DR15 - Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  His accent, even his syntax, had changed, the rough edges of New Orleans gone, as though the voice of a simple Cajun boy of years ago were speaking. Except that early innocence was not one Bello would ever be allowed to reclaim, whether he knew it or not. I picked up a paint-skinned wood chair by the stable entrance and carried it back to the tank and sat down. The sun was low and buried inside rain clouds, the pasture dark with shade, the grass channeled by the wind. “You have a restful place here,” I said.

  “The best,” he replied. His eyes took on the glimmerings of vindication and pride. But I believed another element was at work inside Bello during that moment. I suspected he was beginning to understand that the symbols of his triumph over the world would never pass on to his son, and that his victory over privation and rejection by the wellborn had become ashes in his mouth.

  “See this?” I said.

  “Yeah, one of those pocket voice recorders.”

  I clicked the recorder on, then off with my thumb. “I had a talk with Whitey Bruxal earlier today. I had this recorder running in my pocket. I was going to take you over the hurdles with it, Bello.”

  He was grinning and I could see he didn’t understand.

  “I was going to play back snippets to you and let you have a little glimpse of what your business partner has to say when you’re not around,” I said. “But you’re an intelligent man and I won’t treat you as less.”

  “I ain’t sure what that means.”

  “You can believe this or not. Either the Feds or Lonnie Marceaux are going to hang you by your thumbs. No matter how you cut it, you’ve got Whitey Bruxal as your fall partner.”

  “What you mean, fall partner?”

  “He’s the guy you’re going down with. Is Whitey the kind of guy who will take a maximum sentence rather than rat out a friend? I don’t know the answer. But I bet you do.”

  “He was working a deal wit’ you?”

  “Put it this way. I doubt if Whitey would tell the truth to a corpse. But if I were on a burning plane with him and the plane carried only one parachute, I have a feeling who would end up wearing it.”

  Bello fitted the Stilson back on the faucet head and began to squeak the nut tighter, as though my words were of little interest to him. But I could see the fatigue in his face, and in his eyes the tangle of thoughts that probably waged war inside his head twenty-four hours a day.

  “What would you do?” he asked.

  “I don’t think you’ll ever experience any rest until you own up to your mistakes, Bello.”

  “Starting wit’ what?”

  “I think you attacked Yvonne Darbonne. I think her death is eating you alive. No amount of Holy Roller shouting in tongues is going to change that fact or relieve you of your guilt.”

  “Who tole you I did that?”

  “It’s written all over you.”

  The heavy, oblong steel head of the Stilson rested on the rim of the aluminum tank, his hand grasped tightly around the shank. The back of his hand was brown, mottled with liver spots and lined with veins that looked like knotted package twine. I could hear a horse blowing inside the stable.

  I supposed it was not a time to say anything. But there are moments when caution and restraint just don’t cut it. “Why’d you do it, partner? She was just a kid.”

  “Maybe there’re reasons everybody don’t know about. Maybe t’ings just happen,” he replied.

  “Run that crap on somebody else.”

  “What do you know? You got everyt’ing. They killed my boy. You know what it’s like to have your kid killed?”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The niggers. Monarch Little and all them niggers with black scarfs on their head, selling their dope, pimping their women, corrupting the town.”

  It was hopeless. I think there are those who are psychologically incapable of honesty and I think Bello was one of them. I got back in the truck and left him to himself. In all candor, I doubt if a worse punishment in the world could have been visited upon him.

  BUT I STILL HAD MILES TO GO before I slept. I called Molly on my cell phone and asked if we could have a late dinner.

  “You have to work?” she said.

  “Clete’s in some trouble.”

  “What kind?”

  I searched my mind for an honest answer. “There’s no adequate scale. The rules of reason and logic have no application in his life,” I said.

  “Sound like anybody else you know?” she replied.

  “Put my supper in the icebox.”

  “It already is,” she replied.

