Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

“They say she pulled a train.”

“She did a gang bang?”

“They call it ‘pulling a train.’ They say she was wiped out of her head and took on a bunch of guys upstairs in the house. It was after a kegger or something. There was a lot of Ecstasy and acid floating around. The way these guys talked, Tony didn’t know about it. I heard she was messed up in the head and committed suicide.”

“Yeah, she did. But she wasn’t messed up before she met Tony Lujan. Did she pull the train the day she died?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I work and study all the time. I don’t know who the guys were, either. There’s stuff goes on at the house I don’t get mixed up in.”

The lake was dark in the shade, wrinkled by the wind, the hyacinths blooming with yellow flowers out in the sunlight. “You seem like a good guy, J.J. Why do you hang around with a collection of shits like this bunch?”

“They’re not all bad.”

“Maybe not. But enough of them are. Come see me in New Iberia if you want to go fishing sometime. In the meantime, hang on to my business card, okay?” I said.

I DROVE DIRECTLY to the fraternity house. Two k

ids were raking leaves in the front yard when I walked up to the porch. “Is Slim here?” I said.

“Out back,” one of them replied, hardly looking up from his work.

“Did he just get back from New Orleans?” I said, checking J. J. Castille’s story.

“Search me,” the same kid said.

I walked around the side of the house into the backyard. The St. Augustine grass was uncut, the yard enclosed by thick hedges, the sunshine filtered by pecan and oak trees. Slim Bruxal stood below a speed bag that was mounted on the crossbar of two iron stanchions. He wore a workout shirt that had been scissored into strips and gym shoes and a pair of string-tie gym shorts low on his hips. His fists looked as hard and tight as apples inside his red gloves as he turned the speed bag into a blur, tada-tada-tada-tada, the exposed skin on his back crisscrossed with sweat.

“You’re a hard man to find,” I said.

He turned and looked at me, his eyes hot, his brow knitted, like someone pulling himself out of an angry thought. He removed his right glove by clamping it under his left arm, then extended his hand. “How you doing, Mr. Robicheaux?”

I turned away from him, as though I were distracted by the blowing of a car horn on the street, my hand at my side. “You were with your girl the last couple of days?”

“Girl? I was seeing my therapist in New Orleans. She’s also a grief counselor,” he replied, lowering his hand.

“Can I have her name and number?”

“What for?”

“We’re trying to exclude everyone we can in our investigation into Tony’s death. That’s so we can concentrate on nailing the right guy.”

He gave me a woman’s name and a phone number in the Garden District, up St. Charles Avenue.

“You want the right guy?” he said. “He looks like a pile of soggy meat loaf with warts on it. I hear he’s sitting on his fat black ass in your jail.”

“When was the last time you saw Tony?”

“I think you already know that.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

“We took him for a couple of beers Monday afternoon. We tried to cheer him up. Then he left the bar and drove back to New Iberia.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“No, sir.” He blotted his face with a towel and tossed the towel on the grass. The sun was directly in his eyes, making it even harder for him to hide his irritability. “Look, Tony was my friend. I don’t like being under the microscope for this. He was depressed and we were worried about him. One of the guys had seen him playing baseball with a priest at St. John’s. So we went over there and tried to cheer him up. Then he ends up being killed by this animal Monarch Little.”

“Yeah, I can see how you’re frustrated by all this. But something doesn’t flush here.”