Ten minutes later Acadian Ambulance pulled Monarch out of the tub and loaded him onto a gurney. I walked with them to the back of the ambulance. Monarch’s eyelids suddenly clicked open, just like a doll’s. “What’s happening, Mr. Dee?” he said.
“Your soul just took an exploratory ride over the abyss,” I replied.
“Say again?”
“If you die, I’m going to kick your butt,” I said.
“You’re an unforgiving man,” he said.
I pulled one of his tennis shoes off his foot.
“What you doing?” he said.
I watched them drive away with him. Monarch’s tennis shoe felt sodden and cold and big in my hand. It was a size twelve, larger, I was sure, than the imprints stenciled on the concrete pad in Bello Lujan’s stable. “Tell me again, Sno’ball. What time did Monarch get here?” I said.
“It was eight-t’irty. Some guys dropped him off on the corner. They’d been drinking. I know the time, ’cause I looked at my watch and wondered why Monarch was drinking so early in the morning. He come walking down the street and I axed him that. He said his mama died and would I tie him off.”
“You shot him up?”
“No, Monarch is my friend. And I ain’t gonna say no mo’ ’bout it.”
So the combination shooting gallery and crack house would not be an alibi for Monarch Little. But for all practical purposes, the size of his huge pancakelike feet and his obvious grief over his mother’s death had eliminated him as a viable suspect in the homicide of Bellerophon Lujan.
“Am I going down on this, Mr. Dave?” Sno’ball asked.
“Don’t let me catch you near this house again.”
“Herman ain’t big on the word ‘no.’”
“Tell Herman that of this day he has a bull’s-eye tattooed on his forehead.”
She laughed to herself, looking down the street at the grocery store and a skinny kid trying to pick up Monarch’s weight set. The sun was just breaking out of the mist, shining through the tree over the kid’s head.
“You eat lunch with cops?” I asked.
She fixed her hair with one hand. “If they paying,” she said.
We drove to Bon Creole, way out on St. Peter’s Street, and had po’boy sandwiches, then I drove her back into New Iberia ’s inner city and left her on a street corner used by both pimps and dealers. It was a strange place to deliver a young woman who I believed to be a basically decent and loyal human being. But it was the world to which she belonged, and for those who lived in its maw, its abnormality was simply a matter of perception.
I ARRIVED AT the department shortly after noon. Helen had just returned from New Orleans, where she had been attending a meeting of Louisiana law enforcement administrators on civil preparedness. She caught me in the hallway and walked with me to my office. “What did you get on Bello ’s homicide?” she asked when we were inside.
She had not yet had a chance to talk with Koko Hebert or Mack Bertrand. I told her everything I knew about the initial investigation at the crime scene, then told her about Monarch Little overdosing.
“You’re excluding him?” she said.
“At least for the time being. He may have had a window of opportunity, but there’s no evidence to put him at the crime scene.”
“But Valerie Lujan thinks Monarch did it?”
“If there weren’t people of color around for her to blame her problems on, she’d probably kill herself.”
“You’ve got somebody in mind for this, Dave. I can see it in your face.”
“I stoked Whitey Bruxal up. I told him Bello was going to roll over on him. The possibility that Whitey took him out doesn’t make me feel very good.”
“Before you climb on a cross, you might consider this. It was a premeditated act. The killer hated Bello and wanted him to suffer. The killer also knew Bello ’s routine. Maybe the perp nursed a grudge for years. Bello had that kind of influence on people. Maybe Bruxal didn’t have anything to do with it.”
The phone on my desk rang. It was Mack Bertrand, calling from the crime lab.
“We have prints from several areas on the pick, some good, some bad,” he said. “Most of them were probably left there by the same individual. Regardless, we got no hits with AFIS.”
“Not even possibilities?”
“Nothing.”
I had felt my hopes rise, then fade. “So maybe our suspect is a local with no record,” I said.
“Could be. Bello was a sexual predator.”
“You think this is a revenge killing, pure and simple?”
“I’m at a loss on this whole investigation, Dave, I mean, into the Lujan boy’s death and Crustacean Man and the suicide of the Darbonne girl. I’ve come around to your way of thinking. It’s all part of one piece, but I don’t see the key.”
“Helen’s in my office now. I’ll bring her up to date and get back to you later,” I said.
“Something bothers me about the prints on the pick,” Mack said. “The steel head looks like it’s been partially wiped off. The same with the bottom of the handle. But the prints on the middle of the handle are defined and unsmudged. You following me?”
“I’m not sure.”
“If someone wanted to wipe fingerprints off a murder weapon, in this case a pick, wouldn’t he want to wipe off the entire weapon-both the handle and the head? I think an individual wearing gloves sharpened the pick and later used it to kill Bello. When he swung the pick, he smudged the prints on the bottom of the handle. That’s just speculation, of course. My wife says I spend too much time in my head with this stuff.”
No, you don’t, Mack, I thought.
Helen had been sitting on the corner of my desk, on one haunch, as she always did when she was in my office. After I hung up, I told her what Mack had said. I could see the frustration grow in her face. “Lonnie Marceaux is going to have a field day with this,” she said.
“What does this have to do with Lonnie?”
“He’s hired an ad firm in Baton Rouge to build him up as a crusading prosecutor surrounded by drunken and corrupt flatfeet. I think he also wants to hand me my ass.”
“Maybe I should have a talk with him.”
She pointed a finger at me. “That’s the last thing you’re going to do. You copy that, bwana?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because if bwana not copy, bwana gonna have the worst experience in his life.”
Don’t contend, don’t argue, I heard a voice say inside me. “How did the civil preparedness meeting go?” I asked.
She had not expected my response. She tilted her head sideways, almost looking at me in a new way, her eyes taking on a strange lavender cast that was both sensual and curious, as though I were of romantic interest to her. I felt my cheeks color.
“We toured the levees. A one-hundred-sixty-mile-an-hour storm will turn New Orleans into a bowlful of oil and black sand,” she said. She squeezed my shoulder and looked me in the face. “No matter how this plays out, Streak, I don’t want you beating up on yourself anymore. Even though I yell at you sometimes, you’re one of the best people I’ve ever known.”
I SPENT THE NEXT HALF HOUR cleaning out paperwork from my intake basket, putting off an inevitable stage in the investigation that I was not looking forward to. Finally I picked up the phone and called Cesaire Darbonne at his home. How do you tell a father whose daughter has died of a gunshot wound in his driveway that he is a possible suspect in a homicide? As Mack Bertrand said, how much grief does one man need?
“This is Dave Robicheaux, Mr. Darbonne,” I said. “I’d like to return your daughter’s diary if you’re going to be home this afternoon.”
“I got to go to the grocery store, but if I’m not home, I’ll leave the door unlocked.”
“I’d rather give it to you in person.”
