Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

Who kills with that kind of insatiable rage?

Someone whose anger and desire for revenge comes straight out of the libido.

I looked at the clock. It was 1:21 p.m. on Friday. What better time to catch an academic about to flee a faculty meeting for the solace of a dry martini in his backyard? I called the political science department at UL in Lafayette and was told that Dr. Frank Edwards had already gone for the day.

“Could I have his home telephone number?” I asked.

“We’re not allowed to give that out,” the secretary said.

“I?

?m a police officer.”

“So why don’t you look in the phone directory?” she said.

I flipped open the Lafayette phone book and found the number at the top of the page. The address was in an oak-shaded neighborhood in an old part of town, one of those urban enclaves where people hold on to their accents and their eccentricities and take a peculiar pride in the genteel poverty that often marks their lives. The phone rang for a long time before a man picked up. I assumed he was not one who made use of answering machines. “Yes?” he said.

“May I speak to Dr. Edwards?”

“I’m Dr. Edwards.”

“This is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I’d like to talk with you about Tony Lujan and Slim Bruxal,” I said.

For a moment I thought the line had gone dead. “Are you there, Professor?”

“Lydia Thibodaux contacted you?”

“She said you encouraged her to come forward with information about Slim and Tony. I appreciate your having done that.”

Again the line went silent.

“I’d like to come over to Lafayette and talk with you in person,” I said.

“Yes, I guess you would,” he said, with a sense of resignation I didn’t understand. “I’ll be at home. How important will this turn out to be?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are we talking about a trial, public testimony, that sort of thing?”

“I’m not sure. Is there a problem, sir?”

“That depends on whether or not you think young brownshirts belong in our universities.”

I took the four-lane into Lafayette, and in forty-five minutes was through the university district and driving down a quiet residential street where the sidewalks had been broken and pitched by the huge tree roots that grew under them. Inside the filtered light and the ambience of shade-blooming flowers, the palms and Spanish daggers that grew under a canopy of live oaks, the air vines and lichen-stained goldfish ponds and the late-Victorian frame houses whose rain gutters bled rust down the walls, you could have sworn you were looking at a misplaced piece of history ripped out of the year 1910.

The political science professor was reading on the gallery of his two-story house, one knee crossed, a wood-bladed fan turning overhead, a shot glass and a small pitcher by his foot. A plump, middle-aged white man in mismatched gardening clothes was watering the caladiums at the base of an oak tree with a sprinkling can. When he heard the piked gate squeak open, he smiled politely in my direction, then walked casually into the backyard with his sprinkling can, his soft buttocks tight against his pants.

“You’re Dr. Edwards?” I said to the man on the gallery.

He glanced at my badge, which was clipped on my belt. “Would you like a glass of anisette? It’s ice-cold,” he said.

“No, thanks.” I walked up on the gallery, the boards under my feet sinking with my weight. I sat on the edge of a wide, deep-set straw chair. “Could you explain that remark about young brownshirts?”

The professor was dressed in linen slacks and sandals and a tropical shirt that exposed the bones in his chest. His beard was clipped close to the skin, his teeth tiny and tea-colored inside his mouth. He closed his book on his knee.

“I think the purpose of your visit involves Slim Bruxal more than it does Tony Lujan. Slim conjures up a certain image. I think of arm-bands and people with heavy boots stomping down a street in Nuremberg. But ultimately I guess he’s a victim, too.”

“Not in my view. You told Lydia Thibodaux that Slim and Tony both wore masks. You told her not to be afraid of someone who couldn’t live with the person inside his skin. You were talking about Slim?”