away through the trees, the leaves crunching under his feet like pecan shells, toward a cold drink stand and ice machine a black man had set up under a candy-striped umbrella. "Like the boy says, he doesn't come with handles," Clete said. THAT AFTERNOON THE SHERIFF called me into his office. He was watering his window plants with a hand-painted teakettle, smoking his pipe at the same time. His body was slatted with light through the blinds, and beyond the blinds I could see the whitewashed crypts in the old Catholic cemetery. "I got a call from Alex Guidry. You reported him to the Humane Society?" he said. "He keeps his dogs penned on a filthy concrete slab without shade." "He claims you're harassing him." "What did the Humane Society say?" "They gave him a warning and told him they'd be back. Watch your back with this character, Dave." "That's it?" "No. The other problem is your calls to the FBI in New Orleans. They're off our backs for a while. Why stir them up?" "Cool Breeze should be in our custody. We're letting the Feds twist him to avoid a civil suit over the abuse of prisoners in our jail." "He's a four-time loser, Dave. He's not a victim. He fed a guy into an electric saw." "I don't think it's right." "Tell that to people when we have to pass a parish sales tax to pay off a class action suit, particularly one that will make a bunch of convicts rich. I take that back. Tell it to that female FBI agent. She was here while you were out to lunch. I really enjoyed the half hour I spent listening to her." "Adrien Glazier was here?" IT WAS FRIDAY, AND when I drove home that evening I should have been beginning a fine weekend. Instead, she was waiting for me on the dock, a cardboard satchel balanced on the railing under her hand. I parked the car in the drive and walked down to meet her. She looked hot in her pink suit, her ice-blue eyes filmed from the heat or the dust on the road. "You've got Breeze in lockdown and everybody around here scared. What else do you want, Ms. Glazier?" "It's Special Agent Gla-" "Yeah, I know." "You and Megan Flynn are taking this to the media, aren't you?" "No. At least I'm not." "Then why do both of you keep calling the Bureau?" "Because I'm being denied access to a prisoner who escaped from our jail, that's why." She stared hard into my face, as though searching for the right dials, her back teeth grinding softly, then said, "I want you to look at a few more photos." "No." "What's the matter, you don't want to see the wreckage your gal leaves in her wake?" She pulled the elastic cord loose from the cardboard satchel and spilled half the contents on a spool table. She lifted up a glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of Megan addressing a crowd of Latin peasants from the bed of a produce truck. Megan was leaning forward, her small hands balled into fists, her mouth wide with her oration. "Here's another picture taken a few days later. If you look closely, you'll recognize some of the dead people in the ditch. They were in the crowd that listened to Megan Flynn. Where was she when this happened? At the Hilton in Mexico City." "You really hate her, don't you?" I heard her take a breath, like a person who has stepped into fouled air. "No, I don't hate her, sir. I hate what she does. Other people die so she can feel good about herself," she said. I sifted through the photos and news clippings with my fingers. I picked up one that had been taken from the "Not bad for a kid in a state orphanage. I guess that's the Megan I always remember. Maybe that's why I still think of her as one of the most admirable people I've ever known. Thanks for coming by," I said, and walked up the slope through the oak and pecan trees on my lawn, and on into my lighted house, where my daughter and wife waited supper for me. MONDAY MORNING HELEN SOILEAU came into my office and sat on the corner of my desk. "I was wrong about two things," she said. "Oh?" "The mulatto who tried to do Cool Breeze, the guy with the earring through his nipple? I said maybe I bought his story, he thought Breeze was somebody else? I checked the visitors' sheet. A lawyer for the Giacano family visited him the day before." "You're sure?" "Whiplash Wineburger. You ever meet him?" "Whiplash represents other clients, too." "Pro bono for a mulatto who works in a rice mill?" "Why would the Giacanos want to do an inside hit on a guy like Cool Breeze Broussard?" She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. "Maybe the Feds are squeezing Breeze to bring pressure on the Giacanos," I said, in answer to my own question. "To make them cooperate in an investigation of the Triads?" "Why not?" "The other thing I was going to tell you? Last night Lila Terrebonne went into that new zydeco dump on the parish line. She got into it with the bartender, then pulled a.25 automatic on the bouncer. A couple of uniforms were the first guys to respond. They got her purse from her with the gun in it without any problem. Then one of them brushed against her and she went ape shit. "Dave, I put my arm around her and walked her out the back door, into the parking lot, with nobody else around, and she cried like a kid in my arms… You following me?" "Yeah, I think so," I said. "I don't know who did it, but I know what's been done to her," she said. She stood up, flexed her back, and inverted the flats of her hands inside the back of her gunbelt. The skin was tight around her mouth, her eyes charged with light. My gaze shifted off her face. "When I was a young woman and finally told people what my father did to me, nobody believed it," she said. "'Your dad was a great guy,' they said. 'Your dad was a wonderful parent.'" "Where is she now?" "Iberia General. Nobody's pressing charges. I think her old man already greased the owner of the bar." "You're a good cop, Helen." "Better get her some help. The guy who'll pay the bill won't be the one who did it to her. Too bad it works out that way, huh?" "What do I know?" I said. Her eyes held on mine. She had killed two perps in the line of duty. I think she took no joy in that fact. But neither did she regret what she had done nor did she grieve over the repressed anger that had rescinded any equivocation she might have had before she shot them. She winked at me and went back to her office. |
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