23.
W HITEY BRUXAL"S CAPACITY for deceit and cunning was not to be underestimated. On Friday morning his attorney, a dapper grimebag by the name of Milton Vidrine, called Helen Soileau at the department. Milton had put himself through law school as a bug exterminator, then had made a good living chasing ambulances in Baton Rouge. In fact, he became known as "Twilight Zone" Vidrine because he was an expert at showing up in emergency wards and intensive-care units and convincing half-comatose accident victims to sign settlement agreements and liability waivers that often left the accident victims dest.i.tute. Vidrine said he wanted to talk to Helen and me simultaneously. Coincidentally, I was sitting in her office when the call came in. She clicked on the speakerphone but did not tell him that I was there.
"What"s this about?" she said.
"Mr. Bruxal wants you to have a clear understanding about a situation that is not of his making and over which he has no control," Vidrine replied.
"What might that be?" Helen said.
"I"d like Detective Robicheaux to be present."
"I"m the administrative authority in this department. Do you want to tell me what this is about or do you want to put it in a letter?" she said.
He paused a moment. "Detective Robicheaux has a reputation as a hothead and a violent man. His alcoholic history is no secret in Lafayette. But Mr. Bruxal wants to make sure Detective Robicheaux is not harmed in any way. This call is more a matter of conscience than legality."
Helen was standing against the glare of the window, her face wrapped in shadow, but I could see her laughing silently at the absurdity of a man like Milton Vidrine referring to matters of conscience.
"I"m right here, Mr. Vidrine. Thanks for the character a.s.sessment and for getting in touch," I said, leaning forward in my chair.
Milton Vidrine might have been disarmed for two seconds at the revelation that I had been listening to his remarks, but no more than two seconds. "Mr. Bruxal has fired his employee Thomas Leo Raguza and wants to inform all parties concerned that he takes no responsibility for this man"s actions," he said.
"I"m not sure how I should interpret that," I said.
"You gave Mr. Raguza a severe beating, Detective Robicheaux. Mr. Bruxal has no knowledge about your previous relationship with Mr. Raguza or why or how he provoked you. But Mr. Bruxal does not want to employ anyone who bears hostility toward any member of local law enforcement. He"s also concerned that Mr. Raguza could be a threat."
"Say that last part again," Helen said.
"My client believes Mr. Raguza is unstable and should be considered potentially dangerous."
"Bruxal just recently made this discovery?" I said.
"I"m pa.s.sing on the information as it was presented to me," he replied.
"Here"s some more information for you. Lefty Raguza and your client were involved in the murder of a friend of mine. His name was-"
Before I could continue, Helen propped her arms on her desk and leaned down to the speakerphone. She placed her thumb on the phone"s "memo" b.u.t.ton. "As of this moment this phone conversation is being recorded. Your statement about the danger posed to a member of the Iberia Parish Sheriff"s Department by Thomas Raguza is duly noted. I"m also at this juncture informing you that I consider this information a disguised conveyance of a threat against a member of my department."
"That"s ridiculous," he said.
"Every white-collar guy we slam the cell door on uses those same words," she said.
"I"m going to have a talk with the district attorney, Mr. Marceaux."
"Good, you two deserve each other. Now, you keep your G.o.dd.a.m.n distance from my office," she said.
Helen pushed down on the disconnect and shut off the speakerphone. She realized I was smiling and gave me a look. I dropped my eyes and examined the tops of my fingers. "I"m sick of this bunch wiping their feet on us. Was it you or Purcel who said most of the world"s ills could be corrected with a three-day open season on people?"
"It was Ernest Hemingway."
"I"ve got to read more of him." She sat down behind her desk and brushed at a spot above her eyebrow with one knuckle, the anger subsiding in her face. "What do you think they"re up to?"
"Disa.s.sociating themselves from Raguza and at the same time pointing him in my direction."
She seemed to think about what I had said, her eyes wandering around the room. But that wasn"t it. "We"re anybody"s punch," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Every corrupt enterprise in the country ends up here. They f.u.c.k us with a Roto-Rooter and make us like them for it."
"Who"s "they"?"
"Anybody with a checkbook." Then she blew out her breath. "What"s the status on Cesaire Darbonne?"
"He"s getting printed as we speak."
YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE IN SOMETHING. Everyone does. Even atheists believe in their unbelief. If they didn"t, they"d go mad. The misanthrope believes in his hatred of his fellow man. The gambler believes he"s omniscient and that his knowledge of the future is proof he is loved by G.o.d. The middle-income person who spends enormous amounts of time window-shopping and sorting through used clothing at garage sales is indicating that our goods will never be ashes blowing across the grave. I suspect the drunkard believes his own self-destruction is the penance required for his acceptability in the eyes of his Creator. The adherents of Saint Francis see divinity in the faces of the poor and oppressed but take no notice of the Byzantine fire surrounding themselves. The commonality of all the aforementioned lies in the frailty of their moral vision. It is also what makes them human.
Most cops and newspeople, usually at midpoint in their careers, come to a terrible realization about themselves, namely, that they are in danger of becoming like the jaundiced and embittered individuals they had always pitied as aberrations or anachronisms in their profession. But when people lie to you on a daily basis, when you watch zoning boards sell out whole neighborhoods to p.o.r.n vendors and ma.s.sage parlor owners, when you see the most expensive attorneys in the country labor on behalf of murderers and drug lords, when you investigate instances of child abuse so grievous your entire belief system is called into question, you have to reexamine your own life and perspective in ways we normally reserve for saints.
At that moment you either reaffirm your belief in justice and protection of the innocent or you do not. But unlike the metaphysician, you do not arrive at your faith through the use of syllogism or abstraction. You often rediscover your faith by taking up the cause of one individual, one innocent person who you believe deserves justice and the full protection of the law. If you can accomplish this, the rest of it doesn"t seem to matter so much.
I wanted to believe in Cesaire Darbonne. Like many cane farmers in South Louisiana, he had been driven under by a trade agreement allowing the importation of ma.s.sive amounts of cheap sugar into the United States. The French-speaking provincial world he had grown up in, one of serpentine bayous and endless fields of green cane bending in a Gulf breeze, was becoming urbanized and overlaid with subdivisions and strip malls. But the greatest tragedy in his life was one he could have never foreseen.
His daughter, like mine, seemed to have possessed all the innocence and love and goodness that every father wishes for in his child. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, can understand the level of pain and loss and rage a father experiences when he wakes each day with the knowledge that his daughter has been raped or murdered. The images of her fate haunt him throughout his waking hours and into his sleep, and the thoughts he has about her tormentors are of a kind he never shares with anyone, lest he be considered perverse and pathological himself.
At 2:15 p.m. Mack Bertrand rang my extension. "It"s a match," he said.
"Don"t tell me that," I said.
"Cesaire"s prints are all over it. What else you want me to say? Didn"t you say his pick was missing from his toolshed? It"s obviously his."
"The guy doesn"t need this," I said. "Look, Mack, the motive isn"t there. I"m convinced he didn"t know Bello raped his daughter."
"How can you be sure?"
"He was stunned when I told him."
"Maybe that"s just the impression you had. You"re a sympathetic soul, Dave. Valerie Lujan hated her husband. She wouldn"t have been above pa.s.sing on the information to Cesaire."
"No, Mr. Darbonne looked like he"d been poleaxed. Maybe he killed Bello, but it wasn"t because he knew Bello attacked his daughter."
"Good luck with it."
"With what?" I asked.
"This case. It"s like trying to get cobweb out of your hair, isn"t it?" he said.
I BROUGHT HELEN up to the minute, then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to verify Cesaire Darbonne"s alibi. A clerk remembered seeing him at the Winn-Dixie and so did the clerk at the gas station by the drawbridge. But the preponderance of his alibi rested on his claim that he had changed a flat by the sugar mill entrance, and unfortunately none of the security people at the mill could recall seeing him. Cesaire had another problem as well. Bello Lujan"s horse farm was less than fifteen minutes" drive from Cesaire"s house. Cesaire could have visited the Winn-Dixie, bought gas, changed a flat tire, and still had time and opportunity to murder Bello.
I returned to the office just before 5 p.m.
"You want to get a warrant?" Helen said.
"Not yet," I replied.
"I think Cesaire is looking more and more like our boy," she said.
"It"s too pat. The murder weapon was left a few feet from the body with Darbonne"s fingerprints all over it. But Mack Bertrand believes the last guy who handled the pick was wearing gloves. Why would Darbonne wear gloves, then drop his own pick at the crime scene with his fingerprints on it?"
"We"re back to Whitey Bruxal?"
"Maybe."
"But Bruxal couldn"t hang a frame on Cesaire Darbonne unless he knew Darbonne had motivation, in other words knowledge that his daughter was attacked by Bello. Which doesn"t seem to be the case. I think Bruxal is out of the picture. What bwana say now?"
She had me.
JUST AS I WAS ABOUT TO LEAVE the department for the day, I got a call from Koko Hebert.
