DR14 - Crusader's Cross

  My holstered .45 rested on a table, next to a bottle of Scotch, a paper plate containing the remains of a fried-shrimp dinner, a scattered deck of playing cards, and three empty glasses. The .45 was mine; the rest I had no memory of.

  I stood up from the bed, then felt my knees cave and the blood drain from my head. I lay back down, my head buried in a pillow that smelled of unwashed hair, my jaws like emery paper.

  I slept until early afternoon, and woke trembling and sick, willing to cut off my fingers one at a time with tin snips for the Scotch I had seen earlier.

  Except it was gone.

  A Creole woman, with one eye that looked like a milky-blue marble pushed deep into the side of her face, sat on a chair by the door, her feet in flip-flops, her wash-faded print dress puffing from a floor fan under her. "Where you going?" she said.

  "To the restroom," I replied.

  "There ain't no restroom. The privy's in back. Don't go up to the bar, Mr. Dave."

  "How do you know me?"

  "I belong to your church in Jeanerette. I see you at Mass every Sunday," she replied. Her face was lopsided, perhaps misshaped at birth. Her good eye held on me just a moment, then looked away.

  "Why are you here? Why are you watching me?" I said.

  "You had bad men in here. Poachers and men carrying knives. What you doin' to yourself, a Christian man, you?"

  I used the outbuilding in back. My truck was parked in a clump of gum trees, the paint and body unmarked by an accident. My credit cards and most of my money were still in my wallet. On the lakefront was a bar nailed together from unpainted scrap wood and corrugated tin. I could hear music inside and through a window see men drinking long-necked beers. The wind shifted, and I could smell the fish in the lake, barbecue grease dripping into an outdoor fire, ozone from another storm building out on the Gulf.

  Perhaps it was a happy day after all. Maybe nothing truly bad had happened because of my brief fling with the dirty boogie. Maybe all I needed was a couple of beers to straighten out the kinks, medicate the snakes a bit, whisk the spiders back into a dusty corner. What was wrong with that? I was not sure where I was, but the woods were hung with air vines, the oaks and swamp maples and persimmon trees widely spaced, the coulees layered with yellow and black leaves. It was Louisiana before someone decided to insert it in the grinder.

  "Oh, there you are," I heard Molly Boyle say behind me. She and the Chalons family handyman, Andre Bergeron, walked down a leafy knoll on the edge of the lake. "We were watching the alligators in the shallows. How about something to eat?" she said.

  She drove with me in the truck back toward New Iberia. Her friend, the black man, followed. At Jeanerette, I saw his car turn off the highway. I had hardly spoken since leaving the fish camp deep in the Atchafalaya Basin. Each time we passed a bar I felt as though a life preserver were being pulled from my grasp. "How'd you know where I was?" I asked.

  "The lady who was watching you called me. Her husband owns the bar," she replied.

  "Why was the Chalonses' handyman with you?" I said.

  "Andre helps me in any way he can. He's always been protective of us," she replied. "Don't be angry, Dave."

  "I'm not. I just got jammed up," I said irrationally, my hands tightening on the steering wheel, my breath a noxious fog.

  Molly was silent. When I looked over at her, she was staring out the side window. "I'll go to a meeting with you," she said.

  "I'd better drop you by your house," I said.

  "That's not going to happen, trooper. If you try to pick up a drink today, I'm going to break your arm."

  I looked at her again, in a more cautious way.

  We drove down East Main toward my house, the nineteenth-century homes and manicured lawns and wet trees rushing past me, all of it curiously unchanged, a study in Sunday-afternoon normalcy and permanence to which I had returned like an impaired outsider. I pulled the truck deep into the driveway, past the porte cochere, so that it was almost hidden from the street by the trees and bamboo. I cut the engine and opened the driver's door. When I did, a shiny compact disk fell to the ground. Just next to the edge was a tiny reddish-brown smear that looked like blood.

  "What's that?" Molly said.

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't know what it is." Vainly, I tried to explain to myself where the CD had come from or who could have placed it in my truck. I touched the crusted smear on the surface and was sure I was touching blood. I slipped the CD in my pants pocket and unlocked the back door, my hands shaking.

