Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (4 page)

“Can you show me something with your Lafayette address on it? I’d also like a phone number in case we have to reach you.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said.

“Sometimes a low-yield explosive device containing marker dye is placed among bundles of currency that are stolen from banks or armored cars. When the device goes off, the currency is stained so the robbers can’t use it.”

“So maybe my hundreds are stolen?” she said, handing me a receipt for a twenty-three-hundred deposit on an apartment in Lafayette.

“Probably not. Dye ends up on money all the time. Your name is Trish Klein?”

“Yes, I just moved here from Miami.”

“Ever hear of a guy named Dallas Klein?”

Her eyes held on mine, her thoughts, whatever they were, impossible to read. “Why do you ask?” she said.

“I knew a guy by that name who flew a chopper in Vietnam. He was from Miami.”

“That was my father,” she said.

I finished copying her address and phone number off her deposit receipt and handed it back to her. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Klein. Your dad was a stand-up guy,” I said.

“You knew him in Vietnam?”

“I knew him,” I said. I glanced past her shoulder at the video screen. “You’ve got four kings. Welcome to Louisiana.”

O
N THE WAY BACK
to the office, I asked myself why I hadn’t told her I had been friends with her father in Miami. But maybe the memory was just too unpleasant to revisit, I thought. Maybe she had never learned that her father had been enticed into aiding and abetting the robbery of the armored car, if indeed that’s what happened. Why let the past injure the innocent? I told myself.

No, that was not it. She had paused before she acknowledged her father. As any investigative law officer will tell you, when witnesses or suspects or even ordinary citizens hesitate before answering a question, it’s because they are deciding whether they should either conceal information or outright lie about it.

It was almost 5 p.m. when I got back to the department. Wally, our dispatcher, told me there had been a homicide by gunshot wound on the bayou, amid a cluster of houses upstream from the sugar mill. I gave the serial numbers on the bills to a detective in our robbery unit and asked him to run them through our Internet connection to the U.S. Treasury Department. Then I tried to forget the image of Dallas Klein kneeling on a sidewalk, his fingers laced behind his head.

The sheriff of Iberia Parish was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career in law enforcement as a meter maid with NOPD, then had patrolled the Desire district and Gird Town and worked Narcotics in the French Quarter. She wore jeans or slacks, carried herself like a male athlete, and possessed a strange kind of androgynous beauty. Her face could be sensuous and warm, almost seductive, but it could change while you were talking to her, as though not only two genders but two different people lived inside her. People who saw her in one photograph often did not recognize her in another.

I not only admired Helen, I loved her. She was honest and loyal and never afraid. Anyone who showed disrespect regarding her sexuality did so only once.

A couple of years back, a New Iberia lowlife by the name of Jimmy Dean Styles, who ran a dump called the Boom Boom Room and who would eventually rape and murder a sixteen-year-old girl with a shotgun, was drinking from a bottle of chocolate milk behind his bar while he casually told Helen that even though he had overheard her male fellow officers ridiculing her at the McDonald’s on East Main, he personally considered her “a dyke who’s straight-up and don’t take shit from nobody.”

Then he upended his bottle of chocolate milk, his eyes smiling at the barb he had inserted under her skin.

Helen slipped her baton so quickly from the ring on her belt, he didn’t even have time to flinch before glass and chocolate milk and blood exploded all over his face. Then Helen dropped her business card on the bar and said, “Have a nice day. Call me again if I can be of any more assistance.” That was Helen Soileau.

I tapped on her office door, then opened it. “Wally says we have a homicide by the mill?” I said.

“The nine-one-one came in about fifteen minutes ago. The coroner should be there now. Where were you?”

“A couple of bills with dye on them showed up at the new truck stop. Who’s the victim?”

She glanced down at a notepad. “Yvonne Darbonne. She waited tables at Victor’s. You know her?”

“Yeah, I think I do. Her daddy used to cane-farm and run a bar up the bayou?”

“Bring the cruiser around and let’s find out,” she replied.

