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I took the diary from Molly’s hand. “The weapon was stolen from a fraternity house at Ole Miss. How would Mr. Darbonne come to have possession of it?”
I could see a quiet sense of exasperation working its way into her face. “I don’t know, Dave. I say don’t grieve on what you can’t change,” she said.
I felt a sharp reply start to rise in my throat. But I kept my own counsel and looked across the bayou at the lights coming on in City Park. Then I followed Molly inside the house and helped her wash the dishes and put away the leftovers from supper.
I AWOKE AT FOUR in the morning and sat at the kitchen table in the darkness and listened to the sound of the wind in the trees. A few minutes later, Molly turned on the light and came into the kitchen in her robe and slippers. She sat down across the table from me. “The Darbonne girl?” she said.
“It’s the language in her diary. There’s no self-pity or anger in it,” I replied.
Molly waited, then said, “Go ahead.”
“People like Yvonne Darbonne don’t kill themselves. It’s that simple. Someone else did it.”
Molly propped her elbows on the table, knitted her fingers together, and rested her chin on her fingers. She gazed wanly into my face, trying to hide her fatigue, her eyes filled with the foreboding sense that the dead were about to lay claim upon the quick.
SATURDAY MORNING I drove out to the home of Bello Lujan. His first name was actually Bellerophon, a name that on the surface seems absurd and grandiose in a working-class culture. But South Louisiana is filled with the names of ancient gods and heroes given to our French ancestors during the Reign of Terror when Robespierre and his friends attempted to purge Christian influence from French culture. The irony is that today Cajun pipefitters and waitresses sometimes bear names that Homer would recognize but not most contemporary Americans.
I can’t say I ever liked Bello Lujan. He was aggressive, visceral in his language, naked in his attitudes about wealth and status. When you shook hands with him, he gave you a two-second squeeze that left no doubt about his physical potential. At a professional wrestling match in New Orleans, he got into an exchange of insults with one of the wrestlers and climbed into the ring with a wood stool and beat the wrestler bloody with it. Bello claimed that being a good loser required only one essential element—practice.
But even if I didn’t like him, I tried to understand him or at least the background that had produced him. His father had been a pinball machine repairman who worked for a crime family that operated out of the old Underpass area in Lafayette. When his father was shot to death, Bello’s family moved back and forth between the Iberville Project in New Orleans, the old brothel district in New Iberia, and a dirt-road rural slum in north Lafayette. He shined shoes in saloons and carhopped at a root beer drive-in owned by a mean-spirited man who never allowed him to eat his lunch or supper inside the building. Sometimes I would see Bello on a wintry day at the Southern Pacific station, his wood shine box hung by a leather strap on his shoulders, his face pinched in the cold as he waited to catch a customer stepping down from a Pullman car. Even though my own young life had been marked by privation, I knew Bello had paid more dues than I had. I also knew that he kept a longer memory than I and was not to be crossed.
Supposedly he made his early money in cockfighting and later in the oil and gas business. Others said he pimped for Lafayette’s old crime family when they used to operate a pickup bar and brothel above the Underpass. If asked what he did for a living, he would grin good-naturedly and say, “Anything that makes money, podna.”
But if there was a single characteristic always associated with Bello Lujan’s reputation, it was the fact he could be an almost feral adversary when it came to protection of his interests and his family.
He lived with his wife and son in a big white house on rolling woodland along Bayou Teche, just outside Loreauville. His wife had been crippled in an automobile accident many years ago and seldom appeared in public. The details of the accident had softened around the edges with time, but a child had died in the other vehicle and some said Mrs. Lujan would have been charged had she not been so severely injured herself. Regardless, her lot had not been an easy one. Sometimes people saw her in her wheelchair, peering from behind the curtains in an upstairs window, her face as small and pointed as a bird’s.
Across the road from the trellised entrance to Bello’s driveway were thirty acres of the best pasture in the parish, where he raised thoroughbreds and gaited horses, all of it surrounded by white-painted plank fence. Bello was not simply a gentleman rancher, either. His horse trainers came from Kentucky; his thoroughbreds raced in both the Louisiana and Florida derbies. Winter and spring, Bello got to pose with the roses.
But there were rumors about the origins of his success at the track—stories about stolen seed, a manipulated high-end claim race in California, and doping the odds-on favorite with downers at a track in New Mexico.
I had called in advance. He greeted me in the driveway, dressed in white shorts and a golf shirt, his skin dark with tan, his arms swatched with whorls of shiny black hair. He crouched slightly, his fists raised like a boxer’s. “Dave, you son of a gun, comment la vie, neg? I heard you sold off your boat dock. Too bad. I liked that place,” he said. His accent was a singular one, a strange blend of hard-core coonass and the Italian-Irish inflections of blue-collar New Orleans.
“How’s it hangin’, Bello?” I said,
“How’s yours hangin’?” he replied, still grinning, still full of play.
Then I told him why I was there.
“You want to talk to my son about that girl who killed herself?” he said. “Sorry to hear about something like that, but what’s it got to do with Tony?” He turned his head toward the tennis court, where his son was whocking back balls fired at him by an automatic machine.
“Was he seeing Yvonne Darbonne?” I asked.
Bello rubbed at his nose with the heel of his hand. His brow was knitted, his wide-set, dark eyes busy with thought. “A young guy that good-looking has got a lot of girls around. How should I know? They come and go. I don’t remember anybody by that name around here,” he said.
I started across the lawn toward the tennis court. I could tell his son, Tony, saw me out of the corner of his eye, but he kept on stroking the ball, his cheeks like apples, his curly brown hair tied off his forehead with a bandanna, his hips thin, almost girlish. I heard Bello on my heels. “Hey, Dave, take it out of overdrive, here. That’s my son, there. You’re saying he’s mixed up in somebody’s death? I don’t like that.”
I turned around slowly, trying to fix a smile on my face before I spoke. “This is a homicide investigation, Bello. If you want this interview conducted down at the department, that’s fine. In the meantime, I’m requesting that you stay out of it,” I said.
He opened up his palms, as though bewildered. “It’s Saturday morning. It’s spring. The birds are singing. You hit my front lawn like a thunderstorm. I’m the problem?” he said.
I opened the door to the court and walked out on the dampened, rolled surface of the clay. Tony Lujan was deferential and polite in every way, repeatedly addressing me as “sir.” But in South Louisiana, protocol is often a given and not substantive, particularly among young people of Tony’s financial background.
“You knew Yvonne?” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You knew her well?” I said, my eyes locked on his.
