“Freddy.”
“What did you use to open the can, Freddy?”
“Can opener,” he replied.
“Was it an unusual can opener?” I said, smiling at him now.
“A little bit, maybe,” he said.
“Where’d you get it?” I said.
“I found it,” Chereen said, before her friend could answer. “In the field behind the horse barn.”
“Do you still have it?”
“It’s at the fort. Wit’ the crucifix and the broke chain it was on,” she said.
“A crucifix and a chain? Those things and the can opener were all together?” I said.
“Yes, suh, lying in the weeds. Not far from the fence,” Freddy said.
“I’m glad you guys found and saved those things for me. But you should have told me this yesterday. A man was killed and his killer is still out there, maybe preparing to hurt someone else. When I asked y’all if you had been inside the tape, you told me you hadn’t. So I had to figure all this out on my own. By keeping silent about the things you had found, you were telling me a lie. Indirectly, you were helping a very bad man get away with a terrible crime.”
“They got the point,” the grandfather said.
When I stood up, I could hear my knees pop. “How old are you, sir?” I asked.
“Sixty-one,” he replied.
I wanted to ask him how much value he set on pride. Was it worth the innocent lives of others in danger? I wanted to ask him if he thought he could negotiate with the kind of evil that dwells in a man who could tear a fellow human being apart with a steel pick. I wanted to tell him I was not the source of his discontent and enmity and that as a child of poor and illiterate Cajuns I shared his background and had done nothing to warrant his irritability.
I had all these vituperative thoughts, but I expressed none of them. Instead, I shook his hand without his having offered it. He stared at me blankly.
“Will you accompany me and the children to their fort, sir?” I said.
He brushed some garden cuttings off his shirt with the backs of his fingers. “Yeah, I could use a break. I’ll get some Popsicles out of the icebox to take along. Appreciate the job you doing even though I don’t probably show it,” he said.
space
AFTER I DROVE WITH THE CHILDREN and their grandfather to the plywood fort, I returned to the office and logged the neck chain, crucifix, and the small P-38 army-issue can opener into an evidence locker. Then I called Helen Soileau at home.
“Bello Lujan’s killer is a guy from the Islands. He’s a friend of Lefty Raguza,” I said.
“How do you know?” she said.
“Some kids playing on Bello Lujan’s property found a chain and crucifix and G.I. can opener by Bello’s back fence. I saw this guy wearing this stuff the night I had a run-in with Lefty at that zebra club in Lafayette.”
“You’re sure?” she asked.
“There’s no question about it. I figure Bello broke the chain from the guy’s neck and it fell down inside his shirt. It didn’t fall onto the ground until he was almost to the fence.”
“That doesn’t put the guy at the murder scene. Whitey Bruxal was Bello’s business partner. It’s not improbable his hired help hung around Bello’s stable. But if we can put the neck chain and whatever with the scrapings from under Bello’s nails, we might have something. Find out where the gumball is and bring him in.”
I called Betsy Mossbacher on her cell phone. She picked up on the second ring.
“I need to find the guy from the Islands who works for Whitey Bruxal. His hair looks like a braided mop somebody dipped in a grease bucket. Know who I’m talking about?” I said.
“He’s an illegal by the name of Juan Bolachi. He’s got the smarts of a used Q-tip. What do you want him for?”
“He may have been involved in the murder of Bello Lujan.”
“Our surveillance indicates he already blew town. Good luck finding him. He mucks out stables anywhere between Hialeah and Belmont Park and a couple of quarter-horse tracks in the Southwest. You’re sure this is the guy?”
I called Helen again at her house, even though it was Saturday and I knew my obsessiveness was beginning to test her patience. “The guy from the Islands already split. I’ve got an address for him in Lafayette. Maybe we can match DNA from some items in his residence with the scrapings from—”
“Ease up, bwana. It’s starting to get away from you.”
“I’ll work on it this weekend. On my own time.”
