Pegasus Descending Read online

  In the morning I could not get the dream out of my head. It was Saturday, and Molly, Clete, and I had planned to go fishing at Henderson Swamp that afternoon. But I told Molly I had to run an errand first, and I went to the office and pulled out my file on Yvonne Darbonne. One of the crime scene photos had been taken at an angle to her body, so even though she lay on her side in the position of a question mark, the lens was pointed directly at her face and chest.

  A red winged horse was emblazoned on the front of her T-shirt, and through a magnifying glass I could make out the name of a racetrack inside the folds of the fabric under her breasts. It was the name of the new track and casino north of Lafayette where Trish Klein had been switching out dice at the craps table.

  I looked at my watch. It wasn’t quite noon. Clete was supposed to meet Molly and me at the house at two. There was still time for a visit to the home of Bello Lujan and his son, Tony.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I was standing on the front porch of the Lujan house, just outside Loreauville, the sun winking at me through a mimosa tree, the wind puffing a fringed pale green canopy by the bayou’s edge, where a buffet table was covered with half-eaten food and empty Cold Duck bottles. Tony answered the door-barefoot, shirtless, a towel hung around his neck, his hair still wet from a shower. Behind him, I saw a college-age girl thumbing through a magazine on a couch. She looked at me uncertainly, then picked up her drink glass and went into the kitchen. Tony still had not spoken.

  “You’re not going to ask me in?” I said.

  “Yes, sir, sure,” he said.

  “Y’all have a party last night?” I said, stepping inside. Mounted on the staircase wall was a mechanical apparatus that would allow a seated infirm person to ride up and down the stairs.

  “My parents did. They hosted my fraternity and our little sisters,” he replied.

  “Your little sisters?”

  “It’s a sorority we call our little sisters.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “My father went to New Orleans for the rest of the weekend. My mother is upstairs. You want to talk to her?”

  “No, my question is to you, Tony. Say, who’s your friend back there in the kitchen?”

  “A girl I go to UL with.”

  “Was she a friend of Yvonne Darbonne, too?”

  A flush of color spread across his cheeks. But I had come to believe that Tony Lujan was less shy and awkward than he was fearful and ridden with guilt.

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” he said.

  I didn’t pursue it. “Actually, I came out here because of a photo taken of Yvonne before she was put into a body bag. She was wearing a T-shirt with a winged horse on it. Know the one I mean?”

  “I gave it to her,” he replied. “It’s a promo shirt from the new casino and track. My dad’s an investor in it. He’s partners with Mr. Bruxal. That’s how I got to know Slim. My dad was going to give Yvonne a job in the restaurant.”

  “That’s funny. Your father told me he didn’t know her.”

  His face drained. “I thought maybe you were here about those black guys. My dad thinks they might try to file a civil suit and milk us for whatever they can get. That’s why I thought you wanted to talk to my parents.”

  Tony Lujan’s attitude toward law enforcement was one that no amount of experience has ever allowed me to deal with in an adequate way. Every police officer who reads this knows what I’m talking about, too. Certain groups of people in our society genuinely believe police agencies have only one purpose for existing, and that is to protect and serve the interests of a chosen few. Guess which income bracket they belong to.

  I had gotten what I wanted and probably should have left at that point. But I didn’t. “See, we don’t get involved in civil suits, Tony. In fact, it’s the prosecutor’s office that determines which criminal charges we pursue in a given case. Personally, I don’t think you need to worry about a guy like Monarch Little fooling around with civil suits. The truth is, Monarch Little is one badass motherfucker who swallows his blood in a fight and comes at you right between the lights. He’s not above doing serious collateral damage, either.”

  I heard a glass break in the kitchen.

  I WAS HOOKING UP my boat trailer to my truck when Clete’s Caddy bounced into the driveway, his spinning rod propped up in the backseat, a Rapala flopping on the tip. “Ready to rock?” he said.

  “Almost,” I said.

