DR15 - Pegasus Descending

by James Lee Burke

  Trish’s apartment was on the first floor. I raised the brass knocker and heard chimes ring inside.

  I had deliberately not called in advance in order to catch her unprepared. When she opened the door, I saw three young men and a woman in the living room with her. “Oh, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said, stepping outside, pulling the door shut behind her. “If you’d called, I would have driven to New Iberia.”

  “I had to come to Lafayette anyway. Have any FBI agents talked to you yet?”

  “FBI? No,” she said. “This is about the hundred-dollar bills again?”

  “It seems they were boosted from a savings and loan company in Mobile.”

  I watched for any change in her expression. But her eyes remained fixed on mine—pensive, blue, blinking perhaps once or twice. “Does that mean my money will be confiscated?”

  “You’d better talk with the Feds about that.”

  She screwed her mouth into a button. “Well, if this is a federal case, why are you here?”

  “We have jurisdiction in the passing of stolen money as well as the Feds. Also, I was a friend of your old man.”

  “I see. You’re here in part because of my father?”

  “Who are your guests?” I asked, ignoring her question, nodding at her door.

  “Some people who want to help me start up a breeding farm.”

  “Can we go inside? I’d like to meet them.”

  “You think I stole those bills?”

  “No, of course not. You’re Dallas’s daughter,” I said.

  I saw her jaw set and an irritable moment swim through her eyes. She looked searchingly into my face, her hand resting on the doorknob. “Yes, why don’t you come in? Then maybe we can put an end to this business.”

  Her friends proved to be a strange collection. They were in their twenties or early thirties, and each seemed to claim a role for himself that appeared more an aspiration than a reality. They introduced themselves the way regulars in bars often do, as though last names are not important and an air of open familiarity is proof enough of one’s goodwill. But unlike most people in bars, or at least people like me, there was almost a comic innocence about the friends of Trish Klein.

  A diminutive man named Tommy, with bowed legs, a tubular-shaped nose, and a tiny mouth, said he was a horse jockey, although he was wider at the hips than most jockeys are and probably carried a prohibitive extra ten pounds on his stomach.

  A deeply tanned man named Miguel in an immaculate white strap undershirt, with a tattoo of the Virgin Mary wrapped around his right shoulder, said he was a boxer. One eye was disfigured with scar tissue, the lid hanging at half-mast. His upper arms had the thick dimensions of someone who has put in long hours on the speed bag, but his wrists were thin, his hands too small for a professional fighter.

  The third man introduced himself as Tyler and was all grins and energy and loquaciousness. He wore black jeans and gold chains and a pullover Hawaiian print shirt that ballooned on his skinny frame. His hair looked like it had been clipped with garden shears and blow-dried with an airplane propeller. He claimed to be a student of film and script writing, with screenplays under submission to Clint East-wood and Martin Scorsese. When I asked if he had received any degree of response, he replied, “My agent is supposed to call. But I might do some networking on my own out there. I hear a deal sometimes just needs the right kind of nudge from the screenwriter.”

  The woman was named Lewinda. She stood up eye level with me to shake hands. She was plump and soft all over, peroxided, perfumed, and dressed in tight-fitting tan western slacks, ostrich-skin boots, and a purple shirt stitched with green and red flowers. She said she was a “country vocalist.” Her smile was one of the sweetest I had ever seen on a human face, her accent a song in itself. But when she said she had sung “onstage” in both Wheeling, West Virginia, and Branson, Missouri, I had the feeling an anonymous moment “onstage” was about as good as it had gotten for Lewinda With No Last Name.

  I drank coffee with Trish Klein’s friends for a half hour and wondered if I was in a room filled with mental patients or the most interesting collection of scam artists I’d ever come across. I said good-bye at the door and started down the walkway toward the parking lot. I heard Trish Klein coming hard behind me. “That’s it?” she said. “You drive twenty miles, then drink coffee and go back to your office?”

  “Some days are like that. The Feds are going to pick this one up, anyway.”

  “Then why are you here? Don’t give me any bullshit, either.”

  “I was there when your father died. I tried to stop it, but I was deep in the bag.”

  She stared at me, her mouth slightly parted. I could hear the wind in the trees as I let myself out the iron gate.

  space

  BACK AT THE OFFICE, I went to work on a hit-and-run homicide that had probably occurred nine months to one year ago. The body had been discovered three weeks ago under a tangle of dead brush at the bottom of a coulee on a rural road where trash and garbage of every kind was regularly thrown from speeding automobiles and pickup trucks. Years ago, this particular road had experienced its own infamous fifteen minutes of importance through the book and film titled Dead Man Walking. On their graduation night, two high school kids had parked in the trees to neck. A pair of brothers from St. Martinville raped the girl and murdered both her and her boyfriend. Today, if you drive down this road, you will see amid the mounds of garbage a Styrofoam cross wrapped with a string of plastic flowers.

