James Burke - Pegasus Descending

“What else did they say?”

“Nothing. Slim closed the door. Slim’s a rough guy. He’s not supposed to have the top room, but nobody says anything about it.”

I gave him my business card. “If you remember anything else, call me again, will you? But right now it’s important to remember you did the right thing. You don’t have any reason to feel guilty or ashamed or afraid. Do you know where Slim Bruxal is now?”

“He was back at the house this morning. He said he’d been in New Orleans with a girl.”

“Slim’s at the house now?”

“Far as I know. Am I going to have to testify in court?”

“I’m not sure. Would you be willing to do that?”

He cleared his throat and didn’t answer.

“Did you know Yvonne Darbonne?” I asked.

“She came to the house with Tony once or twice. At least I think it was with Tony. I really didn’t know her.” He looked at me briefly, then his eyes left mine. The wind was cool blowing through the cypress trees on the lake, but his skin was flushed, his forehead shiny with perspiration.

“What are you not telling me?” I said.

“They say she pulled a train.”

“She did a gang bang?”

“They call it ‘pulling a train.’ They say she was wiped out of her head and took on a bunch of guys upstairs in the house. It was after a kegger or something. There was a lot of Ecstasy and acid floating around. The way these guys talked, Tony didn’t know about it. I heard she was messed up in the head and committed suicide.”

“Yeah, she did. But she wasn’t messed up before she met Tony Lujan. Did she pull the train the day she died?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I work and study all the time. I don’t know who the guys were, either. There’s stuff goes on at the house I don’t get mixed up in.”

The lake was dark in the shade, wrinkled by the wind, the hyacinths blooming with yellow flowers out in the sunlight. “You seem like a good guy, J.J. Why do you hang around with a collection of shits like this bunch?”

“They’re not all bad.”

“Maybe not. But enough of them are. Come see me in New Iberia if you want to go fishing sometime. In the meantime, hang on to my business card, okay?” I said.

I DROVE DIRECTLY to the fraternity house. Two kids were raking leaves in the front yard when I walked up to the porch. “Is Slim here?” I said.

“Out back,” one of them replied, hardly looking up from his work.

“Did he just get back from New Orleans?” I said, checking J. J. Castille’s story.

“Search me,” the same kid said.

I walked around the side of the house into the backyard. The St. Augustine grass was uncut, the yard enclosed by thick hedges, the sunshine filtered by pecan and oak trees. Slim Bruxal stood below a speed bag that was mounted on the crossbar of two iron stanchions. He wore a workout shirt that had been scissored into strips and gym shoes and a pair of string-tie gym shorts low on his hips. His fists looked as hard and tight as apples inside his red gloves as he turned the speed bag into a blur, tada-tada-tada-tada, the exposed skin on his back crisscrossed with sweat.

“You’re a hard man to find,” I said.

He turned and looked at me, his eyes hot, his brow knitted, like someone pulling himself out of an angry thought. He removed his right glove by clamping it under his left arm, then extended his hand. “How you doing, Mr. Robicheaux?”

I turned away from him, as though I were distracted by the blowing of a car horn on the street, my hand at my side. “You were with your girl the last couple of days?”

“Girl? I was seeing my therapist in New Orleans. She’s also a grief counselor,” he replied, lowering his hand.

“Can I have her name and number?”

“What for?”

“We’re trying to exclude everyone we can in our investigation into Tony’s death. That’s so we can concentrate on nailing the right guy.”

He gave me a woman’s name and a phone number in the Garden District, up St. Charles Avenue.

“You want the right guy?” he said. “He looks like a pile of soggy meat loaf with warts on it. I hear he’s sitting on his fat black ass in your jail.”

“When was the last time you saw Tony?”

“I think you already know that.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

“We took him for a couple of beers Monday afternoon. We tried to cheer him up. Then he left the bar and drove back to New Iberia.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“No, sir.” He blotted his face with a towel and tossed the towel on the grass. The sun was directly in his eyes, making it even harder for him to hide his irritability. “Look, Tony was my friend. I don’t like being under the microscope for this. He was depressed and we were worried about him. One of the guys had seen him playing baseball with a priest at St. John’s. So we went over there and tried to cheer him up. Then he ends up being killed by this animal Monarch Little.”

“Yeah, I can see how you’re frustrated by all this. But something doesn’t flush here.”

“Flush?”

“Yeah, there’s one element in your story that bothers me.”

“Bothers you. My best friend is dead and you’re bothered?” he replied, his mask slipping, his face hot and glistening in the sun’s glare.

“You said you were worried about Tony’s being depressed. So you tracked him down at a church where he was playing baseball with a minister and took him to a bar. You removed him from an environment where he might have gotten some genuine help. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

“I’m not knocking anybody’s church.”

“Nobody said you were. But between you and me, I think you’re trying to put the slide on me. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

He tried to shine me on, his face suffusing with feigned goodwill and humility.

“What happened to Yvonne Darbonne? Were you one of the dudes who gangbanged her?” I said.

“I don’t have to take this,” he said.

“You’re right, you don’t. Keep up the work on the speed bag. You look good. I know the boxing coach up at Angola. His best middleweight got shanked in the shower. He’d love to have you on the team.”

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m not Tony Lujan.” He tilted his chin up when he spoke.

AS SOON AS IGOT BACK to the office, I received a call from Mack Bertrand at the lab. “Monarch Little’s prints were on the pay phone that was used to call the Lujan house Monday evening,” he said.

“How many other prints were on it?”

“Six sets that were identifiable, all belonging to people with criminal records.”

“The phone is on the corner where he hangs out?”

“Right,” he said.

“It’s another nail in Monarch’s coffin, but it’s still circumstantial.”

“How’d you make out in your meeting with Lonnie Marceaux?”

“I think Lonnie found a horse he can ride all the way to Washington.”

“Have you talked to Helen since you got back from Lafayette?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“She got a call from The New York Times this morning. Somebody leaked a story about a possible local investigation into this televangelical character who’s mixed up with Whitey Bruxal.”

But I really wasn’t interested in Lonnie’s attempts to manipulate the media. “Do you still have DNA swabs from the autopsy on Yvonne Darbonne?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“I believe her death was a homicide.”

“I respect what you say, Dave, but this time I’m on Koko Hebert’s side. Yvonne Darbonne shot herself.”

“Maybe she pulled the trigger. But others helped her do it.”

“Want to drive yourself crazy? You’ve found the perfect way to do it,” he said.