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“I ain’t saying anything else.”
“You don’t have to, Sonny. People stack time in different ways. I think you’ve got a life sentence tattooed right across your forehead.”
I left him in the hallway and walked down the stairs and out into the yard, into wind and the shadows of trees moving on the grass and flowers blooming in a garden across the street and automobiles passing in columns of sunlight that shone through the canopy of oaks overhead. I walked into the ebb and flow of a world separate from the systematic ruin of a young woman’s life.
As I was getting into the cruiser, Sonny Williamson came out on the gallery, his arms pumped. “What do you mean, life sentence?” he shouted. “What’s your problem, man?”
NO BASEBALL BATS were found in the search at the Bruxal or Lujan homes, and the search team had already left the Bruxal property when Top and I arrived. But it was obvious a calamity of some sort had struck the Bruxal family. An upstairs window was broken; an earthen pot lay shattered on a terrace, the root system of the plant cooking in the sun. All the doors were wide open, the air-conditioning gushing out into the heat. The waxed black Humvee had been backed into a stucco pillar by the carriage house and left there, glass and electrical connections leaking from the crushed taillight socket.
Top parked the cruiser in the drive and he and I
rang the bell on the porch and heard it chime deep in the house. But no one came to the door, which yawed open on a living room littered with huge amounts of paper that looked torn from binders. We went around to the back of the house and saw Slim Bruxal under a shed attached to the side of a barn, grooming the red Morgan I had seen running in the pasture on my previous visit.
Slim did not look well. One eye was swollen and bloodshot. A fresh abrasion flamed high on his other cheek. His T-shirt was sweaty and dirt-streaked and stretched out of shape at the neck.
“Who messed up your face?” I said.
“My father did. After he went nuts and chased my mother out of the house.”
“When?”
“Ten minutes ago,” he said. “His goddamn money got transferred out of the Islands into a bunch of domestic accounts. He blamed it on her and me. He says somebody got ahold of all his bank account numbers.”
“Really?” I said, my expression blank.
“Yeah, really.”
Slim’s face reminded me of a hurt child’s, and I had a feeling the injury his father had visited upon him would not go away for a very long time. I asked Top to go to the cruiser and radio Helen we’d be late getting back to the department.
I stepped under the shed and rested my arm across the mare’s croup. I felt her skin wrinkle, heard her tail swish and one hoof thump into the compacted dirt under her.
“I think you’re an intelligent man, Slim, and I won’t try to jerk you around. But one way or another, your kite is about to crash and burn. So is your old man’s. We won’t get you and your father on everything y’all have done, but we’ll get you on part of it and that’ll be enough.
“You killed the homeless man with a baseball bat. It wasn’t planned, but that’s what happened. You and Tony were cruising down the back road, maybe drinking a little brew, blowing a little weed, and you saw this wino walking along the edge of the ditch. Then you thought it’d really be funny to load this guy in your car and maybe take him to a party, push him inside the door and leave him there, rolling around on the rug, wrapped in grunge and puke, people tripping over him, wow, what a gas, huh?”
All movement had drained out of Slim’s body. He stood frozen in the shade, breathing through his mouth, and I knew I had described at least part of what had actually happened on the back road.
He dipped a big round pale yellow sponge into a water bucket and ran it along the horse’s neck, his eyes darkening with thought, his mouth downturned at the corners, the water sliding off the horse’s withers onto Slim’s shoes.
“Except the guy didn’t like what you guys had planned for him, and he got out of the car and started running,” I continued. “Tony was driving and tried to cut him off, but, guess what, he hit the guy with the right fender and broke the guy’s hip. If you guys had just done a hit-and-run on a drunk, you could have bagged ass, left him on the road, and nobody would have ever been the wiser. In fact, you could have even done a nine-one-one call on him and saved his life. But he had seen your faces and he could identify the Buick as well, and that meant only one thing—it was time for this poor bastard to go to that big wineshop in the sky.
“So you got out of the Buick with a baseball bat and parked the guy’s head in the fourth dimension. Tell me I’m wrong.”
He looked me in the face, without really seeing me, thinking about the words, if any, he was about to say.
“Good try, but I don’t think you got jack shit to go on,” he said.
And I knew at that moment the baseball bats we had found in the fraternity garage probably did not contain the one that had delivered the fatal blow to Crustacean Man. Slim had slipped the punch again. All he needed to do now was to keep sponging down his horse and not say anything. But the anger at his father, and by extension at me, still lingered in his face, and I had another run at him.
“You’ve got somebody else’s death on your conscience, too, even though you may never be held legally accountable for it. But one way or another, I’m going to make your life miserable until you own up for what you little sonsofbitches did to Yvonne Darbonne.”
His hand tightened on the sponge, squeezing a curtain of water down the horse’s withers. Then he threw the sponge into the bucket, hard, splattering his jeans.
“You just don’t get it, do you?” he said. “I was the only guy looking out for her. She got stoned out of her mind at the house and puked in the toilet on the second floor. Then some guys took her in a room and she got it on with all three of them. That kind of shit doesn’t go on when I’m in the house. We’ve got a little sister sorority we look out for, and we don’t need a reputation for gangbanging freshman coeds. I broke it up and I took her home. Where was Tony? Glad you asked. Passed out under a picnic table in the backyard with potato salad in his hair.”
“You drove Yvonne Darbonne back to New Iberia? To her house?” I said.
“You got it,” he said. “I was going to take her inside her house, but she got a gun out of the glove box and started waving it around. It was a twenty-two Tony and me target-practiced with. I tried to take it away from her, but she turned it into her face and pulled the trigger. That’s what happened, man. You want to put me in prison for that, go ahead. But get this straight. I helped her when she didn’t have any other friends, including Tony, who in case you didn’t know it was a closet homo.”
