“I heard that crack Koko made. Don’t let him get to you, Dave. He’s full of rage over his kid getting killed in Iraq and doesn’t know who to blame for it.”
“I wasn’t thinking about Koko. I knew Bello before either one of us learned to speak English. He was a tough kid.”
“Yeah?” Mack said, waiting for me to go on.
“He was like most of my generation. The poor bastard believed everything people taught him.”
“Taught him what?”
“If he had money, he could forget he shined shoes down at the S.P. station. Bello never could understand that the kid with the shine box was probably the best person he would ever know.”
Mack put his empty pipe in his mouth and stared at the channel of broken grass in the pasture. He was trying to be polite, but it was no time for my lament on the problems of my generation and the lost innocence of a French-speaking culture that has become little more than a chimerical emanation of itself, packaged and sold to tourists.
“Dave, either we have a random killing, one done by a maniac who didn’t know the vic, or somebody who knew Bello’s daily routine and literally tried to eviscerate him. I hope to get you some prints off the pick handle, but-”
“But what?”
“I think the perp spent some time on this. I don’t think he threw down the weapon so we could find his prints all over it. I think the guy who did this is methodical and intelligent. Does that bring anyone to mind?”
“Yeah, Whitey Bruxal.”
“My thoughts shouldn’t stray too far past the lab, but when they kill like this-I mean, when they try to tear out somebody’s insides-the motivation is usually sexual or racial. Sometimes both.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not sure myself. Does Mrs. Lujan strike you as a charitable and forgiving spouse?”
“Thanks for your help, Mack. Give me a call from the lab, will you?”
“My pleasure,” he replied. “Hey, Dave, you going to talk to Yvonne Darbonne’s father? I mean, to exclude him?”
“Why?”
“No reason. He’s a good man. His daughter was the same age as one of mine. I don’t know if I could live with that kind of grief. I still have a hard time accepting the kinds of shit kids get into today. Drugs, abortion, hepatitis B, AIDS, herpes. They’re just kids, for God’s sakes. Before they’re twenty, they’re screwed up for life.”
You’re right again, Mack, I thought. But what was the solution? An authoritarian government? I feared how many people would answer in the affirmative.
I drove back onto the state road, then crossed a bridge over a coulee and parked in the turnrow by the sugarcane field where the killer probably entered the pasture on his way to Bello ’s stable. But the turnrow was churned with tractor, harvester, truck, and cane-wagon tracks, and littered with beer cans, snuff containers, and used rubbers as well, and I doubted that we would recover any helpful forensic evidence from the scene.
I watched the paramedics drive away with Bello ’s body, then I questioned the black man who had found Bello in the stall. The black man was not wearing tennis shoes and he did not believe any of Bello ’s other employees wore them, either. In fact, he said Bello insisted his employees wear sturdy work boots in order to prevent injuries and to keep his insurance premiums down. That sounded like classic Bello.
The black man also said he had never seen the pick before.
Then I rang the chimes on the front door of the Lujan home and was let inside by the maid.
I have either visited or investigated homicide scenes for over thirty-five years. Clete Purcel and I cut down a corpse that had been hanging in a warehouse for four months. We dug one dancing with maggots out of a wall. We scraped a twentieth-floor jumper off the steel stairs of a fire escape. We had to use tweezers to pick the remnants of one out of a compacted automobile. Twenty-five years ago I saw the interior of a house after rogue members of NOPD had put a hit on a whole family. Murder is an up-close and personal business, and rarely does a journalistic account do it justice. You want a capital sentence in a homicide prosecution? Make sure the jury gets the opportunity to study some color photographs before they go into deliberation.
But the worst part of any homicide investigation usually involves notification and questioning of family members. They want to know if their loved ones suffered, if they died in a brave or cowardly fashion, if the body was degraded. Often their eyes beg, but not for the truth. They want you to lie. And often that is exactly what you do.
