Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “What’s happened to my boy?” Bello said.

  “Can we come in?” I said.

  “No, you tell me where my boy is,” he replied.

  “There’s been a shooting out by the Boom Boom Room,” I said. “We don’t have a positive ID yet, but Tony’s wallet and driver’s license and credit cards were on the body. We’re very sorry to tell you this, but we’re pretty sure the victim is your son.” Then I waited.

  He set the bowl of ice cream on a stand by the door. “You get the fucking collard greens out of your mouth. What do you mean you found his wallet but you ain’t sure about a positive ID?”

  Bugs were swimming in the yellow glow of the porch light. The breeze had died and my clothes felt like damp burlap on my skin.

  “The victim was killed with a shotgun. Positive ID will have to be made with fingerprints,” I said.

  I could see his face crinkling up, his bottom lip trembling. The girl rose from the sofa and placed her hand on his shoulder. She was slim and attractive, not more than twenty, with a narrow face, like a model’s, and shiny chestnut hair that hung to her shoulders. “Maybe you ought to ask them to come in, Mr. Bello,” she said.

  Instead, he knotted my shirt in his fist. “It was that nigger, wasn’t it? Tell me the troot, or I’ll knock your fucking head into the driveway,” he said.

  “You’ll release me or go to jail,” I said.

  But he twisted the fabric of my shirt tighter in his hand, at the same time pushing me out into the darkness. “That nigger killed my boy. You motherfuckers wouldn’t do anything about him, and now he’s killed my boy,” he said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Helen gesture at the two uniformed deputies. They were both big men who had been roughnecks on offshore oil rigs before they became police officers. But it took all of us, including Helen, to cuff Bello and get him in the backseat of a cruiser. When we closed the door on him, he broke out the window with his head and spit on me.

  Helen took a section of paper towel from a roll on the seat of her cruiser and cleaned the spittle off my sleeve and wrist and back. She crumpled the towel and threw it in Bello ’s face. Then she stared down at him through the broken window, her hands on her hips, her fingers touching her slapjack. “We all grieve for your loss, Mr. Lujan, but everybody here is fed up with your abuse. You either act like a sensible human being or I’ll pull the cuffs off you myself and beat the living shit out of you. Look into my face and tell me I won’t do it.”

  He glared up at her, rheumy-eyed, his jaws unshaved, his face aged by ten years in the last ten minutes. “Y’all ain’t understood me. The nigger called. He set my boy up.”

  “What?” Helen said.

  “Ax Lydia up there on the porch. The nigger talked to her. He drove away to meet him.”

  “Who drove away?” I said.

  “Tony. My son drove away to meet that nigger, Monarch Little.”

  Helen and I looked at each other. I walked back under the porch light. “You’re Lydia?” I said to the girl standing there.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “I didn’t say you had. Who else is here?”

  “Mrs. Lujan. She’s upstairs.”

  I left the door slightly ajar, so it wouldn’t lock Helen out. Although I had been in the Lujan home briefly once before, I hadn’t taken adequate note of its design and decor and the contradictions they suggested. The floors were maple that glowed with a honeylike radiance, the molding and window frames done with fine-grained recovered cypress that was probably two hundred years old. The rugs were an immaculate white, the couches made of soft leather that was the color of elephant hide. A lighted crystal chandelier hung over a mahogany table in the dining room, a silver bowl filled with water and floating camellias in the center. It was hard to believe that this was the home of Bello Lujan.

  “A black guy called here earlier?” I said.

  “Yes, sir, he said he was Monarch Little.”

  “You talked to him? You, yourself?”

  “Yeah, I mean yes, sir. I was talking with him when Tony came home from UL. Tony was, like, a little drunk and maybe a little stoned, too. Then he drove off.”

  “Let’s have a seat,” I said, and took a notebook and pen from my shirt pocket. “What’s your last name, Lydia?”

  “ Thibodaux. My father runs the restaurant at the new casino. I go to UL with Tony.”

  “Do you know Monarch Little personally? You know his voice when you hear it, Lydia?”

