Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  NEW IBERIA has always been an insular place, Shintoistic, protective of its traditions, virtually incestuous in its familial relationships and attitudes toward outsiders. It did not take long for the rumors to start about me and Molly Boyle. One week after our tryst in the motel outside Morgan City, Molly received a call from a priest in the diocesan office. He was an elderly, genteel man who obviously did not enjoy the charge that had been given him. He asked about her health, how she was doing in her work, was there any problem in her life that either he or another clergy member could help her with.

  “No, but it’s very thoughtful of you to ask,” she replied. “Everything is wonderful here, Father. Come visit us sometime.”

  “Well, I guess that answers that,” he said. Then, probably because of his years and his long experience with human frailty and the harsh judgment the world can visit upon the innocent, his voice changed. “Take care of yourself, Molly. You’re a good girl. Don’t load the gun so others can hurt you.”

  That same day, Helen tapped on my door. “How you doin’, Streak?” she said.

  “Right as rain,” I replied.

  She sat on the corner of my desk and fed a stick of gum into her mouth. Her triceps were ridged like rolls of nickels. “I’ve gotten three phone calls and several anonymous letters about someone you might be seeing,” she said.

  “Who might that be?”

  She chewed her gum, her eyes roving over my face. “I’m your friend, bwana. Don’t treat me disrespectfully.”

  “A person’s private life is his private life,” I said.

  “That might flush in San Francisco, but not on Bayou Teche. If you’re involved with a Catholic nun, I’d damn well better know about it.”

  “The person you’re talking about never took vows. In fact, she’s been thinking about returning to the role of a lay person. She’s a person of enormous conscience.”

  My words sounded rehearsed, even to me, as though I had read them off an index card. Helen looked out the window at a freight train wobbling down the tracks between two rows of shacks. “They’re going to put you inside the Iron Maiden,” she said.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I said.

  “Take your choice,” she replied.

  THREE MORE DAYS WENT BY. People were polite to me on the street and at the supermarket or the filling station, but it was obvious that something in my life had changed. Few stopped to talk, and none joined me at a coffee counter or table in a restaurant. Those who could not escape a social encounter with me held their eyes steadily on mine, fearful I would read the knowledge that was hidden there. Frequently another cop gave me a thumbs-up or hit me on the shoulder, as if I were spiritually ill. I even cornered one of them in the department’s men’s room and learned quickly that acceptance of sympathy is not without a price.

  “I look like the walking wounded?” I said, and tried to grin.

  “Thought you needed a boost in morale, Dave, is all I was doing. Didn’t mean to get in your face,” he said.

  “Can you spell that out?”

  “My ex spread rumors I molested my stepdaughter. So I know where you’re at right now. I say, screw all them people. You know the troot’ about my situation? She come on to me. But don’t nobody care about the troot’. So I’m like you, screw ’em.”

  Then, just before quitting time, a phone call changed my perspective in ways I could not quite put together. It was from Dana Magelli in New Orleans. “We got the DNA report back on Holly Blankenship. It’s a match,” he said.

  “Match with what?” I said.

  “The Baton Rouge serial killer. He killed her within twelve hours of the time you and Purcel interviewed her. I don’t get it, Dave. This guy hasn’t struck in New Orleans, but he shows up in town the same day you do and murders a hooker. That’s not the guy’s M.O. So far, he’s left street people alone. Got any thoughts?”

  “No.”

  “Gee, I wish I had that kind of latitude. Blow into town, blow out of town, body dumped in a trash pit, sayonara, sonofabitch. Can I get a job over there?”

  I wanted to be angry at Dana, but I couldn’t. The fact the Baton Rouge serial killer had targeted a teenage prostitute, a girl who bore no similarity to his other victims, indicated either a dramatic change in the nature of his obsession or the possibility he was sending a message.

  “Did you hear me?” he said.

  “Yeah, I did. I wish I hadn’t gotten near that girl,” I replied.

  That evening I stood outside my bedroom window, staring at the indentations sculpted into my flower bed. Were these from the workboots of the Baton Rouge serial killer? I called Mack Bertrand, our forensic chemist, at his home. “Can you make some casts in my flower bed?” I said.