Mrs. Lujan did not fall into the category I just described. In fact, when I was escorted by the maid onto the sunporch, I was stunned by what I saw. Mrs. Lujan was standing up with the aid of a walker, dressed in a pink skirt and white blouse, her face bright with purpose, her hair brushed and tied with a ribbon in back. She extended her hand and smiled wanly.
“How are you, Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.
“I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this. I can come back later if you like,” I said.
“Call me Valerie. You’re only carrying out the obligations of your office,” she said. “Do me a favor, though. Would you open the jalousies and let the mist in? I love the cool smell of the morning. When I was a child in New Orleans, I loved the coolness of the mist blowing in from Lake Pontchartrain. My father often took me to the amusement park by the water’s edge. Do you remember the amusement park on the lake?”
Her detachment from Bello ’s murder might have been written off as the effects of shock or perhaps even a thespian attempt to deal with tragedy in a dignified fashion. But I believed that in the mind of Valerie Lujan all the grief the world could expect of her had already been extracted by the death of her son, and she felt no shame in refusing to mourn a husband whose sexual appetites had taken him far from his wife’s bed.
“Did Bello give you any indication that Whitey Bruxal might have wanted him dead?” I said.
“Why would Mr. Bruxal want to harm Bello? Tony was friends with Slim, but Bello didn’t associate with Mr. Bruxal.”
“They were business partners.”
“They may have invested in the same enterprises, but they were hardly partners.” She eased herself down on the couch and sighed pleasantly. “My, it feels good to stand up. I’m volunteering at the university to teach a noncredit drama course. I haven’t done anything so uplifting in years.”
“I see.”
“You don’t think well of me, do you?”
I dropped my eyes. “I think you’ve carried a heavy load much of your life, ma’am.”
“I spoke by telephone this morning with my spiritual adviser, Reverend Alridge. His insight has helped me enormously. My husband was a racist, pure and simple. He sexually exploited Negro women and consequently inflamed their men. That may have contributed to Monarch Little’s murdering my son. Now it may have cost Bello his life as well.”
“You’re saying Monarch Little killed your husband?”
“If I understand correctly, Bello was killed with a maddox or a pick of some kind. You’re a realist and I don’t think given to political correctness, Mr. Robicheaux. Who else except a depraved Negro criminal would kill like that?”
I looked away from the glare in her eyes. In my mind’s eye I saw Monarch Little in his baggy pants and weight lifter’s shirt, with an oversize ball cap askew on his head. I also saw the two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes, with gas cushions in the soles, that he wore as part of his cartoon-character persona.
Wrong fashion choice, Monarch.
“Come visit me again, Mr. Robicheaux. Somehow something good will come out of all of this. I have faith for the first time in years. I hope you find it, too,” Mrs. Lujan said.
Her unevenly recessed eyes were liquid with the warmth of her own sentiment. I had the feeling Mrs. Lujan had just taken up serious residence in the kingdom of the self-deluded and would be a long time in freeing herself from it.
I DROVE TO the rural slum on the bayou, just outside the city limits, where
Monarch lived. A junker car was parked in the drive, but no one answered the door. His neighbor, an elderly black woman picking up trash from a drainage ditch, told me Monarch was in town.
“He’s working?” I said.
“His mother died. I ain’t sure what he’s doin’.”
“Died? I thought his mother was coming home from the hospital.”
“She had a heart attack two days ago. Monarch gone off wit’ his friends. They t’rowed all their beer cans in my li’l yard. Tell Monarch he ought to be ashamed of hisself, his mother not yet in the ground.”
“Ashamed why?”
She picked up a crushed beer can, threw it hard in her gunnysack, and didn’t reply.
I drove back to New Iberia and crossed the Teche on the drawbridge at Burke Street. The water was high on the green slope of the banks, the surface dimpled with rain, and black people were fishing with cane poles and cut bait from under the bridge. Then I turned down Railroad Avenue into New Iberia’s old brothel district, the one place in our town’s history where indeed the past had never become the past.
