Pegasus Descending

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 stu

“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 passing on the information to Cesaire.”

“No, Mr. Darbo

“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 Darbo

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 Darbo

“We’re back to Whitey Bruxal?”

“Maybe.”

“But Bruxal couldn’t hang a frame on Cesaire Darbo

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 scrapings from under Bello ’s fingernails,” he said. “He either had a real good piece of ass 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 assured everybody in the department you’re the real article.”

“Fuck you,” he said. “Pending lab analysis, I’d say the skin tissue came from a person of color. Normally we can’t tell race by looking at tissue scrapings, 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 scrapings 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 Yvo

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 te

“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. Go

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 glasses 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 massive arms straight out, and let me examine his chest and back.

“That’s it,” I said.

“That’s what?”

“You didn’t kill Bello Lujan.”

“That’s a big breakt’rew for you? I ain’t never killed nobody.”