Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  “Miss Ellen, did you see anyone prowling around our house in the last day or so?” I asked.

  She twisted the water faucet shut and walked toward me. She wore a wide straw hat and a blue sundress and an apron with big pockets for her garden tools. Miss Ellen had a way of never speaking to others from a distance, as though honesty and candor always required her to look directly into a person’s eyes when she spoke. “He said he was a friend of yours. He said he was staying with you.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “A blond man who tied a canoe at the foot of your property. It was at dawn. He opened a can of sardines and fed the raccoon.”

  “This wasn’t a friend. Tripod was poisoned.”

  I saw something shrink inside her. “I thought he might have been vacationing here. He was very relaxed and polite. He came out of the fog and made a point of saying hello. He said he didn’t want to startle me.”

  “Was he a tall or short man?”

  “No, he wasn’t tall.”

  “How about an accent or tattoos?”

  She seemed to look into her memory, then she shook her head. “He had tiny pits in his cheeks, like needle holes.”

  “This afternoon somebody from the department will bring you a few mug shots. Maybe you can pick this fellow out for us.”

  But she wasn’t hearing me. Her face made me think of paper that had been held too close to a heat source. It seemed to have wrinkled from within, as though someone had pinched off a piece of her soul. “Mr. Robicheaux, I’m very sorry I didn’t notify you. Is your raccoon-”

  “He’s fine, Miss Ellen. Don’t feel bad about this. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “No, I haven’t,” she said. “I should have called your house.”

  “I think you’ve already told me who this guy is. You’ve done a good deed here.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “I do.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Miss Ellen?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you see this man again, don’t talk with him. Call me or the sheriff’s department,” I said.

  “This man is genuinely wicked, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  I watched her go back to work in her garden, troweling a hole for a potted caladium, the damp black soil she had created out of coffee grinds and compost sprinkled on her forearms like grains of pepper. But I knew Miss Ellen had not returned to the normalcy that characterized an ordinary day in her life as caretaker of East Main. The lie told her by the man in the canoe had diminished her faith in her fellow man, and if wounds can remain green, this one I suspected was at the top of the list.

  On the way back to the house, I saw a tube of roach paste lying inside the bamboo border of my property.

  That afternoon, a uniformed deputy showed Miss Ellen a half-dozen booking-room photos. The deputy radioed in that she took all of two seconds to tap her finger on the face of Lefty Raguza.

  Why would Raguza commit such a senseless act of cruelty? If you ask any of these guys why they do anything (and by “these guys” I mean those who long ago have stopped any pretense of self-justification), the answer is always the same: “I felt like it.”

  I called Joe Dupree, an old friend at the Lafayette P.D. who had transferred from Homicide to the Sex Crimes Unit to Vice. The last helicopter may have lifted off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975, but thirty years later Joe was still humping a pack on a night trail, an M-60 across his shoulders, his arms spread on the stock and barrel like a man on a cross. He was addicted to speed, booze, bad women, and the conviction that no force on earth could remove his fear of sleep. I had long ago given up trying to help Joe, but I still admired his courage, his integrity as a cop, and the fact that he stacked his own time and didn’t complain about the burden he carried.

  “This guy does scut work for Whitey Bruxal?” he said.

  “More or less. Maybe he helped take down an armored car in Miami. Two people got killed in the heist. One of them was a friend of mine.”

  “Why would he want to poison your coon?”

  “Maybe Whitey Bruxal is starting to feel the heat and wants to provoke me into self-destructing. Or maybe it has to do with Clete Purcel. He bounced Raguza around a little bit.”

  “I can’t quite visualize ‘bounced.’”

  “Clete blew him all over a restroom with a fire hose.”

  I heard Joe laugh. “You want me to have a talk with Raguza?”

  “That’s like talking to a closetful of clothes moths. I need a serious handle on him, something that can jam him up and leave him with bad choices.”

  “I’ll see what I can come up with. Look, on the subject of Whitey Bruxal, I took a strange call from his wife three days ago.”

  “You’re not working Vice anymore?”

  “We think Bruxal is laundering meth money. For a while I was in charge of a surveillance at his house. Anyway, his old lady seems to be a real nutcase. Check this out: He met her at what’s called the Wild Hog Festival in Collier County, Florida. People who are half-human come out of the Glades and-”

  “Joe, I’ve got a time squeeze going here.”

  “She tells me in this mushmouth cracker accent that the gas man stole twenty dollars out of her purse. So I told myself this was a good time to see the inside of Bruxal’s house. When I get out there, she tells me she found the twenty-dollar bill on the floor and there was no problem, that the gas man had checked out a leak by the barbecue pit and had come inside to turn off and relight her pilots but she was mistaken about the missing twenty dollars.

  “So I say, ‘You had a gas leak out here?’

  “She said the meter reader smelled it by the barbecue pit out on the breezeway and a repairman came in to turn off all the pilots on the hot water heaters so they could see if gas was still going through the meter. She said the repairman asked her to sit on the glider in the yard in case there was any danger.

  “I said, ‘Your husband wasn’t home?’

