James Burke - Pegasus Descending

It was like listening to two people talking out of one face. The words “rolling chaos” went through my mind, and I hoped fervently she had no idea what I was thinking. “I’ll get you a cup from the cooler,” I said.

“Forget it. You busted Bruxal’s son in that racial beef in front of McDonald’s. This is the first handle we’ve had on him. We want to use it.”

“You had me under surveillance?”

“No, I was passing by McDonald’s and saw it go down.”

“I see. And you want to go after Whitey Bruxal by prosecuting his boy?”

Her eyes shifted off mine, and I knew the idea was not hers, that it had come down from someone over her. “Monarch Little needs to file charges against Bruxal’s kid,” she said.

“Tell it to Monarch. See what kind of reaction you get.”

“That’s where you can help us.”

“Not me,” I replied.

She paused. “Bruxal got your friend in Miami killed. Maybe he gave the order for it.”

It was quiet in the room. I could hear raindrops ticking on the window glass. “You know that for a fact?”

“The people above me seem to.”

“Then you tell those sonsofbitches they’d better prosecute him.”

She paused again and I saw a strange glint come in her eye. “Want me to quote you?”

“Absolutely.”

For the first time that day, she smiled. “They said you were a bit unusual.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I’m just one of the field grunts. What do I know? Tell your boss I’m sorry I tracked horseshit on her carpet,” she said.

“That’s a metaphor?”

“No, I had it on my boots. Give Monarch Little a tumble. Whitey Bruxal is a bad guy. Back in Chugwater, he’d be split open, salted, and tacked on a fence post.”

“I’ve got to visit this place someday,” I replied.

TWO DAYS PASSED and I heard no more from Betsy Mossbacher. On Friday I went back to my file on Crustacean Man, the victim of a hit-and-run whose earthly remains had been left as food for crawfish at the bottom of a coulee. I still did not buy Koko Hebert’s explanation of Crustacean Man’s death. I had investigated many hit-and-run homicides over the years, both in Iberia Parish and New Orleans, and I had never seen one instance in which the victim had received two massive traumas on opposite sides of his body and no obvious ancillary damage that linked the two.

If they were bounced off the grille into the air and they caromed off the windshield, you knew it. If they were dragged under the vehicle, the damage was usually horrendous and pervasive. I looked at the photos taken of the remains at the crime scene. The body looked like one that could have fallen out of a boxcar at Bergen-Belsen. The skin was as tight as a lamp shade against the bone, the round mouth and eyes like the soundless scream in the famous painting by Edvard Munch.

Who are you, partner? What did somebody do to you?

Then a strange conjunction of thoughts came together in my head. Betsy Mossbacher had tried to pressure me into persuading Monarch Little to press charges against Whitey Bruxal’s son. Although it was a cynical legal maneuver, it was a good one. I suspected that Slim Bruxal, in spite of his good manners, was a vicious fraternity punk who had taken immense pleasure in tearing up Monarch Little’s face, and consequently deserved any fate the court dropped on his head. By the same token, Monarch had been cruising for a serious fall a long time. If his denouement happened to come from Whitey Bruxal, those were the breaks.

In the meantime, Monarch was of special interest to me for another reason. Before he had started dealing narcotics, he had worked for two or three shade-tree mechanics and backyard body-and-fender men. In fact, Monarch was something of an artist at his craft and could have made a career out of customizing and restoring vintage collectibles. But Monarch had discovered it was easier and more profitable to steal automobiles than it was to repair them.

I FOUND HIM under a shade tree, with five of his men, in the city’s old red-light district. The wind rustled the leaves in the tree, and a rusted weight set rested inside the dirt apron that extended from the trunk out to the tree’s drip line. Monarch and his friends were listening to music from the radio in Monarch’s Firebird, and drinking Coca-Cola and crushed ice from paper cups that they threw on the ground or in the street when they finished.

It could have been a midafternoon scene in any inner-city neighborhood, but it wasn’t. The old brothels are gone or boarded up with plywood and are nests for rats now, but at one time they serviced Confederate soldiers from Camp Pratt, out by Spanish Lake, in the early months of the Civil War; then the same women in them serviced any number of the twenty thousand Yankee soldiers who marched through New Iberia in pursuit of General Alfred Mouton and his boys in sun-faded butternut. Decades later, the five-dollar white cribs on Railroad Avenue and the three-dollar black ones on Hopkins continued to flourish, right up until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But the industry did not disappear. It morphed into a much more pernicious and complex enterprise.

The whores are window dressing today. The issue is dope. The whores work for it, men like Monarch sell it, cops go on a pad for it, pimps use it as their control mechanism, attorneys make careers defending its purveyors, the government subsidizes the cottage industries that screen for it. Its influence is systemic and I doubt if there is one kid in our parish who doesn’t know where he can buy it if he wants it. College kids get laid on Ex; black kids carrying nine-millimeters melt their heads with crack; and whores do crystal because it burns off their fast-food fat and keeps them competitive in the trade.

The short version? It’s an ugly business and it dehumanizes everyone involved with it. Anyone who thinks otherwise should do an up-close observation of one day in the life of a crack baby.

“What’s the haps, Monarch?” I said.

He was sitting in the passenger seat of his Firebird, his feet stretched out on the dirt beyond the curb. His mouth was pursed from the thickness of the stitches inside his gums. He drank out of his soda cup, tilting it gently to his mouth, letting the mixture of Coke and melting ice slide over his tongue. “No haps, Mr. Dee,” he said.

“Just call me Dave.”

“Call you Mr. Dee.”

“I need to talk with you in a confidential fashion, know what I mean?” I said.

He seemed to think about my proposal, his gaze wandering to a small grocery on the corner, kids riding their bikes along a trash-strewn ditch, a tattered wisp of rope, which used to support a tire swing, swaying from an oak limb overhead. He nodded at one of his friends, and without saying a word all five of them walked to the grocery store and went inside. Monarch got up from the car seat and positioned himself in front of the weight set under the tree. “This about them UL boys?” he said.

“You going to file on the Bruxal kid?” I said.

“Who?” he replied.

He bent over, hooking his palms under the weight bar, his stomach distended like an overflowing tub of bread dough. Then he lifted what I counted to be at least a hundred and forty pounds of steel plate. He curled the bar into his chest ten times, his back straight, his knees locked, his upper arms tightening into croquet balls. He set the bar down on the ground and stepped back from it, breathing slowly through his nose.

“Don’t try to square your problem with the Bruxal kid on your own. His old man is a gangster, the real article, a Brooklyn wiseguy who uses a hired psychopath to take care of his personal problems.”

“What you saying is he was a hump for them dagos in Miami.”

“That’s one way to put it.”