Pegasus Descending

Chapter 20

THE BRUXAL HOME looked like it had been airlifted from Boca Raton and dropped from a high altitude onto a rolling stretch of white-railed horse country fifteen miles north of Lafayette. It was three stories, built in a staggered fashion of pink stucco, with a tile roof and heavy oak doors and scrolled-iron balconies. In the side yard was a turquoise pool surrounded by banana trees, trellises heavy with trumpet vine, potted palms, and the overhang of giant live oaks. Immaculate automobiles that could not have cost less than seventy thousand dollars were parked in the driveway and the porte cochere, almost as though they had been posed for a photographic display demonstrating the munificence of a free-market system that was available to rich and poor alike.

Beyond the barn a red Morgan, a mare, galloped in a field. I thought of the winged horse emblazoned on the T-shirt worn by Yvonne Darbonne the day she died. I thought of her young life destroyed by rape at the hands of Bellerophon Lujan, and I thought of the boys who had gangbanged her in a fraternity house when she was stoned, and I thought of the innocent people all over the world who suffer because of the greed and selfishness of the few.

These were not good thoughts to entertain as I pulled an unmarked departmental car next to the SUV Slim Bruxal had driven the afternoon he busted up Monarch Little at the McDonald’s on East Main in New Iberia.

I had called Whitey earlier, at his office, and had asked to see him. Most criminals of his background would have hung up or told me to talk to their attorney. But Whitey was an intelligent man and had done the unexpected, inviting me to his home at lunchtime. If I was to have any degree of success with him, I needed to empty my mind of all residual anger about him and his friends, even my conviction that they had murdered Dallas Klein, and concentrate on one objective only, and that was to leave in Whitey’s head a tangle of snakes that would eat him alive.

When he opened the door, he stepped out on the porch and looked in the yard, virtually ignoring my presence. “You seen the gardener?”

“No,” I said blankly.

“That’s all right. Come on in. I got this new gardener. He chopped up the hose in the lawn mower. What are you gonna do? People don’t want to work for a living anymore.”

I had to hand it to him. Dressed in white slacks and a black short-sleeved shirt with a silver monogram on the pocket, his white hair clipped and neatly combed, he was the image of an athletic, self-confident man in his prime. The fact I had stomped the shit out of his right-hand man seemed inconsequential to him. He hit me on the shoulder and told me to come into the living room with him.

“So what’s on your mind?” he said, walking ahead of me.

“I’ve got a dilemma,” I said.

“Yeah?” he replied, sitting down in a chair upholstered in red velvet.

Through the front window I could see the driveway, a big live oak in the yard, and the four-lane highway that led to Opelousas. “The Iberia Parish D.A. is an ambitious guy. He wants to wrap up Tony Lujan’s homicide and maybe make a lot of black voters happy at the same time. Get my drift?”

“No, I don’t get your drift.”

“Monarch Little skates. Your boy takes the bounce. I don’t know if Lonnie is going to ask for the needle or not.”

“Say that again.”

“Lonnie Marceaux wants to be governor or a United States senator. He’s not going to get there by convicting a black dirtbag nobody cares about. Lonnie wants to screw you, Mr. Bruxal. By screwing you, he can also bring down Colin Alridge. That will buy him the national attention he needs.”

“Call me Whitey. Slim didn’t kill Tony. Tony was his friend. Where you get off with this?”

“Tony was going to give up Slim on the hit-and-run death of the homeless man. There’s another theory about Slim’s motivation as well.”

“Theories are like skid marks on the bowl. Everybody’s got them. I think you’re here to squeeze my balls.”

I glanced out the window at the highway, then grinned at him. “You’re not going to own anything to squeeze, Whitey,” I said.

For the first time his brow wrinkled.

“The Feds have you and Bellerophon Lujan on racketeering charges. Lonnie wants a piece of you, too. That’s where your son comes in,” I said. “Second in line does the time. From Lonnie’s perspective, your ass is grass.”

“You saying Bello is rolling over on me?”

“I’m saying it’s a done deal. Come on, you’re a smart man. Bello ’s a coonass, born and bred in South Louisiana. You’re from Brooklyn. People here think New York is a place where homosexuals go to get married and every other woman has an abortion.”

