DR14 - Crusader's Cross

  I told him about my visit to Troy's bedside and how Jimmie and I met Ida Durbin in Galveston on the Fourth of July in 1958. I told him about the beating Jimmie gave the pimp, Lou Kale, and how Ida disappeared as though she had been sucked through a hole in the dimension.

  Clete was a good investigator because he was a good listener. While others spoke, his face seldom showed expression. His eyes, which were smoky green, always remained respectful, neutral, occasionally shifting sideways in a reflective way. After I had finished, he ticked a fingernail at a scar that ran diagonally through his left eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose. "This guy Troy was working with pimps?" he said.

  "The uncle was a cop on a pad. Troy was evidently a tagalong," I said.

  "But he believed they killed the girl?"

  "He didn't say that," I replied.

  "House girls are full-time cash on the hoof. Their pimps usually don't kill them."

  But Clete knew better. He raised his eyebrows. "Dave, a thousand things could have happened. Why think the worst? Besides, if there's any blame, it's on your half-crazy brother. Remodeling a pimp's face on behalf of a whore probably isn't the best way to do RR. for her."

  He laughed, then looked at my expression. "Okay, mon," he said. "If you want to scope it out, I'd start with Bordelon's ties to other people. Run that by me again about the two sheriff's deputies."

  "They braced me in the hospital parking lot."

  "They thought Bordelon gave up somebody?"

  "That was my impression."

  "So Troy Bordelon's family is —"

  "They do scut work for the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish."

  Clete removed the celery stalk from his drink and took a long swallow from the glass. His hair was sandy, with strands of white in it, cut like a little boy's. When the vodka and tomato juice hit his stomach, the color seemed to bloom in his face. He looked up at me, squinting against the sunlight.

  "I have crazy thoughts about going back to 'Nam sometimes, finding the family of a mamasan I killed, apologizing, giving them money, somehow making it right," he said. He looked emptily out into the sunlight.

  "What are you saying?"

  "I'd let sleeping dogs lie. But you won't do that. No, sir. No, sir. No, sir. Not ole Streak," he replied, pressing the bottom of his glass hard into the moist gravel.

  Clete was wrong. I disengaged from thoughts about Ida Durbin. During the week, I bass-fished on Bayou Benoit, repaired the roof on the shotgun house I had just taken a mortgage on, and each dawn jogged three miles through the mist-shrouded trees in City Park. In fact, listening to Clete's advice and forgetting Ida was easier than I thought. I even wondered if my ability to give up an obsession was less a virtue than a sign of either age or a newly acquired callousness.

  But airliners crash because a twenty-cent lightbulb burns out on the instrument panel; a Civil War campaign is lost because a Confederate courier wraps three cigars in a secret communique; and a morally demented man takes a job in a Texas book depository and changes world history.

  It was early the next Monday, the rain hitting hard on the tin roof of my house, when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver on the kitchen counter, a cup of coffee in one hand. Between the trees on the back slope of my property, I could see the rain dancing on the bayou, the mist blowing into the cattails. "Hello?" I said.

  "Hey, Robicheaux. What do you say we buy you breakfast?" the voice said.

  "Who's this?" I asked, although I already knew the answer.

  "J. W. Shockly. Talked to you outside Baptist Hospital last week? Billy Joe and I have to do a favor for the boss. I'd really appreciate your help on this."

  "I'm pretty jammed up, partner."

  "It'll take ten minutes. We're at the public library, a half block down the street. What's to lose?"

  I put on a hat and raincoat and walked under the dripping limbs of the live oaks that formed a canopy over East Main. I passed the site of what had once been the residence of the writer and former Confederate soldier George Washington Cable and the grotto dedicated to Christ's mother next to the city library. J. W. Shockly and the other sheriff's deputy from the hospital parking lot, both in civilian clothes, were standing under the shelter at the library entrance, smiles fixed on their faces inside the mist, like brothers-in-arms happy to see an old friend.

  "Can we go somewhere?" Shockly said, extending his hand. "You remember Billy Joe Pitts."