“The evidence you’ve found is one nail in the coffin. But we’re going to need six more like it. Now cool your jets, Streak.”
In terms of the evidentiary aspects of the case, she was right and it was pointless to argue with her. But Helen believed in the viability of the legal process much more than I did. If the building that you wish to see demolished already has a crack in it, why wait on time and decay to finish the job? I tried another tack before she could hang up.
“I think I know how Crustacean Man died,” I said. “Monday morning I want to get a search warrant on the Lujan and Bruxal homes and Slim Bruxal’s fraternity house.”
I heard her sigh. “What do you have?”
“Monarch Little says Slim and Tony and their friends used baseball bats in a beef with some soldiers behind a nightclub. I think they used one on Crustacean Man as well. Koko will back us up on the warrant.”
“Why would college kids deliberately murder a derelict?”
“Why did they gangbang Yvonne Darbonne when she was stoned and drunk and already traumatized by rape? Because they’re sociopaths. Because their parents should have used better rubbers,” I replied.
“Get the warrants,” she said. Chapter 24
W E HAD THE WARRANTS by 11 a.m. Monday. We coordinated with both the Lafayette P.D. and the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Department and arranged to serve all three search warrants simultaneously to ensure that no one at any of the three locations notified the other targets we were on our way.
At exactly 2:45 p.m. Helen and two plainclothes descended on the Lujan home, Lafayette Parish detectives searched the Bruxal home, and Joe Dupree at the Lafayette P.D. accompanied me and Top, our retired NCO, to Slim Bruxal’s fraternity house.
Summer school was out of session and the white three-story Victorian home that had been the second-to-last stop in the short life of Yvonne Darbonne was almost empty. The air-conditioning units in the windows were turned off, either to save electricity or perhaps because they were broken, and the entire building seemed to radiate heat and the smell of moldy clothes and spoiled food someone had forgotten to empty from a garbage container. In fact, without the forced humor and irreverent shouting that passed for camaraderie among the usual residents, the house was a dismal and depressing environment, as though the floors and water-stained wallpaper and dark corridors contained no memories worth remembering and had served no purpose higher than a utilitarian one.
A thick-bodied, crew-cut kid with green and red tattoos on both arms was reading a magazine on the back porch. He told us he couldn’t remember seeing any baseball bats on the premises.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sonny Williamson.”
“You have a speed bag in the backyard, Sonny. You must have other sporting equipment here. Where would it be?” I said.
He lowered his magazine and studied the back hedge. “I got no idea,” he said.
“Get up,” Joe said.
“What?” the kid said. His close-cropped hair was oily and bright on the tips, his upper arms sunburned.
“You deaf as well as impolite?” Joe said.
“No,” the kid said, slowly rising to his feet.
“You’re going to give us the tour. If I think you’re concealing evidence in a homicide investigation, I’m going to turn your life into a toilet,” Joe said.
“What’s your problem, man?” the kid said.
“You are. I don’t like your tats. If you ask me, they
really suck. Where’d you get them?” Joe said.
“In Houston.”
“You should get your money back. These guys using you for queer-bait?” Joe said.
“Queer-bait? What’s going—”
“Shut your mouth. Where are the baseball bats?” Joe said.
“There’s some shit out in the garage. You want to look through it, be my fucking guest,” the kid said.
“Thanks for your help. Now, sit down and don’t move until I tell you,” Joe said.
Just then Joe’s cell phone vibrated on his hip. He glanced at the incoming number on the digital display and took the call while Top and I went into the garage. The heat was stifling, the tin roof ventilated by rust against a white sun, nests of mud daubers caked on the rafters.
“There it is,” Top said, pointing to a canvas duffel bag stuffed with baseball bats.
“Take them out to the car, will you, Top? I want to have a talk with the kid on the porch,” I said.
“You believe he’s really a college student?” he asked.
“Sure, why not?”
