Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “Yeah, we all be having constitutional guarantees, but that ain’t my way.”

  “You know what ‘bruising the freight’ means?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s what happened to Slim Bruxal when he got busted today. He also got dumped in a cell with a couple of black guys who haven’t had a fresh bar of white soap in a while. Who do you think the Bruxal family is going to blame for all this?”

  He sat down on the couch and looked at his feet. “They took my nine,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Them FBI agents. They say ain’t nobody gonna bot’er me.”

  I sat down on a wood chair across from him. I removed my business card from between his fingers and wrote two more telephone numbers on it, then handed it back to him. “If I’m not at the department, you can call me at my house or on my cell,” I said.

  Outside, the willows along the bayou were bending in the breeze, an old man and a child were cane-fishing in the shade, a pretty countrywoman in a sunbonnet was hoeing out a vegetable garden, a strand of black hair curled on her cheek. I had a feeling these ordinary moments in the ordinary day of ordinary people were possessions that Monarch would soon pay a great deal to own.

  “Them FBI agents want Bruxal to put up a kite on me, don’t they? Miss Helen sent you out here to warn me?”

  I didn’t want to tell him that Helen had nothing to do with my visit. “You loaded their gun, podna. They’re just doing their job. They win, you lose. The question is how badly do you lose. Just don’t take things into your own hands. That’s why I gave you those phone numbers.”

  I got up to go.

  “You still interested in somebody who might have done a hit-and-run last year sometime?” he asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Friend of mine up the bayou got a li’l shop in his backyard. Last summer a man brung a big Buick in there wit’ the headlight knocked in and the right fender scratched up. Said he hit a deer. Said he heard my friend done real fine work and he didn’t feel like paying the Buick dealer a lot of money when my friend could do the job just as good.”

  “Who was the guy?”

  Monarch looked up at me and let his eyes hold on mine. “You gonna t’ink I set it up.”

  “Who was it, Monarch?”

  “Better go out to my friend’s place and ax him yourself.”

  THE FRIEND’S AUTO REPAIR BUSINESS was conducted in a pole shed behind an ancient, rust-leaking trailer that sagged on cinder blocks, just outside St. Martinville. The sun was down in the sky now, red and dust-veiled above a line of live oaks on the opposite side of Bayou Teche. The air was breathless, the clouds crackling with electricity in the south. Monarch’s friend was one of the most unusual-looking human beings I had ever seen. He was an albino, with negroid features and gold hair and pink-tinted eyes, his entire body encased in long-sleeved coveralls zipped to the throat. He had been working next to a gas-fired forge. I couldn’t imagine what the temperature was like inside his clothes, but he grinned constantly just the same, as though a grin were the only expression he knew. He seemed delighted at my visit. I had the feeling he was one of those rare individuals who genuinely loves life and has no issue with the world or grievance against his fellow man, regardless of what they may have done or not done to him.

  “Your name is Prospect Desmoreau?” I said.

  “That’s me,” he said. But like every other mismatched element in his makeup, his accent didn’t fit. It was genuine peckerwood, a yeoman dialect that runs through the pine forests and plains from West Virginia into West Texas, one that probably goes back to the early days of the Republic. “Hep you with something?”

  “Monarch Little said a man brought you a Buick last summer that had been damaged from a collision with a deer.”

  “He sure did. I fixed it good as new, too.”

  “Did this man act hinky to you?”

  “No, suh.”

  “What was this fellow’s name?”

  Prospect Desmoreau looked at the wind ruffling the bayou, an amber blaze of late sunlight on its surface. But no matter where his eye traveled, he never stopped grinning. “Mr. Bello brought it in,” he said.

  “Bellerophon Lujan?”

  “Yes, suh. He give me a twenty-dollar tip.”

  “Where was the damage?”

  “Passenger-side fender, passenger-side headlight.”

  “Did you see any material on the car body that indicated Mr. Bello hit a deer? Hair, a piece of antler embedded in the headlight?”

  “Looked to me like somebody had already hosed it down and wiped it off. People do that sometimes when they plow into livestock and such. You looking for somebody done a hit-and-run on a pedestrian?”

  “That pretty well sums it up, Prospect.”

  “There was blood inside the headlight glass. I didn’t see no deer hair, though. Least none I remember. Don’t mean wasn’t none there.”

  “There’s no way you saved the headlight glass, huh?” I said, putting my notebook back in my shirt pocket.

  “You want to look at it?”

  “Sir?”

  “I got a pileful of trash and junk on the other side of the barn. ’Bout every two years I haul it to the dump. I know right where that glass is at, ’cause I seen it just the other day when I was hunting around in the pile for a radio speaker I pulled out of a ’fifty-five Chevy.”

  “Broken glass with blood on it?”

  “Yes, suh. It’s been under an old piece of tarp. I seen it.”

  I stared at him stupidly. “Prospect, I think you’re a remarkable man,” I said.

  “Women tell me that all the time.”

  He dragged a large tangle of canvas off the pile, spilling a shower of wet pine needles and pooled water onto the ground. He lifted a jagged half-moon piece of broken glass from a circle of chrome molding. “Right there on the edge, you can still see the blood.”