  So I had to shake hands with his partner as well. When I did, he squeezed hard on the ends of my fingers.

  "That's quite a grip you've got," I said.

  "Sorry," he said. "How about coffee and a beignet down at Victor's?"

  I shook my head.

  "Here's what it is," Shockly said. "The sheriff sent me down here because me and you go back. See, the nurse who was in Troy's hospital room with you is the sheriff's cousin. She says Troy was telling you some bullcrap about a crime involving a prostitute. The sheriff thinks maybe you're working for the defense. That maybe the restaurant owner's family has hired you to prove Troy was a lowlife or procurer or something, that maybe he was propositioning the waitress and the restaurant owner went apeshit. You following me?"

  "No, not at all," I replied.

  Shockly's hair was buzz-cut, his pale blue suit spotted with rain. His breath smelled like cigarettes and mints. His gaze seemed to search the mist for the right words to use. "Nobody wants to see the restaurant owner ride the needle. But he's not going to skate, either. So how about it?"

  "How about what?" I said.

  "You working for the defense or not?" Billy Joe, his friend, said. He was a shorter man than Shockly, but tougher in appearance, his eye sockets recessed, the skin of his face grainy, his teeth too large for his mouth.

  "I already explained my purpose in visiting the hospital. I think we're done here," I said.

  Billy Joe raised his hands and grinned. "Enough said, then." He popped me on the arm, hard enough to sting through my raincoat.

  When I got back home, I washed my hands and dried them on a dish towel. I fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and berries and milk and sat down to eat by the kitchen window. The air blowing through the screen was cool and smelled of flowers and wet trees and fish spawning in the bayou, and in a few minutes I had almost forgotten about Shockly and Pitts and their shabby attempt to convince me their visit to New Iberia was an innocuous one.

  But just as I started to wash my dishes I heard footsteps on the gallery. I opened the front door and looked down at Billy Joe Pitts, who was squatted on his haunches, scraping the contents from a pet food can onto a sheet of newspaper for my cat, Snuggs. J. W. Shockly waited at the curb in a black SUV, the exhaust pipe smoking in the rain. "What do you think you're doing?" I said.

  "Had this can in the vehicle and saw your cat. Thought I'd treat him to a meal," Pitts said, twisting around, his bottom teeth exposed with his grin.

  Snuggs had just started to eat, but I scooped him up and cradled him in one arm. He was a white, short-haired, unneutered male, thick-necked, heavy, ropy with muscle, his ears chewed, his head notched with pink scars. He was the best cat I ever owned. "Snuggs says thanks but he's on a diet. And I say adios, bud."

  I kicked the pet food and newspaper into the flower bed.

  "Just trying to do a good deed. But to each his own," Billy Joe Pitts said, getting to his feet, his face close to mine now, his skin as damp-smelling as mold.

  chapter FOUR

  It was still raining that afternoon when I drove across the train tracks and parked my pickup behind the courthouse, a short distance from the crumbling, whitewashed crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery. Helen Soileau, my old colleague, had become the parish's first female sheriff. She was either bisexual or a lesbian, I was never sure which, and had the perfect physique for a man. I mention her sexuality not to define her but only to indicate that her life as a law officer was not always an easy one. She started her career as a meter maid at NOPD and became a patrolwoman in Gird Town and the neighb
orhood surrounding the Desire Project. The notoriety of the latter has no equal in the United States, except perhaps for Cabrini Green in Chicago and neighborhoods in the South Bronx. A white female cop who can enter the Desire at night, by herself, is an extraordinary person. Helen Soileau earned respect from people who do not grant it easily. After I told her the story about Troy Bordelon's death and the visit to my house by J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts, she leaned back in her swivel chair and looked at me for a long time. She wore blue slacks and a starched white shirt, with a gold badge hung on the pocket. Her hair was blond and natural but for some reason it had always looked like a wig when she wore it long. So now she had it cut short and tapered on the sides and back, and it gave her an attractive appearance that for the first time in her life caused men to turn and look at her. "You're asking for your job back? Over these two characters coming to your house?" she said.

