Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (5 page)

BOOK: Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
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“Yeah,” I said, my voice catching slightly.

“Wrap up our end on this and give it to the Feds. You copy on that?”

“Absolutely,” I replied.

 

I
DROVE HOME
at 5 p.m. and parked my pickup truck under the porte cochere attached to the shotgun house where Molly and I live in what is called the historical district of New Iberia. Our home is a modest one compared to the Victorian and antebellum structures that define most of East Main, but nonetheless it is a beautiful old place, built of cypress and oak, long and square in shape, like a boxcar, with high ceilings and windows, a small gallery and peaked tin roof, and ventilated green shutters that you can latch over the glass during hurricane season.

The flower beds are planted with azaleas, lilies, hibiscus, philodendron, and rosebushes in the sun and caladiums and hydrangeas in the shade. The yard is over an acre in size and covered with pecan trees, slash pine, and live oaks. The back of the property slopes down to the Teche, and late at night barges and tugboats with green and red running lights drone heavily through the drawbridge at Burke Street on their way to Morgan City. At early dawn there is often ground fog in the trees and on the bayou, and inside it you can sometimes hear a gator flopping or ducks wimpling in the shallows.

Our elderly three-legged pet coon, named Tripod, lives in a hutch in the backyard. His sidekick is an unneutered male cat by the name of Snuggs. Snuggs has a neck like a fireplug and a body that ripples with muscle when he walks. He wears his chewed ears and the pink scars inside his short white hair like badges of honor. The only dogs he allows in the yard are those who have received Tripod’s stamp of approval.

Our next-door neighbor is Miss Ellen Deschamps, an eighty-three-year-old graduate of Millsaps College who feeds every stray cat in New Iberia. She despises people who litter and once hit a man in the head with a bag of carrots for dumping his automobile’s ashtray in the Winn-Dixie parking lot. She also considers Snuggs a profligate interloper but feeds him just the same. Early in the morning I can see Miss Ellen through the bamboo border on our property, feeding her cats or at work in her garden, the big pockets of her apron stuffed with tools and packets of seed. The image of Miss Ellen bending to her tasks on a daily basis, indifferent to the role of eccentric imposed on her by others, always makes me feel better about the world.

Our little spot on East Main is a fine place to live, and the woman I share it with is a person who lays no claim on courage or devotion or resilience but possesses all those virtues in exceptional fashion without ever being conscious of them. Before our marriage, her name was Sister Molly Boyle. In her religious life she had worked in a Maryknoll mission in Guatemala where the Indians were massacred by the army as an object lesson to leftist rebels. Later, she organized cane workers in St. Mary Parish, here in southwest Louisiana, and built homes for the poor. Then she left the religious order to which she belonged and married an alcoholic homicide detective with a long history of violence, and took up residence here, on Bayou Teche, along with Tripod and Snuggs and my adopted daughter, Alafair, who was studying psychology and English at Reed College in Portland.

“What’s happenin’, trooper?” she said when I walked into the kitchen.

She was washing and breaking up lettuce under the faucet, tearing it into chunks with her fingers. Her hair was dark red and cut short, and there was a spray of sun freckles on her arms, neck, and shoulders. Her father had been a retired United States Army line sergeant and later a police officer in Port Arthur, Texas. She spoke of him often and fondly, and I suspected some of her populist, blue-collar attitudes and her ability to do many things with her hands came from him.

I touched her neck and the tips of her hair, then squeezed her shoulders. Molly’s hair was the same shade of red as the dead girl’s by the mill, and I tried to push the image of the wound in the girl’s forehead out of my mind. Molly turned around and looked at me. Her eyes were wide-set and bold and always hard to stare down. “Something happen today?” she said.

“There was a homicide up by the mill. A girl by the name of Yvonne Darbonne. She was about to start UL,” I said.

“You knew her?”

“I know her dad. He lost his farm a few years back.”

“She was murdered?”

“It looks like a suicide, but—”

“What?”

“Nothing. Let me help with supper,” I said, and began taking dishes down from the cabinet.

