Pegasus Descending

“Dave, would you wait for me out in the hallway?” Helen said.

I walked down to the watercooler and had a drink. Through the window I could see the Sunset Limited ru

The last car on the train clicked down the tracks and disappeared beyond a row of shacks.

The door to Lo

“We’re professional people, Helen. We need to drop this and concentrate on the job and not the personal problems of one individual,” Lo

“Not just yet,” she replied. “I want you to have a clear understanding about my position on a couple of matters. Number one, I couldn’t care less about your opinion of me. I think you’re a fraud and a bully, and like most bullies, you’re probably a coward. Number two, you couldn’t shine Dave Robicheaux’s shoes. If you ever try to demean him again, or use the power of your office to hurt him in any fashion, I’m going to personally rip your ass out of its socket and stuff it down your throat.”

You could have worse friends than Helen Soileau.

Chapter 25

I PLACED CESAIRE under arrest after lunch. I cuffed his wrists in front of him rather than behind him and allowed him to drape a windbreaker over his hands before I put him in the back of the cruiser. But there was no disguising his level of humiliation and shame. If I ever saw a broken man, it was Cesaire Darbo

After he was booked for capital murder, I walked with him to a holding cell and asked the guard to lock me inside with him and to give me a few minutes.

“This is a part of the job I don’t like, Mr. Darbo

“It ain’t your fault, no.”

“Look me in the face, sir.”

He stared at me from the iron bench on which he was seated, perhaps unsure whether my request had contained a veiled insult.

“Tell me again you didn’t know Bello Lujan assaulted your daughter,” I said.

“A man who got to repeat himself don’t respect his own word,” he said.

He looked at the tops of his shoes.

“I suspect your bail could be as high as a quarter million dollars. Do you have any kind of collateral you can offer the court?” I said.

“No, suh, I t’ink I’m go

His intuitions were probably more accurate than he knew. He was in the maw of the system, and anyone who has been caught in it, the guilty or i

“Nothing go

“What do you mean it can’t be turned around?”

“I lost my farm and bidness when the gov’ment let in all that sugar from Central America. Ain’t fair to put all that cheap sugar on the market. Ain’t nothing like it used to be. Li’l people ain’t got no chance.”

His linkage of his own fate to economic factors was probably self-serving, if not self-pitying, and his condemnation of the world for his own misfortune was the stuff of grandiosity. But who can fault a man with no legs for not being able to run?

“I’m going to see what I can do,” I said.

“About what?” he said, his eyes lifting to mine.

MOLLY WAS WASHING her car under the porte cochere when I got home. She wore a pair of blue-jean shorts and an old white shirt that was too tight for her shoulders, and her clothes and hair and skin were damp from the garden hose she was spraying on the car’s surface while she wiped it down with a rag. Molly’s physical firmness, the curvature of her hips, the way her rump flexed against her shorts, the suggestion of sexual power in her thighs and the swell of her breasts, all reminded me of my dead wife Bootsie, and I sometimes wondered if Bootsie’s spirit had not slipped inside Molly’s skin, as though the two women who had not known each other in life had melded together and formed a third personality after Bootsie’s death.

But I didn’t care where Molly came from, as long as she remained in my life, and I loved her as much as I did Bootsie, and I loved them both at the same time and never felt a contradiction or a moment of disloyalty about my feelings.

“Come scratch my back, will you?” Molly said. “A mosquito about six inches long got under my shirt.”

She propped her arms on the car’s roof while I moved my nails back and forth across her shoulder blades. The water from the hose continued to run, spilling back across her fist, trailing down her forearm. She shifted her weight and her rump brushed against my loins.

“I had to put Cesaire Darbo

“Uh-huh,” she said, gazing abstractedly through the shadows in the backyard.

“The guy’s broke. He’ll probably stay in lockdown out at the stockade.”

“And?” she said, removing a strand of damp hair from her eye.

“No bondsman will touch him with a dung fork, at least not without collateral.”

“You hurt my feelings,” she said.

“Pardon?”

She rolled her shoulders to indicate I should continue scratching her back. “I thought you were putting moves on me to get me into the sack,” she said.

“I’m not above doing that.”

She deliberately hit me with her rump. “You want to go his bond?” she said.

“I’ll have to put up the house and lot. They’re half yours.”

“Not really, but whatever you want to do is fine with me,” she said.

She turned around, stood on my shoes, and hugged me.

“What’s that for?” I said.

“I won’t tell you,” she said, then continued washing her car.

AFTER SUPPER, I drove to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. He had closed all the blinds and was sitting barefoot on his bed, dressed in a pair of elastic-waisted khakis and a strap undershirt, reaming out the barrel of a.38 revolver with a bore brush. His television set was tuned to The Weather Cha

“Expecting the Union Army to come up the Teche?” I said.

“A bud inside NOPD called me and said I’m about to get picked up for destroying the casino. I rented a camp out in the Atchafalaya Basin. Time to do a survey on the goggle-eye perch population,” he replied.

Then I made a mistake. I told him about all the recent events involving the deaths of Yvo