Crusader's Cross

chapter Twenty-six

I don't know what I expected. My experience with age is that it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us. Perhaps I'm wrong. I wanted to be wrong when I met Ida Durbin. I also wanted to believe I would not act on an old resentment should I have the bad luck to run into her estranged husband, Lou Kale.

They were staying in separate rooms in a lovely old motel built of historic brick on a part of Pinhook Road that had not been blighted by urban development and was still shrouded by spreading live oaks. It was not yet 7:00 a.m. when I showed my badge at the desk and asked for the room number of Ms. Connie Coyne. I had not called in advance.

"We don't have anyone by that name staying here," the clerk said.

"Look again," I said.

"No one by that name is staying here, sir," he repeated, looking past me at someone waiting to check out.

"Don't tell me that. She's here. So is her husband. His name is Lou Coyne."

"Oh, yes. They're both registered under his name. I just saw her go into the dining room," the clerk said.

"Thank you," I said.

According to Jimmie, Ida and her husband kept separate homes in Miami and obviously separate accommodations when they traveled. But the fact they were both registered at the motel under his name, indicating the charges were probably billed to the same credit card, made me wonder how separate in reality Ida's life was from her husband's.

Few people were in the dining room and it wasn't hard to pick out Ida from the other motel guests eating breakfast by the French doors, not far from the buffet table. Her hair still had its natural reddish tone and the years had not taken away her height or the thin, well-defined features of her face. The dramatic change was in her complexion. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, but in the broken light from the terrace her skin seemed etiolated, the freckles drained of color.

She was nibbling on a piece of dry toast while she read from a hardbound book. The only food on her plate consisted of a few melon slices, a half dozen grapes, and a piece of Swiss cheese. Her cup was filled with hot tea. She wore a flowered sundress that I suspected came from an expensive shop on Biscayne Boulevard.

She glanced up at me only when my shadow fell across her reading page. "Why, Dave," she said. "I never could get over how much you and Jimmie looked alike."

"How's the life, Ida?" I said.

"Oh, I hope that's not meant to injure. It's not, is it?"

I sat down without being asked. "Why didn't you write and tell us you were okay, Ida?"

"Because I wasn't okay. Because I was a kid. Because I told myself Jimmie would be fine without me. Pick one you like."

"A guy named Troy Bordelon went to the grave thinking he was partly responsible for your death," I said.

"I never heard of this person. I didn't choose the life I've lived, Dave. It was chosen for me. But others may see it differently."

"I happen be in the latter category, Ida. Val Chalons is trying to frame me on a child molestation charge. He also defamed my wife. That's why he's in Iberia General Hospital. I stomped the shit out of him. If I had it to do over again, I'd rip up his whole ticket. The only regret I have is that his father may have had a seizure because of the damage I did to his son."

If she took any offense at my remarks, it disappeared inside her face. "You seem to be handling the pressures of life well enough," she said, gazing at the terrace and the moss that was lifting in the oak trees by the pool.

I said earlier that in my view age is not a magic agency in our lives. But perhaps Ida was the exception after all. The country girl who had paddled an inner tube far out from shore and saved Jimmie and me from sharks was gone; the woman who had replaced her possessed the timeless and inured hauteur of a successful medieval courtesan. Jimmie had said she had wanted to see her son, Valentine. But where had she been all those years? Raphael Chalons had raised him, not she. Had Mr. Raphael excluded her from her son's life? I doubted it.

"Lost in thought?" she said.

"Why has your son done so much to harm me and my wife? Is he that fearful people will discover who his mother is? Is he that cowardly and insecure?"

She drank from her teacup, then set it back down in the saucer. The freckles on her shoulders seemed to disappear in the glaze of sunlight through the French doors. "It was good seeing you, Dave. I hope things work out for you and your wife," she said.

"Next time you want to wish me well, Ida, put it on a postcard and drop it in a mailbox," I said.

"You're a bitter man," she said.

"Just a realistic one," I replied.

But my failed effort at reconciliation with Ida Durbin and the past was not over. On my way out of the lobby into the porte cochere, I almost knocked down a man dressed in a blazer, an open-collar print shirt, knife-creased slacks, and oxblood loafers. He was a muscularly compact man, his skin deeply tanned, his iron-gray hair slick with gel. When I collided with him, he had been holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a gold lighter in the other. He apologized, lit his cigarette in an expansive fashion, and started to walk around me.

"You pointed a gun at me in a Galveston motel in 1958, Mr. Kale," I said. "You really scared me. You called yourself the butter and egg man."

"Some people are walking memory banks. Me? I can't remember what I ate for supper last night," he said.

"You guys are here to do business, aren't you? Your visit doesn't have anything to do with Val Chalons."

"We need to dial it down, my man. I need to get inside, too, if you'll step aside."

"I'm a sheriff's detective, Mr. Kale. You're a pimp. You want a trip down to the bag, that can be arranged. But regardless of what happens here, you keep your ass out of New Iberia, and you keep a lot of gone between you and Clete Purcel. You reading me on this, Mr. Kale?"

He removed his cigarette from his mouth and tipped his ashes away from his person so they didn't blow back on his coat. "The name is Coyne, Lou Coyne. And you got the wrong dude, buddy."

He went through the revolving door into the motel. It had rained that morning, and the breeze under the porte cochere smelled of wet flowers and leaves and the lichen that was crusted on the massive limbs of the live oaks. I didn't want to get any deeper into the world of Ida Durbin and Lou Kale, no more than you want to immerse yourself in the effluent that backs up from a sewage pipe. But I knew a predator when I saw one. Lou Kale and Ida Durbin were no longer symbols or milestones out of Jimmie's and my adolescent experience. Nor were they simply foils to the innocence of the postwar era in which we had grown up. They may have been upgraded from their origins and elevated by economic circumstance into a larger world, but Ida Durbin and Lou Kale were the emissaries of organized crime, no matter what they called themselves. They were real and they were here.

