DR15 - Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  The political science professor was reading on the gallery of his two-story house, one knee crossed, a wood-bladed fan turning overhead, a shot glass and a small pitcher by his foot. A plump, middle-aged white man in mismatched gardening clothes was watering the caladiums at the base of an oak tree with a sprinkling can. When he heard the piked gate squeak open, he smiled politely in my direction, then walked casually into the backyard with his sprinkling can, his soft buttocks tight against his pants.

  “You’re Dr. Edwards?” I said to the man on the gallery.

  He glanced at my badge, which was clipped on my belt. “Would you like a glass of anisette? It’s ice-cold,” he said.

  “No, thanks.” I walked up on the gallery, the boards under my feet sinking with my weight. I sat on the edge of a wide, deep-set straw chair. “Could you explain that remark about young brownshirts?”

  The professor was dressed in linen slacks and sandals and a tropical shirt that exposed the bones in his chest. His beard was clipped close to the skin, his teeth tiny and tea-colored inside his mouth. He closed his book on his knee.

  “I think the purpose of your visit involves Slim Bruxal more than it does Tony Lujan. Slim conjures up a certain image. I think of arm-bands and people with heavy boots stomping down a street in Nuremberg. But ultimately I guess he’s a victim, too.”

  “Not in my view. You told Lydia Thibodaux that Slim and Tony both wore masks. You told her not to be afraid of someone who couldn’t live with the person inside his skin. You were talking about Slim?”

  He filled his shot glass with anisette, then sipped from it, as though testing its coldness, before draining the entire glass. He wiped his lips with the tips of his fingers, his eyes focused on the columns of sunlight in his yard, the motes of dust and desiccated leaves swimming inside them.

  “There’s a nightclub here, where friends of a kindred spirit tend to gather,” he said. “It features its own kind of entertainment. Are you with me, sir?”

  “I think so.”

  “Most people who frequent this club have no problem with who they are. But others find excuses to be there.”

  “We need to get to it, Dr. Edwards.”

  “Slim and his friends would make themselves available at the bar. Of course, the men who picked them up would be robbed. They would also have their teeth kicked in. Not only teeth but ribs, scrotums, or any other place Slim could get his foot.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “Do you think I’d make up something like this? Do you know the risk I’m taking by telling you this?”

  “With Bruxal?”

  He looked away in annoyance, and frankly I couldn’t blame him for it.

  “Was Tony Lujan gay?” I asked.

  “Maybe he hadn’t decided on what he was.”

  “You think he came on to Slim?”

  “Tony had a dependent personality. He was frightened. His girlfriend had committed suicide. I suspect he had undefined longings that…”

  “Go on.”

  “For what purpose? Tony’s dead. I’m going to ask one favor of you, Detective Robicheaux.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “If the content of this conversation is passed on to Slim Bruxal or his attorney, I want to be notified immediately.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that.”

  “It’s so good to have met you,” he replied, opening his book again, focusing his eyes disjointedly on the page.

  THE TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY on the four-lane, and I took the old highway past Spanish Lake into New Iberia. The sun had gone behind the clouds in the west, and the air was dry and hot and dust was rising from the cane fields. I’m not qualified to speak on the question or causes of global warming, but anyone who believes Louisiana’s climate is similar to the one in which I grew up has a serious thinking disorder. When I was a child, summer thunderstorms would sweep across the wetlands at almost exactly three o’clock every afternoon. Today, weeks will pass with no rain at all. The wind will turn into a blowtorch, the ground into flint, the sky into a huge cloud of cinnamon-colored dust. As I drove past Spanish Lake, I could see electricity forking inside a bank of distant thunderclouds and smell an odor on the wind like fish spawning, like first raindrops lighting on a scorching sidewalk.

  I got back to the department just in time to return the cruiser and punch out for the day. Just as I was leaving the office, my phone rang. It was Joe Dupree, my friend at the Lafayette P.D. “You wanted a handle on this bozo Lefty Raguza. I didn’t come up with a whole lot, but here it is. He does security work at a couple of casinos and the new track in Opelousas. He’s got no arrests in Louisiana, not even traffic citations, but I suspect he’s cruising on the edge of it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He smokes a lot of China white because he doesn’t like to use needles anymore. He also likes to bust up women with his fists, usually someone who’s down to seeds and stems. He hangs in a dump in North Lafayette.”

