“Watch your head,” I said as I put him in the backseat of the cruiser.
“Sir, we told you the truth about what happened out there,” he said. “The fat black guy keyed my father’s new paint job. If I had it to do over, I’d just drive away and eat the loss. But that kid with the rag on his head aimed a nine-millimeter at us. Over nothing.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sam Bruxal. But everybody calls me Slim.”
“You took down Monarch Little, Slim. At gunpoint. That’s impressive. But I’d watch my ass for a while. What’s your last name again?”
“Bruxal,” he said.
“Ever hear of a guy by the name of Whitey Bruxal?”
“That’s my father,” he said, his eyes lifting into mine.
“From Florida?”
“That’s right. We moved to Lafayette from Miami five years ago.”
“Really?” I said, looking at him now with much more interest.
“Yeah, what’s going on?”
“I’d like to have a chance to meet your dad.”
“Oh, you’ll meet him, all right,” Slim replied, then realized he had allowed his manufactured persona to slip. “I mean—”
“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, kid,” I said, and rejoined the deputies, one of whom had hooked up Monarch Little and was about to take him to emergency receiving at Iberia General.
The deputy was a stout, red-haired man with a brush mustache who had been one of the city cops absorbed into the sheriff’s department when the two agencies merged last year. He was a retired NCO and was called “Top” by his colleagues, although he had been a cook in the Marine Corps and never a first sergeant. Top’s admonition about surviving in a bureaucracy was simple: “Make friends with all the clerks and don’t get in the way of a supervisor who wants to be on the links by two p.m.”
“Let me talk to Monarch a minute, will you, Top?” I said.
“Take him home to dinner with you,” he replied.
Monarch was seated in the back of the cruiser, his wrists cuffed in front of him so he could hold a blood-spotted towel to his mouth and nose.
“You going to make it, Monarch?” I said.
“I done tole y’all, I tripped on the curb and busted my face. Ain’t filing no charges. Don’t even remember what happened,” he replied.
Through the back window I saw Helen pull into the parking lot, the reflected image of a giant live oak sliding off her windshield. “You got a history with Slim Bruxal?” I said.
“Who?”
“The guy who remodeled your face.”
“A white guy picked me up after I fell. That the one you talking about?”
“Cute,” I said.
But Monarch was no longer looking at me. His eyes were on Helen, who had walked over to the trash barrel where a deputy had just recovered the nine-millimeter dumped by Monarch’s friend. “I’m ready to go to the hospital. I swallowed blood. I t’ink I’m gonna t’row up again,” he said, pressing the towel to his face.
“Sheriff Soileau might want to talk with you first.”
“I ain’t got nothing to say.”
I straightened up from the passenger window and looked across the top of the cruiser. “He’s all yours, Top,” I said.
Helen came up to me after the cruiser had disappeared down the street. “Looks like you got the cap on it,” she said.
“I wouldn’t say that at all,” I replied.
“Oh?”
“That tall white kid is the son of a Miami bookie by the name of Whitey Bruxal. I think Whitey Bruxal is the guy who got a friend of mine killed in an armored car robbery twenty years ago. It’s no accident my dead friend’s daughter, Trish Klein, is in this area.”
I saw the connections start to come together in Helen’s eyes. “Whatever the Klein woman’s issues are, they’re federal. Unless she manages to kill somebody in our jurisdiction, I don’t want to hear that name again,” she said.
“One other thing. I got the impression Monarch wanted to get a lot of gone between you and him.”
“His mother was a washerwoman who worked for my father. She also turned tricks at the Boom Boom Room. I used to take him for sno-balls in City Park,” she said. “Funny how it shakes out sometimes, huh, bwana?”
I’D HAD A SLIP from my A.A. program the previous year. The causes aren’t important now, but the consequence was the worst bender I ever went on—a two-day blackout that left me on the edges of delirium tremens and with the very real conviction I had committed a homicide. The damage I did to myself was of the kind that alcoholics sometimes do not recover from—the kind when you burn the cables on your elevator and punch a hole in the basement and keep right on going.
