Pegasus Descending

Chapter 21

ON WEDNESDAY, Joe Dupree at the Lafayette P.D. called me just before noon.

“She’s in lockup?” I said.

“I never saw anybody look so good in a jailhouse jumpsuit.”

“For shoplifting at the Acadiana Mall?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that. She walked out of the store with a four-hundred-dollar handbag she didn’t pay for. She caused a big scene when security stopped her. She claimed she was just showing the purse to a friend for the friend’s opinion on it. She probably could have gone back inside and settled the issue by putting it on her credit card. She had a gold Amex and two or three platinum cards in her billfold. Instead, she ended up throwing the purse in the store manager’s face.”

“She’s not posting bail?”

“To my knowledge, she hasn’t even asked about it.” I could hear him chewing gum in the receiver.

“What are you telling me?” I asked.

“I think she likes it here.”

After lunch, I drove to Lafayette in a cruiser, checked my firearm in a security area on the first floor of the jail, and waited on the second floor in an interview room while a guard brought Trish Klein down in an elevator.

The guard was a stout, joyless woman who had once been taken hostage at a men’s prison and held for three days during an attempted jailbreak. I used to see her at Red’s Gym, pumping iron in a roomful of men who radiated testosterone-dour, painted with stink, possessed of memories she didn’t share. She unhooked Trish at the door. I rose when Trish entered the room and offered her a chair. The guard gave me a look that was both hostile and suspicious and locked the door behind her.

“Did you ever hear the story about Robert Mitchum getting out of Los Angeles City Prison?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“Mitchum spent six months in there on a marijuana bust and figured his career was over. The day he got out, a reporter shouted at him, ‘What was it like in there, Bob?’ Mitchum said, ‘Not bad. Just like Palm Springs, without the riffraff.’”

She showed no reaction to the story. In fact, she wore no expression at all, as though both her surroundings and I were of no interest to her.

“What are you doing in here, kiddo?” I said.

“Kiddo, up your ass, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“That’s clever, but people with your background and finances don’t go out of their way to put themselves in the slams.”

“I don’t like being called a thief.”

“Yeah, I bet it was shocking to learn your photo is in the Griffin Book at casinos from Vegas to Atlantic City.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because I think you and your friends are planning a big score on Whitey Bruxal. I think you’re setting up your alibi.”

She looked out the window at the street. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“You guys are going to get yourselves killed. That’s your own choice, but you’re taking Clete Purcel down with you.”

“He’s a grown man. Why don’t you stop treating him like a child?”

Down the corridor I could hear someone yelling, a scuffling sound of chains clinking, and a heavy object crashing against a metal surface, perhaps against the door of an elevator. But Trish Klein paid no attention to the distraction.

“Clete’s been my friend for over thirty years. That’s more time than you’ve been on earth,” I said, regretting the self-righteousness of my words almost as soon as I had spoken them.

“I suspect I should go back upstairs now,” she said.

“You don’t think Whitey is onto you? This guy was a protégé of Meyer Lansky. Your people impersonated gas company employees and creeped his house. Want to hear a couple of stories about people who tried to burn the Mob?”

She didn’t answer, but I told her anyway. One account dealt with a man in Las Vegas whose skull was splintered in a machinist’s vise, another who was hung alive by his rectum from a meat hook. I also told her what insiders said was the fate of a middle-class family man in a Queens suburb who accidentally ran over and killed the child of his neighbor, a notorious Mafia don.

“These bastards might look interesting on the movie screen, but they’re the scum of the earth,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have guessed that, Mr. Robicheaux. I always thought the people who murdered my father were closet humanists.”

It was obvious that my best efforts with Trish Klein were of no value. It was like telling someone not to gargle with Liquid Drano. I was about to call for the guard and leave Trish and her friends to their own fate, when she lifted her eyes up to mine and for just a moment I understood the tenacity of Clete’s commitment to her.

