instances of child abuse so grievous your entire belief system is called into question, you have to reexamine your own life and perspective in ways we normally reserve for saints.
At that moment you either reaffirm your belief in justice and protection of the innocent or you do not. But unlike the metaphysician, you do not arrive at your faith through the use of syllogism or abstraction. You often rediscover your faith by taking up the cause of one individual, one innocent person who you believe deserves justice and the full protection of the law. If you can accomplish this, the rest of it doesn’t seem to matter so much.
I wanted to believe in Cesaire Darbonne. Like many cane farmers in South Louisiana, he had been driven under by a trade agreement allowing the importation of massive amounts of cheap sugar into the United States. The French-speaking provincial world he had grown up in, one of serpentine bayous and endless fields of green cane bending in a Gulf breeze, was becoming urbanized and overlaid with subdivisions and strip malls. But the greatest tragedy in his life was one he could have never foreseen.
His daughter, like mine, seemed to have possessed all the innocence and love and goodness that every father wishes for in his child. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, can understand the level of pain and loss and rage a father experiences when he wakes each day with the knowledge that his daughter has been raped or murdered. The images of her fate haunt him throughout his waking hours and into his sleep, and the thoughts he has about her tormentors are of a kind he never shares with anyone, lest he be considered perverse and pathological himself.
At 2:15 p.m. Mack Bertrand rang my extension. “It’s a match,” he said.
“Don’t tell me that,” I said.
“Cesaire’s prints are all over it. What else you want me to say? Didn’t you say his pick was missing from his toolshed? It’s obviously his.”
“The guy doesn’t need this,” I said. “Look, Mack, the motive isn’t there. I’m convinced he didn’t know Bello raped his daughter.”
“How can you be sure?”
“He was stunned when I told him.”
“Maybe that’s just the impression you had. You’re a sympathetic soul, Dave. Valerie Lujan hated her husband. She wouldn’t have been above passing on the information to Cesaire.”
“No, Mr. Darbonne looked like he’d been poleaxed. Maybe he killed Bello, but it wasn’t because he knew Bello attacked his daughter.”
“Good luck with it.”
“With what?” I asked.
“This case. It’s like trying to get cobweb out of your hair, isn’t it?” he said.
I BROUGHT HELEN up to the minute, then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to verify Cesaire Darbonne’s alibi. A clerk remembered seeing him at the Winn-Dixie and so did the clerk at the gas station by the drawbridge. But the preponderance of his alibi rested on his claim that he had changed a flat by the sugar mill entrance, and unfortunately none of the security people at the mill could recall seeing him. Cesaire had another problem as well. Bello Lujan’s horse farm was less than fifteen minutes’ drive from Cesaire’s house. Cesaire could have visited the Winn-Dixie, bought gas, changed a flat tire, and still had time and opportunity to murder Bello.
I returned to the office just before 5 p.m.
“You want to get a warrant?” Helen said.
“Not yet,” I replied.
“I think Cesaire is looking more and more like our boy,” she said.
“It’s too pat. The murder weapon was left a few feet from the body with Darbonne’s fingerprints all over it. But Mack Bertrand believes the last guy who handled the pick was wearing gloves. Why would Darbonne wear gloves, then drop his own pick at the crime scene with his fingerprints on it?”
“We’re back to Whitey Bruxal?”
“Maybe.”
“But Bruxal couldn’t hang a frame on Cesaire Darbonne unless he knew Darbonne had motivation, in other words knowledge that his daughter was attacked by Bello. Which doesn’t seem to be the case. I think Bruxal is out of the picture. What bwana say now?”
She had me.
JUST AS I WAS ABOUT TO LEAVE the department for the day, I got a call from Koko Hebert.
“I’ve got scrapings from under Bello ’s fingernails,” he said. “He either had a real good piece of ass before he died or he fought with his attacker.”
“Koko, if you still feel a need to prove you’re offensive and obnoxious, I want to set your mind at ease. You don’t have to carry that burden anymore. You’ve assured everybody in the department you’re the real article.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “Pending lab analysis, I’d say the skin tissue came from a person of color. Normally we can’t tell race by looking at tissue scrapings, because it dries out quickly and becomes visually indistinguishable from the victim’s. But Bello got a roll of it under two of his fingernails and they look like they came off a black person. Gender is another matter. We’ve got to go to a lab in Florida for that. Because Bello probably porked half the black girls in this parish, I’m not sure if my tissue scrapings will be relevant. Sort that out, Robicheaux, then give me a call if you need more explanation.”
You didn’t trade shots with Koko Hebert unless you were willing to take a heavy load of shrapnel.
I WENT HOME and had a light supper with Molly, then drove up the bayou in the sunset to Loreauville and Bello Lujan’s stable. The fields were green and sweet-smelling, the clumps of oaks along the road pulsing with birds. The crime scene tape flickered and bounced in the wind. I walked behind the stable and looked at the spot where Mack had found the murder weapon, then studied the breadth of the field where the killer had run toward the steel back fence. What had I missed? Not just here, but in all the interviews involving Yvonne Darbonne and Monarch Little and Slim Bruxal and Crustacean Man and Tony and Bello Lujan. The key glimmered on the edge of my vision, like a shard of memory you take with you from a dream. It lay in an insignificant remark, an oblique reference that I had passed over, a piece of physical evidence that was like a grain of sand on a beach. But what?
On the other side of the steel fence, two little boys and a girl, all of them black, were flying a kite emblazoned with the American flag. The girl, who was not over eight or nine, was holding the kite string. They had made a fort of propped-up plywood inside a stand of persimmon trees and inside the walls had spread a blanket on the ground. A box of snack crackers, a plastic pitcher of what looked like Kool-Aid, three candy bars, and a can of tuna had been dumped out of a grocery bag onto the blanket.
“You guys doin’ all right?” I said.
“We’re camping out, least till dark,” one of the boys said.
“Y’all weren’t out here early this morning, were you?”
“No, suh,” the same boy said.
“That’s a fine fort you’ve got there,” I said.
“Yes, suh,” the same boy said.
His eyes left my face and looked up at the kite popping against the sky. The other boy seemed to concentrate unduly on the kite as well. The girl had wrapped the string around her wrist and was making a game of pulling on the string and releasing it, so that the kite rose, then sagged and rose again in the sunset. She wore elastic- waisted jeans and pink tennis shoes and a white blouse with tiny flowers printed on it. She had big brown eyes and pigtails and a round face and skin that was as dark and shiny as chocolate. Her expression was a study in innocence.
“You guys didn’t go inside that yellow tape on the stable, did you?” I said.
No one answered.
“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.
“Chereen,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“Dave Robicheaux. I’m a police officer. Did y’all see anybody run across this field early this morning?”
“We wasn’t out here,” she replied.