  He got out and watched me load our rods, tackle boxes, and the cooler into the boat. He was wearing shined loafers, cream-colored golf slacks, and a Hawaiian shirt I hadn’t seen before.

  “Dressed kind of sharp, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Not really,” he replied, ripping the tab on a beer, looking off casually at the thick green arch of oak limbs over East Main. “Where’s Molly?”

  “Right there,” I said, nodding toward the porte cochere, where Molly was coming out the side door with an armload of food. “What are you up to, Cletus?”

  “Maybe I like to wear some decent threads once in a while. Will you give it a rest?”

  Because my pickup truck was not big enough for the three of us, he followed us in the Caddy to Henderson Swamp. In the rearview mirror, I could see he was sneaking sips from a beer can on the floorboards. I thought about stopping and possibly preventing legal trouble on the road, but reason and caution and even common sense held little sway in the life of Clete Purcel. I was even more convinced of that fact when I saw him upend the can, crush it in his fist, and drop it over his shoulder into the backseat, where any cop who stopped him would be able to see it.

  “What are you looking at?” Molly said.

  “Clete.”

  “What about him?”

  “That’s like asking about the flight plan of an asteroid.”

  She looked at me quizzically, but I didn’t try to explain further.

  I backed the trailer down the concrete ramp at Henderson and we slid the boat into the water. It was a perfect afternoon for fishing. The day was hot, the wind down, the water dead-still in the coves. Out on the vast expanse of bays and channels and islands of willow and gum trees that comprised the swamp, I could see other fishermen anchored hard by the pilings of the interstate highway and the desiccated wood platforms of oil rigs that had long ago been torn down and hauled away. The air contained the bright, clean smell of rain in the south, which meant the barometer was dropping and the bass and bream would begin feeding as soon as one raindrop dented the surface of the water.

  Molly and I sat in the boat’s stern and Clete sat up on the bass seat by the bow, flicking his Rapala in the lee of the willows that grew along the entrance to a wide bay. He had spread a paper towel over the seat cushion and I noticed that whenever he took a hit off a can of Budweiser or ate one of the po’boy sandwiches Molly had made, he leaned forward to avoid staining his clothes. At six o’clock he looked at his watch, removed his aviator shades and his porkpie hat, and combed his hair. His face was red from beer and sunburn, the area around his eyes still pale. He grinned happily. “Look at that sky,” he said.

  Then a bass that must have weighed eight pounds rolled the surface by a nest of lily pads and took Clete’s Rapala with such force it blew water up into the willows. “Jesus Christ,” Clete said, dropping his beer can in his lap.

  I got the net from under the seat and Molly swung the electric trolling motor about to keep Clete’s line at eleven o’clock from the bow so the bass would not tangle it with ours. Clete cranked the handle on his reel and jerked the tip of his rod up at the same time, bowing his rod into a severe arch.

  “Ease up,” I said. “I’ll get the net under him.”

  The bass broke the surface in a flash of gold and green and a roll of its white belly, then it stripped the monofilament off Clete’s drag and dove for the bottom, sawing the line against the boat.

  “Pull your line around the bow and let him run,” I said.

  Too late. The line snapped and the tip of Clete’s
rod sprang back toward his face. “Wow,” he said, wiping at the beer on his slacks with a paper towel.

  “Tie on a Mepps. We’ll try the next island up the channel,” I said.

  “No, that’s it for me,” he replied.

  “You want to quit?” I said, incredulously.

  “It’s been a great day. I don’t always have to catch fish.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Molly looked at me. “I could go for a red snapper dinner up at the restaurant,” she said.

  We had at least an hour of good fishing left and I wanted to stay out, but Molly had obviously chosen to act charitably toward Clete’s mercurial behavior and I didn’t have it in me to go against her wishes. “You bet,” I said.

  Molly cranked the engine, and we headed across a long bay toward the landing. The surface of the water was the color of tarnished bronze against the sunset, and the new bloom on the cypress trees lifted like green feathers in the wind. Cars with their lights on streamed across the elevated causeway behind us, and ahead I could see the boat ramp and the levee and a lighted restaurant on pilings, with a walkway that extended out over the water.

