Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

  “Every white-collar guy we slam the cell door on uses those same words,” she said.

  “I’m going to have a talk with the district attorney, Mr. Marceaux.”

  “Good, you two deserve each other. Now, you keep your goddamn distance from my office,” she said.

  Helen pushed down on the disconnect and shut off the speakerphone. She realized I was smiling and gave me a look. I dropped my eyes and examined the tops of my fingers. “I’m sick of this bunch wiping their feet on us. Was it you or Purcel who said most of the world’s ills could be corrected with a three-day open season on people?”

  “It was Ernest Hemingway.”

  “I’ve got to read more of him.” She sat down behind her desk and brushed at a spot above her eyebrow with one knuckle, the anger subsiding in her face. “What do you think they’re up to?”

  “Disassociating themselves from Raguza and at the same time pointing him in my direction.”

  She seemed to think about what I had said, her eyes wandering around the room. But that wasn’t it. “We’re anybody’s punch,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Every corrupt enterprise in the country ends up here. They fuck us with a Roto-Rooter and make us like them for it.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Anybody with a checkbook.” Then she blew out her breath. “What’s the status on Cesaire Darbonne?”

  “He’s getting printed as we speak.”

  YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE IN SOMETHING. Everyone does. Even atheists believe in their unbelief. If they didn’t, they’d go mad. The misanthrope believes in his hatred of his fellow man. The gambler believes he’s omniscient and that his knowledge of the future is proof he is loved by God. The middle-income person who spends enormous amounts of time window-shopping and sorting through used clothing at garage sales is indicating that our goods will never be ashes blowing across the grave. I suspect the drunkard believes his own self-destruction is the penance required for his acceptability in the eyes of his Creator. The adherents of Saint Francis see divinity in the faces of the poor and oppressed but take no notice of the Byzantine fire surrounding themselves. The commonality of all the aforementioned lies in the frailty of their moral vision. It is also what makes them human.

  Most cops and newspeople, usually at midpoint in their careers, come to a terrible realization about themselves, namely, that they are in danger of becoming like the jaundiced and embittered individuals they had always pitied as aberrations or anachronisms in their profession. But when people lie to you on a daily basis, when you watch zoning boards sell out whole neighborhoods to porn vendors and massage parlor owners, when you see the most expensive attorneys in the country labor on behalf of murderers and drug lords, when you investigate instances of child abuse so grievous your entire belief system is called into question, you have to reexamine your own life and perspective in ways we normally reserve for saints.

  At that moment you either reaffirm your belief in justice and protection of the innocent or you do not. But unlike the metaphysician, you do not arrive at your faith through the use of syllogism or abstraction. You often rediscover your faith by taking up the cause of one individual, one innocent person who you believe deserves justice and the full protection of the law. If you can accomplish this, the rest of it doesn’t seem to matter so much.

  I wanted to believe in Cesaire Darbonne. Like many cane farmers in South Louisiana, he had been driven under by a trade agreement allowing the importation of massive amounts of cheap sugar into the United States. The French-speaking provincial world he had grown up in, one of serpentine bayous and endless fields of green cane bending in a Gulf breeze, was becoming urbanized and overlaid with subdivisions and strip malls. But the greatest tragedy in his life was one he could have never foreseen.

  His daughter, like mine, seemed to have possessed all the innocence and love and goodness that every father wishes for in his child. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, can understand the level of pain and loss and rage a father experiences when he wakes each day with the knowledge that his daughter has been raped or murdered. The images of her fate haunt him throughout his waking hours and into his sleep, and the thoughts he has about her tormentors are of a kind he never shares with anyone, lest he be considered perverse and pathological himself.

  At 2:15 p.m. Mack Bertrand rang my extension. “It’s a match,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me that,” I said.

  “Cesaire’s prints are all over it. What else you want me to say? Didn’t you say his pick was missing from his toolshed? It’s obviously his.”

