Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"Harpo Delahoussey had a nephew wit' his name. He use to be a city po-liceman in Franklin. Everybody called him Li'l Harpo."

"You think this is one of the peckerwoods?"

"Why else I'm telling you all this? Look, I ain't running no more."

"I think you're living inside your head too much, Breeze. The Giacanos use mechanics out of Miami or Houston."

"Jimmy Fig tole me I was a dumb nigger ought to be pimping and selling crack. What you saying ain't no different. I feel bad I come here."

He got up and walked down the dock toward his truck. He passed two white fishermen who were just arriving, their rods and tackle boxes gripped solidly in their hands. They walked around him, then glanced over their shoulders at his back.

"That boy looks like his old lady just cut him off," one of them said to me, grinning.

"We're not open yet," I said, and went inside the bait shop and latched the screen behind me.

* * *

EIGHT

YOU READ THE JACKET ON a man like Swede Boxleiter and dismiss him as one of those genetically defective creatures for whom psychologists don't have explanations and let it go at that.

Then he does or says something that doesn't fit the pattern, and you go home from work with boards in your head.

Early Monday morning I called Cisco Flynn's home number and got his answering service. An hour later he returned my call.

"Why do you want Swede's address? Leave him alone," he said.

"He's blackmailing you, isn't he?"

"I remember now. You fought Golden Gloves. Too many shots to the head, Dave."

"Maybe Helen Soileau and I should drop by the set again and talk to him there."

BOXLEITER LIVED IN A triplex built of green cinder blocks outside St. Martinville. When I turned into his drive he was throwing a golf ball against the cement steps on the side of the building, ricocheting it off two surfaces before he retrieved it out of the air again, his hand as fast as a snake's head, click-click, click-click, click-click. He wore blue Everlast boxing trunks and a gauzy see-through black shirt and white high-top gym shoes and leather gloves without fingers and a white bill cap that covered his shaved and stitched head like an inverted cook pan. He glanced at me over his shoulder, then began throwing the ball again.

"The Man," he said. The back yard had no grass and lay in deep shade, and beyond the tree trunks the bayou shimmered in the sunlight.

"I thought we'd hear from you," I said.

"How's that?"

"Civil suit, brutality charges, that kind of stuff."

"Can't ever tell."

"Give the golf game a break a minute, will you?"

His eyes smiled at nothing, then he flipped the ball out into the yard and waited, his sunken cheeks and small mouth like those of a curious fish.

"I couldn't figure the hold you had on Cisco," I said. "But it's that photo that began Megan's career, the one of the black man getting nailed in the storm drain, isn't it? You told the cops where he was coming out. Her big break was based on a fraud that cost a guy his life."

He cleaned an ear with his little finger, his eyes as empty of thought as glass.

"Cisco is my friend. I wouldn't hurt him for any reason in the world. Somebody try to hurt him, I'll cut them into steaks."

"Is that right?"

"You want to play some handball?"