James Burke - Pegasus Descending

When I woke in the early dawn, with Molly beside me, I didn’t know where I was. It was misting and gray in the trees, and out on the bayou I could hear the heavy droning sound of a tug pushing a barge down toward Morgan City. The ventilated shutters on the front windows were closed, and the light was slitted and green, the way it had been in the cottage where I lived on Ursulines.

“You okay, Dave?” Molly asked, curled on her side under the sheet.

“I thought I was in New Orleans,” I replied.

She rolled on her back and looked up at me, her hair spread on the pillow like points of fire. She cupped her hand around the back of my neck. “You’re not,” she said.

“It was a funny dream, like I was saying good-bye to something.”

“Come here,” she said.

She kissed me on the mouth, then touched me under the sheet.

Later, after I had showered and dressed, Molly made coffee and heated a pan of milk and poured our orange juice while I filled our bowls with Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas. Both Tripod and Snuggs came inside, and I split a can of cat food between the two of them and gave each his own water bowl (Tripod, like all coons, washed his food before he ate it) and spread newspaper on the linoleum to preempt problems with Tripod’s incontinence. The mist outside had become as thick and gray in the trees as fog, and I couldn’t see the green of the park on the far side of the bayou.

But my problem was not with the weather. I could not get rid of the sense that something bad was about to happen, that an evil medium of some kind, if left unchecked, was about to hurt someone.

All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It’s like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position.

What was it that bothered me so much? Loss of my youth? Fear of mortality? The systemic destruction of the Cajun world in which I had grown up?

Yes to all those things. But my greatest fear was much more immediate than the abstractions I just mentioned. As every investigative law officer will tell you, the clues that lead to a crime’s solution are always there. It’s a matter of seeing or touching or hearing or smelling them. Nothing aberrant happens in a vacuum. The causality and connections wait for us just beyond the perimeter of our vision, in the same way a piece of spiderweb can attach itself to your hand when you grip the undersurface of a banister in a deserted house. The perps aren’t smart. They just have more time to devote to their work than we do.

“Lost in thought?” Molly said.

“The deaths of Crustacean Man, Yvonne Darbonne, and Tony Lujan are all related. But I don’t know if any one of those cases will ever be solved.”

“Time’s on your side.”

“How?”

“Down the line, everybody pays his tab,” she said.

“I’m not always so sure about that.”

“Yes, you are.”

“How you know?” I asked.

“Because you’re a believer. Because you can’t change what you are, no matter what you say about yourself.”

“Is that right?” I said.

“I don’t hang around with the B team, troop,” she said.

Five minutes later, the phone rang. It was Wally, our dispatcher. “Got a nine-one-one from Bello Lujan’s wife. She said the black man who works for her went out to the stable and found Bello on the flo’, inside the stall. She said a horse kicked him. We got Acadian Ambulance on the way.”

“Why’d you call me?”

“’Cause Miz Lujan sounded like my wife does when she tells me to get a dead rat out from under the house. I don’t trust that woman.”

“Keep me updated, will you?”

“Why is it every time I call you I seem to say the wrong t’ing? The problem must be me.”

Just before I went out the door, the phone rang again. “Here’s your update. Acadian Ambulance just called. Ole Bello won’t be posing wit’ the roses for a while. Helen went to New Orleans, so you want to take over t’ings?” he said.

“Will you get the crackers out of your mouth?”

“If the guy blew his nose, his brains would be in the handkerchief. That’s the way the paramedic put it. He says it wasn’t done by no horse, eit’er. That clear enough?”

THE EMERGENCY VEHICLES parked by Bello’s stable still had their flashers on, rippling with blue, red, and white light inside the mist. I stooped under the crime scene tape and walked down the concrete pad that separated two rows of twelve-by-twelve stalls. Koko Hebert was already on the job-gloved, furrow-browed, morose, his gelatinous girth like curtains of fat hanging on a deboned elephant. In the gloom of the stable he kept turning his attention from the stall to the sliding back doors, both of which were pushed back on their tracks. Out in the pasture, a sorrel mare was eating in the grass, one walleye looking back at the stable.

Bello Lujan lay on his left side in the stall. The floor of the stall was comprised of dirt and sand, overlaid with a layer of straw. The wound in the back of Bello ’s skull was deep and tapered and had bled out in a thick pool on the straw. His eyes were open and staring, his face empty of expression, in fact, possessed of a serenity that didn’t fit the level of violence that had been done to his person. A bucket of molasses balls was overturned in the corner of the stall. I suspected he never saw his assailant and perhaps, with luck, he had not suffered, either.

“You got a weapon?” I said.

“It’s outside, in the weeds. A pick with a sawed-off handle. The black guy who found him says the chain was down on the stall and the sorrel was out,” Koko said. “There’re some tennis-shoe impressions on the concrete. Watch where you walk.”

“How do you read it?” I asked.

“ Bello went into the stall with the mare and somebody came up behind him and put it to him long and hard.”

“What do you mean, long and hard?”

“That hole in the back of his head isn’t the only one in him. He took one in the rib cage and one in the armpit. Take a look at the slats on the left side of the stall. I think Bello bounced off the boards, then tried to get up and caught the last one in the skull.” Koko laughed out loud. “Then he got shit on by the horse he was trying to feed. I’m not kidding you. Look at his shirt.”

“Why don’t you show some respect?” I said.

Koko coughed into his palm, still laughing. “Do you ever get tired of it?”

“Of what?” I said.

“Being the only guy in the department with any humanity. It must be tough to be a full-time water-walker,” he said.

“Hey, Dave, come see a minute,” Mack Bertrand said from the back entrance. He had arrived shortly before I did and had done only a preliminary survey of the crime scene. A camera hung from his right hand.

“I’ll talk to you about that remark later, Koko,” I said.

“I can’t wait,” he said.

I joined Mack outside. “What do you have?” I said.

“Take a look at the murder weapon. What’s interesting about it is the tip of the pick has been sharpened down to a fine point, probably on a grinder. When’s the last time you sharpened a pick like that?”

“Never.”

“So in all probability we’ve got a premeditated homicide here and the killer came prepared to do maximum damage,” he said.

I squatted down and looked at the pick. Mack was right. The point had been honed down to a thinness that would break if it was driven into rock or hardpan. Streaks of blood and pieces of hair coated at least four inches of the steel surface. “You’ve got a good eye, Mack,” I said.