Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  I saw his lips burst against his teeth and the shock of the blow climb into his eyes. I stomped his mouth again, in the same place, at the same angle, doing even more serious damage. Then I caught him across the nose and saw something go out of his eyes and face that was not replaceable.

  But the succubus I had tried to exorcise by marrying a woman of peace still held title to my soul. I saw the room distort and the faces of the people around me turn into Grecian masks, and I heard a sound in my ears like the steel tracks of armored vehicles wending their way across an unforgiving land. I heard people screaming and I did not know if their voices were from my sleep or if my own deeds had transformed me into an object of horror and pity in the eyes of my fellow man.

  I ran Lefty Raguza’s head into the corner of the pool table and saw a horsetail of blood leap across the felt. I kicked his legs apart, as though I were about to frisk him, then lost my purpose and smashed his face down on the table’s rim-once, twice, perhaps even a third time. When he fell to the floor his nose was roaring blood, his eyes filled with a new knowledge about the potential of evil, namely, that others could possess elements of darkness in their breast that were the equal of his own.

  “Suffering Mother of Jesus, back off, Dave!” I heard Clete say.

  “What?” I said, my own voice wrapped inside a sound like wind blowing in a tunnel.

  “Dude’s finished. He’s bleeding from every hole in his body. You hear me? Back away. He’s not worth it. The guy may be hemorrhaging.”

  I could feel the room come back in focus, see the faces staring at me in the gloom, their mouths downturned, their eyes marked with sadness, as though everyone there had in some way been diminished by the violence they had witnessed. Clete was standing between me and Lefty Raguza now, the shotgun still inside his coat.

  “I just need a few more seconds with him,” I said. “Can’t just walk away and leave loose ends.”

  “No, we bag it and shag it,” he replied, reaching for my arm.

  I pulled loose from his grasp and knelt beside Raguza. I reached down in my raincoat pocket, then bent over him, my back obscuring the view of Clete and Raguza’s friends, my hands going down almost involuntarily to Raguza’s face and the blood that rilled back from the corners of his mouth. When I got to my feet, the ends of my fingers looked like they had been dipped in a freshly opened can of paint.

  Clete stuck one arm in mine and pulled me with him, out the door, into the night, into the clean smell of ozone and trees that were dripping with rain. A crowd had formed around Lefty Raguza, and I heard a man in a Cajun accent say, “What’s that in his t’roat? Get it out of his t’roat. The guy cain’t get no air.”

  There was a pause, then a second man, also with a Cajun accent, replied, “It’s toot’paste. No, it ain’t. It’s a crunched-up tube of bug poison. Holy shit, the guy done this is a cop?”

  Chapter 19

  CLETE DROVE BECAUSE MY HANDS would not stop shaking in the aftermath of what I had done to Lefty Raguza. The wind had knocked an oak limb down on a power line by Four Corners, darkening part of the city, killing all the traffic lights. Clete sped through the black district, then skirted the university, splashed through the bottom of an underpass, and caught the four-lane to New Iberia. He made it as far as the first drive-by liquor store south of town.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Time for some high-octane liquids. I’m over the hill for this stuff. You want a Dr Pepper?” he said, getting out of the truck.

  “Leave the booze alone, Clete.”

  “You should have seen your face back there. You scare me sometimes, Dave.”

  His words and their content seemed to have been spoken to me by someone else. I watched him walk inside the liquor store and put a six-carton of beer and a pint of Johnnie Walker on the counter. He bought a length of boudin, and while the clerk warmed it in the microwave, he went to the cooler and brought back a king-size bottle of Dr Pepper. I wanted to walk inside and ask him to repeat what he’d said, as though my challenge to him could take the sting out of his remark. Then I realized that my attention was less on Clete than on his purchase-the ice-cold bottles of Dixie, their gold-and-green labels sweating with moisture, the reddish-amber wink inside the Johnnie Walker. I rubbed my hand on my mouth and stared at the trees changing shape in the wind, a yellow ignition of light splintering through the clouds without sound.