“A week before my father’s death, he took me snorkeling off Dania Beach,” she said. “We cooked hot dogs on a grill in a grove of palm trees and played with a big blue beach ball. Then two men parked a convertible under the trees and made him walk off with them, down where the water was hitting on the rocks. I remember how sad he looked, how small and humiliated, like he was no longer my father. I couldn’t hear what the two men were saying, but they were angry and one man kept punching my father in the chest with his finger. When my father came back to our picnic table, his face was white and his hands were shaking.

“I asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘Nothing. Everything is fine. Those guys were just having a bad day.’

“Then he put my snorkel and mask on my head and walked me down to the water and swam backward with me on his chest, until we were at the end of a coral jetty. He said, ‘This is where the clown fish live. Anytime you’re having a problem, you can tell it to the clown fish. These guys love children. Come on, you’ll see.’

“That was the first time I ever held my breath and went all the way under the water. There were clown fish everywhere. They swam right up to my mask and brushed against my shoulders and arms. I never thought about those men again, not until years later when I realized they were probably the ones who murdered my father.”

I wanted to be sympathetic. Dallas had been a good man, a brave soldier, and a devoted parent. But he had been corrupted by his addiction and had become a willing party to an armored car and bank heist that cost not only his life but also the life of the teller who had tried to foil the robbery by pushing shut the vault door. Now Trish’s single-minded obsession with vengeance might cost Clete Purcel his life, or at least a large chunk of it, and that simple fact seemed totally lost on her.

“Why not let Whitey and his pals fall in their own shit? It’s a matter of time before either the Feds or the locals take them down,” I said.

“You said Bruxal was friends with Meyer Lansky?”

“That’s right.”

“Did the system get Lansky?”

“He died of cancer.”

“When he was an old man. You’re a laugh a minute, Mr. Robicheaux.”

I banged on the door for the guard to let me out. I was determined to let Trish have the last word, to be humble enough to remember my own mistakes and not contend with the certainty and confidence of youth. But when I looked at the earnestness and ego-centered determination in her face, I saw a moth about to swim into a flame.

“You probably noticed the hack who brought you in here seemed out of joint,” I said.

“The hack?”

“The female correctional officer. She was held three days in a male prison riot and passed from hand to hand by guys psychiatrists haven’t found names for. She ended up in these guys’ hands because she thought she knew what was inside their heads and she could handle whatever came down the pike. Don’t ask her what they did to her, because she’s never told anyone, at least no one around here.”

I saw her fingers twitch on top of the table.

On the way back to Lafayette, I left a message with Betsy Mossbacher’s voice mail.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, she called me on my cell phone. “You visited the Klein woman in jail?” she said.

“Briefly. But I didn’t learn a whole lot.”

“What’d she tell you?”

“A story about her father and swimming with clown fish.”

“Clown fish?”

“I guess they’re a symbol of childhood innocence for her. Anyway, I think she deliberately got herself arrested.”

“We have the same impression at the Bureau. Some of her griffins have been showing up at three or four casinos where Whitey Bruxal is a part owner. It seems they make a point of standing in front of security cameras and getting themselves escorted off the premises.”

I waited for her to go on.

“Did I catch you on the john?” she said.

“No,” I lied. “I didn’t know you had finished. You think they’re planning to take down a casino?”

“I’d say it’s a diversion of some kind. But my supervisor says I always overestimate people’s intelligence.”

“You guys deal with higher-quality perps,” I said.

“Actually, he was talking about you and Purcel.”

Two uniformed deputies entered the restroom, talking loudly. One of them slammed down the seat in the stall next to me. “Hey, there’s no toilet paper on the roller. Get some out of the supply closet, will you?” he called out to his friend.

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of New Orleans. Not the New Orleans of today but the city where Clete and I had been young patrolmen, in a cruiser, sometimes even walking a beat with nightsticks, at a time when the city in its provincial innocence actually feared Black Panthers and long-haired kids who wore love beads and Roman sandals.

