Louisiana Bigshot

flattering anecdotes he could tell back to them, make them feel like he was their pal. He’d been damned lucky with Junior Brashear—he couldn’t count on something like that happening again.
    One thing his calls produced—bad news about the judge.
    He was in the hospital recovering from a stroke. That didn’t necessarily mean Eddie wasn’t going to go see him, but he wouldn’t try him first. The sheriff was retired now and known to play golf. “Morning or afternoon?” Eddie asked, but his informant didn’t know. If morning, he’d probably be home now, maybe having a postprandial nap and a little action with the wife. If afternoon, Eddie’d just have to wait till he finished playing.
    He went to the house first, a fifties ranch-style in a deathly quiet subdivision. One car in the driveway, one in front; a good sign. He knocked.
    No action. He knocked again.
    Some kind of fluttering at the window.
    He probably had interrupted a nap and hoped to hell it hadn’t included an afternoon delight or he was soon going to be facing one grumpy old man.
    The man who opened the door was a shrunken, wiry grandpa with a sparse shock of brownish hair spread thinly across a shiny skull. He’d come to the door in his underwear; hard to make it clearer you didn’t want to be disturbed. Eddie had a lot of back-pedaling to do.
    “Dickie Ransdell? I sure am sorry to disturb you. Should have called first but Jake Kellogg said, “Just go by the house, he’ll be glad to see you…”
    “You a friend of Jake’s?”
    “Jake and I go back thirty, thirty-five years. Listen, I really am sorry. Let me call you and—”
    “No, no. Come on in. Let me put a pair of pants on.”
    He ushered Eddie into a living room equipped, in small town America fashion, with a television and two La-Z-Boys.
    There were plenty of fake house plants, but that was the only sign Dickie lived with a woman—except that the place was immaculate. That certainly argued for a wife. Yet there were only the sounds of one person getting dressed.
    Ex-sheriff Ransdell strode out again in polo shirt, polyester pants, white belt, and boots. His three or four strands of hair had had a comb run through them, and his face had been washed.
    “You know Jake Kellogg, you must be from New Orleans. What brings you up our way?”
    “Oh, Jake. I been knowing him so long I can’t even remember not knowing him. He was telling me about the time you and him were after some ol’ boy committed a robbery in Gonzalez, ended up over in Marrero in some titty bar—”
    Ransdell finished for him. “And it turned out, he wasn’t one of the patrons, he was a waitress—master of disguise, that one was. Broke a fingernail on the way to jail.”
    They guffawed a little and then Ransdell said, “Don’t believe I caught your name, by the way.”
    “Well, where are my manners?” Eddie got up and extended his hand. “Anthony Edwards.”
    “What can I do you for, Mr. Edwards?”
    “Jake tells me you were involved in a right interesting case a few years ago. Young girl cut with a machete…”
    The sheriff’s face scrunched into a scowl. “What the hell you doing comin’ in my house like this? Claimin’ to know my friends?” He moved fast, walking toward Eddie, trying to box him in.
    Eddie raised a placating arm. “Now, take it easy, Dickie, take it easy.”
    All of a sudden, Eddie heard steps in the hall, light ones. A woman in a robe stepped into view, her gray-blond hair still disheveled from sleep. She had a rifle raised to her shoulder. “What’s going on here?”
    Eddie turned to her politely, nonthreatening as you please. “Well, ma’am, to tell you the truth I’m not sure.”
    The sheriff stepped back far enough to permit Eddie to pass by him. “You will leave our house now, and you will leave this town now.”
    “Yes sir, I sure will. Pleasure meeting you, Dickie. You too, ma’am.” He hoped the irony wasn’t lost on them.
    He had taken the precaution of parking around the corner so that, in case of just such a crisis, his car couldn’t be recognized. He returned to it and drove, at exactly the speed limit, to the county hospital, where he parked in a huge lot, his car becoming one of many just like it (or close enough).
    Truth to tell, he was shaken by the freezing welcome. It wasn’t every day he got thrown out of a former lawman’s house at gunpoint. He needed to do what he had to as quickly as possible and get out of Clayton once and for all. The