Crusader's Cross

chapter EIGHT

"You can't drink at all?" Honoria said.

"I could but I choose not to," I replied, and felt instantly stupid at my own rhetoric.

"I thought if you went through the Twelve Steps, you were cured. It must be awful to know that about yourself."

"To know what?"

"That you're afraid of your own metabolism."

There was a black shine in both her hair and eyes, and she wore a white cotton dress with eyelets in the bodice that exposed the deep tan in her skin. When she ordered her third vodka collins I made a show of noticing the clock above the bar and told her I should be going. But you didn't get off the hook that easily with Honoria Chalons. She gave the waiter a credit card to pay the check before I could, then asked him to put her drink in a Styrofoam cup. "Do me a favor?" she said to me.

I waited for her to go on.

"My car won't start. I think it'll have to be towed. Can you give me a lift?" she said.

We walked back down East Main to my house and got in my pickup truck. She tripped once on a pitch in the sidewalk and I felt her body come hard against me. "I still haven't eaten dinner. Want to stop somewhere?" she said.

"I have work to do," I said.

"It's a grand evening. I don't want to waste it at home. The House of Chalons is a dark place. Few people know how dark it really is," she said.

I looked at her profile in the shadowy light of a streetlamp, and wondered if she was being deliberately grandiose. But she was not. Her eyes were fixed on the rooftops of the Victorian and antebellum homes along the street and the birds circling over the chimneys, as though they held the answer to a question she had never resolved.

"Why are you staring at me?" she said.

"I wonder why you live at home."

"To care for my father. He's quite ill. I don't think he'll live long."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.

"He'll handle it. He always does. God, I need a bath. Every time I come back to Louisiana, I can't seem to scrub the dirt and humidity out of my skin."

In the shadows her cheeks were pooled with color, her eyes glazed with an alcoholic shine. She looked up into my face, almost like a little girl, perhaps faintly embarrassed at the visceral nature of her language. "Take me home?" she said.

We drove down Old Spanish Trail and on through Jeanerette. The moon was low on the horizon, veiled with brown dust from the sugar cane fields, her house lit inside the massive live oaks that surrounded it. I drove through the gate and stopped in front of the porch. My truck windows were down and for a moment I thought I smelled cigar smoke.

The decorum of the era in which Honoria and I were raised would have required me to walk her to the door, or at least offer to do so. But I had already decided Honoria needed to get on with her life, and she didn't need me to help her with it. I was about to say good night, without getting out of the truck, when she placed her hand on my cheek, then tilted her head sideways and pressed her mouth to mine, using her tongue, threading her fingers tightly through the back of my hair.

I could taste vodka and sweet syrup and orange slices and the tartness of crushed cherries in her mouth. I could even taste the coldness of the ice that had been poured from her collins glass into the Styrofoam cup. She took a breath and got up on her knees, then bent down to kiss me again.

"Whoa, kiddo," I said.

"Kiddo yourself," she said. She got out of the truck and walked inside, her back stiff, the porch light bright on her white dress.

I turned the truck around and started back toward the gate. Not more than three feet from my window, I saw the red glow of a cigar among a tangle of persimmon trees. I slowed the truck, the tires creaking on the gravel, and looked into the spectral face of Honoria's father, Raphael Chalons.

"My daughter is a vulnerable woman, sir. Be advised I do not abide the man who would take advantage of that fact," he said.

Good evening to you, too, sir, I thought, and drove on without replying. I also decided that on some occasions good deeds and the obligations of charity should be heaved over the gunnels.

The next morning Jimmie was up before me, fixing breakfast for us, feeding Tripod and Snuggs, whistling a song.

"You must have had a pretty good night," I said.

"This friend of mine, the professor at UL, he's got this huge collection of country and bluegrass music. Remember we used to always say Ida sang just like Kitty Wells? That's because Kitty Wells sang in B flat. See, my friend has put his whole record library in his computer and he came up with all these recordings that have somebody on them singing like Kitty Wells."

