Crusader's Cross

chapter SIX

After I had hung up I went downstairs and tapped on Helen's door. Her desk was covered with photos of women who were thought to be victims of the Baton Rouge serial killer.

"Val Chalons was covering the story on our DOA Thursday night," I said. "I brought up the name of Billy Joe Pitts. He told me he never heard of him."

Helen was chewing on the corner of her lip, trying to concentrate on what I was saying, her fingers splayed on the photos of the dead women. "You lost me," she said.

"I just talked with Pitts. He says Chalons fishes at his father's lake. Chalons was lying."

Helen closed her eyes and opened them. "Dave, we've got our hands full here. We're going to get Pitts. We're going to get that other jerk, what's-his-name, Shockly. But right now -"

"Guys like Pitts don't operate without sanction, Helen. Why did Chalons lie?"

"Maybe he isn't interested in the subject. Maybe he couldn't care less about you or Pitts. Maybe everything isn't about you."

It was quiet in the room. Outside, rain swept across the window. "The assault against my person is an open investigation. I was bringing you up to date."

"Good," she said, her face coloring with embarrassment at her own level of irritation.

I nodded at her desktop. "I went over those this morning. Pretty grim."

She stood up from her desk and tightened the tuck of her shirt with her thumbs, her shoulders flexing, her expression recomposing itself. She picked up a glossy plastic folder and handed it to me. "Here's the Baton Rouge coroner's file. A couple of the women were dead when most of the damage was done to them. Some of them weren't."

"I'll read it and check with you later."

"Do that," she said.

I started out the door.

"Hold on a minute, bwana," she said. "I apologize if I'm a little on edge. This is the worst case I've ever seen. How does a guy this sick go undetected for years?"

In my mind's eye I saw an image from years ago of a nineteen-year-old door gunner blowing apart a South Vietnamese wedding party inside a free-fire zone.

"Because he looks like a regular guy, cooking hot dogs on the grill next door," I said.

After five o'clock, I drove into St. Mary Parish and resumed my own investigation into the fate of Ida Durbin.

To say the Chalons family lived in an antebellum home on Bayou Teche does not go anywhere near an accurate description of the singularity that characterized their home and their way of life. The house was enormous, two and a half stories tall, and had been built in the 1850s inside oak trees that were already mature. Now the trees were centuries old and kept the house in perpetual shade. But rather than restore the home to its original grandeur, as the Chalons's wealth would have allowed them to do, they seemed to treat modernity as an enemy to be kept in abeyance.

According to the legend, the builder had mixed milk and hog's blood in the paint, and it had dried on the cypress and oak planks as hard as iron. I suspected the truth was otherwise. The hardened texture and grayish-green color of the paint was probably due to the smoke from cane stubble fires and the mold and dampness caused by lack of sunlight inside the trees.

Or maybe I just didn't like the romantic legends that seemed to attach themselves to the Chalons family.

Valentine's father was named Raphael. He had become a widower twice and was notorious for his illegitimate children., erotic excursions to the Islands, and his affairs with married women in New Orleans. I wondered sometimes if his home did not mirror his soul. He hired no gardeners and let his grounds run riot. But the result was a rough kind of subtropical Edenic beauty, threaded with snakes and thorned plants that had no names. Even more incongruently, his magnolia trees grew to a huge size, dripping with flowers, his grapefruit trees bursting with golden orbs, without sunlight ever directly touching the leaves.

Formosa termites had eaten through the outbuildings, the old slave quarters, and part of the house's walls and lower veranda, robbing them of any sense of historical severity they might have once contained, as though their edges had been molded by the gentle forces of time and foliage rather than parasitical insects. Raphael had finally relented and allowed chemical treatment of his property, but the accumulative effect of his organized neglect was a tangle of air vines, wild persimmons, palmettos, pecan trees, blooming flowers, and desiccated wood that no film company could replicate.

I stopped my pickup in front of the heavy iron gate that closed off the driveway and prevented tourists from entering the property and photographing it. But before I could get out of the truck, a black man emerged from the shadows and scraped back the gate for me. He was a heavyset, pie-faced man, with big, half-moon eyebrows and a cranium like an inverted pot. What was his name? Andrew? No, Andre. Andre Bergeron. He ran errands and did chores for the Chalons family and used to sell iced-down oysters off the tailgate of a pickup by the drawbridge near Burke Street.

"Thank you," I said.

"Yes, suh," he replied. "You here to see Mr. Val?"

"How'd you know?" I said.

" 'Cause you a po-liceman in New Iberia. 'Cause you probably working on a crime and you here to see Mr. Val 'cause he's a TV newsman and he got a lot of information on them kind of t'ings."

"You got it pretty well figured out," I said.

"Yes, suh. I do."

I drove into the grounds, through towering oak trees that creaked with the wind. The rain had stopped and the sky was marbled with purple and gold clouds, and through the trees I could see the sunlight winking on the bayou.

