Crusader''s Cross

  At age nineteen he carried a union card with both the Teamsters and the Operating Engineers. That’s when he met the Calucci brothers and picked up a cool five hundred bucks for popping the snitch who sent Tommy Fig’s old lady to the women’s prison at St. Gabriel.

  He’d always heard the first hit was the hard one. Not so. It was a breeze. The guy was in his car at the Fair Grounds, eating a chili dog with melted cheese on it. Johnny walked up to the open window, put a Ruger behind the guy’s ear, and pulled the trigger three times. The guy still had the plastic fork sticking out of his mouth when Johnny drove off with a young friend he helped throw a newspaper route.

  If Johnny had an ethos, what some would call a worldview, it was one that operated in his head like shards of light and sometimes sound. His second hit wasn’t on a dirtbag at a racetrack parking lot. The target was the cousin of Bugsy Siegel, a guy who, like Bugsy, had made his bones with Murder, Incorporated. This dude was a stone killer—smart, armed, and with no mercy for the poor schmucks he took out.

  Johnny and his partner had gotten on the train at Jacksonville, headed south along the Florida coast, their sawed-off double-barrel shotguns broken down inside their suitcases. The evening sky was pink and blue, the ocean sliding in long fingers up empty beaches, miles and miles of orange groves slipping past the Pullman’s windows. It was the most beautiful evening of Johnny Wineburger’s life.

  Just outside of West Palm, the sun went down in the ’Glades and a black shade fell across the land. Johnny and his partner fitted the pieces of their shotguns together, plopping twelve-gauge shells packed with double-aught bucks into the open breeches. When their train passed another train headed in the opposite direction, Johnny and his pal kicked open the door to the bedroom occupied by Siegel’s cousin.

  Then one of the most peculiar moments in Johnny’s life occurred. In the jittering light and roar of noise created by the trains passing each other, amid the flashes of gunfire and explosions of wadding and pellets inside the closed room, all the color drained out of the world. The entire earth reduced itself to a black-and-white ink wash that was like the reductive nature of his dreams. Life was simpler than he had ever thought. You pulled the trigger and the target exploded. In this instance, the target was holding a pitcher of martinis and was dressed in a robe with a fur collar, as a king might be. In fact, the shower of gin and broken glass sparkled like a crown in the dead man’s hair. But the power he had represented was now Johnny’s, just as if the dead man’s testosterone had been injected into his own.

  On his second hit he had found the secret few button men shared: Clipping a rat or a dirtbag was scut work for pay; clipping a king was both an acquisition and a high that had no equal.

  But times had changed. The Giacano family had crashed and burned with the death of Didi Gee, and Asians and black street pukes had flooded the projects with crack and turned New Orleans into a septic tank. Punks the Italians would have thrown off a roof now jackrolled family people and sometimes shot them to death just for fun. There was no honor in the life anymore. There was no money in it, either.

  The pukes ran the dope and did drive-bys on school yards. The government not only legalized lotteries and casinos but encouraged addiction in its citizenry. The income for a fence or good house creep was chump change compared to the amounts corporate CEOs scammed off their investors through stock options.

  But a guy still had to pay the bills. The twenty grand Jericho Johnny had borrowed from the shylocks, at a point and a half a week, was eating him alive. So push came to shove and he took this gig out here in Bumfuck. Why not? He didn’t invent the world’s problems. Almost everyone he popped had it coming. Some he wasn’t sure about, but that was their grief, not his. Everybody got to the boneyard. Which was better, catching a big one in the ear or dying a day at a time with tubes up your nose and a catheter clamped on your joint?

  It was dark when he parked his car in a turnrow between two sugar cane fields and began walking up Bayou Teche toward the ancient plantation home that was legendary for the strange people who lived inside it and the overgrown trees and plants that seemed intent on pulling the house back into the earth. The moon was down, the sky black with rain clouds. Through the oaks in the yard he could see lights in the windows, a gas lamp burning in the driveway. Jericho Johnny stopped on the edge of the cane and felt the breeze blow against his skin and realized he was sweating.