  “I’ve seen him around.” Her eyes became uncertain. She glanced at the closed front door, then up the stairs. “He sells dope. Like, if you want to score weed or Ex, everybody says he’s the guy to see.”

  “What did Monarch say to you?”

  “First, there’s, like, all this rap music blaring in the background. I could hardly hear. I told him Tony wasn’t home and he should call back later. He goes, ‘Tell him I can prove the cops planted blood on his daddy’s broken headlight. Tell him to call me back on this phone.’ I go, ‘Which phone?,’ like, I’m supposed to know where he’s calling from. Just then Tony comes in the door, blowing fumes all over the place.”

  “Tony talked to Monarch?”

  “Yeah. No. He just listened. Then he took the phone away from his ear and looked at it, like Monarch had hung up on him or something.”

  “What did Tony say to you?”

  “He went upstairs and got a bunch of cash out of his drawer. He said he’d be back in an hour. He said he was going to get Mr. Bello out of trouble. We were supposed to see The Kingdom of Heaven. If we had just gone to supper and the show, none of this would have happened. It’s like bad things keep happening for no reason.”

  “Which bad things?”

  “All the bad things that have happened to Tony and Mr. Bello.” Her gaze was averted now, neutral in expression, as though she were distancing herself from her own statement.

  I looked at my notes and the sequence of events she had described. I believed that Lydia Thibodaux was telling me elements of the truth about the events of that evening, but obviously not all of them. “Did you ever buy dope from Monarch, Lydia? Did you ever hear his voice up close?”

  “I was with some people once who bought some from him on Ann Street, like where all those gangbangers hang out. Like maybe a year ago.”

  “You think Monarch is a dangerous dude?”

  “That’s what some people say.”

  “Then why would you and Mr. Bello not call the cops?”

  “Sir?”

  “You told Mr. Bello that Monarch had arranged to meet his son. You also knew Tony was stoned. Why would you and Mr. Bello let Tony walk into the lion’s mouth with a wallet full of cash?”

  She sucked in her cheeks and looked straight ahead, her hands folded demurely in her lap.

  “Y’all were willing to let Tony suborn perjury?” I said.

  “Do what?” she said, making a face.

  “Bribe a man to lie.”

  She was disarmed and afraid now, confused about terminology and unsure about the implications of her own rhetoric. It was the kind of moment in an interview when you ask a question the subject is not expecting. “Did you date Tony?” I said.

  “Sometimes we went out,” she replied, momentarily relieved. Then her face clouded again. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘date.’”

  “Yvonne Darbonne was about the same age as you. She had everything to live for. Can you tell me why she ended up shot to death, Lydia? Can you help us with that question? Why’d that young girl have to die?”

  But Lydia Thibodaux’s reply surprised me. “I don’t know why. Tony didn’t talk about her. He said they only went out a couple of times. I think it was more than that, though. I think Tony wasn’t honest with me. I don’t think I ever had a real chance with him. I loved Tony and-”

  The events of the evening and her memories about Tony Lujan, whatever th
ey were, seemed to take their toll all at once. I studied her face and the fatigue in it and the look of theft in her eyes and felt for the first time that night she was speaking the complete truth. I heard a board creak at the top of the stairs.

  A woman in a wheelchair had pushed herself precariously close to the edge of the landing and was trying to see beyond the angle into the living room. Her skin was as white as milk, as though the blood had been drained from her veins or her skin denied exposure to sunlight. Her legs were wasted, her arms marked with the bruises of someone who has had long-term intravenous injections. She kept peering around the edge of the banister, like a person rarely allowed a glimpse of the larger world.

  “Who’s down there, please?” she said. “I saw the emergency lights outside. Has Tony been hurt?”

  WE FOUND TONY LUJAN’S silver Lexus in the morning, parked inside a cluster of persimmon trees and water oaks a hundred yards from the crime scene. We also found impressions of multiple vehicles in the Johnson grass behind the tractor shed where Tony died. Early Tuesday morning Mack Bertrand went to work on the crime scene, the two discharged shotgun shells I had picked up by Tony’s body, and the cut-down double-barrel the firemen had found inside Monarch’s burned-out automobile.

