Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

“I need to ask you where you were early this morning,” I said.

His eyes lifted into mine with an acuity and sense of recognition I never want to see in a man’s face again. “You t’ink I’m the one done that to Bello Lujan?” he said.

“You know about his death?”

“It was on the radio.” He set the coffee in front of me, his eyes riveted on mine.

“We have to exclude people, sir. It’s part of our procedure. Our questions shouldn’t be interpreted as accusations,” I said, using the first-person plural in a way that made me wonder about my own principles.

“I went to the Winn-Dixie at sunup. I got gas in my truck down by the drawbridge. I had a flat out yonder in the road and changed my tire right by the mill gate.”

He sat down across from me, his pale turquoise eyes never leaving mine. Not one strand of his silver hair was out of place; his skin had hardly a wrinkle or imperfection in it, except for the scars on his left forearm and the back of his hand. But the level of indignation in his eyes was like the edge of another personality asserting itself, one that was not given to latitude in its dealings with others.

I took his daughter’s diary out of the envelope and set it in front of him. “Violent and evil men took my wife Annie from me, Mr. Darbonne. The same kind of cruel men murdered my mother. But as bad as my losses have been, I think the greatest suffering any human being can experience is the loss of a child. But I have a job to do, and in this case it’s to exclude you as a suspect in the homicide of Bello Lujan.”

I removed a ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket and set it on top of the brown envelope and pushed them toward him. “Now, I need you to write down the names of the people who saw you this morning and the approximate times their sighting of you or their conversation with you took place. If you don’t know a person’s name, just describe what he or she does at the location the person saw you.”

He pushed the envelope and pen back toward me. “Why I want to hurt Bello Lujan, me?” he said.

If there was to be a moment of truth in this investigation, I thought, it was now. “There’s a possibility Bello attacked your daughter on the day of her death,” I said.

He canted his head to one side and tilted up his chin, as though a cold draft had touched his skin. His mouth parted and the color in his eyes seemed to darken. He placed both his hands on the tabletop. “Bello Lujan raped Yvonne?” he said.

“It’s a strong possibility.”

“And that’s why she took them drugs?”

“Yes, sir, I think that may well have been the case.”

He stared into space, one hand resting on top of Yvonne’s diary. “Why ain’t nobody tole me this?”

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“What Bello did or didn’t do the day of Yvonne’s death is still a matter of speculation, Mr. Darbonne.”

“If I’d knowed this—”

I waited for him to finish his statement, but he didn’t. “You would have killed him?” I said.

He didn’t reply. He took back the pen and brown envelope and began to write, listing the places where he had been that morning and the time period he was there and the people who had seen him.

“Do you own a pick?” I said.

“I got one out in the shed. I brought it from the farm I used to own.”

“Let’s take a look at it,” I said.

We went outside, in the rain, with pieces of newspaper over our heads, and walked down the slope of his yard to an old army surplus radio hut where he kept his tools. He unlocked the door and clicked on a light. Like his home, everything was squared away, his nails in capped jars on his workbench, his tools oiled and sharpened and hung in rows on the walls, his paint cans and petrochemical containers arrayed neatly on a polyethylene tarp so they wouldn’t form rings on the floor.

“My pick ain’t here,” he said.

“I see. Could it be somewhere else?”

“No, suh. I hang it between them two nails. It’s been hanging there since last spring, when Yvonne and me put in a vegetable garden.”

“Does anyone else have a key to the shed?”

“No, suh.”