This was before crack cocaine hit New Orleans like a hydrogen bomb in the early eighties and the administration in Washington, D.C., cut federal aid to the city by half. Oddly, prior to the eighties, New Orleans enjoyed a kind of sybaritic tranquillity that involved a contract between the devil and the forces of justice. The Giacano family ran the vice and maintained implicit understandings with NOPD about the operation of the city. The Quarter was the cash cow. Anyone who jackrolled a tourist got his wheels broken. Anyone who jackrolled an old person anywhere or stuck up a bar or café frequented by cops or who molested a child got his wheels broken and got thrown from a police car at high speed on the parish line, that is, if he was lucky.

The Giacanos were stone killers and corrupt to the core, but they were pragmatists as well as family men and they realized no society remains functional if it doesn’t maintain the appearances of morality.

New Orleans was a Petrarchan sonnet rather than an Elizabethan one, its mind-set more like the medieval world, in the best sense, than the Renaissance. In the spring of 1971 I lived in a cottage by the convent school on Ursulines, and every Sunday morning I would attend Mass at St. Louis Cathedral, then stroll across Jackson Square in the coolness of the shadows while sidewalk artists were setting up their easels along a pike fence that was overhung by palm fronds and oak boughs. At an outdoor table in the Café du Monde, over beignets and coffee with hot milk, I would watch the pinkness of the morning spread across the Quarter, the unicyclists pirouetting in front of the cathedral, jugglers tossing wood balls in the air, street bands who played for tips knocking out “Tin Roof Blues” and “Rampart Street Parade.” The balconies along the streets groaned with the weight of potted plants, and bougainvillea hung in huge clumps from the iron grillwork and bloomed as brightly as drops of blood in the sunlight. Corner grocery stores, run by Italian families, still had wood-bladed fans on the ceilings and sold boudin and po’boy sandwiches to working people. Out front, in the shade of the colonnade, were bins of cantaloupe, bananas, strawberries, and rattlesnake watermelons. Often, on the same corner, in the same wonderful smell that was like a breath of old Europe, a black man sold sno-balls from a pushcart, the ice hand-shaved off a frosted blue block he kept wrapped in a tarp.

Traditional New Orleans was like a piece of South America that had been sawed loose from its moorings and blown by trade winds across the Caribbean, until it affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States. The streetcars, the palms along the neutral grounds, the shotgun cottages with ventilated shutters, the Katz and Betz drugstores whose neon lighting looked like purple and green smoke in the mist, the Irish and Italian dialectical influences that produced an accent mistaken for Brooklyn or the Bronx, the collective eccentricity that drew Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner and William Burroughs to its breast, all these things in one way or another were impaired or changed forever by the arrival of crack cocaine.

Or at least that is the perception of one police officer who was there when it happened.

But in my dream I didn’t see the deleterious effects of the drug trade on the city I loved. I saw only Clete and me, neither of us very long out of Vietnam, walking down Canal in patrolmen’s blues, past the old Pearl Restaurant, where the St. Charles streetcar stopped for passengers under a green-painted iron colonnade, the breeze blowing off Lake Pontchartrain, the evening sky ribbed with strips of pink cloud, the air pulsing with music, black men shooting craps in an alley, kids tap-dancing for change, the kind of moment whose perfection you vainly hope will never be subject to time and decay.

When I woke in the early dawn, with Molly beside me, I didn’t know where I was. It was misting and gray in the trees, and out on the bayou I could hear the heavy droning sound of a tug pushing a barge down toward Morgan City. The ventilated shutters on the front windows were closed, and the light was slitted and green, the way it had been in the cottage where I lived on Ursulines.

“You okay, Dave?” Molly asked, curled on her side under the sheet.

“I thought I was in New Orleans,” I replied.

She rolled on her back and looked up at me, her hair spread on the pillow like points of fire. She cupped her hand around the back of my neck. “You’re not,” she said.

“It was a funny dream, like I was saying good-bye to something.”

“Come here,” she said.

She kissed me on the mouth, then touched me under the sheet.