We drove through downtown and crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at Burke Street, then crossed the bayou again and headed up a broken two-lane road that led past an enormous sugar mill that almost blocked out the sky. At night, during the grinding season, the fires and electric lights and the giant white clouds of steam that rose from the stacks could be seen from miles away, not unlike a medieval painting depicting Dante’s vision of the next world.

Hunkered between the mill and bayou was a community of dull green company-constructed houses left over from an earlier time. In the winter, the stench from the mill and the threadlike pieces of carbon floating off the smokestacks blew with a northern breeze directly onto the houses down below. The yards were dirt, packed as hard as brick, strung with wash lines, the broken windows repaired with tape and plastic bags. Several uniformed cops, two forensic chemists from the lab, the coroner, three cruisers, and an ambulance were already at the scene.

“Who called it in?” I asked Helen as we crossed a rain ditch and pulled into a dirt driveway.

“A neighbor heard the shot. She thought it was a firecracker, then she looked out the window and saw the girl on the ground.”

“She didn’t see anyone else?”

“She thought she heard a car drive away, but she saw no one.”

The girl’s father, whose name was Cesaire Darbonne, had just arrived. Even though he was almost seventy, he was a trim, comely man, with neatly parted steel-colored hair and pale turquoise eyes. His skin was brown, as smooth as tallow, marked on one arm by a chain of white scars that looked like small misshapen hearts. He was also coming apart at the seams.

Two cops had to restrain him from rushing to where his daughter lay in the backyard. They walked him back to a cruiser in the driveway and sat him down in the passenger seat, then stood in front of the open door so he couldn’t get out. “That’s my li’l girl back there. Her birt’day was tomorrow. Who done somet’ing like this to that li’l girl? She ain’t but eighteen years old,” he said.

But the answer was probably not one he wanted to hear. His daughter lay in the Johnson grass by a doorless wood garage, her body in the shape of a question mark. She was wearing a beige skirt and tennis shoes without socks and a T-shirt with a winged horse emblazoned on the front. A blue-black .22 revolver with walnut grips lay by her hand. The entry wound was in the center of her forehead. Her hair, which was dark red, had fallen down in a skein across her face.

I squatted down next to her and picked up the revolver by inserting a pencil through the trigger guard. The cylinder looked like one that had been drilled to hold Magnums, and all the chambers other than the one under hammer were loaded and appeared unfired. A cell phone lay in the grass, less than three feet away. Helen handed me a Ziploc evidence bag. “Powder burns?” she said.

“Enough to put out an eye,” I replied.

Helen squatted down next to me, her forearms resting on her knees, her face lowered. “You ever see a woman shoot herself in the face?” she asked.

“Nope, but suicides do weird things,” I replied.

Helen stood up, chewing on a weed stem. The sun went behind a cloud, then the wind came up and we could smell the heaviness of the bayou. “Bag the cell phone and get it to the lab. Find out who she was talking to before she caught the bus. Has the old man got other kids?”

“To my knowledge, Yvonne was the only one,” I replied.

“Ready to do it?” she said.

“Not really,” I said, rising to my feet, my knees popping like those of a man who was far too old for the task that had been given him.

Helen and I approached Mr. Darbonne, who was still sitting in the back of the cruiser. His khakis were starched and clean, his denim shirt freshly ironed. He looked up at us as though we were the bearers of information that somehow could change the events that had just crashed upon his life like an asteroid. I told him we were sorry about his loss, but my words didn’t seem to register.

“Who was your daughter with today, Mr. Darbonne?” I asked.

“She gone over to the university for orientation. She was starting classes this summer,” he replied. Then he realized he hadn’t answered my question. “I ain’t sure who she gone wit’.”

“Was she dating anyone?” I asked.

“Maybe. She always met him in town. She didn’t want to tell me who he was.”

“Has she been depressed or angry or upset about anything?” Helen said.

“She was happy. She was a good girl. She didn’t smoke or drink. She never been in no trouble. I was looking for work today in Jeanerette. If I’d stayed home, me—” His eyes started to water.

“Did she own a pistol?” I asked.

“What she gonna do wit’ a gun? She read books. She wanted to study journalism and history. She wrote in her diary. She was always going to the movies.”