  A candy-striped awning swelled with the breeze off the bayou. There were white feathers scattered on the grass and the crumpled bodies of pigeons floating among the lily pads along the bayou’s bank. What kind of geek shoots pigeons in his yard? Johnny wondered. Talk about no class. Somebody should ship the guy’s whole family to Iraq, he told himself.

  He was starting to feel uncomfortable about the job. Maybe he was over the hill for it. No, it was something else. He was fooling around with guys who thought real men hit golf balls. Their wives were all neurotic, talked constantly in hush-puppy accents, and treated their husbands like dildos. So their men whacked golf balls like they wanted to kill the tee, got their ashes hauled in Miami, then went back home and pretended they weren’t cooze-whipped dipshits. Another bunch that should be humping a pack in a sandstorm, Johnny thought.

  But his cynicism and bitter humor provided no relief for the quickening of heart that he felt, the dryness in his mouth, and the loops of sweat under his armpits. What was wrong?

  He pulled back the receiver on his silenced Ruger and checked to see if a .22 long round was seated in the chamber. Up ahead he saw fireflies in the trees and smelled an autumnal odor of dead leaves and gas on the wind. Time to get it over with, pop the dude, and get back to New Orleans, he thought. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself back in his saloon, eating a small white bowl of gumbo, the rain falling on the elephant ears and banana trees outside his back windows.

  He moved along the edge of the trees at the back of the Chalonses’ property, past the back porch, the lighted kitchen, the porte cochere that glowed an off-yellow from a bug lamp. Then he stopped under a cedar tree and gazed at the shotgun house down by the bayou. It was paintless and gray, made of very old cedar, with a tin roof and a brick chimney that reminded him of a decayed tooth. The wind puffed off the bayou and Jericho Johnny heard a solitary pecan ping hard against the roof and roll loudly down the metal.

  In the light of the gallery, he could see a little boy playing in the yard. Bad news, Johnny thought. Nobody said anything about a kid being around. Bad karma, bad options. That’s what happened when you messed with amateurs. No class at all.

  He went up the slope toward the main house, into trees black with shadow, his face pointed at the ground so no light would reflect off it. Then he made an arc that took him back down toward the water, past the yard where the child was playing.

  He moved quickly along the grassy slope, through a vegetable garden and over a half-collapsed rick fence. Through a side window of the shotgun house he could see a fat black woman rolling pie dough on top of a table.

  Nobody had said anything about a woman being home. This gig was starting to suck worse and worse. Maybe he should just blow it off, he thought. But the thought of continuing to pay a point and a half a week on twenty large didn’t sit well with him, either.

  Then he saw a man get up from his chair and step out on the gallery and speak to the little boy. The little boy began picking up his toys from the yard and putting them in a wagon. Johnny waited in the darkness, the lint from the cane field itching inside his shirt like lines of ants. Why would anybody want to click the switch on a black guy like this, anyway? Twenty large for a guy who probably worked for collard greens and neck bones?

  Because Johnny was supposed to do the woman and the kid, too, he thought. Well, screw that. The deal was for the man. What was that joke Jimmy Fig used to make about the door gunner in ’Nam? How can you shoot women and children? It’s easy, man, you just don’t lead them as much.

  Yeah, screw that twice.

  T
he front screen slammed, but Johnny could still see the kid in the yard. Was the man still out front? Again, Johnny smelled an odor that was like sewer gas and humus and leaves that have turned yellow and spotted inside pools of rainwater. It was a pleasant smell, like late fall, except it was still summer and too early for the fireflies that were weaving their smoky circles inside the cedar trees.

  Time to boogie, he thought. Pay the vig and find a new gig. Messing with law-abiding people genuinely blew.

  He turned to retrace his steps back to his vehicle. Just as he did, he thought he saw a woman moving toward him through the live oaks on the slope. She was barefoot, her dress little more than gauze, her skin glowing, her hair a black skein across her face. He stood transfixed, dumbfounded by the presence of a figure who had escaped from his dreams and who seemed to be approaching him in slow motion, as though until this moment she had not been allowed to be a full participant in his life.