“I joined the Crotch because I didn’t think a university would accept a guy like me,” he said, hefting the duffel by its strap onto his shoulder. “I ended up at Khe Sanh. I think I screwed myself.”
“It could have been worse.”
“How?”
“You could be an alumnus of a fraternity like this one,” I said.
His eyes crinkled at the corners, the collection of aluminum and wood bats rattling against his back.
I walked back into the yard. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the wind was blowing in the trees. The kid reading the magazine glanced up at me. His eyes had the tint and complexity of clear blue water, devoid of thought or moral sentiment.
“Show me around the inside, will you, Sonny?” I said.
He tossed his magazine aside and walked ahead of me. But before I entered the house, Joe Dupree stopped me. He had just put away his cell phone and seemed to be puzzling through the conversation he’d just had. He gestured for me to follow him back into the yard, out of earshot of Sonny Williamson. “That was a friend of mine at the courthouse. Trish Klein just pleaded no contest on the shoplifting charge, paid a fine, and went back on the street,” he said.
“Have you gotten any reports of crimes committed against Bruxal or his interests?” I said.
“None,” he said.
“Maybe she wasn’t using the jail as an alibi after all.”
“I’m still convinced her people were the ones who creeped Bruxal’s house,” he said.
“You hear anything from the Feds?” I asked.
“A couple of calls from this Mossbacher woman. She seems on the square, but she doesn’t know any more than we do.”
“You got anybody tailing Trish Klein?”
“With our budget for overtime? We don’t have the manpower to patrol our own parking lot,” he replied. “You about to wrap it up here?”
“Just about,” I said.
I can’t tell you exactly why I wanted to go inside the fraternity house with the kid named Sonny Williamson. Maybe, like most people, I wanted to believe in the Orwellian admonition that human beings are always better than we think they are. Ask a street cop how often he has glanced in his rearview mirror at a handcuffed suspect whose clothes are stippled with his victim’s blood, hoping to catch a glimmer of humanity that will dispel his growing sense that not all of us descend from the same tree.
“You have an interesting name,” I said in the kitchen.
“Why’s that?”
“Sonny Boy Williamson was a famous bluesman from Jackson, Tennessee, same town that produced Carl Perkins,” I said.
He seemed to think about the implications of my statement. “Never heard of either one of them. What do you want to see?” he said.
“The bedrooms.”
“They’re all upstairs.”
“Good,” I said.
It was obvious he didn’t like embarking on a mission whose purpose was hidden from him. He stopped on the second landing and gestured vaguely down the hallway. “About a half-dozen guys sleep here, but they’re gone for the summer,” he said.
I looked down from the banister at the living room area below and the thread-worn carpet and scarred furniture. “Your parties usually take place down there?” I said.
“Right, when we have parties.”
“Remember a party about the time of spring break?”
“Not particularly.”
“Think hard.”
“I don’t remember,” he said, shaking his head.
“Don’t you guys sometimes call that ‘booze and cooze night’?”
“No, man, we don’t.”
I rested one hand on his shoulder, as a blind man might if he wanted someone to cross a dangerous street with him. “Show me the bedrooms, Sonny. I’ve got a lot of faith in you. I can tell you’re a guy who wants to do the right thing.”
The afternoon heat was trapped against the ceiling, the air motionless, gray with motes of dust. A drop of sweat ran in a clear line down the side of Sonny’s face. “See for yourself. It’s just empty rooms,” he said, flexing his back.
“But you know the one I’m interested in. She was stoned when she got here, then she loaded up again and probably couldn’t walk too well. So one guy probably offered to help her, you know, show her to the bathroom or give her a place to lie down. It would have been just one guy, right? She wouldn’t have gone upstairs with two or three. That would have caused all kinds of alarm bells to go off in her head, and besides, it would look bad. Who was the guy, Sonny? I don’t think it was Tony Lujan and I know she didn’t like or trust Slim Bruxal. Who’s the guy who walked Yvonne Darbonne upstairs?”