  “The guy doesn’t need this,” I said. “Look, Mack, the motive isn’t there. I’m convinced he didn’t know Bello raped his daughter.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “He was stunned when I told him.”

  “Maybe that’s just the impression you had. You’re a sympathetic soul, Dave. Valerie Lujan hated her husband. She wouldn’t have been above passing on the information to Cesaire.”

  “No, Mr. Darbonne looked like he’d been poleaxed. Maybe he killed Bello, but it wasn’t because he knew Bello attacked his daughter.”

  “Good luck with it.”

  “With what?” I asked.

  “This case. It’s like trying to get cobweb out of your hair, isn’t it?” he said.

  I BROUGHT HELEN up to the minute, then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to verify Cesaire Darbonne’s alibi. A clerk remembered seeing him at the Winn-Dixie and so did the clerk at the gas station by the drawbridge. But the preponderance of his alibi rested on his claim that he had changed a flat by the sugar mill entrance, and unfortunately none of the security people at the mill could recall seeing him. Cesaire had another problem as well. Bello Lujan’s horse farm was less than fifteen minutes’ drive from Cesaire’s house. Cesaire could have visited the Winn-Dixie, bought gas, changed a flat tire, and still had time and opportunity to murder Bello.

  I returned to the office just before 5 p.m.

  “You want to get a warrant?” Helen said.

  “Not yet,” I replied.

  “I think Cesaire is looking more and more like our boy,” she said.

  “It’s too pat. The murder weapon was left a few feet from the body with Darbonne’s fingerprints all over it. But Mack Bertrand believes the last guy who handled the pick was wearing gloves. Why would Darbonne wear gloves, then drop his own pick at the crime scene with his fingerprints on it?”

  “We’re back to Whitey Bruxal?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But Bruxal couldn’t hang a frame on Cesaire Darbonne unless he knew Darbonne had motivation, in other words knowledge that his daughter was attacked by Bello. Which doesn’t seem to be the case. I think Bruxal is out of the picture. What bwana say now?”

  She had me.

  JUST AS I WAS ABOUT TO LEAVE the department for the day, I got a call from Koko Hebert.

  “I’ve got scrapings from under Bello ’s fingernails,” he said. “He either had a real good piece of ass before he died or he fought with his attacker.”

  “Koko, if you still feel a need to prove you’re offensive and obnoxious, I want to set your mind at ease. You don’t have to carry that burden anymore. You’ve assured everybody in the department you’re the real article.”

  “Fuck you,” he said. “Pending lab analysis, I’d say the skin tissue came from a person of color. Normally we can’t tell race by looking at tissue scrapings, because it dries out quickly and becomes visually indistinguishable from the victim’s. But Bello got a roll of it under two of his fingernails and they look like they came off a black person. Gender is another matter. We’ve got to go to a lab in Florida for that. Because Bello probably porked half the black girls in this parish, I’m not sure if my tissue scrapings will be relevant. Sort that out, Robicheaux, then give me a call if you need more explanation.”

  You didn’t trade shots with Koko Hebert unless y
ou were willing to take a heavy load of shrapnel.

  I WENT HOME and had a light supper with Molly, then drove up the bayou in the sunset to Loreauville and Bello Lujan’s stable. The fields were green and sweet-smelling, the clumps of oaks along the road pulsing with birds. The crime scene tape flickered and bounced in the wind. I walked behind the stable and looked at the spot where Mack had found the murder weapon, then studied the breadth of the field where the killer had run toward the steel back fence. What had I missed? Not just here, but in all the interviews involving Yvonne Darbonne and Monarch Little and Slim Bruxal and Crustacean Man and Tony and Bello Lujan. The key glimmered on the edge of my vision, like a shard of memory you take with you from a dream. It lay in an insignificant remark, an oblique reference that I had passed over, a piece of physical evidence that was like a grain of sand on a beach. But what?

