Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  “So you think Claude isn’t a bad dude?” I said to her.

  She was sipping a Coke through a straw at an outdoor table at McDonald’s. Her pimp, whose name was Claude Deshotels, had instructed her to tell us whatever we wanted to know. “He’s got his moments,” she said, looking at the intersection, where two black women in skin-tight white shorts were talking to a man through a car window.

  “You know a guy by the name of Bob Cobb? Some people call him Bad Texas Bob,” I said.

  “What’s he look like?” she asked.

  “Old, dresses like a cowboy, long teeth, used to be a cop,” Clete said.

  She twisted her lips thoughtfully. She was overweight, powdered, her hair dyed gold, hanging in tresses on her shoulders. She looked like a girl who could have worked at a small-town dollar store or the McDonald’s where we were eating. “Got lines around his mouth like a prune?” she said.

  “Sounds like our guy,” I said.

  “There was an old guy who told me to call him Bob. He put a gun and a blackjack on the nightstand. He kept a cigarette burning in the ashtray while we did it,” she said.

  “How long ago?” I said.

  “Two, maybe three weeks,” she said.

  “Did he say anything about wanting to clip somebody? Anything about a kite being up on somebody?” I asked.

  “Kill them?” she said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “I don’t get in the car with johns like that.”

  “How do you know when not to get in a car?” Clete said.

  “I can just tell, that’s all. That’s why nothing real bad ever happened to me. The dangerous ones look at you in a certain way. You can always tell.”

  “The old guy named Bad Texas Bob is dead. He can’t hurt you. You sure you don’t remember anything else about him?” I said.

  “Cops don’t talk when they do it. They just want to get off, then pretend they don’t know you. Can I have another Big Mac?” she said.

  BUT IN OUR SEARCH through New Orleans we had little success in finding the individual who was of most interest to us—Apollonaire Babineau, also known as Jigger Babineau because he had served his apprenticeship in the Mob as a lookout man for a gang of smash-and-grab jewel thieves.

  Jigger was actually a coonass from Barataria, who had never shed his accent or his Cajun attachment to both his wife and mother. But perhaps because of his christened name, Jigger suffered delusions of grandeur. He claimed he had helped Jack Murphy rob the richest women in Miami and West Palm Beach of their jewels, and on a dare had picked the coat pocket of Meyer Lansky at Joe’s Stone Crab. As miscreants go, he was a fairly innocuous character, an anachronism from an earlier era who believed washing stolen and counterfeit money at racetracks was honorable work suitable for a family man.

  Unfortunately for Jigger, he was a degenerate gambler and he lost a pile of money from an armored car robbery in a card game run by the Giacano family. The game got busted, two of the Giacanos went away for the armored car job, even though they were innocent, and Jigger had to go into Witness Protection. Clete and I were the cops who busted the game.

  We tried Jigger’s cottage off Tchoupitoulas and hunted in the bars where he drank. He had left Witness Protection after Didoni Giacano died of colon cancer, but obviously he had learned we were looking for him and had decided to fly under the radar. We began to believe Jigger had blown the Big Sleazy.

  That Saturday night we stayed in Clete’s apartment above his office on St. Ann Street, and in the morning went to Jigger’s cottage again and to a pool hall where he sometimes shot nine ball. No Jigger. We ended up at a lunch counter in the Carrollton district, empty-handed, discouraged, looking through the window at the St. Charles streetcar warping in the heat. Clete glanced at his watch. “It’s twelve-thirty Sunday,” he said.

  “So what?” I said.

  “I wasn’t thinking. Order some meatball sandwiches to go and meet me on the back end of Audubon Park,” he said.

  He was out the door and down the street in his Caddy before I could reply.

  A half hour later I was laying out our lunch on a picnic table under a live oak dripping with Spanish moss when I saw the Caddy coming hard up the street, swerving in a shower of leaves at the park’s entrance. Clete parked in a shady spot among the trees and walked across the grass toward me, a small ice cooler swinging from his hand, an unlit cigarette bouncing in his mouth. “You get some pecan pie?” he said.

