James Burke: Pegasus Descending

“More than you think.”

He looked out at the traffic on the street, his expression neutral, his turquoise eyes empty of any thoughts that I could see. He fitted on his hat, his skin darkening in the shadow it made on his face. In absentminded fashion, he scratched the chain of scars on his right forearm. “You ever want to go duck hunting, I got a camp and a blind. I know where the sac-a-lait is at on Whiskey Bay, too,” he said.

“I appreciate it, sir, but you don’t owe me anything,” I said.

He turned his eyes on me. They were almost luminous, full of portent, and for just a moment I was sure he was about to tell me something of enormous importance. But if that was his intention, he changed his mind and got in his truck without saying anything further and drove away.

“Who was that?” Molly said behind me.

“Mr. Darbonne. He wanted to thank us for getting him out of the can.”

“Your food is getting cold.”

“I’ll be there in a second,” I said, still looking down the street, where Cesaire’s truck was stopped at the traffic light in front of an 1831 antebellum home called the Shadows.

“What’s bothering you, Dave?” Molly said.

“I’ve never had a more perplexing case. It’s like trying to hold water in your fingers. The real problem is most of the people I keep looking at would probably have led normal lives if they hadn’t met one another.”

“Start over again.”

“I have. None of it goes anywhere.”

She kneaded the back of my neck, then ran her fingers up into my hair, her nails raking my scalp. “I’ll always be proud of you,” she said.

“What for?”

“Because you’re incapable of being anyone other than yourself.”

I closed the door and turned around. I wanted to hold her, to pull her against me, to whisper words to her that are embarrassing when they are spoken in a conventional situation. But she had already gone back into the kitchen.

AFTER LUNCH, I returned to the office and once again got out all my notes on Yvonne Darbonne’s death. Except this time I had something else to go on: Slim Bruxal’s firsthand account of how Yvonne had died. At 2 p.m. Helen came into my office. “Where’s Clete Purcel?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied.

“NOPD just tried to serve a warrant at his cottage. It’s empty. The owner says Clete left late last night with a young blond woman. You have no idea where he is?”

“Nothing specific,” I replied, squinting thoughtfully at the far wall.

She closed the door behind her so no one could hear her next words. “Don’t let them get their hands on him, Dave. They’re not talking about six months in Central Lockup. It’s Angola on this one. The insurance companies are tired of Clete destroying half of New Orleans.”

“Glad to know the city is looking out for the right interests,” I said.

She looked at the crime scene photos and case files spread on my desk. “Where are you doing?” she said.

“I think maybe I found the key in the murder of Tony Lujan.”

I DIDN’T TRY to explain it to her. Instead, I went looking for Monarch Little. His next-door neighbor told me Monarch was doing body-and-fender work for a man who ran a repair shop in St. Martinville.

“You know the repairman’s name?” I asked.

The neighbor was the same woman who had shown great irritation at Monarch for getting drunk with his friends and throwing beer cans in her yard after his mother died.

“Monarch done straightened up. Why don’t y’all leave him alone?” she said.

“I’m not here to hurt him, ma’am.”

Her eyes wandered over my face. “He’s working for that albino man on the bayou, the one always grinning when he ain’t got nothing to grin about,” she said.

A half hour later I parked by the side of the sagging, rust-streaked trailer of Prospect Desmoreau, the same albino man who had repaired the Buick that had run down Crustacean Man. Monarch Little was under the pole shed, pulling the door off a Honda that had evidently been broadsided.

“You’re looking good, Mon,” I said.

“My name is Monarch,” he said.

“I need your help.”

“That’s why you’re here? I’m shocked.”

“Lose the comic book dialogue. I’m looking for a black guy who rides a bicycle and salvages bottles and beer cans from the roadside. A black guy who might have seen what happened when Yvonne Darbonne died.”

“The girl who shot herself by the sugar mill?”

I nodded.

The sun was in the west, burning like a bronze flame on the bayou’s surface. Monarch was sweating heavily in the shade, his neck beaded with dirt rings.

“Is this guy on the bike gonna be jammed up over this?” he asked.

“No, I just want to know what he saw. I’m just excluding a possibility, that’s all.”

“There’s two or t’ree street people do that. But they’re white. They stay at a shelter.”

“Quit waltzing me around, Monarch.”

“There’s this one black guy, he’s retarded and got a li’l head. I mean a real li’l-bitty one. You see him digging trash out of Dumpsters or stopping his bike by rain ditches wit’ cars flying right past him. Know who I mean?”

“No,” I replied.

Monarch lifted up his shirt and smelled himself, then wiped the sweat off his upper lip onto the shirt. “He’s retarded and scared of people he don’t know. I better go wit’ you,” he said.

I started to thank him, then thought better of it. Monarch was not given to sentiment. He was also aware that, rightly or wrongly, I would probably never forget the fact he had been a dope dealer. We walked up the grassy slope toward my truck, his shadow merging with mine on the ground. I saw him smile.

“What’s funny?” I said.

“Ever see that old movie about this hunchback guy swinging on the catee’dral bells?” he asked.

“The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”

“Yeah, that’s it. The two of us together look like the guy swinging on the bells. See?” he said, pointing at our shadows. “Everybody t’ought the hunchback was a monster, but he had music inside his head nobody else could hear.”

“You never cease to surprise me, Monarch.”

If my remark held any significance for him, he didn’t show it.

We drove a few miles back down the bayou to a cluster of shacks behind a parking area for harvesting machines and cane wagons. I had not told Monarch the real reason for my interest in the black man Cesaire Darbonne’s neighbor had told us was collecting discarded bottles and cans from the roadside the day Yvonne died. I believed Slim Bruxal had told me the truth when he said Yvonne had deliberately turned the.22 Magnum into her face and had shot herself, and I needed no confirmation of that fact from a witness. But there was a detail in Slim’s story that I had overlooked. He claimed, and I had no reason to doubt him, that Tony Lujan had passed out in the backyard of the fraternity house and was incapable of driving Yvonne home. I had assumed Slim had driven her back to New Iberia in his SUV, but Slim had said Yvonne had taken the.22 out of the glove box. Her diary indicated she didn’t like Slim and had probably avoided him. If she had been riding in Slim’s vehicle, how would she have known a revolver was in the glove box?

The bottle-and-can collector was named Ripton Armentor. As Monarch had said, he looked like he had been assembled from a box of discarded spare parts. His shoulders were square, his chest flat as an ironing board, and his torso too long for his legs, so that his trousers looked like they had been taken off a midget. Worse yet, his head was not much larger than a shot put. And as though he were deliberately trying to compete with the physical incongruities fate had imposed upon him, he wore a neatly pressed blue denim shirt with a necktie that extended all the way to his belt, giving him the appearance of an inverted exclamation mark.