Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “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.

  He dipped a big round pale yellow sponge into a water bucket and ran it along the horse’s neck, his eyes darkening with thought, his mouth downturned at the corners, the water sliding off the horse’s withers onto Slim’s shoes.

  “Except the guy didn’t like what you guys had planned for him, and he got out of the car and started running,” I continued. “Tony was driving and tried to cut him off, but, guess what, he hit the guy with the right fender and broke the guy’s hip. If you guys had just done a hit-and-run on a drunk, you could have bagged ass, left him on the road, and nobody would have ever been the wiser. In fact, you could have even done a nine-one-one call on him and saved his life. But he had seen your faces and he could identify the Buick as well, and that meant only one thing-it was time for this poor bastard to go to that big wineshop in the sky.

  “So you got out of the Buick with a baseball bat and parked the guy’s head in the fourth dimension. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  He looked me in the face, without really seeing me, thinking about the words, if any, he was about to say.

  “Good try, but I don’t think you got jack shit to go on,” he said.

  And I knew at that moment the baseball bats we had found in the fraternity garage probably did not contain the one that had delivered the fatal blow to Crustacean Man. Slim had slipped the punch again. All he needed to do now was to keep sponging down his horse and not say anything. But the anger at his father, and by extension at me, still lingered in his face, and I had another run at him.

  “You’ve got somebody else’s death on your conscience, too, even though you may never be held legally accountable for it. But one way or another, I’m going to make your life miserable until you own up for what you little sonsofbitches did to Yvonne Darbonne.”

  His hand tightened on the sponge, squeezing a curtain of water down the horse’s withers. Then he threw the sponge into the bucket, hard, splattering his jeans.

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” he said. “I was the only guy looking out for her. She got stoned out of her mind at the house and puked in the toilet on the second floor. Then some guys took her in a room and she got it on with all three of them. That kind of shit doesn’t go on when I’m in the house. We’ve got a little sister sorority we look out for, and we don’t need a reputation for gangbanging freshman coeds. I broke it up and I took her home. Where was Tony? Glad you asked. Passed out under a picnic table in the backyard with potato salad in his hair.”

  “You drove Yvonne Darbonne back to New Iberia? To her house?” I said.

  “You got it,” he said. “I was going to take her inside her house, but she got a gun out of the glove box and started waving it around. It was a twenty-two Tony and me target-practiced with. I tried to take it away from her, but she turned it into her face and pulled the trigger. That’s what happened, man. You want to put me in prison for that, go ahead. But get this straight. I helped her when she didn’t have any other friends, including Tony, who in case you didn’t know it was a closet homo.”

  “If you were an innocent man, why’d you run?”

  “Because I’m Whitey Bruxal’s son. Because I don’t like being a backseat hump for every cop in South Louisiana.”

  His cheeks were pooled with color in the warm gloom of the shed, and for just a moment he reminded me of his dead friend Tony. I could hear the wind coursing in the pasture, feel the mare shift her weight under my hand.

  “You killed Tony, though, didn’t you? You knew sooner or later he was going to dime you with the D.A. Maybe he came on to you and you got disgusted with his weakn
ess and cloying dependence and decided to do both of you a favor and blow out his wick.”

  “You got part of it right. He started crying and tried to grab my package. I told him he turned my stomach and he could deal with Monarch Little on his own. If I’d stayed with him, maybe he’d still be alive,” he said. “Believe it or not, that doesn’t let me sleep too good sometimes.”

  What do you believe when you have conversations with people for whom the presence of evil is a given and simply a matter of degree in their daily lives? Do you just walk away from their words or let them invade your own frame of reference? How do you play chess with the devil?

  You don’t.

  “I advise you to come into the department with your lawyer and make a formal statement about the circumstances surrounding Yvonne Darbonne’s death,” I said. “With luck and a little juice, you’ll probably skate.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said, clipping a rope onto the horse’s hackamore. “I’m the least of your worries, Mr. Robicheaux. You got no idea what my father and Lefty Raguza are capable of. My father beat up his wife and son because he lost his money. Think what he might do to somebody else’s family.”