  “We’re a little backed up, but, yeah, what d’you got, Dave?” he said.

  “Maybe just a Peeping Tom.”

  “Can you be a little more forthcoming?”

  “I interviewed the latest serial killer’s victim shortly before she was killed. Maybe the guy knows me.”

  Mack was quiet a moment, and I realized how grandiose if not paranoid my statement must have sounded. But Mack was always a gentleman. “We’ll get it done first thing in the morning, podna,” he said.

  THAT NIGHT I placed flowers on Bootsie’s tomb in St. Martinville. The bayou was black, wrinkled with wind, bladed by moonlight. I sat for a long time on the steel bench in the darkness, saying nothing to Bootsie, not even thinking thoughts she might hear. Then I walked to the old church in the square, pressed a folded five-dollar bill into the poor box, and returned with a votive candle burning inside a small blue vessel. I heard a flapping of wings overhead, but could see no birds in flight. Then I told Bootsie about Molly and me.

  I believe the dead have voice and inhabit the earth as surely as we do. I believe they speak in our dreams or inside the sound of rain or even in the static of a telephone call, on the other side of which there is no caller. But Bootsie did not speak to me, and I felt an intolerable sense of guilt about the affair I had embarked upon with Molly Boyle.

  I not only felt I had betrayed Bootsie, I could no longer deny I was creating scandal for Molly as well as for my church. My rationalizations of my behavior left me exhausted in the morning and agitated during the day.

  “What should I do, Boots?” I said.

  But there was no answer. On another occasion when I had visited her grave, I had seen two brown pelicans floating on the bayou, farther inland than I had seen pelicans since my childhood. On that day Bootsie had spoken to me. Her voice and her presence were as real as if she had sat beside me, clasped my hand, and looked directly into my face. She said that one day the pelicans would return to Bayou Teche, that hope was indeed eternal, and the world was still a grand place in which to live.

  But the wings I had heard earlier were those of bats and the only sound in the cemetery was music from a jukebox in a neon-scrolled bar across the Teche. An evil man once told me that hell is a place that has no boundaries, a place that you carry with you wherever you go. A puff of wind blew out the candle burning on Bootsie’s tomb. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears as I walked across the drawbridge toward the town square. The hammering sound in my ears was almost as loud as the music and the shouts of the revelers as I pushed open the door of the bar and went inside.

  CHAPTER

  15

  FRIDAY MORNING I kept myself buried in the case file of the Baton Rouge serial killer. The street outside was blown with leaves and pieces of newspaper, the clouds swollen with rain. I heard a trash can bounce violently across the asphalt, then freight cars slam together on the train track. I picked up the coffee mug from my desk and drank from it, all my movements precise, like a man seated on the deck of a pitching ship, unsure of what might befall him in the next few seconds. My mouth was dry, and no amount of liquid could lessen the level of dehydration in my body. My right hand trembled as I tried to make notes on the death of Holly Blankenship.

  Helen opened my office
door without knocking and sat on the corner of my desk, which was the only place she ever sat in my office. “Looks like you nicked up your face this morning,” she said.

  “I think I had a defective blade in my razor,” I said. I placed a breath mint into my mouth and cracked it between my molars, my eyes straight ahead.

  “Mack Bertrand says you had him make casts of some footprints under your bedroom window,” she said.

  “There may have been a Peeping Tom in the neighborhood.”

  I could feel her eyes dissecting my face. “Would you explain why Mack should spend his time on a Peeping Tom?”

  “The Blankenship kid was the eighth known victim of the Baton Rouge killer. She died after I interviewed her. Maybe I know the serial killer. Maybe he was following me.”

  “I think we’re leaving something out of the story, here. Was somebody with you the night the Peeping Tom was at your window?”

  “I’m just not going to answer a question like that,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. She snuffed down in her nose. “You don’t look too good.”

  “I’ve got a touch of stomach flu or something,” I replied.

  She placed her hand on top of mine and pressed it against the desk blotter. “I love you, Pops. Don’t make me hurt you,” she said.

