Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

“At least for the time being. He may have had a window of opportunity, but there’s no evidence to put him at the crime scene.”

  “But Valerie Lujan thinks Monarch did it?”

  “If there weren’t people of color around for her to blame her problems on, she’d probably kill herself.”

  “You’ve got somebody in mind for this, Dave. I can see it in your face.”

  “I stoked Whitey Bruxal up. I told him Bello was going to roll over on him. The possibility that Whitey took him out doesn’t make me feel very good.”

  “Before you climb on a cross, you might consider this. It was a premeditated act. The killer hated Bello and wanted him to suffer. The killer also knew Bello ’s routine. Maybe the perp nursed a grudge for years. Bello had that kind of influence on people. Maybe Bruxal didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  The phone on my desk rang. It was Mack Bertrand, calling from the crime lab.

  “We have prints from several areas on the pick, some good, some bad,” he said. “Most of them were probably left there by the same individual. Regardless, we got no hits with AFIS.”

  “Not even possibilities?”

  “Nothing.”

  I had felt my hopes rise, then fade. “So maybe our suspect is a local with no record,” I said.

  “Could be. Bello was a sexual predator.”

  “You think this is a revenge killing, pure and simple?”

  “I’m at a loss on this whole investigation, Dave, I mean, into the Lujan boy’s death and Crustacean Man and the suicide of the Darbonne girl. I’ve come around to your way of thinking. It’s all part of one piece, but I don’t see the key.”

  “Helen’s in my office now. I’ll bring her up to date and get back to you later,” I said.

  “Something bothers me about the prints on the pick,” Mack said. “The steel head looks like it’s been partially wiped off. The same with the bottom of the handle. But the prints on the middle of the handle are defined and unsmudged. You following me?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “If someone wanted to wipe fingerprints off a murder weapon, in this case a pick, wouldn’t he want to wipe off the entire weapon-both the handle and the head? I think an individual wearing gloves sharpened the pick and later used it to kill Bello. When he swung the pick, he smudged the prints on the bottom of the handle. That’s just speculation, of course. My wife says I spend too much time in my head with this stuff.”

  No, you don’t, Mack, I thought.

  Helen had been sitting on the corner of my desk, on one haunch, as she always did when she was in my office. After I hung up, I told her what Mack had said. I could see the frustration grow in her face. “Lonnie Marceaux is going to have a field day with this,” she said.

  “What does this have to do with Lonnie?”

  “He’s hired an ad firm in Baton Rouge to build him up as a crusading prosecutor surrounded by drunken and corrupt flatfeet. I think he also wants to hand me my ass.”

  “Maybe I should have a talk with him.”

  She pointed a finger at me. “That’s the last thing you’re going to do. You copy that, bwana?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Because if bwana not copy, bwana gonna have the worst experience in his life.”

  Don’t contend, don’t argue, I heard a voice say inside me. “How did the civil preparedness meeting go?” I asked.

  She had not expected my response. She tilted her head sideways, almost looking at me in a new way, her eyes taking on a strange lavender cast that was both sensual and curious, as though I were of romantic interest to her. I felt my cheeks color.

  “We toured the levees. A one-hundred-sixty-mile-an-hour storm will turn New Orleans into a bowlful of oil and black sand,” she said. She squeezed my shoulder and looked me in the face. “No matter how this plays out, Streak, I don’t want you beating up on yourself anymore. Even though I yell at you sometimes, you’re one of the best people I’ve ever known.”

  I SPENT THE NEXT HALF HOUR cleaning out paperwork from my intake basket, putting off an inevitable stage in the investigation that I was not looking forward to. Finally I picked up the phone and called Cesaire Darbonne at his home. How do you tell a father whose daughter has died of a gunshot wound in his driveway that he is a possible suspect in a homicide? As Mack Bertrand said, how much grief does one man need?

  “This is Dave Robicheaux, Mr. Darbonne,” I said. “I’d like to return your daughter’s diary if you’re going to be home this afternoon.”