  Clete pulled open the driver’s door and got inside, wiping the rain out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. He handed me the Dr Pepper and twisted off the cap on the Johnnie Walker. He looked sideways at me before he drank. “This is rude as hell, Dave, but my nervous system is shot,” he said.

  Then he took a deep hit and chased it with Dixie. The color bloomed in his face and his chest swelled against his shirt. “Wow, that’s more like it,” he said. “I swear that stuff goes straight into my johnson. Four inches of Scotch or gin and I need to lock my schlong in a vault.”

  “What was that crack about my face?” I asked.

  “I thought you were going to do the guy.”

  “He deserved what he got. I’d do it all over again.”

  “You want to lose your badge over a shithead like Raguza? This isn’t Iberia Parish. We got no safety net here, Streak.”

  He drank again from the Scotch bottle and out of the corner of his eye saw me watching him. “Drink your Dr Pepper,” he said.

  “Tell me that again and see what happens.”

  He turned on the radio and began changing the stations. “The Cubs got a game on.”

  I turned the radio off. “Where do you get off lecturing me, Clete?” I said.

  He put his booze down and rested his big arms across the top of the steering wheel. “Here’s what it is. The problem’s not you, it’s me. I wasn’t kidding about leaving my big-boy in a safe-deposit box. I got myself in a jam with Trish. It’s not just sexual. I really dig her. But I think she and her friends are planning a serious score.”

  He was obviously redirecting the subject, protecting me from my own bad mood and the darkness that still lived inside me. But that was Clete Purcel, a man who would always allow himself to be hurt in order to save his friends from themselves.

  “A serious score where?” I asked.

  “Maybe a takedown on a casino.”

  “They pulled off that savings and loan job in Mobile, didn’t they?”

  “If they did, they got lucky. They’re all amateurs. They get up each day and pretend they’re country singers or boxers or Hollywood screenwriters. It’s like being in a roomful of schizophrenics. Look, I may have a few bad entries in my jacket, but I’m not a criminal, for Chrissakes.”

  “Get away from them.”

  “What do I do, just throw Trish over the gunnels because she wants to nail the guy who killed her father?”

  “In a word, yes.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “I think they already creeped Bruxal’s house.”

  “How you know that?”

  “Joe Dupree at Lafayette P.D. told me. A couple of guys impersonated repairmen from the gas company and got free run of the house for a half hour.”

  “What for?”

  “Who knows? Stop drinking if you’re going to drive.”

  “They were actually inside Bruxal’s house?”

  “Ask Trish Klein.”

  “Dave, you have a talent for making people feel miserable. Every woman I meet turns my life into a nightmare. And all you can say is ‘Stop drinking if you’re going to drive’? Twenty minutes ago you were trying to kill a guy with your bare hands. Why don’t you show a little empathy for a change?”

  We were back to normal. He spun gravel under the tires and roared onto the highway, fishtailing on the asphalt, bent over the wheel like a sorrowful behemoth.

  I HAD LEFT A NOTE for Molly before I had picked up Clete and gone to Monarch Little’s house. When I got home the note was still on the kitchen table, with an additional message written in Molly’s hand at the botto
m: “Got too tired and couldn’t wait up. Pecan pie and milk in the icebox. Love, Molly.”

  I checked the message machine and the caller identification on the telephone. No one had called that evening. I stripped in the bathroom, stuffed my bloody shirt and trousers deep in the clothes hamper, and got in the shower. Molly was still asleep when I lay down beside her. Outside, the rain ticked in the trees and occasionally the flasher lights on emergency vehicles passed on the street. But none of them stopped in front of my house.

  Lefty Raguza had obviously not dimed me with the Lafayette P.D. Would he come around again and try to square things on his own? I doubted it. His real problem would be with Whitey Bruxal. Men like Whitey want respectability almost as much as they desire power and obscene amounts of money. Raguza had just managed to drag Whitey’s name into a back-of-town barroom brawl resulting from Raguza’s cruelty to an animal. I had a feeling Whitey’s bedside visit to his employee would not be a sympathetic one.

