DR14 - Crusader's Cross

  "He talked to him."

  "I got a mug shot of Pitts for him to look at."

  I nodded and waited for her to go on. But she seemed distracted, as though several things were on her mind at once. She got up from her chair and gazed out the window. The tops of her arms were round and thick, her back stiff. "Did you read the story in the Advocate about another abduction in Baton Rouge?" she asked.

  "Yeah, I saw it."

  "I think the perp is using Baton Rouge as his personal hunting reserve. But I don't think he's from there," she said.

  "Why not?"

  "I talked with Baton Rouge P.D. The DNA on the girl in Grand Coteau was just matched to DNA on at least five other victims."

  "Five?"

  "The locals didn't know they had a serial predator on their hands. They screwed up. It happens. I think the guy has deliberately confined himself to Baton Rouge for years, but he saw the black girl at the cemetery by herself and couldn't resist the opportunity. I think he lives in a small town, maybe in Acadiana, and gets his jollies in Baton Rouge."

  "Why you telling me all this?"

  "You still want your shield back?" she asked.

  Two days later after the swelling had gone out of my jaw and my mouth no longer bled when I ate, I reported to my old job at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. I was assigned a corner office on the second floor, one that allowed me a view of the cemetery, trees that lined the railway tracks, and the ivy-scaled brick facades of several buildings that, with a little imagination at twilight, provided a glimpse back into nineteenth-century America.

  The previous night I had laid out a tie and sports coat, shined my shoes, and pressed a pair of slacks and a soft, long-sleeve blue shirt, pretending I had no anxiety about returning to a job for which I was perhaps too old or, worse, simply unfit to do well. Now, standing in my office by myself, the wire baskets on the desk empty, I felt like a guest who has said good night at a party but comes back later because he has nowhere else to go. But all morning uniformed deputies and plainclothes detectives stopped by and shook hands, and it felt wonderful.

  At noon I checked out a cruiser and drove down the bayou to Jeanerette and the community of shacks along the back road where Lemuel Melancon lived. He was sitting in a rocker on his tiny gallery, his body dappled with sunlight that fell through a pecan tree in his front yard. The wind was blowing in the cane behind his house, but his tin roof shimmered with heat.

  I showed him front and profile photos of Billy Joe Pitts. Pitts was wearing a starched sports shirt printed with a tropical design, the fabric stretched tight against the expansion of his chest. The booking time on the photo strip was 11:16 p.m., but Pitts's face showed no expression, not even fatigue, like the head of an unrepentant criminal upon a platter. "Is this the guy who was looking at my truck?" I asked.

  Lemuel held the strip close to his face, then handed it back to me. "Could be. But it was dark. I can't see good no more, me," he said.

  "It's important, Lemuel."

  He took another look and shook his head. "What'd this guy do?" he asked.

  "Helped plant cocaine on some Cambodians so their vehicle and cash could be confiscated."

  "I ain't following you."

  "He's a cop. You see him again, you let me know."

  Lemuel leaned back in his chair and looked out at the road, suddenly disconnected from me and a conversation involving a corrupt white police officer.

  "Lemuel?" I said.

  "Got to clean my li'l house now. Dust keep blowing out of the yard t'rew the screen, dirtying up my whole house. Just cain't keep it clean, no matter what I do. See you another time, Dave."

  We live in the New South. Legal segregation has slipped into history; the Klan has moved west, into white supremacist compounds, where they feel safe from the people whom they fear; and in Mississippi black state troopers ticket white motorists.

  But memories can be long, fear is fear, and race is at the heart of virtually every political issue in the states of the Old Confederacy, particularly in the realignment of the two national political parties. As I drove back to New Iberia, the fields of early sugar cane rippling in the breeze, the buttercups blooming along the rain ditches, I wondered about the memories of violence and injustice that my friend Lemuel Melancon would probably never share with me. But they obviously lived inside him, and I knew that as a white man it was presumptuous of me to ask that he set aside the cautionary instincts that had allowed him to be a survivor.

