Pegasus Descending

Chapter 12

I WOKE AT FIVE-THIRTY the next morning to the sound of mockingbirds in the trees and a boat with a deep draft working its way downstream from the drawbridge at Burke Street. Our home was a wonderful place to wake on an early summer morning. Sometimes ground fog hung on the bayou, and inside it I would hear a gator slap its tail in the lily pads or a nutria or a muskrat roll off a cypress knee into the water. Sometimes I imagined I saw Confederate longboats, sharpshooters humped low inside, the oars muffled, floating silently with the current toward the Yankees’ skirmish line at Nelson’s Canal.

It didn’t matter what the weather was like. Morning with Molly and Snuggs and Tripod was always a grand time, and the arrival of the day had little to do with clocks. Just before first light I would hear the milkman crossing the lawn, fat bottles of cream clinking in his wire basket, then a solid thump on the ceiling when Snuggs dropped from an oak limb onto the roof, right above our bedroom. Molly would stir in her sleep, her hip rounded by the sheet, her hot rump brushing against me. I would put my fingers in her hair, trace them down her shoulders and back, and along the deep curve in her waist. I’d kiss her baby fat and the two red sun moles below her navel. I’d kiss her breasts and stomach and mouth and eyes, then slip her close against me, burying my face in the thick smell of her hair.

When she made love, she did it without stint or reservation or buried resentment because of a cross word or imagined slight. Molly’s charity and smile followed her into bed, and in the morning her skin gave off a warm fragrance just like flowers in a garden. In the blueness of the dawn I would hear the steady rhythm of her breath in my ear while Miss Ellen Deschamps called to her cats from her back porch, and I would start the day with the absolute knowledge that no evil could hold sway in our lives.

When I got to the office, the investigation into the murder of Tony Lujan awaited me in a way I didn’t expect. Wally had written a name and a cell number on a pink message slip and had put it in my mailbox. At the bottom of the slip he had penciled the notation: “Call him between 9:15 and 10.”

“Who’s J. J. Castille?” I said.

“Some colletch kid.”

“Which college kid?”

“He says you was at his fraternity house yesterday.”

“Wally, I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t present information in teaspoons.”

His shirt pocket was fat with cellophane-wrapped cigars, which he rolled around in his mouth but never lighted because of his high blood pressure. “The kid, J. J. Castille, says he’s in class till nine-fifteen. He says you saw him at his fraternity house yesterday but you didn’t talk to him. He says he wants to talk wit’ you now. That’s how come he called the office.”

“Thank you.”

“He also said not to call him at the fraternity house. He said use the cell. That’s why I wrote down the cell number on the note. Anyt’ing else I can interpret for you?”

“No, that’s just fine.”

“You sure?”

In the army or prison, you learn not to make enemies with anyone in records or the kitchen. In law enforcement, you don’t admonish your dispatcher.

As I walked to my office, I couldn’t put a face with the name on the message slip. But I did remember a thin-chested kid at Tony’s fraternity house who had hung in the background, his expression full of conflict. At 9:20 a.m. I punched J. J. Castille’s cell number into my desk phone.

“Hello?” a voice said. In the background I could hear music and many voices talking and the clatter of dishes.

“This is Detective Dave Robicheaux with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I’m returning a call made by J. J. Castille. Are you Mr. Castille?”

“Yes, sir. I need to talk with you.”

“Is this about Tony Lujan?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It’s about him and Slim Bruxal. It’s about something they were saying at the house. Maybe it’s not important.” The pitch of his voice dropped when he mentioned Bruxal’s name.

“It’s important,” I said.

“I can’t talk here.”

“Do you have a car?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ll come over there. Where do you want to meet?”

He didn’t reply immediately. “I just thought I should pass it on.”

“I understand that. You’re doing the right thing, partner. Just tell me where you want to meet.”

“You know the UL campus?”

“I went to school there.”

“I’ll be between Cypress Lake and the music building.”

I checked out an unmarked car, clamped a magnetized flasher on the roof, and was at the campus in under thirty minutes. I pulled into a driveway between a cypress-dotted lake and the old brick music building known as Burke Hall. I saw a kid squatted down on the bank, tossing crumbs from a hot dog bun to a school of perch that popped and roiled the surface when they took the bread. His brown hair grew on his neck and hung in his eyes, and he wore a T-shirt that was washed so thin it looked like cheesecloth hanging on his shoulders.

He rose to greet me but didn’t shake hands. Instead, he looked over his shoulder at the elevated walkway that led into the Student Union.

