Crusader''s Cross

  I got out of the cruiser and stood behind the opened door, my right hand on the butt of my .45. “It’s Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I need somebody to come down here and talk to me,” I called up at the shack.

  A dark-haired man with a ragged beard appeared in the back doorway, just above the wood steps that led down to dry ground. “Holy shit, you’re a cop?” he said.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them, please,” I said. “Who else is in the camp?”

  “Nobody. They went to run the trot line.”

  “Come down here, please,” I said.

  His body was so thin it looked skeletal. His jeans and T-shirt were filthy, his neck beaded with dirt rings. He walked slowly down the steps, as though his connective tissue barely held his bones together. It was impossible to tell his age or estimate his potential. He seemed ageless, without cultural reference, painted on the air. He had teeth on one side of his mouth and none on the other. There was a black glaze in his eyes, a long, tapered skinning knife in a scabbard on his belt. His odor was like scrapings from an animal hide that have burned in a fire.

  “I sure didn’t make you for no lawman,” he said.

  “What’s your name, podna?”

  “Same name it was when we met you ’cross the lake at the bar—Vassar Twitty.”

  “I’m not here to bother you guys about game regulations, Vassar. I don’t care what kind of history you might have in other places, either. But I’ve got a personal problem I think you might be able to help me with. I went on a bender and don’t know what I did.”

  It felt easier saying it than I had thought. He sat down on a step, his knees splayed, and looked about the ground with an idiotic grin on his face.

  “Want to let me in on the joke?” I asked.

  “You was pretty pissed off. We kept telling you to just have another drink and come coon hunting with us. But you was set on getting even with some guy.”

  “Which guy?” I said.

  “Some TV newsman you said was jamming you up. We tried to get your keys away from you, but there wasn’t nothing for it.”

  “For what?” I said, swallowing.

  “When a man wants to rip somebody from his liver to his lights, you leave him alone. We left you alone. I reckon nothing bad happened or you wouldn’t be driving a cruiser. Right? Boy, you was sure stewed,” he said.

  The wind gusted off the lake. It must have been ninety in the shade, but my face felt as cold and bright as if I had bathed it in ice water.

  I WASN’T IN A GOOD STATE of mind when I got back to the department. Could I have gone to Valentine Chalons’s guesthouse and in a bloodlust attacked his sister? How do you reach memories that are locked inside a black box?

  I had another problem, too, one I had kept pushing to the edges of my consciousness. I went into Helen’s office and closed the door behind me. “You don’t look too hot,” she said.

  “I found a guy in the Basin I was drinking with the night Honoria Chalons was murdered. He said I talked about ripping up Val Chalons. He said he and his friends tried to stop me but I took off in my truck.”

  “I think we know all that, don’t we?”

  “You’ve been protecting me, Helen.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I gave you that CD with a blood smear on it. You didn’t turn it over to Doogie Dugas.”

  “Because it didn’t come from the crime scene. Because Doogie is an incompetent idiot.”

  “I know that’s Honoria’s blood on it.”

  “No, you don’t. Listen, Dave, Val Chalons has done everything in his power to put your head on a stick. But luminol doesn’t lie. There were no blood traces in your truck, your clothes, or in your house. Now stop building a case against yourself.”

  “Raphael Chalons came to my house yesterday and tried to put me on his payroll,” I said.

  “That’s interesting,” she said, looking at the tops of her nails.

  “One other item. Molly Boyle and I got married Saturday night.”

  Her elbow was propped on her desk. She rested her chin on her knuckles, her face softening. She seemed to think a long time before she spoke. “You did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Figured out a way to marry your own church. No, don’t say anything. Just quietly disappear. Bwana say ‘bye’ now.”

  JIMMIE’S RESOURCEFULNESS rarely let him down. His friendship with police officers, private investigators, and people in the life extended from Key Biscayne, Florida, to Brownsville, Texas, which was the long, sickle-shaped rim of America’s sexual playground long before the invention of Vegas or Atlantic City. Three hours after his flight had arrived in Miami, he obtained the home address of the man who now called himself Lou Coyne. He also obtained the name of his wife, a woman who called herself Connie Coyne and who lived three houses down from her husband on a canal in Miami Beach.