  “Say that last part again?”

  He walked the mare into the barn, his T-shirt gray and glued with moisture against his back. I grabbed him by the arm and turned him around. “Did you hear me?” I said.

  He pulled up his T-shirt, exposing a burn scar on his stomach. It was V-shaped, welted, the color of a tire patch.

  “I was five years old,” he said. “He said he dropped the iron, that it was an accident. He told me he was sorry. I think he meant it. That’s just the way he’s wired. Now give me some peace.”

  BETSY MOSSBACHER called me at the office five minutes after I walked in. “Do you know where the Klein woman is?” she said.

  “Out of jail,” I said.

  “I know that. She slipped the surveillance on her.”

  “Is this related to Whitey Bruxal’s problems over a money transfer from the Islands?”

  “You better believe it. Somebody rolled thirteen million dollars out of his accounts in the Caymans into a half-dozen banks in Jersey and Florida, all of them in the name of Whitey Bruxal or businesses he owns. In the meantime, an anonymous caller had already alerted the IRS the money was on its way. All that thirteen million is undeclared income.”

  “Trish’s friends impersonated gas company employees and retrieved Whitey’s account numbers from his computer,” I said, more to myself than to her.

  “That’s my guess. All they needed were the nine-digit numbers to do the transfers. It gets better, though. While Trish Klein and her friends were sending signals that they were about to pull a big score on Whitey’s businesses, he was funneling his cash flow into the Caymans. During the last two weeks he parked another two million over there. This is the slickest sting I ever saw. They’ve ruined the guy and they used the government to do it.”

  She laughed into the receiver.

  “Can I get a job with you guys?” I asked.

  “In your dreams,” she said.

  BUT THE HUMOROUS MOMENT with Betsy Mossbacher soon gave way to the realities of my own departmental situation and the political ambitions of Lonnie Marceaux. Just before quitting time, he called Helen’s office and said he wanted to see both of us at 8 a.m. the next day. He refused to discuss the content of the meeting so we would be kept wondering or perhaps, even better, apprehensive and anxiety-ridden until the next morning. When Helen pressed him, he replied, “Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll all have a better perspective tomorrow.”

  He was in fine spirits when we showed up, tilting back in his chair, his fingers crisscrossed in a pyramid, his carefully clipped hair gleaming with brilliantine. “How is everyone this morning?” He beamed.

  “What’s up, Lonnie?” Helen said.

  “It’s time to move forward, much more aggressively than we have been,” he said as soon as we were seated.

  “Move forward with what?” Helen said.

  “An arrest in the homicide of Bello Lujan,” he said.

  “Arrest whom?” I said.

  He rested his chin on the backs of his fingers, staring good-naturedly out the window. “Dave,” he said patiently.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “We’ve got the murder weapon with fingerprints all over it. We’ve got the motive. We’ve got a suspect with no alibi. But I can tell you also what we haven’t got,” he said.

  “I’ll bite,” I said.

  I could see a tic inside his feigned air of tolerance and goodwill. “What we don’t have is somebody under arrest,” he said. He rocked his chair back and forth, the spring going scrinch, scrinch, scrinch. “Why don’t we have somebody under arrest? I think you’re a member of that wandering group of penitents, the incurably liberal-hearted, Dave. Because you believe Cesaire Darbonne is a simple man of the earth, one who has already suffered a terrible tragedy, it would be a collective sin of enormous magnitude if we arrested him for killing the man who raped his daughter. Maybe I’m unfair to you, but I believe you’re a sucker for any tale that involves social victimhood.”

  “I don’t believe Cesaire knew Bello raped his daughter.”

  “You don’t believe? The last time I checked, the grand jury decides those kinds of things.”

  “How would Bello have known?” I said.

  “Somebody told him?” he replied.