But I went back to meetings and pumped iron and ran in the park, and relearned one of the basic tenets of A.A.—that there is no possession more valuable than a sober sunrise, and any drunk who demands more out of life than that will probably not have it.
Unfortunately the nocturnal hours were never good to me. In my dreams I would be drunk again, loathsome even unto myself, a public spectacle whom people treated with either pity or contempt. I would wake from the dream, my throat parched, and walk off balance into the kitchen for a glass of water, unable to extract myself from memories about people and places that I had thought no longer belonged to my life. But the feelings released from my unconscious by the dream would not leave me. It’s like blood splatter on the soul. You don’t rinse it off easily. My hand would tremble on the faucet.
The dawn always came as a form of release. The gargoyles and the polka-dotted giraffes disappeared in the light of day, and my nightmares burned into a soft and harmless glow, like a pistol flare dying inside a mist.
But as William Faulkner said, and as I was about to learn, the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past.
The warning call from Wally, our dispatcher, came in the next day on my cell while I was having midmorning coffee at Victor’s Cafeteria. “Some guy named Whitey Bruxal and a geek wit’ him was just in here to see Helen. I told them Helen was in Baton Rouge. You know these guys?” he said.
“Bruxal is the father of the white kid we busted in the beef at McDonald’s yesterday,” I replied.
“He was seriously out of joint. When I tole him Helen wasn’t here, he wanted to talk to you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you wasn’t here, that he needed to lower his voice, that this ain’t New Orleans.”
“Why New Orleans?”
“He talks like he comes from there.”
I suspected Wally had confused Bruxal’s accent, which was probably eastern seaboard, with the Irish-Italian inflections that are characteristic of blue-collar people born in New Orleans. “Why’d you call me, Wally?” I said.
“He’s on his way to Victor’s.”
“You told him I was here?”
“The janitor did. Want me to chew him out? He was seventy-t’ree last week.”
I paid my check and was about to go out the door when I saw a waxed black Humvee, wrapped with chrome, pull up to the curb. A muscular man in a powder-blue suit, with peroxided blond hair and cords in his neck and tiny pits in his cheeks, cut the engine and got out on the sidewalk. He saw me about to push open the glass door. “He’s here,” he said to a man in the passenger seat.
I did not recognize the passenger in the Humvee, but the driver had the familiarity of someone you have met in a dream, or perhaps at a time in your life when you saw the world through a glass darkly and went about making a religion out of your own dismemberment, inviting as many people as possible to bring saws and tongs to the task. The blond man pulled open the door and came inside, bringing the hot smell of the street with him.
“I told Whitey it was you. Same name, same guy, just a little older,” he said. “Remember me?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied.
“Elmer Fudd, from that bar in Opa-Locka, the one looked like a French Foreign
Legion fort in the Sahara. Last time we saw each other, I gave you some breath mints.”
“If you want to talk to me, you need to come into my office at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk to you. But he does,” the blond man said, glancing toward his friend.
Whitey Bruxal wasn’t what I expected. Miami has always been an open city for the Mafia, which means that no one is allowed a lock on the action and no one gets clipped while he’s there on R & R. Consequently, during the winter season the city is filled with the lower echelons of the New York crime families. The ones I used to see on the beach had the anatomical proportions of upended tadpoles, with barrel chests, no hips, and legs that looked like tendrils, their phalluses as pronounced as bananas inside their Speedos.
But Bruxal was not a run-of-the-mill South Florida bookie. His physique reminded me of a gymnast or a man who plays tennis singles with a mean eye, under a white sun, never thinking of it as just a game. “You the guy who busted my kid?” he said, smiling at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m the detective who hooked him up and took him in. The charges are up to the prosecutor’s office,” I replied.
“I’ll fill you in. The D.A. is talking about felony assault.”
