Crusader's Cross

  “Thanks for passing on the information, Bob. But if I were you, I’d let your friend Pitts drown in his own shit. He’s on a pad for the Chalons family. Did you know that?” I said.

  “I was trying to do you a favor, for old times’ sake. Screw Pitts.” Bob knocked back his whiskey and drew in on his cigarette, the whites of his eyes threaded with tiny veins.

  “Let me buy you a round,” I said.

  “I’m covered.”

  “See you around, partner,” I said.

  “You might think I’m pulling your joint, but I remember a Galveston whore by the name of Ida Whatever. She played a fiddle. No, that wasn’t it. She played a mandolin. Played the fire out of it.”

  “Say that again?”

  But he had nothing to add. Bad Texas Bob had outsmarted me. Like all corrupt people, he had wrapped a piece of truth inside a lie. To try to discern the fact from the lie was to empower the agenda of a classical manipulator, I told myself. I left Bob to his booze in Broussard, wondering if I had just revisited my alcoholic past or seen my future.

  CHAPTER

  9

  THE CORONER, Koko Hebert, was waiting for me when I got to work Thursday morning. He dropped his great weight down ponderously in a chair and fanned his face with his hat. His skin was flushed, his beachball of a stomach rising up and down as he breathed. A package of cigarettes protruded from his shirt pocket. He was probably the most unhealthy-looking human specimen I had ever seen. “How’s life, Koko?” I said.

  “Burning up out there,” he said.

  He pulled his tropical shirt off his chest and shook the cloth. I could smell an odor like talcum and stale antiperspirant wafting off his skin. “The contents of the DOA’s purse, you got a list in your file?” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “Were there car keys in there, house keys on a chain, maybe a penlight on a chain, something like that?” he asked.

  “Yeah, car keys,” I said.

  “On a chain?”

  “No, as I remember, they were on a ring. They’re in an evidence locker,” I replied.

  He held up a small Ziploc bag. Inside it was a thin piece of brass chain, no more than an inch long, with very tiny links. “Maybe this fell out of her clothes. I’m not sure. One of the paramedics found it in the body bag,” he said.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “You said something about the DOA I couldn’t forget. You said a woman who’d swallow her own wedding ring might also figure a way to tell us who killed her. So I wondered about this chain.”

  It was obvious humility did not come easily to Koko Hebert, and I was reminded of George Orwell’s admonition that people are always better than we think they are. Koko fiddled with his Panama hat, then flipped the Ziploc bag and chain on my desk. “Did Mack Bertrand get ahold of you yet?” he asked.

  Mack was our forensic chemist out at the lab. I told Koko I had not heard from him.

  “The DOA’s clothes had small traces of grease and rubber on them,” he said.

  “She was inside the trunk of a car?” I said.

  “That’d be my guess. Give me a call if you need anything else.” He stood up from his chair, the bottom of his stomach like a giant watermelon inside his linen slacks.

  “There is one other thing, Koko. Why do you always give Helen a bad time? Why not cut her some slack?” I said.

  “She’s a dyke trying to do a man’s job. Get a life, Robicheaux,” he replied.

  Lesson learned? Don’t expect too many miracles in one day.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Helen buzzed my extension. “I just got a call from Raphael Chalons. Clete Purcel was out at his house. Know anything about that?” she said.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Then why was he out there?”

  “Clete’s uncontrollable sometimes. I’ve already talked to him. He doesn’t listen.”

  There was silence on the line. I wanted to bite my tongue off. “Talked to him about what? What’s he done, Dave?”

  “Made a home call on Billy Joe Pitts.”

  “And?”

  “I think he might have dropped a set of weights on Pitts’s chest.”

  “I just don’t believe this.”

  “That Clete went after Pitts?”

  “No, that I’m having this conversation. The next time I rehire you, just put a bullet in my brain. In the meantime, straighten out this shit with Chalons.”

  “Why not tell Chalons to kiss your ass? He’s not even in our jurisdiction.”