Helen and I looked at each other. “Can you show us her room, sir?” I said.

The wood floors inside the house were scrubbed, the furniture dusted, the kitchen neat, the dishes washed, the beds made. An ancient purple couch was positioned in front of a small television set. Imitation lace doilies had been spread on the arms and headrest of the couch. In the hallway a black-and-white photo yellowed at the corners showed the father at a hunting camp, surrounded by friends in canvas coats and caps and rubber boots and a giant semicircle of dead ducks at their feet. Yvonne’s dresser and shelves were covered with stuffed animals, worn paperback novels, and books on loan from the city library. Among the titles were
The Moon and Sixpence
and
The Scarlet Letter
.

“We’d like to take her diary with us, sir. I promise it will be returned to you,” I said.

He hesitated. Then his eyes left mine and looked out the window. Two paramedics were placing a gurney in the back of the ambulance. The body bag that contained the earthly remains of Yvonne Darbonne had been zipped over her face, within seconds erasing the identity she had woken with that morning. The straps and vinyl that held her form against the gurney seemed to have shrunken her size and substance to insignificance. Cesaire Darbonne began to run toward the back door.

“Don’t do that, sir. I give you my word your daughter’s person will be treated with respect,” Helen said, stepping in his way, holding up her palms against the air.

He turned from us and began to weep, his back shaking. “She met this boy in town ’cause she was ’shamed of her house. One night she walked all the way home from the bowling alley, wit’ cars going by her at sixty miles an hour. I couldn’t find work, me. I farmed t’irty acres of cane for forty years, but now I cain’t find no work.”

Before we left, we spoke to the neighbor who had made the “shots fired” call. She was in her late-middle years and was a member of that ill-defined racial group sometimes called “Creoles” or sometimes “people of color.” The term “Creole” originally meant a second-generation colonial whose parentage was either French or Spanish or both. Today, the term indicates someone whose bloodline is probably French, Indian, and Afro-American. This lady’s name was Narcisse Ladrine and she insisted she had not witnessed the shooting or a car or person leaving the scene.

“But you heard a vehicle driving away?” I said.

“I ain’t sure,” she said. She wore a print dress that fit her like a potato sack and was so wash-faded you could see the outline of her undergarments through the fabric.

“Try to remember,” I said. “Was it a sound like a truck? Did it make a lot of noise? Maybe the muffler was rusted out?”

“When you hear a gunshot, you ain’t listening for other t’ings.”

She had a point. “Did you see anyone else on the street?” I asked.

“There was a black man on a bicycle picking up bottles and cans out of the ditch.” Then she thought about what she had just said. “Except that was a lot earlier. No, I ain’t seen nobody else out there.”

We went back up the road and checked with the security office at the sugar mill. No one there had seen any unusual activity near the mill or in the community of frame houses by the bayou. In fact, no one at the security office even knew a homicide had occurred there.

A
S WE DROVE BACK
toward the department, a rainstorm swept across the wetlands and pounded the cruiser and scattered hailstones like pieces of smoking dry ice on the road. Back at the office, I began the paperwork on the death of Yvonne Darbonne. I had completely forgotten the matter of the dye-marked one-hundred bills in the possession of Trish Klein, the daughter of my murdered gambling friend in Miami. Just before quitting time, Helen opened my door. “We got a hit on those serial numbers,” she said. “The bills came from the robbery of a savings and loan company in Mobile.”

Helen’s announcement wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “I’ll get ahold of the woman tomorrow,” I said.

“It gets better. The bills from the robbery have been showing up in casinos and at racetracks all along the Gulf Coast,” she said.

“The Klein woman says she got hers at a casino in Biloxi.”

“Here’s an interesting footnote. The Treasury guys think the savings and loan company may be a laundry for the Mob. The wiseguys got ripped off by some bank thieves who didn’t get the word. What’s the background on this Klein woman?”

I told her about the shotgun slaying of Dallas Klein in Opa-Locka, Florida, years ago. Through my second-story window I could see rain hitting on the tops of the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery.

“You were there when he died?” she said.