  Jimmie stayed that night in a hotel that fronted the ocean. In the morning, he dressed in a linen suit and lavender silk shirt, had his shoes shined in the hotel lobby, then took a cab to a two-story white stucco house, one with a faded red tile roof, scrolled iron balconies, heavy, brass-ringed oak doors, and gated walls that towered over the grounds. Each house on the street was similar in ambiance, a fortress unto itself, the name of its security service prominently displayed. But even though it was Saturday, there were no people on this dead-end street, no sounds of children playing on a ficus-shaded lawn.

  A Hispanic gardener came to the gate after Jimmie pushed the buzzer. The St. Augustine grass was closely clipped and thick, the bluish-green of a Caribbean lagoon. The flower beds bloomed with every tropical plant imaginable, and royal palms touched the eaves of the second story. Off to one side of the yard Jimmie could see a lime-colored swimming pool coated with leaves, the cracked dome of a 1950s underground atomic-bomb shelter protruding from the sod, like the top of a giant toadstool, and a boat dock that offered a sweeping view of the ocean.

  “Is Ms. Coyne at home?” Jimmie asked.

  “Sí,” the gardener replied.

  “Would you tell her Jimmie Robicheaux would like to speak to her?”

  “Sí,” the gardener replied, staring into Jimmie’s face.

  “Would you go get her, please?”

  “Sí,” the gardener replied, obviously not comprehending a word.

  “Quién es?” a woman said from inside the fronds of a giant philodendron, where she was pulling weeds on her knees and dropping them in a bucket.

  “My name is Jimmie Robicheaux, Ms. Coyne. I’m looking for an old friend and thought you might be able to help me,” Jimmie said.

  The woman stood up, brushing grains of dirt off a pair of cotton work gloves. She was slender, her hair a silvery-red. She wore a straw hat on the back of her head and a halter and Capri pants, and her shoulders were sprinkled with freckles. She walked to the gate, her eyes examining Jimmie’s face.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.

  But the formality of her speech couldn’t hide her regional inflection, nor disguise the fact she had correctly pronounced Jimmie’s last name, after hearing it only once, which most people outside Louisiana are not able to do easily.

  “Ida Durbin is the name of the lady I need to find,” he said.

  She looked at her watch and rubbed the glass with her thumb, more as an idle distraction from her own thoughts than as an effort to know the time.

  “How’s your friend, the private investigator?” she said.

  “Clete Purcel? He’s doing all right. I think he’d like to have a talk with your husband, though.”

  She stepped near the gate and closed her hand around one of the twisted iron spikes inside the grillework. “And yourself? You been doin’ okay, Jimmie?”

  “Life’s a breeze. How’s it with you, Ida?”

  She reached into the bugle vine growing on the wall and pushed a button, buzzing the gate open. “Come on in, sailor, and let me tell you a story of hearts a
nd flowers,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  22

  ON THE MORNING they had planned to leave Galveston and start a new life in Mexico, Ida had asked Jimmie to drop her off at the bus depot so she could buy a few items downtown for the trip while he returned our Ford convertible to me and packed his clothes at the motel. She stored her suitcase in a coin locker, bought a pair of shoes and a kerchief and a small box of hard candy up the street, drank a lime Coke at a soda fountain, then retrieved her suitcase from the locker and took a seat in the whites-only section of the waiting room. The bus to Monterrey was due in twenty minutes.

  Then she looked through the window and saw Lou Kale’s ’56 Bel Air pull to the curb, followed by an unmarked police car in which sat two plainclothes cops whom she recognized as regular visitors to the house on Post Office Street. Their names were Robert Cobb and Dale Bordelon. Both were rawboned men with cavernous eyes and square, callused-edged hands and mouths that did not smile, their hair mowed so closely into their scalps the ridges in their skulls glistened through the bristles. They followed Lou Kale into the waiting room, then approached Ida while Kale fished for change in front of a cigarette machine. Lou’s lip was puffed, one eyebrow distorted by a knot, one nostril darker than the other from the beating Jimmie had given him.