  I took a Ziploc bag from my back pocket and spread it open. “Just drop it right in there, partner. I need that molding, too. Is there anything else in here from Mr. Bello’s Buick?”

  “No, suh, I don’t think so.”

  “On another subject, how well do you know Monarch Little?”

  “I taught him body-and-fender work. Taught him when he was knee-high to a tree frog.”

  “Too bad he doesn’t make use of it.”

  “Folks don’t always get to choose what they do,” he replied.

  “You seem like a smarter man than that,” I said.

  “His mama is at M.D. Anderson in Houston. She’s had every kind of cancer there is. Monarch ain’t tole you that?” he said, his pink-tinted eyes squinting in the sunlight.

  I DROVE DIRECTLY to the Acadiana Crime Lab and logged in the evidence with Mack Bertrand. It was late and I could tell Mack was anxious to get home to supper and his wife and family. “What are you looking for on this?” he asked.

  “A DNA match or an exclusion on Crustacean Man. ”

  “How soon you need it?”

  “The owner of the vehicle is probably Bello Lujan. I doubt he’s a big flight risk.”

  Mack raised his eyebrows. “Use the process as a buffer between you and him, Dave. No matter what he does, don’t react, don’t let it get personal.”

  “What’s the big deal about Bello?”

  “I think he’s a driven man. He came to our church for a while, but we had to encourage him to attend one that’s probably more suited to his needs.”

  “Can you translate the hieroglyphics for me?”

  “He’s got sex on the brain, he’s full of guilt, he shouts in the middle of the service. He may be dangerous, at least to himself. We sent him to some Holy Rollers who speak in tongues. But I’m not sure even they can deal with him. Does that give you a better perspective?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “What a sense of humor. I’ll have the DNA report for you in three days,” he said.

  THAT EVENING I tried to disconnect my t
houghts from Bello Lujan, in the same way that as a child I tried not to believe that a school-yard bully had become an inextricable part of my life. But I also remembered how, for some unexplainable reason, my path and the bully’s crossed regularly, as though by design, and regardless of what I did to avoid encountering him, my actions always led me back to a choice between public humiliation or the end of a fist.

  Saturday morning I had visited Bello ’s home and questioned his son, Tony, about the T-shirt emblazoned with the image of Pegasus that Yvonne Darbonne had been wearing the day she died. Inadvertently, Tony Lujan had told me his father was an investor in the track and casino advertised on the shirt and that he had planned to give her a job in the casino restaurant. This was after Bello had denied knowing anyone by the name of Yvonne Darbonne.

  I had managed to expose the school bully as a liar. I should have known he would come calling as soon as he returned from his weekend visit to New Orleans.

  “There’s a man standing in the front yard,” Molly said.

  I looked out the window. Bello ’s Buick was parked in the driveway, his son in the passenger seat, but Bello was staring at the street, as though he couldn’t make up his mind what he should do next. I walked out on the gallery. A sun-shower had just stopped, and water was ticking out of the trees.

  I remembered Mack Bertrand’s cautionary words about using procedure as a buffer between me and Bello Lujan. “I suspect this is a business call. If that’s the case, I’d rather talk about it at the office, Bello,” I said.

  “You questioned my boy while I was in New Orleans. About the T-shirt that dead girl was wearing,” he said.

  The sunlight was tea-colored through the oak branches overhead, the air cool from the rain, the sky throbbing with the sound of tree frogs. It was too fine an evening for an angry encounter with a primitive, tormented, and violent man. I stepped off the gallery into the yard so I would not be perceived as speaking down to him. But I did not offer him my hand. “Come see me tomorrow, partner.”

  “My boy told you I was going to give the dead girl a job waitressing at the track clubhouse. I told you I didn’t remember her name. That’s ’cause I give jobs to lots of kids, particularly ones wanting to go to college. You making me out a hypocrite in front of my family?”

  “That’s a term of your own choosing.”

  “You cracking wise now?”

  “What I’m doing is telling you to get out of here.”

  “You told my son this colored kid, what’s his name, Monarch Little, is a badass motherfucker who might put out his lights?”

  “I don’t think I phrased it exactly that way.”

  “Come over here, Tony!” Bello said.

  His son stepped out of the car. His face was bloodless in the shade, his jaws slowly chewing a piece of gum.

  “What did Mr. Robicheaux here say to you?” Bello asked.

  “It’s like you say, Daddy.”

  “He said that colored boy was gonna cool you out?”

  “Not in those words,” Tony said.

  “He said this kid was a badass motherfucker and was gonna hurt you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My son is lying, here?” Bello said to me.

  You don’t argue with drunks and you don’t engage with stupid or irrational people. But when they insist that you are the source of all the unhappiness in their lives and denigrate you without letup, when they stand so close to you that you can smell their enmity in their sweat, at some point you have to take it to them, if for no other reason than self-respect. At least that’s what I told myself.

  “You’ve got a lot more to worry about than just me,” I said.

  “No, my life is fine. It’s you that’s the problem. I didn’t finish high school or go to college. But I did pretty good. Maybe that don’t always sit too well with some people. Think that might be the trouble here, Dave?”

