Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

Don’t contend, don’t argue, I heard a voice say inside me. “How did the civil preparedness meeting go?” I asked.

She had not expected my response. She tilted her head sideways, almost looking at me in a new way, her eyes taking on a strange lavender cast that was both sensual and curious, as though I were of romantic interest to her. I felt my cheeks color.

“We toured the levees. A one-hundred-sixty-mile- an-hour storm will turn New Orleans into a bowlful of oil and black sand,” she said. She squeezed my shoulder and looked me in the face. “No matter how this plays out, Streak, I don’t want you beating up on yourself anymore. Even though I yell at you sometimes, you’re one of the best people I’ve ever known.”

I SPENT THE NEXT HALF HOUR cleaning out paperwork from my intake basket, putting off an inevitable stage in the investigation that I was not looking forward to. Finally I picked up the phone and called Cesaire Darbonne at his home. How do you tell a father whose daughter has died of a gunshot wound in his driveway that he is a possible suspect in a homicide? As Mack Bertrand said, how much grief does one man need?

“This is Dave Robicheaux, Mr. Darbonne,” I said. “I’d like to return your daughter’s diary if you’re going to be home this afternoon.”

“I got to go to the grocery store, but if I’m not home, I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

“I’d rather give it to you in person.”

“Yes, suh, ’bout an hour from now okay?”

“I’ll see you then. Thanks for your goodwill, Mr. Darbonne,” I said.

I eased the receiver back into the cradle, a terrible sense of discomfort seizing my chest. Oftentimes in an investigation involving a violent crime, when the degree of injury and the desire for revenge can last a lifetime, what people do not say is more important than what they do say. Rape victims want to see the perpetrator’s nails ripped out. Relatives of homicide victims, regardless of their religious principles, struggle a lifetime with their anger and desire for revenge, even after the perpetrator is dead, almost as though his specter has taken up residence in their homes.

Cesaire Darbonne had not inquired about any new details we may have discovered regarding his daughter’s death. Even though the fatal shooting of Yvonne Darbonne had gone down as a suicide, wouldn’t the father have asked if I had learned who drove her home on that terrible day, who had given her the gun, who had filled her young body with drugs and booze? I tried to think of an explanation for his lack of curiosity. I didn’t want to think the thoughts I was thinking.

I called Mack at the lab. “How well do you know Cesaire Darbonne?” I said.

“He’s a distant cousin of my wife. Why?”

“I just talked with him. He showed no apparent interest in any details we might have discovered about his daughter’s death.”

“He’s a simple man, Dave. For a guy like Cesaire, the government is an abstraction. He lost his livelihood as a sugar farmer because of decisions somebody made in Washington. He said if he hadn’t been looking for work the day his daughter died, he would have been home to take care of her. I suspect he feels like a windstorm blew through his life and flattened everything around him.”

“Have you ever known him to be violent or vengeful?”

“He used to run a bar. About fifteen years ago, a couple of black guys tried to rob him. I think Cesaire fired a gun in the air and chased them off. I don’t know if you’d call that violence or not.”

“Thanks, Mack.”

After I hung up I removed Yvonne Darbonne’s diary from my desk drawer and read again through the entries that alluded to her love affair with the unnamed young man who had “cheeks red as apples.” One passage in particular seemed to speak worlds about both the nature of their relationship and the poetic soul of the Cajun girl who waited tables at Victor’s and dreamed of studying journalism at the university in Lafayette. She had written of a female seducer and an unwilling boy finally submitting on a bed of “blue-veined violets.” Then there were two quoted lines that suggested benign domination but domination nonetheless:

Hot, faint, and weary with her hard embracing, Like a wild bird being tamed with too much handling.

I had read them before, but I couldn’t remember where. I punched in a Google search on the department’s computer and came up with Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis.

What did it all mean? Probably nothing of an evidentiary nature, but it did lend further credibility to the fact that Tony Lujan had homoerotic tendencies and they accounted in part for his dependent relationship with Slim Bruxal.

I placed the diary in a brown mailing envelope and signed out a cruiser.

It had started to rain again when I drove up the Teche on the broken two-lane back road that led past the sugar mill. The mill was as big as a mountain against the sky, gray and strung with wisps of smoke. Down below, across the road, the community of dull green frame houses by the bayou glistened in the rain, their dirt yards as shiny and hard-looking as old bone. I parked in Cesaire Darbonne’s driveway and tapped on his front door. Through the screen I could see him drinking coffee in his kitchen, a radio playing on a shelf, his eyes staring out the back window at the rain falling on the bayou.

He walked to the front door, his eyes showing neither interest nor apprehension at my presence on his small gallery. When he unlatched the screen, I saw the chain of heart-shaped scars wrapped across the back of his left hand and around his forearm. “Would you like to have some coffee wit’ me, Mr. Robicheaux?” he asked.

“I’d appreciate that,” I replied.

He walked ahead of me into the kitchen. The interior of his home was spotless, the furniture free of dust, his dishes in a plastic rack by the sink, the kitchen linoleum drying from a recent mopping.

“I used to fix coffee and cinnamon toast every afternoon at t’ree when Yvonne was going to school,” he said. “I don’t fix cinnamon toast no more, but I still drink coffee every day at t’ree o’clock. I drip it one tablespoon at a time, just like my daddy done.”

I sat at his kitchen table and placed Yvonne’s diary, still inside the brown envelope, on top of the table while he prepared coffee and hot milk for me at the drainboard. I could feel sweat start to break on my forehead. I did not want to hurt this man.

He walked toward me, the spoon jiggling slightly in the saucer, his eyes concentrated on not spilling the coffee.