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.
I should have been happy with all the gifts I had. Actually, I was, more than I can describe. But I had figured out a way to pay back Whitey Bruxal for Opa-Locka, Florida, and the slate was about to get wiped clean, one way or another.
Chapter 20
THE BRUXAL HOME looked like it had been airlifted from Boca Raton and dropped from a high altitude onto a rolling stretch of white-railed horse country fifteen miles north of Lafayette. It was three stories, built in a staggered fashion of pink stucco, with a tile roof and heavy oak doors and scrolled-iron balconies. In the side yard was a turquoise pool surrounded by banana trees, trellises heavy with trumpet vine, potted palms, and the overhang of giant live oaks. Immaculate automobiles that could not have cost less than seventy thousand dollars were parked in the driveway and the porte cochere, almost as though they had been posed for a photographic display demonstrating the munificence of a free-market system that was available to rich and poor alike.
Beyond the barn a red Morgan, a mare, galloped in a field. I thought of the winged horse emblazoned on the T-shirt worn by Yvonne Darbonne the day she died. I thought of her young life destroyed by rape at the hands of Bellerophon Lujan, and I thought of the boys who had gangbanged her in a fraternity house when she was stoned, and I thought of the innocent people all over the world who suffer because of the greed and selfishness of the few.
These were not good thoughts to entertain as I pulled an unmarked departmental car next to the SUV Slim Bruxal had driven the afternoon he busted up Monarch Little at the McDonald’s on East Main in New Iberia.
I had called Whitey earlier, at his office, and had asked to see him. Most criminals of his background would have hung up or told me to talk to their attorney. But Whitey was an intelligent man and had done the unexpected, inviting me to his home at lunchtime. If I was to have any degree of success with him, I needed to empty my mind of all residual anger about him and his friends, even my conviction that they had murdered Dallas Klein, and concentrate on one objective only, and that was to leave in Whitey’s head a tangle of snakes that would eat him alive.
When he opened the door, he stepped out on the porch and looked in the yard, virtually ignoring my presence. “You seen the gardener?”
“No,” I said blankly.
“That’s all right. Come on in. I got this new gardener. He chopped up the hose in the lawn mower. What are you gonna do? People don’t want to work for a living anymore.”
I had to hand it to him. Dressed in white slacks and a black short-sleeved shirt with a silver monogram on the pocket, his white hair clipped and neatly combed, he was the image of an athletic, self-confident man in his prime. The fact I had stomped the shit out of his right-hand man seemed inconsequential to him. He hit me on the shoulder and told me to come into the living room with him.
“So what’s on your mind?” he said, walking ahead of me.
“I’ve got a dilemma,” I said.
“Yeah?” he replied, sitting down in a chair upholstered in red velvet.
Through the front window I could see the driveway, a big live oak in the yard, and the four-lane highway that led to Opelousas. “The Iberia Parish D.A. is an ambitious guy. He wants to wrap up Tony Lujan’s homicide and maybe make a lot of black voters happy at the same time. Get my drift?”
“No, I don’t get your drift.”
“Monarch Little skates. Your boy takes the bounce. I don’t know if Lonnie is going to ask for the needle or not.”
“Say that again.”
“Lonnie Marceaux wants to be governor or a United States senator. He’s not going to get there by convicting a black dirtbag nobody cares about. Lonnie wants to screw you, Mr. Bruxal. By screwing you, he can also bring down Colin Alridge. That will buy him the national attention he needs.”
“Call me Whitey. Slim didn’t kill Tony. Tony was his friend. Where you get off with this?”
“Tony was going to give up Slim on the hit-and-run death of the homeless man. There’s another theory about Slim’s motivation as well.”
“Theories are like skid marks on the bowl. Everybody’s got them. I think you’re here to squeeze my balls.”
I glanced out the window at the highway, then grinned at him. “You’re not going to own anything to squeeze, Whitey,” I said.
For the first time his brow wrinkled.
“The Feds have you and Bellerophon Lujan on racketeering charges. Lonnie wants a piece of you, too. That’s where your son comes in,” I said. “Second in line does the time. From Lonnie’s perspective, your ass is grass.”
“You saying Bello is rolling over on me?”
“I’m saying it’s a done deal. Come on, you’re a smart man. Bello ’s a coonass, born and bred in South Louisiana. You’re from Brooklyn. People here think New York is a place where homosexuals go to get married and every other woman has an abortion.”
“Why you keep looking out the window?”
I ignored his question. “This is the short version. They’re about to freeze your assets. As you probably know, a RICO conviction will allow the Feds to seize everything you own. In the meantime, you’ve got other issues and other enemies to deal with.”
“Issues? I don’t like that word. Everybody is always talking about issues.” Then, paradoxically, he said, “What issues? What enemies?”
He saw me looking out the window again, this time at a vintage Cadillac convertible with a fresh pink paint job coming up the driveway from the four-lane. “Who’s that guy?” he said.
“He does scut work for us. I told him I’d be here. You mind?”
“What’s his name?”
“Clete Purcel.”
“That fat guy is Purcel? Yeah, I do mind. His squeeze is this Trish Klein broad. What are you guys working
