Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  This was the man now living in Acadiana, where parishioners still make the sign of the cross when they pass a Catholic church and cannot believe that an American president would lie to them.

  I went back to work on Bruxal and ran his name through Google. I found information there that told me far more about him and his present intentions than his criminal jacket did. His name had appeared in several articles published in the Lafayette Daily Advertiser, the Baton Rouge Advocate, and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Whitey Bruxal had become a major player in Louisiana ’s blossoming casino industry.

  Gambling, like prostitution and every other imaginable vice, has a long history in the state. In the nineteenth century the gambling halls along Canal were perhaps the most notorious in the country, not only for their lucrativeness but also for the number of knifings and shootings that took place inside them. The Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who fired the first shot on Fort Sumter, made a fortune after the war as the head of the state lottery. Governor Huey P. Long literally gave Louisiana to Frank Costello, who in turn empowered a crime family in New Orleans to set up and control all organized vice throughout the southern half of the state. The gambling machines were made by a Mob-owned company in Chicago, but the credit line that purchased them came from right here in New Iberia.

  During the mid-1950s, the most despised man in the state was an attorney general who tried to shut down the brothels and deep-six the slots out in the Gulf. The gambling joints and cathouses in St. Landry Parish were run by the sheriff. Every pool hall and blue-collar bar from Lake Charles to the Mississippi line contained football cards, punchboards, and payoff pinball machines. Cops in uniform worked as card dealers and bartenders in nightclubs that deliberately served minors. I could go on, but what difference does it make? The illegal gambling industry of the past is nothing in comparison to its legalized descendant.

  A few years back our governor, who supposedly was in debt millions of dollars to the Vegas syndicate, proved himself a great friend to casino gambling in Louisiana. Today, he and his son are serving time in a federal penitentiary, along with our last three state insurance commissioners. No matter. From Shreveport on the northwestern tip of the state to Lake Charles in the south, the casinos and racetracks soak up all the Texas trade they can get their hands on. New Orleans takes the trade from everywhere, including old people the casinos bus into town from retirement homes in Mississippi. The Indians on the rez are happier than pigs rolling in slop. In fact, everyone is delighted with the new era of gaming in Louisiana, except, of course, the uneducated and the compulsive who lose their life’s savings and the owners of bars and restaurants who have to shut down their businesses because they can’t compete with the giveaway prices at the casinos.

  I went into Helen’s office and told her about my encounter with Whitey Bruxal and his friend Lefty Raguza at Victor’s Cafeteria.

  “Bruxal doesn’t like the way we’re handling things?” she said.

  “He thinks his son and Tony Lujan are getting dumped on. I told him the black kids might go down on the firearms charge.”

  “The lab says there are a half-dozen different prints on the nine-millimeter we found in the trash can. So far nobody from McDonald’s has been willing to identify which black kid was holding it. I don’t think the D.A. is going to carry the ball very far on this one.”

  “It looks like Bruxal is mixed up with some floating casinos and a couple of tracks here. I think a lot of big players from Florida have found a new home in Louisiana. Bruxal’s hunting on the game reserve.”

  She nodded slowly, as though respectfully absorbing my words. But I knew I was bringing problems and complexities into her day that she didn’t need. She had heard it all before, and nothing I said would ever change the historical problems of our state. I only wish I had listened more often to my own counsel.

  “Trish Klein is here to take Bruxal down, Helen. She was switching out dice at the new casino,” I continued.

  “Good. We’ll let Calamity Jane take care of it.”

  “Who?”

  “That FBI field agent, Betsy Mossbacher. She was just in here.” Helen glanced at her watch. “She’s due back here in six minutes. Talk with her, then get her out the door.”

  “Something happen?”

  “You might say that,” she replied.

  Chapter 6

  EXACTLY SIX MINUTES LATER Betsy Mossbacher was at my office door. She wore Levi’s and boots and a black western shirt with pearl-colored snap buttons. Her face had the taut intensity of someone who has just been slapped.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

  “This won’t take long-”

  I cut her off. “If something is going on between you and my boss, I don’t want to get caught in the middle of it,” I said.