Jimmie had been cutting toast on the breadboard while he spoke. He turned around, his starched white shirt crinkling, his hair wet and combed, his face shiny with aftershave. "You know the best part? On a couple of those records somebody's playing a mandolin just the way Ida did," he said.

I looked away so he could not see my eyes. "That's good, Jimmie," I said.

"Yeah, Ida was smart. I always thought she got away from those guys. Why would they want to kill her, anyway? She was just a piney-woods country girl."

Because they're sonsofbitches and they make examples of piney-woods girls, I thought.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing," I replied. "I'd better get to the office."

"Hey, we're going to find ole Ida. You'll see," he said.

"You bet," I said, knowing that Jimmie, like all brave people, would continue to believe in the world, regardless of what it did to him.

A little after nine, Wally, our overweight dispatcher and self-appointed departmental comic, buzzed my phone. "There's a newsman down here wants to see you. Should I send him up?" he said.

"Which newsman?"

"The one on TV looks like an icicle."

"Valentine Chalons?"

"That's the one."

"Why don't you just say so?"

" 'Cause he looks like an icicle. Or I could call him the TV guy wit' a broom up his ass trying to give me a bad time. By the way, that nun left a note for you."

I couldn't begin to follow his words. "Wally -" I began.

"That nun, the one who builds homes for poor people, she was here to see you. I buzzed your phone but you wasn't at your desk. So she left a note. It's in your mailbox. She went out when the TV guy was coming in. You want to see the TV guy or not?"

Three minutes later Valentine Chalons opened my office door without knocking and closed it behind him., his eyes locked on mine. "I'll make this simple. My sister is a grown woman and can associate with whomever she pleases. But I'll be damned if you'll use her to get at my father," he said.

"Sorry to see you interpret things that way, Val," I said.

"My father is a heart patient. He probably doesn't have long to live. What are you trying to do to him?"

"Your sister had a problem with her car. I gave her a ride home."

"You're looking me in the face, telling me you have no issue with my father?"

"If I do, it doesn't involve your sister."

"How about Sister Molly? It's just coincidence I saw her leaving here this morning?"

"I don't know what it is, because I didn't see or talk with her."

"Our handyman told me he saw you at her office yesterday."

"Yeah, I did see her yesterday. But that's none of your business."

"Let me set you straight about that hypocritical bitch. She's a closet Marxist who uses the Church to stir up class hatred in ignorant and gullible people. Except she's not a real nun. She's got some kind of half-ass status that doesn't require her to take vows. So she hides behind the veil and gets to have it both ways."

"What's she got on you, partner?"

He put his hands on his hips, like a drill instructor, and looked sideways out a window, as though the room was too small for the level of anger he needed to express. Then he snuffed down in his nose and shook it off. "Give my dad a break, will you?"

"He's a heart patient but he smokes cigars?" I said.

"You're a beaut, Dave," he said.

Molly Boyle's note was a simple one: Please call. Thanks - Molly B. I rang her office number and was told she was mowing the grass and would return my call later. But why wait, I asked myself, and headed down the road in a cruiser toward Jeanerette.

Then I had to ask myself a more serious question: What was so urgent about seeing Molly Boyle? Why not just wait for her call? The answer that started to suggest itself was one I quickly put out of my mind.

When I pulled in to her agency I saw her seated on a tractor, towing a grass-cutter though a field of buttercups, a little black boy in the seat with her. She turned at the end of a long swath, then saw me walking toward her and shut off the engine. She wore a baseball cap and cotton gloves and a sleeveless blouse that was peppered with sweat. The tops of her arms were dusty and sprinkled with sun freckles. She introduced the little black boy as Tee Bleu Bergeron. "His daddy is our best birdhouse builder," she said.

"Your father works for the Chalons family?" I said.

"Yes, suh, he work for Mr. Raphael. We live right up the bayou from the big house," he replied.

