Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

different biosphere. She blinked and swallowed and made a muted noise like she had a toothache.
    “Please drive me out on the highway and drop me wherever people break furniture and throw bottles through glass windows,” she said.
    “How about home, instead?” I asked.
    “Dave, you are a total drag.”
    “Better appreciate who your friends are, ma’am,” Helen said.
    “Do I know you?” Lila said.
    “Yeah, I had the honor of cleaning up your—”
    “Helen, let’s get Miss Lila home and head back for the office.”
    “Oh, by all means. Yes, indeedy,” Helen said.
     
    WE DROVE SOUTH ALONG Bayou Teche toward Jeanerette, where Lila lived in a plantation home whose bricks had been dug from clay pits and baked in a kiln by slaves in the year 1791. During the Depression her grandfather, a U.S. senator, used dollar-a-day labor to move the home brick by brick on flatboats up the bayou from its original site on the Chitimacha Indian Reservation. Today, it was surrounded by a fourteen-acre lawn, live oak and palm trees, a sky-blue swimming pool, tennis courts, gazebos hung with orange passion vine, two stucco guest cottages, a flagstone patio and fountain, and gardens that bloomed with Mexicali roses.
    But we were about to witness a bizarre spectacle when we turned onto the property and drove through the tunnel of oaks toward the front portico, the kind of rare event that leaves you sickened and ashamed for your fellow human beings. A movie set consisting of paintless shacks and a general store with a wide gallery set up on cinder blocks, put together from weathered cypress and rusted tin roofs and Jax beer and Hadacol signs to look like the quarters on a 1940s corporation farm, had been constructed on the lawn, a dirt road laid out and sprinkled with hoses in front of the galleries. Perhaps two dozen people milled around on the set, unorganized, mostly at loose ends, their bodies shiny with sweat. Sitting in the shade of a live oak tree by a table stacked with catered food was the director, Billy Holtzner, and next to him, cool and relaxed in yellow slacks and white silk shirt, was his friend and business partner, Cisco Flynn.
    “Have you ever seen three monkeys try to fuck a football? I’d like to eighty-six the whole bunch but my father has a yen for a certain item. It tends to come in pink panties,” Lila said from the back seat.
    “We’ll drop you at the porch, Lila. As far as I’m concerned, your car broke down and we gave you a lift home,” I said.
    “Oh, stop it. Both of you get down and have something to eat,” she said. Her face had cleared in the way a storm can blow out of a sky and leave it empty of clouds and full of carrion birds. I saw her tongue touch her bottom lip.
    “Do you need assistance getting inside?” Helen said.
    “Assistance? That’s a lovely word. No, right here will do just fine. My, hasn’t this all been pleasant?” Lila said, and got out and sent a black gardener into the house for a shaker of martinis.
    Helen started to shift into reverse, then stopped, dumbfounded, at what we realized was taking place under the live oak tree.
    Billy Holtzner had summoned all his people around him. He wore khaki shorts with flap pockets and Roman sandals with lavender socks and a crisp print shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his flaccid arms.
    Except for the grizzled line of beard that grew along his jawline and chin, his body seemed to have no hair, as though it had been shaved with a woman’s razor. His workmen and actors and grips and writers and camera people and female assistants stood with wide grins on their faces, some hiding their fear, others rising on the balls of their feet to get a better look, while he singled out one individual, then another, saying, “Have you been a good boy? We’ve been hearing certain rumors again. Come on now, don’t be shy. You know where you have to put it.”
    Then a grown man, someone who probably had a wife or girlfriend or children