Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

“Why are you here?”

“Because I think you and your friends are planning a big score on Whitey Bruxal. I think you’re setting up your alibi.”

She looked out the window at the street. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“You guys are going to get yourselves killed. That’s your own choice, but you’re taking Clete Purcel down with you.”

“He’s a grown man. Why don’t you stop treating him like a child?”

Down the corridor I could hear someone yelling, a scuffling sound of chains clinking, and a heavy object crashing against a metal surface, perhaps against the door of an elevator. But Trish Klein paid no attention to the distraction.

“Clete’s been my friend for over thirty years. That’s more time than you’ve been on earth,” I said, regretting the self-righteousness of my words almost as soon as I had spoken them.

“I suspect I should go back upstairs now,” she said.

“You don’t think Whitey is onto you? This guy was a protégé of Meyer Lansky. Your people impersonated gas company employees and creeped his house. Want to hear a couple of stories about people who tried to burn the Mob?”

She didn’t answer, but I told her anyway. One account dealt with a man in Las Vegas whose skull was splintered in a machinist’s vise, another who was hung alive by his rectum from a meat hook. I also told her what insiders said was the fate of a middle-class family man in a Queens suburb who accidentally ran over and killed the child of his neighbor, a notorious Mafia don.

“These bastards might look interesting on the movie screen, but they’re the scum of the earth,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have guessed that, Mr. Robicheaux. I always thought the people who murdered my father were closet humanists.”

It was obvious that my best efforts with Trish Klein were of no value. It was like telling someone not to gargle with Liquid Drano. I was about to call for the guard and leave Trish and her friends to their own fate, when she lifted her eyes up to mine and for just a moment I understood the tenacity of Clete’s commitment to her.

“A week before my father’s death, he took me snorkeling off Dania Beach,” she said. “We cooked hot dogs on a grill in a grove of palm trees and played with a big blue beach ball. Then two men parked a convertible under the trees and made him walk off with them, down where the water was hitting on the rocks. I remember how sad he looked, how small and humiliated, like he was no longer my father. I couldn’t hear what the two men were saying, but they were angry and one man kept punching my father in the chest with his finger. When my father came back to our picnic table, his face was white and his hands were shaking.

“I asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘Nothing. Everything is fine. Those guys were just having a bad day.’

“Then he put my snorkel and mask on my head and walked me down to the water and swam backward with me on his chest, until we were at the end of a coral jetty. He said, ‘This is where the clown fish live. Anytime you’re having a problem, you can tell it to the clown fish. These guys love children. Come on, you’ll see.’

“That was the first time I ever held my breath and went all the way under the water. There were clown fish everywhere. They swam right up to my mask and brushed against my shoulders and arms. I never thought about those men again, not until years later when I realized they were probably the ones who murdered my father.”

I wanted to be sympathetic. Dallas had been a good man, a brave soldier, and a devoted parent. But he had been corrupted by his addiction and had become a willing party to an armored car and bank heist that cost not only his life but also the life of the teller who had tried to foil the robbery by pushing shut the vault door. Now Trish’s single-minded obsession with vengeance might cost Clete Purcel his life, or at least a large chunk of it, and that simple fact seemed totally lost on her.

“Why not let Whitey and his pals fall in their own shit? It’s a matter of time before either the Feds or the locals take them down,” I said.

“You said Bruxal was friends with Meyer Lansky?”

“That’s right.”

“Did the system get Lansky?”

“He died of cancer.”

“When he was an old man. You’re a laugh a minute, Mr. Robicheaux.”

I banged on the door for the guard to let me out. I was determined to let Trish have the last word, to be humble enough to remember my own mistakes and not contend with the certainty and confidence of youth. But when I looked at the earnestness and ego-centered determination in her face, I saw a moth about to swim into a flame.

“You probably noticed the hack who brought you in here seemed out of joint,” I said.

“The hack?”

“The female correctional officer. She was held three days in a male prison riot and passed from hand to hand by guys psychiatrists haven’t found names for. She ended up in these guys’ hands because she thought she knew what was inside their heads and she could handle whatever came down the pike. Don’t ask her what they did to her, because she’s never told anyone, at least no one around here.”

I saw her fingers twitch on top of the table.

On the way back to Lafayette, I left a message with Betsy Mossbacher’s voice mail.