DR15 - Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Because he’s a gutless fraud.”

  “Pops, you have one character defect I’ve never been able to deal with.”

  “Really?”

  “I can never guess what your feelings are on a given subject. God, you’re a case. Dropping the district attorney in his own office. That’s a beaut.” She smiled at me, her face infused with genuine warmth. In fact, it was radiant and filled with the kind of humanity that I suspect is purchased by living in two genders, and lovely in ways I cannot adequately describe.

  GOVERNOR HUEY LONG, known as the Kingfish, became the prototype for all the southern demagogues who would follow him. According to legend, Huey kept a little black book he called his “sonofabitch file.” Whenever he met a man he disliked, he wrote his name in it. If someone wondered why Huey had entered the individual’s name in the book, the answer was simple: When the opportunity presented itself, Huey would destroy that man’s life.

  What I had not said to Helen was that men like Lonnie Marceaux and Huey Long had ice water in their veins and kept long memories. I still believed Lonnie would not come after me immediately because a public airing of our confrontation would cause him political embarrassment. But for three years he would have the option of filing charges against me, and that option would hang over me during the entirety of our investigation into the murder of Tony Lujan. My guess was Lonnie would eventually have his revenge, but like all cowards, he would use a three-cushion shot to get it.

  In the meantime, I had to keep an investigative clarity of line in the death of Tony Lujan, regardless of my feelings about Lonnie Marceaux. I didn’t buy Monarch Little for the murder. He was just too easy a target. Black dirtbags make wonderful dartboards for prosecutors in need of defendants with cartoonlike dimensions. Unfortunately for Monarch, he had the social grace of a hog on ice and was the kind of defendant juries love to boil into grease and pour down a sewer grate. But nevertheless, Monarch was not stupid. Even if he had shot the Lujan boy, he would not have left the murder weapon on the floor of his Firebird. Also, Monarch was a pragmatist. The person who had murdered Tony Lujan had deliberately disfigured the body postmortem and I suspected had been driven by the kind of insatiable rage we associate with sexually motivated psychopaths.

  Just when I had convinced myself that Monarch was being set up, that the old southern incubus of racial scapegoating was once again rearing its head in our midst, I received a telephone call that was like a brick toppling down a stone well.

  “Mr. Robicheaux?”

  The voice was young, female, threaded with trepidation.

  “Yes, this is Dave Robicheaux. What can I do for you?”

  “It’s Lydia Thibodaux, Tony’s friend.”

  “How are you?” I said, straightening up in my chair.

  “You questioned me the night Tony died. I told you things—” She stopped and started over. “Dr. Edwards is my academic adviser at UL. He was kind of like a friend to Tony. Slim was in one of his classes, too. I told him the truth about what happened. He said I needed to talk with you and straighten everything out. A lot of people say Dr. Edwards is gay, but I don’t care. What does it matter if he’s gay?”

  I couldn’t follow her. “Straighten out what?”

  “I told you I wasn’t sure it was Monarch who called up and asked Tony to meet him. That wasn’t true. I know Monarch’s voice. I bought some weed from him. More than once.”

  “Can you come to my office?”

  For a moment I thought the line had gone dead. Don’t lose her, I told myself. “It’s all right. We’ll talk on the phone. I appreciate your cooperating with us. You’re sure it was Monarch Little?” I said.

  “As sure as you can be just by listening to somebody over the phone. How many people lisp like that? He sounds like he has wires all over his teeth.”

  “What else did you want to straighten out, Lydia?”

  “Sir?”

  “You said there were ‘things’ you told me that were not correct. You used the plural.”

  “Maybe Slim was with Tony.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Before Tony left to meet Monarch, I told him it was crazy to go meet a drug dealer when he was already in so much trouble. Tony said he’d be all right because Slim would go with him. He said, ‘Slim can handle the action. Monarch already learned he’d—’”

  “Say it, Lydia.”