  The skeletal remains at the bottom of the coulee, which in South Louisiana is what we call a naturally formed drainage ditch, came to be known as “Crustacean Man,” because his bones and webbed vestiges of skin were dripping with crawfish when they were lifted out of the mud. Crustacean Man had no identification, had worn no jewelry, and did not have a belt on his trousers or even shoes on his feet. In all probability, he had been a derelict who had wandered north of the old Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. His hip was broken, his skull crushed. The coroner put his death down as hit-and-run vehicular homicide, a not uncommon event in a state that has one of the highest highway fatality rates ij the nation.

  We had contacted numerous auto body repair shops in Acadiana, and used the media as much as possible for leads, but had gotten nowhere. Crustacean Man was probably destined for an anonymous burial and a posterity of a few sheets of paper inside a case file that would eventually be flung into a parish incinerator.

  But there was one piece in the coroner’s postmortem that didn’t fit. I picked up the phone and punched in his number. “What’s the haps, Koko?” I said, then continued before he had a chance to reply. “Crustacean Man’s left hip was broken, but the fatal injury was to the right side of his head. How do you reconcile that?”

  “‘Reconcile,’” he said thoughtfully. “Let me write that down and look up the various definitions. ‘Reconcile.’ I like that word.”

  Koko, you are the most obnoxious human being I’ve ever had the misfortune to work with, I said to myself.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Crustacean Man probably got hit broadside and slammed to the road, then he raised up as the vehicle went over him.”

  “Wouldn’t he have been busted up all over?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Was there any indication he was dragged?”

  “I’m supposed to know this about a guy wild animals and the crawfish ate down to the bone?”

  “I just don’t understand how a guy could receive two massive injuries to two separate areas of the body but none anywhere else.”

  “Maybe the guy’s head was smashed against the asphalt after he was broadsided. Or maybe against a post or telephone pole.”

  “There’s no post or telephone pole near where he was found.”

  “Maybe a second vehicle ran over him.”

  “Two hit-and-run drivers on the same isolated road on the same night?”

  He didn’
t reply. I could hear him breathing against the receiver. “Koko?” I said.

  He hung up. I punched in his number again. “Your attitude sucks,” I said.

  “Maybe I’ve got some questions about this one, too,” he said. “But you and I both know the guy is going into eternity as John Doe, killed by a person or persons unknown. Nobody cared about him when he was alive. Nobody gives a shit about him now. Now, stop jerking off at other people’s expense.”

  Five minutes later, Wally, our hypertensive dispatcher and self-appointed departmental comic, buzzed my extension. “I got an FBI gal out here in shades and a suit and wit’ top-heavy knockers. What you want me to do wit’ her?” he said.

  “Wally, what in God’s name—” I began.

  “She’s in the can. She cain’t hear me.”

  “That’s not the point. This is supposed to be a professional—”

  “She backed her car into a cruiser in the parking lot. Helen’s outside looking at it now. I’ll send her up to your office.”

  I walked to the window and looked down on Helen Soileau and a group of uniformed deputies staring at the crushed front end of a cruiser. A stream of green radiator fluid was draining into a pool on the asphalt. Behind me, someone tapped on my door. I looked through the glass at a tall woman in a powder-blue suit with hair the bright color of straw. She had propped one hand against the wall and was pulling off her shoe. When I opened the door, she looked up at me awkwardly, her left shoe gripped in her hand, the sole splayed with a flattened piece of pink bubble gum. “Yuck, I hate it when that happens,” she said.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “I’m Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher. Phew, what a day,” she replied, straightening up, then walking past me to the window, one shoe on, one shoe off. She looked down at the parking lot. “Oh, jeez.”

  “You’re here about the bills from the Mobile savings and loan job?”

  “Yeah, I’m getting off to kind of a bad start here. I just interviewed the Klein woman. You knew her father was killed in an armored car robbery? Can I sit down?”

  “Yes,” I said, uncertain as to which question I had just answered.

  She sat in a chair by the side of my desk and began prying gum off her shoe with a pencil and wiping it onto a piece of paper over my wastebasket. “The Klein woman talked with you about her father?”

  “She didn’t have to. He was a friend of mine. I saw him killed.”

  Her face became thoughtful, her eyes looking into space, even though she kept digging gum off her shoe with her pencil. “You were the off-duty cop in front of the bar, right?”

  I felt myself swallow. “You obviously ran my sheet, so why do you ask?”

  “You were pinned down while these guys were shooting at you?”

  “I was drunk.”

  She dropped her pencil in the wastebasket and fitted on her shoe. “I have to wash my hands,” she said.

  I was having a hard time assimilating Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher. She seemed to combine ineptitude with abrasiveness and a way of speaking that required a cryptologist to understand what she was saying. Maybe Homeland Security had drained the FBI of its first team, I told myself. Or perhaps a case coordinator was sending her into the hinterland as a training exercise. Or maybe the investigation into two dye-marked bills was not only a waste of time but a way of getting Betsy Mossbacher out of somebody’s hair. When she returned from the restroom, she blew out her breath, as though she had just completed a herculean task. “Quite a coincidence this gal ends up in your backyard, huh?” she said.