Later, after I had showered and dressed, Molly made coffee and heated a pan of milk and poured our orange juice while I filled our bowls with Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas. Both Tripod and Snuggs came inside, and I split a can of cat food between the two of them and gave each his own water bowl (Tripod, like all coons, washed his food before he ate it) and spread newspaper on the linoleum to preempt problems with Tripod’s incontinence. The mist outside had become as thick and gray in the trees as fog, and I couldn’t see the green of the park on the far side of the bayou.

But my problem was not with the weather. I could not get rid of the sense that something bad was about to happen, that an evil medium of some kind, if left unchecked, was about to hurt someone.

All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It’s like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position.

What was it that bothered me so much? Loss of my youth? Fear of mortality? The systemic destruction of the Cajun world in which I had grown up?

Yes to all those things. But my greatest fear was much more immediate than the abstractions I just mentioned. As every investigative law officer will tell you, the clues that lead to a crime’s solution are always there. It’s a matter of seeing or touching or hearing or smelling them. Nothing aberrant happens in a vacuum. The causality and connections wait for us just beyond the perimeter of our vision, in the same way a piece of spiderweb can attach itself to your hand when you grip the undersurface of a banister in a deserted house. The perps aren’t smart. They just have more time to devote to their work than we do.

“Lost in thought?” Molly said.

“The deaths of Crustacean Man, Yvonne Darbonne, and Tony Lujan are all related. But I don’t know if any one of those cases will ever be solved.”

“Time’s on your side.”

“How?”

“Down the line, everybody pays his tab,” she said.

“I’m not always so sure about that.”

“Yes, you are.”

“How you know?” I asked.

“Because you’re a believer. Because you can’t change what you are, no matter what you say about yourself.”

“Is that right?” I said.

“I don’t hang around with the B team, troop,” she said.

Five minutes later, the phone rang. It was Wally, our dispatcher. “Got a nine-one-one from Bello Lujan’s wife. She said the black man who works for her went out to the stable and found Bello on the flo’, inside the stall. She said a horse kicked him. We got Acadian Ambulance on the way.”

“Why’d you call me?”

“’Cause Miz Lujan sounded like my wife does when she tells me to get a dead rat out from under the house. I don’t trust that woman.”

“Keep me updated, will you?”

“Why is it every time I call you I seem to say the wrong t’ing? The problem must be me.”

Just before I went out the door, the phone rang again. “Here’s your update. Acadian Ambulance just called. Ole Bello won’t be posing wit’ the roses for a while. Helen went to New Orleans, so you want to take over t’ings?” he said.

“Will you get the crackers out of your mouth?”

“If the guy blew his nose, his brains would be in the handkerchief. That’s the way the paramedic put it. He says it wasn’t done by no horse, eit’er. That clear enough?”

THE EMERGENCY VEHICLES parked by Bello’s stable still had their flashers on, rippling with blue, red, and white light inside the mist. I stooped under the crime scene tape and walked down the concrete pad that separated two rows of twelve-by-twelve stalls. Koko Hebert was already on the job-gloved, furrow-browed, morose, his gelatinous girth like curtains of fat hanging on a deboned elephant. In the gloom of the stable he kept turning his attention from the stall to the sliding back doors, both of which were pushed back on their tracks. Out in the pasture, a sorrel mare was eating in the grass, one walleye looking back at the stable.

Bello Lujan lay on his left side in the stall. The floor of the stall was comprised of dirt and sand, overlaid with a layer of straw. The wound in the back of Bello ’s skull was deep and tapered and had bled out in a thick pool on the straw. His eyes were open and staring, his face empty of expression, in fact, possessed of a serenity that didn’t fit the level of violence that had been done to his person. A bucket of molasses balls was overturned in the corner of the stall. I suspected he never saw his assailant and perhaps, with luck, he had not suffered, either.

“You got a weapon?” I said.

“It’s outside, in the weeds. A pick with a sawed-off handle. The black guy who found him says the chain was down on the stall and the sorrel was out,” Koko said. “There’re some tennis-shoe impressions on the concrete. Watch where you walk.”

“How do you read it?” I asked.