  “Bwana go now. Bwana write report and put it on my desk when he get back.”

  CLETE’S P.I. OFFICE was on Main, in an old brick building hard by the old jail, the front shaded by a solitary oak tree growing out of the sidewalk. A bell tinkled above the door when I went inside. He was sitting at a metal desk, in the middle of large room that was bare except for two file cabinets, flipping through the pages of a notebook that he always carried in his shirt pocket. “Glad you dropped by. I did some more checking on Billy Joe Pitts and that casino over in Lake Charles.” He looked at the expression on my face and raised his eyebrows. “What?”

  “Helen Soileau says you fired up Raphael Chalons,” I said.

  “I don’t read it that way.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Chalons is backing a couple of casinos in western Louisiana. He’s got a religious crusader fronting points for him with some dudes in Washington. The issue is licenses for some Indian tribes who can siphon off the Texas trade before it goes to casinos deeper in the state.”

  “What’s new about that?”

  “I got a call this morning from Nig Rosewater about a couple of bail skips. Then Nig says, ‘What’s this about some peckerwood cop trying to put up a kite on you?’ Get this—Nig says a cop went to Jericho Johnny Wineburger and offered five grand to have me clipped. Except Jericho Johnny knows better and told the cop to get fucked.”

  Jericho Johnny Wineburger was an old-time button man for the Giacano family and was called Jericho because his work product traveled to a dead city and did not return from it.

  “You sure it was Pitts?” I said.

  “Yeah, because I called up Jericho Johnny and he described Pitts exactly,” Clete said.

  “Pitts’s beef with you is personal. Why would you put it on Raphael Chalons?”

  “You’re not hearing anything I say. You were right about Pitts. He works for the Chalonses. The old man is a regular with Pitts’s chippies. ‘Personal’ is when guys like Chalons look the other way while the hired help splatter your grits. So I went out to his house and told him that. As well as a couple of other things.”

  “Like what other things?”

  “That if he kept his stiff red-eye in his pants, he’d probably have a lot fewer problems. By the way, the guy is supposed to have a sch-long on him like a fifteen-inch chunk of flex pipe. Stop looking like that. He needed a heart-to-heart. He probably appreciated it.”

  Clete tried to make light of his encounter with Raphael Chalons, but he and I had reached an age when cynicism and humor become poor surrogates for the rage we feel when our lives are treated with disregard. I bought him lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria, then drove up the bayou to the home of Raphael Chalons.

  I HAD ALWAYS WANTED to dismiss him as a vestigial reminder of the old oligarchy—imperious, pragmatic, amoral when necessity demanded it, casual if not cavalier regarding the hardship imposed by his society on the backs of blacks and poor whites. He may have been partially all those things but I also believed he was a far more complex man.

  He was a strict traditionalist, even to the point of refusing to air-condition his home. But during the Civil Rights era, when a group of black men entered the clubhouse at the public golf course and were ignored by the waiters, who were also black and feared for their jobs, Chalons sat at their table and told the manager to put their drinks on his tab. After that one seminal incident, black golfers never had trouble at our public links or clubhouse again.


  He became the legal guardian of orphaned children and paid for their education. I suspected he would not use profane language or be personally abusive at gunpoint. In his own mind the estate he had inherited was a votive trust, and those who would impose their way upon it risked his wrath. Sometimes I wondered if Raphael Chalons heard the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux.

  The rumors that he did business with the Giacanos were I’m sure true. To what degree was up for debate. In the state of Louisiana, systemic venality is a given. The state’s culture, mind-set, religious attitudes, and economics are no different from those of a Caribbean nation. The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in the state of Louisiana and not do business with the devil probably knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana. Chalons was an enigma, a protean creation bound more to the past than the present, and in some ways a mirror of us all. But the best description I ever heard of Chalons came from his own attorney, who once told me, “Raphael hates lawyers, keeps all his records in his own head, and is a ruthless sonofabitch. But by God he always keeps his word.”

