James Burke - Pegasus Descending

I had managed to expose the school bully as a liar. I should have known he would come calling as soon as he returned from his weekend visit to New Orleans.

“There’s a man standing in the front yard,” Molly said.

I looked out the window. Bello ’s Buick was parked in the driveway, his son in the passenger seat, but Bello was staring at the street, as though he couldn’t make up his mind what he should do next. I walked out on the gallery. A sun-shower had just stopped, and water was ticking out of the trees.

I remembered Mack Bertrand’s cautionary words about using procedure as a buffer between me and Bello Lujan. “I suspect this is a business call. If that’s the case, I’d rather talk about it at the office, Bello,” I said.

“You questioned my boy while I was in New Orleans. About the T-shirt that dead girl was wearing,” he said.

The sunlight was tea-colored through the oak branches overhead, the air cool from the rain, the sky throbbing with the sound of tree frogs. It was too fine an evening for an angry encounter with a primitive, tormented, and violent man. I stepped off the gallery into the yard so I would not be perceived as speaking down to him. But I did not offer him my hand. “Come see me tomorrow, partner.”

“My boy told you I was going to give the dead girl a job waitressing at the track clubhouse. I told you I didn’t remember her name. That’s ’cause I give jobs to lots of kids, particularly ones wanting to go to college. You making me out a hypocrite in front of my family?”

“That’s a term of your own choosing.”

“You cracking wise now?”

“What I’m doing is telling you to get out of here.”

“You told my son this colored kid, what’s his name, Monarch Little, is a badass motherfucker who might put out his lights?”

“I don’t think I phrased it exactly that way.”

“Come over here, Tony!” Bello said.

His son stepped out of the car. His face was bloodless in the shade, his jaws slowly chewing a piece of gum.

“What did Mr. Robicheaux here say to you?” Bello asked.

“It’s like you say, Daddy.”

“He said that colored boy was gonna cool you out?”

“Not in those words,” Tony said.

“He said this kid was a badass motherfucker and was gonna hurt you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My son is lying, here?” Bello said to me.

You don’t argue with drunks and you don’t engage with stupid or irrational people. But when they insist that you are the source of all the unhappiness in their lives and denigrate you without letup, when they stand so close to you that you can smell their enmity in their sweat, at some point you have to take it to them, if for no other reason than self-respect. At least that’s what I told myself.

“You’ve got a lot more to worry about than just me,” I said.

“No, my life is fine. It’s you that’s the problem. I didn’t finish high school or go to college. But I did pretty good. Maybe that don’t always sit too well with some people. Think that might be the trouble here, Dave?”

I rested one hand on the hood of the Buick. I rubbed the finish and the passenger-side headlight molding and brushed away a leaf that was stuck to the glass. “Fine car you have here. Ever have any work done on it? Looks like somebody might have had a sander on your fender.”

He tried to keep his face empty, but I saw my words take hold in his eyes. Tony gazed down the driveway at the bayou as though he had never seen it before.

“I always treated you good,” Bello said. “We both go back to the old days, when people talked French and kids like us didn’t have ten cents to go to a picture show. How come you can’t show respect for our mutual experience? How come you treat me like some kind of bum?”

“Because you lied to me.”

The skin on his face flexed, just as though I had spit on it. I started back toward the gallery, wondering if he was not about to attack me. Just as I reached the steps, I felt his fingers touch me through my shirt.

“That’s my only son, there,” he said. “He’s gonna be a doctor. He never done anything to deliberately hurt anybody, particularly not to some poor girl who shot herself. Why you trying to mess him up? You got colored kids shooting each other in the streets. Why you got to go after my boy?”

But the hand had already been dealt, for both Bello and me and his son as well. None of us, at that moment, could have guessed at the outcome. I heard a flapping of wings above our heads, like a giant leathery bird rising from the oak tree’s crown into the sky.

THURSDAY MORNING, Mack Bertrand called from the crime lab. “The blood on the Buick headlight fragment came from Crustacean Man,” he said.

“No gray area, no contamination, no dilution of the specimen, none of that stuff?”

“This one is dead-bang. It even gets better. You actually brought me two specimens.”

“Say again?”

“A microscopic piece of bone was on the inside of the molding. My guess is it came from the collision of the fender against Crustacean Man’s hip.”

“You don’t think it came from the blow to his head?”

“Maybe. But the body-and-fender guy told you the glass and molding came from the passenger side of the vehicle, right?”

“Correct.”

“Crustacean Man’s left hip was crushed. My guess is he either walked in front of the vehicle or he was walking on the side of the road, in the same direction as the Buick, when he was hit.”

“Here’s the problem with that scenario, Mack. The cause of death was massive trauma to the right-hand side of the cranium. Death was probably instantaneous. He ended up in the coulee, which means he wasn’t slammed to the asphalt. He wasn’t knocked into a post or telephone pole, either.”

“You’re saying the fatal injury wasn’t caused by the Buick? Maybe a second vehicle killed him?” Mack said.

“There’s another possibility.”

“What?”

“The second blow didn’t come from a vehicle,” I said.

“Maybe he got hit by a chunk of meteorite. Ease up on the batter, Dave,” he said.

A few minutes later I went into Helen’s office and told her of Mack Bertrand’s findings. She was hunched over her desk, her short sleeves folded in tight cuffs on her arms. She thought for a moment before she spoke. “Okay, so we’ve got a dirty vehicle, but we can’t put Bello Lujan behind the wheel,” she said.

“We can make a case for destroying evidence and aiding and abetting.”

“Provided we can prove he had knowledge a crime was actually committed. What if his kid was the driver? What if one of the kid’s fraternity brothers borrowed the car? How about the wife?”

“She’s an invalid. She doesn’t drive. These wouldn’t be issues if the victim wasn’t a wino,” I said.

“If there were no gravity, monkey shit wouldn’t fall out of trees, either.”

“I don’t think this is a simple hit-and-run, Helen. Something else is involved.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Dave, there are times I want to kill you, I mean actually pound your head with my fists.”

I gazed out the window, choosing reticence as the better part of valor.

“Go back to that business about it not being a simple hit-and-run,” she said.

“Mack believes the Buick either struck Crustacean Man in the hip while he was walking down the right-hand side of the road, or Crustacean Man walked out in front of the car. But neither Mack nor Koko can explain the origin of the fatal injury, which was to the head.”

“I think we’re starting to drown in more information than we need here. Look, somebody hit this guy with the Buick. He was left to die on the side of the road. The DNA evidence on that is absolute. Somebody is going down for what we can prove happened. Whoever it is, Bello or somebody else, will probably not receive the punishment he deserves. But we’re going to do our jobs as best we can and leave the rest of it to God. Am I putting this in words you can understand?”