  “Where’d you go?” I said.

  “The old Washington Street Cemetery.” He ripped the tab off a beer and drank from it. His face was hot and flushed in the heat, the can cold-looking and beaded with moisture in his big hand.

  “So why’d you go to the cemetery?” I said.

  “Let’s eat first. Wow, what a scorcher. You could fry eggs on the sidewalk.”

  I began to regret we’d come to New Orleans. We’d revisited the underside of the city, a world of avarice, use, and deceit, even enlisting the aid of a pimp in order to interview a child prostitute, gaining nothing of value in turn except the cynical knowledge that no vice flourishes without sanction. I wanted to take a shower and burn my clothes. I wanted to be back in New Iberia with Molly Boyle.

  Clete finished eating and pinched a paper napkin on his mouth, then studied his convertible, his jaw cocked thoughtfully. Some black teenagers had been parked by Clete’s vehicle for a few minutes, their radio blaring, but they had driven away and now the Caddy sat by itself in the warm shade of the oak tree. Clete stuffed our trash in a barrel and hefted up his ice cooler. “Let’s rock,” he said.

  He fished his keys out of his slacks, but walked to the rear of the Caddy rather than to the driver’s door. He propped one of his two-tone shoes on the bumper and brushed dust off it with his handkerchief. “You going to behave now?” he said to the car trunk.

  Inside, I could hear muffled cries and feet kicking against a hard surface. “Who’s in there?” I said, incredulous.

  “Jigger Babineau. I forgot it was Sunday. Jigger always visits his wife’s tomb on Sunday. The little bastard tried to stab me with the file on his nail clippers.”

  Clete slipped the key into the lock and popped the hatch. The smell of body odor and urine mushroomed out of the trunk. Jigger Babineau sat up, blinking at the light, then tumbled onto the grass, gasping for cool air.

  Jigger had facial features like a stick figure. He had sprayed hair remover on his eyebrows, for reasons he had never explained, and now daily re-created his eyebrows with black eye pencil so that he looked perpetually surprised or frightened. He was short, pear-shaped, and wore double-soled shoes and suits with padded shoulders and some said a roll of socks stuffed inside his fly. His hands were white and round and as small as a ten-year-old child’s. He was plainly disgusted with his circumstances and the indignity that had been visited upon him. “I figured if elephant-ass was back in town, you weren’t far away,” he said.

  “Comment la vie, Jigger?” I said.

  “He’s good. Throw him a beer,” Clete said.

  “How’d you hear about a cop wanting to pop me?” I asked.

  “Why should I tell you anyt’ing?” he said.

  “Because we don’t mind riding you around in my car trunk some more,” Clete said.

  “Do it, you fat fuck. I couldn’t care less. I already pissed myself,” he said.

  “Not a good choice of words, Jigger,” Clete said.

  “Try these—bite my pole. Also, teach your sister to be a little more tidy. She left her diaphragm under my bed again,” Jigger said.

  I cracked a beer and handed it to him. “You could have taken the bounce on that armored car job, Jigger, but we got you into Witness Protection and let the Giacanos go down for the robbery. They’re dead, you’re on the street, and you never did time. Tell me, you really think you got a raw deal?”

  But Jigger was still noncommittal. I tried again, this time using his birth name. “You’re a family guy, Apollo. Clete and I knew that. Th
at’s why you got slack and the Giacanos got back-to-back nickels in Angola,” I said.

  He lifted his shirt off his chest and smelled himself. “You got any salt?” he asked.

  “Hang on,” I said.

  I went back to the trash barrel by our picnic table and dug a tiny pack of salt from our takeout box. Clete could hardly hide his impatience. Jigger sprinkled his beer can and drank from it, then cut a grateful belch. “The word was out somebody had a kite up on an Iberia Parish detective. But no pro in New Orleans is gonna hit a cop. So they didn’t get no takers.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I said.