"I"ve got sc.r.a.pings from under Bello"s fingernails," he said. "He either had a real good piece of a.s.s before he died or he fought with his attacker."
"Koko, if you still feel a need to prove you"re offensive and obnoxious, I want to set your mind at ease. You don"t have to carry that burden anymore. You"ve a.s.sured everybody in the department you"re the real article."
"f.u.c.k you," he said. "Pending lab a.n.a.lysis, I"d say the skin tissue came from a person of color. Normally we can"t tell race by looking at tissue sc.r.a.pings, because it dries out quickly and becomes visually indistinguishable from the victim"s. But Bello got a roll of it under two of his fingernails and they look like they came off a black person. Gender is another matter. We"ve got to go to a lab in Florida for that. Because Bello probably porked half the black girls in this parish, I"m not sure if my tissue sc.r.a.pings will be relevant. Sort that out, Robicheaux, then give me a call if you need more explanation."
You didn"t trade shots with Koko Hebert unless you were willing to take a heavy load of shrapnel.
I WENT HOME and had a light supper with Molly, then drove up the bayou in the sunset to Loreauville and Bello Lujan"s stable. The fields were green and sweet-smelling, the clumps of oaks along the road pulsing with birds. The crime scene tape flickered and bounced in the wind. I walked behind the stable and looked at the spot where Mack had found the murder weapon, then studied the breadth of the field where the killer had run toward the steel back fence. What had I missed? Not just here, but in all the interviews involving Yvonne Darbonne and Monarch Little and Slim Bruxal and Crustacean Man and Tony and Bello Lujan. The key glimmered on the edge of my vision, like a shard of memory you take with you from a dream. It lay in an insignificant remark, an oblique reference that I had pa.s.sed over, a piece of physical evidence that was like a grain of sand on a beach. But what?
On the other side of the steel fence, two little boys and a girl, all of them black, were flying a kite emblazoned with the American flag. The girl, who was not over eight or nine, was holding the kite string. They had made a fort of propped-up plywood inside a stand of persimmon trees and inside the walls had spread a blanket on the ground. A box of snack crackers, a plastic pitcher of what looked like Kool-Aid, three candy bars, and a can of tuna had been dumped out of a grocery bag onto the blanket.
"You guys doin" all right?" I said.
"We"re camping out, least till dark," one of the boys said.
"Y"all weren"t out here early this morning, were you?"
"No, suh," the same boy said.
"That"s a fine fort you"ve got there," I said.
"Yes, suh," the same boy said.
His eyes left my face and looked up at the kite popping against the sky. The other boy seemed to concentrate unduly on the kite as well. The girl had wrapped the string around her wrist and was making a game of pulling on the string and releasing it, so that the kite rose, then sagged and rose again in the sunset. She wore elastic-waisted jeans and pink tennis shoes and a white blouse with tiny flowers printed on it. She had big brown eyes and pigtails and a round face and skin that was as dark and shiny as chocolate. Her expression was a study in innocence.
"You guys didn"t go inside that yellow tape on the stable, did you?" I said.
No one answered.
"What"s your name?" I asked the girl.
"Chereen," she said. "What"s yours?"
"Dave Robicheaux. I"m a police officer. Did y"all see anybody run across this field early this morning?"
"We wasn"t out here," she replied.
"But later maybe you guys went over to see what was going on?"
They looked at one another, then at the birds freckling the sky.
"Y"all sure you don"t want to tell me something?" I said.
"Want some crackers and Kool-Aid?" the girl said.
"Thanks just the same. Don"t you guys go on the other side of that yellow tape, okay?"
"No, suh, we ain"t. Gonna stay right here, outside the fence."
I waved good-bye to them and walked away. When I glanced back over my shoulder, one of the boys was working open the can of tuna while the other boy filled three plastic gla.s.ses with Kool-Aid.
I DROVE BACK into New Iberia and visited Monarch Little at Iberia General. He was sitting up in bed, watching a Chicago White Sox game on the television mounted high up on the wall, the sheet drawn up over his sloping girth. I sat down on the side of his bed and picked up each of his hands and examined his skin from his wrists to his upper arms.
"What you doin"?" he said.
"Lean forward," I said.
"What for?"
"So you don"t end up charged with murder. For once in your life, try cooperating with someone who"s on your side."
He sat motionless while I looked closely at his face and hair and throat and the back of his neck.
"Take off your shirt," I said.
"Mr. Dee-"
"Just do it."
He pulled off his pajama top, held his ma.s.sive arms straight out, and let me examine his chest and back.
"That"s it," I said.