  “I got to go to the grocery store, but if I’m not home, I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

  “I’d rather give it to you in person.”

  “Yes, suh, ’bout an hour from now okay?”

  “I’ll see you then. Thanks for your goodwill, Mr. Darbonne,” I said.

  I eased the receiver back into the cradle, a terrible sense of discomfort seizing my chest. Oftentimes in an investigation involving a violent crime, when the degree of injury and the desire for revenge can last a lifetime, what people do not say is more important than what they do say. Rape victims want to see the perpetrator’s nails ripped out. Relatives of homicide victims, regardless of their religious principles, struggle a lifetime with their anger and desire for revenge, even after the perpetrator is dead, almost as though his specter has taken up residence in their homes.

  Cesaire Darbonne had not inquired about any new details we may have discovered regarding his daughter’s death. Even though the fatal shooting of Yvonne Darbonne had gone down as a suicide, wouldn’t the father have asked if I had learned who drove her home on that terrible day, who had given her the gun, who had filled her young body with drugs and booze? I tried to think of an explanation for his lack of curiosity. I didn’t want to think the thoughts I was thinking.

  I called Mack at the lab. “How well do you know Cesaire Darbonne?” I said.

  “He’s a distant cousin of my wife. Why?”

  “I just talked with him. He showed no apparent interest in any details we might have discovered about his daughter’s death.”

  “He’s a simple man, Dave. For a guy like Cesaire, the government is an abstraction. He lost his livelihood as a sugar farmer because of decisions somebody made in Washington. He said if he hadn’t been looking for work the day his daughter died, he would have been home to take care of her. I suspect he feels like a windstorm blew through his life and flattened everything around him.”

  “Have you ever known him to be violent or vengeful?”

  “He used to run a bar. About fifteen years ago, a couple of black guys tried to rob him. I think Cesaire fired a gun in the air and chased them off. I don’t know if you’d call that violence or not.”

  “Thanks, Mack.”

  After I hung up I removed Yvonne Darbonne’s diary from my desk drawer and read again through the entries that alluded to her love affair with the unnamed young man who had “cheeks red as apples.” One passage in particular seemed to speak worlds about both the nature of their relationship and the poetic soul of the Cajun girl who waited tables at Victor’s and dreamed of studying journalism at the university in Lafayette. She had written of a female seducer and an unwilling boy finally submitting on a bed of “blue-veined violets.” Then there were two quoted lines that suggested benign domination but domination nonetheless:

  Hot, faint, and weary with her hard embracing, Like a wild bird being tamed with too much handling.

  I had read them before, but I couldn’t remember where. I punched in a Google search on the department’s computer and came up with Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis.

  What did it all mean? Probably nothing of an evidentiary nature, but it did lend further credibility to the fact that Tony Lujan had homoerotic tendencies and they accounted in part for his dependent relationship with Slim Bruxal.

  I placed the diary in a brown mailing envelope and signed out a cruiser.

  It had started to rain again when I drove up the Teche on the broken two-lan
e back road that led past the sugar mill. The mill was as big as a mountain against the sky, gray and strung with wisps of smoke. Down below, across the road, the community of dull green frame houses by the bayou glistened in the rain, their dirt yards as shiny and hard-looking as old bone. I parked in Cesaire Darbonne’s driveway and tapped on his front door. Through the screen I could see him drinking coffee in his kitchen, a radio playing on a shelf, his eyes staring out the back window at the rain falling on the bayou.

  He walked to the front door, his eyes showing neither interest nor apprehension at my presence on his small gallery. When he unlatched the screen, I saw the chain of heart-shaped scars wrapped across the back of his left hand and around his forearm. “Would you like to have some coffee wit’ me, Mr. Robicheaux?” he asked.

  “I’d appreciate that,” I replied.

  He walked ahead of me into the kitchen. The interior of his home was spotless, the furniture free of dust, his dishes in a plastic rack by the sink, the kitchen linoleum drying from a recent mopping.

