"Tell me where he went."
"He took the rottweiler. That dog mean t"rew and t"rew. You don"t walk a dog like that in the park, no."
"Go back inside and tell Mrs. Lujan I"ll be right there," I said.
"Suh?"
I said it again. This time I placed my hand rea.s.suringly on her upper arm. "I give you my word no one will know what you just told me," I said.
She went back inside the house uncertainly, leaving the door ajar. With my back to the house, I opened my cell phone and punched in the number to Helen"s office.
"Sheriff Soileau," she said.
"I"m at Bello"s house now. Mrs. Lujan"s nurse says he left here with a rottweiler. Better get somebody over to Monarch"s place."
"You got it, bwana," she said.
I stepped inside the living room and saw Mrs. Lujan out on the sunporch, staring at me from her wheelchair. She was dressed in a flowery blouse and beige skirt, but the seasonal cheeriness of the colors only accentuated the pallor of her skin and the obvious deterioration of her bone structure. Through the windows I could see freshly mowed St. Augustine gra.s.s and a bank of shade trees in the background and a pale green canopy set up on aluminum poles. The canopy was swelling with wind, a loose chain on one corner rattling against a pole.
"Are you here about Tony?" she asked.
"Monarch Little has been released from jail on bond. We"re concerned your husband might want to take the law into his own hands," I replied.
She watched me in the same way a bird watches a potential predator from atop its nest. She was originally from the Carrollton district of New Orleans and had come to Lafayette to study drama at the university when she was only a girl. Her parents, who had been successful antique dealers, were killed in a commercial airline accident her freshman year. Mrs. Lujan, whose first name was Valerie, left school and went to work for a man who made breakfast-room furniture out of compressed sawdust and sold it to the owners of double-wides and prefab homes during the domestic oil boom of the 1970s. Then she met Bellerophon Lujan and perhaps decided that the dreams of a young drama major were just that-dreams that a mature woman tries to put aside with only a brief pang of the heart.
"You"re here because you"re worried about the man who killed my son? Who disfigured him so badly he"s virtually unrecognizable?" she said.
"I"m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Lujan," I said. But it was obvious she was not interested in my sympathies. "Monarch Little hasn"t been charged in the murder of your son. He was in jail on a firearms violation. His bond was reduced and now he"s back on the street. And that"s why I"m here."
Her face was almost skeletal, her hair like corn silk, her eyes filled with both sorrow and the a.n.a.lytical glint of someone who has probably been systematically deceived. She reminded me of a figure in a Modigliani painting, attenuated, her bones like rubber, her body robbed of both beauty and hope by an unkind hand. "You"re saying there"s doubt about this man"s guilt?" she said.
"In my mind, yes."
"Why?"
"The investigation is ongoing."
"Please answer my question."
"I don"t think Monarch Little is a killer."
She stared out the window at the lawn and the wind puffing the canopy that had been used at garden parties in a happier time. "You were one of the policemen who found Tony?"
"Yes, I was."
"Do you think my son suffered?"
"No, I don"t think he did." I let my eyes go flat so they did not focus on her face.
"But the truth is you don"t know?" she said.
"In this kind of instance-"
"Don"t patronize me, Mr. Robicheaux."
My words were of no value. I suspected her grief had now become her only possession and in all probability she would nurse it unto the grave. I looked out the window at the green canopy rippling in the wind and the chain tinkling on the aluminum pole.
"I have a videotape of Yvonne Darbonne dancing at a lawn party. In the background there"s a sound like canvas popping and a chain rattling against metal. I think that video was shot in your yard, Mrs. Lujan."
She lifted her chin. Her eyes were small and green, recessed unequally in her face. "And what if it was?"
"You knew Yvonne Darbonne?"
"I"m not sure that I did. Would you answer my question, please?"
I felt a surge of anger in my chest, less because of her imperious att.i.tude than her callousness toward someone else"s loss. "She died of a gunshot wound in the center of her forehead. She was eighteen years old. I think she was at your house the day of her death. She had red hair and was wearing a short skirt and sleeveless blue tank top at the party. She was dancing to a recording of John Lee Hooker"s "Boom Boom." Does any of that sound familiar to you?"
"I don"t like the way you"re addressing me."
"Mr. Darbonne lost his child to a violent act, just like you lost yours. Why should you take offense because I ask whether or not the girl was at your house? Why is that a problem for you, Mrs. Lujan?"
"Get out."
I placed my business card on a gla.s.s tabletop next to her wheelchair. There was a small pitcher of orange juice and crushed ice, with sprigs of mint in it, sitting on the table. The refraction of sunlight from the pitcher looked like shards of gla.s.s on her skin.
"Either your son or your husband ran over and killed a homeless man. Moral outrage won"t change that fact," I said.