“I doubt that,” I said, and walked past him, out onto the sidewalk.
He followed me. His hair was white and thick, clipped G.I., as stiff as a brush, his skin tanned, his shirt tight on his chest and shoulders. “Doubt it why?” he said.
“Monarch Little is a dealer and general lowlife, but he usually takes his own bounce. I doubt he’ll press charges.”
“I got a problem here. Those black kids pointed a gun at my son,” he said, still smiling at the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah?”
“I haven’t heard anything about charges against the blacks. Way I see it, my son and his friend Tony Lujan are the wronged parties. I’m supposed to feel good the head gangbanger isn’t trying to send my boy to prison?”
“They may take a hit on a firearms charge. Why not wait and see?”
“That’s what you do when a concrete truck is coming down the center stripe at you?”
He was not an unpleasant man, and his beef with the prosecutor’s office not without foundation. But I could not get rid of the image of my friend Dallas Klein, kneeling in the shade of an Opa-Locka bank, just before a shotgun was fired directly into his face.
“I’ve got a problem of my own, Mr. Bruxal,” I said.
The blond man, who had been listening quietly, couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“That’s funny?” I said to him.
His eyes were bright green, his mouth spread open on one side out of his teeth. “You got boons pulling guns on people and you’re telling the victim’s father you got a problem?” he replied.
“What’s your name?”
“Lefty Raguza.” When he spoke his name, his face was charged with energy, his eyes dancing, his chin lifted.
“Thanks,” I said, writing his name in a notebook.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“We like to research who’s in town, who’s not. You know how it is. Got to keep the down-home folks happy,” I replied, winking at him.
“You need to finish your statement to me, Mr. Robicheaux,” Bruxal said, a tanker truck loaded with gasoline passing behind him.
Don’t say it, I thought. “I think if a kid by the name of Dallas Klein had never met you and your friend here, he’d still be alive,” I said.
Bruxal looked at the blond man named Lefty Raguza. The blond man shrugged his shoulders, indicating he did not understand the reference either. “Who’s this Dallas Whatever?” Bruxal asked.
“Your man here already acknowledged he remembers me. He remembers me because we met in Opa-Locka, Florida, when he was trying to collect sixteen grand Dallas owed your sports book. Just to make sure everything is clear here, I want you to know I’m the dude who dimed you with Miami P.D. and the FBI on the armored car boost.”
Bruxal had a square chin and big bones in his cheeks. His expression remained good-natured, his brow unlined, but it was obvious he was thinking, his mind processing information, considering and rejecting various forms of response. “Tell you what, I’d like to talk with you more, but I’m going to do like my lawyer says and butt out. I’ll ask you a favor, though. You mind?”
“Be my guest,” I replied.
“If you got to hook up my son again, call me first? Slim’s dick is too big for his brains, but he’s a good kid. I didn’t have any judgment at that age. How about you? Your sizzle stick get in the way of your brains sometimes, Mr. Robicheaux?”
A moment later I watched him drive away in his Humvee with the man who had once ridiculed me when I was stone-drunk. Bruxal was slick. He had not challenged me on a personal level and he had not made any statement that was demonstrably a lie, the handle that every cop looks for in a guilty man. Instead, he had made a personal entreaty on behalf of his son and put the moral onus on me.
I had a feeling I was going to see a lot more of Whitey Bruxal.
BACK AT THE OFFICE I ran his name through the National Crime Information Center. It was not helpful. Bruxal had been interviewed several times by the FBI and Miami P.D. in the aftermath of the armored car heist and the murder of Dallas Klein and the bank teller, but he had never been directly connected to either the robbery or the homicide. Of course, this was information I already had. He had been arrested in Flatbush for driving with an expired operator’s license and fined once in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn as a co-conspirator in the distribution of Irish Sweepstakes tickets. His third arrest was in West Palm Beach, check this out, for littering. He had been sentenced to six consecutive Saturdays on a sanitation truck.
