Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  I sat down in a deep white chair, leaning forward, my back stiff, so as not to look relaxed or accommodating. “Cesaire Darbonne didn’t kill your husband, Mrs. Lujan,” I said.

  “Just a moment,” she said, and turned to the maid. “Finish up in the kitchen and tell Luther to bring around the car.” Then she addressed me again. “To be honest, I really don’t care who killed my husband.”

  “But we do. Whitey Bruxal thought Bello was going to roll over on him and he used a stable mucker by the name of Juan Bolachi to take him out.”

  “Then you must arrest him.”

  “Except there’s another problem. Whitey decided to frame Cesaire Darbonne for the homicide, but that means Whitey knew we’d eventually discover that Bello raped Yvonne Darbonne and that her father would be a perfect suspect when a pickax stolen from Cesaire’s toolshed was used to tear Bello apart.”

  She looked at a tiny gold watch on her wrist. The color of her skin and the veins in her arms made me think of milk and pieces of green string. “I’d like to be of assistance, but I’m on my way to the cemetery,” she said. “It’s Tony’s birthday. He always loved strawberry cake with pink icing.”

  “Who told Whitey that Bello probably raped Yvonne?” I asked.

  “I certainly didn’t, and I resent your suggesting I did.”

  “That wasn’t my intention. But there is one man you do confide in. He’s your friend and spiritual counselor, someone who claims to be a man of God, someone you trust, a man you believe would never betray you.”

  Her eyes fixed on my face with an intensity that seemed far greater than her failing powers were capable of generating. I knew I had hit home.

  “You’re saying Colin Alridge passed on information about my husband to Whitey Bruxal?” she said.

  “You bet I am. No matter what he tells you, Alridge’s vested interest is with the gambling industry and the lobbyists who support it. He sold both you and Bello down the drain.”

  At this stage in her life, she probably believed nothing else could be taken from her. But I had just proved her wrong. She looked out the front window at the turbulence in the sky and the oak leaves flying from the trees in the yard.

  “My car is waiting outside, Mr. Robicheaux. I’ll be at Tony’s graveside the rest of the afternoon,” she said. “I hope you’ll be gracious and decent enough not to disturb me there. I believe the dead can hear the voices of the living, although we cannot hear theirs. I’ll ask my son to forgive you for not finding his killer and for concentrating your efforts instead on tormenting his mother.”

  I stood up to go, but I didn’t want to leave her with the impression that I accepted her victimhood. She wore her infirmity and her personal loss as a shield against the system, and chances were she would take on the permanent role of martyr and saint and be venerated as an icon of bereavement and moral courage until the day of her death. But I believed Valerie Lujan’s contract with the devil had been signed many years ago, and she knew that every dollar in her possession had come into Bello ’s hands through the deprivation of others.

  I started to say these things and perhaps other things even more injurious to her. But what was the point? Saints are made of plaster and they neither bleed nor hear. So I simply said, “I was drunk for many years, Mrs. Lujan. But I finally learned everybody has to pay his tab. Good luck to you. The Garden of Gethsemane is a tough gig.”

  BUT RHETORIC IS rhetoric and a poor substitute for putting away people who belong in jail. That afternoon, as I drove home, I realized that all my investigative efforts since the spring would result in few if any meaningful convictions. Without a confession, I doubted if Cesaire Darbonne would ever do time for the murder of Tony Lujan. The same with Slim Bruxal. I believed he had killed Crustacean Man with a baseball bat, but the case had already grown cold and there was no forensic connection between Slim and the hapless man who had been struck by the Lujan family’s Buick. Worse, Whitey Bruxal and Lefty Raguza would never be punished for the executionlike slaying of my friend Dallas Klein, a murder I had been too drunk to prevent.

  I helped Molly prepare supper, then I fed Snuggs and Tripod on the back steps. It was shady and cool under the trees, and the wind blowing from the bayou stiffened their fur while they ate. I pulled Snuggs’s tail playfully and bounced him gingerly on his back paws. “How you doin’, soldier?” I said.

  He glanced back at me, his head notched with pink scars, then returned to his food.

