DR15 - Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “It’s the language in her diary. There’s no self-pity or anger in it,” I replied.

  Molly waited, then said, “Go ahead.”

  “People like Yvonne Darbonne don’t kill themselves. It’s that simple. Someone else did it.”

  Molly propped her elbows on the table, knitted her fingers together, and rested her chin on her fingers. She gazed wanly into my face, trying to hide her fatigue, her eyes filled with the foreboding sense that the dead were about to lay claim upon the quick.

  SATURDAY MORNING I drove out to the home of Bello Lujan. His first name was actually Bellerophon, a name that on the surface seems absurd and grandiose in a working-class culture. But South Louisiana is filled with the names of ancient gods and heroes given to our French ancestors during the Reign of Terror when Robespierre and his friends attempted to purge Christian influence from French culture. The irony is that today Cajun pipefitters and waitresses sometimes bear names that Homer would recognize but not most contemporary Americans.

  I can’t say I ever liked Bello Lujan. He was aggressive, visceral in his language, naked in his attitudes about wealth and status. When you shook hands with him, he gave you a two-second squeeze that left no doubt about his physical potential. At a professional wrestling match in New Orleans, he got into an exchange of insults with one of the wrestlers and climbed into the ring with a wood stool and beat the wrestler bloody with it. Bello claimed that being a good loser required only one essential element—practice.

  But even if I didn’t like him, I tried to understand him or at least the background that had produced him. His father had been a pinball machine repairman who worked for a crime family that operated out of the old Underpass area in Lafayette. When his father was shot to death, Bello’s family moved back and forth between the Iberville Project in New Orleans, the old brothel district in New Iberia, and a dirt-road rural slum in north Lafayette. He shined shoes in saloons and carhopped at a root beer drive-in owned by a mean-spirited man who never allowed him to eat his lunch or supper inside the building. Sometimes I would see Bello on a wintry day at the Southern Pacific station, his wood shine box hung by a leather strap on his shoulders, his face pinched in the cold as he waited to catch a customer stepping down from a Pullman car. Even though my own young life had been marked by privation, I knew Bello had paid more dues than I had. I also knew that he kept a longer memory than I and was not to be crossed.

  Supposedly he made his early money in cockfighting and later in the oil and gas business. Others said he pimped for Lafayette’s old crime family when they used to operate a pickup bar and brothel above the Underpass. If asked what he did for a living, he would grin good-naturedly and say, “Anything that makes money, podna.”

  But if there was a single characteristic always associated with Bello Lujan’s reputation, it was the fact he could be an almost feral adversary when it came to protection of his interests and his family.

  He lived with his wife and son in a big white house on rolling woodland along Bayou Teche, just outside Loreauville. His wife had been crippled in an automobile accident many years ago and seldom appeared in public. The details of the accident had softened around the edges with time, but a child had died in the other vehicle and some said Mrs. Lujan would have been charged had she not been so severely injured herself. Regardless, her lot had not been an easy one. Sometimes people saw her in her wheelchair, peering from behind the curtains in an upstairs window, her face as small and pointed as a bird’s.

  Across the road from the trellised entrance to Bello’s driveway were thirty acres of the best pasture in the parish, where he raised thoroughbreds and gaited horses, all of it surrounded by white-painted plank fence. Bello was not simply a gentleman rancher, either. His horse trainers came from Kentucky; his thoroughbreds raced in both the Louisiana and Florida derbies. Winter and spring, Bello got to pose with the roses.

  But there were rumors about the origins of his success at the track—stories about stolen seed, a manipulated high-end claim race in California, and doping the odds-on favorite with downers at a track in New Mexico.

  I had called in advance. He greeted me in the driveway, dressed in white shorts and a golf shirt, his skin dark with tan, his arms swatched with whorls of shiny black hair. He crouched slightly, his fists raised like a boxer’s. “Dave, you son of a gun, comment la vie, neg? I heard you sold off your boat dock. Too bad. I liked that place,” he said. His accent was a singular one, a strange blend of hard-core coonass and the Italian-Irish inflections of blue-collar New Orleans.