  AT LUNCHTIME I ate a bowl of gumbo at Victor’s, then threw up in the bathroom. By midafternoon I was sweating, my teeth rattling, the sky outside black and bursting with trees of electricity. I ate six aspirin and washed them down with ice water from the cooler but got no relief. I finally forced myself to call my old AA sponsor, an ex-convict and former barroom owner by the name of Tee Neg. “I had a slip,” I said.

  “You ain’t talking about a dry drunk, you? You actually done it?” he said.

  “Last night, in St. Martinville. I was in the cemetery. I don’t remember getting home.”

  “I ain’t interested in blow-by-blow. Where you at now?”

  “I’m coming apart.”

  “I ain’t axed you that.”

  “At the sheriff’s department.”

  “Good. You keep your ass there, you. I’m heading into town.”

  “No, that’s not necessary. Tee Neg, did you hear me?”

  But he had already hung up. I swallowed, already envisioning his arrival and the hours, if not days, of abstinence before my metabolism would have any semblance of normalcy.

  Some people say you pick up the dirty boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it. I signed out of the office before Tee Neg arrived and drove through a blinding rainstorm to a bar in the Atchafalaya Basin, where people still spoke French, did not travel farther than two parishes from the place of their birth, and believed, in their incurable innocence, that the smokey, green-canopied swamplands of South Louisiana would always be there for them.

  I DO NOT REMEMBER Saturday at all. At least twenty-four hours of my life had disappeared, just like a large decayed tooth excised from the gums. Later, the odometer on my truck would show I had driven sixty-three miles I could not account for. When I woke Sunday morning, I was in a cabin that was dry and snug, cool from a breeze that inched along the floor. Through the window was a vast, stump-filled lake dimpled by rain. The sky was gray, and when the wind blew the cypress trees on the far side of the lake, the canopy turned a bright green against the somberness of the day, as though the trees drew their color from the wind.

  Inside my head I could hear the original 1946 recording of Harry Choates’s “Jolie Blon,” the song that will always remain for me the most haunting, unforgettable lament ever recorded. Had I dreamed the song? Had I been with someone who had played it over and over again? I had no idea.

  I sat for a long time on the side of the bunk bed in the cabin. The flop hat I wore on fishing trips and my raincoat lay on a chair. My skin had no sensation, as though it had been refrigerated or dry-frozen; my hands were stiff and as thick-feeling as cardboard. I didn’t have the shakes or sweats, nor were there nightmarish images painted on the backs of my eyelids. Instead, I felt nothing—no hunger, thirst, or erotic need, neither guilt nor remorse, as though I had simply ceased to exist.

  My holstered .45 rested on a table, next to a bottle of Scotch, a paper plate containing the remains of a fried-shrimp dinner, a scattered deck of playing cards, and three empty glasses. The .45 was mine; the rest I had no memory of.

  I stood up from the bed, then felt my knees cave and the blood drain from my head. I lay back down, my head buried in a pillow that smelled of unwashed hair, my jaws like emery paper.

  I slept until early afternoon, and woke trembling and sick, willing to cut off my fingers one at a time with tin snips for the Scotch I had seen earlier.

  Except it was gone.

  A Creole woman, with one eye that looked like a milky-blue marble pushed deep into the side of her face, sat on a chair by the door, her feet in flip-flops, her wash-faded print dress puffing from a floor fan under her. “Where you going?” she said.

  “To the restroom,” I replied.

  “There ain’t no restroom. The privy’s in back. Don’t go up to the bar, Mr. Dave.”

  “How do you know me?”

  “I belong to your church in Jeanerette. I see you at Mass every Sunday,” she replied. Her face was lopsided, perhaps misshaped at birth. Her good eye held on me just a moment, then looked away.

  “Why are you here? Why are you watching me?” I said.

  “You had bad men in here. Poachers and men carrying knives. What you doin’ to yourself, a Christian man, you?”

  I used the outbuilding in back. My truck was parked in a clump of gum trees, the paint and body unmarked by an accident. My credit cards and most of my money were still in my wallet. On the lakefront was a bar nailed together from unpainted scrap wood and corrugated tin. I could hear music inside and through a window see men drinking long-necked beers. The wind shifted, and I could smell the fish in the lake, barbecue grease dripping into an outdoor fire, ozone from another storm building out on the Gulf.