  “How about you, Tripod? You doin’ okay, old-timer?” I said.

  Tripod smacked his chops and had no comment.

  I wished life consisted of just taking care of animals, the earth, and one’s family and friends. In fact, that’s what it should be. But it’s not, and the explanation for that fact is not one I have ever been able to provide.

  “Ready to eat?” Molly said through the screen window.

  “Sure,” I said, and went back inside.

  It was 6:10 p.m. and Molly was in the bathroom when the phone on the kitchen counter rang. Outside, the light in the trees was the color of honey, the tidal current in the bayou flowing inland, the surface networked with serpentine lines of dead leaves.

  “That you, Mr. Robicheaux?” the voice said.

  “Cesaire?” I said.

  “This connection ain’t good. I’m at a pay phone not far from Whiskey Bay. I seen your friend wit’ a blond woman. He was driving a pink Cadillac convertible wit’ a white top.”

  “Right, that’s Clete Purcel. You saw him?”

  “Yes, suh. But that ain’t why I called. A couple of gangsters followed him and the woman out of a parking lot in front of a bar. One of them was the father of Tony Lujan’s friend.”

  “Whitey Bruxal?”

  “I ain’t sure of his name. I just know his face. He called the man wit’ him ‘Lefty.’ This guy Lefty’s face looked like a busted-up flowerpot. I t’ought I ought to tell you about your friend.”

  “Why are you at Whiskey Bay, Mr. Darbonne?”

  “I got a camp here. Is your friend gonna be okay?”

  Chapter 27

  AFTER I CLOSED the bedroom door, I removed my cut-down twelve-gauge pump from the closet, sat on the side of the bed, and pushed five shells loaded with double-aught buckshot into the magazine. I strung my handcuffs through the back of my belt, clipped on my holster and 1911-model United States Army.45, Velcro-strapped my.25 automatic on my ankle, and picked up the receiver from the telephone on the dresser. I paused for a moment, thinking of Clete and the alternatives his situation offered, then replaced the receiver in the cradle without punching in a number. I heard the doorknob twist behind me.

  “What are you doing?” Molly asked.

  “That was Cesaire Darbonne. I think Whitey Bruxal and Lefty Raguza have followed Clete and Trish Klein to a camp in the Basin.”

  “Call the department.”

  “Clete’s wanted by NOPD. He’ll be locked up.”

  “That’s Clete’s problem.”

  “It may be a false alarm,” I said, starting toward the door.

  “You simply accept the word of Cesaire Darbonne? A man you believe mutilated the body of a college student with a shotgun?”

  “I’ve got my cell. I’ll call you.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “Not on this one.”

  “Don’t do this, Dave.”

  “If you don’t hear from me in two hours, call nine-one-one.”

  Perhaps my attitude was willful and even cruel, but I had a terrible sense that maybe this time Clete’s luck had finally run out. That thought caused a sensation in my throat that was like swallowing glass.

  IT TOOK ME almost an hour to reach the levee area where Cesaire had called from. He was waiting in his truck in front of a bar that had been knocked together from unpainted plywood and covered with a tin roof that had been peeled off a barn. On the other side of the levee was a wide bay flanged by flooded woods. To the north I could see car lights crossing the elevated highway t
hat traversed the massive network of bayous, rivers, oxbows, lakes, and cypress swamps that comprised the Atchafalaya Basin. The sky was piled with clouds that had turned purple and gold in the sun, the miles of flooded trees bending steadily in the wind. As I got out of my truck, a smell like burning garbage struck my face.

  “Can you show me where they went?” I asked.

  “Down the levee and back in them woods,” he said, pointing. “There’s high ground back in them gum trees and palmettos. It don’t never go underwater unless it storms real bad.”

  I didn’t shake hands with him, which is considered a personal affront in South Louisiana. But as Molly had suggested, it would have been foolish to dismiss the darker side of this man’s nature. When people seek vengeance, they dig up every biblical platitude imaginable to rationalize their behavior, but their motivations are invariably selfish. More important, they have no regard for the damage and pain they often cause the innocent.

  “Why you doing this, Mr. Darbonne?”

