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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.
Then the two boys, dressed in jeans and Clorox-stained print shirts with the sleeves cut off at the armpits, realized something was wrong. They turned and stared stupidly at their companions, who had stepped backward up the levee and were now holding pistols in their hands.
The boys tried to argue, holding their palms outward, as though they were pushing back an invisible adversary. Their arms were olive with suntan, scrolled with reformatory tattoos, their hair spiked in points with butch wax. The man in uniform raised his gun and shouted an unintelligible order at them, motioning at the ground. When the boys did not respond, the second armed man, who wore a Panama hat, turned them toward the water with his hand, almost gently, inserted his shoe against the calf of one, then the other, pushing them to their knees, as though he were arranging manikins in a show window. Then he rejoined the man in uniform up the bank. One of the boys kept looking back fearfully over his shoulder. The other was weeping uncontrollably, his chin tilted upward, his arms stiff at his sides, his eyes tightly shut.
; The men with guns were silhouetted against a molten red sun that had sunk across the top of the levee. Just as a flock of ducks flapped across the sun, the gunmen clasped their weapons with both hands and started shooting. But because of the fading light, or perhaps the nature of their deed, their aim was bad.
Both victims tried to rise from their knees, their bodies convulsing simultaneously from the impact of the rounds.
The witness said, "Their guns just kept popping. It looked like somebody was blowing chunks out of a watermelon."
After it was over, smoke drifted out over the water and the shooter in the Panama hat took close-up flash pictures with a Polaroid camera.
"THE WITNESS USED A pair of binoculars. He says the guy in the green uniform had our department patch on his sleeve," the sheriff said.
"White rogue cops avenging the rape of a black girl?"
"Look, get that FBI agent out of here, will you?"
He looked at the question in my face.
"She's got a broom up her ass." He rubbed his fingers across his mouth. "Did I say that? I'm going to go back to the laundry business. A bad day used to be washing somebody's golf socks," he said.
I LOOKED THROUGH MY office window at the FBI agent named Adrien Glazier. She sat with her legs crossed, her back to me, in a powder-blue suit and white blouse, writing on a legal pad. Her handwriting was filled with severe slants and slashes, with points in the letters that reminded me of incisor teeth.