  We winched the boat back up the trailer, then I saw Clete’s face soften as he glanced up at the railing on the restaurant walkway. “I better head on out. Thanks for the afternoon,” he said.

  A solitary woman stood on the walkway, her face turned into the sunset, her hair moving in the wind.

  “Who’s your lady friend?” I asked, afraid of the answer I would get.

  “I love you, Streak, but at some point in your life, can you give me some space?” he said.

  Then I saw the woman’s profile against the sky.

  “Just keep it in your pants,” I said.

  He lifted his tackle box out of the boat and said good-bye to Molly but not to me. He walked toward the restaurant, his big hand gripped tightly on the disconnected sections of his rod, the back of his neck thick and glowing with heat.

  “I can’t believe you said that,” Molly said.

  “He’s used to it,” I replied.

  A few minutes later, as Molly and I walked up to the restaurant for a meal, Clete and the woman drove past us on the rocks to the levee, the moon rising above his pink convertible. The woman’s face was young and radiant and lovely in the glow from the dashboard. She lifted a highball glass to her mouth, never looking in my direction. May the angels fly with you, Cletus, I said to myself.

  “Who was that?” Molly said.

  “A grifter by the name of Trish Klein. The kind of gal who knows how to break Clete’s heart.”

  Chapter 7

  I HAD THOUGHT MONARCH might be stand-up, might let the FBI do its worse, even if that meant he had to go down on what recidivists used to call “the bitch,” short for “habitual offender,” which was the old-time term for the Clinton-era equivalent known as the three-strikes-and-you’re-out law.

  But on Monday morning Monarch came to the prosecutor’s office with his attorney and filed felony assault charges against Slim Bruxal. It was obvious the previous night had not been an easy one for him. He was raccoon-eyed, morose, and stank of beer sweat and weed. When he tripped on a carpet and knocked his head against a door, two teenage girls snickered.

  I suspected Monarch’s life was about to unravel. How badly was up for debate. But there are no secrets in our small city on the Teche. In a short time the word would be on the street that Monarch Little had become a hump for the Feds to avoid taking his own bounce. It wouldn’t be improbable for his peers to conclude that he was not to be trusted and that he might start dimeing the same gangbangers who now hovered around him like candle moths.

  In the meantime, he had empowered the Iberia Parish district attorney to go forward with assault charges against Slim Bruxal, by extension giving the FBI enormous leverage they could use against Slim’s father, Whitey Bruxal, in what I guessed was a RICO investigation.

  I saw Monarch in the parking lot, on the way to his Firebird.

  “You hep set this up, Mr. Dee?” he asked.

  “I never jammed you, Monarch. Show a little respect,” I replied.

  “Before I come down to the courthouse, I tried to join the army.”

  “Really?” I said, my face deliberately empty.

  “Guy said I might have a weight problem.”

  It was hot and bright in the parking lot, and the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery looked white and hard-edged in the light, the weeds wilted and stained yellow by herbicide. Several deputies in uniform walked past us, talking among themselves, their cigarette smoke hanging in the dead air. “I need to talk to you,” I said to Monarch.

  “I ain’t feeling so good right now. I’m going home and sleep.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said.

  “Hey, you the man called me a pimp. I sell dope, but I ain’t no pimp. Maybe you the one need a little humbleness.”

  THE PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE lost no time serving the arrest warrant on Slim Bruxal. By lunchtime the same day, two Lafayette city police officers and an Iberia Parish detective were at Slim’s fraternity house, a few blocks from the university campus. Evidently he was not in a cooperative mood. The arrest report stated that after he was hooked up, he fought with officers and fell down a flight of stairs. I recognized the name of one of the arresting officers. His name had a way of appearing in news stories involving the apprehension of suspects who always seemed to resist arrest. The newspaper prose describing this type of event is usually written in the passive voice, which means the journalist copied it from the arrest report and used no other source. The telltale line to look for in this kind of print story is “The suspect was subdued.” Slim Bruxal got subdued and probably had it coming. I also suspected that if Slim stayed in custody, his cookie bag would get stepped on extra hard again.