  Mack was one of the most thorough forensic chemists I had ever known. He didn’t speculate, take shortcuts, or complain when he was obviously overloaded. In many instances, he worked holidays and canceled his own vacation time when we needed evidence to get a genuine bad guy off the streets in a hurry. But by the same token, he would not cooperate with a zealous and politically ambitious district attorney who wanted the evidence skewed in the prosecution’s favor. The latter tendency sometimes got him in trouble.

  At noon he came into my office, his white shirt crinkling, his hair wet and neatly combed, his ever present briar pipe nestled in a pouch he carried on his belt. “I’ll treat you to lunch at Victor’s,” he said.

  “You got it, Mack,” I said.

  We strolled toward Main Street together. The wind was up and white clouds were rolling overhead, marbling the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery. “The cut-down double-barrel from Monarch Little’s car is the weapon that fired the two twelve-gauge hulls y’all found at the crime scene,” he said.

  “You’re that sure?” I said. Identification of shell casings doesn’t come close to the precise science associated with identification of a bullet that has been fired through the spiral grooves inside the barrel of a pistol or a rifle.

  “Reasonably sure on one round. Absolutely sure on the second one. The right-hand firing pin on the cut-down has a tiny steel burr on it. The pin is slightly damaged or offset as well. It leaves an almost imperceptible notch when it strikes the shell. I tested the right-hand firing pin five times, and the notch appeared in exactly the same place on the casing each time. Same notch, same position. There’s no way those shells were fired by another shotgun.”

  “How about Monarch’s prints?” I asked.

  “Not his, not anybody’s.”

  We were almost past the cemetery now. Mack kept his face straight ahead as we crossed the street, his necktie flapping in the wind.

  “No one’s?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. There was some fire-retardant foam on the barrel but not on the stock. In my opinion, that gun was thoroughly wiped down. You might talk to the firemen.”

  “Firemen don’t wipe down guns taken from burning vehicles,” I said.

  “That’s my point.”

  I had said Mack didn’t speculate. He didn’t. But he was a man of conscience and he brought attention to situations that didn’t add up.

  “In other words, why would Monarch Little go to the trouble of wiping his prints off a weapon used in a homicide and then leave it in his automobile for anyone to find?” I said.

  “What do I know?” he said.

  “What else did you come up with from the crime scene?”

  “No latents on the shells you recovered. The twenty-five auto was fully loaded and not fired recently. It’s Italian junk and appears to be unregistered. The tire impressions on the Johnson grass came from a number of vehicles. I think a couple of hookers from the Boom Boom Room use that area to reduce their motel overhead. I must have found a dozen used condoms in the weeds.”

  “Is the post in yet?” I asked.

  “No, why?”

  “I was wondering what number shot the shooter used.”

  “I dug some lead out of the shed wall. Double-aught bucks,” Mack said.

  In my mind’s eye I saw Dallas Klein kneeling on a sidewalk, just before somebody fired a load of the same numbered shot into his face. Mack caught my expression. “Heavy stuff,” I said.

  “That model shotgun hasn’t been manufactured for two decades. There’s no registration on the serial number,” Mack continued. “The rust buildup where the barrels were cut off suggest somebody probably hacksawed them off years ago. There’s little powder residue in the mechanisms and the wear on the firing pins is minimal. I’d say it’s been fired only a few times.”

  “So it appears to have had only one function-to serve as an illegal firearm?”

  “If that means anything,” he replied.

  “You don’t make Monarch for this, do you?”

  “A guy who sells crystal to his own people, including high school kids? I’d make Monarch Little for anything. I’m just giving you the arithmetic.”

  But I knew Mack better than that. While we waited for a light to change, he began scraping at the bowl of his pipe with a small penknife, blowing the crust off the blade, away from his person. It was warm and cool at the same time in the sunlight, the air smelling like rain and dust. “Lonnie Marceaux called me this morning,” he said. “He’s ready to rock with Monarch. I told him what I just told you.”

