Crusader's Cross

chapter EIGHTEEN

While Doogie Dugas and his minions tore my house apart, I was transported to jail in St. Mary Parish. It was extralegal, almost a kidnapping, but legality can be a matter of definition, particularly when some of the players own vast amounts of money. Actually, few of the events that night were aimed at solving the murder of Honoria Chalons. I believed the agenda was to dismember my life.

Television programming in Acadiana was interrupted to show live coverage of my house being searched. I was shown being spread-eagled against a cruiser, shaken down, and hooked up. Molly was captured on camera leaving the house, her clothes and hair in disarray, refusing to answer questions asked by reporters who identified her as a Catholic nun. A plain-clothes state police officer was interviewed on site about the possible connection between the death of Honoria Chalons and the homicides committed by the Baton Rouge serial killer.

The sweep of the tarbrush didn't end there, either. The cameras were waiting when I was taken into the parish prison at Franklin. A television newsman, holding a microphone in my face, said, "Is it true you're being called a person of interest in the death by strangulation of a New Orleans prostitute by the name of Holly Blankenship?"

Another asked, "Can you comment on the fact that under questionable circumstances you have shot and killed at least five people while serving as a police officer?"

The aim of the reporters, none of whom I knew, was obviously to slander. They were good at it, too. Their questions were predicated on distortions or flawed syllogisms that were presented as given facts. To try to defend oneself in those circumstances is to legitimize the question. To remain silent seems an admission of guilt. I was beginning to understand how character assassination can be a telecommunications art form. "Can you explain why a Catholic nun was in your home at the time of your arrest?" the first reporter asked.

"I'm under arrest because I shoved a Jeanerette detective who was wrecking my house," I said.

But my attempt at evasion was that of an amateur. "Was the nun Sister Molly Boyle?" the reporter said, working Molly's name into the story for the second time.

I pushed by him, my wrists cuffed behind me, my unshaved jaws like coal smut inside the blinding glare of strobe lights.

A jail is not a geographical place. A jail is a condition. It rings with the sounds of steel clanging against steel, people yelling down stone corridors, toilets flushing, a screw losing it after an inmate throws feces through the bars into his face. Sometimes a gigantic biker arrives wrapped in leg and waist chains, wiped out on meth, his body crawling with stink, his beard and hair as wild as a lion's mane. The elevator stalls between floors. Later, the cops say he went apeshit. The walls shake, and when the elevator doors open, the biker is curled on the floor, bleeding from the mouth and ears, his eyes rolled up in his head from the voltage injected into him by a stun gun.

The external world and the inside of a can – state, federal, city, county, or parish – do not have connection points based on reason, humanity, psychiatry, or penology. Jails represent human and societal failure at its worst, nothing more, nothing less. Jails are a short-stop way of separating aberrant and undesirable people from the rest of us and rendering them as invisible as possible. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there. The people who believe jails rehabilitate usually need jobs.

In any slammer, powerlessness is the norm. You defecate in full view of others; you eat when you're fed. If you're truly unlucky, or young and very frightened and physically weak, you will be the daily punch of sexual predators, a bar of soap passed around in the shower, an item gambled away in a card game or rented out for a deck of smokes.

But as I lay on a steel bunk suspended from chains screwed into the wall, I really didn't care about any of these things. My nemesis was not jail, the unraveling of my career, or even the machinations of Val Chalons. It was me. I remembered a line written by Billy Joe Shaver: "The first time the devil made me do it. The second time I done it on my own." I had stoked my resentments, fed my sense of loss over Bootsie, and turned my depression into a wardrobe of sackcloth and ashes in order to get drunk again.

I felt like a man who had set fire to his own home in order to warm up an unappetizing dinner.

Then I had a peculiar experience, not unlike one of many years ago when I heard a metallic sound, a brief klatch, on a night trail in a tropical country that no one talks about anymore. There was a moment's silence, the kind you automatically know is a prelude to your entrance into eternity, just before a waist-high explosion cut a black PFC nicknamed "Doo-Doo Dogshit" in half and laced my side and thigh with shrapnel that looked like twisted steel fingers.

