The physical details vary, but the most unforgettable image in any homicide is the stark sense of violation and theft and utter helplessness in the victim’s face. I knew all these things before I rounded the corner of the shed. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. I stepped backward, a handkerchief pressed to my mouth, the victim’s remains glistening in the beam of my flashlight.
The murder weapon was undoubtedly a shotgun, discharged within inches of the face, the shells probably loaded with double-aught bucks. The victim’s right jaw had been blown away, exposing his teeth and tongue. His skullcap had been splattered on the shed wall in a spray of white bone and brain matter. The shooter had put at least one round into the victim’s stomach, virtually disemboweling him. Feral dogs had done the rest. A chrome- plated.25-caliber automatic lay amid a network of dandelions, just beyond the tips of the victim’s right hand. In the distance, I saw the flashers of emergency vehicles coming hard down the road.
I went back to my truck and pulled on a pair of polyethylene gloves and stuck three Ziploc bags in my back pocket, although I would have to wait for the crime scene photographer to be done before I picked up any evidence.
“Got any idea who he is?” Top asked.
I didn’t answer.
“Streak?” he said.
“I’m not sure, Top,” I said.
But it was hard to ignore the victim’s Ralph Lauren shirt, his girlish hips, and his curly brown hair, sun- bleached on the tips, probably by many hours on a tennis court. I squatted down next to him and eased his wallet out of his back pocket, swiping at a cloud of gnats in my face.
The wallet was fat with a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. I slipped the driver’s license out of a leather slot for plastic cards and shined my light on it. Then I realized I had almost stepped on two twelve-gauge shell casings that lay just behind me, perhaps five feet out from the shed wall. I rose from the ground and kept my face turned into the breeze, away from the odor that caused my nostrils to clench up each time I breathed it. Helen Soileau and Koko Hebert were walking toward me through the grass.
“You ID the vic?” Helen said.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice thick.
Koko shined his light on the body. “We’ll need a front-end loader to get the guy into a bag,” he said.
Helen’s eyes stayed fastened on my face.
I handed her Tony Lujan’s driver’s license. Blood from his wounds had seeped into his wallet and dried on his photograph. “I’ll make the family notification, but I want backup when I do it,” I said.
Chapter 11
EARLIER THAT EVENING I had tried to get Monarch Little kicked loose on a weapons charge that in all probability would never have gone to trial, since the cut-down shotgun had been seized from his vehicle when he was not anywhere near it. My failure to get Monarch back on the street would probably remain the kindest deed I ever did for him.
People handle grief in different ways. I once looked into the eyes of a Vietnamese woman and realized that sorrow can sometimes possess a depth that goes deeper than the bottom of one’s soul. I knew if I looked too long into this woman’s eyes, I would drown in their luminosity and silence and lose the sunlight in my own life.
I believe Bello’s sorrow was as great as that Vietnamese woman’s, and I was almost thankful that as a primitive and ignorant man, he chose to channel it into rage and threats of violence against others, because then I didn’t have to look into his eyes and see the depth of his loss.
He had met us at his front door, in a crimson robe and house slippers, a bowl of ice cream and blueberries in his hand. He looked at Helen and me and the two uniformed deputies with us and at the flasher lights pulsing on our vehicles, and I saw his jaw tighten and his nostrils swell with air. A college-age girl sat on the sofa behind him. She was the same person I had seen when I had first interviewed Tony Lujan at his house.
“What’s happened to my boy?” Bello said.
“Can we come in?” I said.
“No, you tell me where my boy is,” he replied.
“There’s been a shooting out by the Boom Boom Room,” I said. “We don’t have a positive ID yet, but Tony’s wallet and driver’s license and credit cards were on the body. We’re very sorry to tell you this, but we’re pretty sure the victim is your son.” Then I waited.
He set the bowl of ice cream on a stand by the door. “You get the fucking collard greens out of your mouth. What do you mean you found his wallet but you ain’t sure about a positive ID?”
Bugs were swimming in the yellow glow of the porch light. The breeze had died and my clothes felt like damp burlap on my skin.
“The victim was killed with a shotgun. Positive ID will have to be made with fingerprints,” I said.
I could see his face crinkling up, his bottom lip trembling. The girl rose from the sofa and placed her hand on his shoulder. She was slim and attractive, not more than twenty, with a narrow face, like a model’s, and shiny chestnut hair that hung to her shoulders. “Maybe you ought to ask them to come in, Mr. Bello,” she said.
Instead, he knotted my shirt in his fist. “It was that nigger, wasn’t it? Tell me the troot, or I’ll knock your fucking head into the driveway,” he said.
“You’ll release me or go to jail,” I said.
But he twisted the fabric of my shirt tighter in his hand, at the same time pushing me out into the darkness. “That nigger killed my boy. You motherfuckers wouldn’t do anything about him, and now he’s killed my boy,” he said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Helen gesture at the two uniformed deputies. They were both big men who had been roughnecks on offshore oil rigs before they became police officers. But it took all of us, including Helen, to cuff Bello and get him in the backseat of a cruiser. When we closed the door on him, he broke out the window with his head and spit on me.
Helen took a section of paper towel from a roll on the seat of her cruiser and cleaned the spittle off my sleeve and wrist and back. She crumpled the towel and threw it in Bello ’s face. Then she stared down at him through the broken window, her hands on her hips, her fingers touching her slapjack. “We all grieve for your loss, Mr. Lujan, but everybody here is fed up with your abuse. You either act like a sensible human being or I’ll pull the cuffs off you myself and beat the living shit out of you. Look into my face and tell me I won’t do it.”
He glared up at her, rheumy-eyed, his jaws unshaved, his face aged by ten years in the last ten minutes. “Y’all ain’t understood me. The nigger called. He set my boy up.”
“What?” Helen said.
“Ax Lydia up there on the porch. The nigger talked to her. He drove away to meet him.”
“Who drove away?” I said.
“Tony. My son drove away to meet that nigger, Monarch Little.”
Helen and I looked at each other. I walked back under the porch light. “You’re Lydia?” I said to the girl standing there.
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
“Let’s go inside.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“I didn’t say you had. Who else is here?”
“Mrs. Lujan. She’s upstairs.”
I left the door slightly ajar, so it wouldn’t lock Helen out. Although I had been in the Lujan home briefly once before, I hadn’t taken adequate note of its design and decor and the contradictions they suggested. The floors were maple that glowed with a honeylike radiance, the molding and window frames done with fine-grained recovered cypress that was probably two hundred years old. The rugs were an immaculate white, the couches made of soft leather that was the color of elephant hide. A lighted crystal chandelier hung over a mahogany table in the dining room, a silver bowl filled with water and floating camellias in the center. It was hard to believe that this was the home of Bello Lujan.
