Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  “Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Yes?”

  “Also bring the video. The one you said shows the Darbonne girl at our garden party. Bring that with the cigarettes.”

  Thirty minutes later, the maid let me in the front door. Outside, the sun was white in the sky, the windows running with humidity, but the interior of the house was frigid. There was no sign of Bello or his car. Mrs. Lujan gestured at me from the sunporch, her fingers curling back toward her palm.

  “Sit,” she said. Then she waited, her eyes on my face.

  “You want the cigarettes?” I said.

  “Take one out and give it to me.”

  I removed the cellophane from the package and slipped a cigarette loose for her. She held it between two fingers and waited. I took a folder of matches from my shirt pocket and lit her cigarette and blew out the match. There was no ashtray on the glass tabletop that separated me from her wheelchair, and I set the match on the edge of a coffee saucer and placed the package of cigarettes next to it. She turned her face to one side when she exhaled the smoke, then looked at me quizzically. “You think I’m strange?” she said.

  “It’s not my job to make those kinds of judgments.”

  “Put the video in the machine,” she said.

  I shoved the cassette into the VCR and watched the first images come up on the screen. She continued to smoke as I fast-forwarded the tape, her eyes rheumy, sunken like green marbles into bread dough. She seemed to radiate sickness in the same way that an unchanged bandage or an infected wound does. I even wondered if the diminution of her bone structure had less to do with an automobile accident than a cancerous anger that lived inside her.

  I stopped the tape on the garden party, backed it up, and recommenced it. Once again, Yvonne Darbonne was dancing to the signature composition of John Lee Hooker, her shoulders powdered with freckles, her pug nose turned up at the sky.

  “That’s the girl who shot herself?” Mrs. Lujan said.

  “Do you remember her?”

  “She was pretty. Tony brought her here. Then he left, and she was dancing by herself. She was wearing that tank top. She spilled sangria on it.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was watching the dancers from the upstairs window. She looked up at me and smiled and pointed at the stain on her top. It was wet and dark on the material. Her breasts were molded against the cloth and I remember thinking she didn’t belong out there, at least not with the likes of Slim Bruxal. I waved at her to come inside. I wanted to give her a clean blouse to wear.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I saw her talk to Slim, then to Bello. She walked under the orange tree, below my line of vision, then I couldn’t see her anymore. I heard the door slam. The side door is right under my bedroom, and when it slams I can always feel the vibration through the floor. So I know she went into the house. Then I heard the door slam a second time.”

  Mrs. Lujan drew in on the cigarette and blew out the smoke and watched it flatten against the window. Her makeup was caked, her mouth stitched with wrinkles that were as thin as cat’s whiskers, her eyes looking at an image, imagined or real, trapped inside her head.

  “Who followed Yvonne Darbonne into the house?” I asked.

  “There’s a game room behind the den. Bello keeps the curtains drawn so the western sun doesn’t get in. It’s the place where he goes to be alone. I heard something thump against the wall down there. I kept waiting to hear another thump, the way you do when a sound wakes you up in the middle of the night. But I didn’t. All I heard were voices.”

  “Voices?”

  “I heard a girl’s. I heard it come up through the pipe in the lavatory. It was loud, then it stopped, and I couldn’t hear anything except the sound of water running. I think somebody turned on the shower down there. I can always tell when it’s the shower in the game room. The stall is made of tin. The water makes a drumming sound on the sides. I wanted to think she was just taking a shower. But that’s not why somebody turned on the water, is it?”

  I waited before I spoke again. “What do you think happened down there, Mrs. Lujan?”

  “I used the intercom to call Sidney, the colored man in the kitchen. It took over fifteen minutes to get him up here. I told him to go down to the game room and see who was in there. But he refused.”

  “Pardon?”

  “He said he had left a tray of drinks on the landing and had to take them out on the lawn before somebody tripped on them. But I knew he was lying.”

  “I’m not with you.”