“Why you keep looking out the window?”

I ignored his question. “This is the short version. They’re about to freeze your assets. As you probably know, a RICO conviction will allow the Feds to seize everything you own. In the meantime, you’ve got other issues and other enemies to deal with.”

“Issues? I don’t like that word. Everybody is always talking about issues.” Then, paradoxically, he said, “What issues? What enemies?”

He saw me looking out the window again, this time at a vintage Cadillac convertible with a fresh pink paint job coming up the driveway from the four-lane. “Who’s that guy?” he said.

“He does scut work for us. I told him I’d be here. You mind?”

“What’s his name?”

“Clete Purcel.”

“That fat guy is Purcel? Yeah, I do mind. His squeeze is this Trish Klein broad. What are you guys working here?”

I got up and opened the side door to the terrace. “Hey, Cletus, over here,” I said.

“Hey, you answer my question,” Whitey said.

But again I didn’t reply. Clete walked through the dappled shade of the live oak, his face affable and handsome behind his yellow-tinted aviator’s glasses. I could feel the air-conditioned coolness from the living room rushing past me into the heat and humidity of the afternoon.

“Hey, how’s it hangin’?” he said to Whitey as he came through the door, uninvited.

But I had underestimated Whitey. He might have been a creature of his times, his psychological makeup as hard as the concrete he grew up on, but he was nevertheless capable of mustering a level of dignity, even if it was feigned, that men of his background seldom possess.

“It’s lunchtime and I was going to ask Mr. Robicheaux to join me,” he said. “Because you’re his friend, you’re welcome, too. But this is still my home, the place where my family lives. Any guest in my house has to respect that.”

“You got it, Whitey. But I’ve had the pleasure of meeting your employee Lefty Raguza. He’s not a family-type guy,” Clete said.

“What might have happened outside this house has no application inside it, you follow? You want to eat, there’s a spread laid out for us in the dining room. You want to act rude, it’s time for you to go,” Whitey said.

“Here’s a story for you,” Clete said. “We’ve got a congressman here who was asked to describe Louisiana on CNN. He goes, ‘Half of it is underwater and half of it is under indictment.’ Right now, in your case, that means you’re anybody’s hump. Forget the lunch. Let’s talk business.”

“What business I got with you?”

“The word is your kid’s a closet bone smoker. The Iberia D.A. has got the handle he needs to jam him and you both. Dave didn’t tell you?”

The transformation that took place in Whitey’s face was like none I had ever seen in another person. The eyes didn’t blink or narrow; the color in them did not brighten with anger or haze over with hidden thoughts. The jawbone never pulsed against the cheek. Instead, his expression seemed to take on the emotionless solidity of carved wood, with eyes as dull and cavernous as buckshot. I believe I could have scratched a match alight on his face and he wouldn’t have blinked.

“What’d you call my boy?” he asked.

Clete pressed the palm of his hand against his chest. “I didn’t call him anything. That’s his rep in a couple of drag joints in Lafayette. I thought you and Dave had talked. The D.A. thinks the Lujan kid came on to your son and your son blew up his shit. The point is when piranhas smell blood, they clean the cow to the bone. You want your casino interests let alone? Maybe I can make that happen. I’m getting through to you, here?”

“Yeah, you’re both working with this twat Trish Klein,” Whitey said.

Clete looked at me. “You heard the man, Streak. I told you it was a waste of time. Hey, Whitey, this isn’t Miami. Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum. Dave knocked a tooth out of the D.A.’s mouth and he’s still got his shield. What does that tell you? You think we’re here to shake you down for chump change? While you’re in the slams, what do you think Bello Lujan is going to be doing-protecting your assets till you get out? He’ll turn your pad into a cathouse and your horses into canned dog food.”

We left Whitey standing in his living room. Outside, as we crossed the thick, carpetlike texture of his St. Augustine grass, I heard the red Morgan running in the pasture. Her neck and flanks were dark with sweat, her mouth strung with wisps of saliva. She clattered against a rail and I would have sworn she nickered at me.

