DR10 - Sunset Limited Read Free

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.

----
TWO
    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