“You going to summer school, J.J.?” I said.

“Yeah, but I work in the cafeteria, too. A lot of guys take off for the summer, but I want to get through premed early so’s I can go on to Tulane. I got a scholarship through the Naval ROTC program there.”

He had clean features and brown eyes that were too large for his face and a pronounced Cajun accent. He looked back over his shoulder again. Through the cypress trees I could see kids walking in and out of the building.

“No one is paying any attention to us, J.J. Want to tell me what this is about? My boss doesn’t want me gone from the office too long.” I tried to smile.

“I was studying across the hallway from Slim and Tony’s room the day Tony got murdered. Our doors were open and I could hear them talking about the guy who was run over on the road. Slim kept calling him ‘the wino.’ He said the wino died ’cause he walked out in front of a car.”

“Tony’s car?”

J.J. thought about it. “No, he said ‘a car.’ Slim said winos walked out in front of cars all the time and got killed and nobody cared. Then Tony said, ‘That’s not what happened, Slim.’”

He blew out his breath.

“What else did they say?”

“Nothing. Slim closed the door. Slim’s a rough guy. He’s not supposed to have the top room, but nobody says anything about it.”

I gave him my business card. “If you remember anything else, call me again, will you? But right now it’s important to remember you did the right thing. You don’t have any reason to feel guilty or ashamed or afraid. Do you know where Slim Bruxal is now?”

“He was back at the house this morning. He said he’d been in New Orleans with a girl.”

“Slim’s at the house now?”

“Far as I know. Am I going to have to testify in court?”

“I’m not sure. Would you be willing to do that?”

He cleared his throat and didn’t answer.

“Did you know Yvonne Darbonne?” I asked.

“She came to the house with Tony once or twice. At least I think it was with Tony. I really didn’t know her.” He looked at me briefly, then his eyes left mine. The wind was cool blowing through the cypress trees on the lake, but his skin was flushed, his forehead shiny with perspiration.

“What are you not telling me?” I said.

“They say she pulled a train.”

“She did a gang bang?”

“They call it ‘pulling a train.’ They say she was wiped out of her head and took on a bunch of guys upstairs in the house. It was after a kegger or something. There was a lot of Ecstasy and acid floating around. The way these guys talked, Tony didn’t know about it. I heard she was messed up in the head and committed suicide.”

“Yeah, she did. But she wasn’t messed up before she met Tony Lujan. Did she pull the train the day she died?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I work and study all the time. I don’t know who the guys were, either. There’s stuff goes on at the house I don’t get mixed up in.”

The lake was dark in the shade, wrinkled by the wind, the hyacinths blooming with yellow flowers out in the sunlight. “You seem like a good guy, J.J. Why do you hang around with a collection of shits like this bunch?”

“They’re not all bad.”

“Maybe not. But enough of them are. Come see me in New Iberia if you want to go fishing sometime. In the meantime, hang on to my business card, okay?” I said.

I DROVE DIRECTLY to the fraternity house. Two kids were raking leaves in the front yard when I walked up to the porch. “Is Slim here?” I said.

“Out back,” one of them replied, hardly looking up from his work.

“Did he just get back from New Orleans?” I said, checking J. J. Castille’s story.

“Search me,” the same kid said.

I walked around the side of the house into the backyard. The St. Augustine grass was uncut, the yard enclosed by thick hedges, the sunshine filtered by pecan and oak trees. Slim Bruxal stood below a speed bag that was mounted on the crossbar of two iron stanchions. He wore a workout shirt that had been scissored into strips and gym shoes and a pair of string-tie gym shorts low on his hips. His fists looked as hard and tight as apples inside his red gloves as he turned the speed bag into a blur, tada-tada-tada-tada, the exposed skin on his back crisscrossed with sweat.

“You’re a hard man to find,” I said.

He turned and looked at me, his eyes hot, his brow knitted, like someone pulling himself out of an angry thought. He removed his right glove by clamping it under his left arm, then extended his hand. “How you doing, Mr. Robicheaux?”

I turned away from him, as though I were distracted by the blowing of a car horn on the street, my hand at my side. “You were with your girl the last couple of days?”

“Girl? I was seeing my therapist in New Orleans. She’s also a grief counselor,” he replied, lowering his hand.

“Can I have her name and number?”

“What for?”

“We’re trying to exclude everyone we can in our investigation into Tony’s death. That’s so we can concentrate on nailing the right guy.”

He gave me a woman’s name and a phone number in the Garden District, up St. Charles Avenue.