  This was St. Mary Parish, historically a fiefdom where a few individuals controlled mind-boggling amounts of wealth. In the 1970s a group of Catholic Worker nuns tried to organize the sugar cane workers here. Some of the blacks and poor whites who listened to them discovered they had thirty minutes to move their belongings out of their houses.

  A journey to the bedside of a dying school chum had led me back to the disappearance years ago of Ida Durbin. Had not two rogue deputies, Shockly and Pitts, tried to turn dials on me, my revisiting of a bad experience in my youth would probably have ended there, at a Baptist hospital, in a backward, piney-woods parish in central Louisiana.

  But that parish, its sawmills, corporate cotton and soy bean fields, its catfish farms, along with its politicians and sheriff's department, had always been owned by the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.

  Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my scalp where my attacker had clubbed me with a two-by-four. Was he sent by the Chalonses, over the disappearance or death of a prostitute in 1958? No, that was my old class-conscious paranoia at work, I told myself.

  I kept telling myself that all the way back to New Iberia.

  That evening, Clete Purcel picked me up at the house and we had dinner at a bar-and-grill that served food on a deck overlooking the bayou. It was dusk, the western sky ribbed with strips of orange cloud, the turn bridge on the bayou open for a barge. Clete had been quiet all evening. "I think I need to make a home call on this Pitts character," he said.

  "Nope," I said.

  "Nothing dramatic. Maybe drive him out to a quiet spot and give him a chance to get some things off his chest."

  "Clete —"

  "Nobody messes with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Every lowlife in New Orleans always understood that, big mon. This dickhead doesn't get slack because he's a cop."

  Some people at the next table stared at us.

  "I have no evidence Pitts was the guy," I said.

  "You know he was the guy."

  "Maybe."

  "Trust me, I'll get the 'maybe' out of the equation. Quit worrying. He'll probably thank me for it," he said. He took a bite out of his po'boy sandwich. "These fried oysters are supposed to be aphrodisiacs, did you know that?"

  Talking with Clete Purcel about personal restraint or reasonable behavior was like a meteorologist telling an electrical storm it shouldn't come to town. But I couldn't be mad at Clete. He was the first person to whom I always took my problems, and in I truth his violence, recklessness, and vigilantism were simply the other side of my own personality. I felt his gaze wander over my face and the stitches I had tried to comb my hair over.

  "Will you stop that?" I said.

  "What's your brother say about all this?" he said.

  "Haven't talked with him about it."

  He looked at me.

  "He's got his own problems," I said.

  "Jimmie the Gent is a stand-up guy. Why not treat him like one?" Clete said.

  Years ago my brother had taken a bullet for me and lost an eye. I didn't feel like cluttering up his life with any more grief or the detritus of 1958. I started to tell Clete that when my cell phone rang. The caller number was Helen Soileau's.

  "We got a floater out by the St. Martin line," she said. "It may be the wife of that DEQ official who's in Seagoville. We've got personal effects, but I don't think we'll get a visual ID."

  "That bad?"

  "The guy who did this isn't human."

  "None of them are," I replied.

&n
bsp; "Better see the vie," she said.

  chapter FIVE

  The crime scene was only ten minutes from the bar-and-grill on the bayou. But the images there belonged in a medieval painting of a netherworld that should have existed only in the imagination. On a deadend dirt road lined with garbage was a black pond spiked by gum trees. The sky was tormented by birds, the sun a gush of red on the horizon. The victim lay on her back, her torso half in the water. I felt my stomach constrict when Helen shined her flashlight on the woman's face.

  "Get this. The sonofabitch hung her purse in a tree," she said. "Money, car keys, driver's license, credit cards, everything was in there."

  "Her husband was with the Department of Environmental Quality?"

  "Yeah, he was taking juice from a couple of petrochemical guys. So maybe this isn't the Baton Rouge serial killer."

  The coroner, Koko Hebert, had just arrived. He was a gelatinous, cynical man, a sweaty, foul-smelling chain smoker, given to baggy clothes, tropical shirts, and a trademark Panama hat. I always suspected a Rotarian lay hidden inside his enormous girth and wheezing breath and jaded manner, but, if so, he hid it well. He leaned over with a penlight and stared down at the body. "Jesus Christ," he said.

