Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  I squatted down next to her and picked up the revolver by inserting a pencil through the trigger guard. The cylinder looked like one that had been drilled to hold Magnums, and all the chambers other than the one under hammer were loaded and appeared unfired. A cell phone lay in the grass, less than three feet away. Helen handed me a Ziploc evidence bag. “Powder burns?” she said.

  “Enough to put out an eye,” I replied.

  Helen squatted down next to me, her forearms resting on her knees, her face lowered. “You ever see a woman shoot herself in the face?” she asked.

  “Nope, but suicides do weird things,” I replied.

  Helen stood up, chewing on a weed stem. The sun went behind a cloud, then the wind came up and we could smell the heaviness of the bayou. “Bag the cell phone and get it to the lab. Find out who she was talking to before she caught the bus. Has the old man got other kids?”

  “To my knowledge, Yvonne was the only one,” I replied.

  “Ready to do it?” she said.

  “Not really,” I said, rising to my feet, my knees popping like those of a man who was far too old for the task that had been given him.

  Helen and I approached Mr. Darbonne, who was still sitting in the back of the cruiser. His khakis were starched and clean, his denim shirt freshly ironed. He looked up at us as though we were the bearers of information that somehow could change the events that had just crashed upon his life like an asteroid. I told him we were sorry about his loss, but my words didn’t seem to register.

  “Who was your daughter with today, Mr. Darbonne?” I asked.

  “She gone over to the university for orientation. She was starting classes this summer,” he replied. Then he realized he hadn’t answered my question. “I ain’t sure who she gone wit’.”

  “Was she dating anyone?” I asked.

  “Maybe. She always met him in town. She didn’t want to tell me who he was.”

  “Has she been depressed or angry or upset about anything?” Helen said.

  “She was happy. She was a good girl. She didn’t smoke or drink. She never been in no trouble. I was looking for work today in Jeanerette. If I’d stayed home, me-” His eyes started to water.

  “Did she own a pistol?” I asked.

  “What she gonna do wit’ a gun? She read books. She wanted to study journalism and history. She wrote in her diary. She was always going to the movies.”

  Helen and I looked at each other. “Can you show us her room, sir?” I said.

  The wood floors inside the house were scrubbed, the furniture dusted, the kitchen neat, the dishes washed, the beds made. An ancient purple couch was positioned in front of a small television set. Imitation lace doilies had been spread on the arms and headrest of the couch. In the hallway a black-and-white photo yellowed at the corners showed the father at a hunting camp, surrounded by friends in canvas coats and caps and rubber boots and a giant semicircle of dead ducks at their feet. Yvonne’s dresser and shelves were covered with stuffed animals, worn paperback novels, and books on loan from the city library. Among the titles were The Moon and Sixpence and The Scarlet Letter.

  “We’d like to take her diary with us, sir. I promise it will be returned to you,” I said.

  He hesitated. Then his eyes left mine and looked out the window. Two paramedics were placing a gurney in the back of the ambulance. The body bag that contained the earthly remains of Yvonne Darbonne had been zipped over her face, within seconds erasing the identity she had woken with that morning. The straps and vinyl that held her form against the gurney seemed to have shrunken her size and substance to insignificance. Cesaire Darbonne began to run toward the back door.

  “Don’t do that, sir. I give you my word your daughter’s person will be treated with respect,” Helen said, stepping in his way, holding up her palms against the air.

  He turned from us and began to weep, his back shaking. “She met this boy in town ’cause she was ’shamed of her house. One night she walked all the way home from the bowling alley, wit’ cars going by her at sixty miles an hour. I couldn’t find work, me. I farmed t’irty acres of cane for forty years, but now I cain’t find no work.”

