Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: James Lee Burke
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.
B ACK 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 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.
B ACK 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