“You want the right guy?” he said. “He looks like a pile of soggy meat loaf with warts on it. I hear he’s sitting on his fat black ass in your jail.”

“When was the last time you saw Tony?”

“I think you already know that.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

“We took him for a couple of beers Monday afternoon. We tried to cheer him up. Then he left the bar and drove back to New Iberia.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“No, sir.” He blotted his face with a towel and tossed the towel on the grass. The sun was directly in his eyes, making it even harder for him to hide his irritability. “Look, Tony was my friend. I don’t like being under the microscope for this. He was depressed and we were worried about him. One of the guys had seen him playing baseball with a priest at St. John’s. So we went over there and tried to cheer him up. Then he ends up being killed by this animal Monarch Little.”

“Yeah, I can see how you’re frustrated by all this. But something doesn’t flush here.”

“Flush?”

“Yeah, there’s one element in your story that bothers me.”

“Bothers you. My best friend is dead and you’re bothered?” he replied, his mask slipping, his face hot and glistening in the sun’s glare.

“You said you were worried about Tony’s being depressed. So you tracked him down at a church where he was playing baseball with a minister and took him to a bar. You removed him from an environment where he might have gotten some genuine help. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

“I’m not knocking anybody’s church.”

“Nobody said you were. But between you and me, I think you’re trying to put the slide on me. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

He tried to shine me on, his face suffusing with feigned goodwill and humility.

“What happened to Yvonne Darbonne? Were you one of the dudes who gangbanged her?” I said.

“I don’t have to take this,” he said.

“You’re right, you don’t. Keep up the work on the speed bag. You look good. I know the boxing coach up at Angola. His best middleweight got shanked in the shower. He’d love to have you on the team.”

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m not Tony Lujan.” He tilted his chin up when he spoke.

AS SOON AS IGOT BACK to the office, I received a call from Mack Bertrand at the lab. “Monarch Little’s prints were on the pay phone that was used to call the Lujan house Monday evening,” he said.

“How many other prints were on it?”

“Six sets that were identifiable, all belonging to people with criminal records.”

“The phone is on the corner where he hangs out?”

“Right,” he said.

“It’s another nail in Monarch’s coffin, but it’s still circumstantial.”

“How’d you make out in your meeting with Lonnie Marceaux?”

“I think Lonnie found a horse he can ride all the way to Washington.”

“Have you talked to Helen since you got back from Lafayette?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“She got a call from The New York Times this morning. Somebody leaked a story about a possible local investigation into this televangelical character who’s mixed up with Whitey Bruxal.”

But I really wasn’t interested in Lonnie’s attempts to manipulate the media. “Do you still have DNA swabs from the autopsy on Yvonne Darbonne?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“I believe her death was a homicide.”

“I respect what you say, Dave, but this time I’m on Koko Hebert’s side. Yvonne Darbonne shot herself.”

“Maybe she pulled the trigger. But others helped her do it.”

“Want to drive yourself crazy? You’ve found the perfect way to do it,” he said.

A few minutes later I went down to Helen’s office and told her about my interviews with J. J. Castille and Slim Bruxal. She listened silently, occasionally making a note on a legal pad, waiting until I finished before she spoke. “You think maybe in this instance things aren’t that complicated after all?” she asked, her eyes on the top of her pencil as she drew a little doodle on the pad.

“What do you mean?”

“That Monarch did it. He was resentful, needed money, and miserable in his role as a federal snitch. So he figured he’d score a few bucks off a rich white boy and get even at the same time. Except the rich white boy took a gun to the meeting spot and Monarch blew him apart.”

“It’s not that simple. According to J. J. Castille, Slim Bruxal and Tony had specific knowledge about the death of the hit-and-run on Crustacean Man. I think Bruxal is a player in this.”

“Right now we’re talking about Tony Lujan, not Crustacean Man. You don’t like fraternity kids, Dave. I don’t think you’re entirely objective about this case.”

“I’m not objective about this particular group of fraternity kids, so lay off it, Helen. In my view, the kids who gangbanged Yvonne Darbonne are one cut above sociopaths.”

“All right, bwana.”

“All right what?”

“You made your point.”

I was sitting in a chair in front of her desk. I got up and went to the window behind her, an act a subordinate in a sheriff’s office would not normally do. But Helen and I had been friends and investigative partners long before she became sheriff. “Lonnie leaked the story to The New York Times?” I said.

“Probably,” she replied.

“What did you tell the reporter when he called?”

“That I loved their gardening and culinary articles.”

“What did he say to that?”

