Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

The blond man, who had been listening quietly, couldn’t suppress a laugh.

“That’s funny?” I said to him.

His eyes were bright green, his mouth spread open on one side out of his teeth. “You got boons pulling guns on people and you’re telling the victim’s father you got a problem?” he replied.

“What’s your name?”

“Lefty Raguza.” When he spoke his name, his face was charged with energy, his eyes dancing, his chin lifted.

“Thanks,” I said, writing his name in a notebook.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“We like to research who’s in town, who’s not. You know how it is. Got to keep the down-home folks happy,” I replied, winking at him.

“You need to finish your statement to me, Mr. Robicheaux,” Bruxal said, a tanker truck loaded with gasoline passing behind him.

Don’t say it, I thought. “I think if a kid by the name of Dallas Klein had never met you and your friend here, he’d still be alive,” I said.

Bruxal looked at the blond man named Lefty Raguza. The blond man shrugged his shoulders, indicating he did not understand the reference either. “Who’s this Dallas Whatever?” Bruxal asked.

“Your man here already acknowledged he remembers me. He remembers me because we met in Opa-Locka, Florida, when he was trying to collect sixteen grand Dallas owed your sports book. Just to make sure everything is clear here, I want you to know I’m the dude who dimed you with Miami P.D. and the FBI on the armored car boost.”

Bruxal had a square chin and big bones in his cheeks. His expression remained good-natured, his brow unlined, but it was obvious he was thinking, his mind processing information, considering and rejecting various forms of response. “Tell you what, I’d like to talk with you more, but I’m going to do like my lawyer says and butt out. I’ll ask you a favor, though. You mind?”

“Be my guest,” I replied.

“If you got to hook up my son again, call me first? Slim’s dick is too big for his brains, but he’s a good kid. I didn’t have any judgment at that age. How about you? Your sizzle stick get in the way of your brains sometimes, Mr. Robicheaux?”

A moment later I watched him drive away in his Humvee with the man who had once ridiculed me when I was stone-drunk. Bruxal was slick. He had not challenged me on a personal level and he had not made any statement that was demonstrably a lie, the handle that every cop looks for in a guilty man. Instead, he had made a personal entreaty on behalf of his son and put the moral onus on me.

I had a feeling I was going to see a lot more of Whitey Bruxal.

BACK AT THE OFFICE I ran his name through the National Crime Information Center. It was not helpful. Bruxal had been interviewed several times by the FBI and Miami P.D. in the aftermath of the armored car heist and the murder of Dallas Klein and the bank teller, but he had never been directly connected to either the robbery or the homicide. Of course, this was information I already had. He had been arrested in Flatbush for driving with an expired operator’s license and fined once in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn as a co-conspirator in the distribution of Irish Sweepstakes tickets. His third arrest was in West Palm Beach, check this out, for littering. He had been sentenced to six consecutive Saturdays on a sanitation truck.

If Bugsy Siegel had set the standard, Bruxal had fallen far short of the mark.

But the hit I got on Lefty Thomas Leo Raguza was another matter. He had done time both in Georgia and inside the Flat Top at Raiford Pen for assault with a deadly weapon and had spent a year in the Broward County Stockade for criminal possession of a firearm, a charge that had been knocked down from attempted murder. It took me less than a half hour to find his old parole officer in Fort Lauderdale.

“Tommy Lee Raguza? You bet I remember him,” he said.

“He goes by Lefty now.”

“That’s right, he boxed in Raiford. You’ve got a real bucket of shit on your hands, pal.”

“Can you break that down?”

“When it comes to Tommy Lee Raguza, I’m not up to the task. I’ll fax you a psychiatric evaluation from his file. Get this, that psych report came in before we had to cut him loose. It’ll make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.”

The two-page evaluation that came through the department’s fax machine was a study in failure, not simply societal and institutional failure but the kind that reaches all the way back through the evolution of the species. After a long typed description of Lefty or Tommy Lee Raguza’s psychological and behavioral problems, all couched in Freudian terms, the psychiatrist made this handwritten addendum at the bottom:

Medical science does not provide an adequate vocabulary to describe a man like this. He is probably the cruelest human being I have ever had the misfortune to meet. There is no element in his background, environmental or genetic, that would explain the dispassionate level of iniquity in this man and the level of pleasure he takes in injuring both people and animals. Frankly, I think this man is evil and should be separated from human society for the rest of his life. Unfortunately that will probably not happen.

This was the man now living in Acadiana, where parishioners still make the sign of the cross when they pass a Catholic church and cannot believe that an American president would lie to them.

I went back to work on Bruxal and ran his name through Google. I found information there that told me far more about him and his present intentions than his criminal jacket did. His name had appeared in several article

s published in the Lafayette Daily Advertiser, the Baton Rouge Advocate, and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Whitey Bruxal had become a major player in Louisiana’s blossoming casino industry.