The little boy was many generations removed from antebellum days, but he still obeyed the same custom of referring to the main building on a plantation as "the big house," just as his antecedents had. Sister Molly asked him to go to her office and wait for her. "You've been a good helper, Tee Bleu. I'll drive you home in a little bit," she said.

"Why is he called 'Little Blue'?" I asked.

"His daddy says the umbilical cord was wrapped around his throat when he was born. I think he has some brain damage. But he's a sweet little guy. Why'd you ask?" Sister Molly said.

"I was just curious." But my answer was not an honest one. The little boy did not look like his father, the black man named Andre Bergeron. He was light-skinned, with high cheekbones, and liquid brown eyes and jet-black straight hair. He looked like Honoria Chalons.

"You asked me yesterday about a woman named Ida -" Sister Molly began.

"Ida Durbin," I said.

"Yes. Did something happen to her?"

"I think she may have been murdered many years ago."

"Was she a prostitute?"

"How did you know?" I asked.

"I didn't. But you said the Chalonses would like to forget about her. I think the Chalonses have secrets. I think one of their secrets is their involvement with prostitution. So I should have spoken up when you asked about this Durbin woman."

"What do you know about the Chalonses and prostitution, Sister?"

"Call me Molly. I grew up in Port Arthur. My father was career army and a policeman. He always said the brothels in Galveston were owned by the Chalons and Giacano families. Raphael Chalons is infamous for his sexual behavior." She stopped, obviously conflicted with herself and her own motivations. "I don't feel very comfortable with any of this, Detective Robicheaux. I think I've said too much."

"Call me Dave."

The field fell into shadow and the wind came up and wrinkled the bayou and flattened the uncut wildflowers in the field. She removed her cap and blew a wisp of hair out of one eye. Her face looked dilated in the heat. There were beads of field dirt around her neck and a throbbing insect bite on one cheek. She reminded me of a countrywoman of years ago. In a way, she reminded me of my mother.

"I think you've done a lot for poor people in this area, Sister Molly. I think you and your friends are what the Church is all about," I said, realizing I still could not bring myself to call her by her first name.

Her eyes fastened on mine and her mouth parted slightly. "Thank you," she said.

The silent moment that followed was one neither of us had chosen. I looked out at the bayou and the Spanish moss straightening in the trees along the banks. She fitted her cap back on her head and took the keys out of the ignition for no reason, then tried to reinsert them in the slot. They dropped from her fingers into the uncut grass below the tractor.

"I'm all thumbs some days," she said.

I found the keys for her and placed them in her hand, my fingertips touching the graininess of her skin and the wetness in the cup of her palm. On the way back to New Iberia, I tried to keep an empty place in the center of my mind and not think the thoughts I was thinking.

Question: What can dumb and fearful people always be counted on to do?

Answer: To try to control and manipulate everyone in their environment.

Question: What is the tactic used by these same dumb people as they try to control others?

Answer: They lie.

That night I got a call from a man out of my past, an anachronism from a more primitive time by the name of Robert Cobb, also known as Bad Texas Bob. Years ago in Louisiana, when a convict escaped from a work camp, the state police always assigned the recapture to Bad Texas Bob. Bob's lifetime record was eight for eight, all DOA. He thrived on gunsmoke and blood splatter, and if he ever experienced remorse for his deeds, I never saw any indication of it.

There used to be an all-night café in New Orleans where cops of all kinds hung out. Pimps, wiseguys, junkies, and jackrollers knew to take their business up the street. One night an out-of-town black man walked in, laid a.38 inside a folded newspaper on the counter, and told the cashier to empty the register. Bad Texas Bob climbed out a side window, waited at the entrance for the stickup man to emerge, and blew his brains all over the glass panels of the revolving door.

Over the phone Bob's voice sounded like wet sand sliding through a drainpipe. "Hear you're working a cold case on a whore gone missing," he said.

"Yeah, something like that," I said.

"Galveston, about 1958 or '59?"

