Pegasus Descending

I called Alice Werenhaus, Clete’s secretary at his New Orleans office, and in a half hour she called back and told me where I could find Alridge. I signed out of the department and told Helen I would be out of town until at least the next morning.

Chapter 17

THE TWO-STORY HOME that was deeded in the name of his ministry was built of lacquered logs on a bluff that overlooked the Mississippi Sound and a stretch of shell-streaked beach spiked with salt grass. To the west the alluvial flow of the Mississippi River formed an enormous brown cloud of silt and mud along the Louisiana coastline, but just east of the river’s mouth, the Gulf was green, capped with waves all the way to the southern horizon, and pelicans glided above the water like fighter-bombers in formation.

It was almost dusk when I drove down a broken asphalt lane through pine trees to his front gate. I expected that he would have private security in place around his home, but there was none that I could see, only a railed fence around a yard planted with flowers and St. Augustine grass.

I knocked on the front door, but no one answered and I could hear no sound from inside the house. The borders of the deck were hung with baskets of impatiens and geraniums, and inside the railing were iron chairs that had been painted white and a glass-topped table shaded by a canvas umbrella. The sky was aflame with the sunset, the pine trees north of the dunes whipping in the evening wind. The fragrance of the flowers, the salt air, the resinous smell of the trees that reminded the viewer he was still in the state of Mississippi were like a perfect moment in time, an encapsulation of everything that was aesthetic in the Deep South.

But there were no people. No children playing on the beach, no woman reading on the deck, no gardener snipping flowers for a vase that would be placed with burning candles on a dining room table. For reasons that perhaps made no sense, I thought of the paintings of the young Adolf Hitler when he had supported himself as a sidewalk artist. Hitler’s street scenes and buildings were geometrically precise, the lines like the edges of knives, but there were no people on the streets or inside the buildings, as though the human family had been vacuumed off the planet.

On the far side of Alridge’s house were a dock and boat slip and a cha

I went back to my truck, pushed back the seat, and closed my eyes. As the sun sank behind the pines and the summer light turned green and dark across the sky, I heard the drone of an outboard in the distance. I took my field glasses out of the glove box and focused them on a twelve-foot aluminum boat bouncing through the whitecaps, farther out than I would have been willing to go in a boat that size.

As Colin Alridge came up the cha

“My name is Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said, opening my badge holder. “We met a year or so ago in Jeanerette.”

“Yes, I remember you. How are you?” he said.

Without waiting for me to answer, he looped the painter of his boat around a post on the dock and stepped off the bow onto the planks. He was wearing beltless, wash-faded Levi’s and a print shirt. His skin was slightly burned by the sun, adding an air of ruggedness to his boyish good looks.

“You left your fishing gear and cooler behind,” I said.

“I’m not that keen on fishing, really. I just like to get out in the wind.”

“I’m investigating the death of Tony Lujan. I thought you might be able to help me out.”

“I don’t see how,” he said, gathering up his fishing rod, cooler, and life jacket, glancing sideways at me.

“I’ve interviewed Tony’s mother at some length. Evidently you’re a good friend of the family.”

“I know Mrs. Lujan. She’s a supporter of my ministry, if that’s what you mean.”

“Did she tell you Tony’s life was in danger?”

He gave me a quizzical look. “Where did you get that?” he said. But again he didn’t wait for me to answer. “Mrs. Lujan is a private person. She shares very little about the tragedies in her life.”

Alridge had just made his first and second mistakes. Like all people with something to hide, he telegraphed his fear by trying to fill the environment around him with his own words. Also, he answered questions with questions or made oblique statements that were factually true but did not address the issue. I was convinced he was dirty from the jump, but it was going to be a long haul to prove it.

I pulled at my ear. “Can we sit down?” I asked.

“I’m expecting some people over.”

“You’re not wearing a watch,” I said, and smiled.

“Pardon?”

“You have people coming over but you went out in your boat and didn’t bother to wear a watch.”

“You’re an observant man,” he said. He gri

He dropped his cooler and life jacket and spi

Colin Alridge was not only slick, he was likable. But I had known his kind before. They tested your charity by forcing you to believe in them. To reject their sincerity, their mix of patriotism and religion and love of family, was somehow to reject your own country. Ultimately, they used the suffering of others to justify their own actions. Colin Alridge’s support for foreign wars was unequivocal, regardless of the issues involved. His rhetoric was lofty, his eyes clear, his principles as present in his ma

I sat down in one of the scrolled-iron chairs on the deck and stared at my shoes a moment. “I think Tony Lujan was involved in the death of a homeless man. I think his mother told you what her son had done. You didn’t come forward with that information, Mr. Alridge. That’s called aiding and abetting after the fact.”

“Maybe what you say is true. Maybe it’s not. But as an ordained minister I have certain protections under the law.”

“We can settle some things here or we can do it in front of a grand jury. The word is Bello Lujan and Whitey Bruxal and a few other casino operators launder money through a Washington lobbyist, who in turn gives it to your ministry. Then you exercise your influence on your religious constituency to shut down their competitors. Frankly, I don’t have any interest in your ties to the gambling industry. But I’ve got three open homicide cases on my hands, and I believe you’ve got the key to at least one of them.”

The evening light had receded into a single strip of purple and red clouds on the western horizon, but even in the gloom I could see my words take hold in Alridge’s face, as though he had been bitch-slapped in public.

“You need to speak to my attorney,” he said.

“Fuck your attorney. If you want to shill for Whitey Bruxal and Bello Lujan, that’s your business. But Tony Lujan and maybe Slim Bruxal, that’s Whitey’s kid, ran over a derelict and left him to die on the side of a road. We call the derelict Crustacean Man because we have no other name to put on him. But I guarantee you, Mr. Alridge, before this is over, that guy is going to have a name and somebody is going to take the bounce for his death. If you’re aiding and abetting, your next evangelical crusade is going to be on closed-circuit TV in Angola Pen.”