  “You told him the lack of latents on the murder weapon didn’t add up with the fact it was left on the floor of Monarch’s car for a fireman to find?”

  “Not in so many words, but Lonnie got the drift. I don’t think he liked what he heard. You ever go up against a left-handed pitcher who was always pulling at his belt or the bill of his cap?”

  “Look for a Vaseline ball?”

  “With Lonnie, more like a forkball between the lamps,” he replied.

  A downpour broke just as we reached Victor’s. We went inside and joined the noontime crowd.

  HIGH-PROFILE TRIALS are high-profile because they are usually emblematic of causes and issues far greater in cultural and social importance than the individuals whose immediate lives are involved. In western Kansas, amid an ocean of green wheat, two sociopaths invade a home looking for a money cache that doesn’t exist and end up butchering a farm family whose members possessed all the virtues we admire. The story shocks and captivates the entire country because the farm family is us. A black ex-football player appears to be dead-bang guilty of slicing up two innocent people but skates because the jury hates the Los Angeles Police Department. A female culinary celebrity who profits from insider stock-trading information takes the bounce for Enron executives who ruined the lives of tens of thousands of retirees. That’s the nature of theater. The same horrendous crimes, committed by nonrepresentative individuals, draw no attention whatsoever. Every attorney knows this, every cop, every police reporter. Sometimes justice is done, sometimes not.

  But in the meantime major careers get made or destroyed. Lonnie Marceaux had called me at 8:05 that morning and had gotten as much raw information from me as possible about the murder of Tony Lujan.

  After I returned from lunch at Victor’s, Helen and I reported for a meeting with Lonnie in the prosecutor’s office. The surprise was not the fact he had called a meeting immediately following the Lujan homicide. The surprise was the fact Betsy Mossbacher had been invited and that she showed up on such short notice. As a rule, FBI agents cannot be accused of having great amounts of humility when it comes to dealing with state and local law enforcement. But she arrived in the hallway one
minute before the meeting was to commence, wearing jeans, boots, and an orange shirt tucked inside a wide leather belt. It was sprinkling outside, and there were drops of water in her hair. She brushed them onto the floor, then dried her hand on her jeans. “Phew, how many times does the weather change in one day here?” she said.

  “ South Louisiana is a giant sponge. That’s why we keep in constant motion. If you stand still, you’ll either sink or be eaten alive by giant insects,” I said.

  Betsy Mossbacher laughed, but Helen remained stone-faced and silent, obviously because of her resentment over Betsy Mossbacher’s early reference to her as a member of what she called “the tongue-and-groove club.”

  “How are you, Sheriff Soileau?” Betsy said.

  “Fine. How’s life at the Bureau?” Helen replied.

  “Oh, we chase the ragheads around. You know how it is.”

  “What?” Helen said.

  “I just wanted to see if you were listening,” Betsy said.

  Great start for the afternoon, I thought.

  But personality conflicts were not really on my mind. The fact that Lonnie Marceaux had called a meeting with Helen prematurely in the investigation of the Lujan homicide, even inviting an FBI agent to attend, meant the purpose was entirely political. More specifically, it meant the purpose was entirely about the career of Lonnie Marceaux.

  After we were seated in his office on the second floor of the courthouse, he closed the door and sat down in his swivel chair, leaning backward, stretching out his long legs, as though he were entering a moment of profound thought, his scalp glistening through his crew cut. Behind him was a fine overview of the old part of town and the enormous live oaks that arched over small frame houses.

  “Thanks for coming today. I’ve already gotten some feedback from our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, and our coroner, Koko Hebert,” he said, his gaze lingering a moment on Betsy Mossbacher’s casual dress. “I’m afraid this case is going to have some racial overtones we don’t need. That means we need to move forward with as much dispatch as possible and keep things in perspective, which translates into keeping them simple.” He glanced again at Betsy Mossbacher, probably to see if she was aware of the deference he had shown her by using people’s titles so she could follow the discussion. “Has Koko talked to you yet, Dave?”