  On the other side of the steel fence, two little boys and a girl, all of them black, were flying a kite emblazoned with the American flag. The girl, who was not over eight or nine, was holding the kite string. They had made a fort of propped-up plywood inside a stand of persimmon trees and inside the walls had spread a blanket on the ground. A box of snack crackers, a plastic pitcher of what looked like Kool-Aid, three candy bars, and a can of tuna had been dumped out of a grocery bag onto the blanket.

  “You guys doin’ all right?” I said.

  “We’re camping out, least till dark,” one of the boys said.

  “Y’all weren’t out here early this morning, were you?”

  “No, suh,” the same boy said.

  “That’s a fine fort you’ve got there,” I said.

  “Yes, suh,” the same boy said.

  His eyes left my face and looked up at the kite popping against the sky. The other boy seemed to concentrate unduly on the kite as well. The girl had wrapped the string around her wrist and was making a game of pulling on the string and releasing it, so that the kite rose, then sagged and rose again in the sunset. She wore elastic-waisted jeans and pink tennis shoes and a white blouse with tiny flowers printed on it. She had big brown eyes and pigtails and a round face and skin that was as dark and shiny as chocolate. Her expression was a study in innocence.

  “You guys didn’t go inside that yellow tape on the stable, did you?” I said.

  No one answered.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

  “Chereen,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “Dave Robicheaux. I’m a police officer. Did y’all see anybody run across this field early this morning?”

  “We wasn’t out here,” she replied.

  “But later maybe you guys went over to see what was going on?”

  They looked at one another, then at the birds freckling the sky.

  “Y’all sure you don’t want to tell me something?” I said.

  “Want some crackers and Kool-Aid?” the girl said.

  “Thanks just the same. Don’t you guys go on the other side of that yellow tape, okay?”

  “No, suh, we ain’t. Gonna stay right here, outside the fence.”

  I waved good-bye to them and walked away. When I glanced back over my shoulder, one of the boys was working open the can of tuna while the other boy filled three plastic glasses with Kool-Aid.

  I DROVE BACK into New Iberia and visited Monarch Little at Iberia General. He was sitting up in bed, watching a Chicago White Sox game on the television mounted high up on the wall, the sheet drawn up over his sloping girth. I sat down on the side of his bed and picked up each of his hands and examined his skin from his wrists to his upper arms.

  “What you doin’?” he said.

  “Lean forward,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “So you don’t end up charged with murder. For once in your life, try cooperating with someone who’s on your side.”

  He sat motionless while I looked closely at his face and hair and throat and the back of his neck.

  “Take off your shirt,” I said.

  “Mr. Dee-”

  “Just do it.”

  He pulled off his pajama top, held his massive arms straight out, and let me examine his chest and back.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “That’s what?”

  “You didn’t kill Bello Lujan.”

  “That’s a big breakt’rew for you? I ain’t never killed nobody.”

  “Why’d you put all that skag in your arm, Monarch?”

  “Felt like it.”

  “You almost caught the bus, partner.”

  “Maybe I’d be better off.”

  “What about all those soldiers in Iraq? What kind of day do you think they’re having?”

  “I tried to join the army. They didn’t want me.”

  My question to him had been a cheap shot and I deserved his reply. I sat in a chair next to his bed for a long time and didn’t say anything. He tried to concentrate on the televised baseball game, but it was obvious he was becoming more and more uncomfortable with both my presence and silence.

  “You got some wiring loose in you, Mr. Dee,” he said.

  “I want you to call me as soon as you get out of here,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “My wife wants you to come over for dinner.”

  There was a broken smile at the corner of his mouth. “Who you kidd-” he began.

  “Don’t mock her invitation. She used to be a Catholic nun. She’ll rip your arms off and beat you to death with them,” I said.

  He made a show of crushing the pillow down on his own face, but I could hear him laughing under it.

