"Plus you tied a current homicide to one that was committed forty years ago," I said.
"The real mystery is why the Mob would hire a used-up old fart who thinks bedding hookers will stop his Johnson from dribbling in the toilet bowl three times a night. That Mexican hot pillow joint you visited in Houston? The girl said she wanted to scrub herself down with peroxide," Helen said. When Scruggs stared at her, she nodded affirmatively, her face dramatically sincere.
Scruggs leaned the handle of his ax against the stump and bit a small chew off a plug of tobacco, his shoulders and long back held erect inside his sun-faded shirt. He turned his face away and spit in the dirt, then rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist.
"You born in New Iberia, Robicheaux?" he asked.
"That's right."
"You think with what I know of past events, bodies buried in the levee at Angola, troublesome people killed in St. Mary Parish, I'm going down in a state court?"
"Times have changed, Scruggs," I said.
He hefted the ax in one hand and began splitting a chunk of wood into long white strips for kindling, his lips glazed with a brown residue from the tobacco in his jaw. Then he said, "If y'all going down to Deming to hurt my name there, it won't do you no good. I've lived a good life in the West. It ain't never been dirtied by nigra trouble and rich people that thinks they can make white men into nigras, too."
"You were one of the men who killed Jack Flynn, weren't you?" I said.
"I'm fixing to butcher a hog, then I got a lady friend coming out to visit. I'd like for y'all to be gone before she gets here. By the way, that man up on the gallery ain't no federal agent."
"We'll be around, Scruggs. I guarantee it," I said.
"Yeah, you will. Just like a tumblebug rolling shit balls."
We started toward the car. Behind me I heard his ax blade splitting a piece of pine with a loud snap, then John Nash called out from the gallery, "Mr. Scruggs, where's that fellow used to sell you cordwood, do your fence work and such, the one looks like he's got clap on his face?"
"He don't work for me no more," Scruggs said.
"I bet he don't. Being as he's in a clinic down in Raton with an infected knife wound," John Nash said.
IN THE BACK SEAT of the car Nash took a notebook from his shirt pocket and folded back several pages.
"His name's Jubal Breedlove. We think he killed a trucker about six years ago over some dope but we couldn't prove it. I put him in jail a couple of times on drunk charges. Otherwise, his sheet's not remarkable," he said.
"You found this guy on your own?" I said.
"I started calling hospitals when you first contacted us. Wait till you see his face. People tend to remember it."
"Can you get on the cell phone and make sure Breedlove isn't allowed any phone calls in the next few minutes?" I said.
"I did that early this morning."
"You're a pretty good cop, Mr. Nash."
He grinned, then his eyes focused out the window on a snowshoe rabbit that was hopping through grass by an irrigation ditch. "By the way, I told you only what was on his sheet. About twenty years ago a family camping back in the hills was killed in their tents. The man done it was after the daughter. When I ran Jubal Breedlove in on a drunk charge, I found the girl's high school picture in his billfold."
Less than an hour later we were at the clinic in Raton. Jubal Breedlove lay in a narrow bed in a semi-private room that was divided by a collapsible partition. His face was tentacled with a huge purple-and-straw-berry birthmark, so that his eyes looked squeezed inside a mask. Helen picked up his chart from the foot of the bed and read it.
"Boxleiter put some boom-boom in your bam-bam, didn't he?" she said.
"What?" he said.
"Swede slung your blood all over the apartment. He might as well have written your name on the wall," I said.
"Swede who? I was robbed and stabbed behind a bar in Clayton," he said.
"That's why you waited until the wound was infected before you got treatment," I said.
"I was drunk for three days. I didn't know what planet I was on," he replied. His hair was curly, the color of metal shavings. He tried to concentrate his vision on me and Helen, but his eyes kept shifting to John Nash.
"Harpo wouldn't let you get medical help down in Louisiana, would he? You going to take the bounce for a guy like that?" I asked.
"I want a lawyer in here," he said.
"No, you don't," Nash said, and fitted his hand on Breedlove's jaws and gingerly moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as though examining the function of Breedlove's neck. "Remember me?"
"No."
He moved his hand down on Breedlove's chest, flattening it on the panels of gauze that were taped across Breedlove's knife wound.
"Mr. Nash," I said.
"Remember the girl in the tent? I sure do." John Nash felt the dressing on Breedlove's chest with his fingertips, then worked the heel of his hand in a slow circle, his eyes fixed on Breedlove's. Breedlove's mouth opened as though his lower Up had been jerked downward on a wire, and involuntarily his hands grabbed at Nash's wrist.
"Don't be touching me, boy. That'll get you in a lot of trouble," Nash said.
"Mr. Nash, we need to talk outside a minute," I said.
"That's not necessary," he replied, and gathered a handful of Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and wiped his palm with it. "Because everything is going to be just fine here. Why, look, the man's eyes glisten with repentance already."
WE HAD ONE SUSPECT in Trinidad, Colorado, now a second one in New Mexico. I didn't want to think about the amount of paperwork and the bureaucratic legal problems that might lie ahead of us. After we dropped John Nash off at the sheriffs office, we ate lunch in a cafe by the highway. Through the window we could see a storm moving into the mountains and dust lifting out of the trees in a canyon and flattening on the hardpan.
"What are you thinking about?" Helen asked.
"We need to get Breedlove into custody and extradite him back to Louisiana," I said.
"Fat chance, huh?"
"I can't see it happening right now."
"Maybe John Nash will have another interview with him."
"That guy can cost us the case, Helen."
"He didn't seem worried. I had the feeling Breedlove knows better than to file complaints about local procedure." When I didn't reply, she said, "Wyatt Earp and his brothers used to operate around here?"
"After the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral they hunted down some other members of the Clanton gang and blew them into rags. I think this was one of the places on their route."
"I wonder what kind of salary range they have here," she said.
I paid the check and got a receipt for our expense account.
"That story Archer Terrebonne told me about Lila and her cousin firing a gun across a snowfield, about starting an avalanche?" I said.
"Yeah, you told me," Helen said.
"You feel like driving to Durango?"
WE HEADED UP THROUGH Walsenburg, then drove west into the mountains and a rainstorm that turned to snow when we approached Wolf Creek Pass. The juniper and pinyon trees and cinnamon-colored country of the southern Colorado plateau were behind us now, and on each side of the highway the slopes were thick with spruce and fir and pine that glistened with snow that began melting as soon as it touched the canopy.
At the top of Wolf Creek we pulled into a rest stop and drank coffee from a thermos and looked out on the descending crests of the mountains. The air was cold and gray and smelled like pine needles and wet boulders in a streambed and ice when you chop it out of a wood bucket in the morning.
"Dave, I don't want to be a pill…" Helen began.
"About what?"
"It seems like I remember a story years ago about that avalanche, I mean about Lila's cousin being buried in it and suffocating or freezing to death," she said.