Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  MY TENURE WITH the exchange program was running out in June, and I wanted to carry good memories of South Florida back to New Orleans. I boat-fished out of Key West in the most beautiful water I had ever seen. It was green, as clear as glass, with pools of indigo blue in it that floated like broken clouds of ink. I visited the old federal prison at Fort Jefferson on a blistering-hot day and swore I could smell the land breeze blowing from Cuba. I slept in a pup tent on a coral shelf above water that was threaded with the smoky green phosphorescence of organisms that had no names. I saw the ocean turn wine-dark under a sky bursting with constellations and knew that the truth of Homer’s line would never be diminished by time.

  But wherever I went, a frozen daiquiri winked at me from an outdoor bar roofed by palm fronds; beaded cans of Budweiser protruded from the ice in a fisherman’s cooler; a bottle of Cold Duck clamped between a woman’s thighs burst alive with the pop of a cork and a geyser of foam.

  Delirium tremens or not, I knew I was in for the whole ride.

  During my last week in Miami, I drove up to Opa-Locka to pay my bar tab and buy a round for whoever was trying to escape the noonday heat. The bar was dark and cool inside, the street out beyond the colonnade baking under a white sun. I knocked back a brandy and soda, counted my change, and prepared to go. Through the front window I could see dust blowing along the pavement, heat waves bouncing off a parked car, a bare-chested black man drilling a jackhammer into the asphalt, his skin pouring sweat. I ordered another brandy and soda and looked at the order-out menu on the bar. Then I tossed the menu aside, dropped a half dollar into the jukebox, and kicked it on up into overdrive with four inches of Beam and a beer back.

  By three-thirty I was seriously in the bag. Across the street, I saw an armored car pull up in front of the bank. It was a shimmering box-like vehicle with a red-and-white paint job that pulsed in the heat like a fresh dental extraction. Three armed guards piled out, opened up the back, and began to lift big canvas satchels with padlocks on the tops onto the pavement. One of the guards was Dallas Klein.

  I crossed the street, my drink in one hand, shading my eyes from the glare with the other.

  “Where you been, fellow? I’ve had to knock ’em back for both of us,” I said.

  Dallas was standing in the shade of the bank, the armpits of his gray shirt dark with moisture. “I’m on the job, here, Dave. Catch you later,” he said.

  “What time you get off?”

  “I said beat it.”

  “Say again?”

  “This is a security area. You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “You’ve got things mixed up, podna. I’m a police officer.”

  “What you are is shit-faced. Now stop making an ass out of yourself and go back in the bar.”

  I turned around and walked toward the colonnade, the sun like a wet flame on my skin. I looked back over my shoulder at Dallas, who was now busy with his work, hefting bags of money and carrying them into the bank. My face felt small and tight, the skin dead, freeze-dried in the heat.

  “Something wrong, Dave?” the bartender asked.

  “Yeah, my glass is empty. Double Beam, beer back,” I said.

  While he poured into a shot glass from a bourbon bottle with a chrome nipple on it, I blotted the humidity out of my eyes with a paper napkin, my ears still ringing from the insult Dallas had delivered me. I looked back out the window at the armored car. But the scene had suddenly become surreal, divorced from any of my expectations about that day in my life. A white van came out of nowhere and braked behind the armored car. Four men with cut-down shotguns jumped out on the sidewalk, leaving the driver behind the wheel. They were all dressed in work clothes, their hair and facial features a beige-colored blur under nylon stockings.

  “Call nine-one-one, say, ‘Armed robbery in progress,’ and give this address,” I said to the bartender.

  I unsnapped the.25 automatic that was strapped to my right ankle. When I got off the barstool, one side of the room seemed to collapse under my foot.

  “I wouldn’t go out there,” the bartender said.

  “I’m a cop,” I said.