  Before we left, we spoke to the neighbor who had made the “shots fired” call. She was in her late-middle years and was a member of that ill-defined racial group sometimes called “Creoles” or sometimes “people of color.” The term “Creole” originally meant a second-generation colonial whose parentage was either French or Spanish or both. Today, the term indicates someone whose bloodline is probably French, Indian, and Afro-American. This lady’s name was Narcisse Ladrine and she insisted she had not witnessed the shooting or a car or person leaving the scene.

  “But you heard a vehicle driving away?” I said.

  “I ain’t sure,” she said. She wore a print dress that fit her like a potato sack and was so wash-faded you could see the outline of her undergarments through the fabric.

  “Try to remember,” I said. “Was it a sound like a truck? Did it make a lot of noise? Maybe the muffler was rusted out?”

  “When you hear a gunshot, you ain’t listening for other t’ings.”

  She had a point. “Did you see anyone else on the street?” I asked.

  “There was a black man on a bicycle picking up bottles and cans out of the ditch.” Then she thought about what she had just said. “Except that was a lot earlier. No, I ain’t seen nobody else out there.”

  We went back up the road and checked with the security office at the sugar mill. No one there had seen any unusual activity near the mill or in the community of frame houses by the bayou. In fact, no one at the security office even knew a homicide had occurred there.

  AS WE DROVE BACK toward the department, a rainstorm swept across the wetlands and pounded the cruiser and scattered hailstones like pieces of smoking dry ice on the road. Back at the office, I began the paperwork on the death of Yvonne Darbonne. I had completely forgotten the matter of the dye-marked one-hundred bills in the possession of Trish Klein, the daughter of my murdered gambling friend in Miami. Just before quitting time, Helen opened my door. “We got a hit on those serial numbers,” she said. “The bills came from the robbery of a savings and loan company in Mobile.”

  Helen’s announcement wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “I’ll get ahold of the woman tomorrow,” I said.

  “It gets better. The bills from the robbery have been showing up in casinos and at racetracks all along the Gulf Coast,” she said.

  “The Klein woman says she got hers at a casino in Biloxi.”

  “Here’s an interesting footnote. The Treasury guys think the savings and loan company may be a laundry for the Mob. The wiseguys got ripped off by some bank thieves who didn’t get the word. What’s the background on this Klein woman?”

  I told her about the shotgun slaying of Dallas Klein in Opa-Locka, Florida, years ago. Through my second-story window I could see rain hitting on the tops of the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery.

  “You were there when he died?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice catching slightly.

  “Wrap up our end on this and give it to the Feds. You copy on that?”

  “Absolutely,” I replied.

  I DROVE HOME at 5 p.m. and parked my pickup truck under the porte cochere attached to the shotgun house where Molly and I live in what is called the historical district of New Iberia. Our home is a modest one compared to the Victorian and antebellum structures that define most of East Main, but nonetheless it is a beautiful old place, built of cypress and oak, long and square in shape, like a boxcar, with high ceilings and windows, a small gallery and peaked tin roof, and ventilated green shutters that you can latch over the glass during hurricane season.

  The flower beds are planted with azaleas, lilies, hibiscus, philodendron, and rosebushes in the sun and caladiums and hydrangeas in the shade. The yard is over an acre in size and covered with pecan trees, slash pine, and live oaks. The back of the property slopes down to the Teche, a
nd late at night barges and tugboats with green and red running lights drone heavily through the drawbridge at Burke Street on their way to Morgan City. At early dawn there is often ground fog in the trees and on the bayou, and inside it you can sometimes hear a gator flopping or ducks wimpling in the shallows.

  Our elderly three-legged pet coon, named Tripod, lives in a hutch in the backyard. His sidekick is an unneutered male cat by the name of Snuggs. Snuggs has a neck like a fireplug and a body that ripples with muscle when he walks. He wears his chewed ears and the pink scars inside his short white hair like badges of honor. The only dogs he allows in the yard are those who have received Tripod’s stamp of approval.