  “How’s it hangin’, Bello?” I said,

  “How’s yours hangin’?” he replied, still grinning, still full of play.

  Then I told him why I was there.

  “You want to talk to my son about that girl who killed herself?” he said. “Sorry to hear about something like that, but what’s it got to do with Tony?” He turned his head toward the tennis court, where his son was whocking back balls fired at him by an automatic machine.

  “Was he seeing Yvonne Darbonne?” I asked.

  Bello rubbed at his nose with the heel of his hand. His brow was knitted, his wide-set, dark eyes busy with thought. “A young guy that good-looking has got a lot of girls around. How should I know? They come and go. I don’t remember anybody by that name around here,” he said.

  I started across the lawn toward the tennis court. I could tell his son, Tony, saw me out of the corner of his eye, but he kept on stroking the ball, his cheeks like apples, his curly brown hair tied off his forehead with a bandanna, his hips thin, almost girlish. I heard Bello on my heels. “Hey, Dave, take it out of overdrive, here. That’s my son, there. You’re saying he’s mixed up in somebody’s death? I don’t like that.”

  I turned around slowly, trying to fix a smile on my face before I spoke. “This is a homicide investigation, Bello. If you want this interview conducted down at the department, that’s fine. In the meantime, I’m requesting that you stay out of it,” I said.

  He opened up his palms, as though bewildered. “It’s Saturday morning. It’s spring. The birds are singing. You hit my front lawn like a thunderstorm. I’m the problem?” he said.

  I opened the door to the court and walked out on the dampened, rolled surface of the clay. Tony Lujan was deferential and polite in every way, repeatedly addressing me as “sir.” But in South Louisiana, protocol is often a given and not substantive, particularly among young people of Tony’s financial background.

  “You knew Yvonne?” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You knew her well?” I said, my eyes locked on his.

  “She worked at Victor’s Cafeteria. I’d see her there and maybe around town some.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “The day before she died. We had some ice cream in the park.”

  “You have any idea why she’d want to kill herself?”

  “No, sir.”

  “None?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I think you knew her better than you’re letting on,” I said.

  His eyes were starting to film.

  “Hey, you answer his questions!” Bello said.

  “We went out. We slept together,” Tony said.

  “Why’d you try to lie to me?” I asked.

  The nylon windscreens on the court puffed in the breeze and creaked against their tethers. The color in the boy’s cheeks had the broken shape of flame.

  “You knock that off, Dave. He’s cooperating, here,” Bello said.

  “You need to leave us alone, Bello,” I said.

  “Fuck you. This is my home. You don’t come in here pushing people around,” Bello replied.

  There was nothing for it. Bello was obviously a suffocating, controlling presence in his son’s life, and I knew that without a warrant I would get no more information out of either one of them. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, give me a call, will you?” I said to Tony, handing him my business card.
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  “Yes, sir, I will,” he said.

  I walked back to my truck, with Bello at my side, his eyes stripping the skin off my face. “You trying to make trouble here, Dave? You got an old beef with me about something?” he said.

  “No,” I said, opening the door to my truck.

  “Then what?”

  I didn’t answer and started to get behind the wheel. Bello’s hand sank into my arm. “You don’t demean my family and blow me off,” he said.

  “A young woman is dead. Your son tried to conceal information about his relationship with her. Now, you take your hand off me.”

  “He’s just a kid.”

  “Not anymore,” I replied.

  He stared at me, his face twitching, his lips seeming to form words that had no sound.

  CLETE PURCEL, my old partner from NOPD Homicide, was not in a good mood that night. In fact, he had not been in a good mood all week, ever since a pipehead check writer and bail skip by the name of Frogman Andrepont had thrown a television set through his brother-in-law’s picture-glass window onto the front lawn, then escaped across the roof while Clete ran from the backyard to the front of the house.

