Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  “The Chalonses supposedly had business ties to the Giacanos. The Giacanos had part of the hot pillow action in Galveston. Ida was working in one of their joints,” I replied.

  “That doesn’t make sense. If Ida was killed by a pimp or some cops on a pad, why would the Chalonses care? They wouldn’t even know her name.”

  “When they lie, they’re guilty. Val Chalons is lying,” I said.

  “Maybe. Maybe not, Dave. You don’t like rich guys. I’m not sure how objective you are.”

  I picked up Tripod and set him inside his cage. He felt heavy and solid in my hands, his tail flipping in my face. I started to speak, but this time kept my own counsel.

  Jimmie latched Tripod’s cage door and poked one finger through the screen to scratch his head. Jimmie’s jaws were closely shaved, the small cleft in his chin filled with shadow. “I keep thinking maybe she got away from whoever abducted her. A few times I thought I heard her voice on a jukebox, singing backup maybe or even doing a solo. I always wanted to believe those demos we sent to Sun Records got her out of the life. Kind of a crazy way to think, huh?”

  No different from my thoughts, I started to say. He waited for me to speak. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “She’s dead. That’s why the Chalonses are running scared,” I said.

  “No, there’s some other explanation,” he replied, wagging one finger back and forth, as though he had the power to change the past.

  THAT NIGHT I dreamed of Galveston, Texas, in the year 1958. In the dream I saw the salt-eaten frame houses where girls with piney-woods accents took on all comers for five dollars a pop, while down by the beach snub-nosed hot rods roared past a drive-in restaurant, their exposed V-8 engines chrome-plated and iridescent with an oily sheen, their twin exhausts thundering in a dirty echo off the asphalt. The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality that I could not explain.

  In the darkness I drove to the cemetery in St. Martinville where my third wife, Bootsie, was buried. Bayou Teche was coated with fog, the crypts beaded with moisture as big as marbles. Downstream I could see the steeple of the old French church impaled against the stars, and the massive Evangeline oak under which I first kissed Bootsie Mouton and discovered how the world could become a cathedral in the time it takes for two people to press their mouths against one another.

  I sat on a steel bench by Bootsie’s tomb, my head in my hands, unable to pray or even to think. I did not want the sun to rise or the starlight to go out of the sky. I wanted to stay inside the darkness, the coolness of the fog, the smell of nightdamp and old brick stained with mold. I wanted to be with my dead wife.

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK I sat down at my desk and went to work again on the case of the Baton Rouge serial killer. So far, all of his known victims had been women. Almost all of them had been abducted from their homes or driveways in upscale neighborhoods, often in broad daylight. There were no eyewitnesses. With the exception of the black woman whose body had been found not far from the convent at Grand Coteau, all of the victims had been white and educated.

  One woman evidently was taken out of her front yard while she was watering her flowers. One had parked her SUV in the driveway and left a sack of groceries on the kitchen counter and another on the passenger seat of her vehicle before she disappeared. The door to the SUV was open; a solitary jar of gourmet barbecue sauce was broken on the cement.

  Another victim must have opened her front door to retrieve her mail, then had spilled a handful of envelopes down the brick steps. Her three-year-old daughter, who was playing in the sunroom, wandered out on the street, looking for her mother, and was stopped from walking into traffic by a passing police officer. A female graduate student jogging along the chain lakes north of the LSU campus rounded a bend, waved at friends eating lunch on a bench, and jogged up a path between a bank of azalea bushes. She was not seen again until her body, dressed only in underwear, was found floating in a pond under a railroad trestle in the Atchafalaya Basin.

  Each abduction took place when no male friend or adult family member was at the crime scene. Baton Rouge police and parish sheriff’s deputies had interviewed hundreds of people in the neighborhoods where the victims had lived. The interviews had contributed absolutely nothing to the investigation. Obviously an individual who inspired trust was threading himself in and out of residential enclaves where suspicion and exclusion came with the house deed. Could a black man walk up a driveway to a four-hundred-thousand-dollar home, at three in the afternoon, and drag a woman to his vehicle and not be noticed? Could a delivery man, a telephone worker, an inspector from the gas company? Could a police officer? Could a minister wearing a Roman collar?