Clete got in his Caddy and headed down the driveway. Just as I started my engine, I saw Whitey come out the front door.

“Hey, Robicheaux, wait up,” he called.

I rolled down the window. “What?” I said.

“What he said about my boy?”

“Yeah?”

“People are saying that, or your friend was just working my crank?”

“Your kid has problems. Homosexuality is probably the least of them.”

“You got a kid?”

“An adopted daughter.”

“How would you like it if somebody talked about her like you talk about my boy? How would you like it if my lawyers came after you through your family?”

“We’re not like you, Whitey. Dallas Klein’s blood is on your soul. On the day you die, I believe his specter will stand by your bedside. Nothing you do from now until then will change that fact. Your son is a monster. I have a feeling you know it, too.”

For a moment I saw a look in Whitey’s eyes that made me believe there are some people who are truly damned. Then the moment passed and he squinted into the haze and pinched the humidity out of his eyes. “I went to school under the Catholic nuns,” he said. “They taught us after we pissed not to shake off more than two times. Know what we did? We all ran down to the john and shook it off three times to see what would happen. Good try, Robicheaux, but you and your friend belong here. Like you say, it’s a place for jerk-offs.”

Upstairs, Slim Bruxal pushed open a window and leaned outside, his upper torso naked. “Hey, Dad, can somebody give Carmen a ride back to the dorm? I’ve got a softball game,” he said.

MY LIFE IS NOT GIVEN to prescient moments. But occasionally I have them, particularly with the advance of age. When they occur, they leave behind a sensation like a cold burn on the heart.

The sky was painted with horsetails, the trees blowing hard along the highway as I followed Clete out of Lafayette. Then he pulled into a truck stop and went inside, not glancing back to see if I was behind him.

When Clete made choices, even minuscule ones, that geographically separated him from his friends, he was usually embarking on an odyssey that invariably brought harm to only one person-himself.

I pushed open the door in the café area and saw him at the end of the counter, his aviator glasses in his pocket, the lines at the corners of his eyes like pieces of white thread, a bottle of beer and a foaming glass and a saltshaker in front of him. I cupped my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s twenty minutes after one,” I said. “You haven’t eaten, either.”

“I’m on a diet,” he replied.

I sat down on the stool next to him and asked the waitress for coffee. “You did great back there, Cletus.”

“Remember when we caught Augie Giacano jackrolling an old lady and threw him down a fire escape? Then we dimed him with Didi Gee so he’d get in trouble with his own people?”

“When you threw Augie down the fire escape.”

“Whatever. We didn’t get pushed around by Brooklyn skells like Whitey Bruxal.” He salted his beer and drank from it. He touched at his mouth with a paper napkin, then put the napkin aside, finished the glass in one swallow, and filled it again.

“Eat a hamburger with me,” I said.

“Everything is muy copacetico, Streakus. No problemas here.” His eyes drifted to the television anchored on the café wall. “Check out those tropical storms in the Atlantic. The Florida Straits are starting to look like a turnstile.”

“I’ve got to get back to the department.”

“See you later.”

“I’m not leaving you here alone.”

“What? I’m supposed to feel like the walking wounded?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t get it, Dave. You never did. We’re dinosaurs. This isn’t the same country we grew up in. The scumbags own it, from top to bottom. Except they’re legal now and have college degrees and wear two-thousand-dollar suits. Back in our First District days, we would have fed these motherfuckers into an airplane propeller.”

A truck driver down the counter wearing a greasy bill cap looked at us, and the waitress studied the television screen with undue attention, then turned up the volume. A CNN announcer was talking about a hurricane that was strengthening off the Bahamas.

“The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever,” I said.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

“Snap out of it, Clete.”

This time he didn’t argue with me. But reticence in Clete Purcel was rarely a sign of acquiescence. Instead, it was the exact opposite. He put on his yellow-tinted shades and looked at the television screen, his face composed.

“You’re going to see Trish today?” I said.

“What about it?”

She’s too young for you. You’re going to get hurt real bad, perhaps irrevocably, I thought.

He stared into my eyes. “Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah, what?” I said, trying to smile innocuously.

“Yeah, keep your thoughts to yourself,” he replied.