  "Got any speculations?" Helen said.

  "Yeah, her face looks like a flower pot after a truck ran over it," he said.

  Helen gave me a look. "Are those ligations around her throat?" she asked.

  He made a pained face, as though he were weighing a great decision. "Could be. But those knots could be the nodules associated with bubonic plague. Been a couple of outbreaks in East Texas. Squirrels and pack rats can carry it sometimes. You didn't touch anything here, did you?" he said. He held Helen's eyes somberly, then his mouth broke at the corners and his breath wheezed like air escaping from a ruptured tire. "Ligations, shit. The guy who did this had a boner on he couldn't knock down with a baseball bat."

  "The signature on the Baton Rouge serial killings is death by strangulation," Helen said.

  But the coroner ignored her and motioned for two paramedics to bag up the body.

  "Did you hear me?" she said.

  He stared into space, his eyes askance, a manufactured look of pensiveness on his face. "Our killer is not into methodology," he said.

  "Say again?" Helen said.

  "Our killer is a horny prick who loves beating the shit out of people. He doesn't care how he does it. Are we all better now?" Koko said.

  Helen's face blanched. She started to speak, but I placed my hand on her shoulder. Her muscles felt like a bag of rocks. We watched Koko Hebert walk toward an ambulance, its emergency flashers blinking. It was hot and breathless inside the trees, and the air smelled of stagnant water and leaves that had turned black in damp shade.

  "Blow him off. He's an unhappy fat man who tries to make other people as miserable as he is," I said.

  She slapped a mosquito on her cheek and looked at the smear of blood on her hand. The paramedics lifted the body heavily out of the water, their latex-gloved hands sinking deep into the tissue. "Wrap it up for me, Pops?" Helen said.

  "Sure. You okay?" I said.

  "I will be after a hot bath and four inches of Jack Daniel's. It's God's compensation for giving me this fucking job," she said, then grimaced at her own remark.

  "Drink two inches of it for me," I said.

  She hit me on the arm with the flat of her fist and walked to her cruiser., her eyes sliding off the face of the coroner.

  It was dark by the time the crime scene investigators finished their work. A wind came up and blew the mosquitoes out of the trees, and I could see heat lightning in the clouds over the Gulf and smell distant rain. I thought about four inches of Jack on ice, with a sprig of mint bruised inside the glass. I rubbed my mouth and swallowed dryly. Then I said good night to the other personnel at the scene and got back in my truck.

  Just in time to see a television news van rumble down the road and stop squarely in front of me, its headlights burning into my eyes. The first figure out of the van was none other than Valentine Chalons, the one certifiable celebrity in the Chalons family, the same people who owned cotton, sugar cane, oil, and timber interests all over Louisiana and East Texas, including the parish where my former college friend, Troy Bordelon, had lived.

  Valentine could have descended from Vikings rather than the chivalric Norman French ancestry his family claimed for themselves. He was tall, athletic-looking, and blue-eyed, with a bladed face and hair that had turned silver on the tips in his late thirties. Unlike the rest of the Chalons family, his views were ostensibly populist or libertarian, although I sensed that inside his populism was the soul of a snob.

  He had studied journalism at the University of Missouri, then had worked as a stringer and feature writer for the Associated Press before taking a news anchor position with a television station in New Orleans. But Valentine Chalons's stops on the ladder of success were always temporary, and nobody doubted that he considered ambition a virtue rather than a vice.

  Before the 9/11 attacks, he actually interviewed Osama bin Laden high up in the mountains on the Pakistan border. After hiking three days through burning moonscape and razor-edged rocks, Valentine and an interpreter finally trudged up a path to a cave opening, where the man who would help orchestrate the murder of almost three thousand people stood waiting for him, his robes swirling in the wind. According to what had become a folk legend among newsmen, the first words out of Val's mouth were: "Why don't you build a decent driveway Jack?"

