“Disassociating themselves from Raguza and at the same time pointing him in my direction.”
She seemed to think about what I had said, her eyes wandering around the room. But that wasn’t it. “We’re anybody’s punch,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Every corrupt enterprise in the country ends up here. They fuck us with a Roto-Rooter and make us like them for it.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Anybody with a checkbook.” Then she blew out her breath. “What’s the status on Cesaire Darbonne?”
“He’s getting printed as we speak.”
YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE IN SOMETHING. Everyone does. Even atheists believe in their unbelief. If they didn’t, they’d go mad. The misanthrope believes in his hatred of his fellow man. The gambler believes he’s omniscient and that his knowledge of the future is proof he is loved by God. The middle-income person who spends enormous amounts of time window-shopping and sorting through used clothing at garage sales is indicating that our goods will never be ashes blowing across the grave. I suspect the drunkard believes his own self-destruction is the penance required for his acceptability in the eyes of his Creator. The adherents of Saint Francis see divinity in the faces of the poor and oppressed but take no notice of the Byzantine fire surrounding themselves. The commonality of all the aforementioned lies in the frailty of their moral vision. It i
s also what makes them human.
Most cops and newspeople, usually at midpoint in their careers, come to a terrible realization about themselves, namely, that they are in danger of becoming like the jaundiced and embittered individuals they had always pitied as aberrations or anachronisms in their profession. But when people lie to you on a daily basis, when you watch zoning boards sell out whole neighborhoods to porn vendors and massage parlor owners, when you see the most expensive attorneys in the country labor on behalf of murderers and drug lords, when you investigate instances of child abuse so grievous your entire belief system is called into question, you have to reexamine your own life and perspective in ways we normally reserve for saints.
At that moment you either reaffirm your belief in justice and protection of the innocent or you do not. But unlike the metaphysician, you do not arrive at your faith through the use of syllogism or abstraction. You often rediscover your faith by taking up the cause of one individual, one innocent person who you believe deserves justice and the full protection of the law. If you can accomplish this, the rest of it doesn’t seem to matter so much.
I wanted to believe in Cesaire Darbonne. Like many cane farmers in South Louisiana, he had been driven under by a trade agreement allowing the importation of massive amounts of cheap sugar into the United States. The French-speaking provincial world he had grown up in, one of serpentine bayous and endless fields of green cane bending in a Gulf breeze, was becoming urbanized and overlaid with subdivisions and strip malls. But the greatest tragedy in his life was one he could have never foreseen.
His daughter, like mine, seemed to have possessed all the innocence and love and goodness that every father wishes for in his child. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, can understand the level of pain and loss and rage a father experiences when he wakes each day with the knowledge that his daughter has been raped or murdered. The images of her fate haunt him throughout his waking hours and into his sleep, and the thoughts he has about her tormentors are of a kind he never shares with anyone, lest he be considered perverse and pathological himself.
At 2:15 p.m. Mack Bertrand rang my extension. “It’s a match,” he said.
“Don’t tell me that,” I said.
“Cesaire’s prints are all over it. What else you want me to say? Didn’t you say his pick was missing from his toolshed? It’s obviously his.”
“The guy doesn’t need this,” I said. “Look, Mack, the motive isn’t there. I’m convinced he didn’t know Bello raped his daughter.”
“How can you be sure?”
“He was stunned when I told him.”
“Maybe that’s just the impression you had. You’re a sympathetic soul, Dave. Valerie Lujan hated her husband. She wouldn’t have been above passing on the information to Cesaire.”
“No, Mr. Darbonne looked like he’d been poleaxed. Maybe he killed Bello, but it wasn’t because he knew Bello attacked his daughter.”
“Good luck with it.”
“With what?” I asked.
“This case. It’s like trying to get cobweb out of your hair, isn’t it?” he said.
I BROUGHT HELEN up to the minute, then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to verify Cesaire Darbonne’s alibi. A clerk remembered seeing him at the Winn-Dixie and so did the clerk at the gas station by the drawbridge. But the preponderance of his alibi rested on his claim that he had changed a flat by the sugar mill entrance, and unfortunately none of the security people at the mill could recall seeing him. Cesaire had another problem as well. Bello Lujan’s horse farm was less than fifteen minutes’ drive from Cesaire’s house. Cesaire could have visited the Winn-Dixie, bought gas, changed a flat tire, and still had time and opportunity to murder Bello.
I returned to the office just before 5 p.m.
“You want to get a warrant?” Helen said.
“Not yet,” I replied.
“I think Cesaire is looking more and more like our boy,” she said.
“It’s too pat. The murder weapon was left a few feet from the body with Darbonne’s fingerprints all over it. But Mack Bertrand believes the last guy who handled the pick was wearing gloves. Why would Darbonne wear gloves, then drop his own pick at the crime scene with his fingerprints on it?”