James Burke: Pegasus Descending

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.