James Burke - Pegasus Descending

But there were rumors about the origins of his success at the track-stories about stolen seed, a manipulated high-end claim race in California, and doping the odds-on favorite with downers at a track in New Mexico.

I had called in advance. He greeted me in the driveway, dressed in white shorts and a golf shirt, his skin dark with tan, his arms swatched with whorls of shiny black hair. He crouched slightly, his fists raised like a boxer’s. “Dave, you son of a gun, comment la vie, neg? I heard you sold off your boat dock. Too bad. I liked that place,” he said. His accent was a singular one, a strange blend of hard-core coonass and the Italian-Irish inflections of blue-collar New Orleans.

“How’s it hangin’, Bello?” I said,

“How’s yours hangin’?” he replied, still grinning, still full of play.

Then I told him why I was there.

“You want to talk to my son about that girl who killed herself?” he said. “Sorry to hear about something like that, but what’s it got to do with Tony?” He turned his head toward the tennis court, where his son was whocking back balls fired at him by an automatic machine.

“Was he seeing Yvonne Darbonne?” I asked.

Bello rubbed at his nose with the heel of his hand. His brow was knitted, his wide-set, dark eyes busy with thought. “A young guy that good-looking has got a lot of girls around. How should I know? They come and go. I don’t remember anybody by that name around here,” he said.

I started across the lawn toward the tennis court. I could tell his son, Tony, saw me out of the corner of his eye, but he kept on stroking the ball, his cheeks like apples, his curly brown hair tied off his forehead with a bandanna, his hips thin, almost girlish. I heard Bello on my heels. “Hey, Dave, take it out of overdrive, here. That’s my son, there. You’re saying he’s mixed up in somebody’s death? I don’t like that.”

I turned around slowly, trying to fix a smile on my face before I spoke. “This is a homicide investigation, Bello. If you want this interview conducted down at the department, that’s fine. In the meantime, I’m requesting that you stay out of it,” I said.

He opened up his palms, as though bewildered. “It’s Saturday morning. It’s spring. The birds are singing. You hit my front lawn like a thunderstorm. I’m the problem?” he said.

I opened the door to the court and walked out on the dampened, rolled surface of the clay. Tony Lujan was deferential and polite in every way, repeatedly addressing me as “sir.” But in South Louisiana, protocol is often a given and not substantive, particularly among young people of Tony’s financial background.

“You knew Yvonne?” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You knew her well?” I said, my eyes locked on his.

“She worked at Victor’s Cafeteria. I’d see her there and maybe around town some.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“The day before she died. We had some ice cream in the park.”

“You have any idea why she’d want to kill herself?”

“No, sir.”

“None?”

“No, sir.”

“I think you knew her better than you’re letting on,” I said.

His eyes were starting to film.

“Hey, you answer his questions!” Bello said.

“We went out. We slept together,” Tony said.

“Why’d you try to lie to me?” I asked.

The nylon windscreens on the court puffed in the breeze and creaked against their tethers. The color in the boy’s cheeks had the broken shape of flame.

“You knock that off, Dave. He’s cooperating, here,” Bello said.

“You need to leave us alone, Bello,” I said.

“Fuck you. This is my home. You don’t come in here pushing people around,” Bello replied.

There was nothing for it. Bello was obviously a suffocating, controlling presence in his son’s life, and I knew that without a warrant I would get no more information out of either one of them. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, give me a call, will you?” I said to Tony, handing him my business card.

“Yes, sir, I will,” he said.

I walked back to my truck, with Bello at my side, his eyes stripping the skin off my face. “You trying to make trouble here, Dave? You got an old beef with me about something?” he said.

“No,” I said, opening the door to my truck.

“Then what?”

I didn’t answer and started to get behind the wheel. Bello ’s hand sank into my arm. “You don’t demean my family and blow me off,” he said.

“A young woman is dead. Your son tried to conceal information about his relationship with her. Now, you take your hand off me.”

“He’s just a kid.”

“Not anymore,” I replied.

He stared at me, his face twitching, his lips seeming to form words that had no sound.

CLETE PURCEL, my old partner from NOPD Homicide, was not in a good mood that night. In fact, he had not been in a good mood all week, ever since a pipehead check writer and bail skip by the name of Frogman Andrepont had thrown a television set through his brother-in-law’s picture-glass window onto the front lawn, then escaped across the roof while Clete ran from the backyard to the front of the house.

Clete had opened up his own P.I. and bail bond office on Main in New Iberia, but he still chased down bail skips for his former employers Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater in New Orleans. So after Frogman missed his court appearance, Clete flushed him out of his brother-in-law’s house, only to lose him in Henderson Swamp, where Clete blew out a tire highballing down the top of the levee and was almost eaten alive by mosquitoes.

But as a man on the run, Frogman had two disadvantages: His face looked exactly like a frog’s, including the eye bags, distended throat, and even the reptilian skin; secondly, he was a degenerate gambler as well as a crack addict. In Frogman’s case, this meant Louisiana ’s newest twenty-four-hour casino and all-purpose neon-lit hog trough was as close to paradise as the earth gets.

It was located in a parish to the north of us and was part of a larger complex that featured a clubhouse and horse track. But the horse races and the upscale dining areas were ultimately cosmetic. The real draw was the casino. The other bars in the parish were forced by law to close at 2 a.m. Not so with the casino. Regardless of the uproar raised by local saloon owners and law enforcement agencies and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the booze at the casino flowed from moonrise to dawn. How could anyone doubt this was a great country? They only had to ask Frogman.

Seated at the bar, a martini in his hand, dressed western in case an unsophisticated country girl or two was floating around, Frogman had a sense of security and well-being that tempted him to forgive the state of Louisiana for all the time it had dropped on his head over the years. Actually he could afford to be generous. He’d just hit a three-hundred-dollar jackpot on the slot and had treated himself to a steak dinner and a split of champagne. He’d outsmarted that fat cracker Purcel, too, even if he’d had to remodel his brother-in-law’s living room a little bit. Frogman tried to imagine his brother-in-law’s face when he pulled into his driveway and saw his broken television set and picture-glass window lying in the flower bed. Maybe he should drop a postcard and explain. Why not? It was the right thing to do. He’d take care of it first thing tomorrow.

But Frogman’s brother)in-law was not in a forgiving mood and had already dimed Frogman and his probable whereabouts to Clete Purcel. Saturday night Clete cruised the interior of the casino, not knowing that Frogman was taking a break from the machines and getting his ashes hauled by a Mexican prostitute in an Air Stream trailer out by the stables. So Clete set up shop at a blackjack table and quickly lost four hundred and seventy-three dollars.