By sunset the rain had stopped and I walked by myself down to the bayou’s edge. In the west, the sky was the soft pink of a flamingo’s wing, the air heavy and damp and clean-smelling. Water dripped from the trees onto the bayou’s surface, creating a chain of rings that floated away in the current. But the mildness of the evening and the dripping sound of rainwater onto the bayou could not free me from the image of Yvonne Darbonne curled in the dirt, the red hair that had fallen over her wound tousled by the wind.

Suicides fall into categories. Some victims probably manufacture an internal psychodrama as a way of asking for help, then drift too far across the line. The clinically depressed do it in closed garages or with pills and booze while they listen to
Boléro
or “Clair de lune.” Jumpers find audiences and sail out among the stars. Some fantasize a script in which they transcend their own deaths. In their imagination they watch from above while others find their bodies in horror and are trapped inside a legacy of guilt and grief for the rest of their lives.

But the ones who do it with high-powered firearms in the mouth or razors high up on the forearms, not on the wrists, are often filled with unrelieved rage at themselves. Female suicides are seldom if ever found in the last category.

Was Cesaire Darbonne’s information correct about his daughter? Did she not drink or smoke? Had she always been happy? What could cause someone that young and beautiful and full of promise to fire a bullet into the center of her forehead? Or had someone else been at the scene also?

 

T
HE NEXT DAY
our coroner, Koko Hebert, lumbered into my office. Koko was one of the saddest-looking human beings I had ever known. His body was shaped like a soft-sided pyramid. His breath wheezed in his chest. He stank of nicotine and beer sweat, and sometimes trailed an odor that was worse, one that made me think of a mortuary in Vietnam after the power had failed.

Koko’s cynicism and anger were palpable. But his son had been killed in Iraq, and I had come to believe that his daily assault on the sensibilities of others was his own strange way of asking for help.

The grass was green and the sun was shining outside my window, but when Koko spread his buttocks on a chair in front of my desk, the sun might just as well have gone into eclipse. He took a huge drag off his cigarette, his brow furrowing as though his inhalation of cancer-causing chemicals were a moment of metaphysical importance.

“Would you not smoke in here?” I said.

He took a coffee cup off my desk and ground out his cigarette in it. “You want the post on the Darbonne girl or you want to tell me you don’t have bad habits?” he asked.

“I’m happy you came by.”

“Right. The lab call you yet?”

“Nope.”

“We swabbed both her hands. She was the shooter. It’s down as a suicide.”

“You’re sure?”

“You don’t have confidence in the atomic absorption test?”

“Let’s get something straight on this one, Koko. I appreciate the work you do. But I want the abrasive rhetoric out of my face.”

I could hear the hum of the air conditioner in the silence. “There is no false positive here. She had powder residue on both hands. She inverted the pistol and fired it straight into her forehead. It’s a suicide, plain and simple.”

“Her father said she didn’t drink or use. She was planning to start college. Why does a kid like that want to blow herself away? How did she end up in her own yard with a revolver her father never saw before?”

“Maybe I was looking at the wrong tox screen. The one that had Yvonne Darbonne’s name on it showed she was loaded on alcohol, weed, and Ecstasy. When I opened her up, I thought I’d put my hand in a punch bowl, burgundy and fruit, to be exact. She had also engaged in recent sexual intercourse, with multiple partners. In my opinion, there was not forced penetration, either. There was one bruise on the thigh, but considering the number of partners she had, that’s not unusual. I suspect she got stoned and loaded and was pumping it in four-four time.”

“What do you get out of it, Koko?”

“Out of what?”

“Offending people, testing them.”

He scratched the inside of his thigh, as though a mosquito bite were itching him beyond any level of tolerance. “If I go to meetings, can I learn how to use psychobabble like that?” he said.

I let out my breath and rubbed my temples. “What’s the rest?” I asked.

“There is no ‘rest.’ She was drunk and stoned and she balled a bunch of guys who didn’t bother to use rubbers,” he said. “You’re wondering why a kid like that would kill herself?”

 

R
IGHT AFTER
K
OKO
left the office, our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, called from the Acadiana Crime Lab. Mack was a decent, cheerful, pipe-smoking family man and one of the best crime scene investigators I had ever known. “We ran the weapon in the Darbonne shooting,” he said. “It was reported stolen out of a fraternity house at Ole Miss in 1999.”

