“Yes, suh.”
“Who shot him up?”
“Himself. Monarch still a king. Don’t matter what people do to him. He was born a king.”
I opened my cell phone and called for an ambulance. While I was talking I heard Sno’ball pour a sack of ice into the tub.
“Did Herman give him the dope?” I said.
She pursed her lips and made a twisting motion in front of them, as though she were locking them with a key. “Bust me if you want. But I stayed wit’ him. You want to talk to Herman, Herman ain’t here. Herman ain’t never here. Y’all don’t like this house, Mr. Dave, burn it down. But don’t pretend y’all don’t know what goes on here.”
“What time did Monarch get here?”
“Eight-t’irty.”
“You’re sure. It wasn’t earlier, it wasn’t later?”
“I just tole you.”
Ten minutes later Acadian Ambulance pulled Monarch out of the tub and loaded him onto a gurney. I walked with them to the back of the ambulance. Monarch’s eyelids suddenly clicked open, just like a doll’s. “What’s happening, Mr. Dee?” he said.
“Your soul just took an exploratory ride over the abyss,” I replied.
“Say again?”
“If you die, I’m going to kick your butt,” I said.
“You’re an unforgiving man,” he said.
I pulled one of his tennis shoes off his foot.
“What you doing?” he said.
I watched them drive away with him. Monarch’s tennis shoe felt sodden and cold and big in my hand. It was a size twelve, larger, I was sure, than the imprints stenciled on the concrete pad in Bello Lujan’s stable. “Tell me again, Sno’ball. What time did Monarch get here?” I said.
“It was eight-t’irty. Some guys dropped him off on the corner. They’d been drinking. I know the time, ’cause I looked at my watch and wondered why Monarch was drinking so early in the morning. He come walking down the street and I axed him that. He said his mama died and would I tie him off.”
“You shot him up?”
“No, Monarch is my friend. And I ain’t gonna say no mo’ ’bout it.”
So the combination shooting gallery and crack house would not be an alibi for Monarch Little. But for all practical purposes, the size of his huge pancakelike feet and his obvious grief over his mother’s death had eliminated him as a viable suspect in the homicide of Bellerophon Lujan.
“Am I going down on this, Mr. Dave?” Sno’ball asked.
“Don’t let me catch you near this house again.”
“Herman ain’t big on the word ‘no.’”
“Tell Herman that of this day he has a bull’s-eye tattooed on his forehead.”
She laughed to herself, looking down the street at the grocery store and a skinny kid trying to pick up Monarch’s weight set. The sun was just breaking out of the mist, shining through the tree over the kid’s head.
“You eat lunch with cops?” I asked.
She fixed her hair with one hand. “If they paying,” she said.
We drove to Bon Creole, way out on St. Peter’s Street, and had po’boy sandwiches, then I drove her back into New Iberia’s inner city and left her on a street corner used by both pimps and dealers. It was a strange place to deliver a young woman who I believed to be a basically decent and loyal human being. But it was the world to which she belonged, and for those who lived in its maw, its abnormality was simply a matter of perception.