Chapter 22
JUST AS THE STREET-CORNER crack whores had supplanted their five-dollar antecedents in the cribs that had lined Railroad Avenue, Monarch Little, in his way, had kept the traditions of the red-light district alive by returning to the neighborhood as victim if not as purveyor.
It was still raining lightly when I pulled my truck under the overhang of the oak tree where Monarch used to deal dope. The weight set he had used to add inches to his arms and shoulders still sat on the hard-packed dirt apron under the tree, rusting, beaded with moisture. A kid who was nicknamed “Rag Nose” because he had burned out the inside of his head sniffing airplane glue was sitting on the backrest of a bench a few feet away, looking innocuously up and down the street, as though I were not there.
He was well over six feet tall, with a head that looked like an elongated coconut. His feet were sockless and stuffed in unlaced high-top tennis shoes.
“Seen Monarch around?” I said.
“No, suh, ain’t seen him.” He tapped his feet up and down on the bench, flexing a toothpick in his mouth, furrowing and unfurrowing his brow as though hundreds of thoughts were flying through his mind.
“Still going to your meetings?” I said.
“Yes, suh. All the time. I’m taking off for one in a few minutes.” He looked at his wrist, then realized he wasn’t wearing a watch.
“I need to find Monarch,” I said.
He scratched his head. “Yeah, Monarch be out at his house maybe, or working, or driving round wit’ his friends.”
“Your real name is Walter, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes it is,” he replied, and picked at a scab on the back of one hand.
“I don’t work Vice, Walter. I’m not here to hurt Monarch. I’d like to see him stay out of trouble. But I can’t do that if his friends lie to me.”
The soles of Walter’s tennis shoes tapped on the bench again. He looked up into the tree, then at the mist blowing across the roofs of the houses, then at the wet glaze on the little white grocery store that tried to survive in a neighborhood long ago given over to dealers and whores and kids like Walter who had permanently fried their grits. I saw Walter teeter on the edges of honesty and trust, then the moment faded and he looked down at his shoes. “Ain’t seen him,” he said.
But events were not on Walter’s side. A black woman whose street name was Sno’ball pulled a child’s wagon from around the far side of the grocery store. The wagon was loaded with twenty-pound sacks of crushed ice.
“See you, Mr. Dave,” Walter said, and was gone like a shot.
Sno’ball, so named because she was fat, coal-black, and wore white dresses, towed the wagon down the street toward a tan stucco house whose yard was strewn with garbage. The front porch of the house was wide and breezy and offered shade during the hottest hours of the day, but it was also cluttered with broken wood furniture, a rain-soaked couch, and a mattress that had been blackened by fire.
I caught up with Sno’ball. “Early for a beer party,” I said.
“Refrigerator is burnt out. Bunch of steaks in there gonna spoil,” she said.
“Going to invite me to your cookout?” I said.
She smiled and continued pulling the wagon up the sidewalk, tugging it across the slabs that were pitched and broken by oak roots that grew from a tree in the yard of the stucco house. Sno’ball’s smile and good disposition did not go with the type of work she did. She was a tar mule for Herman Stanga, a black piece of shit who should have been hosed off the bowl long ago. Why she worked for Herman was anyone’s guess.
“I need to give Monarch Little some information, ’Ball,” I said.
“I’ll tell him. I mean, if I see him.”
“Want me to help you carry the ice inside?”
“I got it.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I hefted up two bags, wet and cold under each arm, and started up the walk toward the porch.
“Mr. Dave, we got it under control here,” she said.
I ignored her and walked up the stone steps, crossed the porch, and entered the house. Even though the back and front doors and the windows were open, the smell was overwhelming. I thought of offal, burned food, unwashed hair, feces, black water backed up in a toilet. Broken crack vials were ground into the wood floor; the plaster walls were spray-painted with gang signs and representations of genitalia; a mattress with blood in the center lay on the living room floor. I saw a half-dozen people go out the back door, their faces averted so I would not recognize them.