  I parked my cruiser in the spangled shade of a live oak and was told by a yardman that Raphael Chalons was in the back, down by the bayou, walking his dog. I went around the side of the building, past slave quarters that were used to store baled hay and a cistern that had caved into sticks on its brick foundation. Down the slope, in the sunlight, I saw Raphael Chalons throwing a stick for his pet Rottweiler to fetch. As I approached him, he snapped his fingers at the dog and clipped a leash onto its collar, then stepped on the end of the leash with one foot.

  He was a tall, ascetic-looking man, with shiny black hair and a scrolled and waxed mustache, like the one worn by the legendary Confederate naval officer Raphael Semmes. His hands had the long, tapered quality of a surgeon’s, deeply tanned on the backs, corded with blue veins.

  I told him I had been sent by the sheriff to investigate his complaint regarding Clete Purcel. “Did he bother or threaten you in some way, sir?” I asked.

  “You’re not patronizing me, are you, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Sheriff Soileau doesn’t want someone from our parish threatening people, if in fact that was the case,” I replied.

  I saw the veiled challenge to his veracity register in his eyes. “If he had threatened me, I would have run him off with a shotgun. Did he offend me? Yes, he did. He made an insinuation an employee of mine put a contract on his life. But I have the feeling you know this man.”

  “I do.”

  “So there’s a personal agenda at work here?”

  “No,” I replied, my eyes shifting off his.

  “My son thinks you’re trying to extract information from my daughter about our family. Is that your purpose, Mr. Robicheaux, besides looking out for your friend’s interests?”

  His tone had become pointed, slightly heated, and I saw the dog raise its head, a string of slobber hanging from the side of its mouth. The dog was heavily muscled, its hair coarse, the same black, shiny color as Chalons’s, with tan markings around its rump and ears. Chalons snapped his fingers and the dog got down flat on the ground and rested its head on its paws.

  “There’s a hit man in New Orleans by the name of Jericho Johnny Wineburger,” I said. “His specialty is one in the mouth, one in the forehead, and one in the ear. He once told me, ‘When I pop ’em, I shut all their motors down. Forget life support. They’re cold meat when they bounce off the pavement.’ That’s the guy a cop by the name of Billy Joe Pitts was trying to sic on my friend Clete Purcel.”

  I could see the offensive nature of my language and its implication climb into his face. He studied the bayou and a powerboat splitting a long yellow trough down its center. Then he bent over and unsnapped the leash from the dog’s collar.

  Involuntarily I stepped back and rested my palm on the butt of my holstered .45, my heart beating. But Chalons only patted his dog on its head and said, “Go to the house, Heidi.”

  I watched the dog bound up the grassy slope, then I looked back at Chalons’s face. There were long vertical lines in it, the mouth downturned at the corners, as though he had never learned to smile. I took my hand from my weapon, feeling strangely disappointed that he had not forced the moment. I could not begin to guess at the thoughts that went on behind the black light in his eyes.

  Then, as though he had read my mind, he said, “Please leave my family alone, Mr. Robicheaux. We’ve done you no harm.”

  I WENT DIRECTLY from work to New Orleans, driving the four-lane through Morgan City and Des Allemands. I hit rain on the bridge over the Mississippi River, then a full-blown electrical storm as I turned off Interstate 10 and headed up St. Charles Avenue toward the old Irish Channel.

  Jericho Johnny Wineburger owned a saloon on a side street between Magazine and Tchoupitoulas, and claimed to have been out of the life for at least a decade. But he had at least a thirty-year history of killing people, and supposedly, with another button man, had taken out Bugsy Siegel’s cousin with a shotgun on a train roaring through West Palm Beach. Clete believed Jericho Johnny had turned down the contract on Clete’s life either out of fear of Clete or respect for the fact they both grew up in the Irish Channel.

  I doubted either possibility. Jericho Johnny had ice water in his veins and I suspect was capable of killing his victim and eating a sandwich while he did it.

