Sunset Limited Read Free Page B

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.
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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