It was one of the moments when the truth serves no purpose other than to keep our wounds green. Was Clete right? Were we at the end of our string, flailing at forces that had societal and governmental sanction, convincing ourselves, like fools popping champagne corks aboard a sinking liner, that our violence could extend our youth forever into the future and that the party would never come to an end?

He felt my eyes on the side of his face. “Why you giving me that weird look?”

“Because you’re the best, Clete. Because I love you.”

The trucker down the counter was cutting up a steak on his plate. He glanced sideways at us, then at our reflection in the mirror. Clete leaned over so he could see past me.

“What’s up, bud?” Clete asked.

“Not a whole lot,” the trucker said, returning to his steak. He had created a puddle of ketchup sprinkled with pepper on his plate, and he was dipping each piece of meat in it before he forked it into his mouth.

“That steak looks righteous. You want a beer?” Clete said.

“I got to drive. Another time,” the trucker said.

“I’m Clete Purcel. This is Dave Robicheaux.”

“I’m Joe Vernon Mack.”

“You’re looking at the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide, Joe Vernon,” Clete said.

“Pleased to meet y’all,” the trucker said, chewing contentedly.

Clete picked up both our checks and paid for them at the cash register, then the two of us walked outside into the wind.

I ARRIVED BACK at the department shortly before 3 p.m. A note from Helen on a pink memorandum slip was waiting for me in my mailbox. It said: “See me.” When I walked down to her office, her door was ajar and I could see her standing behind her desk, talking on the phone. She waved me inside.

“He’s here now,” she said into the receiver. “Look, Lonnie, you made some ugly remarks about both him and me. He was defending me and this department as much as himself. You want to make trouble over this, you’ll have me to deal with as well. My advice is that you be a man and accept the fact you shot off your mouth and that you got what you deserved.”

I could hear Lonnie Marceaux’s voice coming out of the receiver like a piece of wire being pulled through a metal hole.

“Stop shouting,” Helen said. “He’s a good cop and you know it. If you want, I’ll contact the Daily Iberian and the wire services in Baton Rouge and we can both make a statement about what happened. It’s your call.”

She held the receiver away from her head and looked at it.

“He hang up?” I said.

“Or shot himself. Except we don’t have that kind of luck around here. Somebody at Lafayette P.D. told him you busted up Lefty Raguza. He thinks you’re running your own program, one that probably conflicts with his. Lonnie wants it all, Dave.”

“All what?”

“He’s going to indict Monarch Little for the Lujan homicide and bring racketeering charges against Whitey Bruxal. He’s also got Colin Alridge in his bomb sights. Alridge is running for lieutenant governor. Lonnie says he’s going to drive a nail through one of his testicles.”

“Why don’t you use a more severe image?”

“Those are his words, not mine.” She placed her hand on the windowsill and gazed out at the cemetery, and I knew she was no longer interested in talking about Lonnie. “I got a call earlier from the sheriff of Orleans Parish. He says a warrant is being cut for Clete Purcel’s arrest.”

“For flooding the casino?”

But my question didn’t register. “The Orleans sheriff says there’re rumors Clete is mixed up with the people who did the savings and loan job in Mobile. This parish isn’t going to be a haven for people who think they don’t have to obey the law.”

“I’ll talk with Clete.”

“You tell him I said he gets this shit off our plate or he leaves town.”

“I understand you perfectly. Thanks for standing up for me with Lonnie,” I said.

She looked me dead-on, her expression caught again in that strange androgynous moment when she seemed to linger between two identities, her face both beautiful and intimidating, a Helen I didn’t really know. “Don’t try to jerk me around, Dave. Fun and games are over,” she said.

I WALKED BACK to my office, unsure of my next move. I was convinced I had gotten nowhere with Whitey Bruxal. Worse, all my investigative work into the deaths of Crustacean Man, Yvonne Darbonne, and Tony Lujan had produced only circumstantial evidence and theories. Most depressing of all was the fact that, regardless of what I did, Lonnie Marceaux was going to use the evidence selectively to advance his own career, even if he had to prosecute Monarch Little, an innocent man, for the murder of Tony Lujan.

