James Burke - Pegasus Descending

I WALKED BACK to my office, unsure of my next move. I was convinced I had gotten nowhere with Whitey Bruxal. Worse, all my investigative work into the deaths of Crustacean Man, Yvonne Darbonne, and Tony Lujan had produced only circumstantial evidence and theories. Most depressing of all was the fact that, regardless of what I did, Lonnie Marceaux was going to use the evidence selectively to advance his own career, even if he had to prosecute Monarch Little, an innocent man, for the murder of Tony Lujan.

I’d had a run at Bruxal earlier, hoping to sow seeds of suspicion about his business partner, Bello Lujan. But why quit now? I asked myself. Some activities are like prayer. After you’ve been shelled off the mound, what do you have to lose?

I waited until quitting time to drive to his horse farm outside Loreauville. From the state road I saw him in front of a long white stable, dressed in strap overalls, working on a faucet that fed a galvanized water tank. He looked up when he heard my truck thumping across the cattle-guard, his Stilson wrench suddenly motionless.

How do you deal with a man like Bellerophon Lujan? Do you hate him? He certainly deserved the odium attached to his name. He was ignorant, driven, corrupt, racist, superstitious, and violent, his wealth ill-gotten, his libidinous appetites legendary. I believed he had probably raped Yvonne Darbonne. And long before he had destroyed her and her faith in her fellow human beings, he had ruined his son’s life with control and verbal abuse that disguised itself as love.

But as much as I despised Bello ’s deeds, I could not hate the man. As my truck approached the horse tank, I saw him grin slightly at the edge of his mouth, and for just a moment I remembered the kid who had waited in the cold with a shine box at the Southern Pacific depot, hoping to catch a few customers before they checked in to the Frederic Hotel.

“You going to take a swing at me?” I said as I got out of my truck.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, twisting the wrench on a three-inch nut. “I’m putting in a frost-free faucet this year, me. All these storms and droughts and hurricanes we been having? That means we gonna have some bad winters, yeah.”

His accent, even his syntax, had changed, the rough edges of New Orleans gone, as though the voice of a simple Cajun boy of years ago were speaking. Except that early innocence was not one Bello would ever be allowed to reclaim, whether he knew it or not. I picked up a paint-skinned wood chair by the stable entrance and carried it back to the tank and sat down. The sun was low and buried inside rain clouds, the pasture dark with shade, the grass channeled by the wind. “You have a restful place here,” I said.

“The best,” he replied. His eyes took on the glimmerings of vindication and pride. But I believed another element was at work inside Bello during that moment. I suspected he was beginning to understand that the symbols of his triumph over the world would never pass on to his son, and that his victory over privation and rejection by the wellborn had become ashes in his mouth.

“See this?” I said.

“Yeah, one of those pocket voice recorders.”

I clicked the recorder on, then off with my thumb. “I had a talk with Whitey Bruxal earlier today. I had this recorder running in my pocket. I was going to take you over the hurdles with it, Bello.”

He was grinning and I could see he didn’t understand.

“I was going to play back snippets to you and let you have a little glimpse of what your business partner has to say when you’re not around,” I said. “But you’re an intelligent man and I won’t treat you as less.”

“I ain’t sure what that means.”

“You can believe this or not. Either the Feds or Lonnie Marceaux are going to hang you by your thumbs. No matter how you cut it, you’ve got Whitey Bruxal as your fall partner.”

“What you mean, fall partner?”

“He’s the guy you’re going down with. Is Whitey the kind of guy who will take a maximum sentence rather than rat out a friend? I don’t know the answer. But I bet you do.”

“He was working a deal wit’ you?”

“Put it this way. I doubt if Whitey would tell the truth to a corpse. But if I were on a burning plane with him and the plane carried only one parachute, I have a feeling who would end up wearing it.”

Bello fitted the Stilson back on the faucet head and began to squeak the nut tighter, as though my words were of little interest to him. But I could see the fatigue in his face, and in his eyes the tangle of thoughts that probably waged war inside his head twenty-four hours a day.

“What would you do?” he asked.

“I don’t think you’ll ever experience any rest until you own up to your mistakes, Bello.”

“Starting wit’ what?”

“I think you attacked Yvonne Darbonne. I think her death is eating you alive. No amount of Holy Roller shouting in tongues is going to change that fact or relieve you of your guilt.”

“Who tole you I did that?”

“It’s written all over you.”

The heavy, oblong steel head of the Stilson rested on the rim of the aluminum tank, his hand grasped tightly around the shank. The back of his hand was brown, mottled with liver spots and lined with veins that looked like knotted package twine. I could hear a horse blowing inside the stable.

I supposed it was not a time to say anything. But there are moments when caution and restraint just don’t cut it. “Why’d you do it, partner? She was just a kid.”

“Maybe there’re reasons everybody don’t know about. Maybe t’ings just happen,” he replied.

“Run that crap on somebody else.”

“What do you know? You got everyt’ing. They killed my boy. You know what it’s like to have your kid killed?”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The niggers. Monarch Little and all them niggers with black scarfs on their head, selling their dope, pimping their women, corrupting the town.”

It was hopeless. I think there are those who are psychologically incapable of honesty and I think Bello was one of them. I got back in the truck and left him to himself. In all candor, I doubt if a worse punishment in the world could have been visited upon him.

BUT I STILL HAD MILES TO GO before I slept. I called Molly on my cell phone and asked if we could have a late dinner.

“You have to work?” she said.

“Clete’s in some trouble.”

“What kind?”

I searched my mind for an honest answer. “There’s no adequate scale. The rules of reason and logic have no application in his life,” I said.

“Sound like anybody else you know?” she replied.

“Put my supper in the icebox.”

“It already is,” she replied.

The owner of the motor court where Clete lived told me Clete and a young woman had gone to a street dance in St. Martinville.

They weren’t hard to find. In fact, as I drove up the two-lane through the dusk, through the corridor of live oaks that led out of town and the miles of waving sugarcane on each side of the road, I saw Clete’s Caddy parked in front of a supper club left over from the 1940s. It was a happy place, where people ate thick steaks and drank Manhattans and old-fashioneds and sometimes had trysts involving a degree of romance in the palm-shrouded motel set behind the club. Above the entrance way was a pink neon outline of a martini glass with the long-legged reclining figure of a nude woman inside.

The refrigerated air in the dining room was so cold it made me shiver. Each table was covered with white linen and set with a candle burning inside a glass chimney. A man in a summer tux was playing a piano that was so black it had purple lights in it. Clete was at a table by himself, a collins drink in his hand, his face flushed and cheerful, his eyes shiny with alcohol.