  "The income wouldn't hurt," I said.

  Helen's eyes had a way of becoming lid-less when she asked questions of people. "Did you ever consider that maybe these two deputies were telling the truth? That they think you're doing P.I. work for the defense in a homicide? That they're just inept and not very bright?"

  "How many redneck cops stop by your house to feed your cat?"

  She pulled at an earlobe. "Yeah, that is a little weird," she said. "But the real reason you want your shield back is to start looking into this disappearance in Galveston, right?"

  "Maybe."

  She tapped the arms of her chair with her palms and made clucking sounds with her tongue. "Love you. Streak, but the answer is no."

  I cleared my throat and looked out the window. Across the street I could see the mist blowing off the crypts in the cemetery, and the dull red texture of the bricks through the cracked places in the plaster. Someone was honking a horn angrily at the intersection, like an idiot railing at a television set. "Mind giving me an explanation?" I said.

  She leaned forward in her chair. "Yeah, I do mind, and that's because I'm your friend," she said.

  I didn't try to sort out the meaning in her words. "Run those two cops for me."

  "Why?"

  "They're dirty."

  She clicked her teeth together. "I forgot what it was like when you were around," she said.

  "Would you clarify that?"

  "Not in your dreams," she replied.

  The church where I attended Mass was on the outskirts of Jeanerette, down the bayou, in St. Mary Parish. Most of the parishioners were people of color and desperately poor. But it was a fine church to attend, built on a green bend of the bayou by an oak-shaded graveyard, and the people in the church had a simplicity and dignity about them that belied the hardship and struggle that characterized their lives.

  That evening I drove down the bayou to attend a meeting of our church-annex committee. The back road to Jeanerette is like a geographical odyssey through Louisiana's history and the disparities that make it less than real and difficult to categorize. The pastureland is emerald green in spring and summer, dotted with cattle and clumps of oak and gum trees, the early sugar cane waving in the richest alluvial soil in America. At sunset, Bayou Teche is high and dark from the spring rains; the air smells of gardenia and magnolia; and antebellum homes glow among the trees with a soft electrical whiteness that makes one wonder if perhaps the Confederacy should not have won the War Between the States after all.

  But inside that perfect bucolic moment, there is another reality at work, one that doesn't stand examination in the harsh light of day. The rain ditches along that same road are strewn with bottles, beer cans, and raw garbage. Under the bayou's rain-dented surface lie discarded paint and motor-oil cans, containers of industrial solvents, rubber tires, and construction debris that will never biologically degrade.

  Across the drawbridge from two of the most lovely historical homes in Louisiana is a trailer slum that probably has no equivalent outside the Third World. The juxtaposition seems almost contrived, like a set in a Marxist documentary meant to discredit capitalistic societies.

  But as I drive this road in the sunset, I try not to dwell upon the problems of the era in which we live. I try to remember the Louisiana of my youth and to convince myself that we can rehabilitate the land and ourselves and regain the past. It's a debate which I seldom win.

  It was dark when I came out of the meeting at the church, the wind cool off the Gulf, the clouds in the south veined with lightning that gave off no sound. An elderly black man from the congregation came up to me in the parking lot. "That guy find you?" he said.

  "Which guy?" I asked.

  "He was looking at your truck and ax if it was yours. He said he t'ought it was for sale." The elderly man was named Lemuel Melancon and he had muttonchop sideburns and wore a white shirt and tie.

  "It has been, but I took the sign out of the window when I drove here. This was a white or black guy?" I said.

  "White. Maybe he'll come back. Pretty good meeting tonight, huh?"

  "Yeah, it was. See you Sunday, Lemuel."

  I drove back to New Iberia, past a sugar mill on the far side of the bayou and through cane fields and a rural slum at the city limits, then I crossed the drawbridge onto Old Spanish Trail and entered the long tunnel of oaks that led to my home on East Main. The street behind me was empty, serpentine lines of dead leaves scudding across the asphalt.

