“Lost in thought?” Molly said.
“The deaths of Crustacean Man, Yvonne Darbonne, and Tony Lujan are all related. But I don’t know if any one of those cases will ever be solved.”
“Time’s on your side.”
“How?”
“Down the line, everybody pays his tab,” she said.
“I’m not always so sure about that.”
“Yes, you are.”
“How you know?” I asked.
“Because you’re a believer. Because you can’t change what you are, no matter what you say about yourself.”
“Is that right?” I said.
“I don’t hang around with the B team, troop,” she said.
Five minutes later, the phone rang. It was Wally, our dispatcher. “Got a nine-one-one from Bello Lujan’s wife. She said the black man who works for her went out to the stable and found Bello on the flo’, inside the stall. She said a horse kicked him. We got Acadian Ambulance on the way.”
“Why’d you call me?”
“’Cause Miz Lujan sounded like my wife does when she tells me to get a dead rat out from under the house. I don’t trust that woman.”
“Keep me updated, will you?”
“Why is it every time I call you I seem to say the wrong t’ing? The problem must be me.”
Just before I went out the door, the phone rang again. “Here’s your update. Acadian Ambulance just called. Ole Bello won’t be posing wit’ the roses for a while. Helen went to New Orleans, so you want to take over t’ings?” he said.
“Will you get the crackers out of your mouth?”
“If the guy blew his nose, his brains would be in the handkerchief. That’s the way the paramedic put it. He says it wasn’t done by no horse, eit’er. That clear enough?”
THE EMERGENCY VEHICLES parked by Bello’s stable still had their flashers on, rippling with blue, red, and white light inside the mist. I stooped under the crime scene tape and walked down the concrete pad that separated two rows of twelve-by-twelve stalls. Koko Hebert was already on the job-gloved, furrow-browed, morose, his gelatinous girth like curtains of fat hanging on a deboned elephant. In the gloom of the stable he kept turning his attention from the stall to the sliding back doors, both of which were pushed back on their tracks. Out in the pasture, a sorrel mare was eating in the grass, one walleye looking back at the stable.
Bello Lujan lay on his left side in the stall. The floor of the stall was comprised of dirt and sand, overlaid with a layer of straw. The wound in the back of Bello ’s skull was deep and tapered and had bled out in a thick pool on the straw. His eyes were open and staring, his face empty of expression, in fact, possessed of a serenity that didn’t fit the level of violence that had been done to his person. A bucket of molasses balls was overturned in the corner of the stall. I suspected he never saw his assailant and perhaps, with luck, he had not suffered, either.
“You got a weapon?” I said.
“It’s outside, in the weeds. A pick with a sawed-off handle. The black guy who found him says the chain was down on the stall and the sorrel was out,” Koko said. “There’re some tennis-shoe impressions on the concrete. Watch where you walk.”
“How do you read it?” I asked.
“ Bello went into the stall with the mare and somebody came up behind him and put it to him long and hard.”
“What do you mean, long and hard?”
“That hole in the back of his head isn’t the only one in him. He took one in the rib cage and one in the armpit. Take a look at the slats on the left side of the stall. I think Bello bounced off the boards, then tried to get up and caught the last one in the skull.” Koko laughed out loud. “Then he got shit on by the horse he was trying to feed. I’m not kidding you. Look at his shirt.”
“Why don’t you show some respect?” I said.
Koko coughed into his palm, still laughing. “Do you ever get tired of it?”
“Of what?” I said.
“Being the only guy in the department with any humanity. It must be tough to be a full-time water-walker,” he said.
“Hey, Dave, come see a minute,” Mack Bertrand said from the back entrance. He had arrived shortly before I did and had done only a preliminary survey of the crime scene. A camera hung from his right hand.
“I’ll talk to you about that remark later, Koko,” I said.
“I can’t wait,” he said.
I joined Mack outside. “What do you have?” I said.
“Take a look at the murder weapon. What’s interesting about it is the tip of the pick has been sharpened down to a fine point, probably on a grinder. When’s the last time you sharpened a pick like that?”
“Never.”
“So in all probability we’ve got a premeditated homicide here and the killer came prepared to do maximum damage,” he said.
I squatted down and looked at the pick. Mack was right. The point had been honed down to a thinness that would break if it was driven into rock or hardpan. Streaks of blood and pieces of hair coated at least four inches of the steel surface. “You’ve got a good eye, Mack,” I said.
“Walk with me to the back fence.”
The rear of the lot was strung with what is called a back-fence, one that is made up of steel spikes and smooth wire and is less attractive than a rail or slat fence but cheaper to construct and more utilitarian. On the other side was an ungrazed pasture, then a line of water oaks and pecan trees that separated the pasture from a sugarcane field. Mack pointed to a channel of dented grass in the pasture.
“My guess is somebody crossed the pasture on foot this morning, maybe somebody who parked his vehicle up there on the turnrow by the sugarcane field,” Mack said. “What do you think?”
I nodded without speaking.
“No, I mean who do you think would do this? Just between us.”
I rested my arm on a steel fence spike. I hated to even think about the possibilities that Mack’s question suggested. “I twisted the screws on Whitey Bruxal. Maybe Whitey thought Bello was about to roll over on him,” I said.
“The Mob uses pickaxes?”
“Whitey’s smart. He doesn’t follow patterns. That’s why he’s never done time.”
“I’m really bothered by this, Dave. Bello came to our church for help. I sent him over to the Holy Rollers. You ever figure out what was driving him?”
“Take your choice. Years ago he tried to lynch a black man. His wife thinks he attacked Yvonne Darbonne. He tried to revise his own life by controlling and destroying his son’s. Everything he touched turned to excrement.”
“He raped the Darbonne girl?”
“I just have the wife’s interpretation of events. She’s not an easy person to talk with. She says Bello raped Yvonne Darbonne the same day Darbonne shot herself.”
“Jesus Christ. Yvonne Darbonne was gangbanged that day.”
“That’s my point. I don’t know if Mrs. Lujan is telling the truth. I don’t believe she’s totally connected to reality.”
“Who is?” Mack said.
It was damp and cool inside the mist, and the pasture on the other side of the fence was emerald green, except for the trail of bruised grass that led from the wire back to the turnrow in the sugarcane. Across the road, Bello ’s house sat heavy and squat and white inside the mist, his flower gardens blooming, the bayou high and yellow in the background. He had owned everything a man could want. But his war with the world and his