  I thought my grandiose words could somehow change the condition I was in. But in the bartender’s eyes I saw a sad knowledge that no amount of rhetoric would ever influence. I walked unsteadily to the front door and jerked it open. The outside world ballooned through the door in a rush of superheated air and carbon monoxide. The street I looked out upon was no longer a part of South Florida. It was a wind-sculpted place in the desert, bleached the color of a biscuit by the sun, home to carrion birds and jackals and blowflies. It was the place that awaits us all, one we don’t allow ourselves to see in our dreams. The.25 auto felt as small and light as plastic in my hand.

  I positioned myself behind one of the Arabic columns under the colonnade and steadied my automatic against the stone. “Police officer! Put down your weapons and get on your faces!” I shouted.

  But the men robbing the armored car did little more than glance in my direction, as they would at a minor annoyance. It was obvious their timing on the takedown of the car had gone amiss. The van had arrived seconds later than it should have, allowing the guards time to start carrying the canvas money satchels inside the bank. The car guards and the elderly bank guard were down on their knees, against the wall of the bank, their fingers laced behind their heads. The robbers simply needed to pick up the satchels that were within easy reach, head out of Opa-Locka, and dump the van, which was undoubtedly stolen. A few minutes later, they could have disappeared back into the anonymity of the city. But one of them had gotten greedy. One of them had gone into the bank to retrieve the satchels there, racking a round into the chamber of his shotgun.

  A teller was already pushing the vault door shut. The robber shot him at point-blank range.

  When the shooter emerged from the bank, he was dragging two satchels that were whipsawed with blood, his pump propped against his hip.

  “I said on your faces, you motherfuckers!” I shouted.

  The first shotgun blast from the robbers on the sidewalk patterned all over the column and the metal door of the bar. A second one caved the window. Then the robbers were shooting at me in unison, blowing dust and powdered stone in the air, peppering the metal door with indentations that looked like shiny nickels.

  I crouched at the bottom of the column, unable to move or return fire without being chewed up. Then I heard someone shouting, “Go, go, go, go!” and the sounds of the van doors slamming shut.

  It should have been over. But it wasn’t. As the van pulled away from the curb, I was sure I heard the robber in the passenger seat speak to Dallas. “You’re a joke, man,” he said. Then he extended his shotgun straight out from the vehicle and blew most of Dallas Klein’s head off.

  Chapter 2

  THE ROBBERY OF the armored car and the double homicide were never solved. I gave the FBI and the Dade County authorities as much information as I could about Dallas Klein’s relationship to the bookie Whitey Bruxal and the three collectors who were trying to dun Dallas for his sixteen-thousand-dollar tab. But I was firing in the well. The three collectors all had alibis, were lawyered-up and deaf, dumb, and don’t know from the jump. Whitey Bruxal returned from New Jersey of his own volition and allowed himself to be interviewed three times without benefit of counsel. I came to believe that the account I had given the authorities of Dallas’s connection to the gamblers was being looked upon with the same degree of credibility cops usually give the words of all drunks and junkies: You can always tell when they’re lying-their lips are moving.

  I hung up my brief tenure with law enforcement in the tropics, attended my first A.A. meeting, a sunrise group that met in a grove of coconut palms on Fort Lauderdale Beach, and caught a flight the same day back to New Orleans.

  That was over two decades ago. I believed Dallas made a deal with the devil and lost. I tried to stop the robbery and failed, but at least I tried, and I did not hold myself responsible for
his death. At least, that was what I told myself. Later, I was fired from NOPD. Perhaps my dismissal was my fault, perhaps not. Frankly, I didn’t care. I went back sober to my birthplace, New Iberia, Louisiana, a small city on Bayou Teche, down by the Gulf of Mexico, and started my life over. It’s always the first inning, I said. And this time I was right about something.

  TODAY I’M A DETECTIVE with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I make a modest salary and live on Bayou Teche with my wife, Molly, who is a former nun, in a shotgun house shaded by oak trees that are at least two hundred years old. With a few exceptions, the cases I work are not spectacular ones. But in the spring of last year, on a lazy afternoon, just about the time the azaleas burst into bloom, I caught an unusual case that at first seemed inconsequential, the kind that gets buried in a file drawer or hopefully absorbed by a federal agency. Later, I would remember the pro forma beginnings of the investigation like the tremolo you might experience through the structure of an airplane just before oil from an engine streaks across your window.