“ Bello went into the stall with the mare and somebody came up behind him and put it to him long and hard.”

“What do you mean, long and hard?”

“That hole in the back of his head isn’t the only one in him. He took one in the rib cage and one in the armpit. Take a look at the slats on the left side of the stall. I think Bello bounced off the boards, then tried to get up and caught the last one in the skull.” Koko laughed out loud. “Then he got shit on by the horse he was trying to feed. I’m not kidding you. Look at his shirt.”

“Why don’t you show some respect?” I said.

Koko coughed into his palm, still laughing. “Do you ever get tired of it?”

“Of what?” I said.

“Being the only guy in the department with any humanity. It must be tough to be a full-time water-walker,” he said.

“Hey, Dave, come see a minute,” Mack Bertrand said from the back entrance. He had arrived shortly before I did and had done only a preliminary survey of the crime scene. A camera hung from his right hand.

“I’ll talk to you about that remark later, Koko,” I said.

“I can’t wait,” he said.

I joined Mack outside. “What do you have?” I said.

“Take a look at the murder weapon. What’s interesting about it is the tip of the pick has been sharpened down to a fine point, probably on a grinder. When’s the last time you sharpened a pick like that?”

“Never.”

“So in all probability we’ve got a premeditated homicide here and the killer came prepared to do maximum damage,” he said.

I squatted down and looked at the pick. Mack was right. The point had been honed down to a thinness that would break if it was driven into rock or hardpan. Streaks of blood and pieces of hair coated at least four inches of the steel surface. “You’ve got a good eye, Mack,” I said.

“Walk with me to the back fence.”

The rear of the lot was strung with what is called a back-fence, one that is made up of steel spikes and smooth wire and is less attractive than a rail or slat fence but cheaper to construct and more utilitarian. On the other side was an ungrazed pasture, then a line of water oaks and pecan trees that separated the pasture from a sugarcane field. Mack pointed to a channel of dented grass in the pasture.

“My guess is somebody crossed the pasture on foot this morning, maybe somebody who parked his vehicle up there on the turnrow by the sugarcane field,” Mack said. “What do you think?”

I nodded without speaking.

“No, I mean who do you think would do this? Just between us.”

I rested my arm on a steel fence spike. I hated to even think about the possibilities that Mack’s question suggested. “I twisted the screws on Whitey Bruxal. Maybe Whitey thought Bello was about to roll over on him,” I said.

“The Mob uses pickaxes?”

“Whitey’s smart. He doesn’t follow patterns. That’s why he’s never done time.”

“I’m really bothered by this, Dave. Bello came to our church for help. I sent him over to the Holy Rollers. You ever figure out what was driving him?”

“Take your choice. Years ago he tried to lynch a black man. His wife thinks he attacked Yvonne Darbonne. He tried to revise his own life by controlling and destroying his son’s. Everything he touched turned to excrement.”

“He raped the Darbonne girl?”

“I just have the wife’s interpretation of events. She’s not an easy person to talk with. She says Bello raped Yvonne Darbonne the same day Darbonne shot herself.”

“Jesus Christ. Yvonne Darbonne was gangbanged that day.”

“That’s my point. I don’t know if Mrs. Lujan is telling the truth. I don’t believe she’s totally connected to reality.”

“Who is?” Mack said.

It was damp and cool inside the mist, and the pasture on the other side of the fence was emerald green, except for the trail of bruised grass that led from the wire back to the turnrow in the sugarcane. Across the road, Bello ’s house sat heavy and squat and white inside the mist, his flower gardens blooming, the bayou high and yellow in the background. He had owned everything a man could want. But his war with the world and his imaginary enemies had never ended. Was the serenity I had seen on his face in the horse stall simply the result of his nerve endings collapsing? Or in life had the aggressive leer of the moral imbecile been a form of pathological rictus that hid the frightened child?

“You already saw the tennis-shoe impressions in the stable?” Mack asked.

“Yeah, I need to talk to the black man who found Bello.”

“He’s up at the main house. Want me to see if I can get any latents off the fence?”