  “You went my bond. You treated me decent. You cared about my li’l girl.”

  “I did those things because I thought you had been unjustly accused. You didn’t kill Bello Lujan, did you?”

  “No, suh.”

  “But you murdered his son.”

  His turquoise eyes were empty, unblinking, his face devoid of any emotion I could detect. “I ain’t never tole you ot’erwise,” he said.

  “Then you planted the weapon in Monarch’s car and set fire to it,” I said.

  “He ain’t selling dope no more.”

  “I wish you had trusted me, Mr. Darbonne.”

  “To do what? Still ain’t nobody in jail for what they done to my li’l girl.”

  How do you explain to a man whose daughter has killed herself that there is no “they,” that the pitiful, guilt-driven man who raped her was a victim himself, that the fraternity boys who gangbanged her couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag, that Slim Bruxal, who had the feral instincts of a vicious street punk, had acted with a degree of conscience and tried to return her safely home? How do you deal with the moral authority of ignorance?

  “You’re not setting me up, are you, partner?” I said.

  “What you talking about, you?”

  “Get in,” I said.

  We drove down the levee, the wind buffeting the truck. Out in the swamp I could see black smoke rising out of the trees from trash or stump fires, then flattening above the canopy.

  “Turn down the grade,” Cesaire said, pointing at a steep set of vehicle tracks that led down the side of the levee into stands of gum and persimmon trees.

  As we dipped down the smooth green incline of the levee, I could see the sunset through the canopy, the leaves of the cypress ruffling in silhouette. But the poetic moment was lost as soon as we entered the shade. Inside the heated enclosure of the woods, an ugly stench hung in the air, one that called to mind a dead bird caught in a flaming chimney.

  I drove at least two hundred yards on top of dried-out humus and layers of leaves that had turned gray with damp rot. The trees were strung with air vines, the ground dotted with palmettos. In the distance I could see ponds of water, like greasy oil slicks among the tree trunks, and a spacious cabin elevated on cinder blocks, wind chimes and birdhouses hanging from the eaves of the peaked tin roof.

  But the cabin was not the focus of my attention. Off to the left was the scorched hulk of a Cadillac convertible, strings of smoke rising from what had once been a flamingo-pink paint job. The hatch had been popped, perhaps by the heat of the gas tank burning, and the top had collapsed in a soft gray patina of ash on the seats. There was no sound of life around either the Caddy or the cabin. I stopped the truck and cut the ignition.

  “I want you to stay here, Mr. Darbonne. I’m going to take a look at my friend’s car, then I’m going inside the cabin. If everything goes all right, I’ll be back in a few minutes. But I want you to stay right where you are.”

  “What’s the deal wit’ this Bruxal guy? How come he’s after your friend and his woman?”

  “It’s complicated, but the short version is Whitey Bruxal ordered Bello Lujan killed and then put it on you. He did to you, Mr. Darbonne, what you did to Monarch Little.”

  Cesaire stared at me in the deepening shadows. A mosquito lit on his neck, sucking his blood, but he gave it no notice. “That’s the man took the pickax out of my toolshed?”

  “When we’re finished here, I’m going to help you in whatever way I can. If I don’t return in ten minutes, walk back to the bar and call nine-one-one.”

  I opened the door quietly, slipped my cut-down pump from the gun rack behind the seat, and got out of the truck. I walked toward the Cadillac, my heart pounding.

  The heat from the fire had curled all the leaves in a water oak that towered above the Caddy’s shell. The tires had exploded and the air stank of burnt rubber and the leather in the seats and the wiring and hoses that had melted in the engine. But one odor in particular overpowered all the others. It was one that lived in my sleep, and the image and sound that went with it-a burst of flame from a nozzle, an incongruous mewing sound, like that of a newborn kitten-were etched forever in my unconscious, and no amount of booze or hospital dope will ever remove them.

  I walked through a dry coulee full of leaves and came up on the driver’s side of the Caddy. The door hung ajar and the window was rolled down. The convertible top had settled like an ashy veil on the shape of a man who sat slumped forward on the steering wheel.