  “She called the FBI ‘Fart, Barf, and Itch.’”

  “That’s an old NOPD heirloom.”

  “I don’t care what it is. I told her we expect a degree of professionalism from her and her department, unless I walked into the tongue-and-groove club by mistake.”

  “You said that to Helen Soileau?”

  She widened her eyes and took a deep breath. “You don’t seem to get what this investigation is about. This Klein woman is trouble-for us and herself. But she seems to have special status with you because of your relationship with her dead father.”

  “We already covered that, Agent Mossbacher.”

  “Your friend Clete Purcel helped her elude a surveillance in a casino where she was switching out the dice. But you didn’t relay that information to us.”

  “I don’t think that’s my job.”

  I could see the heat intensify in her face. “Listen, we have a couple of large issues on the burner-Whitey Bruxal and the robbery of a savings and loan. I don’t know how much you know of Bruxal, but he’s an extremely intelligent man and not to be underestimated. You know who Meyer Lansky was?”

  “The financial brains of the Mob.”

  “Bruxal used to hang in a Miami coffee shop called Wolfie’s. Lansky would challenge anyone in the place to stump him with a mathematical problem. The only person who ever did it was Whitey Bruxal. Lansky was so impressed, he used to take Bruxal fishing with him on a charter. God, I need a drink of water. Why do I have days like this?”

  It was like listening to two people talking out of one face. The words “rolling chaos” went through my mind, and I hoped fervently she had no idea what I was thinking. “I’ll get you a cup from the cooler,” I said.

  “Forget it. You busted Bruxal’s son in that racial beef in front of McDonald’s. This is the first handle we’ve had on him. We want to use it.”

  “You had me under surveillance?”

  “No, I was passing by McDonald’s and saw it go down.”

  “I see. And you want to go after Whitey Bruxal by prosecuting his boy?”

  Her eyes shifted off mine, and I knew the idea was not hers, that it had come down from someone over her. “Monarch Little needs to file charges against Bruxal’s kid,” she said.

  “Tell it to Monarch. See what kind of reaction you get.”

  “That’s where you can help us.”

  “Not me,” I replied.

  She paused. “Bruxal got your friend in Miami killed. Maybe he gave the order for it.”

  It was quiet in the room. I could hear raindrops ticking on the window glass. “You know that for a fact?”

  “The people above me seem to.”

  “Then you tell those sonsofbitches they’d better prosecute him.”

  She paused again and I saw a strange glint come in her eye. “Want me to quote you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  For the first time that day, she smiled. “They said you were a bit unusual.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “I’m just one of the field grunts. What do I know? Tell your boss I’m sorry I tracked horseshit on her carpet,” she said.

  “That’s a metaphor?”<
br />
  “No, I had it on my boots. Give Monarch Little a tumble. Whitey Bruxal is a bad guy. Back in Chugwater, he’d be split open, salted, and tacked on a fence post.”

  “I’ve got to visit this place someday,” I replied.

  TWO DAYS PASSED and I heard no more from Betsy Mossbacher. On Friday I went back to my file on Crustacean Man, the victim of a hit-and-run whose earthly remains had been left as food for crawfish at the bottom of a coulee. I still did not buy Koko Hebert’s explanation of Crustacean Man’s death. I had investigated many hit-and-run homicides over the years, both in Iberia Parish and New Orleans, and I had never seen one instance in which the victim had received two massive traumas on opposite sides of his body and no obvious ancillary damage that linked the two.

  If they were bounced off the grille into the air and they caromed off the windshield, you knew it. If they were dragged under the vehicle, the damage was usually horrendous and pervasive. I looked at the photos taken of the remains at the crime scene. The body looked like one that could have fallen out of a boxcar at Bergen-Belsen. The skin was as tight as a lamp shade against the bone, the round mouth and eyes like the soundless scream in the famous painting by Edvard Munch.

  Who are you, partner? What did somebody do to you?