  THAT NIGHT the weatherman on the late news talked about another storm building in the Caribbean, one that was expected to reach hurricane velocity as it approached Cuba. I fell asleep on the couch while dry lightning flickered in the trees and leaves gusted in the street. I dreamed about baseball and summer evenings in City Park back in the 1950s, when we played pepper games in front of the old wood and chicken-wire backstop that was overhung by oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. In the dream the air smelled of boiled crabs and barbecue grease flaring on hot charcoal, and I could hear a Cajun band playing “Jolie Blon” down by the old brick firehouse. The dream seemed to reflect an innocent time in our history, an idyllic vision I have never been able to disengage from. But in reality there were many elements of the 1950s that were not so innocent, and Monarch Little was there, in the dream, to tell me that. Or at least that was what I thought.

  He was standing at home plate with a bat propped on his shoulder, in an era when people of color were not allowed in the park, whacking grounders to the three black children I had seen flying a kite by Bello Lujan’s back fence. Except in the dream the children were uninterested in Monarch and his baseball bat, and were sitting on the close-cropped grass just beyond the infield, eating a picnic lunch. One of the children was opening a can of tuna.

  I woke from the dream like a man breaking through a pane of glass.

  THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday. I got up at seven and dressed in the kitchen so I wouldn’t wake Molly. I fed Snuggs and Tripod on the back steps, left Molly a note on the chalkboard we used for messages, took a half-carton of orange juice out of the icebox for myself, and drove down St. Peter Street to Iberia General. Monarch was just checking out of the hospital as I came through the reception area.

  “I need to talk with you,” I said.

  “I got a cab coming,” he said.

  “After we talk, I’ll take you wherever you want to go. My truck’s outside.”

  “I ain’t eat yet,” he said.

  “That makes two of us,” I said.

  We headed toward the McDonald’s on East Main. The clothes Monarch had been wearing when the paramedics pulled him out of the ice water at the crack house had been washed and dried at the hospital and, riding in the truck, with the windows down and the trees and shadows sliding by us, he looked cool and comfortable, strangely at peace with himself. I pulled into the line of vehicles at the take-
out window.

  “You lay down your sword and shield?” I said.

  “What you mean, ‘sword and shield’?”

  “You’re not ‘gonna study the war no more.’ Those are lyrics from a hymn. The singer is telling the listener he’s resigned from the fray, that he’s made his separate peace.”

  “What the FBI do to me, what y’all do to me, it don’t matter one way or the other. I just ain’t gonna fight wit’ it no more. I’m t’rew wit’ dope, t’rew wit’ gangs, t’rew wit’ the life. If I stack time, that’s the way it be.”

  “That’s what I was talking about.”

  “Then why you got to say everyt’ing in code?” he said.

  The electronic order box came on and I ordered eggs, sausage, biscuits, and coffee and milk for both of us. “T’row a couple of fried pies in there,” Monarch said.

  “Two fried pies,” I said to the box.

  I got our order at the second window in the line, then parked under the big oak tree by the front. I couldn’t believe how much food Monarch could stuff into his mouth at one time.

  “What you want to know?” he asked, pieces of scrambled egg falling off his chin.

  “When I questioned you about Tony Lujan’s death, you said you were supposed to meet him out by the Boom Boom Room, but you changed your mind.”

  “Right.”

  “Why?”

  “I was gonna jack him for money. It was a bad idea. So I didn’t go. He ended up shotgunned to deat’, but I didn’t have nothing to do wit’ it.”

  “Yeah, I know all that. But why was it a bad idea?”

  “I just tole you. I was gonna jack him-”

  “No, that’s not the explanation you gave me originally. You were afraid something was going to happen.”

  “Yeah, I said what if Tony called up Slim Bruxal and Slim and them other colletch boys showed up wit’ ball bats.”

  “Why baseball bats?”

  “’Cause they done it before. I checked them out. They had a beef behind a nightclub in Lake Charles wit’ a couple of soldiers from Fort Polk. They got ball bats out of their car and busted up a soldier and smashed all the windows out of his car.”