Crusader's Cross

chapter TWENTY-NINE

The next morning the sky was the gray-black of gun cotton, the dried-out palm fronds in my neighbor's yard stiffening in the wind. The air was full of leaves, and smelled like iodine or ship's brass on a hot day out on the salt. Helen called me into the office as soon as I got to the department. "I want you to go to New Orleans with me and question the guy they've got in custody," she said.

"Why not wait on the DNA report?" I asked.

"It's a media circus there. Iberia Parish is going to get shuffled out of the deck. We're going to be left with two unsolved homicides."

"I'm not understanding you," I said.

"The Baton Rouge serial killer dropped two DOAs on our doorstep. The guy in custody had a Popsicle route in the Garden District and Baton Rouge. You brought up the question first – why would he drive eighty miles to leave his victims in our parish?"

"So he's not the guy. Wait on the DNA," I said.

"This from you?"

"Why not?"

She paused, her eyes dissecting my face. "You don't want your wife left alone?"

"I've made some serious mistakes in the past and other people had to pay for them."

I saw the impatience go out of her face. "What if we're dealing with two serial killers, not one? Two shitbags working together?" she said.

"It's a possibility," I said.

"I'm taking you off the desk. The D.A.'s office can go play with itself. Sign out a cruiser, bwana. We'll be back by five," she said.

The wind shook the cruiser all the way down the four-lane to New Orleans. When we crossed the bridge at Des Allemands I could see boats rocking in their slips, leaves starting to strip from the trees by the water. In the south, lightning was striking on a bay, quivering in the clouds like pieces of white thread.

The suspect had already been processed into central lockup. His name was Ernest T. Fogel, a man whose race was hard to determine. He had uncut wiry hair, deeply pitted cheeks, and skin that looked chemically tanned. His jacket was not extensive: a molestation complaint that was dropped and two arrests for battery against prostitutes across the river in Algiers. Both victims had worked out of bars a few blocks from his rented room. Inside his file was a social worker's recommendation to the court that Ernest Fogel be kept away from children and pornography. A guard opened Fogel's cell and let me, Helen, and Dana Magelli inside.

Dana was a trim, dark-haired man, a sharp dresser whose style often belied his emotional disposition. He introduced us to Fogel with the strange formality that characterizes relationships between criminals and law enforcement personnel inside the system. The protocol exists less for reasons of professionalism than the fact it allows guards and cops and prosecutors to insulate themselves from certain individuals who are dramatically different from the rest of us. I didn't know if Fogel was one of these or not.

He sat on a cot, unshaved, dressed in jailhouse orange, a metal tray of half-eaten food beside him. According to Dana, Fogel maintained he was innocent of any crime whatsoever. He claimed the fifteen-year-old hooker tied up inside his house was a niece by a former marriage and that he was trying to save her from a life as a crack whore. Simultaneously he kept offering pieces of information that seemed to indicate an enormous knowledge about the killings in the Baton Rouge area. So far he had not asked for a lawyer. I had the sense Ernest T. Fogel was having a grand time.

"Fibers from your clothing were on the body of a girl by the name of Holly Blankenship, Mr. Fogel. How do you account for that?" I said.

"Was that her name?" he said, looking up at me.

"It was the name of a runaway somebody killed and threw in a garbage dump," I said.

"Me and my wife busted up. I ain't proud of everything I've did since then. That's just the way it is," he said.

"The way what is?" Helen said.

"When you're a single man, that's the way it is. There's women for hire. I ain't put them on the street," he replied.

"She was murdered the same day a friend of mine and I interviewed her," I said. "Then fibers from your shirt show up on her body. Then you get busted with a girl tied up in your home. That's a lot for coincidence, isn't it?"

"I don't know about no interview or what that's got to do wit' me. But say what you want." He was looking straight ahead now, seemingly indifferent to his legal jeopardy.

"I think you're a player in this, Mr. Fogel. But I think you're the weak sister in the script," I said.

His eyes clicked up at mine. "I'm what?"

"Serial killers often work in pairs. One guy is the orchestrator, the other guy does the scut work. Between the two of them, they form a third personality that commits deeds neither man could do on his own. You with me so far?"