  “He said, ‘Monarch already learned he’d better not fuck with Slim.’ Tony always looked up to Slim. It never made sense to me. Slim is no good.”

  “What do you base that on?”

  “He’s mean. His fraternity brothers act like he’s their friend, but the truth is they’re afraid of him. I told Dr. Edwards that. I mean, I told him Slim scared me.”

  I was writing on a yellow legal pad while she talked. “What did Dr. Edwards have to say about that?”

  “He said Tony and Slim both wore masks. He said not to be afraid of someone who can’t live with the person who’s inside his skin. He said it was too bad Tony couldn’t have learned that lesson. I don’t know what he meant. What do you think he meant?”

  “I’m not sure. Was Tony maybe unusual or different in some way?” I asked, wondering if I was now pushing the envelope.

  “Sir?”

  “Let me meet you someplace.”

  “I have to go to work now. I’m helping my father at the restaurant.”

  “Your father runs the restaurant at the new casino?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I was just trying to undo a lie I told you. Now you’re trying to make me say bad things about Tony. Monarch Little killed him, didn’t he? Why are you protecting a piece of scum like that? I wish I hadn’t called you, Mr. Robicheaux. You’re on the side of black people. It’s always like this. They do whatever they want.”

  I started to reply, but she broke the connection.

  Had I been completely wrong? Did Monarch do it after all? Was my enmity toward Lonnie Marceaux so extreme that I would take up the cause of a dope dealer who had set up and murdered a hapless college kid whose father had already psychologically damaged him beyond repair? Was I one of those who always saw a person of color as a victim of social injustice?

  I didn’t like to think about the answer.

  THE TEMPERATURE HIT ninety-nine that afternoon. The trees along East Main were almost indistinguishable from one another inside the haze of heat and humidity and dust that covered the town. The tide was out and Bayou Teche had sunken inside its banks, and in the harshness of the sunlight, alligator gars roiled the water next to clumps of lily pads that had burned yellow on the edges. As I drove home, the wind was hot and smelled of tar and carbon monoxide, and even though I had left my air-conditioned offices only five minutes ago, I could feel sweat running down my sides like trails of ants.

  Molly was not an angry or resentful woman, nor was she one who judged or sought to punish. But her disappointment in others could lie buried in her face as deep as a stone bruise. Perhaps she thought violence could be exorcised from an individual in the same way demons were cast out by medieval clerics. No, that was my own resentful thinking at work. Molly believed too much in others. At least, she probably believed too much in me.

  We said little at supper and even less as we washed the dishes and put them away. As the light went out of the sky and the trees filled with thousands of birds, we found ways to occupy ourselves with chores that did not involve the other. Just before ten o’clock, when I usually watched the news, I heard her moving about in the kitchen, opening the icebox, setting down a plate on the table.

  “Dave?” she said.

  I got up from my soft chair in the living room and went to the kitchen door. She had on her nightgown and I could see the spray of freckles on her shoulders. “What’s up?” I said.

  “I fixed you a piece of pie and
some milk.”

  “Are you having any?”

  “I’m pretty tired. I think I’m just going to bed.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “The heat seems to affect me more than it used to.”

  “It’s been a hot one.”

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Yeah, good night,” I replied.

  I lay on the couch and watched the local news until ten-thirty, then I stared at CNN for the amount of time it took me to fall asleep, in my clothes, a floor fan blowing in my face, my wife on the other side of the bedroom wall.

  SOME PEOPLE IN A.A. say coincidence is your Higher Power acting anonymously. I’m not sure about that, but on Thursday morning, after I had already left for work, Tripod began to tremble and to cough and rasp deep in his throat, as though he had swallowed a hair-ball. Molly took him to a veterinary clinic, one that also boarded and groomed animals. While she was waiting for the veterinarian, a blade-faced, well-dressed man with an athletic build, six and a half feet tall, entered the room with a French poodle on a leash. The poodle’s fur was dyed pink. Molly had put Tripod in a cardboard box lined with newspaper and a vinyl garbage bag, and had fold-tucked the flaps on the top over Tripod’s head and placed the box by her foot. But Tripod had wedged his head between the flaps and had just started a survey of the room when the poodle’s scent struck his nostrils.