  “I used to fix coffee and cinnamon toast every afternoon at t’ree when Yvonne was going to school,” he said. “I don’t fix cinnamon toast no more, but I still drink coffee every day at t’ree o’clock. I drip it one tablespoon at a time, just like my daddy done.”

  I sat at his kitchen table and placed Yvonne’s diary, still inside the brown envelope, on top of the table while he prepared coffee and hot milk for me at the drainboard. I could feel sweat start to break on my forehead. I did not want to hurt this man.

  He walked toward me, the spoon jiggling slightly in the saucer, his eyes concentrated on not spilling the coffee.

  “I need to ask you where you were early this morning,” I said.

  His eyes lifted into mine with an acuity and sense of recognition I never want to see in a man’s face again. “You t’ink I’m the one done that to Bello Lujan?” he said.

  “You know about his death?”

  “It was on the radio.” He set the coffee in front of me, his eyes riveted on mine.

  “We have to exclude people, sir. It’s part of our procedure. Our questions shouldn’t be interpreted as accusations,” I said, using the first-person plural in a way that made me wonder about my own principles.

  “I went to the Winn-Dixie at sunup. I got gas in my truck down by the drawbridge. I had a flat out yonder in the road and changed my tire right by the mill gate.”

  He sat down across from me, his pale turquoise eyes never leaving mine. Not one strand of his silver hair was out of place; his skin had hardly a wrinkle or imperfection in it, except for the scars on his left forearm and the back of his hand. But the level of indignation in his eyes was like the edge of another personality asserting itself, one that was not given to latitude in its dealings with others.

  I took his daughter’s diary out of the envelope and set it in front of him. “Violent and evil men took my wife Annie from me, Mr. Darbonne. The same kind of cruel men murdered my mother. But as bad as my losses have been, I think the greatest suffering any human being can experience is the loss of a child. But I have a job to do, and in this case it’s to exclude you as a suspect in the homicide of Bello Lujan.”

  I removed a ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket and set it on top of the brown envelope and pushed them toward him. “Now, I need you to write down the names of the people who saw you this morning and the approximate times their sighting of you or their conversation with you took place. If you don’t know a person’s name, just describe what he or she does at the location the person saw you.”

  He pushed the envelope and pen back toward me. “Why I want to hurt Bello Lujan, me?” he said.

  If there was to be a moment of truth in this investigation, I thought, it was now. “There’s a possibility Bello attacked your daughter on the day of her death,” I said.

  He canted his head to one side and tilted up his chin, as though a cold draft had touched his skin. His mouth parted and the color in his eyes seemed to darken. He placed both his hands on the tabletop. “Bello Lujan raped Yvonne?” he said.

  “It’s a strong possibility.”

  “And that’s why she took them drugs?”

  “Yes, sir, I think that may well have been the case.”

  He stared into space, one hand resting on top of Yvonne’s diary. “Why ain’t nobody tole me this?”

  “What Bello did or didn’t do the day of Yvonne’s death is still a matter of speculation, Mr. Darbonne.”

  “If I’d knowed this-”

  I waited for him to finish his statement, but he didn’t. “You would have killed him?” I said.

  He didn’t reply. He took back the pen and brown envelope and began to write, listing the places where he had been that morning and the time period he was there and the people who had seen him.

  “Do you own a pick?” I said.

  “I got one out in the shed. I brought it from the farm I used to own.”

  “Let’s take a look at it,” I said.

  We went outside, in the rain, with pieces of newspaper over our heads, and walked down the slope of his yard to an old army surplus radio hut where he kept his tools. He unlocked the door and clicked on a light. Like his home, everything was squared away, his nails in capped jars on his workbench, his tools oiled and sharpened and hung in rows on the walls, his paint cans and petrochemical containers arrayed neatly on a polyethylene tarp so they wouldn’t form rings on the floor.

  “My pick ain’t here,” he said.

  “I see. Could it be somewhere else?”