  “We found a neck chain and crucifix and G.I. can opener near the crime scene that belongs to one of Whitey Bruxal’s gumballs, a guy from Jamaica by the name of Juan Bolachi,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know all about that and it doesn’t mean dick,” Lonnie said before I could continue.

  “We’ve got scrapings from under Bello ’s fingernails,” I said. “It’s just a matter of-”

  “A matter of getting this guy Bolachi in custody is what you’re trying to say, right? Unfortunately, he’s not in custody and all you’ve got is speculation,” Lonnie said. “Everyone has skin tissue under their nails. It doesn’t mean the skin tissue came from a killer, for God’s sakes.”

  My hands were beginning to tremble with anger. I pressed them flat against my knees, below the level of his desktop, so Lonnie couldn’t see them. “Cesaire Darbonne is an innocent man,” I said, all of my arguments spent, my grandiose declaration itself an admission of defeat.

  Lonnie touched at a speck of saliva on the corner of his lip and looked at it. “The warrant will be ready at one p.m. today,” he said. “Helen, I want Dave to serve it. It’s his case. He should see it through to its conclusion.”

  He pulled on an earlobe and studied the far wall.

  Then I realized Lonnie had found his means for revenge. He didn’t care whether Cesaire Darbonne was guilty or not. The case was prosecutable and for Lonnie that was all that mattered. His butt was covered and I had to place under arrest a man whose personal tragedy weighed heavily upon me. I didn’t like Lonnie, but I thought he had a bottom beyond which he didn’t go. His ambition, his manipulation of uneducated people, his pandering to fear and the lowest common denominator in the electorate were all sickening characteristics in themselves but not without precedent in either national or state politics. Now I realized what bothered me most about Lonnie. He didn’t care about either the place or the people whom he professed to love and was capable of mocking them while he simultaneously did them injury.

  “One day this is going to be over, partner, and we’ll all have different roles,” I said, getting up from my chair.

  “Want to interpret that for me?” he said, slouched back in his chair, still smiling.

  “No, I don’t,” I replied.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said.

  “Dave, would you wait for me out in the hallway?” Helen said.

  I walked down to the watercooler and had a drink. Through the window I could see the Sunset Limited running down the tracks, hours off schedule, passengers eating breakfast in the dining car. At one
time we literally set our watches by the Sunset Limited. It ran every day, from Los Angeles to Miami and back again, and somehow assured us that we were part of something much larger than ourselves-a country of southwestern vistas and cities glimmering at sunset on the edge of vast oceans, where the waves broke against the skin like a secular baptism. It was the stuff of mythos, but it was real because we believed it was real.

  The last car on the train clicked down the tracks and disappeared beyond a row of shacks.

  The door to Lonnie’s office was half open and I saw him rise to his feet, placing a pen and his glasses in his shirt pocket, indicating he had to be somewhere else and that it was obviously time for Helen to go. The hush inside the office was of a kind that comes before a clap of thunder or a violent act you never anticipate.

  “We’re professional people, Helen. We need to drop this and concentrate on the job and not the personal problems of one individual,” Lonnie said.

  “Not just yet,” she replied. “I want you to have a clear understanding about my position on a couple of matters. Number one, I couldn’t care less about your opinion of me. I think you’re a fraud and a bully, and like most bullies, you’re probably a coward. Number two, you couldn’t shine Dave Robicheaux’s shoes. If you ever try to demean him again, or use the power of your office to hurt him in any fashion, I’m going to personally rip your ass out of its socket and stuff it down your throat.”

  You could have worse friends than Helen Soileau.

  Chapter 25

  I PLACED CESAIRE under arrest after lunch. I cuffed his wrists in front of him rather than behind him and allowed him to drape a windbreaker over his hands before I put him in the back of the cruiser. But there was no disguising his level of humiliation and shame. If I ever saw a broken man, it was Cesaire Darbonne.

  After he was booked for capital murder, I walked with him to a holding cell and asked the guard to lock me inside with him and to give me a few minutes.