I’d had a run at Bruxal earlier, hoping to sow seeds of suspicion about his business partner, Bello Lujan. But why quit now? I asked myself. Some activities are like prayer. After you’ve been shelled off the mound, what do you have to lose?

I waited until quitting time to drive to his horse farm outside Loreauville. From the state road I saw him in front of a long white stable, dressed in strap overalls, working on a faucet that fed a galvanized water tank. He looked up when he heard my truck thumping across the cattle-guard, his Stilson wrench suddenly motionless.

How do you deal with a man like Bellerophon Lujan? Do you hate him? He certainly deserved the odium attached to his name. He was ignorant, driven, corrupt, racist, superstitious, and violent, his wealth ill-gotten, his libidinous appetites legendary. I believed he had probably raped Yvonne Darbonne. And long before he had destroyed her and her faith in her fellow human beings, he had ruined his son’s life with control and verbal abuse that disguised itself as love.

But as much as I despised Bello ’s deeds, I could not hate the man. As my truck approached the horse tank, I saw him grin slightly at the edge of his mouth, and for just a moment I remembered the kid who had waited in the cold with a shine box at the Southern Pacific depot, hoping to catch a few customers before they checked in to the Frederic Hotel.

“You going to take a swing at me?” I said as I got out of my truck.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, twisting the wrench on a three-inch nut. “I’m putting in a frost-free faucet this year, me. All these storms and droughts and hurricanes we been having? That means we gonna have some bad winters, yeah.”

His accent, even his syntax, had changed, the rough edges of New Orleans gone, as though the voice of a simple Cajun boy of years ago were speaking. Except that early innocence was not one Bello would ever be allowed to reclaim, whether he knew it or not. I picked up a paint-skinned wood chair by the stable entrance and carried it back to the tank and sat down. The sun was low and buried inside rain clouds, the pasture dark with shade, the grass channeled by the wind. “You have a restful place here,” I said.

“The best,” he replied. His eyes took on the glimmerings of vindication and pride. But I believed another element was at work inside Bello during that moment. I suspected he was beginning to understand that the symbols of his triumph over the world would never pass on to his son, and that his victory over privation and rejection by the wellborn had become ashes in his mouth.

“See this?” I said.

“Yeah, one of those pocket voice recorders.”

I clicked the recorder on, then off with my thumb. “I had a talk with Whitey Bruxal earlier today. I had this recorder running in my pocket. I was going to take you over the hurdles with it, Bello.”

He was grinning and I could see he didn’t understand.

“I was going to play back snippets to you and let you have a little glimpse of what your business partner has to say when you’re not around,” I said. “But you’re an intelligent man and I won’t treat you as less.”

“I ain’t sure what that means.”

“You can believe this or not. Either the Feds or Lonnie Marceaux are going to hang you by your thumbs. No matter how you cut it, you’ve got Whitey Bruxal as your fall partner.”

“What you mean, fall partner?”

“He’s the guy you’re going down with. Is Whitey the kind of guy who will take a maximum sentence rather than rat out a friend? I don’t know the answer. But I bet you do.”

“He was working a deal wit’ you?”

“Put it this way. I doubt if Whitey would tell the truth to a corpse. But if I were on a burning plane with him and the plane carried only one parachute, I have a feeling who would end up wearing it.”

Bello fitted the Stilson back on the faucet head and began to squeak the nut tighter, as though my words were of little interest to him. But I could see the fatigue in his face, and in his eyes the tangle of thoughts that probably waged war inside his head twenty-four hours a day.

“What would you do?” he asked.

“I don’t think you’ll ever experience any rest until you own up to your mistakes, Bello.”

“Starting wit’ what?”

“I think you attacked Yvonne Darbonne. I think her death is eating you alive. No amount of Holy Roller shouting in tongues is going to change that fact or relieve you of your guilt.”

“Who tole you I did that?”

“It’s written all over you.”

The heavy, oblong steel head of the Stilson rested on the rim of the aluminum tank, his hand grasped tightly around the shank. The back of his hand was brown, mottled with liver spots and lined with veins that looked like knotted package twine. I could hear a horse blowing inside the stable.