A white light filled the inside of my head. I felt myself float up toward the canopy, then crash to the earth. Later, I would swear I saw Doo-Doo walking through the jungle, unharmed, strings of smoke rising from his clothes. He turned, gave me the peace sign in farewell, and said, Got to dee-dee, Loot. Big Boss Man upstairs need me to hep out. Hey, don't you worry none. Chuck going back alive in '65.

My men could have left me there. I'd screwed up and taken them down a night trail that was strung with bouncing betties and trip-wired 105 duds. But that was not their way. They came from barrios and southern shitholes and black northern slums and were the bravest and finest kids I ever knew. While I lay on a poncho liner and a mountain boy from North Georgia rigged up a litter with web gear, I could hear the rounds from an offshore battery arcing with a whooshing sound out of their trajectory, exploding in the jungle, shaking the earth under me. I was laced with morphine and blood-expander and knew I was going to die unless I got to battalion aid. I heard someone calling for the dust-off, then a voice whispering, "They can't get the slick in. He's fucked, man. Oh Jesus Christ, they're coming through the grass."

But they carried me all night, with no sleep, their arms straining against one hundred eighty pounds of dead weight, while they humped their own weapons and packs and radios and sweltered inside their flak vests, their exposed skin a feast for the mosquitoes that boiled out of the elephant grass.

That's when I felt my long-held fear of death finally use itself up and lift from my soul the way ash floats off a dead fire. I closed my eyes in surrender to my fate and placed my trust in the tender mercies of those who bore me toward an uncertain destination, perhaps one that would be lit by flame and filled with explosions that sounded like ships' boilers blowing apart.

But I was not a player any longer. The dice had rolled out of the cup, and if the numerical sum on them was snake-eyes or boxcars, the matter was out of my control, and that simple conclusion about my life-span on earth set me free.

I fell asleep in the jail cell, even though a drunk snored loudly on the floor and a deranged man in sweatpants and a woman's blouse kept shouting accusations through the bars at a city cop he claimed had stolen his airline tickets to Paris.

When the sun came up, I realized I'd just had the first restful sleep since I had gotten drunk. With my cell partners I ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, tiny sausages, toast, jelly, and coffee. Then I heard Helen Soileau's voice in a foyer and a moment later a screw unlocked my cell door and walked me to the front of the jail.

"Saw you on early-morning TV," Helen said as she drove us back to New Iberia.

"Val Chalons doesn't take prisoners," I said.

"What were your latents doing at the crime scene, Dave?"

The sky was still pink with sunrise, the air sweet with the smell of flowers and rain, the cane waving in the fields. I started to lie, to say that perhaps indeed I had been at Val's guesthouse on another occasion, even though earlier I had already denied that possibility to her. But I couldn't do it.

"I'm not sure how they got there. I got back on the juice. I was drunk all weekend," I said.

She took a call on her radio, her expression frozen in place. Then she hung her microphone back on the dash. "What was that last part?"

"I've got two days sobriety now," I said.

"Two days?"

I waited for her to go on. But she didn't. In the silence I could hear the tires of the cruiser on the asphalt. "I think maybe I went to Val Chalons's guesthouse in a blackout. I think I took a CD from his stereo, one with Ida Durbin's voice on it," I said.

"Ida Durbin again?"

"The CD is at the house. I think there's a blood smear on it, maybe from my own hand."

She rubbed at one temple with the ends of her fingers, as though an intolerable migraine had begun to eat its way through her head. "Maybe it's time for you not to say any more without a lawyer."

"I didn't kill Honoria."

"You don't know what you did, so don't give me your doodah. Dave, you make me so mad I want to stop the car and beat the shit out of you. Goddamn it!"

"I'm sorry," I said.

