Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"So you're just gonna drop this Harpo Scruggs stuff in his lap?" Helen said.

"You bet. If Ricky thinks someone snitched him off, we'll know about it in a hurry."

"That story about the jazz musician true?" she said.

"I think it is. He just didn't get tagged with it."

The name of the musician is forgotten now, except among those in the 1950s who had believed his talent was the greatest since Bix Beiderbecke's. The melancholy sound of his horn hypnotized audiences at open-air concerts on West Venice beach. His dark hair and eyes and pale skin, the fatal beauty that lived in his face, that was like a white rose opening to black light, made women turn and stare at him on the street. His rendition of "My Funny Valentine" took you into a consideration about mutability and death that left you numb.

But he was a junky and jammed up with LAPD, and when he gave up the names of his suppliers, he had no idea that he was about to deal with Ricky Scarlotti.

Ricky had run a casino in Las Vegas, then a race track in Tijuana, before the Chicago Commission moved him to Los Angeles. Ricky didn't believe in simply killing people. He created living object lessons. He sent two black men to the musician's apartment in Malibu, where they pulled his teeth with pliers and mutilated his mouth. Later, the musician became a pharmaceutical derelict, went to prison in Germany, and died a suicide.

Helen and I drove through the Garden District, past the columned nineteenth-century homes shadowed by oaks whose root systems humped under sidewalks and cracked them upward like baked clay, past the iron green-painted streetcars with red-bordered windows clanging on the neutral ground, past Loyola University and Audubon Park, then to the levee where St. Charles ended and Ricky kept the restaurant, bookstore, and flower shop that supposedly brought him his income.

His second-story office was carpeted with a snow-white rug and filled with glass artworks and polished steel-and-glass furniture. A huge picture window gave onto the river and an enormous palm tree that brushed with the wind against the side of the building.

Ricky's beige pinstripe suit coat hung on the back of his chair. He wore a soft white shirt with a plum-colored tie and suspenders, and even though he was nearing sixty, his large frame still had the powerful muscle structure of a much younger man.

But it was the shape of his head and the appearance of his face that drew your attention. His ears were too large, cupped outward, the face unnaturally rotund, the eyes pouched with permanent dark bags, the eyebrows half-mooned, the black hair like a carefully scissored pelt glued to the skull.

"It's been a long time, Robicheaux. You still off the bottle?" he said.

"We're hearing some stuff that's probably all gas, Ricky. You know a mechanic, a freelancer, by the name of Harpo Scruggs?" I said.

"A guy fixes cars?" he said, and grinned.

"He's supposed to be a serious button man out of New Mexico," I said.

"Who's she? I've seen you around New Orleans someplace, right?" He was looking at Helen now.

"I was a patrolwoman here years ago. I still go to the Jazz and Heritage Festival in the spring. You like jazz?" Helen said.

"No."

"You ought to check it out. Wynton Marsalis is there. Great horn man. You don't like cornet?" she said.

"What is this, Robicheaux?"

"I told you, Ricky. Harpo Scruggs. He tried to kill Willie Broussard, then a priest. My boss is seriously pissed off."

"Tell him that makes two of us, 'cause I don't like out-of-town cops 'fronting me in my own office. I particularly don't like no bride of Frankenstein making an implication about a rumor that was put to rest a long time ago."

"Nobody has shown you any personal disrespect here, Ricky. You need to show the same courtesy to others," I said.

"That's all right. I'll wait outside," Helen said, then paused by the door. She let her eyes drift onto Ricky Scarlotti's face. "Say, come on over to New Iberia sometime. I've got a calico cat that just won't believe you."

She winked, then closed the door behind her.

"I don't provoke no more, Robicheaux. Look, I know about you and Purcel visiting Jimmy Figorelli. What kind of behavior is that? Purcel smashes the guy in the mouth for no reason. Now you're laying off some hillbilly cafone on me."

"I didn't say he was a hillbilly."

"I've heard of him. But I don't put out contracts on priests. What d'you think I am?"

"A vicious, sadistic piece of shit, Ricky."

He opened his desk drawer and removed a stick of gum and peeled it and placed it in his mouth. Then he brushed at the tip of one nostril with his knuckle, huffing air out of his breathing passage. He pushed a button on his desk and turned his back on me and stared out the picture window at the river until I had left the room.