  “ Sidney couldn’t look at me. His eyeballs kept rolling around in his head. I told him to stop acting like Stepin Fetchit and get down there. Ten minutes later I called him on the intercom again. He still hadn’t gone into the game room.”

  “Why wouldn’t he do as you told him, Mrs. Lujan?”

  She wore dentures, and they looked hard and stiff inside her mouth, her flesh by contrast soft and trembling against them. “Because he was afraid of what he would have to tell me. Because he was afraid of my goddamn husband,” she said.

  Her eyes were moist now, the flat of her fist pressed against her mouth.

  “There’s something else I have to ask you, Mrs. Lujan,” I said.

  When she looked up at me, the whites of her eyes were threaded with tiny red lines.

  “I think Colin Alridge has knowledge about your son’s death. I think he may know why Tony was murdered. I believe you gave Alridge information you won’t give us,” I said. “Monarch Little didn’t kill your boy, did he?”

  She stared into space, as though reviewing all the words she had said and listened to and all the images her own words had caused her to see inside her head and the confession of personal failure and inadequacy she had just made to a stranger. Her face grew still and composed and she looked up at me again, this time her eyes free of pain, her thoughts clear.

  “I’ve been a fool, Mr. Robicheaux. You are what I’ve heard others say of you. You’re a dishonorable and self-serving man, and I should not have confided in you. You’ll leave a black animal on the street while the blood of his victim runs in the gutter. There is only one type of person who does that, sir, someone who feels an intolerable sense of guilt about himself. Take your videocassette with you when you leave. Don’t return without a warrant, either.”

  THAT NIGHT I lay beside Molly in the dark and tried to sleep. I have never given much credence to the notion that the dead are held captive by the weight of tombstones placed on their chests. I believe they slip loose from their fastenings of rotted satin and mold board and tree roots and the clay itself and visit us in nocturnal moments that we are allowed to dismiss as dreams. They’re in our midst, still hanging on for reasons of their own. Sometimes I think their visitation has less to do with their own motives than ours. I think sometimes it is we who need the dead rather than the other way around.

  Once, I saw the specter of my drowned father standing in the surf, rain dancing on his hard hat while he gave me the thumbs-up sign. Annie, my murdered wife, spoke to me inside the static on a telephone line during an electric storm. Sometimes at dusk, when the wind swirled through the sugarcane in a field, denting and flattening it just like elephant grass under the downdraft of a helicopter, I was sure I saw men from my platoon, all KIA, waiting for the Jolly Green to descend from the sky.

  A therapist told me these experiences were a psychotic reaction to events I couldn’t control. The therapist was a decent and well-meaning man and I didn’t argue with him. But I know what I saw and heard, and just like anyone who has stacked time in what Saint John of the Cross described as the dark night of the soul, I long ago gave up either defending myself or arguing with those who have never had their ticket punched.

  It was hot and breathless outside, and the sound of dry thunder, like crackling cellophane, leaked from clouds that gave no rain. Through the back window I could see vapor lamps burning in City Park and a layer of dust floa
ting on the bayou’s surface. I could see the shadows of the oaks moving in my yard when the wind puffed through the canopy. I could see beads of humidity, as bright as quicksilver, slipping down the giant serrated leaves of the philodendron, and the humped shape of a gator lumbering crookedly across the mudbank, suddenly plunging into water and disappearing inside the lily pads. I saw all these things just as I heard helicopter blades roaring by overhead, and for just a second, for no reason that made any sense, I saw Dallas Klein getting to his knees on a hot street swirling with yellow dust in Opa-Locka, Florida, like a man preparing himself for his own decapitation.

  I sat up in bed, unsure if I was awake or dreaming. I looked down the slope to the bayou, and all was as it had been a few moments earlier, except my heart was racing and I could smell my own odor rising from inside my T-shirt. I felt Molly’s weight shift in the bed.

  “Did you have a dream?” she said.

