Pegasus Descending Part 11

"She has bad night vision. She doesn't even have a license. You can check."

"So that leaves you."

He was shaking his head even before I finished the sentence. "If I'd killed a homeless guy, it would have been an accident. Why would I want to hide it?"

"But it's obvious you know when and how it happened."

"I didn't kill anybody."

"You said your mother has bad night vision. How do you know the homeless guy was struck at night?"

He closed then opened his eyes, like a man who has just stepped on the trapdoor of a hangman's scaffold. "You got to let me see a lawyer. It's in the Const.i.tution, isn't it? I'm guaranteed at least a phone call, right?"

"Listen to me. A man with no name was killed by an automobile your family owns and drives. The dead man was probably a wino, a guy with few if any friends, no family, and no known origins. He was the kind of guy who gets bagged and tagged and dropped in a hole in ground, case closed. Except that's not going to happen here. That guy had a right to live, just like you and I do. Whoever ran over him is going to be indicted and sent to trial. I give you my absolute word on that, Tony. You believe me when I say that?"

"Yes, sir."

"You're a young man and young people make mistakes. Usually the cause is a lack of judgment. People get scared, they can't think straight, they make bad decisions. They want to run from the deed they've committed because it's almost as though it didn't happen, it's not them, it's like someone else did it. If they could only go home, this terrible moment in their lives would be erased. That's what happened, didn't it, Tony? You just didn't think straight. It's only human in a situation like that. Tell us your version of events before somebody else does. Don't take a fall you don't deserve. That's not stand-up, it's dumb. Just tell the truth and trust the people trying to help you."

He watched me carefully while I spoke, his face turned slightly aside, as though he didn't want the full measure of my words to undo his defenses. But I had not convinced him. I took another run at ip.

"You ever read Stephen Crane?" I said.

"The writer?"

"Yeah, the writer."

"No," he said.

"Crane said few of us are nouns. Most of us are adverbs. No tragedy is orchestrated by one individual. An event we blame ourselves for may have been years in the making and may have much more to do with others than ourselves. Without recognition of that fact, we never acquire any wisdom about anything. Our case name for the homeless guy is Crustacean Man. Help us give back this guy his name. You can start correcting things, turning them around, right now, as we speak. It's that easy."

His eyes were locked on mine, his eyelids st.i.tched to his brows. His bottom lip was white on the corner where he was biting down on it, to the point I thought the skin would break. I could almost hear words forming in his throat. Then his gaze broke and the moment was lost. "I want to talk to my father. What have you done with him?" he said.

"Your old man can take care of himself," I replied.

"He might actually go to prison?"

"It's a good possibility."

He started to cry. It was the first time I had seen Tony Lujan show any concern for anyone but himself. I took out a clean, folded handkerchief and handed it to him. "We're done here. I'm not going to question you any more. Other people will talk to you later," I said.

He cleared his throat and spit. He looked at the clouds scudding across the sky and the gray outline of the parish stockade. "I need to confess something," he said.

I waited for him to speak, but he didn't. "What is it?" I said.

"I'm holding."

"You're dealing?"

"No," he said. He unb.u.t.toned his s.h.i.+rt pocket and removed a small plastic bag rolled around three joints. "I smoke one or two a day, that's all. I know if I'm arrested at the jail, I'll be searched and then charged for holding."

I took the bag from him, shook the joints out, and ground them under my heel. "So you're not holding now," I said, and stuffed the bag back in his pocket.

I started walking toward the cruiser, with Tony perhaps ten feet behind me. I heard him quicken his step to catch up with me.

"That was a pretty decent thing to do, Mr. Rob.i.+.c.heaux," he said.

"Don't deceive yourself, kid. What I told you back there in the trees wasn't a ruse. You had your chance and you blew it. The people I work with are going to twist your head off and spit in it," I replied.

I HAD NOT SEEN Clete Purcel since Sat.u.r.day evening, when he had driven away from the boat landing at Henderson Swamp with Trish Klein, his face and hers glowing like those of youthful lovers in the sunset. I left three messages on his cell phone, and also went by his office, only to find it closed. Friday I went by his office again, and this time his part-time secretary, Hulga Volkmann, was behind the desk. She was a big, rosy-complected, cheerful, and scatterbrained woman who wore flower-print dresses and perfume that would numb the olfactory senses of an elephant.

"He went to New Orleans for a day or so, then called from Cancun. He'll be back tonight," she said.

"Clete's in Mexico?" I said.

"Or was it Bimini?" she said.