  Then a strange conjunction of thoughts came together in my head. Betsy Mossbacher had tried to pressure me into persuading Monarch Little to press charges against Whitey Bruxal’s son. Although it was a cynical legal maneuver, it was a good one. I suspected that Slim Bruxal, in spite of his good manners, was a vicious fraternity punk who had taken immense pleasure in tearing up Monarch Little’s face, and consequently deserved any fate the court dropped on his head. By the same token, Monarch had been cruising for a serious fall a long time. If his denouement happened to come from Whitey Bruxal, those were the breaks.

  In the meantime, Monarch was of special interest to me for another reason. Before he had started dealing narcotics, he had worked for two or three shade-tree mechanics and backyard body-and-fender men. In fact, Monarch was something of an artist at his craft and could have made a career out of customizing and restoring vintage collectibles. But Monarch had discovered it was easier and more profitable to steal automobiles than it was to repair them.

  I FOUND HIM under a shade tree, with five of his men, in the city’s old red-light district. The wind rustled the leaves in the tree, and a rusted weight set rested inside the dirt apron that extended from the trunk out to the tree’s drip line. Monarch and his friends were listening to music from the radio in Monarch’s Firebird, and drinking Coca-Cola and crushed ice from paper cups that they threw on the ground or in the street when they finished.

  It could have been a midafternoon scene in any inner-city neighborhood, but it wasn’t. The old brothels are gone or boarded up with plywood and are nests for rats now, but at one time they serviced Confederate soldiers from Camp Pratt, out by Spanish Lake, in the early months of the Civil War; then the same women in them serviced any number of the twenty thousand Yankee soldiers who marched through New Iberia in pursuit of General Alfred Mouton and his boys in sun-faded butternut. Decades later, the five-dollar white cribs on Railroad Avenue and the three-dollar black ones on Hopkins continued to flourish, right up until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But the industry did not disappear. It morphed into a much more pernicious and complex enterprise.

  The whores are window dressing today. The issue is dope. The whores work for it, men like Monarch sell it, cops go on a pad for it, pimps use it as their control mechanism, attorneys make careers defending its purveyors, the government subsidizes the cottage industries that screen for it. Its influence is systemic and I doubt if there is one kid in our parish who doesn’t know where he can buy it if he wants it. College kids get laid on Ex; black kids carrying nine-millimeters melt their heads with crack; and whores do crystal because it burns off their fast-food fat and keeps them competitive in the trade.

  The short version? It’s an ugly business and it dehumanizes everyone involved with it. Anyone who thinks otherwise should do an up-close observation of one day in the life of a crack baby.

  “What’s the haps, Monarch?” I said.

  He was sitting in the passenger seat of his Firebird, his feet stretched out on the dirt beyond the curb. His mouth was pursed from the thickness of the stitches inside his gums. He drank out of his soda cup, tilting it gently to his mouth, letting the mixture of Coke and melting ice slide over his tongue. “No haps, Mr. Dee,” he said.

  “Just call me Dave.”

  “Call you Mr. Dee.”

  “I need to talk with you in a confidential fashion, know what I mean?” I said.

  He seemed to think about my proposal, his gaze wandering to a small grocery on the corner, kids riding their bikes along a trash-strewn ditch, a tattered wisp of rope, which used to support a tire swing, swaying from an oak limb overhead. He nodded at one of his friends, and without saying a word all five of them walked to the grocery store and went inside. Monarch got up from the car seat and positioned himself in front of the weight set under the tree. “This about them UL boys?” he said.

  “You going to file on the Bruxal kid?” I said.

  “Who?” he replied.

  He bent over, hooking his palms under the weight bar, his stomach distended like an overflowing tub of bread dough. Then he lifted what I counted to be at least a hundred and forty pounds of steel plate. He curled the bar into his chest ten times, his back straight, his knees locked, his upper arms tightening into croquet balls. He set the bar down on the ground and stepped back from it, breathing slowly through his nose.

  “Don’t try to square your problem with the Bruxal kid on your own. His old man is a gangster, the real article, a Brooklyn wiseguy who uses a hired psychopath to take care of his personal problems.”