  The owner of the motor court where Clete lived told me Clete and a young woman had gone to a street dance in St. Martinville.

  They weren’t hard to find. In fact, as I drove up the two-lane through the dusk, through the corridor of live oaks that led out of town and the miles of waving sugarcane on each side of the road, I saw Clete’s Caddy parked in front of a supper club left over from the 1940s. It was a happy place, where people ate thick steaks and drank Manhattans and old-fashioneds and sometimes had trysts involving a degree of romance in the palm-shrouded motel set behind the club. Above the entrance way was a pink neon outline of a martini glass with the long-legged reclining figure of a nude woman inside.

  The refrigerated air in the dining room was so cold it made me shiver. Each table was covered with white linen and set with a candle burning inside a glass chimney. A man in a summer tux was playing a piano that was so black it had purple lights in it. Clete was at a table by himself, a collins drink in his hand, his face flushed and cheerful, his eyes shiny with alcohol.

  “Where’s Trish?” I said.

  “On the phone.”

  I sat down without being asked. “Helen says Orleans Parish is cutting a warrant for your arrest.”

  “So I’ll get out of town for a little while. You want a steak?”

  “The Orleans sheriff told Helen he knows you’re mixed up with bank robbers. What’s the matter with you, Clete? You know how many people in South Louisiana want an excuse to blow you away?”

  “That’s their problem.”

  I was so angry I could hardly speak.

  “There used to be a slop chute in San Diego that had a sign over the door like the one out there. You ever go to San Diego?” he said.

  “No. Listen, Clete—”

  But he had already launched into one of his alcoholic reveries that served only one function—to distract attention from the subject at hand.

  “It was a joint that had a neon sign with a gal inside a pink martini glass. We used to call her the gin-fizz kitty from Texas City. A whole bunch of Marines had fallen in love with this same broad who worked the bars outside Pendleton. They said she could kiss you into next week, not counting what she could do in the sack. Bottom line is she got all these guys to put her name down as beneficiary on their life insurance policies. When CID finally caught up with her, we found out she’d been a whore in Texas City. We also found out a half-dozen guys she screwed ended up in body bags. How about that for passing on the ultimate form of clap? Hey, I was one of them. Get that look off your face.”

  He drank from his collins glass, then started laughing, like a man watching his own tether line pull loose from the earth.

  “I want to take you outside and knock you down,” I said.

  “It’s all rock ’n’ roll, Streak. Going up or coming down, we all get to the same barn. What can happen that hasn’t already happened in my life?”

  “I think you’ve melted your brain. Don’t you realize the implications of the story you just told me?”

  “What, that Trish is hustling me? Don’t make me mad at you, big mon.”

  But there was more hurt in his face than indignation. In the back of the club I saw Trish Klein replace the receiver on a pay phone, then stare in our direction, her mouth red and soft, her heart-shaped face achingly beautiful in the pastel lighting. I got up from the table and left without saying good-bye.

  I PLANNED D
URING the next two days to talk to Trish Klein in private about her relationship with one of the best and most self-destructive and vulnerable human beings I had ever known. I got the opportunity in a way I didn’t suspect. Chapter 21

  O N WEDNESDAY, Joe Dupree at the Lafayette P.D. called me just before noon.

  “She’s in lockup?” I said.

  “I never saw anybody look so good in a jailhouse jumpsuit.”

  “For shoplifting at the Acadiana Mall?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that. She walked out of the store with a four-hundred-dollar handbag she didn’t pay for. She caused a big scene when security stopped her. She claimed she was just showing the purse to a friend for the friend’s opinion on it. She probably could have gone back inside and settled the issue by putting it on her credit card. She had a gold Amex and two or three platinum cards in her billfold. Instead, she ended up throwing the purse in the store manager’s face.”

  “She’s not posting bail?”

  “To my knowledge, she hasn’t even asked about it.” I could hear him chewing gum in the receiver.

