James Burke - Sunset Limited

"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.

AT ONE TIME THE graveyard had sat on dry ground, fringed by persimmon and gum trees, but almost twenty years ago the Atchafalaya had broken a levee and channeled an oxbow through the woods, flooding the grave sites, then had left behind a swampy knob of sediment strung with river trash. One side of the graveyard dipped toward the river, and each year the water cut more deeply under the bank, so that the top layer hung like the edge of a mushroom over the current.

Most of the framed and spiked name tags that served as markers had been knocked down or stepped on and broken by hunters. The dime-store vases and the jelly glasses used for flower jars lay embedded in sediment. The graduation and wedding and birth pictures wrapped in plastic had been washed off the graves on which they had been originally placed and were now spotted with mud, curled and yellowed by the sun so that the faces on them were not only anonymous but stared incongruously out of situations that seemed to have never existed.

The forensic pathologist and a St. Mary Parish deputy and the two black men hired as diggers and the backhoe operator waited.

"You know which one it is?" I asked Cool Breeze.

"That one yonder, wit' the pipe cross. I welded it myself. The shaft goes down t'ree feet," he said.

The serrated teeth on the bucket of the backhoe bit into the soft earth and lifted a huge divot of loam and roots and emerald-colored grass from the top of the grave. Cool Breeze's shoulder brushed against mine, and I could feel the rigidity and muted power in his body, like the tremolo that rises from the boiler room of a ship.

"We can wait on the levee until they're finished," I said.

"I got to look," he said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"Cain't have nobody saying later that ain't her."

"Breeze, she's been in the ground a long time."

"Don't matter. I'll know. What you t'ink I am anyway? Other men can look at my wife, but I'm scared to do it myself?"

"I think you're a brave man," I said.

He turned his head and looked at the side of my face.

The backhoe was bright yellow against the islands of willow trees between the graveyard and the main portion of the river. The loam in the grave turned to mud as the bucket on the backhoe dipped closer to the coffin. The day was blue-gold and warm and flowers still bloomed on the levee, but the air smelled of humus, of tree roots torn out of wet soil, of leaves that have gone acidic and brown in dead water. At five feet the two black diggers climbed into the hole with spades and began sculpting the coffin's shape, pouring water from a two-gallon can on the edges, wiping the surface and corners slick with rags.

They worked a canvas tarp and wood planks under it, then ran ropes tied to chains under the tarp, and we all lifted. The coffin came free more easily than I had expected, rocking almost weightlessly in the bottom of the canvas loop, a missing panel in one side blossoming with muddy fabric.

"Open it up," Cool Breeze said.

The pathologist looked at me. He wore red suspenders and a straw hat and had a stomach like a small pillow pushed under his belt. I nodded, and one of the diggers prized the lid loose with a blade screwdriver.

I had seen exhumations before. The view of mortality they present to the living is not easily dismissed. Sometimes the coffin fills with hair, the nails, particularly on the bare feet, grow into claws, the face puckers into a gray apple, the burial clothes contain odors that cause people to retch.