  A call came in from the operator of a truck stop on the parish line. A woman who was waiting on a tire repair had gone into the casino and removed a one-hundred-dollar bill from her purse, then had changed her mind and taken out a fifty and given it to the clerk.

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize I had a smaller denomination,” she said.

  “The hundred is no problem,” the clerk said, waiting.

  “No, that’s okay,” she replied.

  He noticed she had two one-hundred bills tucked in her wallet, both of them stained along the edges with a red dye.

  I parked the cruiser in front of the truck stop and entered through the side door, into the casino section, and saw a blond woman seated at a stool in front of a video poker machine, feeding a five-dollar bill into the slot. She was dressed in jeans and a yellow cowboy shirt. She sipped at her coffee, her face reflective as she studied the row of electronic playing cards on the screen.

  “I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Sheriff’s Department,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said, turning her eyes on me. They were blue and full of light, without any sense of apprehension that I could see.

  “You have some currency in your wallet that perhaps we need to take a look at,” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You were going to give the clerk a hundred-dollar bill. Could I see it?”

  She smiled. “Sure,” she said, and took her wallet from her purse. “Actually I have two of them. Are you looking for counterfeit money or something?”

  “We let the Feds worry about stuff like that,” I said, taking the bills from her hand. “Where’d you get these?”

  “At a casino in Biloxi,” she replied.

  “You mind if I write down the serial numbers?” I said. “While we’re at this, can you give me some identification?”

  She handed me a Florida driver’s license. “I’m living in Lafayette now. I’m not in trouble, am I?” she said. Her face was tilted up into mine, her eyes radiantly blue, sincere, not blinking.

  “Can you show me something with your Lafayette address on it? I’d also like a phone number in case we have to reach you.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said.

  “Sometimes a low-yield explosive device containing marker dye is placed among bundles of currency that are stolen from banks or armored cars. When the device goes off, the currency is stained so the robbers can’t use it.”

  “So maybe my hundreds are stolen?” she said, handing me a receipt for a twenty-three-hundred deposit on an apartment in Lafayette.

  “Probably not. Dye ends up on money all the time. Your name is Trish Klein?”

  “Yes, I just moved here from Miami.”

  “Ever hear of a guy named Dallas Klein?”

  Her eyes held on mine, her thoughts, whatever they were, impossible to read. “Why do you ask?” she said.

  “I knew a guy by that name who flew a chopper in Vietnam. He was from Miami.”

  “That was my father,” she said.

  I finished copying her address and phone number off her deposit receipt and handed it back to her. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Klein. Your dad was a stand-up guy,” I said.

  “You knew him in Vietnam?”

  “I knew him,” I said. I glanced past her shoulder at the video screen. “You’ve got four kings. Welcome to Louisiana.”

  ON THE WAY BACK to the office, I asked myself why I hadn’t told her I had been friends with her father in Miami. But maybe the memory was just too unpleasant to revisit, I thought. Maybe she had never learned that her father had been enticed into aiding and abetting the robbery of the armored car, if indeed that’s what happened. Why let the past injure the innocent? I told myself.

  No, that was not it. She had paused before she acknowledged her father. As any investigative law officer will tell you, when witnesses or suspects or even ordinary citizens hesitate before answering a question, it’s because they are deciding whether they should either conceal information or outright lie about it.

  It was almost 5 p.m. when I got back to the department. Wally, our dispatcher, told me there had been a homicide by gunshot wound on the bayou, amid a cluster of houses upstream from the sugar mill. I gave the serial numbers on the bills to a detective in our robbery unit and asked him to run them through our Internet connection to the U.S. Treasury Department. Then I tried to forget the image of Dallas Klein kneeling on a sidewalk, his fingers laced behind his head.

