“Ready to eat?” Molly said through the screen window.
“Sure,” I said, and went back inside.
It was 6:10 p.m. and Molly was in the bathroom when the phone on the kitchen counter rang. Outside, the light in the trees was the color of honey, the tidal current in the bayou flowing inland, the surface networked with serpentine lines of dead leaves.
“That you, Mr. Robicheaux?” the voice said.
“Cesaire?” I said.
“This connection ain’t good. I’m at a pay phone not far from Whiskey Bay. I seen your friend wit’ a blond woman. He was driving a pink Cadillac convertible wit’ a white top.”
“Right, that’s Clete Purcel. You saw him?”
“Yes, suh. But that ain’t why I called. A couple of gangsters followed him and the woman out of a parking lot in front of a bar. One of them was the father of Tony Lujan’s friend.”
“Whitey Bruxal?”
“I ain’t sure of his name. I just know his face. He called the man wit’ him ‘Lefty.’ This guy Lefty’s face looked like a busted-up flowerpot. I t’ought I ought to tell you about your friend.”
“Why are you at Whiskey Bay, Mr. Darbonne?”
“I got a camp here. Is your friend gonna be okay?” Chapter 27
A FTER I CLOSED the bedroom door, I removed my cut-down twelve-gauge pump from the closet, sat on the side of the bed, and pushed five shells loaded with double-aught buckshot into the magazine. I strung my handcuffs through the back of my belt, clipped on my holster and 1911-model United States Army .45, Velcro-strapped my .25 automatic on my ankle, and picked up the receiver from the telephone on the dresser. I paused for a moment, thinking of Clete and the alternatives his situation offered, then replaced the receiver in the cradle without punching in a number. I heard the doorknob twist behind me.
“What are you doing?” Molly asked.
“That was Cesaire Darbonne. I think Whitey Bruxal and Lefty Raguza have followed Clete and Trish Klein to a camp in the Basin.”
“Call the department.”
“Clete’s wanted by NOPD. He’ll be locked up.”
“That’s Clete’s problem.”
“It may be a false alarm,” I said, starting toward the door.
“You simply accept the word of Cesaire Darbonne? A man you believe mutilated the body of a college student with a shotgun?”
“I’ve got my cell. I’ll call you.”
“I’m going with you.”
“Not on this one.”
“Don’t do this, Dave.”
“If you don’t hear from me in two hours, call nine-one-one.”
Perhaps my attitude was willful and even cruel, but I had a terrible sense that maybe this time Clete’s luck had finally run out. That thought caused a sensation in my throat that was like swallowing glass.
IT TOOK ME almost an hour to reach the levee area where Cesaire had called from. He was waiting in his truck in front of a bar that had been knocked together from unpainted plywood and covered with a tin roof that had been peeled off a barn. On the other side of the levee was a wide bay flanged by flooded woods. To the north I could see car lights crossing the elevated highway that traversed the massive network of bayous, rivers, oxbows, lakes, and cypress swamps that comprised the Atchafalaya Basin. The sky was piled with clouds that had turned purple and gold in the sun, the miles of flooded trees bending steadily in the wind. As I got out of my truck, a smell like burning garbage struck my face.
“Can you show me where they went?” I asked.
“Down the levee and back in them woods,” he said, pointing. “There’s high ground back in them gum trees and palmettos. It don’t never go underwater unless it storms real bad.”
I didn’t shake hands with him, which is considered a personal affront in South Louisiana. But as Molly had suggested, it would have been foolish to dismiss the darker side of this man’s nature. When people seek vengeance, they dig up every biblical platitude imaginable to rationalize their behavior, but their motivations are invariably selfish. More important, they have no regard for the damage and pain they often cause the innocent.
“Why you doing this, Mr. Darbonne?”
“You went my bond. You treated me decent. You cared about my li’l girl.”
“I did those things because I thought you had been unjustly accused. You didn’t kill Bello Lujan, did you?”
“No, suh.”
“But you murdered his son.”
His turquoise eyes were empty, unblinking, his face devoid of any emotion I could detect. “I ain’t never tole you ot’erwise,” he said.
“Then you planted the weapon in Monarch’s car and set fire to it,” I said.
“He ain’t selling dope no more.”