  Lonnie Marceaux was filling out a form on a clipboard at the intake window, the poodle’s leash lying on the floor. The poodle turned toward Tripod’s box and made a soft growling sound, like the purr of a distant motorboat. Tripod jerked his head down through the flaps and skittered around in the box, coughing violently, his weight flopping sideways on the stump of his missing hind foot.

  “Sir! Sir! Would you take control of your animal? He’s frightening my coon,” Molly said.

  “Sasha is harmless, believe me,” Lonnie said.

  “The coon doesn’t know that. I’m not sure I do, either,” she replied.

  He nodded as though he understood the urgency of her request but kept writing. In the meantime, Tripod’s paws skittered and scratched inside the cardboard and his incontinence kicked into major download.

  “Sir, you’re causing problems you can’t guess at. There’s a tether post for your pet in the other room,” Molly said.

  “Sorry, I don’t quite understand.”

  “This is a very old and sick raccoon. Your dog is terrifying him. Now, try to act with a little decency.”

  “Please accept my apologies,” Lonnie said, bending over to pick up the poodle’s leash. Then he sat down three chairs away from Molly and Tripod and began reading a magazine, impervious to Molly’s stare.

  Molly gathered Tripod’s box in her arms and rose from her chair just as the receptionist slid back the glass on the intake window. “Mr. Marceaux, did you want your poodle shampooed and clipped?” she asked.

  “Give her the works. She’s going to a show this weekend,” he said, looking at the receptionist over the top of his magazine.

  “You’re Lonnie Marceaux, the district attorney?” Molly said.

  “I am,” he replied pleasantly.

  “I must be the dumbest woman on the planet,” she said, and started toward the other waiting room.

  “Are we back to my poodle again?”

  Just then, the bottom broke out of the box and Tripod plummeted to the floor, landing on his back with a sickening thump.

  Molly squatted down and picked him up, his bladder emptying down her forearms. “Poor Tripod,” she said.

  “Madam, I’m not responsible for your diffi—” Lonnie began.

  “Shut up,” she said. “I took my husband to task for punching you in the mouth. Now I wish he’d knocked your teeth down your throat. I’ve known some self-important idiots in public office, but you’re pathetic.”

  “You’re Mrs. Robicheaux?”

  “Duh.”

  MOLLY CALLED MY OFFICE as soon as she returned home with Tripod.

  “He was poisoned?” I said.

  “The vet’s not sure, but that’s what he thinks,” she replied. “Tripod probably vomited most of it back up. The vet wants to see him again in two days, but most of the poison is probably out of his system.”

  “What’s Tripod doing right now?”

  “Sleeping on a blanket in front of the floor fan.”

  “Run that stuff about Lonnie Marceaux by me again.”

  “Who cares about a jerk like that? Come home for lunch,” she said.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “It’s not important. Why waste time talking about it? I’ll see you at lunch. Keep your powder dry.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Guess.”

  MOLLY DIDN’T GO ABOUT THINGS HALFWAY. What some might refer to as a conjugal expression of amends was, in the case of Molly Boyle, like being subsumed by an Elizabethan sonnet devoted to celebration of Eros and the ethereal interludes he offered from all the dross of everyday life. Her skin, which was fine-grained and smooth and taut from years of farmwork in Central America, took on a flush that was like the cool burn of the sun out on the Gulf in late autumn. The pillow was imprinted with the smell of her hair, the sheets damp from the sweat on her thighs and back. When I closed my eyes, I thought of breakers sliding across a beach into clumps of bougainvillea and a coral cove where schooled-up kingfish flitted next to a patch of floating hot blue, and I thought of a great hard-bodied fish curling out of a wave and plunging into a rain ring. She came under me, her womb actually scalding, then got on top of me and did it again, her breath drawing slowly in and out as though a piece of ice were evaporating on her tongue.