  “Take a walk outside with us, Missy,” Cobb said, looking down at her from a great height.

  “I’m waiting on my bus,” she replied.

  Cobb reached down and cupped her by the elbow. She felt herself rising to her feet, even though she had not been told she was under arrest or that she had violated any law. Her eyes swept the waiting room. The Negroes sitting in the section marked COLORED preoccupied themselves with their children or twisting about in their seats to watch the traffic on the street. The two clerks behind the ticket counter had suddenly discovered concerns of great import on printed fare and schedule sheets that moments earlier had seemed of little significance to them.

  In her mind’s eye she saw herself inside a single frame of a filmstrip that had suddenly frozen inside the projector. The sound was gone and all the figures were stationary, robbed of motion and breath, the selfishness of their ulterior motives in the script as stark as the grain in the film. Every figure in the frame, including herself, was complicit in a deed that the larger society would say could not occur. In this case, the deed was the abduction of an innocent person by law enforcement personnel in the middle of an American city, in full view of people who hid their eyes.

  But the onus was on her, not them. She was a whore. She existed beyond the invisible boundaries of respectability and was not entitled to histrionic displays. To resist her abductors, who were also her users, was to make herself visible and to call into question the legitimacy of an entire system. As she rose from the bench, she could smell the detectives’ armpits through their clothes.

  She walked between the two men to their car, without either of them touching her person again. In the filmstrip that recommenced in her mind’s eye, she saw herself as a gray, nondescript creature in the back of the car, disconnected from the rest of the world, the air tinged with the hot musty odor of the fabric in the seats. The detective named Cobb set her suitcase by her side and said, “It’s gonna be all right, kid.” For reassurance he grinned, his lips stretching back over teeth that were as long as a horse’s.

  As the car pulled away from the curb, with Lou Kale’s Bel Air following close behind, she looked down the street and saw a canary-yellow convertible at the traffic light, with me behind the steering wheel and Jimmie in the passenger seat. Jimmie was tapping his hands on the dashboard to music she could not hear.

  THEY DROVE HER TO A FARMHOUSE, down in the Texas wetlands east of Beaumont. It was raining when they arrived, and through the bedroom window she could see acres of sawgrass and a flooded woods and, out in a bay, the gray outlines of mothballed U.S. Navy warships. The room was bare, except for a chipped chest of drawers and a bed that puffed with dust when she sat upon it. The sky was black now, and when lightning flared in the clouds she saw a solitary blue heron lift from the sawgrass and glide on extended wings toward the protection of the woods.

  The man named Cobb was the first to take her. She kept her eyes shut and rested her hands lightly on the tips of his shoulders while he labored on top of her, his breath washing over her face. Inside her mind she watched the heron’s flight across the points of the sawgrass, its wings flapping, its grace undisturbed by the storm raging in the sky.

  The second detective, Dale Bordelon, tried to give her whiskey, then he brought her food that she wouldn’t eat. When he placed his hand on her, a tremor went through her body. “Something you don’t like about me?” he said.

  “I’m sore,” she replied.

  “Whores don’t get sore.”

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  When she came back into the bedroom, he was already in his underwear and socks, smoking a cigarette on the side of the bed, tipping the ashes into the neck of an empty beer bottle. “Time’s a-wasting, girl. Get them clothes off. I mean all off, too,” he said.

  “Where’s Lou?” she asked.

  “What d’you care about him? We’re the best friends you got.”

  “I told you, Bob Cobb hurt me. I cain’t do it anymore today.”

  He looked meanly into space, exhaling cigarette smoke from his nostrils. He hadn’t shaved that morning and his jaws were like dirty sandpaper. “To heck with it,” he said. Then he dressed and went out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  She curled up in a ball on the bed. When she awoke the sky was still dark, the clouds quaking with thunder, rain ticking in pools below the eaves. Lou Kale was sitting in a wood chair by the bed, leaning forward, his face gathered with a strange look of concern. A candle burned in a bottle on a nightstand someone had brought into the room. “Gonna give you a little bump, Connie. It’ll hep you ride over the hard spots for a while,” he said.