  Clete had opened up his own P.I. and bail bond office on Main in New Iberia, but he still chased down bail skips for his former employers Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater in New Orleans. So after Frogman missed his court appearance, Clete flushed him out of his brother-in-law’s house, only to lose him in Henderson Swamp, where Clete blew out a tire highballing down the top of the levee and was almost eaten alive by mosquitoes.

  But as a man on the run, Frogman had two disadvantages: His face looked exactly like a frog’s, including the eye bags, distended throat, and even the reptilian skin; secondly, he was a degenerate gambler as well as a crack addict. In Frogman’s case, this meant Louisiana’s newest twenty-four-hour casino and all-purpose neon-lit hog trough was as close to paradise as the earth gets.

  It was located in a parish to the north of us and was part of a larger complex that featured a clubhouse and horse track. But the horse races and the upscale dining areas were ultimately cosmetic. The real draw was the casino. The other bars in the parish were forced by law to close at 2 a.m. Not so with the casino. Regardless of the uproar raised by local saloon owners and law enforcement agencies and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the booze at the casino flowed from moonrise to dawn. How could anyone doubt this was a great country? They only had to ask Frogman.

  Seated at the bar, a martini in his hand, dressed western in case an unsophisticated country girl or two was floating around, Frogman had a sense of security and well-being that tempted him to forgive the state of Louisiana for all the time it had dropped on his head over the years. Actually he could afford to be generous. He’d just hit a three-hundred-dollar jackpot on the slot and had treated himself to a steak dinner and a split of champagne. He’d outsmarted that fat cracker Purcel, too, even if he’d had to remodel his brother-in-law’s living room a little bit. Frogman tried to imagine his brother-in-law’s face when he pulled into his driveway and saw his broken television set and picture-glass window lying in the flower bed. Maybe he should drop a postcard and explain. Why not? It was the right thing to do. He’d take care of it first thing tomorrow.

  But Frogman’s brother)in-law was not in a forgiving mood and had already dimed Frogman and his probable whereabouts to Clete Purcel. Saturday night Clete cruised the interior of the casino, not knowing that Frogman was taking a break from the machines and getting his ashes hauled by a Mexican prostitute in an Air Stream trailer out by the stables. So Clete set up shop at a blackjack table and quickly lost four hundred and seventy-three dollars.

  “You lost how much?” I asked.

  “The dealer had a pair of ta-tas that would make your eyes cross. She kept hanging them in my face every time I had to decide whether I wanted a hit. How can you think in a situation like that?” he said.

  It was Sunday morning, and he was telling me all this in my backyard, in his own convoluted, exhaustive fashion, which usually indicated he had precipitated a disaster of some kind and was using every circuitous means possible to avoid taking responsibility for it.

  Years ago Clete had fried his legitimate career in law enforcement with weed and pills and booze. He had also managed to kill a federally protected witness and had even done security in Vegas and Reno for a sadistic gangster by the name of Sally Dio, whose plane crashed into a mountain in western Montana. After Sally and several of his gumballs were combed out of the trees with garden rakes, investigators discovered Sally’s engines were clogged with sand that someone had poured into the fuel tanks. Clete Purcel blew Big Fork, Montana, like the town was burning down.

  He was hated and feared by both the Mob and many of his old colleagues at NOPD. His detractors tried to dismiss him as a drunk and an addict and a whoremonger, but in truth Clete Purcel was one of the most intelligent and decent men I ever knew, complex in ways that few could guess at.

  He had been raised in the old Irish Channel and talked like it—an accent more akin to Southie or Flatbush than the Deep South. His hands were as big as hams, the knuckles half-mooned with scars. With regularity his massive shoulders and broad back ripped the seams of his tropical shirts. He had a small Irish mouth, the corners downturned, and sandy hair and green eyes that crinkled when he smiled. A black witness to one of his escapades described him as “an albino ape crawling across my rooftop in skivvies,” and Clete wasn’t offended.