  Even if Molly had not been with me, my home offered no succor for the drunk teetering on the edge of delirium tremens. I had returned all the booze I'd purchased at Winn-Dixie. There was not even a bottle of vanilla extract in a cabinet. But at least my brother was not home and did not have to see me in the condition I was in.

  The only other consolation I had was the fact my bender had not hurt my animals. When I bought my house I had created a small swinging door in the back entrance so Tripod and Snuggs, in case of emergencies, could get to a bag of dry food on the floor. But I couldn't take credit for having thought about them. A drunk on a drunk thinks about nothing except staying drunk.

  I got in the shower, turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, and stayed there until the tank was almost empty. Then I dressed in fresh clothes and shaved while my hand trembled on the razor. I could hear Molly clanking pans in the kitchen.

  I went into the living room and loaded the CD into my stereo. There was no seal or logo on it, and I suspected it contained nothing more than an Internet download of music someone had not bothered to pay for. But who had left it in my truck? The poachers the Creole woman had mentioned?

  I pushed the "play" button on the stereo and the long-dead voice of Harry Choates, singing his signature song, "Jolie Blon," filled the room. That's why I had heard those words over and over in my head when I had woken up that morning, I told myself. Perhaps someone with a cut on his hand had given me Choates's song and I had probably played it repeatedly in my truck's stereo. A blackout didn't necessarily mean I had committed monstrous acts. I had to control my imagination. Yes, that was it. It was all a matter of personal control.

  Then a second song began to play, one titled "Two Bottles of Wine," which had been written by Delbert McClinton for Emmylou Harris in the late 1970s. But the singer was not Emmylou. The band was raucous, the recording probably done in a bar or at a party, and the voice on it was the same voice as on the old 45-rpm recording Jimmie believed to have been cut by Ida Durbin.

  "Everything in there okay, Dave?" Molly called from the kitchen.

  chapter SIXTEEN

  Monday morning the Garden of Gethsemane was the 7:35 traffic backup at the railroad crossing. It also included a horn blowing like a shard of glass in the ear, the hot smell of tar and diesel fumes, undigested food that lay greasy and cold in the stomach, waiting to fountain out of my throat. Then, to demonstrate I was in control of things and not bothered by the metabolic disaster inside my body, I blew my horn at a passing streak of freight cars.

  I had attended an AA meeting the previous night, determined to leave my weekend bender behind, and this morning I had dressed in pressed slacks, shined shoes, a striped tie, and a white shirt that crinkled with light. But as I walked into the office I knew my affectation of freshness and confidence was the cheap ruse of a willful man who had thrown away years of sobriety, betrayed his friends in AA, and perhaps mortgaged a long series of tomorrows.

  By midmorning I could feel a tension band begin to tighten on the right side of my head. I constantly touched at my scalp, as though I were wearing a hat that had begun to shrink. I chewed gum, washed my face with cold water in the lavatory, and tried not to think about where I might go when the clock finally struck noon. But that problem was about to be taken away from me.

  The chief of police in Jeanerette was Doogie Dugas. He was not a bad fellow, simply a showboat and political sycophant. But like most sycophants he was inept and lived in fear of p
eople who had power. I was walking past Helen's open door when I saw her talking on the telephone, snapping her fingers at me. "Hang on, Chief, Dave Robicheaux just walked in," she said. "I'm going to put you on the speakerphone. Dave's the lead detective in our own investigation."

  "— get the impression Mr. Val isn't a big fan of Dave Robicheaux," Doogie's voice said.

  "Uh, you're on the speakerphone now, Chief," Helen said.

  There was a pause. "You got any evidence this guy is local?" Doogie said.

  "Which guy?" I said.

  "The Baton Rouge serial killer," he said.

  "No, we don't have any evidence to that effect. What's going on?" I said.

  "What's going on is it looks like a butcher shop in there. The sheriff and me got road stops set up on the parish line, but I'm gonna need some lab hep here," he replied.

  "Sir, I have no idea what you're talking about," I said.