"No," he said.

But he was lying. I saw the insult take hold in his face, a resentful light glimmer inside his eyelashes.

"It's an easy concept," I said. "One guy is the brains. The other guy is a sock puppet. You want to ride the needle for some dude who's probably having a nice lunch right now, maybe knocking back a cold beer, while you take his weight?"

Ernest Fogel made no reply.

"Do you know where you are? This is central lockup," Helen said. "Ever had the midnight express up your ass?"

He looked into space for a long time. Down the corridor a cop dragged his baton along the bars of a cell door.

"How about it, buddy? Why not get your side of things out on the table? Maybe your situation isn't as bad as you think," Dana said.

"I need a razor and some decent soap. I need a hairbrush, too, maybe some aftershave," Fogel said.

"That can be arranged," Dana said. "You want to make a statement?"

"No, there's gonna be press at my arraignment. I ain't going there looking like a street person. I'd better talk to a lawyer now. Y'all got a good one? I don't mean nobody's cousin in the public defender's office, either."

Helen, Dana, and I looked at one another. The only sound in the cell was the reverberation of a flushing toilet farther down the corridor. Dana's handsome face was pinched with anger and frustration.

"You ever hurt children? You ever do that, Ernest?" he asked, his hands folding and unfolding by his sides.

Fogel stirred the tip of his finger in a small jelly container on his food tray, then licked his finger clean, the back of his head turned to us so we could not see his face.

A tractor-trailer rig had spun out on the bridge at Des Allemands, backing up westbound traffic all the way through St. Charles Parish, so Helen and I headed up the interstate toward Baton Rouge, our flasher rippling. On the southwestern edge of Lake Pontchartrain I asked her to pull off on the shoulder a moment.

"What's up?" she said.

"I just want to look at the lake," I said.

It was an odd request, I suspect, but Helen was a tolerant and decent person and had become a survivor because she had always accepted people for what they are. The lake was smoky green, dented with rain, blown with whitecaps. It looked exactly as the Gulf had looked on the day Jimmie and I had found ourselves trapped on the third sandbar off Galveston beach many years ago, the day Ida Durbin saved us from our own recklessness. The horizon was threaded with lightning, the air peppered with the smell of brine, the surf brown and frothy with sand sliding back from the beach. For just a moment it was 1958 again, and I thought perhaps if I turned my head fast enough I would see the glistening hard-candy surfaces of Chevy Bel Airs and chopped-down '32 and '39 Fords with Merc engines roaring down the highway, their Hollywood mufflers throbbing off the asphalt in the rain.

But it was not 1958 and I was a fool to keep holding on to memories about it. For good or bad, the present and the future lay right up the Mississippi River – a ninety-mile corridor called Toxic Alley. Its smokestacks and settling ponds told their own story. And maybe I had seen the reality of my own future back at central lockup. I had been inches away from a deviant who was arguably a child molester, an appellation that had now been attached to my name. I got back in the cruiser and shut the door.

"Ready to rock?" Helen said.

"Pour it on," I said.

But I got no peace the rest of the day. Back in New Iberia, the rain swept in sheets across the town and filled the gutters on Main with rivers of black water and dead insects. Molly and I ate supper in the kitchen while our window shutters rattled against their latches and the bayou rose above its banks into the trees.

"Want to go to the movies?" she said.

"Not this evening," I replied.

"I thought I'd take Miss Ellen. She doesn't get out much."

"That's fine. I'll read a bit."

"Did something happen today?"

"No, not at all. Just be a little careful."

"About what?"

"I can't put my hand on it. It's like the war. It's like seeing a guy out there in the elephant grass, then not seeing him," I said.

She squeezed my hand. "Don't scare me, Dave," she said.

After Molly picked up the elderly lady from next door and headed for the movie theater, I realized what it was that had bothered me all day. It wasn't the fact that a serial killer was in our midst or that I couldn't return to the year 1958 or the fact that Valentine Chalons had bested me at every turn. It was none of those things, even though they laid a certain degree of claim on me. The real problem was my last conversation with Koko Hebert. How had Koko put it? Something to the effect that when Val Chalons and his minions were finished with me, my name wouldn't be worth warm spit on the sidewalk. Then he had added, "You and your wife will be picking flypaper off your skin the rest of your lives."