"You have some information for me, Bob?"

"Maybe. Galveston is where I started out. I'm having a couple of drinks in Broussard. Hey, guys like us were the real cops, weren't we?"

No, we weren't, I thought. But I had learned long ago not to argue with those who need to revise the past.

I drove on the old Lafayette highway to the little town of Broussard, crossed the train tracks, and parked in front of a low-roofed bar whose cracked windows were held together with silver tape and framed with Christmas tree lights. The interior was dark, the air refrigerated, the cigarette smoke curling through an exhaust fan in back. Bad Texas Bob was at the bar, hunkered over a shot glass and draft beer, wearing a gray suit, string tie, cowboy boots, and a short-brim Stetson canted on the side of his head.

He wore expensive jewelry, smoked gold-tipped, lavender cigarettes, and tried to affect an aura of contentment and prosperity. But the years had not been kind to Bob. His teeth were as long as a horse's, his face emaciated, the backs of his hands brown with liver spots. Bad Texas Bob was the nightmare that every cop fears he might become.

"You still in the Dr Pepper club?" he said.

"No other place will have me. How you been doing, Bob?"

"I do a little consulting work. I work part-time at the casino in Lake Charles. Billy Joe Pitts says you were interested in a whore by the name of -" He snapped his fingers at the air.

"Ida Durbin," I said.

He tossed back his whiskey and chased it with the draft beer, then wiped the salt from the beer glass off his mouth. "Yeah, that was her name. I knew her. What do you want to know?"

His eyes were level with mine – watery, iniquitous, harboring thoughts or memories of a kind you never want to guess at, the skin at the corners as wrinkled as a turtle's.

"What happened to her, Bob?" I said.

"Nothing, as far as I know. People who run cathouses don't kill their whores, if that's what you were thinking."

He pointed for the bartender to refill his shot glass. He seemed to be disconnected from our conversation now, but when I glanced at the bar mirror I saw his eyes looking back at me. "She had sandy hair, nice-looking, tall gal? I remember her. Didn't nothing happen to her. I would have knowed about it," he said.

But Bob's confidence level had slipped and he was talking too fast.

"Her pimp was named Lou Kale. Remember a lowlife by that name?" I said.

"I never worked Vice. I just used to see this little gal around the island, is all."

But I remembered another story connected to Bob and some of his colleagues, one I had always hoped was exaggerated or apocryphal, in the same way you hope that stories about pedophilia among the clergy or financial corruption in your own family are untrue.

A notorious Baton Rouge madam by the name of Vicki Rochon used to run a house specializing in oral sex. A fundamentalist Christian group was about to close her down when the local cops offered her a deal: Vicki and her girls could take a vacation in Panama City, then return to town in a couple of months and their business would not be interrupted again. No money was involved. Vicki became an invaluable snitch and personally provided free ones for the cops. As a bonus, her son, who was doing hard time in Angola's Camp J, was transferred to an honor farm. Bad Texas Bob became one of Vicki's most ardent free patrons.

"Thanks for passing on the information, Bob. But if I were you, I'd let your friend Pitts drown in his own shit. He's on a pad for the Chalons family. Did you know that?" I said.

"I was trying to do you a favor, for old times' sake. Screw Pitts." Bob knocked back his whiskey and drew in on his cigarette, the whites of his eyes threaded with tiny veins.

"Let me buy you a round," I said.

"I'm covered."

"See you around, partner," I said.

"You might think I'm pulling your joint, but I remember a Galveston whore by the name of Ida Whatever. She played a fiddle. No, that wasn't it. She played a mandolin. Played the fire out of it."

"Say that again?"

But he had nothing to add. Bad Texas Bob had outsmarted me. Like all corrupt people, he had wrapped a piece of truth inside a lie. To try to discern the fact from the lie was to empower the agenda of a classical manipulator, I told myself. I left Bob to his booze in Broussard, wondering if I had just revisited my alcoholic past or seen my future.