  "Honoria Chalons, somebody cut all over her. I never seen anyt'ing like this. Y'all coming over here or not?" he said.

  Helen and I and our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, drove to the Chalons home on the far side of Jeanerette. The homicide had taken place in the guesthouse sometime during the weekend, when Val and his father were in New Orleans on business. Val claimed he had returned shortly after nine on Monday morning and had found the body.

  Crime scene tape had already been strung through the trees, sealing off the immediate area around the guesthouse, which was located by a swimming pool that had long ago been abandoned to mold and the scales of dead vines. Crime scene technicians from three parishes were already inside the guesthouse, photographing the body, the walls, the furniture, the tile floors., the glass in the windows, even the ceiling.

  Honoria was nude, her body reclining on a white sofa, the incision in her throat so deep she was almost decapitated. But the wounds in the rest of her body had bled so profusely it was obvious that the mortal blow was not the first one the killer had struck.

  "Good Lord," I heard Mack say softly beside me.

  The guesthouse was actually the residence of Val Chalons, and so far no one had offered an explanation for Honoria's presence there. The initial assault seemed to have occurred just as she was about to enter the shower. One strip of blood angled down the wall mirror and there was a smear against the doorjamb, as though she had bumped against it on her way to the living room. A second attack must have taken place in front of a huge television screen and stereo center, causing her to lose large amounts of blood that probably drained over the tops of her feet.

  The oddity that no one could explain was the pattern of the footprints. They were evenly spaced, firmly patterned in the rug, as though she had still been in control of her movements and was unhurried about her destination. Mack believed she had sat down with deliberation on the couch, and had lain back with her head on a cushion, perhaps even lifting her chin in anticipation of the blow across the throat.

  The front door had been unlocked. There was no sign of a weapon on the premises.

  I looked at the white furniture, the black marble in the wet bar, the gleaming stainless-steel perfection of the kitchen area, the stereo player that was still turned on, its dials glowing with a soft green luminescence, and I felt I had been there before. But perhaps I was just remembering the interior of Val Chalons's office at the television station in Lafayette, which was similar in decor, I told myself.

  Koko Hebert, our coroner, had gone outside, under a tree beyond the crime scene tape, to smoke a cigarette. His clothes smelled like an ashtray. His lungs made sounds as if he had just labored up a mountainside.

  "Was she raped?" I said.

  "No marks around the vagina or thighs that I can see," he replied.

  "Any sign of semen?"

  "Traces in the pubic hair. St. Mary's forensic pathologist will call me after he gets inside her."

  "Mack says her blood trail doesn't make any sense. The assailant attacked her at least three times, but she made no attempt to run away. There were no defensive wounds, either."

  "Maybe she dug it."

  "You enjoy pissing people off, Koko?"

  "Yeah, when they still got booze on their breath and they're blowing it in my face while they're asking stupid questions," he replied.

  A crime scene team from state police headquarters in Baton Rouge had just landed in a helicopter across the bayou, and a St. Mary Parish sheriff's cruiser was bringing them across the drawbridge to the Chalonses' house. The crime scene area had been soggy from the weekend rains, and now the St. Augustine grass had been trod into green mulch. Plainclothes detectives, cops in uniform, and crime scene investigators came and went with the freedom of people for whom the gates of an amusement park had suddenly been opened. I wondered how Raphael Chalons would deal with the intrusion of the twenty-first century into his cloistered domain.

  A brief shower rolled across the sugar cane fields and pattered on the trees, then a few minutes later the sun came out and the trees were green and dripping like crystal against a brilliant blue sky. But still I had seen no sign of Valentine Chalons.

  It had not been easy looking at Honoria. She had been a bizarre person, but probably no more so than any true artist is. In fact, I believe her pulp fiction sexual behavior and feigned iconoclastic attitudes hid a fragility and childlike emotional need that ultimately was harmful to no one but herself. She had also died with dignity under the worst of circumstances and proved she was capable of extraordinary courage.

  Then I saw Val coming through the trees. I started to offer condolences but did not get the chance. His shoulder glazed across mine, as though I were not there, as he charged inside the guesthouse. "You left her uncovered?" he shouted. "The next one of you who points a camera at her is going to have it stuffed down his mouth!"