That was it. The damage Val Chalons could do was endless. His kind planted lies in the popular mind, smeared people's names, destroyed lives, and floated above the fray while others did their dirty work for them. As their victim, you never got the opportunity to confront your accusers. You didn't get to walk out on a dirt street in nineteenth-century Arizona and empty a double-barrel twelve gauge into the Clanton gang. Instead, you and your family picked flypaper off your skin.

In the meantime, the predators would continue hunting on the game reserve. They'd transport crack, brown skag, and crystal meth down 1-49 and across I-10 and peddle it in the projects and on inner-city basketball courts and street corners, where teenage kids carried beepers and nine-Mikes and looked you straight in the eye when they explained why they had to do a drive-by on their own classmates.

The by-product was the whores. Sexual liberation and herpes and AIDS be damned, the demand was still there, as big as ever. But depressed times didn't produce the whores anymore. The dope did.

And guys like Lou Kale were there to help in any way they could.

Yes indeed, I thought, Lou Kale, now living regally in Lafayette, about to open an escort service.

Years ago, many street cops used to keep a second weapon they called a "drop" or a "throw-down." It was usually junk, foreign-made, pitted with rust, the grips cracked, sometimes without grips at all. The important element was the filed-off or acid-burned serial numbers. When the scene went south and a fleeing suspect turned out to be unarmed, the "throw-down" had a way of ending up under the body of a dead man.

Mine was an old.38 I took off a Murphy artist and part-time drug mule who used to work out of a bar two blocks from the Desire Welfare Project. The barrel and sight had been hacksawed off an inch from the cylinder. The grips were wrapped with electrician's tape. But the previous owner's carelessness and neglect had not affected his weapon's mechanical integrity. The cylinder still locked firmly in place when the hammer snapped down on the firing pin and didn't shave lead on the back end of the barrel.

I put on my raincoat and hat, dropped the revolver in my pocket, and drove to Lou Kale's motel in Lafayette.

It was still raining hard when I parked under a spreading oak and showed my badge to a young woman at the desk. "Lou Kale," I said.

She was probably a college kid. Her face was plain, earnest, eager to please, totally removed for any implication my presence might have. "He's in one-nineteen. Would you like me to ring his room?" she said.

"That's all right. Would you let me have a key, please?"

"I'm not sure I'm supposed to do that," she said.

"It's fine. This is part of a police investigation," I said.

"Well, I guess it's all right, then," she said, programming a card for me.

I walked down the corridor, past soft drink and candy machines, and entered an annex that paralleled the swimming pool. I didn't feel good about what I had just done. The girl at the desk was probably a good person and I had taken advantage of her trust and deceived her. In my mind's eye I saw myself somehow making it up to her, and I knew at that moment that the script for the next few minutes was already written in my head and the final act was one that I must not allow myself to see. I stuck the electronic key into the door of Room 119 and pulled it out quickly. When the tiny green light flashed at me, I twisted the door handle and stepped inside, my right hand squeezed around the taped grips of the.38.

Lou Kale was asleep on his side, bare-chested, a pair of pajama bottoms notched into his love handles. The room was dark, but the swimming pool lights were on outside and the surface of the water glowed with a misty green luminosity in the rain. When I closed the curtain on the sliding door, Lou Kale's eyes opened as though he had been shaken violently awake.

"You know what a dry drunk is, Lou?" I said.

"Dry what?"

"It's a guy like me. That means you're shit out of luck."

He lifted himself up on his arms. His abdominal muscles looked as hard as the rollers on a washtub, his chest and shoulders coated with soft strips of monkey fur. Even with the air-conditioning on, the room smelled like an animal's lair or un-buried offal. By the bed was a service table, and in the middle of it a steak knife and ragged pink T-bone rested on a white plate marbled with gravy and blood.

"I got no beef with you, Jack," he said.