  We took a shower together and dressed, and I checked on Tripod again and smoothed his fur with a brush that was used for no other purpose. “Who did this to you, old partner?” I said.

  I went into the backyard and checked Tripod’s bowls. There was clean water in one bowl and a half-eaten strip of a sardine in the other. Most of the time, if he was not in the house, he stayed on his chain and wasn’t allowed to roam because of his age and his propensity for getting into trouble. There seemed little chance that he had eaten either tainted or poisoned food by accident.

  Through the bamboo border on the side yard, I saw Miss Ellen Deschamps sprinkling her rose garden in the shade. Miss Ellen was our one-woman, or rather one-lady, neighborhood crime watch program. Parish sheriffs, zoning boards, and city mayors could come and go, but Miss Ellen’s standards did not change with the political season. She served high tea on her upstairs balcony at exactly 3 p.m. every weekday and had her black yardman deliver handwritten invitations to her guests. Any resident on East Main who did not properly attend to the upkeep of his home and lawn and flower beds would receive a polite note from Miss Ellen. If that failed, she put on formal dress, including white gloves, and marched to the home of the offending party and invited him out on his own porch, in full view of the street, to have an extended conversation about the importance of setting a good example for the less fortunate.

  “Miss Ellen, did you see anyone prowling around our house in the last day or so?” I asked.

  She twisted the water faucet shut and walked toward me. She wore a wide straw hat and a blue sundress and an apron with big pockets for her garden tools. Miss Ellen had a way of never speaking to others from a distance, as though honesty and candor always required her to look directly into a person’s eyes when she spoke. “He said he was a friend of yours. He said he was staying with you.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “A blond man who tied a canoe at the foot of your property. It was at dawn. He opened a can of sardines and fed the raccoon.”

  “This wasn’t a friend. Tripod was poisoned.”

  I saw something shrink inside her. “I thought he might have been vacationing here. He was very relaxed and polite. He came out of the fog and made a point of saying hello. He said he didn’t want to startle me.”

  “Was he a tall o
r short man?”

  “No, he wasn’t tall.”

  “How about an accent or tattoos?”

  She seemed to look into her memory, then she shook her head. “He had tiny pits in his cheeks, like needle holes.”

  “This afternoon somebody from the department will bring you a few mug shots. Maybe you can pick this fellow out for us.”

  But she wasn’t hearing me. Her face made me think of paper that had been held too close to a heat source. It seemed to have wrinkled from within, as though someone had pinched off a piece of her soul. “Mr. Robicheaux, I’m very sorry I didn’t notify you. Is your raccoon—”

  “He’s fine, Miss Ellen. Don’t feel bad about this. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “No, I haven’t,” she said. “I should have called your house.”

  “I think you’ve already told me who this guy is. You’ve done a good deed here.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “I do.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Miss Ellen?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you see this man again, don’t talk with him. Call me or the sheriff’s department,” I said.

  “This man is genuinely wicked, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  I watched her go back to work in her garden, troweling a hole for a potted caladium, the damp black soil she had created out of coffee grinds and compost sprinkled on her forearms like grains of pepper. But I knew Miss Ellen had not returned to the normalcy that characterized an ordinary day in her life as caretaker of East Main. The lie told her by the man in the canoe had diminished her faith in her fellow man, and if wounds can remain green, this one I suspected was at the top of the list.

  On the way back to the house, I saw a tube of roach paste lying inside the bamboo border of my property.

  That afternoon, a uniformed deputy showed Miss Ellen a half-dozen booking-room photos. The deputy radioed in that she took all of two seconds to tap her finger on the face of Lefty Raguza.

  Why would Raguza commit such a senseless act of cruelty? If you ask any of these guys why they do anything (and by “these guys” I mean those who long ago have stopped any pretense of self-justification), the answer is always the same: “I felt like it.”