“Any other prints besides the DOA’s?”

“It was oiled and cleaned recently. There were a couple of smears, but not enough to run through AFIS. Where you going with this, Dave?”

“Probably nowhere.”

“It’s a suicide, podna. Her thumb pulled the trigger. Her fingerprints were on the back of the frame. I think she turned the pistol around and squeezed off one right into her face.”

“What’d you get out of her cell phone?”

“Mostly numbers of kids at New Iberia High. Nothing unusual. Except…”

“Go ahead, Mack.”

“She made two calls during the week to the home of Bello Lujan.”

In my mind’s eye I saw a sun-browned man wearing white jodhpurs, with swirls of black hair on his arms. At least that was Bello’s image today, although I had known him in an earlier and much different incarnation. “Why would she be calling a guy like that?” I said.

“He’s got a kid at UL. Maybe Bello’s kid and the vic knew each other.” Then Mack paused. “Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“The girl took her life. Nothing will undo that. Bello wasn’t born. He was poured out of a colostomy bag. Leave him alone.”

“That’s strong for you, Mack.”

“Not when it comes to Bello Lujan,” he replied.

 

H
AVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE
cause a disastrous accident by driving so slowly that others are forced to pass him on a hill or curve? Or perhaps a driver running a yellow light, trapping a turning vehicle in the intersection so that it is exposed to high-speed traffic on its flank? The person responsible for the accident rarely looks in his rearview mirror and is seldom brought to justice. I wondered if that would prove to be the case with Yvonne Darbonne.

I looked at my watch. It was 11:05 and I still hadn’t pursued the matter of the dye-marked bills in the possession of Dallas Klein’s daughter. I also had a hit-and-run homicide case on my desk, three cold cases involving disappearances from ten years back, and a gangbanger shooting that had left two dope dealers on Ann Street peppered with rounds from a .25 auto.

Welcome to small-town America in the spring of 2005.

Yvonne Darbonne’s diary lay on my desk. It had a sky-blue vinyl cover with a sprinkle of sunflowers emblazoned on one corner. The first entry was dated three months earlier. It read:

Went with him to City Park and threw bread to the ducks and fox squirrels. He put his windbreaker on my shoulders when it got cold. His cheeks were red as apples.

She had written on perhaps thirty pages of the book. She had used few names of people and no family names. The last entries seemed filled with happiness and romance and did not indicate any sense of emotional conflict that I could see. In fact, her handwriting and sentence structure and her general grasp of the world appeared to be those of a sensible and mature person. I looked at my watch and all the case files stacked on my desk and all the work sitting in my intake basket. Yvonne Darbonne’s death was going down as a suicide. My function was over, I told myself. I placed the diary in a desk drawer, closed the drawer, and drove to Lafayette to interview Trish Klein.

Chapter
3

S
HE HAD TAKEN AN APARTMENT
in an oak-shaded neighborhood not far from Girard Park. Her apartment complex was constructed of soft white brick, with a tile roof and Spanish ironwork along the balconies. Bougainvillea in full bloom dripped from the brick wall that surrounded the pool area. The swimming pool was heated, and even though the sun was high in the sky, steam rose from the water inside the shadows the live oaks made on the surface. Less than a quarter of a mile away, the Lafayette Oil Center might have been abuzz with concerns of profit and loss and images of black clouds rising into a desert sky from a burning pipeline in Iraq, but inside the enclosure of this particular residential complex, the year was 1955, and the moss in the trees and the gentleness of the day seemed to indicate that a less complicated era, at least temporarily, was still available to us.

Trish’s apartment was on the first floor. I raised the brass knocker and heard chimes ring inside.

I had deliberately not called in advance in order to catch her unprepared. When she opened the door, I saw three young men and a woman in the living room with her. “Oh, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said, stepping outside, pulling the door shut behind her. “If you’d called, I would have driven to New Iberia.”

“I had to come to Lafayette anyway. Have any FBI agents talked to you yet?”

BOOK: Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
2.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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