  Perhaps it was a happy day after all. Maybe nothing truly bad had happened because of my brief fling with the dirty boogie. Maybe all I needed was a couple of beers to straighten out the kinks, medicate the snakes a bit, whisk the spiders back into a dusty corner. What was wrong with that? I was not sure where I was, but the woods were hung with air vines, the oaks and swamp maples and persimmon trees widely spaced, the coulees layered with yellow and black leaves. It was Louisiana before someone decided to insert it in the grinder.

  “Oh, there you are,” I heard Molly Boyle say behind me. She and the Chalons family handyman, Andre Bergeron, walked down a leafy knoll on the edge of the lake. “We were watching the alligators in the shallows. How about something to eat?” she said.

  She drove with me in the truck back toward New Iberia. Her friend, the black man, followed. At Jeanerette, I saw his car turn off the highway. I had hardly spoken since leaving the fish camp deep in the Atchafalaya Basin. Each time we passed a bar I felt as though a life preserver were being pulled from my grasp. “How’d you know where I was?” I asked.

  “The lady who was watching you called me. Her husband owns the bar,” she replied.

  “Why was the Chalonses’ handyman with you?” I said.

  “Andre helps me in any way he can. He’s always been protective of us,” she replied. “Don’t be angry, Dave.”

  “I’m not. I just got jammed up,” I said irrationally, my hands tightening on the steering wheel, my breath a noxious fog.

  Molly was silent. When I looked over at her, she was staring out the side window. “I’ll go to a meeting with you,” she said.

  “I’d better drop you by your house,” I said.

  “That’s not going to happen, trooper. If you try to pick up a drink today, I’m going to break your arm.”

  I looked at her again, in a more cautious way.

  We drove down East Main toward my house, the ninetee
nth-century homes and manicured lawns and wet trees rushing past me, all of it curiously unchanged, a study in Sunday-afternoon normalcy and permanence to which I had returned like an impaired outsider. I pulled the truck deep into the driveway, past the porte cochere, so that it was almost hidden from the street by the trees and bamboo. I cut the engine and opened the driver’s door. When I did, a shiny compact disk fell to the ground. Just next to the edge was a tiny reddish-brown smear that looked like blood.

  “What’s that?” Molly said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what it is.” Vainly, I tried to explain to myself where the CD had come from or who could have placed it in my truck. I touched the crusted smear on the surface and was sure I was touching blood. I slipped the CD in my pants pocket and unlocked the back door, my hands shaking.

  Even if Molly had not been with me, my home offered no succor for the drunk teetering on the edge of delirium tremens. I had returned all the booze I’d purchased at Winn-Dixie. There was not even a bottle of vanilla extract in a cabinet. But at least my brother was not home and did not have to see me in the condition I was in.

  The only other consolation I had was the fact my bender had not hurt my animals. When I bought my house I had created a small swinging door in the back entrance so Tripod and Snuggs, in case of emergencies, could get to a bag of dry food on the floor. But I couldn’t take credit for having thought about them. A drunk on a drunk thinks about nothing except staying drunk.

  I got in the shower, turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, and stayed there until the tank was almost empty. Then I dressed in fresh clothes and shaved while my hand trembled on the razor. I could hear Molly clanking pans in the kitchen.

  I went into the living room and loaded the CD into my stereo. There was no seal or logo on it, and I suspected it contained nothing more than an Internet download of music someone had not bothered to pay for. But who had left it in my truck? The poachers the Creole woman had mentioned?

  I pushed the “play” button on the stereo and the long-dead voice of Harry Choates, singing his signature song, “Jolie Blon,” filled the room. That’s why I had heard those words over and over in my head when I had woken up that morning, I told myself. Perhaps someone with a cut on his hand had given me Choates’s song and I had probably played it repeatedly in my truck’s stereo. A blackout didn’t necessarily mean I had committed monstrous acts. I had to control my imagination. Yes, that was it. It was all a matter of personal control.