James Burke - Sunset Limited

Then I saw it in her face, the dryness at the corner of the mouth, the skin that twitched slightly below the eye, the chin lifted as though to remove a tension in the throat.

"We thought y'all might want to help bring down this guy Scruggs. He's going back and forth across state lines like a Ping-Pong ball," I said.

"If you don't have enough grounds for a warrant, why should we?" she said.

"Every cop who worked with him says he was dirty. Maybe he even murdered convicts in Angola. But there's no sheet on him anywhere," I said.

"You're saying somehow that's our fault?"

"No, we're thinking Protected Witness Program or paid federal informant," Helen said.

"Where do you get your information? You people think-" she began.

"Scruggs is the kind of guy who would flirt around the edges of the Klan. Back in the fifties you had guys like that on the payroll," I said.

"You're talking about events of four decades ago," Adrien Glazier said.

"What if he was one of the men who murdered Jack Flynn? What if he committed that murder while he was in the employ of the government?" I said.

"You're not going to interrogate me in my own office, Mr. Robicheaux."

We stared mutely at each other, her eyes watching the recognition grow in mine.

"That's it, isn't it? You know Scruggs killed Megan Flynn's father. You've known it all along. That's why you bear her all this resentment."

"You'll either leave now or I'll have you removed from the building," she said.

"Here's a Kleenex. Your eyes look a little wet, ma'am. I can relate to your situation. I used to work for the NOPD and had to lie and cover up for male bozos all the time," Helen said.

WE DROVE INTO THE Quarter and had beignets and coffee and hot milk at the Cafe du Monde. While Helen bought some pralines for her nephew, I walked across the street into Jackson Square, past the sidewalk artists who had set up their easels along the piked fence that surrounded the park, past the front of St. Louis Cathedral where a string band was playing, and over to a small bookstore on Toulouse.

Everyone in AA knows that his survival as a wet drunk was due partly to the fact that most people fear the insane and leave them alone. But those who are cursed with the gift of Cassandra often have the same fate imposed upon them. Gus Vitelli was a slight, bony Sicilian ex-horse trainer and professional bouree player whose left leg had been withered by polio and who had probably read almost every book in the New Orleans library system. He was obsessed with what he called "untold history," and his bookstore was filled with material on conspiracies of every kind.

He told anyone who would listen that the main players in the assassinations of both John Kennedy and Martin Luther King came from the New Orleans area. Some of the names he offered were those of Italian gangsters. But if the Mob was bothered by his accusations, they didn't show it. Gus Vitelli had long ago been dismissed in New Orleans as a crank.

The problem was that Gus was a reasonable and intelligent man. At least in my view.

He was wearing a T-shirt that exclaimed "I Know Jack Shit," and wrote prices on used books while I told him the story about the murder of Jack Flynn and the possible involvement of an FBI informant.

"It wouldn't surprise me that it got covered up. Hoover wasn't any friend of pinkos and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade," he said. He walked to a display table and began arranging a pile of paperback books, his left leg seeming to collapse and then spring tight again with each step. "I got a CIA manual here that was written to teach the Honduran army how to torture people. Look at the publication date, 1983. You think people are gonna believe that?" He flipped the manual at me.

"Gus, have you heard anything about a hit on a black guy named Willie Broussard?"

"Something involving the Giacanos or Ricky Scarlotti?"

"You got it."

"Nothing about a hit. But the word is Ricky Scar's sweating ball bearings 'cause he might have to give up some Asian guys. The truth is, I'm not interested. People like Ricky give all Italians a bad name. My greatgrandfather sold bananas and pies out of a wagon. He raised thirteen kids like that. He got hung from a street-lamp in 1890 when the police commissioner was killed."

I thanked him for his time and started to leave.

"The guy who was crucified against the barn wall?" he said. "The reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is they think 'conspiracy' means everybody's on the same program. That's not how it works. Everybody's got a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebody's wife."

I HAD WORRIED THAT Cool Breeze Broussard might go after Alex Guidry. But I had not thought about his father.

Mout' and two of his Hmong business partners bounced their stake truck loaded with cut flowers into the parking lot of the New Iberia Country Club. Mout' climbed down from the cab and asked the golf pro where he could find Alex Guidry. It was windy and bright, and Mout' wore a suit coat and a small rainbow-colored umbrella that clamped on his head like an elevated hat.

He began walking down the fairway, his haystack body bent forward, his brogans rising and falling as though he were stepping over plowed rows in a field, a cigar stub in the side of his mouth, his face expressionless.

He passed a weeping willow that was turning gold with the season, and a sycamore whose leaves looked like flame, then stopped at a polite distance from the green and waited until Alex Guidry and his three friends had putted into the cup.

"Mr. Guidry, suh?" Mout' said.

Guidry glanced at him, then turned his back and studied the next fairway.

"Mr. Guidry, I got to talk wit' you about my boy," Mout' said.

Guidry pulled his golf cart off the far slope of the green. But his friends had not moved and were looking at his back now.

"Mr. Guidry, I know you got power round here. But my boy ain't coming after you. Suh, please don't walk away," Mout' said.

"Does somebody have a cell phone?" Guidry asked his friends.

"Alex, we can go over here and have a smoke," one of them said.

"I didn't join this club to have an old nigger follow me around the golf course," Guidry replied.

"Suh, my boy blamed himself twenty years for Ida's death. I just want you to talk wit' me for five minutes. I apologize to these gentlemen here," Mout' said.

Guidry began walking toward the next tee, his golf cart rattling behind him.

For the next hour Mout' followed him, perspiration leaking out of the leather brace that held his umbrella hat in place, the sun lighting the pink-and-white discoloration that afflicted one side of his face.

Finally Guidry sliced a ball into the rough, speared his club angrily into his golf bag, walked to the clubhouse, and went into the bar.

It took Mout' twenty minutes to cover the same amount of ground and he was sweating and breathing heavily when he came inside the bar. He stood in the center of the room, amid the felt-covered card tables and click of poker chips and muted conversation, and removed his umbrella hat and fixed his blue, cataract-frosted eyes on Guidry's face.

Guidry kept signaling the manager with one finger.

"Mr. Robicheaux say you held a wet towel over Ida's nose and mout' and made her heart stop. He gonna prove it, so that mean my boy don't have to do nothing, he ain't no threat to you," Mout' said.

"Somebody get this guy out of here," Guidry said.

"I'm going, suh. You can tell these people here anyt'ing you want. But I knowed you when you was buying black girls for t'ree dol'ars over on Hopkins. So you ain't had to go after Ida. You ain't had to take my boy's wife, suh."

The room was totally quiet. Alex Guidry's face burned like a red lamp. Mout' Broussard walked back outside, his body bent forward at the middle, his expression as blank as the grated door on a woodstove.