  But I wasn’t a player in Slim Bruxal’s fate and I tried to concentrate on the ebb and flow of petty concerns that constituted most of my ordinary business day. These included a terrorist bomb scare involving a suitcase someone abandoned in front of Victor’s Cafeteria; a sexual battery charge filed by a man who claimed his three-hundred-pound wife was forcing him to have sex with her four times a week; the disappearance from a picnic bench of a roasted pig, which turned out to have been eaten by a nine-foot alligator we found floating contentedly in the family swimming pool; the flight of a homemade airplane down the bayou, three feet off the water, that ended with the crash landing of the plane on a cockfighting farm and the shredding by propeller of at least a dozen roosters; the theft of bones from crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery by a bunch of kids with rings in their lips and nostrils and pentagrams tattooed on their shaved heads. How the bones could add to what the kids had already done to their faces and heads remained a mystery.

  A house creep cut a hole through an attic roof to avoid setting off the alarm system and electrocuted himself when he tapped into a breaker box. A biker blitzed on weed and downers roared through a church picnic in City Park, punched a hole in a hedge, and almost decapitated himself on a wash line. But my favorite caper of the week was a 911 call we received from a meth addict who was outraged that his dealer had shown up at the door without the drugs the caller had paid for, committing fraud, according to the caller, and adding insult to injury by robbing him at gunpoint of seventy-eight dollars and his stash.

  It was 3:16 p.m. when I looked at my watch. I couldn’t concentrate any longer on the Pool, my term for that army of merry pranksters and miscreants who wend their way endlessly through the turnstiles of the system. I dropped all the paperwork on my desk into a drawer and headed for Monarch Little’s house, where he lived in a rural black slum paradoxically located on a pastoral stretch of oak-shaded land along Bayou Teche, not far from the sugar mill community where Yvonne Darbonne had died.

  I knocked on the screen door. Monarch’s house was made of clapboard, with a peaked tin roof, and was set amid a cluster of water oaks and pecan trees and slash pines down by the water’s edge. An old Coca-Cola
machine beaded with moisture throbbed under an improvised porte cochere where his Firebird was parked. He was wearing boxer shorts and a strap undershirt when he opened the door. “What you want now?” he asked.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Don’t matter to me.”

  If Monarch was getting rich in the dope trade, the interior of his house didn’t show it. The furniture was worn, the wallpaper spotted with rainwater, the linoleum in the kitchen split and wedged upward in a dirty fissure. A floor fan vibrated in front of a stuffed couch where he had probably been napping when I knocked.

  “I think Slim Bruxal’s old man was mixed up in the murder of a friend of mine,” I said. “That means I want to see Whitey Bruxal brought up on homicide charges. That doesn’t mean I want to see you turned into fish chum.”

  “I ain’t buying this, Mr. Dee.”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “No, you just got your own reasons for doing what you doing. It don’t have nothing to do wit’ me.”

  “I saw my friend shot point-blank in the face with a twelve-gauge. I tried to convince both the Feds and Miami-Dade P.D. that Bruxal or his friends were behind it. But I was a drunk back then and didn’t have much credibility. Now I have a chance to nail him. But I’m not going to do it by feeding a guy to the sharks. It’s not a complicated idea.”

  “That’s all fine, but right now I ain’t got a lot of selections, starting wit’ how I make a living.”

  I handed him my business card with a name and telephone number I had already penciled on the back. “This is the name of the United States Attorney in Baton Rouge. He’s a friend of mine. You tell him you’re cooperating with the FBI, but you need some protection. You have that right. Because you have a sheet doesn’t mean you don’t have constitutional guarantees.”