  The sheriff of Iberia Parish was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career in law enforcement as a meter maid with NOPD, then had patrolled the Desire district and Gird Town and worked Narcotics in the French Quarter. She wore jeans or slacks, carried herself like a male athlete, and possessed a strange kind of androgynous beauty. Her face could be sensuous and warm, almost seductive, but it could change while you were talking to her, as though not only two genders but two different people lived inside her. People who saw her in one photograph often did not recognize her in another.

  I not only admired Helen, I loved her. She was honest and loyal and never afraid. Anyone who showed disrespect regarding her sexuality did so only once.

  A couple of years back, a New Iberia lowlife by the name of Jimmy Dean Styles, who ran a dump called the Boom Boom Room and who would eventually rape and murder a sixteen-year-old girl with a shotgun, was drinking from a bottle of chocolate milk behind his bar while he casually told Helen that even though he had overheard her male fellow officers ridiculing her at the McDonald’s on East Main, he personally considered her “a dyke who’s straight-up and don’t take shit from nobody.”

  Then he upended his bottle of chocolate milk, his eyes smiling at the barb he had inserted under her skin.

  Helen slipped her baton so quickly from the ring on her belt, he didn’t even have time to flinch before glass and chocolate milk and blood exploded all over his face. Then Helen dropped her business card on the bar and said, “Have a nice day. Call me again if I can be of any more assistance.” That was Helen Soileau.

  I tapped on her office door, then opened it. “Wally says we have a homicide by the mill?” I said.

  “The nine-one-one came in about fifteen minutes ago. The coroner should be there now. Where were you?”

  “A couple of bills with dye on them showed up at the new truck stop. Who’s the victim?”

  She glanced down at a notepad. “Yvonne Darbonne. She waited tables at Victor’s. You know her?”

  “Yeah, I think I do. Her daddy used to cane-farm and run a bar up the bayou?”

  “Bring the cruiser around and let’s find out,” she replied.

  We drove through downtown and crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at Burke Street, then crossed the bayou again and headed up a broken two-lane road that led past an enormous sugar mill that almost blocked out the sky. At night, during the grinding season, the fires and electric lights and the giant white clouds of steam that rose from the st
acks could be seen from miles away, not unlike a medieval painting depicting Dante’s vision of the next world.

  Hunkered between the mill and bayou was a community of dull green company-constructed houses left over from an earlier time. In the winter, the stench from the mill and the threadlike pieces of carbon floating off the smokestacks blew with a northern breeze directly onto the houses down below. The yards were dirt, packed as hard as brick, strung with wash lines, the broken windows repaired with tape and plastic bags. Several uniformed cops, two forensic chemists from the lab, the coroner, three cruisers, and an ambulance were already at the scene.

  “Who called it in?” I asked Helen as we crossed a rain ditch and pulled into a dirt driveway.

  “A neighbor heard the shot. She thought it was a firecracker, then she looked out the window and saw the girl on the ground.”

  “She didn’t see anyone else?”

  “She thought she heard a car drive away, but she saw no one.”

  The girl’s father, whose name was Cesaire Darbonne, had just arrived. Even though he was almost seventy, he was a trim, comely man, with neatly parted steel-colored hair and pale turquoise eyes. His skin was brown, as smooth as tallow, marked on one arm by a chain of white scars that looked like small misshapen hearts. He was also coming apart at the seams.

  Two cops had to restrain him from rushing to where his daughter lay in the backyard. They walked him back to a cruiser in the driveway and sat him down in the passenger seat, then stood in front of the open door so he couldn’t get out. “That’s my li’l girl back there. Her birt’day was tomorrow. Who done somet’ing like this to that li’l girl? She ain’t but eighteen years old,” he said.

  But the answer was probably not one he wanted to hear. His daughter lay in the Johnson grass by a doorless wood garage, her body in the shape of a question mark. She was wearing a beige skirt and tennis shoes without socks and a T-shirt with a winged horse emblazoned on the front. A blue-black.22 revolver with walnut grips lay by her hand. The entry wound was in the center of her forehead. Her hair, which was dark red, had fallen down in a skein across her face.