  Johnny felt his ankle sink in a depression and the tendon twist against the bone. He bit down on the pain and righted himself, momentarily losing sight of the woman in the trees. Behind him, he thought he heard leaves blowing across the ground or wind rustling in a canebrake. When he turned toward the bayou, a figure stepped out from behind an abandoned privy and swung a short cutting instrument out of the sky, whipping it down with such force that the blow exploded inside his skull like an electrical flash.

  He did not remember striking the ground, or the blow that landed on the back of his neck or the one that cut deep into his shoulder. A black man stood above him, cocking his head one way, then another, a hatchet hanging from his right hand. The black man had big half-moon eyebrows and an innocuous pieface; his erratic, jerky motions reminded Johnny of an owl sitting on a branch in a tree.

  Taken out by Uncle Remus. What a laugh, he thought.

  “Wasn’t going to hurt your boy or woman,” Johnny said.

  The black man leaned over him. “Say again?” he said.

  I whack kings. I took out Benny Siegel’s cousin, Johnny said somewhere deep inside himself.

  Then the barefoot woman who wore only white gauze approached him from the trees, parting the veil of hair on her face with her fingers. She knelt beside him, cupping her hands behind his head, lifting his face to hers. When she put her mouth on his it was cold and dry, as hollow as the grave. Then he felt her tongue slide past his teeth and probe deep inside him, stirring a heat in his genitals he had never experienced before. In the distance he heard a train, one that rattled with light and roared with sound, and he now realized what it was he had always wanted.

  THE HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION was conducted by the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department, and it wasn’t until the next morning that Helen Soileau and I went out to the home of Andre Bergeron and interviewed him in the warm shade of a pecan tree. Out in the sunlight I could see the depression and blood splatter in the grass where Jericho Johnny had spent the last few minutes of his life.

  “You hit him three times with the hatchet?” I said.

  “I ain’t counted. Man had a pistol in his hand,” Andre replied. “Say, I done tole all this to them others.”

  “But not to us,” Helen said.

  “I ain’t meaning no disrespect, but ain’t y’all just supposed to work inside Iberia Parish?”

  “We take a lot of interest in anything that happens on Mr. Val’s property, Andre. We’d really appreciate your helping us out, that is, if you’d consent to talk with us,” I said.

  “I seen the gun in his hand. My wife and li’l boy was in the house. So I done what I had to. His words to me was he wasn’t gonna hurt my son or my woman. That’s what the man said. Then he died.”

  “Why do you think he would say that to you?” I asked.

  “’Cause he didn’t come here to kill nobody but me. Or maybe he was sent here to kill all of us but he couldn’t do it. You tell me.”

  “You seem like a smart man. Why would a professional hit man be here to kill you or your family?” Helen said.

  “It don’t make no sense to me, either,” he replied.

  “Nice spot you have here,” I said.

  “It ain’t bad,” he said.

  “How’d you get the drop on this dude? I’d say that was pretty slick,” I said.

  “Seen him out of the corner of my eye. Circled ’round the house, got my tool off the po’ch, and you know the rest.”

  “I knew this guy, Andre. He worked for money and no other reason. He was the best in the business and charged accordingly. You make somebody mad at you, somebody so mad he’d pay an uptown guy like Jericho Johnny Wineburger to kill you and your family?” I said.

  “What I know, me?”

  “You don’t think he was after Mr. Val?” I said.

  “Ax Mr. Val,” he replied.

  “Thanks for your time, partner,” I said, and handed him one of our business cards. “Mr. Val is a man of mystery, isn’t he? You know where he might be now?”

  “He had an argument wit’ a man in the front yard this morning. Man wit’ real li’l ears. He flipped the man’s tie in his face and told him not to come ’round here no more. Then he went off by hisself.”

  “By the way, where’s the hatchet?” I said.