  Mack Bertrand tried to explain that a sheet had been placed over Honoria's body but it had been removed upon the arrival of the investigative team from Baton Rouge.

  "You're finished taking pictures, fellow. You want me to say it again?" Val said.

  The entire crime scene became quiet. Not one person offered a rejoinder, less out of respect or embarrassment than collective acceptance that the Chalons family operated in rarefied air. Then, after a long beat, a Baton Rouge detective said, "We got all we need, Mr. Chalons. We're sorry about your loss."

  But Val was not finished. He emerged from the guesthouse and pointed a finger at me. "You degenerate piece of shit! You dare come into my home?"

  "Dial it down, Mr. Val," Helen said.

  "He screwed my sister, for God's sakes, a girl who was ten years old inside," he said.

  "If you have a charge to make about one of our personnel, you need to come into the office," Helen said.

  "Maybe I'll just do this instead," he said. He advanced three steps in less time than I could blink and swung his fist into my face.

  The blow knocked me across a garden sprinkler and against a glider that was suspended from a thick oak limb. My nose felt as though hundreds of needles had been shoved up it and into my brain. I grabbed a rope on the glider and sat down, my eyes watering uncontrollably.

  "Get a towel," I heard Helen say.

  I saw two St. Mary sheriff's deputies holding Val Chalons by his arms, his wrists cuffed behind him. Someone pushed a clutch of ice cubes wrapped in paper towels into my hands. I held the coldness against my face until my skin began to numb. When I looked at the ice it was speckled with blood. The yard, the trees, the flowers, and Honoria's body inside the open guesthouse door kept warping in the sunlight.

  "You call it, bwana," Helen said.

  Val glared at me, his cheeks splotched with color, his hair hanging in his eyes, the rims of his nostrils white, as though he were breathing subzero air.

  "Cut him loose," I said.

  "A little time in an isolation cell might take some of that prissiness out of him," Helen said.

  "Val Chalons is a coward and a liar and has guilt painted all over him. Let him go," I said, loud
enough for everyone in the yard to hear.

  In the background I saw a uniformed deputy climb down a ladder with a security camera that had been mounted high in the fork of an oak tree.

  I went home, changed shirts, and returned to the office. Helen was waiting for me, as I knew she would be, her hands stuck in her back pockets, a quizzical look in her eye, one tooth chewing on the corner of her lip. "You pumped Honoria Chalons?" she said.

  "Why don't you be more direct?" I said.

  We were standing in front of her office door, and people were passing in the corridor. "Answer the question," she said.

  "Val Chalons believes what he needs to believe. End of discussion," I said.

  "Step inside," she said.

  She closed the door behind us. Through the window I could see the cemetery and a black kid trying to fly a red kite among the crypts. I wanted to be outside in the wind with him, away from all the sordid details that my life had taken on in only a few days. "Why would Val Chalons make up a story like that?" Helen asked.

  "I believe there's a form of evil at work inside the Chalons home that we can't even guess at. Honoria tried to tell me about it. Now she's dead."

  "You don't think the Baton Rouge serial guy is involved in this?"

  "Honoria's death is connected to the Chalons family and the Chalons family only. Don't let them put it off on somebody else, Helen."

  "That doesn't sound like an entirely objective statement. At the crime scene you seemed a little nervous about something. Have you been inside that guesthouse before?"

  "No," I said, and felt my heart jump, just as though it had been touched with an electrical wire.

  "Okay, bwana," she said, her manner relaxing now. "By the way, I was proud of you out there."

  I left her office and washed my face in the men's room. When I looked at my reflection, I felt as though I were looking at the disembodied head of a Judas, that it was I who was the liar, not Val Chalons. But I had no idea why I felt that way.

  chapter SEVENTEEN

  That evening, at dusk, Clete Purcel and I sat in canvas chairs on the edge of Henderson Swamp, pole-fishing with corks and cut-bait like a pair of over-the-hill duffers who cared less about catching fish than just being close by a cypress-dotted swamp while the sun turned into a red ember on the horizon.