“Sure, go ahead,” I said, still unable to process my own thoughts about the life and death of Bello Lujan.

“I heard that crack Koko made. Don’t let him get to you, Dave. He’s full of rage over his kid getting killed in Iraq and doesn’t know who to blame for it.”

“I wasn’t thinking about Koko. I knew Bello before either one of us learned to speak English. He was a tough kid.”

“Yeah?” Mack said, waiting for me to go on.

“He was like most of my generation. The poor bastard believed everything people taught him.”

“Taught him what?”

“If he had money, he could forget he shined shoes down at the S.P. station. Bello never could understand that the kid with the shine box was probably the best person he would ever know.”

Mack put his empty pipe in his mouth and stared at the channel of broken grass in the pasture. He was trying to be polite, but it was no time for my lament on the problems of my generation and the lost innocence of a French-speaking culture that has become little more than a chimerical emanation of itself, packaged and sold to tourists.

“Dave, either we have a random killing, one done by a maniac who didn’t know the vic, or somebody who knew Bello’s daily routine and literally tried to eviscerate him. I hope to get you some prints off the pick handle, but-”

“But what?”

“I think the perp spent some time on this. I don’t think he threw down the weapon so we could find his prints all over it. I think the guy who did this is methodical and intelligent. Does that bring anyone to mind?”

“Yeah, Whitey Bruxal.”

“My thoughts shouldn’t stray too far past the lab, but when they kill like this-I mean, when they try to tear out somebody’s insides-the motivation is usually sexual or racial. Sometimes both.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not sure myself. Does Mrs. Lujan strike you as a charitable and forgiving spouse?”

“Thanks for your help, Mack. Give me a call from the lab, will you?”

“My pleasure,” he replied. “Hey, Dave, you going to talk to Yvonne Darbonne’s father? I mean, to exclude him?”

“Why?”

“No reason. He’s a good man. His daughter was the same age as one of mine. I don’t know if I could live with that kind of grief. I still have a hard time accepting the kinds of shit kids get into today. Drugs, abortion, hepatitis B, AIDS, herpes. They’re just kids, for God’s sakes. Before they’re twenty, they’re screwed up for life.”

You’re right again, Mack, I thought. But what was the solution? An authoritarian government? I feared how many people would answer in the affirmative.

I drove back onto the state road, then crossed a bridge over a coulee and parked in the turnrow by the sugarcane field where the killer probably entered the pasture on his way to Bello ’s stable. But the turnrow was churned with tractor, harvester, truck, and cane-wagon tracks, and littered with beer cans, snuff containers, and used rubbers as well, and I doubted that we would recover any helpful forensic evidence from the scene.

I watched the paramedics drive away with Bello ’s body, then I questioned the black man who had found Bello in the stall. The black man was not wearing tennis shoes and he did not believe any of Bello ’s other employees wore them, either. In fact, he said Bello insisted his employees wear sturdy work boots in order to prevent injuries and to keep his insurance premiums down. That sounded like classic Bello.

The black man also said he had never seen the pick before.

Then I rang the chimes on the front door of the Lujan home and was let inside by the maid.

I have either visited or investigated homicide scenes for over thirty-five years. Clete Purcel and I cut down a corpse that had been hanging in a warehouse for four months. We dug one dancing with maggots out of a wall. We scraped a twentieth-floor jumper off the steel stairs of a fire escape. We had to use tweezers to pick the remnants of one out of a compacted automobile. Twenty-five years ago I saw the interior of a house after rogue members of NOPD had put a hit on a whole family. Murder is an up-close and personal business, and rarely does a journalistic account do it justice. You want a capital sentence in a homicide prosecution? Make sure the jury gets the opportunity to study some color photographs before they go into deliberation.

But the worst part of any homicide investigation usually involves notification and questioning of family members. They want to know if their loved ones suffered, if they died in a brave or cowardly fashion, if the body was degraded. Often their eyes beg, but not for the truth. They want you to lie. And often that is exactly what you do.

