“I’ll see if I can get you kicked. But I want you in my office at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow morning.”
His eyes wandered around the opposite wall and up on the ceiling. “That’s military talk, ain’t it? Kind of stuff John Wayne like to snap off.”
“Sometimes you make me wish I was black, Monarch.”
“Why?”
“So I could beat the crap out of you and not feel guilty about it,” I said.
But Monarch was not destined to make the street that night. Before I could get in touch with Helen, Wally took a 911 call from a community of rusted trailers, shacks, weed-grown yards, and piled garbage that was so egregious in the social decay it represented that it seemed planned rather than accidental. The 911 caller said he had heard shots, four of them, that afternoon, down by the bayou. He had thought the shooter was target-practicing and consequently had paid little attention to it. At sunset he had let his dog out to run in the sugarcane. The dog had come back from the field with blood on its muzzle.
So far, the only deputy at the crime scene was our retired Marine NCO, Top. He had driven his cruiser down a turnrow in the field, his flasher bar rippling with color, and was now standing with the driver’s door open, gazing at the sun’s last reflection on the bayou. A hundred yards up the bayou, the turn bridge’s lights were on, and close to the four corners, a juke joint rimmed by a shell parking lot thundered with music. Behind us, inside the deep evening shade of clustered cedar and locust trees and slash pines, children rode bicycles among trailers and shacks where no one ever responded to a knock on a door without first checking to see who the visitor was.
“Where’s the vic?” I said.
Top picked up a rock and threw it at a dog that was slinking through the Johnson grass toward the back of a tin-sided tractor shed. “Still need to ask?”
“What’s that smell?”
“You don’t want to know.”
I took a flashlight from my glove box and walked to the rear of the shed. I have investigated many homicides over the years. They’re all bad and none are easy to look at. Rarely does a fictionalized treatment do them justice. 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
E ARLIER 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.