  “No, suh. I hang it between them two nails. It’s been hanging there since last spring, when Yvonne and me put in a vegetable garden.”

  “Does anyone else have a key to the shed?”

  “No, suh.”

  “Would you mind coming down to the department and being fingerprinted?”

  It was dry and bright inside the shed, and the rain was slanting outside the door and clicking on the roof. The inside of the shed had a pleasant, warm odor to it, like leaves and field mice and oats in heavy burlap bags. “Sir?” I said.

  “I don’t mind,” he said. He wiped the rainwater out of his eyes with his left hand.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you get those scars on your arm?”

  “Duck-hunting accident ’bout twenty years ago. Just like all this, a big dumb accident. One t’ing turn into another and you cain’t turn none of it around. All she wanted to do was go to colletch. Everyt’ing gone to hell just because she wanted to go to colletch. She met that Lujan boy and t’ought she was gonna be his sweetheart. How come she didn’t tell me none of this? I wish I wasn’t never born.”

  Chapter 23

  WHITEY BRUXAL’S CAPACITY for deceit and cunning was not to be underestimated. On Friday morning his attorney, a dapper grimebag by the name of Milton Vidrine, called Helen Soileau at the department. Milton had put himself through law school as a bug exterminator, then had made a good living chasing ambulances in Baton Rouge. In fact, he became known as “Twilight Zone” Vidrine because he was an expert at showing up in emergency wards and intensive-care units and convincing half-comatose accident victims to sign settlement agreements and liability waivers that often left the accident victims destitute. Vidrine said he wanted to talk to Helen and me simultaneously. Coincidentally, I was sitting in her office when the call came in. She clicked on the speakerphone but did not tell him that I was there.

  “What’s this about?” she said.

  “Mr. Bruxal wants you to have a clear understanding about a situation that is not of his making and over which he has no control,” Vidrine replied.

  “What might that be?” Helen said.

  “I’d like Detective Robicheaux to be present.”

  “I’m the administrative authority in this department. Do you want to tell me what this is about or do you want to put it in a letter?” she said.

  He paused a moment. “Detective Robicheaux has a reputation as a hothead and a violent man.
His alcoholic history is no secret in Lafayette. But Mr. Bruxal wants to make sure Detective Robicheaux is not harmed in any way. This call is more a matter of conscience than legality.”

  Helen was standing against the glare of the window, her face wrapped in shadow, but I could see her laughing silently at the absurdity of a man like Milton Vidrine referring to matters of conscience.

  “I’m right here, Mr. Vidrine. Thanks for the character assessment and for getting in touch,” I said, leaning forward in my chair.

  Milton Vidrine might have been disarmed for two seconds at the revelation that I had been listening to his remarks, but no more than two seconds. “Mr. Bruxal has fired his employee Thomas Leo Raguza and wants to inform all parties concerned that he takes no responsibility for this man’s actions,” he said.

  “I’m not sure how I should interpret that,” I said.

  “You gave Mr. Raguza a severe beating, Detective Robicheaux. Mr. Bruxal has no knowledge about your previous relationship with Mr. Raguza or why or how he provoked you. But Mr. Bruxal does not want to employ anyone who bears hostility toward any member of local law enforcement. He’s also concerned that Mr. Raguza could be a threat.”

  “Say that last part again,” Helen said.

  “My client believes Mr. Raguza is unstable and should be considered potentially dangerous.”

  “Bruxal just recently made this discovery?” I said.

  “I’m passing on the information as it was presented to me,” he replied.

  “Here’s some more information for you. Lefty Raguza and your client were involved in the murder of a friend of mine. His name was-”

  Before I could continue, Helen propped her arms on her desk and leaned down to the speakerphone. She placed her thumb on the phone’s “memo” button. “As of this moment this phone conversation is being recorded. Your statement about the danger posed to a member of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department by Thomas Raguza is duly noted. I’m also at this juncture informing you that I consider this information a disguised conveyance of a threat against a member of my department.”