Want to find out who the closet boozers are in your neighborhood? Ask the garbage man. Want to check out the local politics? Talk with the barber. Want to find out what your neighbors are really like? Ask a kid. Want to find out who's washing money at the track, fencing stolen property, running dope, greasing the zoning board, providing hookers for conventioneers, or selling gang-bangers Technines modified with hell triggers? Forget news media and police pencil pushers and official sources of all kinds. Ask a beat cop who hasn't slept since 1965 or a street junkie whose head glows in the dark.

During the morning I talked with a retired DEA agent while he drove golf balls on a practice range; an ex-Air American pilot who flew nine years inside the Golden Triangle; an old-time Washington, D.C., hooker who operated a bar in North Lafayette; and a pharmaceutically addicted city Vice cop who had done two tours in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. They all shared one commonality – they had been witnesses to events of historical importance that few people knew about and they had seen forms of human behavior about which they never spoke. The latter quality alone, to my mind, made them exceptional human beings.

For generations all the vice in Louisiana had been run by a few individuals in New Orleans. Even when I was a beat cop, no one opened a brothel, set up a slot machine, or sold one lid of Afghan skunk without first kissing the ring of Didoni Giacano. But Didi Gee was pushing up mushrooms, gambling was a state-sponsored industry, and narcotics had become part of the culture. Louisiana, once a closed fiefdom operated by the appointees of Frank Costello, was now wide open to the entrepreneurial spirit. Drug mules hammered down Interstate 10, from both Houston and Miami, loaded with weed, meth, and coke. Pimps had their pick of crack whores, whose managerial costs were minimal.

But none of my friends had ever heard of Lou Kale or Ida Durbin. Nor had they heard of anyone going by the names of Connie and Lou Coyne. I began to wonder if I had been too hard on Ida. She may have saved Clete Purcel's life, I told myself, and according to Clete's account, even Lou Kale had seemed a reluctant participant in his interrogation and beating.

Or was I being romantic and foolish about people who had invested their lives in the use of others?

I drove back to New Iberia, unable to think straight. Helen had left a Post-it on my door. SEE ME, it said.

"Where have you been?" she asked, looking up from her desk.

"I took some personal time in Lafayette. I called Wally before eight," I replied.

"What kind of 'personal time'?"

"I saw Ida Durbin."

"I have to meet this woman."

"What is it, Helen?"

"Raphael Chalons wants to see you."

"Why?"

"You got me. Unless he thinks you're a priest." She looked at her watch. "It sounded to me like he was already on the bus."

I have heard both hospice personnel and psychologists maintain that human beings lose body weight at the moment of death,, that the dimensions of the skeleton and the tissue visibly shrink before the eye, as though the escape of the soul leaves behind a cavity swirling with atoms. Raphael Chalons was not dead when I reached Iberia General, but his stricken face and hollow eyes and the sag of his flesh on his bones made me wonder if the Angel of Death was not deliberately casting a slow shadow on the haunted man who stared back at me from the hospital bed.

"I tried to bring you flowers earlier, Mr. Raphael. But the nurse felt my visit wasn't an appropriate one," I said.

My words and their banality were obviously of no interest to him. His eyes were as black as a raven's wing, his facial skin oily, spiked with whiskers, furrowed around the mouth. One hand lay palm-up on top of the sheet. He crooked his fingers at me.

I did not want to approach him. I did not want to inhale his breath. I did not want his words to put talons in my breast. I did not want to be held captive by another dying man.

But I leaned over him just the same. His fingers rose up and tapped my chest, as though he could convey meaning through my skin to compensate for the failure of his vocal cords. His lips moved, but his words were only pinpricks of spittle on my face.

"I can't understand you, sir," I said.

A flame burned in his cheeks and his eyes rolled up at mine, as a dependent lover's might. A clot broke in his throat. "Not his fault," he said.

"Sir?" I said.

His lingers tore a button on my shirt. His breath was dank, earth-smelling, like dirt spaded from a tree-covered grave. "The fault is mine. All my fault. Everything," he whispered. "Please stop my son."

"From doing what, Mr. Raphael?"

But his hand released my shirt and his gaze receded from mine, as though he were sinking into a black well and I was now only a marginal figure on its perimeter.

The nurse came in and closed the blinds. It was only then I noticed that my flowers were on the windowsill. "Don't worry, he's only sleeping," she said. "He has bursts of energy, then he falls asleep. He liked your flowers."

"Has he talked about his son?" I asked.

"No, not at all," she replied. She nodded toward the door, indicating she wanted to finish the conversation in the corridor. "May I be frank? I was very disturbed by something I saw take place here. It was very distressing."

"Go ahead," I said.

"Mr. Val came into the room with two lawyers. They tried to get Mr. Raphael to dictate a will. But he wouldn't do it. Mr. Val was quite upset. No, the better term is irate."

"Thank you for telling me this," I said.

"You and Mr. Raphael must be very close."

"Why do you think that?"

"He only asked to see one other person. Someone named Ida. Fortunately, she showed up here about an hour ago. I saw her stroking his hair on the pillow. She seemed a very elegant person. Do you know her, Detective Robicheaux?"

At three that afternoon a nurse's aide found Raphael Chalons half out of his bed, his sightless eyes staring out of his head as though he had looked into a camera's flash. The blanket and sheet had cascaded over his shoulders, like the mantle a medieval lord might wear as he walked toward a blade of light on the earth's rim.