James Burke - Pegasus Descending

“Pardon?”

“He said he had left a tray of drinks on the landing and had to take them out on the lawn before somebody tripped on them. But I knew he was lying.”

“I’m not with you.”

“ Sidney couldn’t look at me. His eyeballs kept rolling around in his head. I told him to stop acting like Stepin Fetchit and get down there. Ten minutes later I called him on the intercom again. He still hadn’t gone into the game room.”

“Why wouldn’t he do as you told him, Mrs. Lujan?”

She wore dentures, and they looked hard and stiff inside her mouth, her flesh by contrast soft and trembling against them. “Because he was afraid of what he would have to tell me. Because he was afraid of my goddamn husband,” she said.

Her eyes were moist now, the flat of her fist pressed against her mouth.

“There’s something else I have to ask you, Mrs. Lujan,” I said.

When she looked up at me, the whites of her eyes were threaded with tiny red lines.

“I think Colin Alridge has knowledge about your son’s death. I think he may know why Tony was murdered. I believe you gave Alridge information you won’t give us,” I said. “Monarch Little didn’t kill your boy, did he?”

She stared into space, as though reviewing all the words she had said and listened to and all the images her own words had caused her to see inside her head and the confession of personal failure and inadequacy she had just made to a stranger. Her face grew still and composed and she looked up at me again, this time her eyes free of pain, her thoughts clear.

“I’ve been a fool, Mr. Robicheaux. You are what I’ve heard others say of you. You’re a dishonorable and self-serving man, and I should not have confided in you. You’ll leave a black animal on the street while the blood of his victim runs in the gutter. There is only one type of person who does that, sir, someone who feels an intolerable sense of guilt about himself. Take your videocassette with you when you leave. Don’t return without a warrant, either.”

THAT NIGHT I lay beside Molly in the dark and tried to sleep. I have never given much credence to the notion that the dead are held captive by the weight of tombstones placed on their chests. I believe they slip loose from their fastenings of rotted satin and mold board and tree roots and the clay itself and visit us in nocturnal moments that we are allowed to dismiss as dreams. They’re in our midst, still hanging on for reasons of their own. Sometimes I think their visitation has less to do with their own motives than ours. I think sometimes it is we who need the dead rather than the other way around.

Once, I saw the specter of my drowned father standing in the surf, rain dancing on his hard hat while he gave me the thumbs-up sign. Annie, my murdered wife, spoke to me inside the static on a telephone line during an electric storm. Sometimes at dusk, when the wind swirled through the sugarcane in a field, denting and flattening it just like elephant grass under the downdraft of a helicopter, I was sure I saw men from my platoon, all KIA, waiting for the Jolly Green to descend from the sky.

A therapist told me these experiences were a psychotic reaction to events I couldn’t control. The therapist was a decent and well-meaning man and I didn’t argue with him. But I know what I saw and heard, and just like anyone who has stacked time in what Saint John of the Cross described as the dark night of the soul, I long ago gave up either defending myself or arguing with those who have never had their ticket punched.

It was hot and breathless outside, and the sound of dry thunder, like crackling cellophane, leaked from clouds that gave no rain. Through the back window I could see vapor lamps burning in City Park and a layer of dust floating on the bayou’s surface. I could see the shadows of the oaks moving in my yard when the wind puffed through the canopy. I could see beads of humidity, as bright as quicksilver, slipping down the giant serrated leaves of the philodendron, and the humped shape of a gator lumbering crookedly across the mudbank, suddenly plunging into water and disappearing inside the lily pads. I saw all these things just as I heard helicopter blades roaring by overhead, and for just a second, for no reason that made any sense, I saw Dallas Klein getting to his knees on a hot street swirling with yellow dust in Opa-Locka, Florida, like a man preparing himself for his own decapitation.

I sat up in bed, unsure if I was awake or dreaming. I looked down the slope to the bayou, and all was as it had been a few moments earlier, except my heart was racing and I could smell my own odor rising from inside my T-shirt. I felt Molly’s weight shift in the bed.

“Did you have a dream?” she said.

“A chopper flew over the house and woke me up. It was probably a guy on his way out to a rig.”

“Did you dream about the war?”

“No, I don’t dream about it much anymore. It was just the sudden sound of helicopter blades that woke me, that’s all.”

But you don’t tell a lie to a Catholic nun and get away with it. Molly went into the kitchen and returned with a glass of lemonade for each of us. We sat there in the dark and drank the lemonade and watched the trees flare against the sky. She placed her hand on top of mine and squeezed it. “You never have to keep secrets from me,” she said.

“I know.”

“You know it but you don’t believe it.”

“I believe you’re everything that’s good, Molly Boyle.”

She lay down next to me, the curve of her body close against me, her arm across my chest, the fragrance of her hair cool in my face. And that’s the way I went to sleep, inside the fragrance and body heat of Molly Boyle, and I did not wake until dawn.

BUT IN THE MORNING I could not shake the vision I had seen of Dallas Klein kneeling on a sidewalk in Opa-Locka, Florida. Was the vision simply a matter of unresolved guilt about his death? Or was it a warning?

Because I carried a badge, I sometimes presumed. Sometimes in my vanity I saw myself as a light bearer, possessed of an invulnerability that ordinary men and women did not share. There were times when I actually believed my badge was indeed a shield. Soldiers experience the same false sense of confidence after surviving their first combat. Gamblers think they have magic painted on them when they pick a perfecta out of the air or draw successfully to an inside straight. The high of a boozer doesn’t even come close to any of the aforementioned.

All of it is an illusion. Our appointment in Samarra is made for us without our consent, and Death finds us of its own accord and in its own time. Cops rarely die in firefights with bank robbers. They’re shot to death during routine traffic stops or while responding to domestic disturbances. As a rule, their killers couldn’t masturbate without a diagram.

I had taken too much for granted in my attitude about the killers of Dallas Klein. The people who had killed him were not only cold-blooded, they were cynical and cruel and I believe totally committed to a life of evil. They exploited Dallas ’s weakness as a compulsive gambler to rob him of his honesty, his valorous war record, his self-respect, and finally his life. His executioner had even ridiculed him before pulling the trigger on the shotgun, calling him “a joke,” ensuring he would realize before he died how badly he had been used.

I had no doubt Whitey Bruxal was behind the armored car heist. But Lefty Raguza’s role was another matter. Could he have been at the scene? He’d had an alibi, but an alibi for a guy like Raguza was never further than a phone call away. I had heard the shooter speak just before the van steered around the armored car, but the alcohol in my blood and the gunfire and glass caving out of the saloon window onto the concrete and the whang of buckshot into the metal door behind him had turned my ears into cauliflower. I had tried a thousand times to re-create the voice in my head, always with the same result. I had witnessed an execution, and my recall of it was absolutely worthless.