the scene? He’d had an alibi, but an alibi for a guy like Raguza was never further than a phone call away. I had heard the shooter speak just before the van steered around the armored car, but the alcohol in my blood and the gunfire and glass caving out of the saloon window onto the concrete and the whang of buckshot into the metal door behind him had turned my ears into cauliflower. I had tried a thousand times to re-create the voice in my head, always with the same result. I had witnessed an execution, and my recall of it was absolutely worthless.
The killer had been someone for whom cruelty and sexual pleasure were interchangeable, a man who I suspected not only killed for enjoyment but who experienced the moment as a form of benediction bestowed upon him by his own id.
Did this describe Lefty Raguza?
And Clete had not only baited Whitey Bruxal and gotten into it with Raguza, he was in the sack with Trish Klein, an amateur grifter who thought she could use a collection of self-deluded blue-collar kids to bring down her father’s killer.
In the meantime, Lonnie Marceaux was playing both ends against the middle and using both the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department to further his own political ambitions.
I believed Whitey Bruxal and Lefty Raguza had come to Louisiana with the same sense of excitement and expectation generated in hogs when they get a downwind sniff of a trough brimming with swill. We were amateurs and they knew it. They bought politicians and media people for chump change, and fleeced Social Security recipients and twenty-five- dollar-an-hour offshore oil drillers alike, while convincing them that casinos increased their quality of life.
Lonnie Marceaux thought he was going to take Bruxal off at the neck. Inside Lonnie’s worldview, Helen Soileau and I were as important as his fingernail parings. Yesterday I had walked out on a meeting with him, as though somehow that changed the fact he was skewing an investigation to serve his own ends. Maybe it was time to set the record straight in a more definitive fashion. I picked up my phone and called his office. “I’d like to drop by for a minute,” I said.
“What for?” he asked.
“To apologize.”
“People go off half-cocked sometimes. Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“I appreciate your attitude. But I’d like to apologize in person.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Yeah, it is. I’ll be right over.”
When I entered his office he was standing by his desk, putting files in a briefcase. His long-sleeved white shirt had glittering strips in it, like tin ribbons, and it hung on his frame without a fold or crease in it, as though the sense of freshness and efficiency he brought to the job could not be diminished by the heat of the day. He glanced up from his briefcase and grinned. “You don’t have a splinter in your butt about something, do you?” he asked.
“I haven’t been adequately forthcoming with you, Lonnie. I don’t think Monarch Little is our killer. If anybody had motivation to kill the Lujan kid, it was Slim Bruxal or his old man.”
“What motivation is that?”
“Tony Lujan was the weak sister in the death of Crustacean Man. He was going to roll over on Slim.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“I know that Monarch Little is too convenient a target for your office.”
“Is he, now?”
“He’s a gangbanger and dope dealer, and large crowds aren’t going to be saying rosaries for him if he rides the needle. There won’t be a civil rights issue about him, either. Most black civic leaders wouldn’t take the time to piss on his grave.”
“You’re telling me, to my face, I’m framing an innocent man?”
“If you pop Monarch, you win three ways. You clear the homicide, you take a dealer off the street permanently, and you’ve still got Slim Bruxal on an assault beef. You can freeze out the Feds and use Slim to squeeze his old man and by extension Colin Alridge.”
“You know, if it weren’t for your age and the fact we’re both civilized men, I think I’d break your nose.”
“Your magnanimity is humbling, Lonnie, but anytime you’d like to walk into the restroom and bolt the door, I’d be glad to accommodate you.”
“I want you off the case.”
“Talk to Helen.”
“That’s perfect.”
“Run that by me again?”
“If it wasn’t for Helen Soileau, you couldn’t get a job picking up litter in City Park. She’s covered your sorry ass for so long, people think she’s either stopped being a queer or you’re her portable muff diver. But I’m not going to let either her or you—”