Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

“You’re a rough bunch.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said.

Then I saw a look in her face that every veteran police officer recognizes. It was the look of a cop out of sync with her peers, her supervisors, and the political and bureaucratic obligations that had been dropped on her. There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear.

“I talked with Monarch Little last night,” I said. “He admitted he called Tony Lujan and tried to shake him down just before Tony was killed. They were supposed to meet out by the Boom Boom Room, but Monarch claims he decided not to go.”

“So?” she said.

“I believe him. I think Monarch is an innocent man.”

She bit off a piece of her thumbnail and looked down the street. “Who do you think did it?”

“Right now I’d bet money on Slim Bruxal.”

“Could be,” she said. “Tell Purcel to keep his wick dry and stay away from casinos. One other thing—”

“I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“I talked to the sheriff before I came over here. She seems to be very protective toward you. I’d thank my stars I had a boss like that.”

I decided not to comment on her ongoing inventory of my personal life. I wrote my cell number on a slip of paper and handed it to her. “Call me with anything you get on Trish Klein. I’ll do the same,” I said.

“I hope you’re telling me the truth.”

“I don’t want to offend you, but I think you should give some serious thought to the way you talk to other people, Agent Mossbacher.”

“No shit?” she replied.

After she stuck my number in her shirt pocket, she backed into my garbage can and mashed it between her bumper and an oak tree. “Oh jeez, I can’t believe I did this again,” she said, twisting the steering wheel, bouncing over the curb in a shuddering scrape of steel against concrete.

I was convinced they grew them special in Chugwater, Wyoming.

ON SUNDAY, Molly and I went to Mass at the university chapel in Lafayette, then ate deep-fried crawfish at Foti’s in St. Martinville and took an airboat ride on Lake Martin. It was a wonderful afternoon. The lake was wide, the water high from the storm, the shoreline bordered with flooded cypress and willow trees whose leaves riffled in the breeze. Strapped into the elevated seats on the airboat, roaring across the lily pads, ear protectors clamped down on our heads, we had an extraordinary view of the Edenic loveliness that at one time characterized all of Louisiana. Each time the airboat tilted into a turn or swerved across a slough that was little more than wet sand, Molly hugged my arm like a teenage girl on a carnival ride.

But I couldn’t get my mind off my conversation with Betsy Mossbacher. Obviously she had learned through a phone tap that Whitey Bruxal believed he was about to be taken down by the daughter of a man he had ordered killed. It was probably true he had ice water in his veins; indeed, he had probably been respected for his intelligence and mathematical talents by Meyer Lansky, the financial wizard of the Mob. But I believed that Whitey, like his mentors in Brooklyn and Miami, was driven by avarice, and like any man addicted to the love of money, his greatest and most abiding fear was not the loss of his life or even his soul.

“What are you thinking about?” Molly asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

We were walking from the airboat landing to her car. The sun hung just above a line of willow trees on the far side of the lake, and a long, segmented line of black geese wended its way across it. Molly took my hand in hers. “You still thinking about that incident the other night?” she said.

“A little bit.”

“You took Communion, didn’t you?”

“I was drunk when my friend Dallas Klein died. If I hadn’t been drinking, I could have taken a couple of those guys out.”

“Let the past go, Dave.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“What doesn’t?”

“We’re the sum total of what we’ve done and where we’ve been. I still see Dallas’s face in my sleep. It’s no accident Whitey Bruxal ended up here,” I replied.

I saw a look of sadness come into her eyes that I would have cut off my fingers to remove.