  Our next-door neighbor is Miss Ellen Deschamps, an eighty-three-year-old graduate of Millsaps College who feeds every stray cat in New Iberia. She despises people who litter and once hit a man in the head with a bag of carrots for dumping his automobile’s ashtray in the Winn-Dixie parking lot. She also considers Snuggs a profligate interloper but feeds him just the same. Early in the morning I can see Miss Ellen through the bamboo border on our property, feeding her cats or at work in her garden, the big pockets of her apron stuffed with tools and packets of seed. The image of Miss Ellen bending to her tasks on a daily basis, indifferent to the role of eccentric imposed on her by others, always makes me feel better about the world.

  Our little spot on East Main is a fine place to live, and the woman I share it with is a person who lays no claim on courage or devotion or resilience but possesses all those virtues in exceptional fashion without ever being conscious of them. Before our marriage, her name was Sister Molly Boyle. In her religious life she had worked in a Maryknoll mission in Guatemala where the Indians were massacred by the army as an object lesson to leftist rebels. Later, she organized cane workers in St. Mary Parish, here in southwest Louisiana, and built homes for the poor. Then she left the religious order to which she belonged and married an alcoholic homicide detective with a long history of violence, and took up residence here, on Bayou Teche, along with Tripod and Snuggs and my adopted daughter, Alafair, who was studying psychology and English at Reed College in Portland.

  “What’s happenin’, trooper?” she said when I walked into the kitchen.

  She was washing and breaking up lettuce under the faucet, tearing it into chunks with her fingers. Her hair was dark red and cut short, and there was a spray of sun freckles on her arms, neck, and shoulders. Her father had been a retired United States Army line sergeant and later a police officer in Port Arthur, Texas. She spoke of him often and fondly, and I suspected some of her populist, blue-collar attitudes and her ability to do many things with her hands came from him.

  I touched her neck and the tips of her hair, then squeezed her shoulders. Molly’s hair was the same shade of red as the dead girl’s by the mill, and I tried to push the image of the wound in the girl’s forehead out of my mind. Molly turned around and looked at me. Her eyes were wide-set and bold and always hard to stare down. “Something happen today?” she said.

  “There was a homicide up by the mill. A girl by the name of Yvonne Darbonne. She was about to start UL,” I said.

  “You knew her?”

  “I know her dad. He lost his farm a few years back.”

  “She was murdered?”

  “It looks like a suicide, but-”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Let me help with supper,” I said, and began taking dishes down from the cabinet.

  By sunset the rain had stopped and I walked by myself down to the bayou’s edge. In the west, the sky was the soft pink of a flamingo’s wing, the air heavy and damp and clean-smelling. Water dripped from the trees onto the bayou’s surface, creating a chain of rings that floated away in the current. But the mildness of the evening and the dripping sound of rainwater onto the bayou could not free me from the image of Yvonne Darbonne curled in the dirt, the red hair that had fallen over her wound tousled by the wind.

  Suicides fall into categories. Some victims probably manufacture an internal psychodrama as a way of asking for help, then drift too far across the line. The clinically depressed do it in closed garages or with pills and booze while they listen to Boléro or “Clair de lune.” Jumpers find audiences and sail out among the stars. Some fantasize a script in which they transcend their own deaths. In their imagination they watch from above while others find their bodies in horror and are trapped inside a legacy of guilt and grief for the rest of their lives.

  But the ones who do it with high-powered firearms in the mouth or razors high up on the forearms, not on the wrists, are often filled with unrelieved rage at themselves. Female suicides are seldom if ever found in the last category.

  Was Cesaire Darbonne’s information correct about his daughter? Did she not drink or smoke? Had she always been happy? What could cause someone that young and beautiful and full of promise to fire a bullet into the center of her forehead? Or had someone else been at the scene also?

  THE NEXT DAY our coroner, Koko Hebert, lumbered into my office. Koko was one of the saddest-looking human beings I had ever known. His body was shaped like a soft-sided pyramid. His breath wheezed in his chest. He stank of nicotine and beer sweat, and sometimes trailed an odor that was worse, one that made me think of a mortuary in Vietnam after the power had failed.