  The figure was that of a big man, or at least he had been a big man until the fire had seared and buckled his flesh and boiled his blood and deformed his features. I touched the door handle, then pulled my hand away from the heat that was still trapped inside the metal. I removed a handkerchief from my pocket and clasped the handle with it and pulled the door completely open.

  The veil of ash on the man’s head fell away and powdered in his lap. His mouth was locked open, his eyes cavernous and poached, his ears little more than red-black stubs. I backed away and fell to one knee, the butt of my shotgun propped up in the leaves. I tried to suppress the sob in my chest, but to no avail. I cried, as a child would, my back heaving, my hand clenched over my eyes. A Beretta lay on the floor, by the foot pedals, the pistol grips blown off by the rounds that had exploded in the magazine. It was the same model, with a fourteen-round magazine, that Clete had carried.

  I backed away into the coulee and looked again at the cabin. The sun had dipped over the horizon, and someone in the cabin had either lit a lantern or turned on a battery-powered light. I circled far to one side of the cabin, so I could see the back as well as the front entrance. Farther down the slope was a canal and a boathouse and a shed inside of which at least two vehicles were parked.

  I knelt behind a tree and studied the cabin. My cell phone was in my pocket and I could have called for help. But I knew I wouldn’t, and I also knew I was not even going to think about the things I was about to do. I would just do them and add up the score when it was all over. My ears were filled with a sound like a train entering a tunnel, a taste like copper pennies in my mouth. My hands were damp and tight on the stock and pump of the twelve-gauge, my breath almost rasping with anticipation. In my mind’s eye, I already saw the pink mist I was going to create out of the faces inside the cabin.

  I moved quickly up the coulee until I was in a place that was overhung with cypress boughs and black with shadow, swimming with clouds of mosquitoes and gnats. The back entrance was actually a ramp that led to a screened porch that was stacked with collapsible-wire crab traps. I saw a silhouette against a back window, then the silhouette disappeared and the glass was filled with an unobstructed yellow radiance again.

  This one is under a black flag, Cletus. This one is for you, I thought.

  I entered that adrenaline-fed dead zone of bloodlust that requires no pretense of moral justification for its inhabitants. I pushed off the safety behind the shotgun’s trigger guard with my in
dex finger and sprinted across the backyard, bent low, my neck running with sweat, the wind suddenly cold on my face. Then I pounded up the ramp, ripped open the screen, and crashed over a tangle of fishing tackle and cartons of preserve jars into the cabin’s interior, the sound of my shoes like hammers on the floor, the shotgun’s stock against my shoulder.

  At first I couldn’t assimilate the scene and situation I had burst into. Trish Klein lay in a corner, hog-tied wrists-to-ankles, her mouth wrapped round and round with silver duct tape. Clete Purcel was not only alive, he had been propped up in a heavy oak chair, his forearms and calves cinched to the wood with plastic ligatures. His eyes were swollen into puffed slits, his face streaked with blood, his bare chest and shoulders and arms burned by cigarettes. A coarse piece of hemp rope hung down from his throat.

  Lefty Raguza had stripped to the waist and slipped on a pair of leather gloves before going to work on Clete’s face. Had he not been wearing gloves, perhaps he might have been more successful in pulling a.38 revolver from a shoulder holster hanging on the back of a chair. When I squeezed the trigger on the twelve-gauge, the load of double-aught bucks caught him across the collarbone and in the throat and exited into wallpaper that was printed with garden scenes of children watering flowers from sprinkler cans.

  Lefty fell heavily against the wall, as though stunned that an event he had always associated with other people was now happening to him. In fact, the cool green fire in his eyes never died. As he slid toward the floor, he looked straight ahead, never blinking, his gaze steady, his mouth pursed like a fish’s when it feeds at the surface of a lake. One hand came to rest on his genitalia, then he made a puffing sound and died.

  I heard Trish Klein trying to talk behind the tape over her mouth, then Clete raised his head and spit and whispered something I couldn’t understand. I ejected the spent shell from the chamber and heard it hit the floor.

  “What is it?” I said, my ears still ringing from the roar of the shotgun inside the room.