Mrs. Lujan did not fall into the category I just described. In fact, when I was escorted by the maid onto the sunporch, I was stunned by what I saw. Mrs. Lujan was standing up with the aid of a walker, dressed in a pink skirt and white blouse, her face bright with purpose, her hair brushed and tied with a ribbon in back. She extended her hand and smiled wanly.

“How are you, Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.

“I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this. I can come back later if you like,” I said.

“Call me Valerie. You’re only carrying out the obligations of your office,” she said. “Do me a favor, though. Would you open the jalousies and let the mist in? I love the cool smell of the morning. When I was a child in New Orleans, I loved the coolness of the mist blowing in from Lake Pontchartrain. My father often took me to the amusement park by the water’s edge. Do you remember the amusement park on the lake?”

Her detachment from Bello ’s murder might have been written off as the effects of shock or perhaps even a thespian attempt to deal with tragedy in a dignified fashion. But I believed that in the mind of Valerie Lujan all the grief the world could expect of her had already been extracted by the death of her son, and she felt no shame in refusing to mourn a husband whose sexual appetites had taken him far from his wife’s bed.

“Did Bello give you any indication that Whitey Bruxal might have wanted him dead?” I said.

“Why would Mr. Bruxal want to harm Bello? Tony was friends with Slim, but Bello didn’t associate with Mr. Bruxal.”

“They were business partners.”

“They may have invested in the same enterprises, but they were hardly partners.” She eased herself down on the couch and sighed pleasantly. “My, it feels good to stand up. I’m volunteering at the university to teach a noncredit drama course. I haven’t done anything so uplifting in years.”

“I see.”

“You don’t think well of me, do you?”

I dropped my eyes. “I think you’ve carried a heavy load much of your life, ma’am.”

“I spoke by telephone this morning with my spiritual adviser, Reverend Alridge. His insight has helped me enormously. My husband was a racist, pure and simple. He sexually exploited Negro women and consequently inflamed their men. That may have contributed to Monarch Little’s murdering my son. Now it may have cost Bello his life as well.”

“You’re saying Monarch Little killed your husband?”

“If I understand correctly, Bello was killed with a maddox or a pick of some kind. You’re a realist and I don’t think given to political correctness, Mr. Robicheaux. Who else except a depraved Negro criminal would kill like that?”

I looked away from the glare in her eyes. In my mind’s eye I saw Monarch Little in his baggy pants and weight lifter’s shirt, with an oversize ball cap askew on his head. I also saw the two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes, with gas cushions in the soles, that he wore as part of his cartoon-character persona.

Wrong fashion choice, Monarch.

“Come visit me again, Mr. Robicheaux. Somehow something good will come out of all of this. I have faith for the first time in years. I hope you find it, too,” Mrs. Lujan said.

Her unevenly recessed eyes were liquid with the warmth of her own sentiment. I had the feeling Mrs. Lujan had just taken up serious residence in the kingdom of the self-deluded and would be a long time in freeing herself from it.

I DROVE TO the rural slum on the bayou, just outside the city limits, where Monarch lived. A junker car was parked in the drive, but no one answered the door. His neighbor, an elderly black woman picking up trash from a drainage ditch, told me Monarch was in town.

“He’s working?” I said.

“His mother died. I ain’t sure what he’s doin’.”

“Died? I thought his mother was coming home from the hospital.”

“She had a heart attack two days ago. Monarch gone off wit’ his friends. They t’rowed all their beer cans in my li’l yard. Tell Monarch he ought to be ashamed of hisself, his mother not yet in the ground.”

“Ashamed why?”

She picked up a crushed beer can, threw it hard in her gunnysack, and didn’t reply.

I drove back to New Iberia and crossed the Teche on the drawbridge at Burke Street. The water was high on the green slope of the banks, the surface dimpled with rain, and black people were fishing with cane poles and cut bait from under the bridge. Then I turned down Railroad Avenue into New Iberia’s old brothel district, the one place in our town’s history where indeed the past had never become the past.