James Burke - Pegasus Descending

“Where’s Trish?” I said.

“On the phone.”

I sat down without being asked. “Helen says Orleans Parish is cutting a warrant for your arrest.”

“So I’ll get out of town for a little while. You want a steak?”

“The Orleans sheriff told Helen he knows you’re mixed up with bank robbers. What’s the matter with you, Clete? You know how many people in South Louisiana want an excuse to blow you away?”

“That’s their problem.”

I was so angry I could hardly speak.

“There used to be a slop chute in San Diego that had a sign over the door like the one out there. You ever go to San Diego?” he said.

“No. Listen, Clete-”

But he had already launched into one of his alcoholic reveries that served only one function-to distract attention from the subject at hand.

“It was a joint that had a neon sign with a gal inside a pink martini glass. We used to call her the gin-fizz kitty from Texas City. A whole bunch of Marines had fallen in love with this same broad who worked the bars outside Pendleton. They said she could kiss you into next week, not counting what she could do in the sack. Bottom line is she got all these guys to put her name down as beneficiary on their life insurance policies. When CID finally caught up with her, we found out she’d been a whore in Texas City. We also found out a half-dozen guys she screwed ended up in body bags. How about that for passing on the ultimate form of clap? Hey, I was one of them. Get that look off your face.”

He drank from his collins glass, then started laughing, like a man watching his own tether line pull loose from the earth.

“I want to take you outside and knock you down,” I said.

“It’s all rock ’n’ roll, Streak. Going up or coming down, we all get to the same barn. What can happen that hasn’t already happened in my life?”

“I think you’ve melted your brain. Don’t you realize the implications of the story you just told me?”

“What, that Trish is hustling me? Don’t make me mad at you, big mon.”

But there was more hurt in his face than indignation. In the back of the club I saw Trish Klein replace the receiver on a pay phone, then stare in our direction, her mouth red and soft, her heart-shaped face achingly beautiful in the pastel lighting. I got up from the table and left without saying good-bye.

I PLANNED DURING the next two days to talk to Trish Klein in private about her relationship with one of the best and most self-destructive and vulnerable human beings I had ever known. I got the opportunity in a way I didn’t suspect.

ON WEDNESDAY, Joe Dupree at the Lafayette P.D. called me just before noon.

“She’s in lockup?” I said.

“I never saw anybody look so good in a jailhouse jumpsuit.”

“For shoplifting at the Acadiana Mall?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that. She walked out of the store with a four-hundred-dollar handbag she didn’t pay for. She caused a big scene when security stopped her. She claimed she was just showing the purse to a friend for the friend’s opinion on it. She probably could have gone back inside and settled the issue by putting it on her credit card. She had a gold Amex and two or three platinum cards in her billfold. Instead, she ended up throwing the purse in the store manager’s face.”

“She’s not posting bail?”

“To my knowledge, she hasn’t even asked about it.” I could hear him chewing gum in the receiver.

“What are you telling me?” I asked.

“I think she likes it here.”

After lunch, I drove to Lafayette in a cruiser, checked my firearm in a security area on the first floor of the jail, and waited on the second floor in an interview room while a guard brought Trish Klein down in an elevator.

The guard was a stout, joyless woman who had once been taken hostage at a men’s prison and held for three days during an attempted jailbreak. I used to see her at Red’s Gym, pumping iron in a roomful of men who radiated testosterone-dour, painted with stink, possessed of memories she didn’t share. She unhooked Trish at the door. I rose when Trish entered the room and offered her a chair. The guard gave me a look that was both hostile and suspicious and locked the door behind her.

“Did you ever hear the story about Robert Mitchum getting out of Los Angeles City Prison?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“Mitchum spent six months in there on a marijuana bust and figured his career was over. The day he got out, a reporter shouted at him, ‘What was it like in there, Bob?’ Mitchum said, ‘Not bad. Just like Palm Springs, without the riffraff.’”

She showed no reaction to the story. In fact, she wore no expression at all, as though both her surroundings and I were of no interest to her.

“What are you doing in here, kiddo?” I said.

“Kiddo, up your ass, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“That’s clever, but people with your background and finances don’t go out of their way to put themselves in the slams.”

“I don’t like being called a thief.”

“Yeah, I bet it was shocking to learn your photo is in the Griffin Book at casinos from Vegas to Atlantic City.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because I think you and your friends are planning a big score on Whitey Bruxal. I think you’re setting up your alibi.”

She looked out the window at the street. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“You guys are going to get yourselves killed. That’s your own choice, but you’re taking Clete Purcel down with you.”

“He’s a grown man. Why don’t you stop treating him like a child?”

Down the corridor I could hear someone yelling, a scuffling sound of chains clinking, and a heavy object crashing against a metal surface, perhaps against the door of an elevator. But Trish Klein paid no attention to the distraction.

“Clete’s been my friend for over thirty years. That’s more time than you’ve been on earth,” I said, regretting the self-righteousness of my words almost as soon as I had spoken them.

“I suspect I should go back upstairs now,” she said.

“You don’t think Whitey is onto you? This guy was a protégé of Meyer Lansky. Your people impersonated gas company employees and creeped his house. Want to hear a couple of stories about people who tried to burn the Mob?”

She didn’t answer, but I told her anyway. One account dealt with a man in Las Vegas whose skull was splintered in a machinist’s vise, another who was hung alive by his rectum from a meat hook. I also told her what insiders said was the fate of a middle-class family man in a Queens suburb who accidentally ran over and killed the child of his neighbor, a notorious Mafia don.

“These bastards might look interesting on the movie screen, but they’re the scum of the earth,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have guessed that, Mr. Robicheaux. I always thought the people who murdered my father were closet humanists.”

It was obvious that my best efforts with Trish Klein were of no value. It was like telling someone not to gargle with Liquid Drano. I was about to call for the guard and leave Trish and her friends to their own fate, when she lifted her eyes up to mine and for just a moment I understood the tenacity of Clete’s commitment to her.

“A week before my father’s death, he took me snorkeling off Dania Beach,” she said. “We cooked hot dogs on a grill in a grove of palm trees and played with a big blue beach ball. Then two men parked a convertible under the trees and made him walk off with them, down where the water was hitting on the rocks. I remember how sad he looked, how small and humiliated, like he was no longer my father. I couldn’t hear what the two men were saying, but they were angry and one man kept punching my father in the chest with his finger. When my father came back to our picnic table, his face was white and his hands were shaking.