Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (45 page)

“What’s up, Lonnie?” Helen said.

“It’s time to move forward, much more aggressively than we have been,” he said as soon as we were seated.

“Move forward with what?” Helen said.

“An arrest in the homicide of Bello Lujan,” he said.

“Arrest whom?” I said.

He rested his chin on the backs of his fingers, staring good-naturedly out the window. “
Dave,
” he said patiently.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“We’ve got the murder weapon with fingerprints all over it. We’ve got the motive. We’ve got a suspect with no alibi. But I can tell you also what we haven’t got,” he said.

“I’ll bite,” I said.

I could see a tic inside his feigned air of tolerance and goodwill. “What we don’t have is somebody under arrest,” he said. He rocked his chair back and forth, the spring going
scrinch, scrinch, scrinch
. “Why don’t we have somebody under arrest? I think you’re a member of that wandering group of penitents, the incurably liberal-hearted, Dave. Because you believe Cesaire Darbonne is a simple man of the earth, one who has already suffered a terrible tragedy, it would be a collective sin of enormous magnitude if we arrested him for killing the man who raped his daughter. Maybe I’m unfair to you, but I believe you’re a sucker for any tale that involves social victimhood.”

“I don’t believe Cesaire knew Bello raped his daughter.”

“
You
don’t believe? The last time I checked, the grand jury decides those kinds of things.”

“How would Bello have known?” I said.

“Somebody told him?” he replied.

“We found a neck chain and crucifix and G.I. can opener near the crime scene that belongs to one of Whitey Bruxal’s gumballs, a guy from Jamaica by the name of Juan Bolachi,” I said.

“Yeah, I know all about that and it doesn’t mean dick,” Lonnie said before I could continue.

“We’ve got scrapings from under Bello’s fingernails,” I said. “It’s just a matter of—”

“A matter of getting this guy Bolachi in custody is what you’re trying to say, right? Unfortunately, he’s not in custody and all you’ve got is speculation,” Lonnie said. “Everyone has skin tissue under their nails. It doesn’t mean the skin tissue came from a killer, for God’s sakes.”

My hands were beginning to tremble with anger. I pressed them flat against my knees, below the level of his desktop, so Lonnie couldn’t see them. “Cesaire Darbonne is an innocent man,” I said, all of my arguments spent, my grandiose declaration itself an admission of defeat.

Lonnie touched at a speck of saliva on the corner of his lip and looked at it. “The warrant will be ready at one p.m. today,” he said. “Helen, I want Dave to serve it. It’s his case. He should see it through to its conclusion.”

He pulled on an earlobe and studied the far wall.

Then I realized Lonnie had found his means for revenge. He didn’t care whether Cesaire Darbonne was guilty or not. The case was prosecutable and for Lonnie that was all that mattered. His butt was covered and I had to place under arrest a man whose personal tragedy weighed heavily upon me. I didn’t like Lonnie, but I thought he had a bottom beyond which he didn’t go. His ambition, his manipulation of uneducated people, his pandering to fear and the lowest common denominator in the electorate were all sickening characteristics in themselves but not without precedent in either national or state politics. Now I realized what bothered me most about Lonnie. He didn’t care about either the place or the people whom he professed to love and was capable of mocking them while he simultaneously did them injury.

“One day this is going to be over, partner, and we’ll all have different roles,” I said, getting up from my chair.

“Want to interpret that for me?” he said, slouched back in his chair, still smiling.

“No, I don’t,” I replied.

“I didn’t think so,” he said.

“Dave, would you wait for me out in the hallway?” Helen said.

I walked down to the watercooler and had a drink. Through the window I could see the Sunset Limited running down the tracks, hours off schedule, passengers eating breakfast in the dining car. At one time we literally set our watches by the Sunset Limited. It ran every day, from Los Angeles to Miami and back again, and somehow assured us that we were part of something much larger than ourselves—a country of southwestern vistas and cities glimmering at sunset on the edge of vast oceans, where the waves broke against the skin like a secular baptism. It was the stuff of mythos, but it was real because we believed it was real.

The last car on the train clicked down the tracks and disappeared beyond a row of shacks.

