Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

“Flush?”

“Yeah, there’s one element in your story that bothers me.”

“Bothers you. My best friend is dead and you’re bothered?” he replied, his mask slipping, his face hot and glistening in the sun’s glare.

“You said you were worried about Tony’s being depressed. So you tracked him down at a church where he was playing baseball with a minister and took him to a bar. You removed him from an environment where he might have gotten some genuine help. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

“I’m not knocking anybody’s church.”

“Nobody said you were. But between you and me, I think you’re trying to put the slide on me. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

He tried to shine me on, his face suffusing with feigned goodwill and humility.

“What happened to Yvonne Darbonne? Were you one of the dudes who gangbanged her?” I said.

“I don’t have to take this,” he said.

“You’re right, you don’t. Keep up the work on the speed bag. You look good. I know the boxing coach up at Angola. His best middleweight got shanked in the shower. He’d love to have you on the team.”

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m not Tony Lujan.” He tilted his chin up when he spoke.

AS SOON AS IGOT BACK to the office, I received a call from Mack Bertrand at the lab. “Monarch Little’s prints were on the pay phone that was used to call the Lujan house Monday evening,” he said.

“How many other prints were on it?”

“Six sets that were identifiable, all belonging to people with criminal records.”

“The phone is on the corner where he hangs out?”

“Right,” he said.

“It’s another nail in Monarch’s coffin, but it’s still circumstantial.”

“How’d you make out in your meeting with Lonnie Marceaux?”

“I think Lonnie found a horse he can ride all the way to Washington.”

“Have you talked to Helen since you got back from Lafayette?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“She got a call from The New York Times this morning. Somebody leaked a story about a possible local investigation into this televangelical character who’s mixed up with Whitey Bruxal.”

But I really wasn’t interested in Lonnie’s attempts to manipulate the media. “Do you still have DNA swabs from the autopsy on Yvonne Darbonne?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“I believe her death was a homicide.”

“I respect what you say, Dave, but this time I’m on Koko Hebert’s side. Yvonne Darbonne shot herself.”

“Maybe she pulled the trigger. But others helped her do it.”

“Want to drive yourself crazy? You’ve found the perfect way to do it,” he said.

A few minutes later I went down to Helen’s office and told her about my interviews with J. J. Castille and Slim Bruxal. She listened silently, occasionally making a note on a legal pad, waiting until I finished before she spoke. “You think maybe in this instance things aren’t that complicated after all?” she asked, her eyes on the top of her pencil as she drew a little doodle on the pad.

“What do you mean?”