James Burke - Pegasus Descending

She had written on perhaps thirty pages of the book. She had used few names of people and no family names. The last entries seemed filled with happiness and romance and did not indicate any sense of emotional conflict that I could see. In fact, her handwriting and sentence structure and her general grasp of the world appeared to be those of a sensible and mature person. I looked at my watch and all the case files stacked on my desk and all the work sitting in my intake basket. Yvonne Darbonne’s death was going down as a suicide. My function was over, I told myself. I placed the diary in a desk drawer, closed the drawer, and drove to Lafayette to interview Trish Klein.

SHE HAD TAKEN AN APARTMENT in an oak-shaded neighborhood not far from Girard Park. Her apartment complex was constructed of soft white brick, with a tile roof and Spanish ironwork along the balconies. Bougainvillea in full bloom dripped from the brick wall that surrounded the pool area. The swimming pool was heated, and even though the sun was high in the sky, steam rose from the water inside the shadows the live oaks made on the surface. Less than a quarter of a mile away, the Lafayette Oil Center might have been abuzz with concerns of profit and loss and images of black clouds rising into a desert sky from a burning pipeline in Iraq, but inside the enclosure of this particular residential complex, the year was 1955, and the moss in the trees and the gentleness of the day seemed to indicate that a less complicated era, at least temporarily, was still available to us.

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.

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.