  “Cops took it. I got to get to my chores. Anyt’ing else?”

  Helen and I got back in the cruiser and drove down the driveway, past the carpenters repairing the house and the tree surgeons pruning the oaks. Then, for no apparent reason, Helen braked the cruiser and rested her arms across the top of the wheel. Her shirt was stretched tight across her shoulders, the fingers of her right hand flicking at the air, as though she were trying to pick thoughts out of it. The sunlight through the pruned trees was so bright she had put on shades and I couldn’t read her expression. “You feel jerked around?” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “Like he was pointing the finger at Val Chalons but pretending not to?”

  “That’s what it sounded like to me.”

  She took her foot off the brake and let the idle carry the cruiser toward the highway, the pea gravel ticking under the tires. “Why would Chalons pay to have his handyman hit?” she said.

  “Money.”

  “Money?”

  “Money,” I said.

  “Like Bergeron might have a claim on the estate?”

  “You got it.”

  “Try to make that one stick,” she said, easing her foot back on the gas.

  AS SOON AS WE GOT BACK to the department, I found a note in my mailbox asking me to call Jimmie at his apartment.

  “Lou Kale was here about thirty minutes ago. He seems a little irrational,” Jimmie said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, he thinks I’m involved in some kind of scam with Clete Purcel. He says Purcel is trying to blackmail either him or Val Chalons. What’s the deal?”

  “Clete sent letters simultaneously to both Kale and Chalons.”

  “He deliberately stoked up this guy?”

  “I helped a little.”

  “A police officer?”

  “I think Val Chalons’s real parents are Lou Kale and Ida Durbin. I think Old Man Chalons died without leaving a will. That means Val has no familial claim on the Chalons fortune. I think the handyman, Andre Bergeron, may be the heir to a hundred million dollars. So Val Chalons hired Jericho Johnny Wineburger to kill the handyman and maybe his wife and child, too.”

  “You’re making some of this up?”

  “Nope.”

  “And Kale thinks I’m involved in a plot to blackmail him or his son, with that kind of money at stake?”

  “Seems like it.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “I’ll have a talk with Kale.”

  “Let it slide. Rest up and try not to think. You and Purcel, both. No matter what happens, don’t think,” he said, then quietly hung up the phone.

  IN THE MORNING I walked downtown to Koko Hebert’s office and waited for him to get off the telephone. Outside, the wi
nd was blowing in the trees on Main Street and the air was still cool and damp-smelling in the shade, but inside Koko’s office the atmosphere was stifling, the odor of nicotine wrapped like cellophane on every surface in the room.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Did you get the post on Johnny Wineburger from the forensic pathologist in St. Mary?” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “We’re on the same side, Koko. Can’t you speak civilly to people?”

  “No, you’re on your own side, Robicheaux. That said, what do you want?”

  I gave up. “Could the wounds on Johnny Wineburger have been made by the same instrument that killed Honoria Chalons?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “She was cut by an instrument that was honed like a barber’s razor. The hatchet Wineburger was killed with must have been used to chop bricks. You trying to make the black guy for Honoria-Chalons’s death?”

  “It occurred to me.”

  He swiveled himself around in his chair and stared out a side window at a brick wall. From the back, he looked like a sad elephant humped on a circus stool. He drew in on his cigarette, then released a thick ball of white smoke from his mouth. “You’re not going to win,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You think you’re going to bring down Val Chalons. But he and his people are just getting started. When they’re finished with you, your name won’t be worth warm spit on the sidewalk. You and your wife will be picking flypaper off your skin the rest of your lives.”

  “That’s the breaks,” I said.

  “I hate talking to you,” he said.

  THAT NIGHT A HURRICANE WATCH was in effect from Pensacola, Florida, to Morgan City, Louisiana. But in New Iberia the air was dead, superheated, stained with the smell of dead water beetles, the trees traced with the wisplike patterns of fireflies. Along East Main the windows sparkled like ice with condensation. Just before 11:00 p.m. Dana Magelli called from New Orleans.