James Burke: Pegasus Descending

I lay the shotgun across the tabletop and pressed a towel between Whitey’s forearms and the exposed entrails he was trying to hold inside his stomach cavity.

“Hang on,” I said. “I’m calling for the paramedics.”

“You read it all wrong, Dave. In the bedroom,” I heard Clete say hoarsely behind me.

But at that point I trusted none of my own faculties. My shoulder ached miserably and my ears were popping as though I were aboard an airplane that had suddenly lost altitude. Who was the man in the burned Caddy? How did the car burn? I sank into a chair and reached for my cell phone.

Then a shadow cast by a light inside the bedroom fell across my hand. I turned my head and stared into the face of Valerie Lujan.

“I’m sorry it’s come to this, Mr. Robicheaux. I wish you had left us alone,” she said.

She was standing in the doorway now, supported by an aluminum brace whose socket fitted around her left forearm. In her other hand she held a small pistol. Her flesh tone was pink, her eyes clear, as though she had been suffused with new life from an iniquitous enterprise.

I looked at the shotgun, the blue-black of the steel, the damp imprints of my hands still on the stock, the safety still pushed to the off position. But I had not ejected the spent shell after I had shot Whitey. Even if I could pick up the gun, I would never have time to jack another round into the chamber before Valerie Lujan shot me at point-blank range.

“How many mistakes can one man make?” I said.

“Did you think an ignoramus like my husband amassed a fortune by running cockfights and handling oil leases that usually resulted in dry holes? He could hardly write his name. Half the money Miss Klein stole from Mr. Bruxal belongs to me.”

I was losing more blood than I had thought and the room was spinning around me. Whitey was bent forward across from me, the tops of his forearms glistening with blue and red lights.

“Let me call nine-one-one. It will save this man’s life. You still have a chance to be a friend of the court, Mrs. Lujan,” I said.

But the resolution in her eyes was of a kind I knew my words would have no effect on. She stepped farther into the room, her metal brace clinking with her weight. I saw Clete strain against the plastic ligatures that held him in the chair.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Robicheaux. But way leads on to way,” she said.

“You ran over the homeless man, not Tony,” I said.

“How did you know?”

“Tony wouldn’t have gone to prison for his father or even Slim. But he would have for his mother.”

“You need to understand something, sir. A vagrant came out of the darkness and struck the side of my car. When we tried to help him, he bragged on the amount of money he was going to make. Then he laughed at Slim Bruxal. That was a mistake. You keep your mouth off my relationship with my son, Mr. Robicheaux. In fact, you tell your tale to the devil.”

She raised the pistol and aimed it at my face. I could feel my mind racing, searching for words that would turn the situation around, that would impose humanity on a person whose small wasted hand and crippled mind had the power to shut down my life with the casualness of a fool arbitrarily slamming a door.

“Mrs. Lujan, you’re not a killer,” I said.

“We all are,” she said.

I saw her index finger and hand tighten on the pistol’s trigger and tiny pearl grips. Then there was a solitary pop, like a Chinese firecracker, behind me and the petals of a red flower spilled from the middle of Valerie Lujan’s forehead. For less than a second there was a look in her eyes I will never forget, as though she realized that once again an unfair hand had cheated her out of the life that should have been hers. Then all the neurological motors and complexities that defined who and what she was drained out of her face, just like the features of a wax figure softening in front of a flame. The pistol she had been holding struck the floor with more sound than the weight of her body.

Cesaire Darbonne stood in the back doorway, Clete Purcel’s throw-down.22 hanging from his hand, the woods behind him thrashing with wind. He stared at the gun, then set it on the kitchen counter and looked at it again. I could hear him breathing in the silence.

“It was lying out there in the weeds, wit’ a knife and a blackjack,” he said. “I heard the gunfire. I didn’t know what else to do. Did I do the right t’ing?”

I didn’t reply. Valerie Lujan had said we’re all killers. Was she correct? Does our simian ancestry feed daily at the heart? Perhaps better people than I can answer that question. I cut loose Trish Klein and Clete Purcel and silently asked my old friend Dallas to forgive me for failing him years ago on that flyblown, burning day in Opa-Locka, Florida, when I learned that charnel houses can wait for us on the other side of morning. Then I called both the FBI and the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department and asked them to send everything they had.

NOPD EASED UP ON CLETE while he recuperated at Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette, although none of us had any doubt that this time Clete was not going to skate. He tried to dismiss his impending legal troubles as well as the events that had taken place at the camp out by Whiskey Bay. Through his window he had a lovely view of the older part of Lafayette, the houses couched deep inside a canopy of live oaks, slash pine, pecan, and hackberry trees. He joked and pretended he had never lost control of the situation on the levee, that bad judgment and mortality still held no sway in his life.

“I’m telling you, I was never scared. Bruxal and his hired lame-brains just weren’t the first team,” he said. “Soon as they locked me in the trunk, I knew they’d blown it.”

He had installed a release latch inside the hatch. When Whitey Bruxal and Lefty Raguza and the man named Ernesto had run Clete’s vehicle off the road, they put Trish in the SUV and took Clete’s Beretta from him, tossing his stiletto and throw-down into the weeds. Then they stuffed Clete into the Caddy’s trunk. Clete’s flare pistol, the one he carried with him when he was out on the salt, was behind the spare tire. When Ernesto stopped the Caddy, Clete popped the hatch and fired the flare pistol straight into Ernesto’s face.

Unfortunately for Ernesto, Trish and Clete had just gone up the levee to fill a ten-gallon gas can to power the generator at his rented camp. Worse yet, the can had evidently fallen on its side and soaked the carpet on the passenger’s side of the car. The explosion of flame from the windows wrapped all the way across the roof.

But Clete’s dismissal of his experience at Whiskey Bay was not convincing. When no one was watching, I could see the haunted look in his eyes, not unlike the thousand-yard stare that soldiers bring back from places no one should ever have to revisit.

“Get that expression off your face,” he said to me one evening, just after Trish had left.

“I think you should leave the United States, Cletus. Check out the Islands, maybe stay gone a year or so,” I said.

“This is our country, Dave. We fought for it. We’re not going to give it over to these sonsofbitches,” he said. “Get us a couple of Dr Peppers out of the machine, will you? The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide stomp ass and take names and are here to stay, big mon.”

That was Clete Purcel, thousand-yard stare or not.

My feelings about the people who died at the camp by Whiskey Bay are simple: I think each of them got what he or she deserved and I’m glad they’re dead.

Cesaire Darbonne pled guilty to the premeditated murder of Tony Lujan and was sentenced to life imprisonment at Angola. His lawyer told me later that Cesaire refused to allow him to enter an insanity plea or to ask for leniency from the court. I visit him regularly and believe he is one of those rare individuals who discovers a form of dignity inside jail that would have been denied him outside. I hope one day that his sentence is commuted.