Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

“We’re back to Whitey Bruxal?”

“Maybe.”

“But Bruxal couldn’t hang a frame on Cesaire Darbonne unless he knew Darbonne had motivation, in other words knowledge that his daughter was attacked by Bello. Which doesn’t seem to be the case. I think Bruxal is out of the picture. What bwana say now?”

She had me.

JUST AS I WAS ABOUT TO LEAVE the department for the day, I got a call from Koko Hebert.

“I’ve got scrapings from under Bello’s fingernails,” he said. “He either had a real good piece of ass before he died or he fought with his attacker.”

“Koko, if you still feel a need to prove you’re offensive and obnoxious, I want to set your mind at ease. You don’t have to carry that burden anymore. You’ve assured everybody in the department you’re the real article.”

“Fuck you,” he said. “Pending lab analysis, I’d say the skin tissue came from a person of color. Normally we can’t tell race by looking at tissue scrapings, because it dries out quickly and becomes visually indistinguishable from the victim’s. But Bello got a roll of it under two of his fingernails and they look like they came off a black person. Gender is another matter. We’ve got to go to a lab in Florida for that. Because Bello probably porked half the black girls in this parish, I’m not sure if my tissue scrapings will be relevant. Sort that out, Robicheaux, then give me a call if you need more explanation.”

You didn’t trade shots with Koko Hebert unless you were willing to take a heavy load of shrapnel.

I WENT HOME and had a light supper with Molly, then drove up the bayou in the sunset to Loreauville and Bello Lujan’s stable. The fields were green and sweet-smelling, the clumps of oaks along the road pulsing with birds. The crime scene tape flickered and bounced in the wind. I walked behind the stable and looked at the spot where Mack had found the murder weapon, then studied the breadth of the field where the killer had run toward the steel back fence. What had I missed? Not just here, but in all the interviews involving Yvonne Darbonne and Monarch Little and Slim Bruxal and Crustacean Man and Tony and Bello Lujan. The key glimmered on the edge of my vision, like a shard of memory you take with you from a dream. It lay in an insignificant remark, an oblique reference that I had passed over, a piece of physical evidence that was like a grain of sand on a beach. But what?

On the other side of the steel fence, two little boys and a girl, all of them black, were flying a kite emblazoned with the American flag. The girl, who was not over eight or nine, was holding the kite string. They had made a fort of propped-up plywood inside a stand of persimmon trees and inside the walls had spread a blanket on the ground. A box of snack crackers, a plastic pitcher of what looked like Kool-Aid, three candy bars, and a can of tuna had been dumped out of a grocery bag onto the blanket.

“You guys doin’ all right?” I said.

“We’re camping out, least till dark,” one of the boys said.

“Y’all weren’t out here early this morning, were you?”

“No, suh,” the same boy said.

“That’s a fine fort you’ve got there,” I said.

“Yes, suh,” the same boy said.

His eyes left my face and looked up at the kite popping against the sky. The other boy seemed to concentrate unduly on the kite as well. The girl had wrapped the string around her wrist and was making a game of pulling on the string and releasing it, so that the kite rose, then sagged and rose again in the sunset. She wore elastic-waisted jeans and pink tennis shoes and a white blouse with tiny flowers printed on it. She had big brown eyes and pigtails and a round face and skin that was as dark and shiny as chocolate. Her expression was a study in innocence.

“You guys didn’t go inside that yellow tape on the stable, did you?” I said.

No one answered.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

“Chereen,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Dave Robicheaux. I’m a police officer. Did y’all see anybody run across this field early this morning?”

“We wasn’t out here,” she replied.

“But later maybe you guys went over to see what was going on?”

They looked at one another, then at the birds freckling the sky.

“Y’all sure you don’t want to tell me something?” I said.

“Want some crackers and Kool-Aid?” the girl said.

“Thanks just the same. Don’t you guys go on the other side of that yellow tape, okay?”

“No, suh, we ain’t. Gonna stay right here, outside the fence.”