But I kept my attention on the black woman. “Come out on the front porch with me,” I said.
“Suh?”
I stepped backward, taking her hand in mine. She followed me outside, glancing back once.
“What’s Mr. Bello up to, Miss Regina?” I asked.
“I’m making ten dollars an hour here. I cain’t lose this job.”
“Tell me where he went.”
“He took the rottweiler. That dog mean t’rew and t’rew. You don’t walk a dog like that in the park, no.”
“Go back inside and tell Mrs. Lujan I’ll be right there,” I said.
“Suh?”
I said it again. This time I placed my hand reassuringly on her upper arm. “I give you my word no one will know what you just told me,” I said.
She went back inside the house uncertainly, leaving the door ajar. With my back to the house, I opened my cell phone and punched in the number to Helen’s office.
“Sheriff Soileau,” she said.
“I’m at Bello’s house now. Mrs. Lujan’s nurse says he left here with a rottweiler. Better get somebody over to Monarch’s place.”
“You got it, bwana,” she said.
I stepped inside the living room and saw Mrs. Lujan out on the sunporch, staring at me from her wheelchair. She was dressed in a flowery blouse and beige skirt, but the seasonal cheeriness of the colors only accentuated the pallor of her skin and the obvious deterioration of her bone structure. Through the windows I could see freshly mowed St. Augustine grass and a bank of shade trees in the background and a pale green canopy set up on aluminum poles. The canopy was swelling with wind, a loose chain on one corner rattling against a pole.
“Are you here about Tony?” she asked.
“Monarch Little has been released from jail on bond. We’re concerned your husband might want to take the law into his own hands,” I replied.
She watched me in the same way a bird watches a potential predator from atop its nest. She was originally from the Carrollton district of New Orleans and had come to Lafayette to study drama at the university when she was only a girl. Her parents, who had been successful antique dealers, were killed in a commercial airline accident her freshman year. Mrs. Lujan, whose first name was Valerie, left school and went to work for a man who made breakfast-room furniture out of compressed sawdust and sold it to the owners of double-wides and prefab homes during the domestic oil boom of the 1970s. Then she met Bellerophon Lujan and perhaps decided that the dreams of a young drama major were just that—dreams that a mature woman tries to put aside with only a brief pang of the heart.
“You’re here because you’re worried about the man who killed my son? Who disfigured him so badly he’s virtually unrecognizable?” she said.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Lujan,” I said. But it was obvious she was not interested in my sympathies. “Monarch Little hasn’t been charged in the murder of your son. He was in jail on a firearms violation. His bond was reduced and now he’s back on the street. And that’s why I’m here.”
Her face was almost skeletal, her hair like corn silk, her eyes filled with both sorrow and the analytical glint of someone who has probably been systematically deceived. She reminded me of a figure in a Modigliani painting, attenuated, her bones like rubber, her body robbed of both beauty and hope by an unkind hand. “You’re saying there’s doubt about this man’s guilt?” she said.
“In my mind, yes.”
“Why?”
“The investigation is ongoing.”
“Please answer my question.”
“I don’t think Monarch Little is a killer.”
She stared out the window at the lawn and the wind puffing the canopy that had been used at garden parties in a happier time. “You were one of the policemen who found Tony?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Do you think my son suffered?”
“No, I don’t think he did.” I let my eyes go flat so they did not focus on her face.