  But no one saw a delivery or official vehicle parked near the crime scene. The black and Hispanic lawn men who worked nearby were questioned and excluded. Every known sex offender in the area was pulled in and run through the ringer. Oddly, the perpetrator had given a free pass to the groups who are usually the targets of misogynistic predators. None of his victims had been a prostitute, runaway, or barroom derelict.

  None of the crime scenes showed any sign of struggle or resistance. The broken jar of gourmet barbecue sauce and the spilled mail on a woman’s front steps were the only physical indications that in seconds someone’s life had turned into a visit to the Abyss.

  The serial killer did not have a face or a history that we knew about. His DNA was not in the national database. He had hung Fontaine Belloc’s purse in a tree to taunt us and to show his contempt for her and her family. He sought out victims who were reasonably happy and at peace with the world and left society’s rejects alone. His body fluids were left behind as a toxic smear on the rest of us.

  I read through the autopsy report on Fontaine Belloc again. The details were not of a kind anyone wishes to remember. But one stuck in my mind and would not go away. I picked up my phone and called the office of Koko Hebert, our parish coroner. “She swallowed her wedding ring?” I said.

  “From its position, I’d say a couple of hours before she died,” he replied.

  “He forced her to eat it?”

  “Not in my opinion.”

  “Spell it out, will you, Koko?”

  “Her wrists were bound, probably with plastic cuffs. There were teeth marks on the ring finger. I think she used her teeth to work the ring off her finger and swallow it. What difference does it make?”

  “Because if she was that determined to keep this bastard from taking her ring, maybe she figured out a way to leave us a message about his identity,” I said, my blood rising.

  “Yeah, that’s a possibility, isn’t it?” he replied.

  I replaced the receiver in the cradle without saying good-bye.

  A mockingbird flew into my window glass, flecking it with a pinpoint of white matter. I got up from the desk and looked down onto the lawn. The bird lay still in the shade, one wing at a broken angle.

  It was not a good morning. And it was about to get worse.

  JUST BEFORE NOON, Honoria Chalons called the office to ask how I was feeling.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “My first husband is buried at the church cemetery in St. Martinville. I saw you there this morning. You didn’t look well. Are you all right?” she said.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Can you have a drink with me this afternoon?”

  “I traded in sour mash for AA. That was after it chewed me up and spit me out.”

  “So I’ll buy you an iced tea.”

  “Another time.”

  “You think I’m a mentally ill person?”

  “Guys like me don’t get to judge other people’s stability.”

  “The things I said to you about death yesterday? They’re all true.”

  “I believe you.”

  “What I said about the nun is true, too. My father and Val genuinely f
ear her. They won’t even go inside the little church she attends.”

  “Which nun are we talking about?”

  “Have that drink with me?”

  “Give me a number where I can call you after work,” I said.

  I went downstairs and caught Helen on her way to lunch. “You know a nun who’s had some run-ins with the Chalons family?” I said.

  She thought about it. “There’s one on Old Jeanerette Road. Years ago, she stoked up the sugar cane workers in St. Mary Parish. She runs a group that builds houses for the poor now. Why?”

  “I was out to the Chalons house. The nun came up in the conversation.”

  Helen sucked in her cheeks, her eyes studying a dead space between us. “Nothing I say has any influence, does it?” she said.

  “Had you rather I not tell you what I’m doing?”

  Helen put her hand inside her shirt collar and picked at a mosquito bite on her shoulder, her gaze wandering along the corridor wall, her breath audible in the silence. “If I remember right, about two years back somebody slashed up her car tires. Check the file. Her name is Molly Boyle. Her middle name is ‘trouble.’ She’s your kind of gal.”