  “What are you telling me?” I asked.

  “I think she likes it here.”

  After lunch, I drove to Lafayette in a cruiser, checked my firearm in a security area on the first floor of the jail, and waited on the second floor in an interview room while a guard brought Trish Klein down in an elevator.

  The guard was a stout, joyless woman who had once been taken hostage at a men’s prison and held for three days during an attempted jailbreak. I used to see her at Red’s Gym, pumping iron in a roomful of men who radiated testosterone—dour, painted with stink, possessed of memories she didn’t share. She unhooked Trish at the door. I rose when Trish entered the room and offered her a chair. The guard gave me a look that was both hostile and suspicious and locked the door behind her.

  “Did you ever hear the story about Robert Mitchum getting out of Los Angeles City Prison?” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Mitchum spent six months in there on a marijuana bust and figured his career was over. The day he got out, a reporter shouted at him, ‘What was it like in there, Bob?’ Mitchum said, ‘Not bad. Just like Palm Springs, without the riffraff.’”

  She showed no reaction to the story. In fact, she wore no expression at all, as though both her surroundings and I were of no interest to her.

  “What are you doing in here, kiddo?” I said.

  “Kiddo, up your ass, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “That’s clever, but people with your background and finances don’t go out of their way to put themselves in the slams.”

  “I don’t like being called a thief.”

  “Yeah, I bet it was shocking to learn your photo is in the Griffin Book at casinos from Vegas to Atlantic City.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Because I think you and your friends are planning a big score on Whitey Bruxal. I think you’re setting up your alibi.”

  She looked out the window at the street. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “You guys are going to get yourselves killed. That’s your own choice, but you’re taking Clete Purcel down with you.”

  “He’s a grown man. Why don’t you stop treating him like a child?”

  Down the corridor I could hear someone yelling, a scuffling sound of chains clinking, and a heavy object crashing against a metal surface, perhaps against the door of an elevator. But Trish Klein paid no attention to the distraction.

  “Clete’s been my friend for over thirty years. That’s more time than you’ve been on earth,” I said, regretting the self-righteousness of my words almost as soon as I had spoken them.

  “I suspect I should go back upstairs now,” she said.

  “You don’t think Whitey is onto you? This guy was a protégé of Meyer Lansky. Your people impersonated gas company employees and creeped his house. Want to hear a couple of stories about people who tried to burn the Mob?”

  She didn’t answer, but I told her anyway. One account dealt with a man in Las Vegas whose skull was splintered in a machinist’s vise, another who was hung alive by his rectum from a meat hook. I also told her what insiders said was the fate of a middle-class family man in a Queens suburb who accidentally ran over and killed the child of his neighbor, a notorious Mafia don.

  “These bastards might look interesting on the movie screen, but they’re the scum of the earth,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t have guessed that, Mr. Robicheaux. I always thought the people who murdered my father were closet humanists.”

  It was obvious that my best efforts with Trish Klein were of no value. It was like telling someone not to gargle with Liquid Drano. I was about to call for the guard and leave Trish and her friends to their own fate, when she lifted her eyes up to mine and for just a moment I understood the tenacity of Clete’s commitment to her.

  “A week before my father’s death, he took me snorkeling off Dania Beach,” she said. “We cooked hot dogs on a grill in a grove of palm trees and played with a big blue beach ball. Then two men parked a convertible under the trees and made him walk off with them, down where the water was hitting on the rocks. I remember how sad he looked, how small and humiliated, like he was no longer my father. I couldn’t hear what the two men were saying, but they were angry and one man kept punching my father in the chest with his finger. When my father came back to our picnic table, his face was white and his hands were shaking.

  “I asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘Nothing. Everything is fine. Those guys were just having a bad day.’

  “Then he put my snorkel and mask on my head and walked me down to the water and swam backward with me on his chest, until we were at the end of a coral jetty. He said, ‘This is where the clown fish live. Anytime you’re having a problem, you can tell it to the clown fish. These guys love children. Come on, you’ll see.’

