James Burke - Pegasus Descending

“I need to give Monarch Little some information, ’Ball,” I said.

“I’ll tell him. I mean, if I see him.”

“Want me to help you carry the ice inside?”

“I got it.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. I hefted up two bags, wet and cold under each arm, and started up the walk toward the porch.

“Mr. Dave, we got it under control here,” she said.

I ignored her and walked up the stone steps, crossed the porch, and entered the house. Even though the back and front doors and the windows were open, the smell was overwhelming. I thought of offal, burned food, unwashed hair, feces, black water backed up in a toilet. Broken crack vials were ground into the wood floor; the plaster walls were spray-painted with gang signs and representations of genitalia; a mattress with blood in the center lay on the living room floor. I saw a half-dozen people go out the back door, their faces averted so I would not recognize them.

“Where is he, ’Ball?” I said.

“In the bat’room. He wasn’t ready for it. He didn’t have no tolerance.”

The bathroom door was ajar. I eased it open and saw Monarch in the tub, shirtless, his eyes closed, pillows stuffed around him so he would not slip below the waterline and the melting ice that covered his chest. I could see the hype marks inside his right arm.

“Brown skag?” I said.

“Yes, suh.”

“Who shot him up?”

“Himself. Monarch still a king. Don’t matter what people do to him. He was born a king.”

I opened my cell phone and called for an ambulance. While I was talking I heard Sno’ball pour a sack of ice into the tub.

“Did Herman give him the dope?” I said.

She pursed her lips and made a twisting motion in front of them, as though she were locking them with a key. “Bust me if you want. But I stayed wit’ him. You want to talk to Herman, Herman ain’t here. Herman ain’t never here. Y’all don’t like this house, Mr. Dave, burn it down. But don’t pretend y’all don’t know what goes on here.”

“What time did Monarch get here?”

“Eight-t’irty.”

“You’re sure. It wasn’t earlier, it wasn’t later?”

“I just tole you.”

Ten minutes later Acadian Ambulance pulled Monarch out of the tub and loaded him onto a gurney. I walked with them to the back of the ambulance. Monarch’s eyelids suddenly clicked open, just like a doll’s. “What’s happening, Mr. Dee?” he said.

“Your soul just took an exploratory ride over the abyss,” I replied.

“Say again?”

“If you die, I’m going to kick your butt,” I said.

“You’re an unforgiving man,” he said.

I pulled one of his tennis shoes off his foot.

“What you doing?” he said.

I watched them drive away with him. Monarch’s tennis shoe felt sodden and cold and big in my hand. It was a size twelve, larger, I was sure, than the imprints stenciled on the concrete pad in Bello Lujan’s stable. “Tell me again, Sno’ball. What time did Monarch get here?” I said.

“It was eight-t’irty. Some guys dropped him off on the corner. They’d been drinking. I know the time, ’cause I looked at my watch and wondered why Monarch was drinking so early in the morning. He come walking down the street and I axed him that. He said his mama died and would I tie him off.”

“You shot him up?”

“No, Monarch is my friend. And I ain’t gonna say no mo’ ’bout it.”

So the combination shooting gallery and crack house would not be an alibi for Monarch Little. But for all practical purposes, the size of his huge pancakelike feet and his obvious grief over his mother’s death had eliminated him as a viable suspect in the homicide of Bellerophon Lujan.

“Am I going down on this, Mr. Dave?” Sno’ball asked.

“Don’t let me catch you near this house again.”

“Herman ain’t big on the word ‘no.’”

“Tell Herman that of this day he has a bull’s-eye tattooed on his forehead.”

She laughed to herself, looking down the street at the grocery store and a skinny kid trying to pick up Monarch’s weight set. The sun was just breaking out of the mist, shining through the tree over the kid’s head.

“You eat lunch with cops?” I asked.

She fixed her hair with one hand. “If they paying,” she said.

We drove to Bon Creole, way out on St. Peter’s Street, and had po’boy sandwiches, then I drove her back into New Iberia ’s inner city and left her on a street corner used by both pimps and dealers. It was a strange place to deliver a young woman who I believed to be a basically decent and loyal human being. But it was the world to which she belonged, and for those who lived in its maw, its abnormality was simply a matter of perception.

I ARRIVED AT the department shortly after noon. Helen had just returned from New Orleans, where she had been attending a meeting of Louisiana law enforcement administrators on civil preparedness. She caught me in the hallway and walked with me to my office. “What did you get on Bello ’s homicide?” she asked when we were inside.

She had not yet had a chance to talk with Koko Hebert or Mack Bertrand. I told her everything I knew about the initial investigation at the crime scene, then told her about Monarch Little overdosing.

“You’re excluding him?” she said.

“At least for the time being. He may have had a window of opportunity, but there’s no evidence to put him at the crime scene.”

“But Valerie Lujan thinks Monarch did it?”

“If there weren’t people of color around for her to blame her problems on, she’d probably kill herself.”

“You’ve got somebody in mind for this, Dave. I can see it in your face.”

“I stoked Whitey Bruxal up. I told him Bello was going to roll over on him. The possibility that Whitey took him out doesn’t make me feel very good.”

“Before you climb on a cross, you might consider this. It was a premeditated act. The killer hated Bello and wanted him to suffer. The killer also knew Bello ’s routine. Maybe the perp nursed a grudge for years. Bello had that kind of influence on people. Maybe Bruxal didn’t have anything to do with it.”

The phone on my desk rang. It was Mack Bertrand, calling from the crime lab.

“We have prints from several areas on the pick, some good, some bad,” he said. “Most of them were probably left there by the same individual. Regardless, we got no hits with AFIS.”

“Not even possibilities?”

“Nothing.”

I had felt my hopes rise, then fade. “So maybe our suspect is a local with no record,” I said.

“Could be. Bello was a sexual predator.”

“You think this is a revenge killing, pure and simple?”

“I’m at a loss on this whole investigation, Dave, I mean, into the Lujan boy’s death and Crustacean Man and the suicide of the Darbonne girl. I’ve come around to your way of thinking. It’s all part of one piece, but I don’t see the key.”

“Helen’s in my office now. I’ll bring her up to date and get back to you later,” I said.

“Something bothers me about the prints on the pick,” Mack said. “The steel head looks like it’s been partially wiped off. The same with the bottom of the handle. But the prints on the middle of the handle are defined and unsmudged. You following me?”

“I’m not sure.”

“If someone wanted to wipe fingerprints off a murder weapon, in this case a pick, wouldn’t he want to wipe off the entire weapon-both the handle and the head? I think an individual wearing gloves sharpened the pick and later used it to kill Bello. When he swung the pick, he smudged the prints on the bottom of the handle. That’s just speculation, of course. My wife says I spend too much time in my head with this stuff.”