Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Page B

hers, that it had come down from someone over her. “Monarch Little needs to file charges against Bruxal’s kid,” she said.
    “Tell it to Monarch. See what kind of reaction you get.”
    “That’s where you can help us.”
    “Not me,” I replied.
    She paused. “Bruxal got your friend in Miami killed. Maybe he gave the order for it.”
    It was quiet in the room. I could hear raindrops ticking on the window glass. “You know that for a fact?”
    “The people above me seem to.”
    “Then you tell those sonsofbitches they’d better prosecute him.”
    She paused again and I saw a strange glint come in her eye. “Want me to quote you?”
    “Absolutely.”
    For the first time that day, she smiled. “They said you were a bit unusual.”
    “Who’s ‘they’?”
    “I’m just one of the field grunts. What do I know? Tell your boss I’m sorry I tracked horseshit on her carpet,” she said.
    “That’s a metaphor?”
    “No, I had it on my boots. Give Monarch Little a tumble. Whitey Bruxal is a bad guy. Back in Chugwater, he’d be split open, salted, and tacked on a fence post.”
    “I’ve got to visit this place someday,” I replied.
     
    T WO DAYS PASSED and I heard no more from Betsy Mossbacher. On Friday I went back to my file on Crustacean Man, the victim of a hit-and-run whose earthly remains had been left as food for crawfish at the bottom of a coulee. I still did not buy Koko Hebert’s explanation of Crustacean Man’s death. I had investigated many hit-and-run homicides over the years, both in Iberia Parish and New Orleans, and I had never seen one instance in which the victim had received two massive traumas on opposite sides of his body and no obvious ancillary damage that linked the two.
    If they were bounced off the grille into the air and they caromed off the windshield, you knew it. If they were dragged under the vehicle, the damage was usually horrendous and pervasive. I looked at the photos taken of the remains at the crime scene. The body looked like one that could have fallen out of a boxcar at Bergen-Belsen. The skin was as tight as a lamp shade against the bone, the round mouth and eyes like the soundless scream in the famous painting by Edvard Munch.
    Who are you, partner? What did somebody do to you?
    Then a strange conjunction of thoughts came together in my head. Betsy Mossbacher had tried to pressure me into persuading Monarch Little to press charges against Whitey Bruxal’s son. Although it was a cynical legal maneuver, it was a good one. I suspected that Slim Bruxal, in spite of his good manners, was a vicious fraternity punk who had taken immense pleasure in tearing up Monarch Little’s face, and consequently deserved any fate the court dropped on his head. By the same token, Monarch had been cruising for a serious fall a long time. If his denouement happened to come from Whitey Bruxal, those were the breaks.
    In the meantime, Monarch was of special interest to me for another reason. Before he had started dealing narcotics, he had worked for two or three shade-tree mechanics and backyard body-and-fender men. In fact, Monarch was something of an artist at his craft and could have made a career out of customizing and restoring vintage collectibles. But Monarch had discovered it was easier and more profitable to steal automobiles than it was to repair them.
     
    I FOUND HIM under a shade tree, with five of his men, in the city’s old red-light district. The wind rustled the leaves in the tree, and a rusted weight set rested inside the dirt apron that extended from the trunk out to the tree’s drip line. Monarch and his friends were listening to music from the radio in Monarch’s Firebird, and drinking Coca-Cola and crushed ice from paper cups that they threw on the ground or in the street when they finished.
    It could have been a midafternoon scene in any inner-city neighborhood, but it wasn’t. The old brothels are gone or boarded up with plywood and are nests for rats now, but