  “A chopper flew over the house and woke me up. It was probably a guy on his way out to a rig.”

  “Did you dream about the war?”

  “No, I don’t dream about it much anymore. It was just the sudden sound of helicopter blades that woke me, that’s all.”

  But you don’t tell a lie to a Catholic nun and get away with it. Molly went into the kitchen and returned with a glass of lemonade for each of us. We sat there in the dark and drank the lemonade and watched the trees flare against the sky. She placed her hand on top of mine and squeezed it. “You never have to keep secrets from me,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You know it but you don’t believe it.”

  “I believe you’re everything that’s good, Molly Boyle.”

  She lay down next to me, the curve of her body close against me, her arm across my chest, the fragrance of her hair cool in my face. And that’s the way I went to sleep, inside the fragrance and body heat of Molly Boyle, and I did not wake until dawn.

  BUT IN THE MORNING I could not shake the vision I had seen of Dallas Klein kneeling on a sidewalk in Opa-Locka, Florida. Was the vision simply a matter of unresolved guilt about his death? Or was it a warning?

  Because I carried a badge, I sometimes presumed. Sometimes in my vanity I saw myself as a light bearer, possessed of an invulnerability that ordinary men and women did not share. There were times when I actually believed my badge was indeed a shield. Soldiers experience the same false sense of confidence after surviving their first combat. Gamblers think they have magic painted on them when they pick a perfecta out of the air or draw successfully to an inside straight. The high of a boozer doesn’t even come close to any of the aforementioned.

  All of it is an illusion. Our appointment in Samarra is made for us without our consent, and Death finds us of its own accord and in its own time. Cops rarely die in firefights with bank robbers. They’re shot to death during routine traffic stops or while responding to domestic disturbances. As a rule, their killers couldn’t masturbate without a diagram.

  I had taken too much for granted in my attitude about the killers of Dallas Klein. The people who had killed him were not only cold-blooded, they were cynical and cruel and I believe totally committed to a life of evil. They exploited Dallas ’s weakness as a compulsive gambler to rob him of his honesty, his valorous war record, his self-respect, and finally his life. His executioner had even ridiculed him before pulling the trigger on the shotgun, calling him “a joke,” ensuring he would realize before he died how badly he had been used.

  I had no doubt Whitey Bruxal was behind the armored car heist. But Lefty Raguza’s role was another matter. Could he have been at the scene? He’d had an alibi, but an alibi for a guy like Raguza was never further than a phone call away. I had heard the shooter speak just before the van steered around the armored car, but the alcohol in my blood and the gunfire and glass caving out of the saloon window onto the concrete and the whang of buckshot into the metal door behind him had turned my ears into cauliflower. I had tried a thousand times to re-create the voice in my head, always with the same result. I had witnessed an execution, and my recall of it was absolutely worthless.

  The killer had been someone for whom cruelty and sexual pleasure were interchangeable, a man who I suspected not only killed for enjoyment but who experienced the moment as a form of benediction bestowed upon him by his own id.

  Did this describe Lefty Raguza?

  And Clete had not only baited Whitey Bruxal and gotten into it with Raguza, he was in the sack with Trish Klein, an amateur grifter who thought she could use a collection of self-deluded blue-collar kids to bring down her father’s killer.

  In the meantime, Lonnie Marceaux was playing both ends against the middle and using both the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department to further his own political ambitions.

  I believed Whitey Bruxal and Lefty Raguza had come to Louisiana with the same sense of excitement and expectation generated in hogs when they get a downwind sniff of a trough brimming with swill. We were amateurs and they knew it. They bought politicians and media people for chump change, and fleeced Social Security recipients and twenty-five-dollar-an-hour offshore oil drillers alike, while convincing them that casinos increased their quality of life.