If Bugsy Siegel had set the standard, Bruxal had fallen far short of the mark.
But the hit I got on Lefty Thomas Leo Raguza was another matter. He had done time both in Georgia and inside the Flat Top at Raiford Pen for assault with a deadly weapon and had spent a year in the Broward County Stockade for criminal possession of a firearm, a charge that had been knocked down from attempted murder. It took me less than a half hour to find his old parole officer in Fort Lauderdale.
“Tommy Lee Raguza? You bet I remember him,” he said.
“He goes by Lefty now.”
“That’s right, he boxed in Raiford. You’ve got a real bucket of shit on your hands, pal.”
“Can you break that down?”
“When it comes to Tommy Lee Raguza, I’m not up to the task. I’ll fax you a psychiatric evaluation from his file. Get this, that psych report came in before we had to cut him loose. It’ll make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.”
The two-page evaluation that came through the department’s fax machine was a study in failure, not simply societal and institutional failure but the kind that reaches all the way back through the evolution of the species. After a long typed description of Lefty or Tommy Lee Raguza’s psychological and behavioral problems, all couched in Freudian terms, the psychiatrist made this handwritten addendum at the bottom:
Medical science does not provide an adequate vocabulary to describe a man like this. He is probably the cruelest human being I have ever had the misfortune to meet. There is no element in his background, environmental or genetic, that would explain the dispassionate level of iniquity in this man and the level of pleasure he takes in injuring both people and animals. Frankly, I think this man is evil and should be separated from human society for the rest of his life. Unfortunately that will probably not happen.
This was the man now living in Acadiana, where parishioners still make the sign of the cross when they pass a Catholic church and cannot believe that an American president would lie to them.
I went back to work on Bruxal and ran his name through Google. I found information there that told me far more about him and his present intentions than his criminal jacket did. His name had appeared in several article
s published in the Lafayette Daily Advertiser, the Baton Rouge Advocate, and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Whitey Bruxal had become a major player in Louisiana’s blossoming casino industry.
Gambling, like prostitution and every other imaginable vice, has a long history in the state. In the nineteenth century the gambling halls along Canal were perhaps the most notorious in the country, not only for their lucrativeness but also for the number of knifings and shootings that took place inside them. The Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who fired the first shot on Fort Sumter, made a fortune after the war as the head of the state lottery. Governor Huey P. Long literally gave Louisiana to Frank Costello, who in turn empowered a crime family in New Orleans to set up and control all organized vice throughout the southern half of the state. The gambling machines were made by a Mob-owned company in Chicago, but the credit line that purchased them came from right here in New Iberia.
During the mid-1950s, the most despised man in the state was an attorney general who tried to shut down the brothels and deep-six the slots out in the Gulf. The gambling joints and cathouses in St. Landry Parish were run by the sheriff. Every pool hall and blue-collar bar from Lake Charles to the Mississippi line contained football cards, punchboards, and payoff pinball machines. Cops in uniform worked as card dealers and bartenders in nightclubs that deliberately served minors. I could go on, but what difference does it make? The illegal gambling industry of the past is nothing in comparison to its legalized descendant.
A few years back our governor, who supposedly was in debt millions of dollars to the Vegas syndicate, proved himself a great friend to casino gambling in Louisiana. Today, he and his son are serving time in a federal penitentiary, along with our last three state insurance commissioners. No matter. From Shreveport on the northwestern tip of the state to Lake Charles in the south, the casinos and racetracks soak up all the Texas trade they can get their hands on. New Orleans takes the trade from everywhere, including old people the casinos bus into town from retirement homes in Mississippi. The Indians on the rez are happier than pigs rolling in slop. In fact, everyone is delighted with the new era of gaming in Louisiana, except, of course, the uneducated and the compulsive who lose their life’s savings and the owners of bars and restaurants who have to shut down their businesses because they can’t compete with the giveaway prices at the casinos.