  “Like they hand out business cards wit’ their names on them?” he said.

  “How’d you like the side of your head kicked in?” Clete said.

  “That’s it, Purcel. Tell your sister she’s glommed my magic twanger for the last time,” Jigger said.

  I thought Clete was going to hit him, but this time he couldn’t help but laugh. Jigger drank again from the can and looked at me. “I heard the juice was coming down from some people who used to own some cathouses. That’s how come the work went to this cop. He was tight with the people running these cathouses.”

  “Why did these guys want me out of the way, Jigger?”

  “I didn’t try to find out. It’s amateurs who’s messed up this city. I stay away from them,” he said. “You got another brew in there?”

  I squatted down, eye-level with him. “You’re not giving us a lot of help here, partner,” I said.

  “Jericho Johnny put you on to me?” he said.

  “Your name came up in the conversation,” I replied.

  “What’s that tell you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The number-one button man in New Orleans giving up a made guy to a cop? The old days are gone, Robicheaux. Live wit’ it,” he said.

  WHEN I GOT HOME Sunday evening, I called Molly Boyle, but she was not home. I went to bed early, then was awakened by the phone ringing inside the sound of rain. It was Dana Magelli, an old friend at NOPD. “Did you and Clete Purcel question a kid by the name of Holly Blankenship, a runaway from Iowa?” he asked.

  “Yesterday?”

  “Right. Her pimp says y’all talked to her at a McDonald’s.”

  “She didn’t use that last name,” I said. “She’s not using any name now,” Dana said.

  “What?”

  “Her body was dumped in a trash pit out by Chalmette in the early a.m. The guy who strangled her used a coat hanger. You working on the Baton Rouge serial killer case?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not why we were in town,” I said, trying to shake the image of a hapless, overweight girl murdered and thrown away like yesterday’s coffee grinds.

  “You there?” Dana said.

  “I was trying to get a lead on a guy I had to shoot. His name was Bob Cobb.”

  “Yeah, I know all about that. Funny the girl ends up dead right after she talks to you. Must be just coincidence, huh? Why would anyone kill a girl because she talked to a cop? Her pimp gave you permission, didn’t he?” he said.

  CHAPTER

  14

  EARLY MONDAY MORNING I was in Helen’s office. “There was semen in the girl?” she said.

  “That’s what Dana said,” I replied.

  “So let’s see what their lab says. In the meantime, there’s no connection between her homicide and you being in New Orleans, none at least that we can see. You reading me on this?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We’re buried in open cases. Our backlog looks like the national debt. Don’t stir up things with NOPD. If they want your help, they’ll call. That translates into mind your own business.”

  She stared at me steadily, biting at a hangnail, waiting to see if her words had taken effect.

  “The girl got it on with Bad Texas Bob, a guy who contracted to kill me. The girl talks to me, then she’s dead. What’s the point in saying there’s no connection?”

  Helen removed a tiny piece of skin from her tongue and dropped it into the wastebasket.

  I WENT HOME FOR LUNCH. My next-door neighbor was Miss Ellen Deschamps. She was eighty-two years old, a graduate of a girls’ finishing school in Mississippi, and she lived in the two-story, oak-shaded frame house she had been born in. Miss Ellen had never married, and every afternoon at three served tea on her upstairs veranda for herself and her older sister or friends who were invited by written invitation.

  Miss Ellen was devoted to gardening and feeding stray cats. Each spring her flower beds and window boxes were bursting with color; her oaks were surrounded by caladiums that looked individually hand-painted. Cats sat or slept on every stone and wood surface in her yard. But Miss Ellen had another obsession as well. She monitored every aspect of life on East Main and wrote polite notes on expensive stationery to her neighbors when they didn’t cut their lawns, take in their empty trash cans in timely fashion, trim their hedges, or paint their houses with colors she considered tasteful.

  With Miss Ellen on the job, which was twenty-four hours a day, we didn’t have to worry about a Neighborhood Crime Watch program.