  “The rim of the Gulf Coast is all one culture.”

  She seemed to chew the inside of her cheek. “Did you know Trish Klein roams around half of this country as well as Latin America?”

  “No.”

  “She inherited a boxcar load of money from her grandmother. She owns beautiful horses. She’s educated and has taste. But she says she got the hot bills at a low-rent hotel-and-casino in Mississippi, the kind of dump a roofers’ union uses for its conventions. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Check out her friends. They’re like people who met at a bus depot and decided to live together,” I said.

  “You knew the savings and loan was a laundry for the Mob?”

  I could feel my irritability growing. “So what?” I said.

  “Maybe somebody squeezed Trish Klein’s father and made him give up the armored car schedule.”

  “Dallas owed a lot of money to some bad dudes. I told this to the Feds many years ago.”

  “Was one of them a bookie by the name of Whitey Bruxal?”

  “Since you came in here you’ve been asking me questions you already know the answer to. You saying maybe I don’t tell the truth?”

  She walked to the window again and gazed down on the cruiser she had struck. “You ever mess with cows?” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “In calving season you spend about six weeks learning about natural and unnatural law.”

  “You lost me,” I said.

  “The cows have got sunburned bags and you’ve got shit, piss, and blood up to your right armpit. You hardly sleep, you’re cold most of the time, and you hear animals bawling day and night. When the mommies reject their calves, you graft the orphans to another mommy. You throw everybody a lot of cottonseed cake and pull it off and feel you’ve done a real good deed. Then one day you ship the whole bunch to the slaughterhouse. Some irony, huh?”

  “I’ve always been poor at allegory,” I said.

  “The point is our best efforts are seldom good enough. You told Miami-Dade P.D. your buddy Dallas Klein was probably working with the men who boosted his armored car. Consciously or unconsciously, I think you blamed yourself for his death. Are you still carrying guilt, Detective Robicheaux? Is that why you seem to have a remarkable lack of curiosity about his daughter’s behavior?”

  She put a bright piece of red candy in her mouth and sucked on it. I looked her evenly in the eyes but did not answer her question, a bubble of anger rising in my chest like an old friend.

  “Well,” she said finally, then turned to go, somehow saddened, even aged, by our exchange.

  “Where are you from?” I said.

  “Chugwater, Wyoming.”

  “They must be frank as hell in Chugwater, Wyoming.”

  “That’s what happens when you mess with cows,” she replied.

  I didn’t need this. Chapter 4

  T HAT EVENING I TOOK Yvonne Darbonne’s diary home with me, and after supper walked down to the bayou with a folding chair and began to reread the thirty pages of entries that offered a small glimpse into the soul of an eighteen-year-old Cajun girl who had fallen in love with the world.

  The last four pages contained the following entries:

  We ate ice cream on the square in St. Martinville and walked out on the dock behind the old church. The moon was high above the oaks, and the moss looked like silver thread against the moon. He kissed me and wrapped me inside his coat. I could feel him against me, down there….

  Today we took a boat out to his father’s camp in the swamp. I know he wants to do it, but he’s afraid to ask. He touched my breast, then said he was sorry. I told him it’s not wrong if people love each other. His eyes are dark brown, the way water is when starlight is trapped inside it. He hasn’t asked me if I’m a virgin. I wonder if he’ll think less of me. His goodness is in everything he does….

  Last night he introduced me to his friends. They’re nice boys, I think, except for one. He has a hawk’s eyes and a mouth that always looks hungry. I saw him watching me in the mirror when he thought no one was looking.

  But Yvonne Darbonne’s concern with an imperfection in her new-found world was brief. Her last entry returned to the boyfriend:

  I told him I wanted him to do it and for him not to be afraid. When we were finished, he kissed my nipples and the tops of my fingers. It was hot in the cabin and his hair was wet and fell in curls on his forehead. I know n
ow I love him in a way that’s different from anyone else I’ve loved. I can’t believe we’ll be going to college together this summer. He wants to meet my father. He told me never to be ashamed of the place I lived.

  Molly walked down the slope and placed her hand on my shoulder. “What are you reading?” she asked.

  “The diary of the Darbonne girl. How does a kid like this end up shooting herself?”

  I handed the diary to her, with my thumb inserted between the last two pages of entries. Molly turned the pages into the light and read for a moment, then closed the covers and looked into space.

  “Who’s the boy?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Her cell phone contained the number of Bello Lujan. Evidently he’s got a son at UL. Maybe he and Yvonne Darbonne were an item.”

  “The Daily Iberian said her death has been ruled a suicide.”

  “That doesn’t mean someone else isn’t responsible. Where did she get the revolver she shot herself with? Who’s the bastard who left her drunk and stoned in the yard with a handgun?”

  “Maybe she already had it.”

  “Her father says otherwise,” I replied.

  “Family members feel guilty. They often lie.”

  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.