James Burke: Pegasus Descending

“I think you’re an intelligent man, Slim, and I won’t try to jerk you around. But one way or another, your kite is about to crash and burn. So is your old man’s. We won’t get you and your father on everything y’all have done, but we’ll get you on part of it and that’ll be enough.

“You killed the homeless man with a baseball bat. It wasn’t planned, but that’s what happened. You and Tony were cruising down the back road, maybe drinking a little brew, blowing a little weed, and you saw this wino walking along the edge of the ditch. Then you thought it’d really be funny to load this guy in your car and maybe take him to a party, push him inside the door and leave him there, rolling around on the rug, wrapped in grunge and puke, people tripping over him, wow, what a gas, huh?”

All movement had drained out of Slim’s body. He stood frozen in the shade, breathing through his mouth, and I knew I had described at least part of what had actually happened on the back road.

He dipped a big round pale yellow sponge into a water bucket and ran it along the horse’s neck, his eyes darkening with thought, his mouth downturned at the corners, the water sliding off the horse’s withers onto Slim’s shoes.

“Except the guy didn’t like what you guys had planned for him, and he got out of the car and started running,” I continued. “Tony was driving and tried to cut him off, but, guess what, he hit the guy with the right fender and broke the guy’s hip. If you guys had just done a hit-and-run on a drunk, you could have bagged ass, left him on the road, and nobody would have ever been the wiser. In fact, you could have even done a nine-one-one call on him and saved his life. But he had seen your faces and he could identify the Buick as well, and that meant only one thing-it was time for this poor bastard to go to that big wineshop in the sky.

“So you got out of the Buick with a baseball bat and parked the guy’s head in the fourth dimension. Tell me I’m wrong.”

He looked me in the face, without really seeing me, thinking about the words, if any, he was about to say.

“Good try, but I don’t think you got jack shit to go on,” he said.

And I knew at that moment the baseball bats we had found in the fraternity garage probably did not contain the one that had delivered the fatal blow to Crustacean Man. Slim had slipped the punch again. All he needed to do now was to keep sponging down his horse and not say anything. But the anger at his father, and by extension at me, still lingered in his face, and I had another run at him.

“You’ve got somebody else’s death on your conscience, too, even though you may never be held legally accountable for it. But one way or another, I’m going to make your life miserable until you own up for what you little sonsofbitches did to Yvonne Darbonne.”

His hand tightened on the sponge, squeezing a curtain of water down the horse’s withers. Then he threw the sponge into the bucket, hard, splattering his jeans.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” he said. “I was the only guy looking out for her. She got stoned out of her mind at the house and puked in the toilet on the second floor. Then some guys took her in a room and she got it on with all three of them. That kind of shit doesn’t go on when I’m in the house. We’ve got a little sister sorority we look out for, and we don’t need a reputation for gangbanging freshman coeds. I broke it up and I took her home. Where was Tony? Glad you asked. Passed out under a picnic table in the backyard with potato salad in his hair.”

“You drove Yvonne Darbonne back to New Iberia? To her house?” I said.

“You got it,” he said. “I was going to take her inside her house, but she got a gun out of the glove box and started waving it around. It was a twenty-two Tony and me target-practiced with. I tried to take it away from her, but she turned it into her face and pulled the trigger. That’s what happened, man. You want to put me in prison for that, go ahead. But get this straight. I helped her when she didn’t have any other friends, including Tony, who in case you didn’t know it was a closet homo.”

“If you were an innocent man, why’d you run?”

“Because I’m Whitey Bruxal’s son. Because I don’t like being a backseat hump for every cop in South Louisiana.”

His cheeks were pooled with color in the warm gloom of the shed, and for just a moment he reminded me of his dead friend Tony. I could hear the wind coursing in the pasture, feel the mare shift her weight under my hand.

“You killed Tony, though, didn’t you? You knew sooner or later he was going to dime you with the D.A. Maybe he came on to you and you got disgusted with his weakness and cloying dependence and decided to do both of you a favor and blow out his wick.”

“You got part of it right. He started crying and tried to grab my package. I told him he turned my stomach and he could deal with Monarch Little on his own. If I’d stayed with him, maybe he’d still be alive,” he said. “Believe it or not, that doesn’t let me sleep too good sometimes.”

What do you believe when you have conversations with people for whom the presence of evil is a given and simply a matter of degree in their daily lives? Do you just walk away from their words or let them invade your own frame of reference? How do you play chess with the devil?

You don’t.

“I advise you to come into the department with your lawyer and make a formal statement about the circumstances surrounding Yvonne Darbonne’s death,” I said. “With luck and a little juice, you’ll probably skate.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, clipping a rope onto the horse’s hackamore. “I’m the least of your worries, Mr. Robicheaux. You got no idea what my father and Lefty Raguza are capable of. My father beat up his wife and son because he lost his money. Think what he might do to somebody else’s family.”

“Say that last part again?”

He walked the mare into the barn, his T-shirt gray and glued with moisture against his back. I grabbed him by the arm and turned him around. “Did you hear me?” I said.

He pulled up his T-shirt, exposing a burn scar on his stomach. It was V-shaped, welted, the color of a tire patch.

“I was five years old,” he said. “He said he dropped the iron, that it was an accident. He told me he was sorry. I think he meant it. That’s just the way he’s wired. Now give me some peace.”

BETSY MOSSBACHER called me at the office five minutes after I walked in. “Do you know where the Klein woman is?” she said.

“Out of jail,” I said.

“I know that. She slipped the surveillance on her.”

“Is this related to Whitey Bruxal’s problems over a money transfer from the Islands?”

“You better believe it. Somebody rolled thirteen million dollars out of his accounts in the Caymans into a half-dozen banks in Jersey and Florida, all of them in the name of Whitey Bruxal or businesses he owns. In the meantime, an anonymous caller had already alerted the IRS the money was on its way. All that thirteen million is undeclared income.”

“Trish’s friends impersonated gas company employees and retrieved Whitey’s account numbers from his computer,” I said, more to myself than to her.

“That’s my guess. All they needed were the nine-digit numbers to do the transfers. It gets better, though. While Trish Klein and her friends were sending signals that they were about to pull a big score on Whitey’s businesses, he was funneling his cash flow into the Caymans. During the last two weeks he parked another two million over there. This is the slickest sting I ever saw. They’ve ruined the guy and they used the government to do it.”

She laughed into the receiver.

“Can I get a job with you guys?” I asked.