"Remember when you woke me up in that motel in Galveston? You touched the muzzle of a nickel-plated automatic to the center of my forehead. You called me 'hoss' and told me I had a lot of luck. I was twenty years old."

"What are you doing with that gun, man?"

I had dumped all six shells from the cylinder into my palm. I inserted one of them into a random chamber and clicked the cylinder back into the revolver's frame. Then I put the hammer on half-cock, spun the chamber, and reset the hammer.

"I'm going to hand you this pistol, Lou. When I do, I want you to point it at me and squeeze the trigger. Maybe you'll punch my ticket. But if not, it will be my turn, and the odds for you will have shrunk appreciably. Are you processing this, Lou?"

"You need to fire your psychiatrist."

"Take it," I said.

"I don't want it."

"This is as good as it's going to get, partner. I advise you to take it."

But he kept his hands at his sides, his face jerking away each time the barrel came close to him. "Take it, you piece of shit," I said.

"No!" he said, teeth clenched.

That's when I lost it. I hooked him in the face with my left, mashed my knee into his chest, and forced the revolver into his hands. "Do it!" I said.

"No!"

"Do it, you motherfucker!"

The muzzle was pointed into my chest, inches from my sternum. I forced his thumb onto the trigger and pressed it back against the trigger guard. I heard the hammer snap on an empty chamber. His eyes were wide with disbelief as they stared up into mine.

"You're crazy," he said, his voice seizing in his throat, like a child who has been crying uncontrollably.

"My turn," I said, pulling the revolver from his hands.

"Just tell me what you want."

"Val Chalons is your son, isn't he?"

"That's what this is about? Are you nuts? You make me pull the trigger on a cop over -"

I clenched my left hand on his throat and jammed the.38 into his mouth with my right, forcing the cylinder over his teeth. He gagged, spittle running from the corners of his mouth. I pulled the trigger and heard the hammer snap again on an empty chamber.

"Oh Jesus," he said, trembling all over when I slid the barrel from his mouth.

"Is Val Chalons your -"

"Yeah, yeah, we found out when the old man needed a kidney donation. He had to get the kidney from the girl."

"Honoria?"

He nodded, blotting the spittle and blood on his mouth with the bedsheet.

"Val put the contract on me?" I said.

"Figure it out. How many people want you snuffed?"

"I wouldn't be clever."

"He don't consult with me. He's an educated man. People get in his face, he deals with it. That he gets from me."

I looked at him a long time. There were other questions I could have asked him, but the surge of terror that had robbed him of his defenses was gone and I had no inclination to restore it. In fact, I wondered if the moral insanity that characterizes terminal alcoholism had not taken up presence in my own life. I wiped the.38 clean on a towel and opened the curtain on the sliding glass door. Hailstones were bouncing on the St. Augustine grass and the cement by the pool.

"I can't force you out of the area, Lou, but I'm going to make life as uncomfortable for you as I can," I said.

"You did a switcherroo on that gun, didn't you? You palmed the shell?"

I flipped open the cylinder on the.38 and shucked out the cartridge I had loaded earlier. It had been one chamber removed from rotating under the firing pin.

"You got a lot of luck, Lou. Wear this on your key chain," I said, and bounced the cartridge off his chest.

As I turned to walk out, I heard him scrape the steak knife off his dinner plate and charge at my back. I drove my elbow into his face and left him on the carpet, holding his nose with both hands.

A moment later I stopped at the desk in the lobby. "I owe you an apology, Miss," I said.

"What for?" the girl behind the desk said, smiling.

"One day I'll tell you. Here are a couple of gift certificates for a dinner at the Patio in New Iberia. The owner gave them to me, so it's no big deal."

"You don't have to do that," she said.

"Yeah, I do."

"Thank you," she said.

"Good night," I said.

"Good night," she replied.

I got in my truck and drove out from under the spreading oak where I had parked. A blue and pink neon sign in the shape of a martini glass and a reclining nude inside it was stenciled against the sky. I floored the truck through a broken chain of puddles and swerved out onto the old two-lane to New Iberia, the road ahead black with rain.