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.
space
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 massive 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 gangbangers 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 sno-balls 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 fucking 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 sno-ball 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 sno-ball 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 woul
d never separate himself from that class 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.
“No challenge is too much for your talents, Robert. Thanks for coming over,” Lonnie said. He handed the barber three ten-dollar bills held crisply between two fingers.
The barber thanked him and folded the apron carefully so that no hair dropped on the floor, then nodded at me and left the room.
“I have a crowded schedule some days,” Lonnie said, looking at a steel pocket mirror he kept in his desk drawer.
“It’s that time of year,” I said.
He didn’t make the connection. In fact, I didn’t care whether or not there was one to make.
“Bellerophon Lujan is in jail?” he said.
I looked at my watch. “He’s probably out by now.”
He made a tent out of his hands and patted the pads of his fingers against one another, a thought buried like an insect between his eyes. “We’re getting reports on this friend of yours, Clete Purcel. Evidently he caused some massive property damage at the casino in New Orleans.”
“Then that’s between him and them.”
“Not if he’s inserting himself into one of our investigations.”
“You’ll have to take that up with Clete.”
“I don’t need to. I have you. You’re the other half of the coin.”
“You brought me over here about Clete Purcel?”
“You’re not hearing me. I got a call from a couple of guys in New Orleans, fraternity brothers who have interests in common with Colin Alridge and want to know why Purcel was hassling their boy in the tearoom at the Pontchartrain Hotel.”
“What’s their problem? From what I understand, Alridge handled himself in a pretty dignified manner,” I said.
“I honest-to-God believe you have trouble with the English language, Dave. My words have no effect on you. If anybody brings down Alridge, it’s going to be us. NOPD might let Purcel wipe his shit all over their parish, but that’s not going to happen in New Iberia. If Purcel was bird-dogging Alridge, you knew about it. I’ve already told you every element of this investigation will be coordinated out of this office. But I’ve got a feeling you’re using a surrogate to pursue your own agenda.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“I’d like to believe that.”
“Believe it.”
He rocked back in his swivel chair and let his gaze drift out the window. The sky was full of yellow dust and leaves that were gusting out of the trees. “So what did your pal find out?”
“Colin Alridge seems to be a friend of Mrs. Lujan. Maybe a spiritual adviser or something like that.”
“Spiritual adviser, my ass.”
“Clete said Alridge seemed upset about Tony Lujan’s death, like maybe he felt guilty over it.”
Lonnie made a snuffing sound in his nose and brushed a piece of clipped hair out of one nostril. “Did you pass this information on to Helen?”
“It’s not information. It’s speculation on the part of a private investigator.”
“There are a lot of bad traits I can accept in people, Dave, but disingenuousness isn’t one of them.” He held his eyes on mine. “No, I’m not going to be euphemistic here. I won’t put up with lying.”
I felt a flame spread across my back, the way it can wrap around you when you have shingles. I watched the dust blowing across the tops of the trees out in the street, newspaper swirling off the asphalt. “I hope it rains. It’s been awfully hot,” I said. “Give me a call if I can provide you with any more help.”
“We’re not finished here,” he said.
“That’s what you think.”
BUT INDIRECTLY Lonnie Marceaux had made a point. Clete’s speculation about Colin Alridge’s involvement with the Lujan family wasn’t to be ignored. I called Mrs. Lujan and asked if I could visit her at her home again.
“No, you may not,” she said.
“I’ll come with a warrant if I have to.” I could hear her breathing against the receiver. “Is your husband there, Mrs. Lujan?”
“My husband is in jail. You should know that.”
“No, he’s not.”
She was silent again. Then she said, “What time did he get out?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Find out and call me back,” she said, and hung up.
I rang the jail, then redialed Mrs. Lujan’s number.
“He was out at nine-seventeen a.m.” It was now a quarter to noon.
“Have you seen him since his release?”
“No, ma’am.”
“If you wanted to find him, would you know where to look?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I could give you two or three addresses. Guess which part of town they’re in. Guess who lives at those addresses.”
“I wouldn’t know, Mrs. Lujan.”
“You wouldn’t know? Do you smoke cigarettes?”
“I don’t.”
“Do you know where to buy some?”
This time I didn’t answer.
“My husband is an inflexible man and doesn’t allow smoking in our home. Please buy me a package of Camels and bring them to the house. Can you do that for me, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“My pleasure,” I said.
“Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Yes?”
“Also bring the video. The one you said shows the Darbonne girl at our garden party. Bring that with the cigarettes.”
Thirty minutes later, the maid let me in the front door. Outside, the sun was white in the sky, the windows running with humidity, but the interior of the house was frigid. There was no sign of Bello or his car. Mrs. Lujan gestured at me from the sunporch, her fingers curling back toward her palm.
“Sit,” she said. Then she waited, her eyes on my face.
“You want the cigarettes?” I said.
“Take one out and give it to me.”
I removed the cellophane from the package and slipped a cigarette loose for her. She held it between two fingers and waited. I took a folder of matches from my shirt pocket and lit her cigarette and blew out the match. There was no ashtray on the glass tabletop that separated me from her wheelchair, and I set the match on the edge of a coffee saucer and placed the package of cigarettes next to it. She turned her face to one side when she exhaled the smoke, then looked at me quizzically. “You think I’m strange?” she said.
“It’s not my job to make those kinds of judgments.”
“Put the video in th
e machine,” she said.
I shoved the cassette into the VCR and watched the first images come up on the screen. She continued to smoke as I fast-forwarded the tape, her eyes rheumy, sunken like green marbles into bread dough. She seemed to radiate sickness in the same way that an unchanged bandage or an infected wound does. I even wondered if the diminution of her bone structure had less to do with an automobile accident than a cancerous anger that lived inside her.
I stopped the tape on the garden party, backed it up, and recommenced it. Once again, Yvonne Darbonne was dancing to the signature composition of John Lee Hooker, her shoulders powdered with freckles, her pug nose turned up at the sky.
“That’s the girl who shot herself?” Mrs. Lujan said.
“Do you remember her?”
“She was pretty. Tony brought her here. Then he left, and she was dancing by herself. She was wearing that tank top. She spilled sangria on it.”
“Go on.”
“I was watching the dancers from the upstairs window. She looked up at me and smiled and pointed at the stain on her top. It was wet and dark on the material. Her breasts were molded against the cloth and I remember thinking she didn’t belong out there, at least not with the likes of Slim Bruxal. I waved at her to come inside. I wanted to give her a clean blouse to wear.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I saw her talk to Slim, then to Bello. She walked under the orange tree, below my line of vision, then I couldn’t see her anymore. I heard the door slam. The side door is right under my bedroom, and when it slams I can always feel the vibration through the floor. So I know she went into the house. Then I heard the door slam a second time.”
Mrs. Lujan drew in on the cigarette and blew out the smoke and watched it flatten against the window. Her makeup was caked, her mouth stitched with wrinkles that were as thin as cat’s whiskers, her eyes looking at an image, imagined or real, trapped inside her head.
“Who followed Yvonne Darbonne into the house?” I asked.
“There’s a game room behind the den. Bello keeps the curtains drawn so the western sun doesn’t get in. It’s the place where he goes to be alone. I heard something thump against the wall down there. I kept waiting to hear another thump, the way you do when a sound wakes you up in the middle of the night. But I didn’t. All I heard were voices.”