Clete Purcel's romantic problems did not occur as a result of his having love affairs with biker girls and neurotic artists and strippers. Instead, they usually began when he got involved with any woman who was halfway normal, in other words, the type of person he didn't believe he deserved. Any attempt to convince him that he was attractive to women other than pipeheads and narcissistic meltdowns was futile. In Clete's mind, he was still the son of a milkman in the Irish Channel, with skinned knuckles from fights on the school ground and welts across his b.u.t.t from his father's razor strop. Nice girls didn't hang with a guy who had a scar like a pink inner-tube patch through one eyebrow, put there by a black warlord from the Gird Town Deuces. Nice girls didn't hang with a former jarhead who still heard the downdraft of helicopter blades in his sleep.

"Is Clete with a lady by the name of Trish Klein?" I asked the secretary.

"He was with someone. I heard a lot of noise in the background. I think he was in a casino," Hulga said.

Clete lived down the bayou in a Depression-era motor court, one that still did not have telephones in the cottages and was covered by the shade of oaks hundreds of years old. At ten Sat.u.r.day morning, I knocked on his door. He answered it in his skivvies and an unders.h.i.+rt, smiling sleepily. "How you doin', big mon?" he said. A square bandage was taped high up on his left shoulder.

"Why don't you tell your friends where you are once in a while?"

"Oh, Trish and I drove over to the Big Sleazy for the day, then one thing led to another. You know how it goes. You want coffee?"

"I don't want to hear Darwin's history of the planet. Did you let her hustle you?"

"Lighten up on the terminology," he replied, filling a metal coffeepot at the sink.

"What happened to your shoulder?"

"Nothing. A scratch. I had to get a teta.n.u.s shot."

"I think Trish Klein is playing you, Cletus," I said, instantly regretting my words.

"h.e.l.l, yes. Why would a great-looking broad be interested in an over-the-hill P.I. who's got a worse jacket than most perps?"

"I didn't say that. Your weakness is your good heart. People take advantage of it."

"Good try. Get the milk out of the icebox, will you? G.o.d!"

"G.o.d what?"

"I woke up feeling great. I haven't had any booze in two days. Trish and I are going to a street dance in Lafayette tonight. Then you come in here and walk around on my libido with golf shoes. Plus you insult Trish."

"I worry about you. You were gone four days without telling me where you were."

He tossed a loaf of bread into my hands. "Make some toast."

"What happened in New Orleans?"

"Ever hear of a guy named Lefty Raguza?"

"He's a psychopath who works for a bookie and general s.h.i.+thead by the name of Whitey Bruxal."

"I had to straighten him out. It wasn't a major event. You don't figure him for a listener, huh?"

"What have you done, Clete?"

Then he told me of the beginnings of his romantic involvement with the girl whose nickname he had taken from a song by Jimmy Clanton.

Chapter.

9.

L AST SUNDAY MORNING he and Trish Klein had headed down the four-lane toward New Orleans, the top down, the cane blowing in the fields on each side of them, then they skirted a sun-shower at Morgan City and turned into a convenience store to put up the top. It was still early and there were few vehicles on the highway. A Ford Explorer that had been a quarter mile behind Clete went past the convenience store, a blond man at the wheel, then the road was empty again, the wind balmy and flecked with rain.

"I love it here. You can almost smell the Gulf. That's the only thing I miss about Miami-the smell of the ocean in the morning," Trish said.

"You lived by the water?" Clete said.

She had taken a bandanna off her head and was shaking out her hair. Clete couldn't keep his eyes off her. Nor could he read her or her intentions, or judge whether or not he had any chance with her. All he knew was she had the most beautiful blue eyes and heart-shaped face he had ever seen. "We had a house in Coconut Grove. My grandmother kept a sailboat. We used to sail down into the Keys when the kingfish were running," she said.

"That must have been great," he said, his gaze wandering over her eyes and mouth, her words not really registering.

"You want to go now?" she asked.

"Pardon?"

"It's starting to rain."

"Right," he said.

They drove back onto the four-lane and crossed the bridge over the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya River. From the bridge's apex, Morgan City looked like a Caribbean port, with its palm-dotted streets, red-tiled roofs, biscuit-colored stucco buildings, and shotgun houses fronted by ceiling-high windows and ventilated green shutters. As Clete descended the bridge, he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the Ford Explorer again. The blond man was hunched over the wheel, wearing shades, cutting in and out of the pa.s.sing lane. Then he dropped behind a semi and disappeared from view.