“Where is he, ’Ball?” I said.
“In the bat’room. He wasn’t ready for it. He didn’t have no tolerance.”
The bathroom door was ajar. I eased it open and saw Monarch in the tub, shirtless, his eyes closed, pillows stuffed around him so he would not slip below the waterline and the melting ice that covered his chest. I could see the hype marks inside his right arm.
“Brown skag?” I said.
“Yes, suh.”
“Who shot him up?”
“Himself. Monarch still a king. Don’t matter what people do to him. He was born a king.”
I opened my cell phone and called for an ambulance. While I was talking I heard Sno’ball pour a sack of ice into the tub.
“Did Herman give him the dope?” I said.
She pursed her lips and made a twisting motion in front of them, as though she were locking them with a key. “Bust me if you want. But I stayed wit’ him. You want to talk to Herman, Herman ain’t here. Herman ain’t never here. Y’all don’t like this house, Mr. Dave, burn it down. But don’t pretend y’all don’t know what goes on here.”
“What time did Monarch get here?”
“Eight-t’irty.”
“You’re sure. It wasn’t earlier, it wasn’t later?”
“I just tole you.”
Ten minutes later Acadian Ambulance pulled Monarch out of the tub and loaded him onto a gurney. I walked with them to the back of the ambulance. Monarch’s eyelids suddenly clicked open, just like a doll’s. “What’s happening, Mr. Dee?” he said.
“Your soul just took an exploratory ride over the abyss,” I replied.
“Say again?”
“If you die, I’m going to kick your butt,” I said.
“You’re an unforgiving man,” he said.
I pulled one of his tennis shoes off his foot.
“What you doing?” he said.
I watched them drive away with him. Monarch’s tennis shoe felt sodden and cold and big in my hand. It was a size twelve, larger, I was sure, than the imprints stenciled on the concrete pad in Bello Lujan’s stable. “Tell me again, Sno’ball. What time did Monarch get here?” I said.
“It was eight-t’irty. Some guys dropped him off on the corner. They’d been drinking. I know the time, ’cause I looked at my watch and wondered why Monarch was drinking so early in the morning. He come walking down the street and I axed him th
at. He said his mama died and would I tie him off.”
“You shot him up?”
“No, Monarch is my friend. And I ain’t gonna say no mo’ ’bout it.”
So the combination shooting gallery and crack house would not be an alibi for Monarch Little. But for all practical purposes, the size of his huge pancakelike feet and his obvious grief over his mother’s death had eliminated him as a viable suspect in the homicide of Bellerophon Lujan.
“Am I going down on this, Mr. Dave?” Sno’ball asked.
“Don’t let me catch you near this house again.”
“Herman ain’t big on the word ‘no.’”
“Tell Herman that of this day he has a bull’s-eye tattooed on his forehead.”
She laughed to herself, looking down the street at the grocery store and a skinny kid trying to pick up Monarch’s weight set. The sun was just breaking out of the mist, shining through the tree over the kid’s head.
“You eat lunch with cops?” I asked.
She fixed her hair with one hand. “If they paying,” she said.
We drove to Bon Creole, way out on St. Peter’s Street, and had po’boy sandwiches, then I drove her back into New Iberia ’s inner city and left her on a street corner used by both pimps and dealers. It was a strange place to deliver a young woman who I believed to be a basically decent and loyal human being. But it was the world to which she belonged, and for those who lived in its maw, its abnormality was simply a matter of perception.
I ARRIVED AT the department shortly after noon. Helen had just returned from New Orleans, where she had been attending a meeting of Louisiana law enforcement administrators on civil preparedness. She caught me in the hallway and walked with me to my office. “What did you get on Bello ’s homicide?” she asked when we were inside.
She had not yet had a chance to talk with Koko Hebert or Mack Bertrand. I told her everything I knew about the initial investigation at the crime scene, then told her about Monarch Little overdosing.
“You’re excluding him?” she said.
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