Sunset Limited (2 page)

It was sprinkling now, and she wore an orange silk shirt and khaki slacks and sandals, her funny straw hat spotted with rain, her hair dark red against the gloom of the day, her face glowing with a smile that was like a thorn in the heart.

Clete stood by the gunnel and looked at her and puckered his mouth. “Wow,” he said under his breath.

SHE WAS ONE OF those rare women gifted with eyes that could linger briefly on yours and make you feel, rightly or wrongly, you were genuinely invited into the mystery of her life.

“I’ve seen her somewhere,” Clete said as he prepared to climb out on the bow.

“Last week’s
Newsweek
magazine,” I said.

“That’s it. She won a Pulitzer Prize or something. There was a picture of her hanging out of a slick,” he said. His gum snapped in his jaw.

She had been on the cover, wearing camouflage pants and a T-shirt, with dog tags around her neck, the downdraft of the British helicopter whipping her hair and flattening her clothes against her body, the strap of her camera laced around one wrist, while, below, Serbian armor burned in columns of red and black smoke.

But I remembered another Megan, too: the in-your-face orphan of years ago, who, with her brother, would run away from foster homes in Louisiana and Colorado, until they were old enough to finally disappear into that wandering army of fruit pickers and wheat harvesters whom their father, an unrepentant IWW radical, had spent a lifetime trying to organize.

I stepped off the bow onto the dock and walked toward my truck to back the trailer down the ramp. I didn’t mean to be impolite. I admired the Flynns, but you paid a price for their friendship and proximity to the vessel of social anger their lives had become.

“Not glad to see me, Streak?” she said.

“Always glad. How you doin’, Megan?”

She looked over my shoulder at Clete Purcel, who had pulled the port side of the boat flush into the rubber tires on my dock and was unloading the cooler and rods out of the stern. Clete’s thick arms and fire-hydrant neck were peeling and red with fresh sunburn. When he stooped over with the cooler, his tropical shirt split across his back. He grinned at us and shrugged his shoulders.

“That one had to come out of the Irish Channel,” she said.

“You’re not a fisher, Meg. You out here on business?”

“You know who Cool Breeze Broussard is?” she asked.

“A house creep and general thief.”

“He says your parish lockup is a toilet. He says your jailer is a sadist.”

“We lost the old jailer. I’ve been on leave. I don’t know much about the new guy.”

“Cool Breeze says inmates are gagged and handcuffed to a detention chair. They have to sit in their own excrement. The U.S. Department of Justice believes him.”

“Jails are bad places. Talk to the sheriff, Megan. I’m off the clock.”

“Typical New Iberia. Bullshit over humanity.”

“See you around,” I said, and walked to my truck. Rain was pinging in large, cold drops on the tin roof of the bait shop.

“Cool Breeze said you were stand-up. He’s in lockdown now because he dimed the jailer. I’ll tell him you were off the clock,” she said.

“This town didn’t kill your father.”

“No, they just put me and my brother in an orphanage where we polished floors with our knees. Tell your Irish friend he’s beautiful. Come out to the house and visit us, Streak,” she said, and walked across the dirt road to where she had parked her car under the trees in my drive.

Up on the dock, Clete poured the crushed ice and canned drinks and speckled trout out of the cooler. The trout looked stiff and cold on the board planks.

“You ever hear anything about prisoners being gagged and cuffed to chairs in the Iberia Parish Prison?” I asked.

“That’s what that was about? Maybe she ought to check out what those guys did to get in there.”

“She said you were beautiful.”

“She did?” He looked down the road where her car was disappearing under the canopy of oaks that grew along the bayou. Then he cracked a Budweiser and flipped me a can of diet Dr Pepper. The scar over his left eyebrow flattened against his skull when he grinned.

THE TURNKEY HAD BEEN a brig chaser in the Marine Corps and still wore his hair buzzed into the scalp and shaved in a razor-neat line on the back of his neck. His body was lean and braided with muscle, his walk as measured and erect as if he were on a parade ground. He unlocked the cell at the far end of the corridor, hooked up Willie Cool Breeze Broussard in waist and leg manacles, and escorted him with one hand to the door of the interview room, where I waited.

“Think he’s going to run on you, Top?” I said.

“He runs at the mouth, that’s what he does.”

The turnkey closed the door behind us. Cool Breeze looked like two hundred pounds of soft black chocolate poured inside jailhouse denims. His head was bald, lacquered with wax, shiny as horn, his eyes drooping at the corners like a prizefighter’s. It was hard to believe he was a second-story man and four-time loser.

“If they’re jamming you up, Cool Breeze, it’s not on your sheet,” I said.

“What you call Isolation?”

“The screw says you asked for lockdown.”

His wrists were immobilized by the cuffs attached to the chain around his waist. He shifted in his chair and looked sideways at the door.

“I was on Camp J up at Angola. It’s worse in here. A hack made a kid blow him at gunpoint,” he said.

“I don’t want to offend you, Breeze, but this isn’t your style.”

“What ain’t?”

“You’re not one to rat out anybody, not even a bad screw.”

His eyes shifted back and forth inside his face. He rubbed his nose on his shoulder.

“I’m down on this VCR beef. A truckload of them. What makes it double bad is I boosted the load from a Giacano warehouse in Lake Charles. I need to get some distance between me and my problems, maybe like in the Islands, know what I saying?”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“No, you don’t get it. The Giacanos are tied into some guys in New York City making dubs of movies, maybe a hundred t’ousand of them a week. So they buy lots of VCRs, cut-rate prices, Cool Breeze Midnight Supply Service, you wit’ me?”

“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.