Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

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.