  I WENT TO LUNCH at Bon Creole and tried not to think about my brief run-in with Helen. When I came out of the restaurant, the sun was like a white flame in the sky, the highway rippling with heat, the air smelling of salt, and water evaporating from backed-up storm ditches. At the office, I pulled a file on the nun and a series of complaints, all involving harassment and vandalism, that she had lodged with the sheriff’s department. The deputies’ entries in the file were matter-of-fact and made no conclusion about possible perpetrators, other than a mention that several black teenagers in the area had been questioned.

  I took a handful of loose mug shots from my desk drawer, dropped them in my shirt pocket, and went to find Sister Molly Boyle.

  She had created an administrative center in a restored nineteenth-century farmhouse on the bayou, eleven miles south of town, and lived next door with another nun in a cypress cottage. Ostensibly she worked under the auspices of the diocese in Lafayette, but as I turned into the gravel driveway I had the sense the archenemy of the Chalons family had staked out her own territory.

  The entire compound was about three acres in size. The lawn was bright green and freshly mowed, partially shaded by live oaks and pecan trees, the embankment along the Teche planted with elephant ears, caladiums, impatiens, and periwinkles. A large sunny area was devoted to vegetable gardens, beehives, and a huge compost heap piled inside a rectangle of railroad ties. A tractor was parked in a pole shed, and poultry pecked in a bare spot under a spreading oak that grew above the shed and the adjacent barn. A secretary in the office walked with me onto the gallery and said I would probably find Sister Molly in the barn.

  She was grinding a machete on an emery wheel, her eyes encased in machinist goggles, the heel of her hand pressed down close to the blade’s edge. I waited until she clicked off the toggle switch on the grinder before I spoke. “I didn’t want to startle you, Sister. I’m Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.

  She pulled her goggles off with one thumb and left a greasy smear by her eyebrow. Her hair was dark red and tied up on her head with a white kerchief, the tails of her denim shirt knotted across her stomach. The heat and trapped moisture inside the barn were stifling. Motes of dust and desiccated manure floated as thick as gnats in the shafts of sunlight through the cracks. But she seemed unbothered by any of it. “I go by Molly,” she said, and extended her hand.

  “It looks like some vandals were trying to give you a bad time a couple of years back. Have any idea who they were?” I said.

  “The deputies who came out thought they were kids from the neighborhood,” she replied.

  “But you don’t?”

  “Our dog was poisoned. Our car tires were cut into ribbons. Our secretary was shot in the back with an air rifle. We help impoverished people own their homes. Why would their children want to hurt us?”

  I blotted the perspiration out of my eyes on my arm. “Can we go outside?” I said.

  She hung the machete on a nail, the edge of its curved blade like a strip of blue ice. Then she pulled her kerchief loose from her head and shook out her hair. “How about some lemonade?” she said.

  I sat at a spool table on the back porch of her cottage while she went inside. Through the trees the sunlight looked hard and brittle and unrelenting on the bayou’s surface. She came back on the porch with a tray of cookies and two glasses of lemonade, with sprigs of mint in them.

  “You tried to unionize the farmworkers hereabouts?” I said.

  “For a while. Mechanization took the jobs away, so we turned to other things. We teach people folk crafts and carpentry now.”

  “Has the Chalons family ever tried to injure you?”

  She gazed at the bayou, her eyes blinking more than they should have. “They let us know they were around,” she said.

  I removed the handful of mug shots from my shirt pocket and placed them on the table. “Ever see any of these guys?” I asked.

  She separated the photos one from the other with her index finger. Then she tapped on the face of a man with grainy skin, recessed eyes, and teeth that were too big for his mouth. “That’s one I won’t forget,” she said.

  “His name is Billy Joe Pitts. He’s a sheriff’s deputy.”

