James Burke - Pegasus Descending

Through the bamboo border on the side yard, I saw Miss Ellen Deschamps sprinkling her rose garden in the shade. Miss Ellen was our one-woman, or rather one-lady, neighborhood crime watch program. Parish sheriffs, zoning boards, and city mayors could come and go, but Miss Ellen’s standards did not change with the political season. She served high tea on her upstairs balcony at exactly 3 p.m. every weekday and had her black yardman deliver handwritten invitations to her guests. Any resident on East Main who did not properly attend to the upkeep of his home and lawn and flower beds would receive a polite note from Miss Ellen. If that failed, she put on formal dress, including white gloves, and marched to the home of the offending party and invited him out on his own porch, in full view of the street, to have an extended conversation about the importance of setting a good example for the less fortunate.

“Miss Ellen, did you see anyone prowling around our house in the last day or so?” I asked.

She twisted the water faucet shut and walked toward me. She wore a wide straw hat and a blue sundress and an apron with big pockets for her garden tools. Miss Ellen had a way of never speaking to others from a distance, as though honesty and candor always required her to look directly into a person’s eyes when she spoke. “He said he was a friend of yours. He said he was staying with you.”

“Who?” I asked.

“A blond man who tied a canoe at the foot of your property. It was at dawn. He opened a can of sardines and fed the raccoon.”

“This wasn’t a friend. Tripod was poisoned.”

I saw something shrink inside her. “I thought he might have been vacationing here. He was very relaxed and polite. He came out of the fog and made a point of saying hello. He said he didn’t want to startle me.”

“Was he a tall or short man?”

“No, he wasn’t tall.”

“How about an accent or tattoos?”

She seemed to look into her memory, then she shook her head. “He had tiny pits in his cheeks, like needle holes.”

“This afternoon somebody from the department will bring you a few mug shots. Maybe you can pick this fellow out for us.”

But she wasn’t hearing me. Her face made me think of paper that had been held too close to a heat source. It seemed to have wrinkled from within, as though someone had pinched off a piece of her soul. “Mr. Robicheaux, I’m very sorry I didn’t notify you. Is your raccoon-”

“He’s fine, Miss Ellen. Don’t feel bad about this. You’ve been very helpful.”

“No, I haven’t,” she said. “I should have called your house.”

“I think you’ve already told me who this guy is. You’ve done a good deed here.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“I do.”

“Thank you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Miss Ellen?”

“Yes?”

“If you see this man again, don’t talk with him. Call me or the sheriff’s department,” I said.

“This man is genuinely wicked, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he is.”

I watched her go back to work in her garden, troweling a hole for a potted caladium, the damp black soil she had created out of coffee grinds and compost sprinkled on her forearms like grains of pepper. But I knew Miss Ellen had not returned to the normalcy that characterized an ordinary day in her life as caretaker of East Main. The lie told her by the man in the canoe had diminished her faith in her fellow man, and if wounds can remain green, this one I suspected was at the top of the list.

On the way back to the house, I saw a tube of roach paste lying inside the bamboo border of my property.

That afternoon, a uniformed deputy showed Miss Ellen a half-dozen booking-room photos. The deputy radioed in that she took all of two seconds to tap her finger on the face of Lefty Raguza.

Why would Raguza commit such a senseless act of cruelty? If you ask any of these guys why they do anything (and by “these guys” I mean those who long ago have stopped any pretense of self-justification), the answer is always the same: “I felt like it.”

I called Joe Dupree, an old friend at the Lafayette P.D. who had transferred from Homicide to the Sex Crimes Unit to Vice. The last helicopter may have lifted off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975, but thirty years later Joe was still humping a pack on a night trail, an M-60 across his shoulders, his arms spread on the stock and barrel like a man on a cross. He was addicted to speed, booze, bad women, and the conviction that no force on earth could remove his fear of sleep. I had long ago given up trying to help Joe, but I still admired his courage, his integrity as a cop, and the fact that he stacked his own time and didn’t complain about the burden he carried.

“This guy does scut work for Whitey Bruxal?” he said.

“More or less. Maybe he helped take down an armored car in Miami. Two people got killed in the heist. One of them was a friend of mine.”

“Why would he want to poison your coon?”

“Maybe Whitey Bruxal is starting to feel the heat and wants to provoke me into self-destructing. Or maybe it has to do with Clete Purcel. He bounced Raguza around a little bit.”

“I can’t quite visualize ‘bounced.’”

“Clete blew him all over a restroom with a fire hose.”

I heard Joe laugh. “You want me to have a talk with Raguza?”

“That’s like talking to a closetful of clothes moths. I need a serious handle on him, something that can jam him up and leave him with bad choices.”

“I’ll see what I can come up with. Look, on the subject of Whitey Bruxal, I took a strange call from his wife three days ago.”

“You’re not working Vice anymore?”

“We think Bruxal is laundering meth money. For a while I was in charge of a surveillance at his house. Anyway, his old lady seems to be a real nutcase. Check this out: He met her at what’s called the Wild Hog Festival in Collier County, Florida. People who are half-human come out of the Glades and-”

“Joe, I’ve got a time squeeze going here.”

“She tells me in this mushmouth cracker accent that the gas man stole twenty dollars out of her purse. So I told myself this was a good time to see the inside of Bruxal’s house. When I get out there, she tells me she found the twenty-dollar bill on the floor and there was no problem, that the gas man had checked out a leak by the barbecue pit and had come inside to turn off and relight her pilots but she was mistaken about the missing twenty dollars.

“So I say, ‘You had a gas leak out here?’

“She said the meter reader smelled it by the barbecue pit out on the breezeway and a repairman came in to turn off all the pilots on the hot water heaters so they could see if gas was still going through the meter. She said the repairman asked her to sit on the glider in the yard in case there was any danger.

“I said, ‘Your husband wasn’t home?’

“She goes, ‘No, he was out of town. Why you ask that?’

“Then she tells me these guys were in and out of her house for a half hour. I called the gas company when I got back to the department. They said no meter reader had been out to the Bruxal residence since last month.”

“Feds?” I said.

“They’re chasing terrorists.”

“Thanks for your help, Joe.”

“We’re firing pop guns against the side of an aircraft carrier,” he said.

“I don’t see it that way.”

“The gambling industry in this country pulls in hundreds of billions a year. Guys like us earn paychecks that have the purchase power of toilet paper. Who do you think is gonna walk out of the smoke?”

“So we’ll piss in their shoes.”

“That’s why I always liked you, Dave. Innocent all the way to the boneyard.”