James Burke - Pegasus Descending

The professor was dressed in linen slacks and sandals and a tropical shirt that exposed the bones in his chest. His beard was clipped close to the skin, his teeth tiny and tea-colored inside his mouth. He closed his book on his knee.

“I think the purpose of your visit involves Slim Bruxal more than it does Tony Lujan. Slim conjures up a certain image. I think of arm-bands and people with heavy boots stomping down a street in Nuremberg. But ultimately I guess he’s a victim, too.”

“Not in my view. You told Lydia Thibodaux that Slim and Tony both wore masks. You told her not to be afraid of someone who couldn’t live with the person inside his skin. You were talking about Slim?”

He filled his shot glass with anisette, then sipped from it, as though testing its coldness, before draining the entire glass. He wiped his lips with the tips of his fingers, his eyes focused on the columns of sunlight in his yard, the motes of dust and desiccated leaves swimming inside them.

“There’s a nightclub here, where friends of a kindred spirit tend to gather,” he said. “It features its own kind of entertainment. Are you with me, sir?”

“I think so.”

“Most people who frequent this club have no problem with who they are. But others find excuses to be there.”

“We need to get to it, Dr. Edwards.”

“Slim and his friends would make themselves available at the bar. Of course, the men who picked them up would be robbed. They would also have their teeth kicked in. Not only teeth but ribs, scrotums, or any other place Slim could get his foot.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“Do you think I’d make up something like this? Do you know the risk I’m taking by telling you this?”

“With Bruxal?”

He looked away in annoyance, and frankly I couldn’t blame him for it.

“Was Tony Lujan gay?” I asked.

“Maybe he hadn’t decided on what he was.”

“You think he came on to Slim?”

“Tony had a dependent personality. He was frightened. His girlfriend had committed suicide. I suspect he had undefined longings that…”

“Go on.”

“For what purpose? Tony’s dead. I’m going to ask one favor of you, Detective Robicheaux.”

“Yes, sir?”

“If the content of this conversation is passed on to Slim Bruxal or his attorney, I want to be notified immediately.”

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“It’s so good to have met you,” he replied, opening his book again, focusing his eyes disjointedly on the page.

THE TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY on the four-lane, and I took the old highway past Spanish Lake into New Iberia. The sun had gone behind the clouds in the west, and the air was dry and hot and dust was rising from the cane fields. I’m not qualified to speak on the question or causes of global warming, but anyone who believes Louisiana ’s climate is similar to the one in which I grew up has a serious thinking disorder. When I was a child, summer thunderstorms would sweep across the wetlands at almost exactly three o’clock every afternoon. Today, weeks will pass with no rain at all. The wind will turn into a blowtorch, the ground into flint, the sky into a huge cloud of cinnamon-colored dust. As I drove past Spanish Lake, I could see electricity forking inside a bank of distant thunderclouds and smell an odor on the wind like fish spawning, like first raindrops lighting on a scorching sidewalk.

I got back to the department just in time to return the cruiser and punch out for the day. Just as I was leaving the office, my phone rang. It was Joe Dupree, my friend at the Lafayette P.D. “You wanted a handle on this bozo Lefty Raguza. I didn’t come up with a whole lot, but here it is. He does security work at a couple of casinos and the new track in Opelousas. He’s got no arrests in Louisiana, not even traffic citations, but I suspect he’s cruising on the edge of it.”

“How do you mean?”

“He smokes a lot of China white because he doesn’t like to use needles anymore. He also likes to bust up women with his fists, usually someone who’s down to seeds and stems. He hangs in a dump in North Lafayette.”

“A rough-trade joint?”

“No, it’s a zebra hangout. From what I hear, the broads he picks up never see it coming. Then they’re on the floor, spitting out their teeth. Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“If you have a tête-à-tête with this guy, not a lot of people around here are gonna be wringing their hands or calling up the ACLU.”

He gave me the address of a club north of the Four Corners district in Lafayette.

I headed home in my truck and by the time I reached my driveway I could feel the barometer dropping and see birds descending out of the sky into the trees. Then, like a blessing from heaven, the clouds broke loose and hailstones as big as mothballs clattered down on our tin roof.

Molly and I opened all the windows and flooded the house with the cool smell of the storm, then fixed potato salad, ham-and-onion sandwiches, and iced tea, and ate supper in the kitchen. We brought Tripod and Snuggs inside and gave each of them a bowl of ice cream, which they ate in front of the floor fan, their fur lifting in the breeze. Steam rose off the bayou, then the sky went totally black with the storm and the lights came on in City Park and you could see torrents of leaves blowing out of the trees and falling on the water.

But in spite of the fine evening the rain had brought us, I couldn’t stop thinking about the implications of my interview with Dr. Edwards. I believed him to be a man of conscience who had been willing to put his reputation and his academic career at risk in order to see justice done. Perhaps more significantly, he had also been willing to invite the violent potential of Slim Bruxal into his life. The legal importance of my interview with Dr. Edwards was doubtful. That fact, I’m sure, was not lost on him. The fact he had remained willing to go forward with it anyway said a lot about Dr. Edwards’s character. It also said a lot about Slim Bruxal and the ferocious energies of homophobes who can’t deal with the female hiding inside them.

But another piece of unfinished business was on my mind as well. As I watched Tripod eating from his ice cream bowl in front of the fan, I thought about the many years he had shared our house, and our lives, as an adopted member of the family. I thought about the war he had waged with Batist, the elderly black man who had run our bait shop, over custody of the candy bars and fried pies Batist kept on a display rack by the cash register. I remembered how Alafair, as a little girl, had snuck Tripod through her screen window and hid him under the covers after he had been expelled from the house for doing various kinds of mischief. I thought about how Tripod had always been a loyal and loving pet who never strayed more than fifty yards from his home because it had always been a safe place where he could trust the people who lived or visited there.

Then in my mind’s eye I saw a blond man with tiny pits pooled in his cheeks squeezing a tube of roach paste into Tripod’s bowl.

All these things, along with the fact that Monarch Little had lied to me, gave me no rest.

“Pax Christi is having a meeting at Grand Coteau tonight. I think I should go. I missed the last one. Do you mind?” Molly said.

“No, just be careful on the road,” I said.

As soon as Molly had backed her car into East Main, I took my Remington twelve-gauge from the closet and sat down on the side of the bed with it and a box of pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks. Years ago I had sawed off the barrel at the pump handle, sanded the serrations smooth with emery paper, and removed the sportsman’s plug from the magazine. I fed the shells into the tube, one after the other, until I felt the magazine spring come tight against my thumb. Then I called Clete Purcel at his motor court and told him I would pick him up in ten minutes.