The door to Lonnie’s office was half open and I saw him rise to his feet, placing a pen and his glasses in his shirt pocket, indicating he had to be somewhere else and that it was obviously time for Helen to go. The hush inside the office was of a kind that comes before a clap of thunder or a violent act you never anticipate.

“We’re professional people, Helen. We need to drop this and concentrate on the job and not the personal problems of one individual,” Lonnie said.

“Not just yet,” she replied. “I want you to have a clear understanding about my position on a couple of matters. Number one, I couldn’t care less about your opinion of me. I think you’re a fraud and a bully, and like most bullies, you’re probably a coward. Number two, you couldn’t shine Dave Robicheaux’s shoes. If you ever try to demean him again, or use the power of your office to hurt him in any fashion, I’m going to personally rip your ass out of its socket and stuff it down your throat.”

You could have worse friends than Helen Soileau.

Chapter
25

I
PLACED
C
ESAIRE
under arrest after lunch. I cuffed his wrists in front of him rather than behind him and allowed him to drape a windbreaker over his hands before I put him in the back of the cruiser. But there was no disguising his level of humiliation and shame. If I ever saw a broken man, it was Cesaire Darbonne.

After he was booked for capital murder, I walked with him to a holding cell and asked the guard to lock me inside with him and to give me a few minutes.

“This is a part of the job I don’t like, Mr. Darbonne,” I said. “I don’t believe you killed Bello Lujan. But even if you did, I and others like me would understand why you did it, even if we considered it wrong.”

“It ain’t your fault, no.”

“Look me in the face, sir.”

He stared at me from the iron bench on which he was seated, perhaps unsure whether my request had contained a veiled insult.

“Tell me again you didn’t know Bello Lujan assaulted your daughter,” I said.

“A man who got to repeat himself don’t respect his own word,” he said.

He looked at the tops of his shoes.

“I suspect your bail could be as high as a quarter million dollars. Do you have any kind of collateral you can offer the court?” I said.

“No, suh, I t’ink I’m gonna be here awhile.”

His intuitions were probably more accurate than he knew. He was in the maw of the system, and anyone who has been caught in it, the guilty or innocent or hapless alike, will be the first to tell you that justice is indeed blind. “I hope it comes out all right for you, sir,” I said.

“Nothing gonna come out all right. Ain’t no way to turn it around now.”

“What do you mean it can’t be turned around?”

“I lost my farm and bidness when the gov’ment let in all that sugar from Central America. Ain’t fair to put all that cheap sugar on the market. Ain’t nothing like it used to be. Li’l people ain’t got no chance.”

His linkage of his own fate to economic factors was probably self-serving, if not self-pitying, and his condemnation of the world for his own misfortune was the stuff of grandiosity. But who can fault a man with no legs for not being able to run?

“I’m going to see what I can do,” I said.

“About what?” he said, his eyes lifting to mine.

M
OLLY WAS WASHING
her car under the porte cochere when I got home. She wore a pair of blue-jean shorts and an old white shirt that was too tight for her shoulders, and her clothes and hair and skin were damp from the garden hose she was spraying on the car’s surface while she wiped it down with a rag. Molly’s physical firmness, the curvature of her hips, the way her rump flexed against her shorts, the suggestion of sexual power in her thighs and the swell of her breasts, all reminded me of my dead wife Bootsie, and I sometimes wondered if Bootsie’s spirit had not slipped inside Molly’s skin, as though the two women who had not known each other in life had melded together and formed a third personality after Bootsie’s death.

But I didn’t care where Molly came from, as long as she remained in my life, and I loved her as much as I did Bootsie, and I loved them both at the same time and never felt a contradiction or a moment of disloyalty about my feelings.

“Come scratch my back, will you?” Molly said. “A mosquito about six inches long got under my shirt.”

She propped her arms on the car’s roof while I moved my nails back and forth across her shoulder blades. The water from the hose continued to run, spilling back across her fist, trailing down her forearm. She shifted her weight and her rump brushed against my loins.

“I had to put Cesaire Darbonne in jail today,” I said. “I suspect he’ll be arraigned tomorrow for capital murder.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, gazing abstractedly through the shadows in the backyard.