“It was a she. She sounded cute, too.” She looked up and winked. You didn’t put the slide on Helen Soileau.

EVEN THOUGH MONARCH LITTLE might have turned federal informant, he was still considered a high flight risk by the parish court and his bail on the illegal weapons charge had been set at seventy-five thousand dollars. He had also been transferred to the parish prison, an institution that earned itself a degree of national notoriety in the early 1990s for a practice known as “detention chair confinement” and the gagging of bound prisoners.

Just before quitting time, I drove through the gates of the prison compound, the coils of razor wire atop the fences trembling with a silvery light. I hung my badge holder on my belt, checked my holstered.45 at the admissions counter, and asked that Monarch be brought out to an interview room.

When I began my career in law enforcement, walking a beat in the lower Magazine area with Clete Purcel, a career house creep who had pulled time twice in Arkansas, considered years ago to be the worst of the worst among American prison systems, told me he had learned character in jail. Because of my youth and inexperience, I thought his remark grandiose if not ridiculous. But like most cops, I came to respect the dues that a stand-up or “solid con” has to pay. For an individual to survive the system with his integrity and personal identity intact requires enormous amounts of physical courage, humility, wisdom about people, and the ability to eat pain without resenting oneself. The era of the redneck gunbull may have slipped into history, but the atavistic and sexual energies of people in captivity have not. Ask any fish what his first shower experience was like after he wised off to the wrong guy.

Lonnie Marceaux had said Monarch wasn’t particularly bright. He was wrong. Monarch had a wolf’s intelligence and could sniff weakness, fear, or strength in an adversary in the same way an animal does. And even though he acted the role of a smart-ass with me, in the can he showed respect to inmates and prison personnel alike. More important, he never violated a confidence and never ratted out another inmate, even if his silence cost him lockdown or isolation.

At least that had been his reputation before word reached the parish prison that Monarch was no longer an inner-city king but just another hump on a federal pad.

A turnkey walked him down a corridor to the interview room, Monarch outfitted in jailhouse orange. He was also draped in waist and leg chains.

“Why the traveling junkyard, Cap?” I said.

“District attorney’s orders,” the turnkey replied.

“I’d appreciate your unhooking him,” I said.

“Can’t do it, Streak. Holler on the gate when you’re done.”

After the turnkey was gone, Monarch sat down in a wood chair, his chains tinkling, his manacled hands locked against his torso. “This gonna take long? They serving supper in a few minutes,” he said.

“You in lockup?”

“Gen pop. Ain’t axed for lockup.”

“Some bad dudes in general pop.”

“Yeah, most of them use to work for me. Come on, Mr. Dee. You got better t’ings to do, ain’t you?”

“They’re about to put a homicide jacket on you, Monarch.”

“Like you ain’t part of it?”

“You have a violent history. Dusting a rich white boy wouldn’t be inconsistent with some of your past behavior.”

My statement was simplistic. In truth, I wanted him to contradict it.

“You talking about that drive-by on the dude who said he was gonna cook me in a pot?”

“He put up a kite on you, then got capped watering his grass.”

“He got capped ’cause he stepped on some dago’s dope so many times there wasn’t nothing left of it but baby laxative.”

“You burned down a police officer’s house.”

Monarch twisted a crick out of his neck, his chains clinking, his manacled hands rolling into balls at his sides. “There use to be a cop ’round here liked to run black girls in for soliciting, even when they wasn’t soliciting. Except they didn’t end up down at the jail. They ended up copping his stick in the back of his cruiser. So a fire broke out under his house one night. Too bad he wasn’t home.”

“Where’d you get the cut-down that was in your car?”

“You seen it?”

“Yeah, in an evidence locker.”

“Then you know more about it than I do, ’cause I ain’t never seen it and I ain’t got no idea how it got in my car. You a smart cop. The FBI was already jamming me. Why would I leave a sawed-off shotgun in my car?”

“You called Tony’s house and tried to extort money from him. Your prints were on the pay phone where the call was made. You set up a meet with Tony. Your voice has been identified.”

“I ain’t called nobody. I’m t’rew here. Tell the screw I’m ready to go eat. Y’all got a nigger in the box. Y’all ain’t gonna look for nobody else.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Where you been, man? I’m sitting here in chains. I ain’t did nothing. Whoever smoked that white boy is laughing at y’all.” He stood up from his chair. “On the gate!” he yelled, his love handles bunching over his waist chain.

IN THE MORNING I got lucky. Wally buzzed my phone and told me a kid by the name of J. J. Castille was in the waiting room and wanted to see me.