  “My name is Ida. I left Post Office Street, Lou.”

  “Like it or not, we’re in the life, hon. Folks like us ain’t got yesterdays. Forget that Robicheaux kid.”

  He held a bent spoon over the candle. Inside the curl of flame around the spoon she could see a yellowish-brown liquid boiling, like the broth that rises to the top of chicken soup. The syringe was fashioned from an eyedropper; the tourniquet was a necktie.

  “I don’t want it,” she said.

  “We got to do what those Vice roaches say. We’re little people, Connie . . . excuse me . . . Ida.”

  “I don’t want no dope, Lou.”

  “Those guys will be gone by tomorrow night. Just go with it. Don’t do anything else to get us in trouble. Now give me your arm.”

  Her elbow jerked slightly when the needle punched into an artery. For a brief moment the room was still, the lightning frozen inside the clouds, then she saw the headlight on a train engine wobbling in front of her eyes and felt a warm rush through her body that was like a long-delayed orgasm.

  Her head lolled on the pillow, her mouth open. Even though her eyes were closed, she could see Lou Kale through the lids, which somehow had become translucent, as thin as Japanese paper. She had never felt this warm inside her skin before, this content and serene. Lou put away his works and stroked her forehead.

  “I’ll come by later and give you another one,” he said.

  “Get in bed with me.”

  “That’s the dope talking, Ida.”

  “No, I want you.”

  “I guess it goes with the job,” he said.

  He propped the chair under the doorknob and made love to her, at first mechanically, then he found himself caught up in it, looking at her eyes and mouth and the sandy red color of her hair in a new way. When he got off her, he was self-conscious about his nakedness, confused about what he had just done or why he felt affected by it.

  “Be nice to that cop,” he said, dressing with his back to her. “I’m jammed up on this deal, too.”

&nb
sp; “Don’t leave, Lou. I’m afraid of them.”

  “It wasn’t really me you wanted, was it? You got me mixed up with that warm feeling the dope gave you.”

  “I always said you weren’t a bad guy, Lou. You never made the girls do anything they didn’t want to. You never hit nobody, either. Remember when you told me I could sing as good as Texas Ruby?”

  He pulled on his trousers and walked back and forth in front of the window, pushing at his temple with the heel of his hand. “I ain’t supposed to be having these kind of thoughts. I’m breaking a big rule here,” he said.

  “You already said it—‘We’re little people.’ We have to be smarter than they are.”

  “Cobb can have me on Sugarland Farm in twenty-four hours. Why didn’t you stay up in Snerdville where you belong? You’re a king-size migraine, Ida,” he said.

  “Is that what you really think of me?”

  “I don’t know what I think. You messed with my head.”

  He lay down beside her. She curled against him, placing her face against his chest. A moment passed and she felt the tension go out of his body. He exhaled loudly and slipped his arms around her back and tucked her head under his cheek.

  “I’ll get us out of this,” he said.

  “I know you will, Lou.”

  “But you got to promise me something.”

  She spread her fingers over his heart and waited.

  “There ain’t no turning back. They’ll pour gasoline on you and set you afire. I seen them do it. Say ‘promise,’ Ida. Say it now,” he said.

  BEFORE LOU LEFT that night, Ida heard him lie to the detectives and tell them he had injected her a second time. He also told them she’d had a seizure from the heroin and that she should not be bothered again, at least until the next day. During the night she heard the voices of several men who were playing cards and drinking. Once, somebody opened the bedroom door, blading her face with a band of white light. The figure stared at her, motionless, in silhouette, his upper body and head like a buffalo’s. Then someone called him back to the poker game and he shut the door.

  In the morning she waited until the men were finished with the bathroom, then took fresh clothes from her suitcase and cleaned a gray film out of the tub with a wad of toilet paper. The men had used up the hot tank, so she bathed in cold water and washed her hair with a cake of harsh soap.