  But I had a problem of my own that would not go away, nor would it let me sleep. After four hours, I gave up any hope of escaping the gargoyle that lived within me. I sat on the side of the bed, my hands in my lap, my head filled with images that no power on earth could relieve me of. The digital clock on the nightstand read 4:13 a.m. “What’s wrong, Dave?” I heard Molly say.

  “I tried to kill a guy tonight,” I replied.

  I felt her weight shift on the mattress, her legs and bottom slide loose from the sheets. She walked around the side of the bed and sat beside me. She picked up my hand and looked hard into my face. “Tried to kill which guy?” she said.

  “The man who poisoned Tripod. I kicked his face in, then I shoved that tube of roach paste down his throat. I mean down his throat, too. I wanted him to strangle on it.”

  She looked into space, her hand still covering mine. “How bad did you hurt him?”

  “Enough so he’ll never poison one of our animals again.”

  “Dave, when you say you wanted to kill this man, you’re describing an emotion, not an intention. There’s a big difference. Had you really wanted to kill him, he’d be dead.”

  I thought about what she had just said. The implications were not necessarily flattering. “I never shot anyone who didn’t try to kill me first,” I said, now defending a history of violence that went all the way back to Vietnam.

  “This man is evil and I wish you hadn’t gone after him on your own. But stop judging yourself so harshly. You were protecting a creature who can’t protect himself. You don’t think God can understand that?”

  I’m not a theologian, but I believe absolution can be granted to us in many forms. Perhaps it can come in the ends of a woman’s fingers on your skin. Some people call it the redemptive power of love. Anyway, why argue with it when it comes your way?

  THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday and Helen was home when I called her. I told her about my behavior of the previous night, every detail of it, including the fact Clete had backed my play with a twelve-gauge pump. When I finished my account, I could hear a whirring sound in the receiver and feel a steel band tightening across my sternum.

  “You still there?” I said.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Nobody called in a nine-one-one?”

  “That’s your main concern here?”

  “Raguza dealt the play. Considering what he did to Tripod, I think he got off light.”

  “There’s no point talking to you. You hear nothing I say.”

  “I called to tell you I’ll take the heat. If it costs me my job, that’s the way it is. I don’t want you compromised.”

  “I’m having a hard time with this show of magnanimity.”

  “I did what I felt I had to. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you or the department,” I said. “I know Raguza, Helen. He’s the kind of guy you put out of action before he burns your house down.”

  It was quiet a moment, then I heard a sound like dry bread being crunched and I realized she was eating toast. I thought our conversation was over, that my moment in the confessional box had come and gone. As was often the case in my dealings with the complexity of Helen Soileau, I was wrong.

  “One day they’re going to kill you, Pops. When that happens, a big part of me is going to die with you,” she said.

  I went outside and worked in the yard, flinging shovel-loads of compost into the flower beds, my eyes burning with sweat. Then I jogged two miles in the park, but Helen’s words stayed with me like an arrow in the chest. Just as I returned home, out of breath, aching for a shower, Betsy Mossbacher pulled a steel-gray Toyota into my drive.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She didn’t reply. She got out of her car and looked me flat in the face. Her jeans were belted high on her hips, her cowboy boots powdered with dust.

  “What’s the trouble?” I said.

  “You are.”

  “You’ll have to explain that to me.”

  “You went over to Lafayette and beat the crap out of Lefty Raguza.”

  “What about it?” I said.

  My cavalier attitude seemed to light a fire in her chest. Her eyes stayed fixed on my face, as though she was deciding how much information she should convey to a fool. “You listen,” she said. “We have knowledge about the inner workings of Whitey Bruxal’s circle that you don’t. You understand the connotations of what I’m saying?”

  “You’ve got him tapped?”

  She didn’t acknowledge my question. “Bruxal thinks Trish Klein and her merry pranksters are planning to take down one of his operations. He also thinks your fat friend Clete Purcel is involved. So what do you guys do? You remodel Raguza’s head and stuff a tube of Super Glue down his throat.”