"Your cruelty seems to have no bounds," she replied.
BELLO HAD GONE FIRST to Monarch Little"s home, located in a blue-collar neighborhood that was gradually becoming all black. A woman had been hanging wash in her backyard when she saw Bello come up the dirt driveway, the rottweiler straining at the leash he had double-wrapped around his fist. "You know where Mr. Little is?" he asked, smiling at her.
"No, suh," she replied.
"You been out in the yard long? Or maybe at your kitchen window? Or maybe out on your gallery, pounding out your broom?" He was grinning at nothing now, his eyes roving about aimlessly, the dog stringing saliva into the dirt.
"He come in a while ago, then left again," the woman replied. She was overweight, her dress blowing on her body like a tent, her arms wrapped with a skin infection that leached them of their color.
"Wasn"t driving that Firebird, though, was he? "Cause it got burnt up," Bello said.
She wasn"t going to reply, then she looked again at his face and felt the words break involuntarily from her throat. "He was wit" his cousin, in a beat-up truck. It"s got boards stuck up on the sides to haul yard trash wit"."
"Where they gone to?" Bello was still grinning, his eyes never quite lighting on her. He lifted up on the dog"s choke chain, tightening it until the dog stiffened and sat down in the dirt. "Tell me where he"s at. I owe him some money."
"That corner where they always standing around under the tree. I heard them say they was going to the li"l sto" there," she said.
"The corner they sell dope at?"
"I don"t know nothing about that."
"But that"s the corner you"re talking about, isn"t it?"
"Yes, suh."
"If I don"t find him, you don"t need to tell him I was here, do you?"
"No, suh," she replied, shaking her head quickly.
"T"ank you," he said. He turned the dog in a circle and walked it back to his Buick, making a snicking sound behind his teeth.
I HAD JUST LEFT Bello"s house when I got the dispatcher"s call. I hit the siren and the flasher and headed down Loreauville Road, cane fields and horse farms and clumps of live oaks racing past me.
THE AIR-CONDITIONING UNIT in Bello"s Buick was turned up full blast as he approached the corner that had always served as a secondary home for Monarch and his friends. Bello"s dog sat on the front seat, its yellow eyes looking dully out the window, its choke chain dripping like ice from its neck. The frigid interior of the Buick, with its deep leather seats and clean smell, digital instrument panels, and silent power train, seemed a galaxy away from the dusty, superheated, and litter-strewn environment on the corner. A black kid drinking from a quart bottle of ale eyeballed Bello"s car, waiting to see if the driver would roll down the window, indicating he wanted to make a buy.
Bello slowed the Buick against the curb, the white orb of sun suddenly disappearing behind the ma.s.sive canopy of the shade tree. He turned off the ignition, cracked the windows, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the change in light before he got out of the car. Bello had never had a cautionary sense about people of color, and had never thought of them, at least individually, as a viable challenge to his authority as a white man. In the past, they had always done what he told them. That"s the way it was. If they believed otherwise, a phone call to an employer or a manager of rental properties could bring about a level of religious conversion that even a beating could not.
But something had changed at the corner. The g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers were there, as always, playing cards, drinking soda pop or beer, or taking turns at the weight set, their hair matted down with black silk scarfs, even in the heat; but they seemed disconnected from Monarch, in the same way that candle moths lose their flight pattern when their light source is removed. Monarch and his cousin, a yardman who looked like he was made from coat-hanger wire, were eating spearmint s...o...b..a.l.l.s with tiny wood spoons at a plank table under the tree. The yardman"s paint-skinned truck, garden tools bungee-corded to the sides, was parked in the background. Monarch was wearing jeans and old tennis shoes and a colorless denim shirt, the sleeves scissored off at the armpits. He looked at the spangled sunlight bouncing off the windshield of Bello"s Buick but gave no indication he recognized the man behind the wheel.
A bare-chested black kid, not over seventeen, his shirt wadded up and hanging from his back pocket, tapped on Bello"s window. His arms were without muscular tone, soft, his chin grown with fuzz that looked like black thread. Bello smiled when he rolled down the window. "Yeah?" Bello said.
"Want some weed?" the kid asked.
"That"s not what I had in mind," Bello replied.
"You name it, I got it, man," the kid said, his arm propped on the roof, exposing his armpit. He gazed nonchalantly down the street.
"You gonna hook me up wit" some cooze?" Bello said.
"There"s a lady or two I can introduce you to."
"I got a special one in mind," Bello said, squinting up at him.
"Yeah?"
"Your mama. She still working rough trade?"
The black kid kept his gaze averted and did not look back at him. "Why you want to do that, man?" he said.