  “A rough-trade joint?”

  “No, it’s a zebra hangout. From what I hear, the broads he picks up never see it coming. Then they’re on the floor, spitting out their teeth. Dave?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you have a tête-à-tête with this guy, not a lot of people around here are gonna be wringing their hands or calling up the ACLU.”

  He gave me the address of a club north of the Four Corners district in Lafayette.

  I headed home in my truck and by the time I reached my driveway I could feel the barometer dropping and see birds descending out of the sky into the trees. Then, like a blessing from heaven, the clouds broke loose and hailstones as big as mothballs clattered down on our tin roof.

  Molly and I opened all the windows and flooded the house with the cool smell of the storm, then fixed potato salad, ham-and-onion sandwiches, and iced tea, and ate supper in the kitchen. We brought Tripod and Snuggs inside and gave each of them a bowl of ice cream, which they ate in front of the floor fan, their fur lifting in the breeze. Steam rose off the bayou, then the sky went totally black with the storm and the lights came on in City Park and you could see torrents of leaves blowing out of the trees and falling on the water.

  But in spite of the fine evening the rain had brought us, I couldn’t stop thinking about the implications of my interview with Dr. Edwards. I believed him to be a man of conscience who had been willing to put his reputation and his academic career at risk in order to see justice done. Perhaps more significantly, he had also been willing to invite the violent potential of Slim Bruxal into his life. The legal importance of my interview with Dr. Edwards was doubtful. That fact, I’m sure, was not lost on him. The fact he had remained willing to go forward with it anyway said a lot about Dr. Edwards’s character. It also said a lot about Slim Bruxal and the ferocious energies of homophobes who can’t deal with the female hiding inside them.

  But another piece of unfinished business was on my mind as well. As I watched Tripod eating from his ice cream bowl in front of the fan, I thought about the many years he had shared our house, and our lives, as an adopted member of the family. I thought about the war he had waged with Batist, the elderly black man who had run our bait shop, over custody of the candy bars and fried pies Batist kept on a display rack by the cash register. I remembered how Alafair, as a little girl, had snuck Tripod through her screen window and hid him under the covers after he had been expelled from the house for doing various kinds of mischief. I thought about how Tripod had always been a loyal and loving pet who never strayed more than fifty yards from his home because it had always been a safe place where he could trust the people who lived or visited there.

  Then in my mind’s eye I saw a blond man with tiny pits pooled in his cheeks squeezing a tube of roach paste into Tripod’s bowl.

  All these things, along with the fact that Monarch Little had lied to me, gave me no rest.

  “Pax Christi is having a meeting at Grand Coteau tonight. I think I should go. I missed the last one. Do you mi
nd?” Molly said.

  “No, just be careful on the road,” I said.

  As soon as Molly had backed her car into East Main, I took my Remington twelve-gauge from the closet and sat down on the side of the bed with it and a box of pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks. Years ago I had sawed off the barrel at the pump handle, sanded the serrations smooth with emery paper, and removed the sportsman’s plug from the magazine. I fed the shells into the tube, one after the other, until I felt the magazine spring come tight against my thumb. Then I called Clete Purcel at his motor court and told him I would pick him up in ten minutes.

  “What’s shakin’, big mon?” he said.

  “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide ride again,” I replied.

  “Ah,” he said, like a starving man dipping a spoonful of chocolate ripple into his mouth. Chapter 18

  T HE SKY WAS STILL BLACK and charged with lightning, the cypress and oak trees along the Teche thrashing in the wind, when I parked my truck in front of Monarch Little’s house. Through the front window I could see him working a crossword puzzle on his knee, his brow knitted, a small pencil clenched in his meaty hand. I kicked open the front door and entered the living room in a gust of wind and water. I threw my rain hat in his face.

  “You really piss me off, Monarch. And it’s not just because you’re a dope dealer. It’s because you’re genuinely stupid,” I said.

