James Burke - Sunset Limited

"That's Billy Holtzner. You want to meet him?" Cisco said.

"Who?"

"When the Pope visited the studio about seven years ago, Billy asked him if he had a script. Wait here a minute."

I tried to stop him but it was too late. The rudeness of his having to ask permission for me to be introduced seemed to elude him. I saw him bend down toward the man named Holtzner and speak in a low voice, while Holtzner puffed on his cigar and looked at nothing. Then Cisco raised up and came back inside, turning up his palms awkwardly at his sides, his eyes askance with embarrassment.

"Billy's head is all tied up with a project right now. He's kind of intense when he's in preproduction." He tried to laugh.

"You're looking solid, Cisco."

"Orange juice and wheat germ and three-mile runs along the surf. It's the only life."

"Tell Megan I'm sorry I missed her."

"I apologize about Billy. He's a good guy. He's just eccentric."

"You know anything about movie dubs?"

"Yeah, they cost the industry a lot of money. That's got something to do with this guy Broussard?"

"You got me."

When I walked out the front door the man in the reclining chair had turned off the bug light and was smoking his cigar reflectively, one knee crossed over the other. I could feel his eyes on me, taking my measure. I nodded at him, but he didn't respond. The ash of his cigar glowed like a hot coal in the shadows.

THE JAILER, ALEX GUIDRY, LIVED outside of town on a ten-acre horse farm devoid of trees or shade. The sun's heat pooled in the tin roofs of his outbuildings, and grit and desiccated manure blew out of his horse lots. His oblong 1960s red-brick house, its central-air-conditioning units roaring outside a back window twenty-four hours a day, looked like a utilitarian fortress constructed for no other purpose than to repel the elements.

His family had worked for a sugar mill down toward New Orleans, and his wife's father used to sell Negro burial insurance, but I knew little else about him. He was one of those aging, well-preserved men with whom you associate a golf photo on the local sports page, membership in a self-congratulatory civic club, a charitable drive that is of no consequence.

Or was there something else, a vague and ugly story years back? I couldn't remember.

Sunday afternoon I parked my pickup truck by his stable and walked past a chain-link dog pen to the riding ring. The dog pen exploded with the barking of two German shepherds who caromed off the fencing, their teeth bared, their paws skittering the feces that lay baked on the hot concrete pad.

Alex Guidry cantered a black gelding in a circle, his booted calves fitted with English spurs. The gelding's neck and sides were iridescent with sweat. Guidry sawed the bit back in the gelding's mouth.

"What is it?" he said.

"I'm Dave Robicheaux. I called earlier."

He wore tan riding pants and a form-fitting white polo shirt. He dismounted and wiped the sweat off his face with a towel and threw it to a black man who had come out of the stable to take the horse.

"You want to know if this guy Broussard was in the detention chair? The answer is no," he said.

"He says you've put other inmates in there. For days."

"Then he's lying."

"You have a detention chair, though, don't you?"

"For inmates who are out of control, who don't respond to Isolation."

"You gag them?"

"No."

I rubbed the back of my neck and looked at the dog pen. The water bowl was turned over and flies boiled in the door of the small doghouse that gave the only relief from the sun.

"You've got a lot of room here. You can't let your dogs run?" I said. I tried to smile.

"Anything else, Mr. Robicheaux?"

"Yeah. Nothing better happen to Cool Breeze while he's in your custody."

"I'll keep that in mind, sir. Close the gate on your way out, please."

I got back in my truck and drove down the shell road toward the cattle guard. A half dozen Red Angus grazed in Guidry's pasture, while snowy egrets perched on their backs.

Then I remembered. It was ten or eleven years back, and Alex Guidry had been charged with shooting a neighbor's dog. Guidry had claimed the dog had attacked one of his calves and eaten its entrails, but the neighbor told another story, that Guidry had baited a steel trap for the animal and had killed it out of sheer meanness.

I looked into the rearview mirror and saw him watching me from the end of the shell drive, his legs slightly spread, a leather riding crop hanging from his wrist.

MONDAY MORNING I RETURNED to work at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and took my mail out of my pigeonhole and tapped on the sheriff's office.

He tilted back in his swivel chair and smiled when he saw me. His jowls were flecked with tiny blue and red veins that looked like fresh ink on a map when his temper flared. He had shaved too close and there was a piece of bloody tissue paper stuck in the cleft in his chin. Unconsciously he kept stuffing his shirt down over his paunch into his gunbelt.

"You mind if I come back to work a week early?" I asked.

"This have anything to do with Cool Breeze Broussard's complaint to the Justice Department?"

"I went out to Alex Guidry's place yesterday. How'd we end up with a guy like that as our jailer?"

"It's not a job people line up for," the sheriff said. He scratched his forehead. "You've got an FBI agent in your office right now, some gal named Adrien Glazier. You know her?"

"Nope. How'd she know I was going to be here?"

"She called your house first. Your wife told her. Anyway, I'm glad you're back. I want this bullshit at the jail cleared up. We just got a very weird case that was thrown in our face from St. Mary Parish."

He opened a manila folder and put on his glasses and peered down at the fax sheets in his fingers. This is the story he told me.

THREE MONTHS AGO, UNDER a moon haloed with a rain ring and sky filled with dust blowing out of the sugarcane fields, a seventeen-year-old black girl named Sunshine Labiche claimed two white boys forced her car off a dirt road into a ditch. They dragged her from behind the wheel, walked her by each arm into a cane field, then took turns raping and sodomizing her.

The next morning she identified both boys from a book of mug shots. They were brothers, from St. Mary Parish, but four months earlier they had been arrested for a convenience store holdup in New Iberia and had been released for lack of evidence.

This time they should have gone down.

They didn't.

Both had alibis, and the girl admitted she had been smoking rock with her boyfriend before she was raped. She dropped the charges.

Late Saturday afternoon an unmarked car came to the farmhouse of the two brothers over in St. Mary Parish. The father, who was bedridden in the front room, watched the visitors, unbeknown to them, through a crack in the blinds. The driver of the car wore a green uniform, like sheriffs deputies in Iberia Parish, and sunglasses and stayed behind the wheel, while a second man, in civilian clothes and a Panama hat, went to the gallery and explained to the two brothers they only had to clear up a couple of questions in New Iberia, then they would be driven back home.

"It ain't gonna take five minutes. We know you boys didn't have to come all the way over to Iberia Parish just to change your luck," he said.

The brothers were not cuffed; in fact, they were allowed to take a twelve-pack of beer with them to drink in the back seat.

A half hour later, just at sunset, a student from USL, who was camped out in the Atchafalaya swamp, looked through the flooded willow and gum trees that surrounded his houseboat and saw a car stop on the levee. Two older men and two boys got out. One of the older men wore a uniform. They all held cans of beer in their hands; all of them urinated off the levee into the cattails.