She swerved the cruiser to the shoulder and got out under a spreading oak tree. She walked up and down by my window, her fists on her hips, the corner of her mouth bitten white. For a moment I thought she was truly going to lose it. She stood still for a long time, her back to me, then got back in the vehicle.

"Helen -"

"Shut up," she said.

She did not speak again until she turned into my drive. "Be in my office in one hour, looking sharp, your head out of your ass for a change," she said.

Doogie Dugas and his posse comitatus had tossed my house from one end to the other. They had even pulled all my lawn tools out of my shed and left them scattered in the yard. The doors to my truck were ajar, the lock on the steel toolbox I had welded to the bed sheared in half by bolt cutters. The driver's seat was still pushed against the steering wheel, the floor area behind it empty of the flop hat and hooded raincoat I had worn during my blackout Saturday.

The irony of Dugas's search was that he had probably tainted any evidence he had seized by using an improperly acquired warrant. The greater irony was the fact that he and his friends had evidently ignored an item they should have picked up. It was a sheet of yellow legal pad paper, now rain-damaged, speckled with mud, blown into the canebrake that separated my yard from Miss Ellen's. I would have probably paid little attention to it as well, but every day I picked up litter that either blew or was thrown into my yard. It was dated Saturday, 9:15 p.m. and read:

Dear Dave,

Why don't you stay home? Who's taking care of your cat and raccoon? Anyone who neglects or who is cruel to a defenseless creature deserves to be tortured.

I have to tell someone about the secrets nobody in our family will deal with. My father won't admit the harm our silence has caused. Maybe our souls are damned. My prayer today is that hell is oblivion and not a place of torment.

You must call me. I can tell you about Ida Durbin.

Love, H.

Was she insane? Twisted on coke and booze? Or perhaps touched with an insight into evil that would make most of us shudder? Whatever the answer, she had taken her secrets to the grave.

After I shaved and showered and changed clothes, I placed Honoria's note in one Ziploc bag and put the CD with the blood smear on the surface in another, and drove to the department. Helen was waiting for me, her mood still rumpled. "What's that?" she said, indicating Honoria's note.

I placed it on her desk. She was standing up, her palms propped on her desk blotter as she read Honoria's words, her chest rising and falling. The door was closed now, the blinds open, and people passing in the corridor made a point of not glancing inside. The room seemed to grow warmer, the sunlight through the window more intense.

"This was in your yard?" Helen said.

"Right."

"This is your parachute on a murder beef?"

"I don't know what it is. My guess is Honoria was an incest victim."

"Where in the name of God do you get these ideas?"

"Koko Hebert says Honoria had intercourse in the twenty-four-hour period before she died. She was about to shower in the guesthouse, where Val Chalons lives, not in the main house, where she lived. She had every behavioral characteristic of someone who has been the long-term victim of a sexual predator."

"Dave, APIS came back with only one match that didn't belong in that guesthouse – yours."

"Except I had no motive to murder her. There was DNA in her genital area. I'll bet the lab will show it was left there by a relative. My guess is it belongs either to the father or the brother."

But I had already lost her attention. "I must have had two dozen calls this morning," she said. "They want you skinned, salted, and hung in a gibbet."

"Am I suspended?"

"Suspension might be the least of it."

"What do you want me to do, Helen?"

"Lose the nun."

"Can't do it."

"Then please go somewhere else for a while."

And that's what I did. As far as the water cooler, my face burning as though I had been slapped. Then I went back into her office, the door hanging open behind me.

"You want my shield, just say it."

"You're always psychoanalyzing other people. Why don't you look inside your own head for a change?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Bootsie died on you and it made you madder than hell. Your daughter is gone and every day you wake up, you're scared you'll drink again. So you figured out a way to climb on a cross, a place where it's safe and people can't do anything else to you. I don't think you're going to like it up there, bwana."

The week was not going well. Worse, Clete had called early the previous morning and, without thinking, I told him Jimmie had gotten a lead on Lou Kale and that Kale might be running an escort service out of Miami. That was a mistake.