James Burke - Pegasus Descending

“What’s shakin’, big mon?” he said.

“The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide ride again,” I replied.

“Ah,” he said, like a starving man dipping a spoonful of chocolate ripple into his mouth.

THE SKY WAS STILL BLACK and charged with lightning, the cypress and oak trees along the Teche thrashing in the wind, when I parked my truck in front of Monarch Little’s house. Through the front window I could see him working a crossword puzzle on his knee, his brow knitted, a small pencil clenched in his meaty hand. I kicked open the front door and entered the living room in a gust of wind and water. I threw my rain hat in his face.

“You really piss me off, Monarch. And it’s not just because you’re a dope dealer. It’s because you’re genuinely stupid,” I said.

His mouth hung open.

“You know the definition of stupid?” I said. “Stupid is when you have your head stuffed so far up your fat ass you think you can help your cause by lying in a homicide investigation.”

He looked past me at my truck. Clete was sitting in the passenger seat, drinking from a can of beer, the raindrops sliding down the window in the porch light.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“A friend of mine who gets even more pissed off than I do at stupid people. Pick up my hat.”

“Mr. Dee, I-”

“If I have to pick it up, I’m going to slap you silly with it.”

“Why you hurting me like this?” He reached down and handed me my hat. I started to hit him with it, then stopped.

“You lied to me. A lie is an act of theft. It steals people’s faith and makes them resent themselves. No, don’t open your mouth. Wrong time to open your mouth, Monarch. If you try to lie to me again, I’m going out the door and let you drown in your own shit. Am I getting through here?”

“You kick open my-”

I slapped his head with my hat, twice, whipping it hard across his scalp. He took both blows full force and didn’t raise his hands to protect himself. He even tried to stare me down, but his eyes were shiny now and his lower lip was trembling.

“Answer my question,” I said.

“I didn’t have no money. I got to bring my mother home from M.D. Anderson. She got to have nurses, special care, special diet, trips back and fort’ to Houston. I t’ought I’d jack Tony Lujan for a couple of grand. So I called him up and said I’d meet him out by the Boom Boom Room. Then I started t’inking. What if he called Slim Bruxal? What if some of them colletch boys showed up wit’ ball bats? What if Mr. Bello showed up and decided to pop me down by the bayou? So I ain’t gone. Next t’ing I know, my car’s on fire and shotgun shells are blowing up inside it.”

I pressed out the folds in my rain hat and smoothed the brim. “You’ll take a polygraph on that?”

“I’ll ax Miss Betsy if I should.”

“The FBI agent?”

“Yeah, who you t’ink? She been my friend.”

“Do you know what the term ‘uneducable’ means?”

“No, I ain’t that smart. But at least Miss Betsy ain’t slapped me wit’ her hat and she ain’t talked to me like I’m a dumb nigger.”

I had stepped into it again, taking on the role of a white man from an earlier generation talking to a black street kid who had grown up in a free-fire zone. I wanted to blame my ineptitude on Monarch, but in truth I had acted imperiously toward a man who was clinging to the sides of the planet with suction cups. Even worse, I had been deliberately cruel, an act that under any circumstances is inexcusable.

“You ever hear anything about Tony Lujan or Slim Bruxal being homosexual?” I asked.

He wiped at his nose with his wrist, then I saw several disconnected thoughts start to come together in his eyes. “You saying, like, was they lovers?”

“Not exactly.”

“You saying, like, maybe they had a fight, and Slim took him out with the shotgun and put it on me?”

“Could be. Or maybe Tony came on to him and Slim couldn’t deal with it. My point is, I think you’re an innocent man.”

He lowered his head and fiddled with his hands. When he looked up again, there were tears on his eyelashes. “I got allergies. Every time the wet’er changes, my nose starts running. I got to get me a prescription for it.”

I sat down on a tattered footstool in front of him. A bolt of lightning struck on the far side of the bayou, and the entire rural slum in which Monarch lived-the pecan trees, the crepe myrtle, the slash pines, the junker cars slick with rain, the clapboard shacks and tar-paper roofs-was caught inside a cobalt glow that collapsed in on itself as quickly as it came.

“I apologize for hitting you. I didn’t have the right to speak down to you, either,” I said. “Believe it or not, I respect you. You treated Bello Lujan with mercy when you could have broken his neck and gotten away with it. You’re a stand-up guy, Monarch. It’s too bad you’re on the wrong side of the fence.”

“What’s ‘uneducable’ or whatever mean?”

“It means Betsy Mossbacher is probably straight-up, but watch out for the DOJ. They’ll use you, then spit you out like yesterday’s chewing gum. You heard it first from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department.”

“I ain’t up to this no more.”

THE CLUB WHERE Lefty Raguza hung out was located north of the Four Corners area in Lafayette, on a backstreet that for years had marked the border between a poor black neighborhood of dirt streets and rental shotgun cabins and a similar neighborhood of poor whites and what are sometimes called Creoles or people of color. Before the civil rights era, the bar had been one where dark-skinned people moved back and forth across the color line as the situation demanded. In back, inside a grove of pine and cedar trees, was a cluster of dilapidated cabins where many an interracial tryst was conducted.

Over the years the streets had become paved and the privies replaced by indoor plumbing, but the Caribbean nature of the neighborhood and the function of the bar, one that Joe Dupree had referred to as a zebra hangout, remained unchanged.

I turned off the asphalt into a gravel parking lot that was pooled with gray water and layered with flattened beer cans. The club was oblong, built of both cinder blocks and wood, all of it painted red and purple, the corrugated roof the color of an old nickel. Behind the building, a transformer on a pole was leaking sparks into the darkness, but a gasoline generator was roaring inside a wooden shed, powering the lights inside the bar. When I turned off the ignition, killing the windshield wipers, the rain cascaded down the glass.

“That’s his Ford Explorer,” Clete said.

“You’re sure?” I said.

“He followed me all the way to New Orleans in it.”

Clete’s humped shape, his porkpie hat tilted down on his forehead, was silhouetted against a streetlight. My twelve-gauge pump rested between his thighs, the barrel leaning away from him, against the dash.

“I’m going through the front door. Watch the back,” I said.

“How far you want to take this?”

“That’s up to Raguza.”

“I know you, Dave. You get us into rooms without doors or windows, then give yourself absolution for leaving hair on the walls.”

“This from you?”

“If you want to smoke the guy, I got a throw-down on my ankle. But get him out of the bar before you do it.”

“You’re exaggerating the nature of the situation, Clete.”

“Right,” he said.

I unclipped my holster and my.45 from my belt and set them on the floor of the cab. Then I took my slapjack out of my raincoat pocket and set it on top of the holster. “Satisfied?”

“Where’s your hideaway?” he asked.

“Which hideaway?” I said.