Pegasus Descending

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 the 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.

THAT NIGHT I SLEPT in a motel in Slidell, on the northeast side of Lake Pontchartrain, and early the next morning I returned to New Iberia. I felt better for having confronted Alridge, but I was no closer to resolving the contradictions at work in the Lujan homicide. With rare exception, homicides are committed for reasons of money, sex, or power, or any combination thereof. What was the motivation in Tony’s death? If Monarch Little was the shooter, it was because he had tried to extort money from Tony and the extortion attempt had gone south. But Tony’s occasional girlfriend, Lydia Thibodaux, had indicated Slim Bruxal had gone to the meeting with Tony. Where was Slim while Tony was being blown apart, or was Slim in fact the shooter?

It was possible. Slim was probably mixed up in the death of Crustacean Man and feared that Tony would flip for the D.A. By killing Tony and putting it on Monarch, he would take out two problems at once. But in my mind’s eye I could still see the point-blank wounds delivered to Tony’s skullcap, jaw, and viscera. The person who killed Tony had borne him a special hatred and was not simply a cynical pragmatist getting a problem out of the way.

Who kills with that kind of insatiable rage?

Someone whose anger and desire for revenge comes straight out of the libido.

I looked at the clock. It was 1:21 p.m. on Friday. What better time to catch an academic about to flee a faculty meeting for the solace of a dry martini in his backyard? I called the political science department at UL in Lafayette and was told that Dr. Frank Edwards had already gone for the day.

“Could I have his home telephone number?” I asked.

“We’re not allowed to give that out,” the secretary said.

“I’m a police officer.”

“So why don’t you look in the phone directory?” she said.

I flipped open the Lafayette phone book and found the number at the top of the page. The address was in an oak-shaded neighborhood in an old part of town, one of those urban enclaves where people hold on to their accents and their eccentricities and take a peculiar pride in the genteel poverty that often marks their lives. The phone rang for a long time before a man picked up. I assumed he was not one who made use of answering machines. “Yes?” he said.

“May I speak to Dr. Edwards?”

“I’m Dr. Edwards.”

“This is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I’d like to talk with you about Tony Lujan and Slim Bruxal,” I said.

For a moment I thought the line had gone dead. “Are you there, Professor?”

“Lydia Thibodaux contacted you?”

“She said you encouraged her to come forward with information about Slim and Tony. I appreciate your having done that.”

Again the line went silent.

“I’d like to come over to Lafayette and talk with you in person,” I said.

“Yes, I guess you would,” he said, with a sense of resignation I didn’t understand. “I’ll be at home. How important will this turn out to be?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are we talking about a trial, public testimony, that sort of thing?”

“I’m not sure. Is there a problem, sir?”

“That depends on whether or not you think young brownshirts belong in our universities.”

I took the four-lane into Lafayette, and in forty-five minutes was through the university district and driving down a quiet residential street where the sidewalks had been broken and pitched by the huge tree roots that grew under them. Inside the filtered light and the ambience of shade-blooming flowers, the palms and Spanish daggers that grew under a canopy of live oaks, the air vines and lichen-stained goldfish ponds and the late-Victorian frame houses whose rain gutters bled rust down the walls, you could have sworn you were looking at a misplaced piece of history ripped out of the year 1910.

The political science professor was reading on the gallery of his two-story house, one knee crossed, a wood-bladed fan turning overhead, a shot glass and a small pitcher by his foot. A plump, middle-aged white man in mismatched gardening clothes was watering the caladiums at the base of an oak tree with a sprinkling can. When he heard the piked gate squeak open, he smiled politely in my direction, then walked casually into the backyard with his sprinkling can, his soft buttocks tight against his pants.

“You’re Dr. Edwards?” I said to the man on the gallery.

He glanced at my badge, which was clipped on my belt. “Would you like a glass of anisette? It’s ice-cold,” he said.

“No, thanks.” I walked up on the gallery, the boards under my feet sinking with my weight. I sat on the edge of a wide, deep-set straw chair. “Could you explain that remark about young brownshirts?”

The professor was dressed in linen slacks and sandals and a tropical shirt that exposed the bones in his chest. His beard was clipped close to the skin, his teeth tiny and tea-colored inside his mouth. He closed his book on his knee.

“I think the purpose of your visit involves Slim Bruxal more than it does Tony Lujan. Slim conjures up a certain image. I think of arm-bands and people with heavy boots stomping down a street in Nuremberg. But ultimately I guess he’s a victim, too.”

“Not in my view. You told Lydia Thibodaux that Slim and Tony both wore masks. You told her not to be afraid of someone who couldn’t live with the person inside his skin. You were talking about Slim?”

He filled his shot glass with anisette, then sipped from it, as though testing its coldness, before draining the entire glass. He wiped his lips with the tips of his fingers, his eyes focused on the columns of sunlight in his yard, the motes of dust and desiccated leaves swimming inside them.

“There’s a nightclub here, where friends of a kindred spirit tend to gather,” he said. “It features its own kind of entertainment. Are you with me, sir?”

“I think so.”

“Most people who frequent this club have no problem with who they are. But others find excuses to be there.”

“We need to get to it, Dr. Edwards.”

“Slim and his friends would make themselves available at the bar. Of course, the men who picked them up would be robbed. They would also have their teeth kicked in. Not only teeth but ribs, scrotums, or any other place Slim could get his foot.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“Do you think I’d make up something like this? Do you know the risk I’m taking by telling you this?”