  Lonnie Marceaux thought he was going to take Bruxal off at the neck. Inside Lonnie’s worldview, Helen Soileau and I were as important as his fingernail parings. Yesterday I had walked out on a meeting with him, as though somehow that changed the fact he was skewing an investigation to serve his own ends. Maybe it was time to set the record straight in a more definitive fashion. I picked up my phone and called his office. “I’d like to drop by for a minute,” I said.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “To apologize.”

  “People go off half-cocked sometimes. Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “I appreciate your attitude. But I’d like to apologize in person.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Yeah, it is. I’ll be right over.”

  When I entered his office he was standing by his desk, putting files in a briefcase. His long-sleeved white shirt had glittering strips in it, like tin ribbons, and it hung on his frame without a fold or crease in it, as though the sense of freshness and efficiency he brought to the job could not be diminished by the heat of the day. He glanced up from his briefcase and grinned. “You don’t have a splinter in your butt about something, do you?” he asked.

  “I haven’t been adequately forthcoming with you, Lonnie. I don’t think Monarch Little is our killer. If anybody had motivation to kill the Lujan kid, it was Slim Bruxal or his old man.”

  “What motivation is that?”

  “Tony Lujan was the weak sister in the death of Crustacean Man. He was going to roll over on Slim.”

  “But you don’t know that.”

  “I know that Monarch Little is too convenient a target for your office.”

  “Is he, now?”

  “He’s a gangbanger and dope dealer, and large crowds aren’t going to be saying rosaries for him if he rides the needle. There won’t be a civil rights issue about him, either. Most black civic leaders wouldn’t take the time to piss on his grave.”

  “You’re telling me, to my face, I’m framing an innocent man?”

  “If you pop Monarch, you win three ways. You clear the homicide, you take a dealer off the street permanently, and you’ve still got Slim Bruxal on an assault beef. You can freeze out the Feds and use Slim to squeeze his old man and by extension Colin Alridge.”

  “You know, if it weren’t for your age and the fact we’re both civilized men, I think I’d break your nose.”

  “Your magnanimity is humbling, Lonnie, but anytime you’d like to walk into the restroom and bolt the door, I’d be glad to accommodate you.”

  “I want you off the case.”

  “Talk to Helen.”

  “That’s perfect.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “If it wasn’t for Helen Soileau, you couldn�
�t get a job picking up litter in City Park. She’s covered your sorry ass for so long, people think she’s either stopped being a queer or you’re her portable muff diver. But I’m not going to let either her or you-”

  That’s as far as he got. I hit him so hard the blow peppered blood across the window glass. He went straight down on his buttocks like a man whose legs had caved into broken ceramic.

  Chapter 16

  THAT DAY I HAD PLANNED to meet Molly at home for lunch. She worked at a Catholic foundation down the bayou that built homes for poor people, and twice a week she prepared an extraordinary lunch before she left for work, then returned home before noon and laid it on the kitchen table so it would be ready when I walked through the door.

  Today she had heated up a pot of white rice and a fricassee chicken that had already cooked down into a soft stew of onions, pimientos, floating pieces of meat, chopped-up peppers, and brown gravy. She had set flowery lace mats on the table, and heaped a tight ball of steaming rice in each of our gumbo bowls, and placed jelly glasses and a pitcher of iced tea filled with lemon slices and sprigs of mint in the center. It was a simple meal, but one that few men can come home to at noontime on a workday.

  I sat down with her, and she said grace for both of us, one hand touching mine. Snuggs was stretched out on a throw rug in front of a floor fan, his short fur stiffening in the breeze. Through the back window I could see a spray of gold and red four-o’clocks opening in the shade of a live oak and blue jays flying in and out of the sunlight. I filled a spoon with rice and stewed chicken and put it in my mouth.

  “What happened to your finger?” Molly asked.

  “You mean that little cut?” I replied, removing my hand from the table and picking up the napkin in my lap.

  “I don’t call that a little cut. It looks like somebody bit you.”

  I laughed and tried to shine her on.

  “Dave?”

  “Huh?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I had a little run-in with Lonnie Marceaux.”