I supposed it was not a time to say anything. But there are moments when caution and restraint just don’t cut it. “Why’d you do it, partner? She was just a kid.”

“Maybe there’re reasons everybody don’t know about. Maybe t’ings just happen,” he replied.

“Run that crap on somebody else.”

“What do you know? You got everyt’ing. They killed my boy. You know what it’s like to have your kid killed?”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The niggers. Monarch Little and all them niggers with black scarfs on their head, selling their dope, pimping their women, corrupting the town.”

It was hopeless. I think there are those who are psychologically incapable of honesty and I think Bello was one of them. I got back in the truck and left him to himself. In all candor, I doubt if a worse punishment in the world could have been visited upon him.

BUT I STILL HAD MILES TO GO before I slept. I called Molly on my cell phone and asked if we could have a late dinner.

“You have to work?” she said.

“Clete’s in some trouble.”

“What kind?”

I searched my mind for an honest answer. “There’s no adequate scale. The rules of reason and logic have no application in his life,” I said.

“Sound like anybody else you know?” she replied.

“Put my supper in the icebox.”

“It already is,” she replied.

The owner of the motor court where Clete lived told me Clete and a young woman had gone to a street dance in St. Martinville.

They weren’t hard to find. In fact, as I drove up the two-lane through the dusk, through the corridor of live oaks that led out of town and the miles of waving sugarcane on each side of the road, I saw Clete’s Caddy parked in front of a supper club left over from the 1940s. It was a happy place, where people ate thick steaks and drank Manhattans and old-fashioneds and sometimes had trysts involving a degree of romance in the palm-shrouded motel set behind the club. Above the entrance way was a pink neon outline of a martini glass with the long-legged reclining figure of a nude woman inside.

The refrigerated air in the dining room was so cold it made me shiver. Each table was covered with white linen and set with a candle burning inside a glass chimney. A man in a summer tux was playing a piano that was so black it had purple lights in it. Clete was at a table by himself, a collins drink in his hand, his face flushed and cheerful, his eyes shiny with alcohol.

“Where’s Trish?” I said.

“On the phone.”

I sat down without being asked. “Helen says Orleans Parish is cutting a warrant for your arrest.”

“So I’ll get out of town for a little while. You want a steak?”

“The Orleans sheriff told Helen he knows you’re mixed up with bank robbers. What’s the matter with you, Clete? You know how many people in South Louisiana want an excuse to blow you away?”

“That’s their problem.”

I was so angry I could hardly speak.

“There used to be a slop chute in San Diego that had a sign over the door like the one out there. You ever go to San Diego?” he said.

“No. Listen, Clete-”

But he had already launched into one of his alcoholic reveries that served only one function-to distract attention from the subject at hand.

“It was a joint that had a neon sign with a gal inside a pink martini glass. We used to call her the gin-fizz kitty from Texas City. A whole bunch of Marines had fallen in love with this same broad who worked the bars outside Pendleton. They said she could kiss you into next week, not counting what she could do in the sack. Bottom line is she got all these guys to put her name down as beneficiary on their life insurance policies. When CID finally caught up with her, we found out she’d been a whore in Texas City. We also found out a half-dozen guys she screwed ended up in body bags. How about that for passing on the ultimate form of clap? Hey, I was one of them. Get that look off your face.”

He drank from his collins glass, then started laughing, like a man watching his own tether line pull loose from the earth.

“I want to take you outside and knock you down,” I said.

“It’s all rock ’n’ roll, Streak. Going up or coming down, we all get to the same barn. What can happen that hasn’t already happened in my life?”

“I think you’ve melted your brain. Don’t you realize the implications of the story you just told me?”

“What, that Trish is hustling me? Don’t make me mad at you, big mon.”

But there was more hurt in his face than indignation. In the back of the club I saw Trish Klein replace the receiver on a pay phone, then stare in our direction, her mouth red and soft, her heart-shaped face achingly beautiful in the pastel lighting. I got up from the table and left without saying good-bye.

I PLANNED DURING the next two days to talk to Trish Klein in private about her relationship with one of the best and most self-destructive and vulnerable human beings I had ever known. I got the opportunity in a way I didn’t suspect.