  He talked openly about his visceral appetites, his addictions, his romances with junkies and strippers, his alcoholic blackouts that turned into scorched-earth episodes that caused people to climb out of barroom windows. But inside his violence and his reckless disregard for his own welfare was another man, one who carried images and thought processes in his head that he seldom shared: a father who used to make a little boy kneel for hours at a time on grains of rice; a wife who dumped him because she couldn’t sleep with a man who believed the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape; the grinding sound of steel tracks through a Third World village, an arch of liquid flame, the smell of straw and animals burning, and the screams of tiny men in black pajamas trapped inside a spider hole.

  These were the memories his booze and pills couldn’t even make a dent in.

  “What happened to Frogman?” I said.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” he said. “I got cleaned out at blackjack, so I was watching this great-looking broad shooting craps. You should have seen her ass when she bent over. Remember that song by Jimmy Clanton, ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’? I was getting a boner just watching from the bar.”

  The kitchen window was open and I could see the curtains blowing inside the screen and hear Molly loading the dishwasher. “Clete, would you just—”

  “Then I noticed this gal was probably part of a crew, maybe even running the crew. I think two of them had been counting cards at my blackjack table earlier. The gal crapped out twice, then the dice came back to her again. Soon as she picked them up from the stick man, a guy collides into the drink waitress and splashes cups of beer all over the place. That’s when she switched the dice. It was smooth, too. The boxman didn’t have a clue. She made seven passes in a row. Then she switched them back out, to one of the guys who’d been counting cards at my table.”

  “What’s the point?” I said, my impatience growing.

  We were sitting on the back steps. He squinted with one eye at the bayou, as though organizing his thoughts. “A half hour later she was back at the same table and switched them out again. Except this time she got greedy. She was doubling up her bets, until she had about eight or nine grand on the felt. Everyone around the table was starting to go apeshit and stacking chips on the pass line. The boxman called up a couple of security guys and I figured she was dead meat. That’s when Frogman showed up.”

  “He was in her crew?”

  “Dig this. The boxman and security guys were just about to bust the broad, then Frogman cam
e stumbling into the crowd and went down on the floor like he’d stepped on a high-voltage wire. At first I thought it was part of the switch-off. I had to shove my way through the crowd to look at him close-up. He was curled in a ball, shivering all over, spit coming out of both sides of his mouth, then somebody started yelling, ‘The guy’s having an epileptic fit!’

  “Except I knew Frogman didn’t have epilepsy. His hands were shriveled up like claws against his chest and his eyes were popping out of his head. I told the boxman to get a resuscitation cup out of their first-aid kit, but he just stared at me like I was talking Sanskrit. So I shouted at him, ‘Nobody does mouth-to-mouth in a time of AIDS. Get the cup out of your fucking first-aid kit.’

  “You know what kind of medical aid they have in a dump like that? French ticklers and aphrodisiacs you buy from the rubber machine in the can. I couldn’t believe what I had to do next. I don’t think Frogman Andrepont has gone near a toothbrush since he got out of Angola five years ago. I grabbed his nose and opened up his mouth and was just about to do the unthinkable, when the broad with the bod that looks like Venus in blue jeans pushed me aside and said, ‘Move it over, bub.’

  “She closed off Frogman’s nostrils and blew air down his throat and pounded on his chest until he finally made this terrible sucking sound and started breathing again. The security guys still weren’t sure if they were watching a scam or not. They were checking the dice on the table, but they couldn’t find the ones she’d switched into the game. Then the paramedics got there and Venus in blue jeans beat it out the back door.

  “I showed some deputies my papers on Frogman and cuffed him to the gurney and was going to ride to the hospital in the ambulance with him, when I saw Venus hauling that beautiful ass of hers across the parking lot. I caught up with her and said, ‘You just ripped off the casino and saved a guy’s life at the same time. Grifters don’t do that.’