DR08 - Burning Angel Read Free Page B

his backyard. His face was cool and pleasant as he sipped his iced tea and looked at a motorboat and a water-skier hammering down the bayou on pillows of yellow foam.
    ”Bertie can come to my office if she wants. I don't know what else to tell you, Dave,“ he said. His short salt-and-pepper hair was wet and freshly combed, the part a razor-straight pink line in his scalp.
    ”She says your grandfather gave her family the land.“
    ”The truth is we haven't charged her any rent. She's interpreted that to mean she owns the land.“
    ”Are you selling it?“
    ”It's a matter of time until it gets developed by someone.“
    ”Those black people have lived there a long time, Moleen.“
    ”Tell me about it.“ Then the brief moment of impatience went out of his face. ”Look, here's the reality, and I don't mean it as a complaint. There're six or seven nigra families in there we've taken care of for fifty years. I'm talking about doctor and dentist bills, schooling, extra money for June Teenth, getting people out of jail.
    Bertie tends to forget some things.“
    ”She mentioned something about gold being buried on the property.“
    ”Good heavens. I don't want to offend you, but don't y'all have something better to do?“
    ”She took care of me when I was little. It's hard to chase her out of my office.“ He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. His nails were immaculate, his touch as soft as a woman's. ”Send her back to me,“ he said.
    ”What's this stuff about gold?“
    ”Who knows? I always heard Jean Lafitte buried his treasure right across the bayou there, right over by those two big cypress trees.“
    Then his smile became a question mark. ”Why are you frowning?“
    ”You're the second person to mention Lafitte to me in the last couple of days.“
    ”Hmmm,“ he said, blowing air out his nostrils.
    ”Thanks for your time, Moleen.“
    ”My pleasure.“ I walked toward my truck, which was parked on the gravel cul-de-sac by his boathouse. I rubbed the back of my neck, as though a half-forgotten thought were trying to burrow its way out of my skin.
    ”Excuse me, didn't you represent Bertie's nephew once?“ I asked.
    ”That's right.“
    ”His name's Luke, you got him out of the death house?“
    ”That's the man.“ I nodded and waved good-bye again. He had mentioned getting people out of jail but nothing as dramatic as saving somebody from the electric chair hours before an electrocution. Why not? Maybe he was just humble, I said in response to my own question.
    When I backed out of the drive, he was idly pouring his iced tea into the inverted cone at the top of an anthill.
    I drove out on the St. Martinville highway to the lime green duplex set back among pine trees where Delia Landry had suddenly been thrust through a door into an envelope of pain that most of us can imagine only in nightmares. The killers had virtually destroyed the interior.
    The mattresses, pillows, and stuffed chairs were slashed open, dishes and books raked off the shelves, dresser drawers dumped on the floors, plaster and lathes stripped out of the walls with either a crowbar or claw hammer; even the top of the toilet tank was broken in half across the bowl.
    Her most personal items from the bathroom's cabinets were strewn across the floor, cracked and ground into the imitation tile by heavy shoes.
    The sliding shower glass that extended across the tub had been shattered out of the frame. On the opposite side of the tub was a dried red streak that could have been painted there by a heavily soaked paintbrush.
    When a homicide victim's life can be traced backward to a nether world of pickup bars, pimps, and nickel-and-dime hustlers and street dealers, the search for a likely perpetrator isn't a long one. But Delia Landry was a social worker who had graduated in political science from LSU only three years ago; she attended a Catholic church in St.
    Martinville, came from a middle-class family in Slidell, taught a catechism class to