DR10 - Sunset Limited (2 page)

"You've been selling the Giacanos their own equipment? You're
establishing new standards, Breeze."

He smiled slightly, but the peculiar downward slope of his
eyes gave his expression a melancholy cast, like a bloodhound's. He
shook his head.

"You still don't see it, Robicheaux. None of these guys are
that smart. They started making dubs of them kung fu movies from Hong
Kong. The money behind them kung fus comes from some very bad guys. You
heard of the Triads?"

"We're talking about China White?"

"That's how it gets washed, my man."

I took out my business card and wrote my home number and the
number of the bait shop on the back. I leaned across the table and
slipped it in his shirt pocket. "Watch your butt in here, Breeze,
particularly that ex-jarhead."

"Meet the jailer. It's easy to catch him after five. He like
to work late, when they ain't no visitors around."

MEGAN'S BROTHER CISCO OWNED a home up
Bayou Teche, just south
of Loreauville. It was built in the style of the West Indies, one story
and rambling, shaded by oaks, with a wide, elevated gallery, green,
ventilated window shutters, and fern baskets hanging from the eaves.
Cisco and his friends, movie people like himself, came and went with
the seasons, shooting ducks in the wetlands, fishing for tarpon and
speckled trout in the Gulf. Their attitudes were those of people who
used geographical areas and social cultures as playgrounds and nothing
more. Their glittering lawn parties, which we saw only from the road
through the myrtle bushes and azalea and banana trees that fringed his
property, were the stuff of legend in our small sugarcane town along
the Teche.

I had never understood Cisco. He was tough, like his sister,
and he had the same good looks they had both inherited from their
father, but when his reddish-brown eyes settled on yours, he seemed to
search inside your skin for something he wanted, perhaps coveted, yet
couldn't define. Then the moment would pass and his attention would
wander away like a balloon on the breeze.

He had dug irrigation ditches and worked the fruit orchards in
the San Joaquin and had ended up in Hollywood as a road-wise,
city-library-educated street kid who was dumbfounded when he discovered
his handsome face and seminal prowess could earn him access to a movie
lot, first as an extra, then as a stuntman.

It wasn't long before he realized he was not only braver than
the actors whose deeds he performed but that he was more intelligent
than most of them as well. He co-wrote scripts for five years, formed
an independent production group with two Vietnam combat veterans, and
put together a low-budget film on the lives of migrant farmworkers that
won prizes in France and Italy.

His next film opened in theaters all over the United States.

Now Cisco had an office on Sunset Boulevard, a home in Pacific
Palisades, and membership in that magic world where bougainvillea and
ocean sun were just the token symbols of the health and riches that
southern California could bestow on its own.

It was late Sunday evening when I turned off the state road
and drove up the gravel lane toward his veranda. His lawn was
blue-green with St. Augustine grass and smelled of chemical fertilizer
and the water sprinklers twirling between the oak and pine trees. I
could see him working out on a pair of parallel bars in the side yard,
his bare arms and shoulders cording with muscle and vein, his skin
painted with the sun's late red light through the cypresses on the
bayou.

As always, Cisco was courteous and hospitable, but in a way
that made you feel his behavior was learned rather than natural, a
barrier rather than an invitation.

"Megan? No, she had to fly to New Orleans. Can I help you with
something?" he said. Before I could answer, he said, "Come on inside. I
need something cold. How do you guys live here in the summer?"

All the furniture in the living room was white, the floor
covered with straw mats, blond, wood-bladed ceiling fans turning
overhead. He stood shirtless and barefooted at a wet bar and filled a
tall glass with crushed ice and collins mix and cherries. The hair on
his stomach looked like flattened strands of red wire above the
beltline of his yellow slacks.

"It was about an inmate in the parish prison, a guy named Cool
Breeze Broussard," I said.

He drank from his glass, his eyes empty. "You want me to tell
her something?" he asked.

"Maybe this guy was mistreated at the jail, but I think his
real problem is with some mobbed-up dudes in New Orleans. Anyway, she
can give me a call."

"Cool Breeze Broussard. That's quite a name."

"It might end up in one of your movies, huh?"

"You can't ever tell," he replied, and smiled.

On one wall were framed still shots from Cisco's films, and on
a side wall photographs that were all milestones in Megan's career: a
ragged ditch strewn with the bodies of civilians in Guatemala, African
children whose emaciated faces were crawling with blowflies, French
Legionnaires pinned down behind sandbags while mortar rounds geysered
dirt above their heads.

But, oddly, the color photograph that had launched her career
and had made
Life
magazine was located at the
bottom corner of the collection. It had been shot in the opening of a
storm drain that bled into the Mississippi just as an enormous black
man, in New Orleans City Prison denims strung with sewage, had burst
out of the darkness into the fresh air, his hands raised toward the
sun, as though he were trying to pay tribute to its energy and power.
But a round from a sharpshooter's rifle had torn through his throat,
exiting in a bloody mist, twisting his mouth open like that of a man
experiencing orgasm.

A second framed photograph showed five uniformed cops looking
down at the body, which seemed shrunken and without personality in
death. A smiling crew-cropped man in civilian clothes was staring
directly at the camera in the foreground, a red apple with a white hunk
bitten out of it cupped in his palm.

"What are you thinking about?" Cisco asked.

"Seems like an inconspicuous place to put these," I said.

"The guy paid some hard dues. For Megan and me, both," he said.

"Both?"

"I was her assistant on that shot, inside the pipe when those
cops decided he'd make good dog food. Look, you think Hollywood's the
only meat market out there? The cops got citations. The black guy got
to rape a sixteen-year-old white girl before he went out. I get to hang
his picture on the wall of a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar house. The
only person who didn't get a trade-off was the high school girl."

"I see. Well, I guess I'd better be going."

Through the French doors I saw a man of about fifty walk down
the veranda in khaki shorts and slippers with his shirt unbuttoned on
his concave chest. He sat down in a reclining chair with a magazine and
lit a cigar.

"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.