  “What you saying is he was a hump for them dagos in Miami.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  He bent over to pick up the weights again. I put my hand on his shoulder. It felt like concrete under his shirt. “Forget the Mr. Universe routine for a minute. You want to take this kid down, I’ll help you. In the meantime, you watch your back.”

  “Since when y’all started going out of your way to jam up rich white boys?”

  “Slim Bruxal is a special case.”

  “Yeah, he special, all right. That’s why the FBI been trying to plug my dick into a wall socket. They after his old man, ain’t they?”

  “Maybe. What’ve they got on you?”

  “Some agents come by my house. They say they might be looking at me for t’ree-strikes-and-you-out.”

  “How many adult convictions do you have?”

  “Two. But right now I’m a li’l warm on a deal wasn’t my fault. My cousin hid his works at my house so his P.O. wouldn’t catch him wit’ them. I didn’t know they was there. A DEA narc busted my cousin and my cousin give me up. His syringe and spoon and a half ounce of tar was under my lavatory. So they say I either flip or I go down for the whole ride. That’s life wit’out no parole, Mr. Dee.”

  He hefted up the weight bar and curled it toward his sternum, releasing it slowly so that the tension built unmercifully in his forearms, his face impassive to the pain burning in his tendons.

  He put on a good show, but he was caught and he knew it. The Feds would probably squeeze him until blood was coming out of his fingernails. I wondered how stand-up Monarch really was. Enough to do mainline time? If the FBI flipped him, they wouldn’t use him just on the Bruxal case, either. He would become a permanent rat, at the beck and call of the Bureau whenever they wanted him.

  Monarch had made his own choices and I couldn’t feel sorry for him. He wasn’t an addict; he was a dealer. He robbed his customers of their souls and profited off the misery of his own people. But he was not without certain qualities, and he didn’t ask for the kind of world he had been born into.

  He did ten curls and dropped the weights in the dirt. I tapped his upper arm
with my fist. “You take steroids?” I asked.

  “You ever see steroid freaks take a shower at the health club?”

  “Come to think of it, no,” I replied.

  “That’s ’cause they don’t take showers at the health club. That’s ’cause their package usually looks like smoked oysters.”

  “Nine months to a year ago, somebody did a hit-and-run on a guy out in the parish. I wondered if you heard of anyone needing body or fender work about that time, somebody who didn’t want to go to a regular shop?”

  “I could ax around. That gonna buy me some juice wit’ the t’ree-strikes-and-you-out sit’ation?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then don’t hold your breat’.”

  I looked at him for a long time. “You’re an intelligent man. You could be anything you want to be,” I said.

  “So?”

  “Why don’t you wise up and stop taking it on your knees from white people?” I said.

  “Say that again?”

  “The people you work for live in mansions in Miami and the Islands. While you pimp and deal product on street corners for chump change, they’re depositing millions in offshore accounts. You take the weight and stack the time for white guys who wouldn’t wipe their ass with you.”

  “Ain’t nobody talks to me like that. Nobody, Mr. Dee.”

  “Somebody better, because you’re about to become a professional snitch or a bar of shower soap in Marion Pen. We’re talking about jailing with the Aryan Brotherhood, Monarch. In Marion, they eat gangbangers for bedtime snacks.”

  Even in the deep shade of the oak tree, I thought I saw his pulse beating in his throat.

  THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of horses galloping in a large dusty pen, without sound, their muscles rippling like oily rope. In the distance were meadows and softly rounded green hills and a fast-running stream that was bordered by cottonwood trees. In the herd were buck-skins, palominos, piebalds, Appaloosas, Arabian creams, duns, bays, sorrels, and strawberry roans, their mouths strung with saliva, their collective breath like the pounding of Indian war drums. The sky was forked with lightning, the air pungent with the promise of rain. But there was no water inside the pen, only heat and clouds of dust and powdered manure. Then a red mare lifted out of the herd on extended wings, her rear hooves kicking open the pen gate as she rose into the sky. Suddenly, in the dream, I heard the sound of the other horses thundering toward the stream and the shade of the cottonwoods.