Val opened the front door. He was expansive, jocular, a bourbon and crushed ice in his hand, his sister Honoria seated at the piano in the middle of the living room, a solitary lamp burning behind her. The woodwork was dark, the furniture heavy, the air musky-smelling. "How you doing, old buddy?" Val said.

"Hope you'll forgive me for not calling first," I said.

"Oh no, no, no, not a problem. You remember Honoria, don't you?" he said.

Honoria was hard to forget. She was dark-haired and dark-skinned, like her father, with brown eyes and a small red mouth, a mole at one corner. Honoria had received a doctorate from the Sorbonne and had taught music theory for three years at the university in Lafayette. But either her iconoclastic ways or rumors about her libertine behavior caused the university to deny her tenure. Sometimes I would see her in New Iberia's public library, by herself, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, reading until closing time.

"You want a soft drink?" Val asked.

"No, just a word with you," I replied.

Honoria got up from the piano bench and started toward the kitchen. She wore a spaghetti-strap black dress with purple shoes, and the muscles in her back were deeply tanned and looked as hard as iron when she walked.

"I didn't mean for you to leave," I said awkwardly.

"I was going to see if there was any iced tea. I thought you might like that in place of a soft drink," she said. She stared at me, waiting, the sepia-tinted light shining on the tops of her breasts.

"Don't bother," I said.

She walked away, leaving me with the illogical impression that somehow I had been rude.

"What's up?" Val said.

"You told me you didn't know Billy Joe Pitts. He says you fish on his father's lake. Why would you want to jerk me around, Val?"

"Yeah, I know Old Man Pitts. Maybe I didn't put the names together. Square with me, Dave. What are you trying to prove here?"

"I think Pitts tried to click off my switch. Your family owns the parish he works for. A guy like that doesn't take a dump without somebody's permission."

"That's a great line. You could be a screenwriter in a blink. I'm serious. I'd like to help you with that. Isn't your daughter studying literature?"

Valentine was slick. He didn't defend or attack. He treated an insult like a compliment and an adversary like a misguided friend. I had acted foolishly in coming to his house. What had I expected? For a man to agree with me when I called him a liar?

"Thanks for your time. I'll let myself out," I said.

"Don't go away mad. I'm glad you dropped by. Hey, I live in the guesthouse in back. Let's throw a steak on the grill."

"Another time," I said.

He placed his arm across my shoulders. He was almost a half head taller than I, even with a slight slouch in his posture. I tried to step away from him, without being rude, but to no avail. He pointed to an ancient parchment sealed in a glass frame on the wall. "That's our family coat of arms. The parchment is fifteenth century, but the seal goes back a thousand years earlier."

The coat of arms involved a shield, a gladius or sword a Roman legionnaire would have carried, the cross of the Crusades, and the visored helmet of a medieval knight errant.

"The family name comes from the Battle of Chalons. My ancestors got rid of their own name and substituted the name of a great event," he said. He removed his arm from my shoulder and gazed benevolently into my face. I couldn't tell if he was feigning humility or actually offering up his family history to inspire awe in others.

"Your ancestors fought against Attila the Hun?" I said.

"We probably didn't do a very good job of it. We had to fight his descendants in that delayed Teutonic migration known as World Wars One and Two."

I looked at him blankly. He had just lifted a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby and used it as though it were of his own creation.

"You're not impressed?" he said.

"I had a long day. I'll be seeing you, Val."

When I shook hands with him, I felt his fingers wrap around my skin and squeeze, his eyes lingering on mine, as though he were trying to read my thoughts. "I like you, Dave," he said.

Out in the yard, I unconsciously rubbed my hand on my trousers.

The black man named Andre was picking up litter that had blown into the drive from the highway. He waved at me and I waved back. Then, in the easy sweep of wind through the trees, I heard someone behind me. I turned, expecting to see Valentine Chalons again. But it was his sister, Honoria, her black hair curved under her cheeks, a gold chain and cross askew on her chest.

Her eyes were liquid, almost luminous in the shade, her facial skin smooth, without a wrinkle or crease. She continued to look at me strangely, without speaking.

"Could I help you?" I said.

"Do you remember the night you drove me home from the dance at the country club?" she asked.

"No, I don't remember that."

"You probably wouldn't. I had to put you to bed rather than the other way around."

"I used to have blackouts, Honoria. I did a lot of things that are still inside a dark box somewhere. I don't know if I want to revisit them."

Her eyes went away from mine and came back. "My father and brother aren't afraid of you. But they are afraid of the nun," she said.

"The nun?"

"The Buddhists believe the dead don't know they're dead. So maybe some people die and go to hell and never know it. It's just another day. Like this one, now. Do you think that's true? That hell is just a place you step into on an ordinary day?"

The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria's face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a windowpane.

Honoria's eyes remained fixed on mine, expectant, somehow trusting, the redness of her mouth and the mole next to it as inviting as a poisonous flower.