  “She goes, ‘No, he was out of town. Why you ask that?’

  “Then she tells me these guys were in and out of her house for a half hour. I called the gas company when I got back to the department. They said no meter reader had been out to the Bruxal residence since last month.”

  “Feds?” I said.

  “They’re chasing terrorists.”

  “Thanks for your help, Joe.”

  “We’re firing pop guns against the side of an aircraft carrier,” he said.

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “The gambling industry in this country pulls in hundreds of billions a year. Guys like us earn paychecks that have the purchase power of toilet paper. Who do you think is gonna walk out of the smoke?”

  “So we’ll piss in their shoes.”

  “That’s why I always liked you, Dave. Innocent all the way to the boneyard.”

  I LOOKED AT the case files on my desk and couldn’t begin to compute the amount of time I needed to pursue the investigation into the murder of Tony Lujan, the possible rape and subsequent suicide of Yvonne Darbonne, and the vehicular hit-and-run death of Crustacean Man. I was convinced all three cases were tied to one another, but I wasn’t sure how. To complicate matters, Tony’s part-time girlfriend had told me she was absolutely sure Monarch had called the Lujan home and arranged a meeting with Tony shortly before he was killed at close range with a twelve-gauge shotgun. My earlier belief that Monarch was not a killer now seemed more and more like the thinking of a politically correct fool.

  My file folders on Tony Lujan, Yvonne Darbonne, and Crustacean Man were thick with handwritten notes, crime scene photos, summations of witness interviews, postmortem forms, cassette tapes of 911 calls, forensic reports, and national database printouts on firearms and ballistics. The clerical work I had done on all three cases was impressive to look at. The truth was, all three investigations had become circular and virtually worthless in terms of prosecutorial val
ue. But in my opinion there was still one individual out there besides the killer who had knowledge about the causes behind Tony’s death. If so, he had obviously not been willing to come forward, even though he was ostensibly a religious man. I had met him once before, at the home of the Chalons family, one that was notorious for its involvement with casinos on the Texas-Louisiana state line. Maybe it was time to test the legitimacy of Colin Alridge’s claim on spirituality.

  I called Alice Werenhaus, Clete’s secretary at his New Orleans office, and in a half hour she called back and told me where I could find Alridge. I signed out of the department and told Helen I would be out of town until at least the next morning.

  Chapter 17

  THE TWO-STORY HOME that was deeded in the name of his ministry was built of lacquered logs on a bluff that overlooked the Mississippi Sound and a stretch of shell-streaked beach spiked with salt grass. To the west the alluvial flow of the Mississippi River formed an enormous brown cloud of silt and mud along the Louisiana coastline, but just east of the river’s mouth, the Gulf was green, capped with waves all the way to the southern horizon, and pelicans glided above the water like fighter-bombers in formation.

  It was almost dusk when I drove down a broken asphalt lane through pine trees to his front gate. I expected that he would have private security in place around his home, but there was none that I could see, only a railed fence around a yard planted with flowers and St. Augustine grass.

  I knocked on the front door, but no one answered and I could hear no sound from inside the house. The borders of the deck were hung with baskets of impatiens and geraniums, and inside the railing were iron chairs that had been painted white and a glass-topped table shaded by a canvas umbrella. The sky was aflame with the sunset, the pine trees north of the dunes whipping in the evening wind. The fragrance of the flowers, the salt air, the resinous smell of the trees that reminded the viewer he was still in the state of Mississippi were like a perfect moment in time, an encapsulation of everything that was aesthetic in the Deep South.

  But there were no people. No children playing on the beach, no woman reading on the deck, no gardener snipping flowers for a vase that would be placed with burning candles on a dining room table. For reasons that perhaps made no sense, I thought of the paintings of the young Adolf Hitler when he had supported himself as a sidewalk artist. Hitler’s street scenes and buildings were geometrically precise, the lines like the edges of knives, but there were no people on the streets or inside the buildings, as though the human family had been vacuumed off the planet.

  On the far side of Alridge’s house were a dock and boat slip and a channel that was fed by the bay at high tide. No boat was moored at the dock, but a bright rainbowlike film of gasoline and oil floated next to one of the pilings. A cooler and an orange life jacket and a cheap spinning rod lay in a pile on the planks, as though the owner had started to take them with him in his boat, then had lost interest in his purpose.

  I went back to my truck, pushed back the seat, and closed my eyes. As the sun sank behind the pines and the summer light turned green and dark across the sky, I heard the drone of an outboard in the distance. I took my field glasses out of the glove box and focused them on a twelve-foot aluminum boat bouncing through the whitecaps, farther out than I would have been willing to go in a boat that size.

  As Colin Alridge came up the channel, canted sideways on the rear seat, his hand on the throttle, his expression showed mild curiosity at my presence but no sense of alarm. He cut the gas and let his boat slide into the dock on its wake.

  “My name is Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said, opening my badge holder. “We met a year or so ago in Jeanerette.”

  “Yes, I remember you. How are you?” he said.