  The air was cold and smelled of ozone. The streets were flooded, and thunder was booming over the Gulf when I parked in front of his saloon and ran for the colonnade. The only customers in the saloon were some kids shooting pool in back and a white woman in a house robe who slept with her face on her hands at a table. Jericho Johnny stood behind the bar drying glasses while he watched a professional wrestling match on TV. He looked at me and slid a toothpick into the corner of his mouth. “This about Purcel?” he asked.

  His words came out in an accentuated whisper, as though they were filtered through wet grit. Some said his vocal cords were impaired when he was a child and he accidentally drank rug cleaner. But I think the story was romantic in origin. I think Jericho Johnny came out of a different gene pool than the rest of us.

  “I need the name of the cop who wanted you to clip Clete,” I said.

  I thought he might give me a bad time, but he didn’t. He looked at the backs of his nails. “Pitts,” he said.

  “But you told him to get lost?” I said.

  “In so many words, yeah, I did. You still on the wagon?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “’Cause I’ll stand you a beer and a shot if you’re not. Otherwise, I’ll offer you a cup of coffee. Take the two-by-four out of your ass, Robicheaux.”

  His accent could have been mistaken for Flat-bush or South Boston. He had worked on the docks when he was a kid, and he had silver hair, short, powerful forearms wrapped with tattoos, and a face that could have been called handsome except for the thinness in his lips. He poured me a demitasse of black coffee and placed it on a small saucer with a cube of sugar and a tiny spoon. He saw me look at the woman who was sleeping with her face on her hands. “She lives up the street. She’s scared of lightning and can’t sleep during an electrical storm, so she comes down here,” he said.

  “You didn’t piece off the work?” I asked.

  “I never pieced off a job in my life,” he re plied.

  “Why’d you tell Nig Rosewater about it?”

  “I didn’t. This cop, this guy Pitts, he went to two or three people in the business about Purcel. I was just one of them. That’s how Nig heard about it. I own a saloon today. I live in a nice house out back. I been out of the life a long time now.”

  “You think somebody else took the contract?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know.”

  A phone rang in back and he went to answer it. The rain and lightning had quit, and the street was dark and in the light from the saloon I could see the fronds of a banana tree flapping
against a side window. The woman who had been sleeping at the table woke up and looked around, as though unsure of where she was. “I want to go home,” she said.

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Down the block, next to the grocery store,” she replied.

  “I’ll take you there,” I said.

  “Do I know you?” she said.

  “I’m a friend of Johnny’s,” I said.

  She was very old, quite feeble, and even with her hand on my arm she had to take small steps as we walked toward the front door.

  “Where you going?” Jericho Johnny said from behind the bar.

  I explained I was taking the elderly woman home.

  His toothpick flexed in the corner of his mouth and his eyes looked at a neutral space between us. “Come back when you’re done,” he said.

  A few minutes later I reentered the saloon and finished my coffee. The kids who had been shooting pool bought a bagful of cold long-neck beers to go and went out the door. The wind was blowing through the screen doors, and the inside of the saloon smelled like rain and sawdust.

  Jericho Johnny leaned on his arms. “Here’s the deal, Robicheaux. That guy Pitts wasn’t trying to put a kite on just Purcel. He wanted a twofer—seventy-five hundred for the whole job.”

  “Who was the other hit?” I asked.

  “Who you think?” he said.

  “Pitts used my name specifically?”

  “He said it was a friend of Purcel. An Iberia Parish plainclothes. He said the guy had been an NOPD Homicide roach, but got kicked off the force because he was a drunk. He said if this guy gets smoked, no cops around here are gonna be burning candles. Sound like anybody you know?”

  “You willing to wear a wire?”

  He laughed to himself and began stacking bottles of Bacardi and Beam and Jack Daniel’s on a shelf.

  “Why’d you tell me all this, Johnny?” I said.

  “That was my mother you drove home. I don’t like to owe people. You mixed up with politics?”

  “No.”