  Koko’s cynicism and anger were palpable. But his son had been killed in Iraq, and I had come to believe that his daily assault on the sensibilities of others was his own strange way of asking for help.

  The grass was green and the sun was shining outside my window, but when Koko spread his buttocks on a chair in front of my desk, the sun might just as well have gone into eclipse. He took a huge drag off his cigarette, his brow furrowing as though his inhalation of cancer-causing chemicals were a moment of metaphysical importance.

  “Would you not smoke in here?” I said.

  He took a coffee cup off my desk and ground out his cigarette in it. “You want the post on the Darbonne girl or you want to tell me you don’t have bad habits?” he asked.

  “I’m happy you came by.”

  “Right. The lab call you yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “We swabbed both her hands. She was the shooter. It’s down as a suicide.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You don’t have confidence in the atomic absorption test?”

  “Let’s get something straight on this one, Koko. I appreciate the work you do. But I want the abrasive rhetoric out of my face.”

  I could hear the hum of the air conditioner in the silence. “There is no false positive here. She had powder residue on both hands. She inverted the pistol and fired it straight into her forehead. It’s a suicide, plain and simple.”

  “Her father said she didn’t drink or use. She was planning to start college. Why does a kid like that want to blow herself away? How did she end up in her own yard with a revolver her father never saw before?”

  “Maybe I was looking at the wrong tox screen. The one that had Yvonne Darbonne’s name on it showed she was loaded on alcohol, weed, and Ecstasy. When I opened her up, I thought I’d put my hand in a punch bowl, burgundy and fruit, to be exact. She had also engaged in recent sexual intercourse, with multiple partners. In my opinion, there was not forced penetration, either. There was one bruise on the thigh, but considering the number of partners she had, that’s not unusual. I suspect she got stoned and loaded and was pumping it in four-four time.”

  “What do you get out of it, Koko?”

  “Out of what?”

  “Offending people, testing them.”

  He scratched the inside of his thigh, as though a mosquito bite were itching him beyond any level of tolerance. “If I go to meetings, can I learn how to use psychobabble like that?” he said.

  I let out my breath and rubbed my temples. “What’s the rest?” I asked.

  “There is no ‘rest.’ She was drunk and stoned and she balled a bunch of guys who didn’t bother to use rubbers,” he said. “You�
��re wondering why a kid like that would kill herself?”

  RIGHT AFTER KOKO left the office, our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, called from the Acadiana Crime Lab. Mack was a decent, cheerful, pipe-smoking family man and one of the best crime scene investigators I had ever known. “We ran the weapon in the Darbonne shooting,” he said. “It was reported stolen out of a fraternity house at Ole Miss in 1999.”

  “Any other prints besides the DOA’s?”

  “It was oiled and cleaned recently. There were a couple of smears, but not enough to run through AFIS. Where you going with this, Dave?”

  “Probably nowhere.”

  “It’s a suicide, podna. Her thumb pulled the trigger. Her fingerprints were on the back of the frame. I think she turned the pistol around and squeezed off one right into her face.”

  “What’d you get out of her cell phone?”

  “Mostly numbers of kids at New Iberia High. Nothing unusual. Except…”

  “Go ahead, Mack.”

  “She made two calls during the week to the home of Bello Lujan.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw a sun-browned man wearing white jodhpurs, with swirls of black hair on his arms. At least that was Bello ’s image today, although I had known him in an earlier and much different incarnation. “Why would she be calling a guy like that?” I said.

  “He’s got a kid at UL. Maybe Bello ’s kid and the vic knew each other.” Then Mack paused. “Dave?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The girl took her life. Nothing will undo that. Bello wasn’t born. He was poured out of a colostomy bag. Leave him alone.”

  “That’s strong for you, Mack.”

  “Not when it comes to Bello Lujan,” he replied.