  “He pulled me over to the side of the highway north of Alexandria. We’d been circulating a union petition among some cannery workers. He made some rather nasty remarks.”

  “He threatened you?”

  “His remarks were sexual in nature. That night our car was vandalized.”

  “Did you ever hear of a woman named Ida Durbin?”

  “No, I don’t recall that name. Who is she?”

  “Someone I believe the Chalons family would like to forget,” I said.

  She paused a moment. “You’re not really here about our troubles, are you?”

  I felt my face tighten. “Billy Joe Pitts is part of an ongoing assault-and-battery investigation. I think he takes his orders from the Chalonses.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “You’ve been very helpful.” But I had lost her attention and I believe her trust as well.

  She looked at her watch. “I have to make some deliveries now. We run a folk craft workshop and sell the birdhouses they make. A tough way to raise a dollar, huh?”

  Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

  Just before I drove off the property onto the state road, I saw a group of black people leave the rehabilitated farmhouse that served as Sister Molly’s administrative center. They were laughing, clapping one another on the shoulder about a joke of some kind. A dome-headed black man recognized me through the windshield and raised a hand in greeting. It was Andre Bergeron, the handyman who did chores for the Chalons family. I waved out the window in response and headed back to New Iberia.

  AFTER WORK, I fixed supper for Jimmie and me at the house. I was beginning to regret I had told him of Ida Durbin’s fate. He blamed himself and kept trying to recall details of their last day together, as though some clue could be extracted from an idle remark she made over forty years ago. He told me he was meeting a musicologist that night at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.

  “I know I’ve heard Ida’s voice on a record. I’m sure of it, Dave,” he said.

  I did the dishes and didn’t try to contend with Jimmie’s obsession. After he was gone, I showered and took a walk downtown in the twilight. From the drawbridge looking south I could see the gardens behind the Shadows, a plantation home built in 1831, and the receding corridor of oak and cypress trees along the banks of the Teche, a tidal stream that had been navigated by Spaniards in bladed helmets, French missionaries, displaced Acadians, pirates, Confederate and Yankee gun crews, and plantation revelers who toasted their own prosperity on paddle wheelers that floated through the night like candlelit wedding cakes.<
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  Jean Lafitte had auctioned off West Indian slaves a few hundred yards from where I stood. As a lesson in terror, Union soldiers under the command of General Nathaniel Banks had raped women, burned crops, and looted the homes of the rich up and down the bayou when they marched through New Iberia in April 1863. People still found minié balls in the heartwood of felled oak trees and pieces of broken china in chicken yards, green depressions carpeted with mushrooms in a woods where soldiers with no names were hurriedly buried.

  As the heat went out of the day, the summer light seemed to ascend higher into the sky, so that the bayou itself became a long amber ribbon between the green darkness of the trees, the surface creasing in the wind, somehow disconnected from the present, the alluvial soil along the banks filled with the bones of Indians, Europeans, and Reconstruction-empowered Africans, all of whom had thought their dominion over the land was forever.

  But in my reverie about the nature of history and collective vanity I had forgotten a more prosaic detail from my day at the office. Either Jimmie or I had accidentally turned off the message machine on my telephone, and when I returned home the phone was ringing without stop.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “I wasn’t going to call, but principle is principle, I think.”

  “Honoria?” I said.

  “Yes. Who did you think it was?” she said.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “I was supposed to call you back after work,” I said.

  “To put it more accurately, you asked for my phone number. We were going to have a drink.”

  Not exactly, but it wasn’t a time to argue. “I got buried today. I’m terribly sorry,” I said.

  She didn’t speak, and I could feel my hand tightening on the receiver, my discomfort growing. I had meant to call her back, but not to have a drink. Instead, my whole agenda with Honoria had been about Sister Molly Boyle, whom I had been able to contact on my own. The consequence was I had forgotten about Honoria. The truth was I had tried to use her.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “Down the street, at Clementine’s.”

  “Can I treat you to a dessert?”