  His mouth hung open.

  “You know the definition of stupid?” I said. “Stupid is when you have your head stuffed so far up your fat ass you think you can help your cause by lying in a homicide investigation.”

  He looked past me at my truck. Clete was sitting in the passenger seat, drinking from a can of beer, the raindrops sliding down the window in the porch light.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “A friend of mine who gets even more pissed off than I do at stupid people. Pick up my hat.”

  “Mr. Dee, I—”

  “If I have to pick it up, I’m going to slap you silly with it.”

  “Why you hurting me like this?” He reached down and handed me my hat. I started to hit him with it, then stopped.

  “You lied to me. A lie is an act of theft. It steals people’s faith and makes them resent themselves. No, don’t open your mouth. Wrong time to open your mouth, Monarch. If you try to lie to me again, I’m going out the door and let you drown in your own shit. Am I getting through here?”

  “You kick open my—”

  I slapped his head with my hat, twice, whipping it hard across his scalp. He took both blows full force and didn’t raise his hands to protect himself. He even tried to stare me down, but his eyes were shiny now and his lower lip was trembling.

  “Answer my question,” I said.

  “I didn’t have no money. I got to bring my mother home from M.D. Anderson. She got to have nurses, special care, special diet, trips back and fort’ to Houston. I t’ought I’d jack Tony Lujan for a couple of grand. So I called him up and said I’d meet him out by the Boom Boom Room. Then I started t’inking. What if he called Slim Bruxal? What if some of them colletch boys showed up wit’ ball bats? What if Mr. Bello showed up and decided to pop me down by the bayou? So I ain’t gone. Next t’ing I know, my car’s on fire and shotgun shells are blowing up inside it.”

  I pressed out the folds in my rain hat and smoothed the brim. “You’ll take a polygraph on that?”

  “I’ll ax Miss Betsy if I should.”

  “The FBI agent?”

  “Yeah, who you t’ink? She been my friend.”

  “Do you know what the term ‘uneducable’ means?”

  “No, I ain’t that smart. But at least Miss Betsy ain’t slapped me wit’ her hat and she ain’t talked to me like I’m a dumb nigger.”

  I had stepped into it again, taking on the role of a white man from an earlier generation talking to a black street kid who had grown up in a free-fire zone. I wanted to blame my ineptitude on Monarch, but in truth I had acted imperiously toward a man who was clinging to the sides of the planet with suction cups. Even worse, I had been deliberately cruel, an act that under any circumstances is inexcusable.

  “You ever hear anything about Tony Lujan or Slim Bruxal being homosexual?” I asked.

  He wiped at his nose with his wrist, then I saw several disconnected thoughts start to come together in his eyes. “You saying, like, was they lovers?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You saying, like, maybe they had a fight, and Slim took him out with the shotgun and put it on me?”

  “Could be. Or maybe Tony came on to him and Slim couldn’t deal with it. My point is, I think you’re an innocent man.”

  He lowered his head and fiddled with his hands. When he looked up again, there were tears on his eyelashes. “I got allergies. Every time the wet’er changes, my nose starts running. I got to get me a prescription for it.”

  I sat down on a tattered footstool in front of him. A bolt of lightning struck on the far side of the bayou, and the entire rural slum in which Monarch lived—the pecan trees, the crepe myrtle, the slash pines, the junker cars slick with rain, the clapboard shacks and tar-paper roofs—was caught inside a cobalt glow that collapsed in on itself as quickly as it came.

  “I apologize for hitting you. I didn’t have the right to speak down to you, either,” I said. “Believe it or not, I respect you. You treated Bello Lujan with mercy when you could have broken his neck and gotten away with it. You’re a stand-up guy, Monarch. It’s too bad you’re on the wrong side of the fence.”

  “What’s ‘uneducable’ or whatever mean?”

  “It means Betsy Mossbacher is probably straight-up, but watch out for the DOJ. They’ll use you, then spit you out like yesterday’s chewing gum. You heard it first from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department.”

  “I ain’t up to this no more.”