“With Bruxal?”

He looked away in annoyance, and frankly I couldn’t blame him for it.

“Was Tony Lujan gay?” I asked.

“Maybe he hadn’t decided on what he was.”

“You think he came on to Slim?”

“Tony had a dependent personality. He was frightened. His girlfriend had committed suicide. I suspect he had undefined longings that…”

“Go on.”

“For what purpose? Tony’s dead. I’m going to ask one favor of you, Detective Robicheaux.”

“Yes, sir?”

“If the content of this conversation is passed on to Slim Bruxal or his attorney, I want to be notified immediately.”

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“It’s so good to have met you,” he replied, opening his book again, focusing his eyes disjointedly on the page.

THE TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY on the four-lane, and I took the old highway past Spanish Lake into New Iberia. The sun had gone behind the clouds in the west, and the air was dry and hot and dust was rising from the cane fields. I’m not qualified to speak on the question or causes of global warming, but anyone who believes Louisiana ’s climate is similar to the one in which I grew up has a serious thinking disorder. When I was a child, summer thunderstorms would sweep across the wetlands at almost exactly three o’clock every afternoon. Today, weeks will pass with no rain at all. The wind will turn into a blowtorch, the ground into flint, the sky into a huge cloud of cinnamon-colored dust. As I drove past Spanish Lake, I could see electricity forking inside a bank of distant thunderclouds and smell an odor on the wind like fish spawning, like first raindrops lighting on a scorching sidewalk.

I got back to the department just in time to return the cruiser and punch out for the day. Just as I was leaving the office, my phone rang. It was Joe Dupree, my friend at the Lafayette P.D. “You wanted a handle on this bozo Lefty Raguza. I didn’t come up with a whole lot, but here it is. He does security work at a couple of casinos and the new track in Opelousas. He’s got no arrests in Louisiana, not even traffic citations, but I suspect he’s cruising on the edge of it.”

“How do you mean?”

“He smokes a lot of China white because he doesn’t like to use needles anymore. He also likes to bust up women with his fists, usually someone who’s down to seeds and stems. He hangs in a dump in North Lafayette.”

“A rough-trade joint?”

“No, it’s a zebra hangout. From what I hear, the broads he picks up never see it coming. Then they’re on the floor, spitting out their teeth. Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“If you have a tête-à-tête with this guy, not a lot of people around here are gonna be wringing their hands or calling up the ACLU.”

He gave me the address of a club north of the Four Corners district in Lafayette.

I headed home in my truck and by the time I reached my driveway I could feel the barometer dropping and see birds descending out of the sky into the trees. Then, like a blessing from heaven, the clouds broke loose and hailstones as big as mothballs clattered down on our tin roof.

Molly and I opened all the windows and flooded the house with the cool smell of the storm, then fixed potato salad, ham-and-onion sandwiches, and iced tea, and ate supper in the kitchen. We brought Tripod and Snuggs inside and gave each of them a bowl of ice cream, which they ate in front of the floor fan, their fur lifting in the breeze. Steam rose off the bayou, then the sky went totally black with the storm and the lights came on in City Park and you could see torrents of leaves blowing out of the trees and falling on the water.

But in spite of the fine evening the rain had brought us, I couldn’t stop thinking about the implications of my interview with Dr. Edwards. I believed him to be a man of conscience who had been willing to put his reputation and his academic career at risk in order to see justice done. Perhaps more significantly, he had also been willing to invite the violent potential of Slim Bruxal into his life. The legal importance of my interview with Dr. Edwards was doubtful. That fact, I’m sure, was not lost on him. The fact he had remained willing to go forward with it anyway said a lot about Dr. Edwards’s character. It also said a lot about Slim Bruxal and the ferocious energies of homophobes who can’t deal with the female hiding inside them.

But another piece of unfinished business was on my mind as well. As I watched Tripod eating from his ice cream bowl in front of the fan, I thought about the many years he had shared our house, and our lives, as an adopted member of the family. I thought about the war he had waged with Batist, the elderly black man who had run our bait shop, over custody of the candy bars and fried pies Batist kept on a display rack by the cash register. I remembered how Alafair, as a little girl, had snuck Tripod through her screen window and hid him under the covers after he had been expelled from the house for doing various kinds of mischief. I thought about how Tripod had always been a loyal and loving pet who never strayed more than fifty yards from his home because it had always been a safe place where he could trust the people who lived or visited there.

Then in my mind’s eye I saw a blond man with tiny pits pooled in his cheeks squeezing a tube of roach paste into Tripod’s bowl.

All these things, along with the fact that Monarch Little had lied to me, gave me no rest.

“Pax Christi is having a meeting at Grand Coteau tonight. I think I should go. I missed the last one. Do you mind?” Molly said.

“No, just be careful on the road,” I said.

As soon as Molly had backed her car into East Main, I took my Remington twelve-gauge from the closet and sat down on the side of the bed with it and a box of pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks. Years ago I had sawed off the barrel at the pump handle, sanded the serrations smooth with emery paper, and removed the sportsman’s plug from the magazine. I fed the shells into the tube, one after the other, until I felt the magazine spring come tight against my thumb. Then I called Clete Purcel at his motor court and told him I would pick him up in ten minutes.

“What’s shakin’, big mon?” he said.

“The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide ride again,” I replied.

“Ah,” he said, like a starving man dipping a spoonful of chocolate ripple into his mouth.