  “It was roach paste,” I said.

  She blinked, I suspected from a level of anger that she could barely contain. “You think this is funny?”

  “No, I don’t,” I replied.

  “Good. Because we now have the sense Whitey believes you and Purcel may both be working with Trish Klein. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if you are.”

  “Wrong. Look, you know anything about Whitey’s house getting creeped?”

  “No,” she said, surprised.

  “I think Trish Klein’s friends did it. They convinced Whitey’s wife they were from the gas company.”

  I could see the consternation in her face. It was obvious the Lafayette P.D. was not sharing information with her, perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because she was a Fed, or perhaps both.

  “What were they after?” she asked.

  “You got me. But whatever it is, Purcel is not part of it.”

  “That’s not the impression we have. Your friend’s anatomy seems turned around. I think his penis and main bowel are located where his brains should be,” she said.

  “You don’t have the right to talk about him like that,” I said.

  “You still don’t get it, do you? I work with a few people who aren’t as charitable as I am. They wouldn’t be totally unhappy if Whitey decided to have your friend clipped. Of if Whitey decided to put up a kite on an Iberia Parish detective who’s known for his hostility toward the Bureau.”

  “You’re a rough bunch.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she said.

  Then I saw a look in her face that every veteran police officer recognizes. It was the look of a cop out of sync with her peers, her supervisors, and the political and bureaucratic obligations that had been dropped on her. There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear.

  “I talked with Monarch Little last night,” I said. “He admitted he called Tony Lujan and tried to shake him down just before Tony was killed. They were supposed to meet out by the Boom Boom Room, but Monarch claims he decided not to go.”

  “So?” she said.

  “I believe him. I think Monarch is an innocent man.”

&nbs
p; She bit off a piece of her thumbnail and looked down the street. “Who do you think did it?”

  “Right now I’d bet money on Slim Bruxal.”

  “Could be,” she said. “Tell Purcel to keep his wick dry and stay away from casinos. One other thing-”

  “I don’t know if I can handle it.”

  “I talked to the sheriff before I came over here. She seems to be very protective toward you. I’d thank my stars I had a boss like that.”

  I decided not to comment on her ongoing inventory of my personal life. I wrote my cell number on a slip of paper and handed it to her. “Call me with anything you get on Trish Klein. I’ll do the same,” I said.

  “I hope you’re telling me the truth.”

  “I don’t want to offend you, but I think you should give some serious thought to the way you talk to other people, Agent Mossbacher.”

  “No shit?” she replied.

  After she stuck my number in her shirt pocket, she backed into my garbage can and mashed it between her bumper and an oak tree. “Oh jeez, I can’t believe I did this again,” she said, twisting the steering wheel, bouncing over the curb in a shuddering scrape of steel against concrete.

  I was convinced they grew them special in Chugwater, Wyoming.

  ON SUNDAY, Molly and I went to Mass at the university chapel in Lafayette, then ate deep-fried crawfish at Foti’s in St. Martinville and took an airboat ride on Lake Martin. It was a wonderful afternoon. The lake was wide, the water high from the storm, the shoreline bordered with flooded cypress and willow trees whose leaves riffled in the breeze. Strapped into the elevated seats on the airboat, roaring across the lily pads, ear protectors clamped down on our heads, we had an extraordinary view of the Edenic loveliness that at one time characterized all of Louisiana. Each time the airboat tilted into a turn or swerved across a slough that was little more than wet sand, Molly hugged my arm like a teenage girl on a carnival ride.

  But I couldn’t get my mind off my conversation with Betsy Mossbacher. Obviously she had learned through a phone tap that Whitey Bruxal believed he was about to be taken down by the daughter of a man he had ordered killed. It was probably true he had ice water in his veins; indeed, he had probably been respected for his intelligence and mathematical talents by Meyer Lansky, the financial wizard of the Mob. But I believed that Whitey, like his mentors in Brooklyn and Miami, was driven by avarice, and like any man addicted to the love of money, his greatest and most abiding fear was not the loss of his life or even his soul.