  Now he owned a television station in Lafayette and one in Shreveport and was an editorial contributor on a national cable network. But regardless of his acquisitions, Val remained a hands-on journalist and took great pleasure in covering a story himself as well as immersing himself in the fray.

  "You're too late, podna," I said.

  "That's what you think. I got a shot inside the ambulance at the intersection," he replied. He motioned to his cameramen, who flooded the pond and the trees with light. One of them accidentally snapped the yellow crime scene tape that was wrapped around a pine trunk.

  "You guys step back," I said.

  "Sorry," the offending cameraman said.

  But Val didn't miss a beat. He extended his microphone in front of my face. "Does the victim have a name yet?" he said.

  "No," I replied.

  But he slogged on, undeterred, and repeated the question, using the name of the missing DEQ official's wife.

  "Cut the bullshit, Val. You want information, talk to the sheriff," I said.

  He lowered the mike. "How you been?" he said.

  "Great." I slipped my hands into my back pockets and took a step closer to him, maybe because his aggressive manner had given me license I wouldn't have had otherwise. "Did you know a guy by the name of Troy Bordelon?"

  "No, I don't think so. Who is he?"

  "A dead guy who worked for your family."

  "A dead guy?"

  "He gave me a deathbed statement about the disappearance of a prostitute named Ida Durbin. I think she was killed." I held my eyes on his.

  "I'm listening," he said.

  "A couple of rogue cops paid me a visit. Their names are J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts. These guys seemed worried about what Troy might have told me. Their names ring a bell?"

  "Nope." He looked idly at one of his cameramen who was filming the pond and the drag marks where the paramedics had pulled the body out of the water.

  "And you never heard of Troy Bordelon?" I said.

  "I just told you."

  "You're a knowledgeable man, so I thought I'd ask," I said.

  He inserted a piece of gum into his mouth and chewed it, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "You kill me, Dave. Come out to the plantation. We've got a cook from France now. I want him to fix a dinner especially for you."

  "I'm off butter and cream," I said.

  He laughed to himself and shook his head. "It was worth every minute of the drive out here. Have a good one." He
patted me on the shoulder and walked away, a self-amused grin on his face.

  Let it go, I told myself. But I couldn't take his imperious, fraternity-boy manner. I caught up with him at the passenger window of his van. "Ida Durbin worked in a hot pillow joint on Post Office Street in Galveston in 1958. Would your old man know anything about those places?" I said.

  "You're asking this about my father?" he said.

  "Want me to repeat the question?" I said.

  He touched at his nose and snapped his gum in his jaws. For a moment I thought he might step outside the vehicle. But he didn't. "Dave, I'd love to get you your own show. The ratings would go through the roof. Let me make a couple of calls to New York. I'm not putting you on. I could swing it," he said.

  Then the van pulled away, bouncing through the dips in the road, the high beams spearing through the underbrush and trees.

  You just blew it, bubba, I said under my breath.

  I couldn't find Clete for three days. The owner of the motor court where he lived said Clete had thrown a suitcase in his Cadillac early Friday morning, driven away with a wave of the hand, and had not returned.

  But at dawn the following Monday, Clete called the house on his cell phone.

  "Where are you?" I said.

  "Across the bayou. In City Park. I can see your backyard from here."

  "Why the mystery?"

  "My situation is a little warm right now. Anybody been around?"

  "What have you done, Clete?"

  "It's under control. Haul your butt over here, Streak. Over-and-out."

  I drove down Main and across the drawbridge into the park. The sky was gray, the trees shrouded with mist, the surface of the bayou chained with rain rings. Clete was sitting on a table under a picnic shelter, his restored Cadillac parked back in the trees. But if he was trying to hide his Caddy from notice, he had taken on an impossible task. It was a beautiful automobile, with big fins, Frenched headlights, wire wheels and whitewalls, an immaculate cream-colored top, and a waxed finish that was the shade of a flamingo's wing — all of it the gift of a pornographic actor and drug mule by the name of Gunner Ardoin, who credited Clete with turning his life around.