  THE CLUB WHERE Lefty Raguza hung out was located north of the Four Corners area in Lafayette, on a backstreet that for years had marked the border between a poor black neighborhood of dirt streets and rental shotgun cabins and a similar neighborhood of poor whites and what are sometimes called Creoles or people of color. Before the civil rights era, the bar had been one where dark-skinned people moved back and forth across the color line as the situation demanded. In back, inside a grove of pine and cedar trees, was a cluster of dilapidated cabins where many an interracial tryst was conducted.

  Over the years the streets had become paved and the privies replaced by indoor plumbing, but the Caribbean nature of the neighborhood and the function of the bar, one that Joe Dupree had referred to as a zebra hangout, remained unchanged.

  I turned off the asphalt into a gravel parking lot that was pooled with gray water and layered with flattened beer cans. The club was oblong, built of both cinder blocks and wood, all of it painted red and purple, the corrugated roof the color of an old nickel. Behind the building, a transformer on a pole was leaking sparks into the darkness, but a gasoline generator was roaring inside a wooden shed, powering the lights inside the bar. When I turned off the ignition, killing the windshield wipers, the rain cascaded down the glass.

  “That’s his Ford Explorer,” Clete said.

  “You’re sure?” I said.

  “He followed me all the way to New Orleans in it.”

  Clete’s humped shape, his porkpie hat tilted down on his forehead, was silhouetted against a streetlight. My twelve-gauge pump rested between his thighs, the barrel leaning away from him, against the dash.

  “I’m going through the front door. Watch the back,” I said.

  “How far you want to take this?”

  “That’s up to Raguza.”

  “I know you, Dave. You get us into rooms without doors or windows, then give yourself absolution for leaving hair on the walls.”

  “This from you?”

  “If you want to smoke the guy, I got a throw-down on my ankle. But get him out of the bar before you do it.”

  “You’re exaggerating the nat
ure of the situation, Clete.”

  “Right,” he said.

  I unclipped my holster and my .45 from my belt and set them on the floor of the cab. Then I took my slapjack out of my raincoat pocket and set it on top of the holster. “Satisfied?”

  “Where’s your hideaway?” he asked.

  “Which hideaway?” I said.

  He tapped the edge of his loafer against my right ankle. “What’s that, a steel brace?”

  “Stay in the truck.”

  He pulled at his belt and made a face, but this time it wasn’t about me. “You got any Tums? I ate some shrimp spaghetti for lunch that smelled like three-day-old fish bait.”

  I got out in the rain. The power wire on the pole fell into the darkness, then struck a pool of water and snapped like a coach whip. Clete got out on the other side of the truck, the shotgun stiff and hard-looking inside his raincoat. He walked heavily toward the rear of the club, his big shoulders bent forward, the back of his neck glistening with rainwater.

  I pushed open the front door and stepped inside the smoky, air-conditioned coolness of the club. A long wood bar ran the length of one wall. The people drinking there glanced at the door and the inrush of rain, as though expecting an event, a messenger, a harbinger that would indicate a change in their lives. Then they returned to their drinks or watching their reflections in the bar mirror, hypnotized somehow by the stylized ways they smoked their own cigarettes.

  In an alcove to the right of the bar was a cone of yellow light, under which Lefty Raguza stood by a pool table, chalking the tip of his cue. He wore a pleated short-sleeved lavender shirt and cream-colored slacks and suede shoes with thick soles and heels. His sleeves were folded neatly on his upper arms so that his biceps bulged against the fabric with the tautness of muskmelons. He gave no indication of noticing my entry into the club, but I knew that he saw me, in the same way you know when a predator’s eyes brush across your skin, like the touch of a soiled hand.

  I ordered a glass of club soda and ice with a lemon twist at the bar and watched him in the mirror. He leaned over the table and busted an eight-ball rack all over the felt. A solitary ball dropped into a corner pocket, but he didn’t move toward his next shot. Instead, he set his cue butt-down on the floor and casually chalked his cue again, stroking the talc across the rounded surface, taking his time, ignoring the other shooter, who waited by the wall rack, obviously impatient for the game to go forward.