Clete and Trish crossed another bridge at Des Allemands and ate deep-fried soft-sh.e.l.l crabs in a restaurant by a waterway where the banks were still thickly wooded and undeveloped and houseboats were moored under the overhang of the trees. When they got back on the highway, Clete saw the Explorer swing behind him. Clete took the exit to Luling and approached the huge steel bridge spanning the Mississippi. The Explorer dropped back four cars but stayed with him.

At one point the blond man threw some trash out the window, perhaps a fast-food container, something that splattered and bounced across the pavement.

"Know anybody who drives a dark green Explorer?" Clete said.

"n.o.body I can think of." Trish leaned forward so she could see into the side mirror. "I don't see one. Where is it?"

"He's about three cars back now. A blond guy with shades on, throwing garbage on the road."

"No, that doesn't sound like anybody I know. He's following us?"

"He's probably just a jerk. Sometimes I think we should make littering a capital offense, you know, have a few roadside executions. It would really solve a lot of environmental problems here."

He could feel her looking at the side of his face. When he glanced at her, she was smiling, her eyes lit with a tenderness that made his loins go weak.

"What'd I say?" he asked.

"Nothing. You're just a sweet guy." She touched his shoulder with her fingertips. Clete forgot about the man in the Explorer and wondered if he wasn't being played.

They drove down I-10 to New Orleans and parked in a multilevel garage in the French Quarter. A storm was blowing off Lake Pontchartrain and the air smelled like salt and warm concrete when the first drops of rain hit it. They walked to the casino, at the bottom of Ca.n.a.l, and Clete could hear the horn blowing on the paddle-wheel excursion boat out on the river. He paused at the steps leading into the casino, under a row of transplanted palms that lifted and straightened in the breeze.

"Sure you want to go in here? Wouldn't you like to take a boat ride instead?" he said.

"Come on, I'm just going to play a couple of slots. Then I've got a surprise for you."

"What kind of surprise?"

"You'll see." She winked at him.

He told himself he was pulling the rip cord if she went near the c.r.a.ps table or if she started playing blackjack and a member of her crew was in place at the table or watching the game from the crowd. Clete had never been a gambler, but he had learned most of the casino hustles when he had run security for Sally Dio in Vegas and Reno. One of the best scams going involved card counting. Actually, it wasn't even a scam. It was a matter of having more brains than the house. A good card counter could determine at which point a blackjack deck contained a preponderance of cards in the high numbers, usually 10 through king. The high numbers in the shoe raised the odds that the dealer, who was required to take a hit on 16 or less, would go bust. The player just had to stand pat and let the dealer beat himself.

There was a hitch, however. The casino cameras and pit managers could tell when a card counter's betting pattern had changed. So a crew made use of a player who always bet the same high amount of money but did not take a seat at the table and commence betting until he received a signal from a colleague in the crowd. The player would stay at the table as long as the odds remained in his favor, then linger briefly after the shuffle, losing a few bets if necessary. Finally he would glance at his watch, pick up his winnings, and stroll over to a c.r.a.ps or roulette table, where he would be absorbed into the crowd.

Clete ordered a vodka collins at the bar and watched while Trish wandered between the rows of slot machines. Was she casing the joint? Did she and her crew plan to take it down? He couldn't tell. But she was no garden-variety grifter. Nor was she a degenerate gambler. So what were they doing here.

The recycled air was like cigarette smoke that had been trapped for days in a refrigerator full of spoiled cheese. Half the people on the floor had B.O. and reminded Clete of outpatients at the methadone clinic. The rest were p.e.c.k.e.rwoods in s.h.i.+ny suits and vinyl shoes, with haircuts that resembled plastic wigs that didn't fit their heads. What a dump, he thought. The people who ran it would probably comp Hermann Goring.

Then he saw the blond driver of the Explorer watching him from behind a column by the entrance. The blond man wore a silk neckerchief and a magenta-colored silk s.h.i.+rt that was molded against his lats and shoulders and tapered waist. His facial skin was bright and hard-looking, like polished ceramic, his eyes a mystery behind his shades. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack with his mouth and cupped the flame from a gold lighter to it.

Clete thought about bracing him, then decided to let the hired help handle it. He introduced himself to a security man by the c.r.a.ps table, out of sight of the blond man, opening his P.I. badge holder in his palm. "I have an office on St. Ann in the Quarter and one in New Iberia," he said. "I think a dude hanging by the entrance is bird-d.o.g.g.i.ng me and my lady friend. Blond hair, shades, reddish-purple s.h.i.+rt, kerchief around the neck. He's been following me since Morgan City. But I've got no idea who he is."

The security man listened attentively. He was trim and well dressed, his whitewalled hair freshly barbered. "You said your name was Purcel?"

"Right."

"You used to be with NOPD?"