  I parked the truck under my porte-cochere and replaced the FOR SALE placard in the back window. I unlocked the front door of my house, then paused in the gentle sweep of wind across the gallery. Normally, when Snuggs heard my truck, he ran to the front, particularly when he had not been fed. But there was no sign of him. I picked up his pet bowl and went inside, then looked for him in the backyard. Tripod, my three-legged raccoon, was on top of his hutch, staring at me.

  "How's it hangin', Tripod? Have you seen Snuggs tonight?" I said.

  I patted his head and smoothed down the fur on his back and gave his tail a little tug. He rubbed his muzzle against my forearm.

  It was balmy inside the trees, the night alive with wind. A tugboat was passing on the bayou, its wake lit by its running lights. Decayed leaves and pecan husks that were soft with mold crunched under my shoes as I walked back toward the house. Dry thunder pealed slowly across the sky, then I heard Tripod climb down the side of his hutch and jump heavily inside.

  "What is it, 'Pod? Thunder got you scared?" I said.

  I returned to his hutch and started to lift him up. The tree limbs overhead flickered with lightning, then I heard a sound or felt a presence that should not have been there, a twig snapping under the sole of a shoe, an inhalation of breath, like a man oxygenating his blood in preparation for an expenditure of enormous physical energy.

  I set Tripod down and straightened up, just in time to see a man with a nylon stocking over his face swing a two-by-four at the side of my head. I caught part of the blow with my arm, but not well enough. I felt my scalp split and wood splinters bite into my ear and my cheek. I crashed against the hutch, grabbing at the air, just as he hit me again, this time across the neck and shoulders.

  I tried to get to my feet, but he kicked me in the ribs with the point of his shoe, then in the armpit, and once right across the mouth. I tumbled backwards, trying to get the hutch between me and the man with the two-by-four. I could hear Tripod's paws skittering on the floor and wire sides of his hutch. I grabbed a handful of dirt and leaves, threw it blindly at my attacker's face, got my pocketknife loose from my pants, and pulled the blade open.

  But when I stood erect, I was alone, the yard suddenly gone silent, as though I had stepped outside of time and the world around me had been reconfigured without my consent. Blood was leaking from my hairline and there was a bitter, coppery taste, like wet pennies, in my mouth. Tripod had scampered up into the live oak above his hutch and was peering down at me, his body trembling.

  I had no idea where my attacker had gone. I walked off balance toward the house, as though a piece of membrane were torn lo
ose inside my head. In the kitchen I had to sit down to punch in a 911 call on the telephone, then had to spit the blood out of my mouth into a paper towel before I could tell the dispatcher what had happened.

  In less than a minute I heard a siren coming hard down East Main. I looked through the kitchen window and saw Snuggs sitting on the outside sill, framed against the philodendron, pawing at the screen to come inside.

  The emergency-room physician at Iberia General kept me overnight, and when I woke, the early-morning sun looked like pink smoke inside the oak trees. A nurse's aide brought breakfast to me on a tray, then wheeled me down the corridor for an X ray. When I returned to the room, Helen Soileau was sitting by the window, reading the Baton Rouge Advocate. The main story above the fold was about another abduction in Baton Rouge, this time the wife of a state environmental quality official who was serving time in a federal prison. Helen folded the paper and set it on the windowsill. "Bad night, huh, bwana?" she said.

  "Not really," I said, sitting down on the side of the bed.

  "They going to kick you loose?"

  "Soon as the doc looks at my X ray."

  "We couldn't find the board your attacker used, so we got nothing we can lift latents off. You think he was the same guy asking about your truck at the church?"

  "Maybe."

  "More specifically, you think it was one of those deputies — Shockly or Pitts?"

  "Who knows?"

  "I ran both of them and got a hit on Pitts. Four years back he was charged with planting coke on some Cambodians. They got pulled over at a traffic stop and their SUV and thirty thousand in cash seized. They'd saved the money to buy a restaurant in Baton Rouge."

  "How'd Pitts get out of it?" I asked.

  "Gave evidence against the other cops. Did you say a black man at your church got a look at the guy who was hanging around your truck?"