“That’s all fine, but right now I ain’t got a lot of selections, starting wit’ how I make a living.”
I handed him my business card with a name and telephone number I had already penciled on the back. “This is the name of the United States Attorney in Baton Rouge. He’s a friend of mine. You tell him you’re cooperating with the FBI, but you need some protection. You have that right. Because you have a sheet doesn’t mean you don’t have constitutional guarantees.”
“Yeah, we all be having constitutional guarantees, but that ain’t my way.”
“You know what ‘bruising the freight’ means?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s what happened to Slim Bruxal when he got busted today. He also got dumped in a cell with a couple of black guys who haven’t had a fresh bar of white soap in a while. Who do you think the Bruxal family is going to blame for all this?”
He sat down on the couch and looked at his feet. “They took my nine,” he said.
“Who?”
“Them FBI agents. They say ain’t nobody gonna bot’er me.”
I sat down on a wood chair across from him. I removed my business card from between his fingers and wrote two more telephone numbers on it, then handed it back to him. “If I’m not at the department, you can call me at my house or on my cell,” I said.
Outside, the willows along the bayou were bending in the breeze, an old man and a child were cane-fishing in the shade, a pretty countrywoman in a sunbonnet was hoeing out a vegetable garden, a strand of black hair curled on her cheek. I had a feeling these ordinary moments in the ordinary day of ordinary people were possessions that Monarch would soon pay a great deal to own.
“Them FBI agents want Bruxal to put up a kite on me, don’t they? Miss Helen sent you out here to warn me?”
I didn’t want to tell him that Helen had nothing to do with my visit. “You loaded their gun, podna. They’re just doing their job. They win, you lose. The question is how badly do you lose. Just don’t take things into your own hands. That’s why I gave you those phone numbers.”
I got up to go.
“You still interested in somebody who might have done a hit-and-run last year sometime?” he asked.
“What about it?”
“Friend of mine up the bayou got a li’l shop in his backyard. Last summer a man brung a big Buick in there wit’ the headlight knocked in and the right fender scratched up. Said he hit a deer. Said he heard my friend done real fine work and he didn’t feel like paying the Buick dealer a lot of money when my friend could do the job just as good.”
“Who was the guy?”
Monarch looked up at me and let his eyes hold on mine. “You gonna t’ink I set it up.”
“Who was it, Monarch?”
“Better go out to my friend’s place and ax him yourself.”
THE FRIEND’S AUTO REPAIR BUSINESS was conducted in a pole shed behind an ancient, rust-leaking trailer that sagged on cinder blocks, just outside St. Martinville. The sun was down in the sky now, red and dust-veiled above a line of live oaks on the opposite side of Bayou Teche. The air was breathless, the clouds crackling with electricity in the south. Monarch’s friend was one of the most unusual-looking human beings I had ever seen. He was an albino, with negroid features and gold hair and pink-tinted eyes, his entire body encased in long-sleeved coveralls zipped to the throat. He had been working next to a gas-fired forge. I couldn’t imagine what the temperature was like inside his clothes, but he grinned constantly just the same, as though a grin were the only expression he knew. He seemed delighted at my visit. I had the feeling he was one of those rare individuals who genuinely loves life and has no issue with the world or grievance against his fellow man, regardless of what they may have done or not done to him.
“Your name is Prospect Desmoreau?” I said.
“That’s me,” he said. But like every other mismatched element in his makeup, his accent didn’t fit. It was genuine peckerwood, a yeoman dialect that runs through the pine forests and plains from West Virginia into West Texas, one that probably goes back to the early days of the Republic. “Hep you with something?”
“Monarch Little said a man brought you a Buick last summer that had been damaged from a collision with a deer.”
“He sure did. I fixed it good as new, too.”
“Did this man act hinky to you?”
“No, suh.”
“What was this fellow’s name?”
Prospect Desmoreau looked at the wind ruffling the bayou, an amber blaze of late sunlight on its surface. But no matter where his eye traveled, he never stopped grinning. “Mr. Bello brought it in,” he said.
“Bellerophon Lujan?”
“Yes, suh. He give me a twenty-dollar tip.”
“Where was the damage?”
“Passenger-side fender, passenger-side headlight.”
“Did you see any material on the car body that indicated Mr. Bello hit a deer? Hair, a piece of antler embedded in the headlight?”
“Looked to me like somebody had already hosed it down and wiped it off. People do that sometimes when they plow into livestock and such. You looking for somebody done a hit-and-run on a pedestrian?”
“That pretty well sums it up, Prospect.”
“There was blood inside the headlight glass. I didn’t see no deer hair, though. Least none I remember. Don’t mean wasn’t none there.”
“There’s no way you saved the headlight glass, huh?” I said, putting my notebook back in my shirt pocket.
“You want to look at it?”
“Sir?”
“I got a pileful of trash and junk on the other side of the barn. ’Bout every two years I haul it to the dump. I know right where that glass is at, ’cause I seen it just the other day when I was hunting around in the pile for a radio speaker I pulled out of a ’fifty-five Chevy.”
“Broken glass with blood on it?”
“Yes, suh. It’s been under an old piece of tarp. I seen it.”
I stared at him stupidly. “Prospect, I think you’re a remarkable man,” I said.
“Women tell me that all the time.”
He dragged a large tangle of canvas off the pile, spilling a shower of wet pine needles and pooled water onto the ground. He lifted a jagged half-moon piece of broken glass from a circle of chrome molding. “Right there on the edge, you can still see the blood.”
I took a Ziploc bag from my back pocket and spread it open. “Just drop it right in there, partner. I need that molding, too. Is there anything else in here from Mr. Bello’s Buick?”
“No, suh, I don’t think so.”
“On another subject, how well do you know Monarch Little?”
“I taught him body-and-fender work. Taught him when he was knee-high to a tree frog.”
“Too bad he doesn’t make use of it.”
“Folks don’t always get to choose what they do,” he replied.
“You seem like a smarter man than that,” I said.
“His mama is at M.D. Anderson in Houston. She’s had every kind of cancer there is. Monarch ain’t tole you that?” he said, his pink-tinted eyes squinting in the sunlight.
I DROVE DIRECTLY to the Acadiana Crime Lab and logged in the evidence with Mack Bertrand. It was late and I could tell Mack was anxious to get home to supper and his wife and family. “What are you looking for on this?” he asked.
“A DNA match or an exclusion on Crustacean Man. ”
