James Burke - Sunset Limited

"I think I finally figured out something about wars. A few people start them and the rest of us fight them. I'm talking about all these people who use our area for a bidet. I think this state is becoming a mental asylum, I really do." Something outside the window caught his attention. "Ah, my morning wouldn't be complete without it. Cisco Flynn just walked in the front door."

FIVE MINUTES LATER CISCO sat down in front of my desk.

"You got anything on these guys who attacked Megan?" he asked.

"Yeah. One of them is dead."

"Did you clear Swede on that deal?"

"You mean did I check out his alibi? He created a memorable moment at the theater. Water flowed out of the men's room into the lobby. At about five in the afternoon."

"From what I understand, that should put him home free."

"It might."

I watched his face. His reddish-brown eyes smiled at nothing.

"Megan felt bad that maybe she made a suspect out of Swede," he said.

"You can pretend otherwise, but he's a dangerous man, Cisco."

"How about the cowboy who went out the window? Would you call him a dangerous man?"

I didn't answer. We stared at each other across the desk. Then his eyes broke.

"Good seeing you, Dave. Thanks for giving Megan the gun," he said.

I watched silently as he opened the office door and went out into the hall.

I propped my forehead on my fingers and stared at the empty green surface of my desk blotter. Why hadn't I seen it? I had even used the term "aerialist" to the San Antonio homicide investigator.

I went out the side door of the building and caught Cisco at his car. The day was beautiful, and his suntanned face looked gold and handsome in the cool light.

"You called the dead man a cowboy," I said.

He grinned, bemused. "What's the big deal?" he said.

"Who said anything about how the guy was dressed?"

"I mean 'cowboy' like 'hit man.' That's what contract killers are called, aren't they?"

"You and Boxleiter worked this scam together, didn't you?"

He laughed and shook his head and got in his car and drove out of the lot, then waved from the window just before he disappeared in the traffic.

THE FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST CALLED me that afternoon.

"I can give it to you over the phone or talk in person. I'd rather do it in person," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Because autopsies can tell us things about human behavior I don't like to know about," he replied.

An hour later I walked into his office.

"Let's go outside and sit under the trees. You'll have to excuse my mood. My own work depresses the hell out of me sometimes," he said.

We sat in metal chairs behind the white-painted brick building that housed his office. The hard-packed earth stayed in shade almost year-round and was green with mold and sloped down to a ragged patch of bamboo on the bayou. Out in the sunlight an empty pirogue that had pulled loose from its mooring turned aimlessly in the current.

"There're abrasions on the back of her head and scrape marks on her shoulder, like trauma from a fall rather than a direct blow," he said. "Of course, you're more interested in cause of death."

"I'm interested in all of it."

"I mean, the abrasions on her skin could have been unrelated to her death. Didn't you say her husband knocked her around before she fled the home?"

"Yes."

"I found evidence of water in the lungs. It's a bit complicated, but there's no question about its presence at the time she died."

"So she was alive when she went into the marsh?"

"Hear me out. The water came out of a tap, not a swamp or marsh or brackish bay, not unless the latter contains the same chemicals you find in a city water supply."

"A faucet?"

"But that's not what killed her." He wore an immaculate white shirt, and his red suspenders hung loosely on his concave chest. He snuffed down in his nose and fixed his glasses. "It was heart failure, maybe brought on by suffocation."

"I'm not putting it together, Clois."

"You were in Vietnam. What'd the South Vietnamese do when they got their hands on the Vietcong?"

"Water poured on a towel?"

"I think in this case we're talking about a wet towel held down on the face. Maybe she fell, then somebody finished the job. But I'm in a speculative area now."

The image he had called up out of memory was not one I wanted to think about. I looked at the fractured light on the bayou, a garden blooming with blue and pink hydrangeas on the far bank. But he wasn't finished.

"She was pregnant. Maybe two months. Does that mean anything?" he said.

"Yeah, it sure does."

"You don't look too good."

"It's a bad story, Doc."

"They all are."

THAT EVENING CLETE PARKED HIS convertible by the dock and hefted an ice chest up on his shoulder and carried it to a fish-cleaning table by one of the water faucets I had mounted at intervals on a water line that ran the length of the dock's handrail. He poured the ice and at least two dozen sac-a-lait out on the table, put on a pair of cloth gardener's gloves, and started scaling the sac-a-lait with a spoon and splitting open their stomachs and half-mooning the heads at the gills.

"You catch fish somewhere else and clean them at my dock?" I said.

"I hate to tell you this, the fishing's a lot better at Henderson. How about I take y'all to the Patio for dinner tonight?"

"Things aren't real cool at the house right now."

He kept his eyes flat, his face neutral. He washed the spooned fish scales off the board plank. I told him about the autopsy on Ida Broussard.

When I finished he said, "You like graveyard stories? How about this? I caught Swede Boxleiter going out of the Terrebonne cemetery last night. He'd used a trowel to take the bricks out of the crypt and pry open the casket. He took the rings from the corpse's fingers, and a pair of riding spurs and a silver picture frame that Archer Terrebonne says held a photo of some little girls a slave poisoned.

"I cuffed Boxleiter to a car bumper and went up to the house and told Terrebonne a ghoul had been in his family crypt. That guy must have Freon in his veins. He didn't say a word. He went down there with a light and lifted the bricks back out and dragged the casket out on the ground and straightened the bones and rags inside and put the stolen stuff back on the corpse, didn't blink an eye. He didn't even look at Boxleiter, like Boxleiter was an insect sitting under a glass jar."

"What'd you do with Boxleiter?"

"Fired him this morning."

" You fired him?"

"Billy Holtzner tends to delegate authority in some situations. He promised me a two-hundred-buck bonus, then hid in his trailer while I walked Boxleiter off the set. Have you told this Broussard guy his wife was murdered?"

"He's not home."

"Dave, I'll say it again. Don't let him come around the set to square a beef, okay?"

"He's not a bad guy, Clete."

"Yeah, they've got a lot of that kind on Camp J."

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I sat with Cool Breeze on the gallery of his father's house and told him, in detail, of the pathologist's findings. He had been pushing the swing at an angle with one foot, then he stopped and scratched his hand and looked out at the street.

"The blow on the back of her head and the marks on her shoulders, could you have done that?" I said.

"I pushed her down on the steps. But her head didn't hit nothing but the screen."

"Was the baby yours?"

"Two months? No, we wasn't… It couldn't be my baby."

"You know where she went after she left your house, don't you?" I said.

"I do now."

"You stay away from Alex Guidry. I want your promise on that, Breeze."

He pulled on his fingers and stared at the street.

"I talked with Harpo Scruggs Sunday night," I said. "He's making noise about your testifying against the Giacanos and Ricky Scarlotti."