  When I pulled into the drive, she was weeding a flower bed in the lee of her house. She got to her feet and called out to me: “Mr. Robicheaux, so glad I saw you. Did you find out who that man was?”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  She walked through the bamboo that separated our property. She wore cotton gloves, a denim dress with huge pockets for garden tools, and rubber boots patinaed with mud. A half dozen cats, including Snuggs, trailed along behind her. “The man looking in your windows Friday night. I called the police about him. They didn’t tell you?” she said.

  “No, they didn’t,” I replied.

  “Well, he surely didn’t have any business in your yard. Besides, it was raining to beat the band. So why would he have been by your window if he wasn’t a Peeping Tom?”

  “What did this fellow look like, Miss Ellen?”

  “I don’t really know. He was wearing a raincoat, one with a hood.”

  “Was he white?”

  “I wouldn’t know that, either. Are you going to have your cat fixed?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You should. His romantic inclinations seem to have no bounds,” she said.

  I wondered if there was a second meaning in her statement.

  Inside, I called the city police department and talked to the dispatcher. He told me a patrol car had been sent to my address at 11:16 Friday night, but no one had been in the yard, and the responding officer saw no point in waking me up. “Dave, Miss Ellen said the Peeping Tom was in her yard, yours, and maybe two or t’ree yards on the other side of you,” the dispatcher said. “We would have had to wake up the whole block. You know how many calls we get from that lady every week?”

  I went outside and walked through the side yard by my bedroom windows. The flower bed was planted with hydrangeas and camellias, and the mixture of black dirt, coffee grinds, and compost mixed with horse manure that I used in my gardens was still soggy from Friday night’s downpour. Underneath the windowsill were the deeply etched prints of a man’s work boots. The blinds were just as they had been Friday night—two inches short of the sill, a perfect viewing slot for a voyeur to have watched Molly Boyle and me in the throes of our passion.

  AFTER WORK I drove down Old Jeanerette Road to Molly’s agency and caught her at the end of her workday, carrying a shovel, hoe, and steel rake over her shoulder toward the barn, a machete hanging from her other hand. “How was New Orleans?” she said.

  “The same,” I said, not mentioning the death of the runaway girl from Iowa. Inside the barn, I watched her put away her tools, first wiping each of them clean, hanging them from nails on the walls. “Molly, would anyone have reason to follow you around?” I asked.

  “Why would anyone want to follow me around?”

  “The neighbor thought someone might have been in my yard Friday night,” I replied. “But my neighbor is a li
ttle eccentric sometimes.”

  Molly smiled, as though the subject were of little consequence, then began sharpening her machete on the emery wheel, orange and blue stars dancing on her jeans. She wiped the blade on an oily rag, then hung the machete on a wood peg.

  “You keep your tools sharp,” I said.

  “My father taught me that. He had simple admonitions: ‘Feed your animals before you feed yourself. . . . Take care of your tools and they’ll take care of you. . . . Put your shotgun through the fence, then crawl after it.’ My favorite was ‘Never trust a white person black people don’t like.’ “

  “Come to the house,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “I know a motel on the other side of Morgan City. It’s on the water, off the highway. Not many people go there. There’s a restaurant where we can have dinner.”

  I could see the conflict in her face. “Come on, Molly,” I said, my voice almost plaintive.

  We were there in under a half hour. Not only there, but in the shower stall, the hot water beating down on our heads, her legs clenched around my thighs, her fingers splayed on my back, her mouth wide with a cry that she fought to suppress but could not.

  Then we were on the bed and she came a second time, her stomach and thighs rolling under me, her mouth wet against my cheek. Her hair and skin smelled like the ocean, or the smell a wave full of seaweed gives off when it bursts on hot sand. Then somewhere down below a coral shelf a mermaid winked a blue eye at me and invited me to come and rest inside a pink cave where she lived. The sound went out of the room, and when I opened my eyes the shadows of the overhead wood fan were flicking across Molly’s face, like clock hands out of control.