  Without waiting for me to answer, he looped the painter of his boat around a post on the dock and stepped off the bow onto the planks. He was wearing beltless, wash-faded Levi’s and a print shirt. His skin was slightly burned by the sun, adding an air of ruggedness to his boyish good looks.

  “You left your fishing gear and cooler behind,” I said.

  “I’m not that keen on fishing, really. I just like to get out in the wind.”

  “I’m investigating the death of Tony Lujan. I thought you might be able to help me out.”

  “I don’t see how,” he said, gathering up his fishing rod, cooler, and life jacket, glancing sideways at me.

  “I’ve interviewed Tony’s mother at some length. Evidently you’re a good friend of the family.”

  “I know Mrs. Lujan. She’s a supporter of my ministry, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Did she tell you Tony’s life was in danger?”

  He gave me a quizzical look. “Where did you get that?” he said. But again he didn’t wait for me to answer. “Mrs. Lujan is a private person. She shares very little about the tragedies in her life.”

  Alridge had just made his first and second mistakes. Like all people with something to hide, he telegraphed his fear by trying to fill the environment around him with his own words. Also, he answered questions with questions or made oblique statements that were factually true but did not address the issue. I was convinced he was dirty from the jump, but it was going to be a long haul to prove it.

  I pulled at my ear. “Can we sit down?” I asked.

  “I’m expecting some people over.”

  “You’re not wearing a watch,” I said, and smiled.

  “Pardon?”

  “You have people coming over but you went out in your boat and didn’t bother to wear a watch.”

  “You’re an observant man,” he said. He grinned and removed a pocketwatch from his jeans. “Let’s go up on the deck for a few minutes. But then I have to take a shower and put something together for dinner.”

  He dropped his cooler and life jacket and spinning rod on the grass, then mounted the wood steps to the deck. “Watch that third step. It’s a little rotted,” he said, glancing back at me.

  Colin Alridge was not only slick, he was likable. But I had known his kind before. They tested your charity by forcing you to believe in them. To reject their sincerity, their mix of patriotism and religion and love of family, was somehow to reject your own country. Ultimately, they used the suffering of others to justify their own actions. Colin Alridge’s support for foreign wars was unequivocal, regardless of the issues involved. His rhetoric was lofty, his eyes clear, his principles as present in his manner as a flag popping in the breeze. Tony Lujan might be a thorn in his conscience, but not one so great that a Band-Aid or two couldn’t heal it.

  I sat down in one of the scrolled-iron chairs on the deck and stared at my shoes a moment. “I think Tony Lujan was involved in the death of a homeless man. I think his mother told you what her son had done. You didn’t come forward with that information, Mr. Alridge. That’s called aiding and abetting after the fact.”

  “Maybe what you say is true. Maybe it’s not. But as an ordained minister I have certain protections under the law.”

  “We can settle some things here or we can do it in front of a grand jury. The word is Bello Lujan and Whitey Bruxal and a few other casino operators launder money through a Washington lobbyist, who in turn gives it to your ministry. Then you exercise your influence on your religious constituency to shut down their competitors. Frankly, I don’t have any interest in your ties to the gambling industry. But I’ve got three open homicide cases on my hands, and I believe you’ve got the key to at least one of them.”

  The evening light had receded into a single strip of purple and red clouds on the western horizon, but even in the gloom I could see my words take hold in Alridge’s face, as though he had been bitch-slapped in public.

  “You need to speak to my attorney,” he said.

  “Fuck your attorney. If you want to shill for Whitey Bruxal and Bello Lujan, that’s your business. But Tony Lujan and maybe Slim Bruxal, that’s Whitey’s kid, ran over a derelict and left him to die on th
e side of a road. We call the derelict Crustacean Man because we have no other name to put on him. But I guarantee you, Mr. Alridge, before this is over, that guy is going to have a name and somebody is going to take the bounce for his death. If you’re aiding and abetting, your next evangelical crusade is going to be on closed-circuit TV in Angola Pen.”

  He rose from his chair, flipping open his cell phone, almost spiking himself in the eye on one of the umbrella’s points. “I just hit the speed dial to the ministry’s security service. They’ll help you find your way to your vehicle.”

  I stood up and looked at the sunset. The air was filled with the heavy, damp, green smell of the Gulf, and I said or perhaps thought a prayer of thanks for the fact I didn’t have to live inside Colin Alridge’s skin. “One cautionary word before I go,” I said. “I used to find ways to skirt on the edge of blowing out my own doors. That’s how depression works. It’s like being drunk, except you don’t know you’re drunk, and you find ways to set yourself up for the Big Exit because you can’t deal with the guilt that’s stitched like a black tumor across your brain. I’d give some thought to my problems, Mr. Alridge, before I stepped across a line and found myself irrevocably on the way to being dead for a very long time.”

  Then I walked back down the steps and followed a sandy path toward my truck, the wind cool and gusting off the bay through the pines. When I looked over my shoulder, Alridge was still on his deck, his hands propped on the railing, like a ship’s captain peering out onto the ocean, every light in his house blazing against the darkness.