""Cause you put your f.u.c.king hand on my car," Bello said. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the heat. "Want to meet my dog?"
"No, suh," the boy said, stepping back, lifting his hands in front of him. "T"ought you was someone else, suh."
Bello snapped his fingers softly and the rottweiler dropped to the asphalt behind him. Bello closed the car door and picked up the animal"s leash. Everyone on the corner was staring at him now, everyone except Monarch Little, who continued eating his s...o...b..ll with his tiny wood spoon, digging out the last grains of spearmint-flavored ice from the bottom of the cone.
Bello stepped up on the curb. The wind puffed the oak tree overhead, and tiny yellow leaves drifted down into the shade. Monarch"s cousin rose from the table and walked to a trash barrel by his truck and dropped his empty s...o...b..ll cone inside. The cousin"s strap overalls looked made from rags, the weave almost washed out of the fabric. His facial expression was bladed, filled with cautionary lights.
"Been t"inking about me?" Bello said to Monarch.
"Don"t know who you are. Ain"t interested, either," Monarch replied.
"You fixing to find out. You should have stayed in jail, yeah."
Monarch seemed to think a long time before he spoke. "I ain"t did it. That dog ain"t gonna make me say I did, either. The people on this corner ain"t gonna hurt you, so you ain"t got to be afraid. But don"t come down here no more t"reatening people wit" dogs, no."
"My son was gonna be a doctor. You took that from me," Bello said.
Monarch waved an index finger back and forth. "I ain"t took nothing from you. Do what you gonna do. But you better look around you. This ain"t your pond. Now, I"m walking away from here. I don"t want no trouble."
Monarch got up from the table, a net of sunlight and shadow sliding over his skin.
That"s when Bello unsnapped the leash from the rottweiler"s choke chain and said, "Sic le neg!"
The dog took only two bounds before it was airborne and aimed right at Monarch"s chest. Monarch twisted away and wrapped his arms across his face, waiting for the dog"s teeth to sink into his flesh. Instead, he felt a suck of air past his head and heard metal whang on bone. Then the dog"s great weight bounced off him, and when he opened his eyes, the dog lay in the dust, its body quivering, its fur split across the crown of its skull.
Monarch"s cousin lowered the shovel he had used on the dog, pointing its tip into the dirt, letting his callused palm slip down the shaft. One of his eyes constantly watered, and he pressed a handkerchief into the socket, all the time watching Bello with his other eye, so that in an odd way he looked like two people, one managing himself while the other studied an adversary. "A mistake got made here "cause folks was in hot blood. Don"t mean it got to continue, suh," he said.
"You tear my dog"s head off and lecture me?" Bello said.
The corner was completely silent except for the wind coursing through the leaves overhead. A locomotive engine blew in the distance, the sound climbing into the hot sky.
"My cousin ain"t done you nothing. You come here blaming us for your grief. Now you got more of it, not less. But it ain"t on us," Monarch said.
No one could say later what thoughts or perhaps memories went through Bello"s mind at that moment. Did he remember a kid with a shoe-shine box waiting in the cold at the Southern Pacific station? Or the one who worked for tips at the root beer drive-in, where the owner did not allow him to eat his lunch or supper inside the building? Or did he realize, at that particular moment, that no matter what he accomplished in life, he would never separate himself from that cla.s.s of white men who were considered by other whites to be no better on the social ladder than Negroes and, worse yet, considered even less in stature by people of color themselves?
He ripped into Monarch with both fists. But once again Bello had misjudged both his situation and his adversary. Monarch slipped the first punch, ate the second one, then got Bello in a bear hug, pinning his hands at his sides, crushing the air from his lungs. Bello struggled helplessly against Monarch"s huge arms, his body pressed hard against Monarch"s girth, his shoes leaving the ground.
"Tear him up, Monarch!" somebody yelled.
But instead Monarch wrestled Bello against the Buick, trapping him there, holding him tight against the hot metal while sheriff"s deputies spilled out of three cruisers, Monarch"s sweat mixing with Bello"s inside a cone of heat and dust and the smell of engine oil and rubber tires. The expression of despair and loss and a lifetime of impotent rage on Bello"s face was one I will never forget. No greater injury could have been imposed upon him. A black man had not only bested him in public but had treated him with mercy and pity while others watched, a deed that Bello was incapable of forgiving.
Chapter.
15.
T HE NEXT MORNING, Lonnie Marceaux buzzed my extension and said he wanted to see me in his office. When I got there, a barber was wiping shaving cream from Lonnie"s sideburns and snipping hair out of his nose. The barber held up a mirror for Lonnie to examine his work. Lonnie touched at a spot by his hairline. "Just a tad more on top," he said.
The barber used his comb and clippers briefly, then held up the mirror again.