“The guy’s broke. He’ll probably stay in lockdown out at the stockade.”

“And?” she said, removing a strand of damp hair from her eye.

“No bondsman will touch him with a dung fork, at least not without collateral.”

“You hurt my feelings,” she said.

“Pardon?”

She rolled her shoulders to indicate I should continue scratching her back. “I thought you were putting moves on me to get me into the sack,” she said.

“I’m not above doing that.”

She deliberately hit me with her rump. “You want to go his bond?” she said.

“I’ll have to put up the house and lot. They’re half yours.”

“Not really, but whatever you want to do is fine with me,” she said.

She turned around, stood on my shoes, and hugged me.

“What’s that for?” I said.

“I won’t tell you,” she said, then continued washing her car.

A
FTER SUPPER
, I drove to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. He had closed all the blinds and was sitting barefoot on his bed, dressed in a pair of elastic-waisted khakis and a strap undershirt, reaming out the barrel of a .38 revolver with a bore brush. His television set was tuned to The Weather Channel, the sound turned off. A shaded lamp burned on the nightstand, and under its glow were a can of oil, his sap, a throw-down .22 piece of junk with tape on the wood grips, a six-inch stiletto, and a nine-millimeter Beretta that carried a fourteen-round magazine. I took a can of Dr Pepper out of his icebox and sat down in a straight-back wood chair across from him.

“Expecting the Union Army to come up the Teche?” I said.

“A bud inside NOPD called me and said I’m about to get picked up for destroying the casino. I rented a camp out in the Atchafalaya Basin. Time to do a survey on the goggle-eye perch population,” he replied.

Then I made a mistake. I told him about all the recent events involving the deaths of Yvonne Darbonne, Crustacean Man, and Tony and Bello Lujan. I told him about the scam Trish Klein and her crew had pulled on Whitey Bruxal. I also told him about Slim Bruxal’s implication that his father and Lefty Raguza might decide to take their pound of flesh.

Clete wiped the oil off the blue-black surfaces of his .38, then flipped the cylinder from the frame and began inserting cartridges one by one into the chambers, his blond eyelashes lowered so I could not read his eyes.

“I can hear your wheels turning, Clete. Forget about it,” I said.

“I’m glad I’ve finally heard the voice of God. You can actually go into people’s heads now and explain their own thoughts to them.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. I’m trying to—”

He cut me off before I could continue. “We used to do business one way with these assholes—under a black flag. Why do you think Whitey Bruxal is here? It’s because he gets a free pass. In the old days, at least he would have been under the control of the Giacanos. Now he can kick the shit out of cerebral palsy victims and be on the Society page.”

“You don’t think NOPD can find you in a fishing camp? Use your brain,” I said.

He spun the cylinder on the .38, the butt end of the loaded cartridges glinting in the light. His green eyes were bright and happy, free of alcoholic influence or fatigue, and I realized when he didn’t reply that I hadn’t listened carefully to what he had said and I had once again misread the complexities of an antithetically mixed man.

“You were already planning to take out Whitey Bruxal, weren’t you?” I said.

“Not exactly. But if these guys make a move on us, we hunt them down and pitch the rule book. What’s to lose? We’re dinosaurs anyway. The only guys who haven’t figured that out are us. Pop me a beer, will you?”

He laid a clear line of oil along the side of the Beretta, then wiped all of its surfaces clean with a rag. He pulled back the slide on an empty magazine and ran the bore brush up and down the inside of the barrel, smiling at me while he did it. In the muted glow of the lamplight he looked like a young man again, one who still believed the world was a magical place full of adventure and goodness and intriguing encounters up every street. In moments like these I sometimes wondered if Clete had ever intended to age and grow old and change from the irresponsible man of his youth, if indeed he had not always courted death as a means of tearing off the hands on his own clock.

“Why you looking at me like that?” he asked.

“No reason.”

“You worry about all the wrong things, Streak. In this case, about me and Trish. All that stuff you told me about the Lujan murders and Crustacean Man and the Darbonne girl? There’s something missing. This character in the D.A.’s office, what’s his name?”