“I wish you had trusted me, Mr. Darbonne.”
“To do what? Still ain’t nobody in jail for what they done to my li’l girl.”
How do you explain to a man whose daughter has killed herself that there is no “they,” that the pitiful, guilt-driven man who raped her was a victim himself, that the fraternity boys who gangbanged her couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag, that Slim Bruxal, who had the feral instincts of a vicious street punk, had acted with a degree of conscience and tried to return her safely home? How do you deal with the moral authority of ignorance?
“You’re not setting me up, are you, partner?” I said.
“What you talking about, you?”
“Get in,” I said.
We drove down the levee, the wind buffeting the truck. Out in the swamp I could see black smoke rising out of the trees from trash or stump fires, then flattening above the canopy.
“Turn down the grade,” Cesaire said, pointing at a steep set of vehicle tracks that led down the side of the levee into stands of gum and persimmon trees.
As we dipped down the smooth green incline of the levee, I could see the sunset through the canopy, the leaves of the cypress ruffling in silhouette. But the poetic moment was lost as soon as we entered the shade. Inside the heated enclosure of the woods, an ugly stench hung in the air, one that called to mind a dead bird caught in a flaming chimney.
I drove at least two hundred yards on top of dried-out humus and layers of leaves that had turned gray with damp rot. The trees were strung with air vines, the ground dotted with palmettos. In the distance I could see ponds of water, like greasy oil slicks among the tree trunks, and a spacious cabin elevated on cinder blocks, wind chimes and birdhouses hanging from the eaves of the peaked tin roof.
But the cabin was not the focus of my attention. Off to the left was the scorched hulk of a Cadillac convertible, strings of smoke rising from what had once been a flamingo-pink paint job. The hatch had been popped, perhaps by the heat of the gas tank burning, and the top had collapsed in a soft gray patina of ash on the seats. There was no sound of life around either the Caddy or the cabin. I stopped the truck and cut the ignition.
“I want you to stay here, Mr. Darbonne. I’m going to take a look at my friend’s car, then I’m going inside the cabin. If everything goes all right, I’ll be back in a few minutes. But I want you to stay right where you are.”
“What’s the deal wit’ this Bruxal guy? How come he’s after your friend and his woman?”
“It’s complicated, but the short version is Whitey Bruxal ordered Bello Lujan killed and then put it on you. He did to you, Mr. Darbonne, what you did to Monarch Little.”
Cesaire stared at me in the deepening shadows. A mosquito lit on his neck, sucking his blood, but he gave it no notice. “That’s the man took the pickax out of my toolshed?”
“When we’re finished here, I’m going to help you in whatever way I can. If I don’t return in ten minutes, walk back to the bar and call nine-one-one.”
I opened the door quietly, slipped my cut-down pump from the gun rack behind the seat, and got out of the truck. I walked toward the Cadillac, my heart pounding.
The heat from the fire had curled all the leaves in a water oak that tower
ed above the Caddy’s shell. The tires had exploded and the air stank of burnt rubber and the leather in the seats and the wiring and hoses that had melted in the engine. But one odor in particular overpowered all the others. It was one that lived in my sleep, and the image and sound that went with it—a burst of flame from a nozzle, an incongruous mewing sound, like that of a newborn kitten—were etched forever in my unconscious, and no amount of booze or hospital dope will ever remove them.
I walked through a dry coulee full of leaves and came up on the driver’s side of the Caddy. The door hung ajar and the window was rolled down. The convertible top had settled like an ashy veil on the shape of a man who sat slumped forward on the steering wheel.
The figure was that of a big man, or at least he had been a big man until the fire had seared and buckled his flesh and boiled his blood and deformed his features. I touched the door handle, then pulled my hand away from the heat that was still trapped inside the metal. I removed a handkerchief from my pocket and clasped the handle with it and pulled the door completely open.
The veil of ash on the man’s head fell away and powdered in his lap. His mouth was locked open, his eyes cavernous and poached, his ears little more than red-black stubs. I backed away and fell to one knee, the butt of my shotgun propped up in the leaves. I tried to suppress the sob in my chest, but to no avail. I cried, as a child would, my back heaving, my hand clenched over my eyes. A Beretta lay on the floor, by the foot pedals, the pistol grips blown off by the rounds that had exploded in the magazine. It was the same model, with a fourteen-round magazine, that Clete had carried.