“Send him up,” I said.

“He’s got a package in his hand. He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

“I know him. He’s okay.”

“He’s on his way.”

A moment later J.J. tapped on my glass and I motioned him inside. “You want to go fishing?” I asked.

“I got something here I thought you might want. I don’t know if it’s important or not. But I don’t feel good about a lot of things that have happened at the house. Anyway, here it is.” He set a rectangular object on my desk. It was wrapped in brown paper and taped down at the edges.

I told him to have a chair, then began unwrapping the paper.

“I work for room and board at the house, and I’m supposed to clean up all the junk and loose trash people leave behind at the end of each semester,” he said. “So I found a boxful of junk down in the basement, and that videocassette was in there. I started to throw it out, then I thought maybe somebody tossed it in there by mistake. So I stuck it in the VCR and watched a little bit of it. I’m probably wasting your time.”

“Let’s take a look,” I said.

We went downstairs to a small room that contained a computer, a fax and Xerox machine, and a television set that we used to view surveillance videos. I shoved J.J.’s cassette into the VCR. A collage of meaningless scenes appeared on the screen-a crowd of revelers at a sports bar, Mardi Gras floats, a kid mooning from an upstairs window, a wedding party emerging from a church, the bride in white, her face glowing with happiness.

I pushed the fast-forward button.

“Stop! Right there, back it up,” J.J. said.

I eased back to footage of a touch football game, then eased forward and froze the frame on a lawn party in progress. The St. Augustine grass was in full sun, live oaks and towering slash pines and a blue sky backdropping the dancers. From the lack of shadows, I guessed the video was shot close to noon.

“That’s her, isn’t it? Right in the middle,” J.J. said.

I pressed the play button and Yvonne Darbonne came to life on the screen. She was barefoot and dressed in a sleeveless blue tank top that exposed her bra straps, and a beige skirt that stretched tight high up on her rump as she raised herself on the balls of her feet and lifted her hands into the air. John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” was playing in the background.

The lens swept across the crowd but quickly returned to Yvonne Darbonne. She looked absolutely beautiful-sensuous, innocent, filled with joy, in love with the world.

Then the music stopped, the camera swung across the tops of the trees, and for just a moment I heard a popping sound and the ringing of metal against metal, like a flag and chain blowing on an aluminum pole.

I reran the scene three times and wondered if the footage was of any value at all. She was not wearing the clothes she had died in. There was no time or date indicator attached to the footage, and to J.J.’s knowledge none of the guests he could identify was linked personally to Yvonne.

“I was right, huh, waste of time?” he said.

I stared at the image of Yvonne that I had frozen on the screen. Her eyes were closed, her pug nose lifted into the sunlight, her exposed shoulders red with fresh sunburn.

“It’s hard to tell, J.J. Can I keep this?”

“Sure, it was being thrown out.”

“Stay in touch. We’ll entertain the bass one of these days.”

But he didn’t get up from his chair. He picked at his nails, his brow furrowed. “There’s one other thing I didn’t tell you. I’m in premed, just like Tony was.”

“Yeah?”

“Tony had the tests for a bunch of my science classes, including the finals for chemistry. I think he got them from Slim. Tony offered to let me use his copy of an anatomy test. He said it wasn’t cheating. He said the test was just a study guide. But another guy told me Slim paid him to break into a file drawer in a professor’s office.”

“Were Slim and Tony selling the tests?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Okay, partner. Thanks for coming in.” But before he went out the door, I had one more question for him. “Did you use the help on the anatomy exam?”

“No, sir. I made a D on it,” he said, grinning self-effacingly.

I gave him the thumbs-up sign.

A few minutes later I called Koko Hebert at his office. “Was the Darbonne girl sunburned?” I asked.

“Why you want to know?”

“Because that’s my job.”

“No, your job is being a full-time compulsive-obsessive neurotic pain in the ass.”

“If you don’t like the way I do things, take it up with the sheriff or the D.A. I sympathize with your loss of a family member, Koko, but I’m not going to be the target of your anger anymore.”

The receiver was quiet for a long time. “Koko?” I said.

“I heard you. I’m pulling up her file. Yeah, there was a certain degree of erythema on her shoulders and the back of her neck. It probably occurred a few hours before her death.”

“But she was wearing a T-shirt at the time of her death, wasn’t she?”

“Right,” he said.

“Would the burn be more consistent with someone wearing a sleeveless tank top?”

“Probably.”

“I didn’t mean to be rough around the edges a minute ago,” I said.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“No, that’s it. I just-”

He hung up.