James Burke - Pegasus Descending

Upstairs, Slim Bruxal pushed open a window and leaned outside, his upper torso naked. “Hey, Dad, can somebody give Carmen a ride back to the dorm? I’ve got a softball game,” he said.

MY LIFE IS NOT GIVEN to prescient moments. But occasionally I have them, particularly with the advance of age. When they occur, they leave behind a sensation like a cold burn on the heart.

The sky was painted with horsetails, the trees blowing hard along the highway as I followed Clete out of Lafayette. Then he pulled into a truck stop and went inside, not glancing back to see if I was behind him.

When Clete made choices, even minuscule ones, that geographically separated him from his friends, he was usually embarking on an odyssey that invariably brought harm to only one person-himself.

I pushed open the door in the café area and saw him at the end of the counter, his aviator glasses in his pocket, the lines at the corners of his eyes like pieces of white thread, a bottle of beer and a foaming glass and a saltshaker in front of him. I cupped my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s twenty minutes after one,” I said. “You haven’t eaten, either.”

“I’m on a diet,” he replied.

I sat down on the stool next to him and asked the waitress for coffee. “You did great back there, Cletus.”

“Remember when we caught Augie Giacano jackrolling an old lady and threw him down a fire escape? Then we dimed him with Didi Gee so he’d get in trouble with his own people?”

“When you threw Augie down the fire escape.”

“Whatever. We didn’t get pushed around by Brooklyn skells like Whitey Bruxal.” He salted his beer and drank from it. He touched at his mouth with a paper napkin, then put the napkin aside, finished the glass in one swallow, and filled it again.

“Eat a hamburger with me,” I said.

“Everything is muy copacetico, Streakus. No problemas here.” His eyes drifted to the television anchored on the café wall. “Check out those tropical storms in the Atlantic. The Florida Straits are starting to look like a turnstile.”

“I’ve got to get back to the department.”

“See you later.”

“I’m not leaving you here alone.”

“What? I’m supposed to feel like the walking wounded?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t get it, Dave. You never did. We’re dinosaurs. This isn’t the same country we grew up in. The scumbags own it, from top to bottom. Except they’re legal now and have college degrees and wear two-thousand-dollar suits. Back in our First District days, we would have fed these motherfuckers into an airplane propeller.”

A truck driver down the counter wearing a greasy bill cap looked at us, and the waitress studied the television screen with undue attention, then turned up the volume. A CNN announcer was talking about a hurricane that was strengthening off the Bahamas.

“The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever,” I said.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

“Snap out of it, Clete.”

This time he didn’t argue with me. But reticence in Clete Purcel was rarely a sign of acquiescence. Instead, it was the exact opposite. He put on his yellow-tinted shades and looked at the television screen, his face composed.

“You’re going to see Trish today?” I said.

“What about it?”

She’s too young for you. You’re going to get hurt real bad, perhaps irrevocably, I thought.

He stared into my eyes. “Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah, what?” I said, trying to smile innocuously.

“Yeah, keep your thoughts to yourself,” he replied.

It was one of the moments when the truth serves no purpose other than to keep our wounds green. Was Clete right? Were we at the end of our string, flailing at forces that had societal and governmental sanction, convincing ourselves, like fools popping champagne corks aboard a sinking liner, that our violence could extend our youth forever into the future and that the party would never come to an end?

He felt my eyes on the side of his face. “Why you giving me that weird look?”

“Because you’re the best, Clete. Because I love you.”

The trucker down the counter was cutting up a steak on his plate. He glanced sideways at us, then at our reflection in the mirror. Clete leaned over so he could see past me.

“What’s up, bud?” Clete asked.

“Not a whole lot,” the trucker said, returning to his steak. He had created a puddle of ketchup sprinkled with pepper on his plate, and he was dipping each piece of meat in it before he forked it into his mouth.

“That steak looks righteous. You want a beer?” Clete said.

“I got to drive. Another time,” the trucker said.

“I’m Clete Purcel. This is Dave Robicheaux.”

“I’m Joe Vernon Mack.”

“You’re looking at the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide, Joe Vernon,” Clete said.

“Pleased to meet y’all,” the trucker said, chewing contentedly.

Clete picked up both our checks and paid for them at the cash register, then the two of us walked outside into the wind.

I ARRIVED BACK at the department shortly before 3 p.m. A note from Helen on a pink memorandum slip was waiting for me in my mailbox. It said: “See me.” When I walked down to her office, her door was ajar and I could see her standing behind her desk, talking on the phone. She waved me inside.

“He’s here now,” she said into the receiver. “Look, Lonnie, you made some ugly remarks about both him and me. He was defending me and this department as much as himself. You want to make trouble over this, you’ll have me to deal with as well. My advice is that you be a man and accept the fact you shot off your mouth and that you got what you deserved.”

I could hear Lonnie Marceaux’s voice coming out of the receiver like a piece of wire being pulled through a metal hole.

“Stop shouting,” Helen said. “He’s a good cop and you know it. If you want, I’ll contact the Daily Iberian and the wire services in Baton Rouge and we can both make a statement about what happened. It’s your call.”

She held the receiver away from her head and looked at it.

“He hang up?” I said.

“Or shot himself. Except we don’t have that kind of luck around here. Somebody at Lafayette P.D. told him you busted up Lefty Raguza. He thinks you’re running your own program, one that probably conflicts with his. Lonnie wants it all, Dave.”

“All what?”

“He’s going to indict Monarch Little for the Lujan homicide and bring racketeering charges against Whitey Bruxal. He’s also got Colin Alridge in his bomb sights. Alridge is running for lieutenant governor. Lonnie says he’s going to drive a nail through one of his testicles.”

“Why don’t you use a more severe image?”

“Those are his words, not mine.” She placed her hand on the windowsill and gazed out at the cemetery, and I knew she was no longer interested in talking about Lonnie. “I got a call earlier from the sheriff of Orleans Parish. He says a warrant is being cut for Clete Purcel’s arrest.”

“For flooding the casino?”

But my question didn’t register. “The Orleans sheriff says there’re rumors Clete is mixed up with the people who did the savings and loan job in Mobile. This parish isn’t going to be a haven for people who think they don’t have to obey the law.”

“I’ll talk with Clete.”

“You tell him I said he gets this shit off our plate or he leaves town.”

“I understand you perfectly. Thanks for standing up for me with Lonnie,” I said.

She looked me dead-on, her expression caught again in that strange androgynous moment when she seemed to linger between two identities, her face both beautiful and intimidating, a Helen I didn’t really know. “Don’t try to jerk me around, Dave. Fun and games are over,” she said.