He had stepped back from me, causing my hand to drop from his shoulder. His neck was slick with sweat, his breathing audible in the silence. “I wasn’t there,” he said.
“How can you say you weren’t there if you don’t even remember the party? You mean you don’t attend fraternity parties?”
He stared at me dumbly, unable to reason through the question. I pushed open a bedroom door that was already ajar. The closet was empty, the drawers pulled loose from the dresser, the bed little more than a stained mattress askew on a set of springs.
“Is this y’all’s fuck pad?” I said.
“You’re all wrong on this.”
“Right. Were you one of them, Sonny?”
“One of who?”
“She’d already been raped earlier in the day. She was drunk and stoned and unable to protect herself. Did your buds say she was a good lay? Did you have a go at her yourself?”
“I ain’t saying anything else.”
“You don’t have to, Sonny. People stack time in different ways. I think you’ve got a life sentence tattooed right across your forehead.”
I left him in the hallway and walked down the stairs and out into the yard, into wind and the shadows of trees moving on the grass and flowers blooming in a garden across the street and automobiles passing in columns of sunlight that shone through the canopy of oaks overhead. I walked into the ebb and flow of a world separate from the systematic ruin of a young woman’s life.
As I was getting into the cruiser, Sonny Williamson came out on the gallery, his arms pumped. “What do you mean, life sentence?” he shouted. “What’s your problem, man?”
NO BASEBALL BATS were found in the search at the Bruxal or Lujan homes, and the search team had already left the Bruxal property when Top and I arrived. But it was obvious a calamity of some sort had struck the Bruxal family. An upstairs window was broken; an earthen pot lay shattered on a terrace, the root system of the plant cooking in the sun. All the doors were wide open, the air-conditioning gushing out into the heat. The waxed black Humvee had been backed into a stucco pillar by the carriage house and left there, glass and electrical connections leaking from the crushed taillight socket.
Top parked the cruiser in the drive and he and I
rang the bell on the porch and heard it chime deep in the house. But no one came to the door, which yawed open on a living room littered with huge amounts of paper that looked torn from binders. We went around to the back of the house and saw Slim Bruxal under a shed attached to the side of a barn, grooming the red Morgan I had seen running in the pasture on my previous visit.
Slim did not look well. One eye was swollen and bloodshot. A fresh abrasion flamed high on his other cheek. His T-shirt was sweaty and dirt-streaked and stretched out of shape at the neck.
“Who messed up your face?” I said.
“My father did. After he went nuts and chased my mother out of the house.”
“When?”
“Ten minutes ago,” he said. “His goddamn money got transferred out of the Islands into a bunch of domestic accounts. He blamed it on her and me. He says somebody got ahold of all his bank account numbers.”
“Really?” I said, my expression blank.
“Yeah, really.”
Slim’s face reminded me of a hurt child’s, and I had a feeling the injury his father had visited upon him would not go away for a very long time. I asked Top to go to the cruiser and radio Helen we’d be late getting back to the department.
I stepped under the shed and rested my arm across the mare’s croup. I felt her skin wrinkle, heard her tail swish and one hoof thump into the compacted dirt under her.
“I think you’re an intelligent man, Slim, and I won’t try to jerk you around. But one way or another, your kite is about to crash and burn. So is your old man’s. We won’t get you and your father on everything y’all have done, but we’ll get you on part of it and that’ll be enough.
“You killed the homeless man with a baseball bat. It wasn’t planned, but that’s what happened. You and Tony were cruising down the back road, maybe drinking a little brew, blowing a little weed, and you saw this wino walking along the edge of the ditch. Then you thought it’d really be funny to load this guy in your car and maybe take him to a party, push him inside the door and leave him there, rolling around on the rug, wrapped in grunge and puke, people tripping over him, wow, what a gas, huh?”
All movement had drained out of Slim’s body. He stood frozen in the shade, breathing through his mouth, and I knew I had described at least part of what had actually happened on the back road.
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