  I rested one hand on the hood of the Buick. I rubbed the finish and the passenger-side headlight molding and brushed away a leaf that was stuck to the glass. “Fine car you have here. Ever have any work done on it? Looks like somebody might have had a sander on your fender.”

  He tried to keep his face empty, but I saw my words take hold in his eyes. Tony gazed down the driveway at the bayou as though he had never seen it before.

  “I always treated you good,” Bello said. “We both go back to the old days, when people talked French and kids like us didn’t have ten cents to go to a picture show. How come you can’t show respect for our mutual experience? How come you treat me like some kind of bum?”

  “Because you lied to me.”

  The skin on his face flexed, just as though I had spit on it. I started back toward the gallery, wondering if he was not about to attack me. Just as I reached the steps, I felt his fingers touch me through my shirt.

  “That’s my only son, there,” he said. “He’s gonna be a doctor. He never done anything to deliberately hurt anybody, particularly not to some poor girl who shot herself. Why you trying to mess him up? You got colored kids shooting each other in the streets. Why you got to go after my boy?”

  But the hand had already been dealt, for both Bello and me and his son as well. None of us, at that moment, could have guessed at the outcome. I heard a flapping of wings above our heads, like a giant leathery bird rising from the oak tree’s crown into the sky.

  Chapter 8

  THURSDAY MORNING, Mack Bertrand called from the crime lab. “The blood on the Buick headlight fragment came from Crustacean Man,” he said.

  “No gray area, no contamination, no dilution of the specimen, none of that stuff?”

  “This one is dead-bang. It even gets better. You actually brought me two specimens.”

  “Say again?”

  “A microscopic piece of bone was on the inside of the molding. My guess is it came from the collision of the fender against Crustacean Man’s hip.”

  “You don’t think it came from the blow to his head?”

  “Maybe. But the body-and-fender guy told you the glass and molding came from the passenger side of the vehicle, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Crustacean Man’s left hip was crushed. My guess is he either walked in front of the vehicle or he was walking on the side of the road, in the same direction as the Buick, when he was hit.”

  “Here’s the problem with that scenario, Mack. The cause of death was massive trauma to the right-hand side of the cranium. Death was probably instantaneous. He ended up in the coulee, which means he wasn’t slammed to the asphalt. He wasn’t knocked into a post or telephone pole, either.”

  “You’re saying the fatal injury wasn’t caused by the Buick? Maybe a second vehicle killed him?” Mack said.

  “There’s another possibility.”

  “What?”

  “The second blow didn’t come from a vehicle,” I said.

  “Maybe he got hit by a chunk of meteorite. Ease up on the batter, Dave,” he said.

  A few minutes later I went into Helen’s office and told her of Mack Bertrand’s findings. She was hunched over her desk, her short sleeves folded in tight cuffs on her arms. She thought for a moment before she spoke. “Okay, so we’ve got a dirty vehicle, but we can’t put Bello Lujan behind the wheel,” she said.

  “We can make a case for destroying evidence and aiding and abetting.”

  “Provided we can prove he had knowledge a crime was actually committed. What if his kid was the driver? What if one of the kid’s fraternity brothers borrowed the car? How about the wife?”

  “She’s an invalid. She doesn’t drive. These wouldn’t be issues if the victim wasn’t a wino,” I said.

  “If there were no gravity, monkey shit wouldn’t fall out of trees, either.”

  “I don’t think this is a simple hit-and-run, Helen. Something else is involved.”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dave, there are times I want to kill you, I mean actually p
ound your head with my fists.”

  I gazed out the window, choosing reticence as the better part of valor.

  “Go back to that business about it not being a simple hit-and-run,” she said.

  “Mack believes the Buick either struck Crustacean Man in the hip while he was walking down the right-hand side of the road, or Crustacean Man walked out in front of the car. But neither Mack nor Koko can explain the origin of the fatal injury, which was to the head.”

  “I think we’re starting to drown in more information than we need here. Look, somebody hit this guy with the Buick. He was left to die on the side of the road. The DNA evidence on that is absolute. Somebody is going down for what we can prove happened. Whoever it is, Bello or somebody else, will probably not receive the punishment he deserves. But we’re going to do our jobs as best we can and leave the rest of it to God. Am I putting this in words you can understand?”

  “ Bello ’s son is the key.”

  “Why?”

  “Because his face is full of secrets.”

  “Be honest with me. Are you trying to tie all this to the suicide of Yvonne Darbonne?”

  “I have the feeling it’s connected. But I can’t tell you how.”

  She rubbed the back of her neck, her starched shirt tightening across her chest. Then she laughed to herself.

  “Want to let me in on it?” I asked.

  “No, I want to keep you as a friend. Get a warrant on Bello and bring his kid in as a potential material witness.”

  Time to deep-six the role as receptacle for Helen’s invective at my expense, I thought. “Tony Lujan’s name is now involved in three separate investigations-the assault on Monarch Little, the shooting death of Yvonne Darbonne, and a vehicular homicide. You think I’m obsessive or being unfair to him? How often does the average premed student get in this much trouble?”