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 charitable drive that is of no consequence.

Or was there something else, a vague and ugly story years back? I couldn't remember.

Sunday afternoon I parked my pickup truck by his stable and walked past a chain-link dog pen to the riding ring. The dog pen exploded with the barking of two German shepherds who caromed off the fencing, their teeth bared, their paws skittering the feces that lay baked on the hot concrete pad.

Alex Guidry cantered a black gelding in a circle, his booted calves fitted with English spurs. The gelding's neck and sides were iridescent with sweat. Guidry sawed the bit back in the gelding's mouth.

"What is it?" he said.

"I'm Dave Robicheaux. I called earlier."

He wore tan riding pants and a form-fitting white polo shirt. He dismounted and wiped the sweat off his face with a towel and threw it to a black man who had come out of the stable to take the horse.

"You want to know if this guy Broussard was in the detention chair? The answer is no," he said.

"He says you've put other inmates in there. For days."

"Then he's lying."

"You have a detention chair, though, don't you?"

"For inmates who are out of control, who don't respond to Isolation."

"You gag them?"

"No."