  “That was the first time I ever held my breath and went all the way under the water. There were clown fish everywhere. They swam right up to my mask and brushed against my shoulders and arms. I never thought about those men again, not until years later when I realized they were probably the ones who murdered my father.”

  I wanted to be sympathetic. Dallas had been a good man, a brave soldier, and a devoted parent. But he had been corrupted by his addiction and had become a willing party to an armored car and bank heist that cost not only his life but also the life of the teller who had tried to foil the robbery by pushing shut the vault door. Now Trish’s single-minded obsession with vengeance might cost Clete Purcel his life, or at least a large chunk of it, and that simple fact seemed totally lost on her.

  “Why not let Whitey and his pals fall in their own shit? It’s a matter of time before either the Feds or the locals take them down,” I said.

  “You said Bruxal was friends with Meyer Lansky?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did the system get Lansky?”

  “He died of cancer.”

  “When he was an old man. You’re a laugh a minute, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  I banged on the door for the guard to let me out. I was determined to let Trish have the last word, to be humble enough to remember my own mistakes and not contend with the certainty and confidence of youth. But when I looked at the earnestness and ego-centered determination in her face, I saw a moth about to swim into a flame.

  “You probably noticed the hack who brought you in here seemed out of joint,” I said.

  “The hack?”

  “The female correctional officer. She was held three days in a male prison riot and passed from hand to hand by guys psychiatrists haven’t found names for. She ended up in these guys’ hands because she thought she knew what was inside their heads and she could handle whatever came down the pike. Don’t ask her what they did to her, because she’s never told anyone, at least no one around here.”

  I saw her fingers twitch on top of the table.

 
On the way back to Lafayette, I left a message with Betsy Mossbacher’s voice mail.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, she called me on my cell phone. “You visited the Klein woman in jail?” she said.

  “Briefly. But I didn’t learn a whole lot.”

  “What’d she tell you?”

  “A story about her father and swimming with clown fish.”

  “Clown fish?”

  “I guess they’re a symbol of childhood innocence for her. Anyway, I think she deliberately got herself arrested.”

  “We have the same impression at the Bureau. Some of her griffins have been showing up at three or four casinos where Whitey Bruxal is a part owner. It seems they make a point of standing in front of security cameras and getting themselves escorted off the premises.”

  I waited for her to go on.

  “Did I catch you on the john?” she said.

  “No,” I lied. “I didn’t know you had finished. You think they’re planning to take down a casino?”

  “I’d say it’s a diversion of some kind. But my supervisor says I always overestimate people’s intelligence.”

  “You guys deal with higher-quality perps,” I said.

  “Actually, he was talking about you and Purcel.”

  Two uniformed deputies entered the restroom, talking loudly. One of them slammed down the seat in the stall next to me. “Hey, there’s no toilet paper on the roller. Get some out of the supply closet, will you?” he called out to his friend.

  space

  THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of New Orleans. Not the New Orleans of today but the city where Clete and I had been young patrolmen, in a cruiser, sometimes even walking a beat with nightsticks, at a time when the city in its provincial innocence actually feared Black Panthers and long-haired kids who wore love beads and Roman sandals.

  This was before crack cocaine hit New Orleans like a hydrogen bomb in the early eighties and the administration in Washington, D.C., cut federal aid to the city by half. Oddly, prior to the eighties, New Orleans enjoyed a kind of sybaritic tranquillity that involved a contract between the devil and the forces of justice. The Giacano family ran the vice and maintained implicit understandings with NOPD about the operation of the city. The Quarter was the cash cow. Anyone who jackrolled a tourist got his wheels broken. Anyone who jackrolled an old person anywhere or stuck up a bar or café frequented by cops or who molested a child got his wheels broken and got thrown from a police car at high speed on the parish line, that is, if he was lucky.