I backed away into the coulee and looked again at the cabin. The sun had dipped over the horizon, and someone in the cabin had either lit a lantern or turned on a battery-powered light. I circled far to one side of the cabin, so I could see the back as well as the front entrance. Farther down the slope was a canal and a boathouse and a shed inside of which at least two vehicles were parked.
I knelt behind a tree and studied the cabin. My cell phone was in my pocket and I could have called for help. But I knew I wouldn’t, and I also knew I was not even going to think about the things I was about to do. I would just do them and add up the score when it was all over. My ears were filled with a sound like a train entering a tunnel, a taste like copper pennies in my mouth. My hands were damp and tight on the stock and pump of the twelve-gauge, my breath almost rasping with anticipation. In my mind’s eye, I already saw the pink mist I was going to create out of the faces inside the cabin.
I moved quickly up the coulee until I was in a place that was overhung with cypress boughs and black with shadow, swimming with clouds of mosquitoes and gnats. The back entrance was actually a ramp that led to a screened porch that was stacked with collapsible-wire crab traps. I saw a silhouette against a back window, then the silhouette disappeared and the glass was filled with an unobstructed yellow radiance again.
This one is under a black flag, Cletus. This one is for you, I thought.
I entered that adrenaline-fed dead zone of bloodlust that requires no pretense of moral justification for its inhabitants. I pushed off the safety behind the shotgun’s trigger guard with my index finger and sprinted across the backyard, bent low, my neck running with sweat, the wind suddenly cold on my face. Then I pounded up the ramp, ripped open the screen, and crashed over a tangle of fishing tackle and cartons of preserve jars into the cabin’s interior, the sound of my shoes like hammers on the floor, the shotgun’s stock against my shoulder.
At first I couldn’t assimilate the scene and situation I had burst into. Trish Klein lay in a corner, hog-tied wrists-to-ankles, her mouth wrapped round and round with silver duct tape. Clete Purcel was not only alive, he had been propped up in a heavy oak chair, his forearms and calves cinched to the wood with plastic ligatures. His eyes were swollen into puffed slits, his face streaked with blood, his bare chest and shoulders and arms burned by cigarettes. A coarse piece of hemp rope hung down from his throat.
Lefty Raguza had stripped to the waist and slipped on a pair of leather gloves before going to work on Clete’s face. Had he not been wearing gloves, perhaps he might have been more successful in pulling a .38 revolver from a shoulder holster hanging on the back of a chair. When I squeezed the trigger on the twelve-gauge, the load of double-aught bucks caught him across the collarbone and in the throat and exited into wallpaper that was printed with garden scenes of children watering flowers from sprinkler cans.
Lefty fell heavily against the wall, as though stunned that an event he had always associated with other people was now happening to him. In fact, the cool green fire in his eyes never died. As he slid toward the floor, he looked straight ahead, never blinking, his gaze steady, his mouth pursed like a fish’s when it feeds at the surface of a lake. One hand came to rest on his genitalia, then he made a puffing sound and died.
I heard Trish Klein trying to talk behind the tape over her mouth, then Clete raised his head and spit and whispered something I couldn’t understand. I ejected the spent shell from the chamber and heard it hit the floor.
“What is it?” I said, my ears still ringing from the roar of the shotgun inside the room.
Clete nodded at a door to a side room.
Too late.
Whitey Bruxal came out shooting. He was holding a chrome-plated .25-caliber automatic straight out in front of him, squeezing off rounds as fast as he could pull his finger, his face averted from the shotgun blast he knew he would probably have to eat. One round lasered across my scalp, then a second one caught me on the rotator cuff, just as though someone had punched the bone with a hammer and cold chisel.
I spun away from him, my left arm held out defensively in front of me, and swung the shotgun haphazardly in his direction. When I fired, the shotgun jerked upward in my hand and I saw Whitey tilt forward, as though he had been struck by a violent attack of nausea. He laced both arms across his stomach, his mouth open, and sat down heavily in a chair. His forehead was pinpointed with sweat and the level of pain and terror in his eyes made me look away from his face.
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 m
e 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.