Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She swerved the cruiser to the shoulder and got out under a spreading oak tree. She walked up and down by my window, her fists on her hips, the corner of her mouth bitten white. For a moment I thought she was truly going to lose it. She stood still for a long time, her back to me, then got back into the vehicle.

  “Helen—”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  She did not speak again until she turned into my drive. “Be in my office in one hour, looking sharp, your head out of your ass for a change,” she said.

  DOOGIE DUGAS and his posse comitatus had tossed my house from one end to the other. They had even pulled all my lawn tools out of my shed and left them scattered in the yard. The doors to my truck were ajar, the lock on the steel toolbox I had welded to the bed sheared in half by bolt cutters. The driver’s seat was still pushed against the steering wheel, the floor area behind it empty of the flop hat and hooded raincoat I had worn during my blackout Saturday.

  The irony of Dugas’s search was that he had probably tainted any evidence he had seized by using an improperly acquired warrant. The greater irony was the fact that he and his friends had evidently ignored an item they should have picked up.

  It was a sheet of yellow legal pad paper, now rain-damaged, speckled with mud, blown into the canebrake that separated my yard from Miss Ellen’s. I would have probably paid little attention to it as well, but every day I picked up litter that either blew or was thrown into my yard. It was dated Saturday, 9:15 P.M. and read:

  Dear Dave,

  Why don’t you stay home? Who’s taking care of your cat and raccoon? Anyone who neglects or who is cruel to a defenseless creature deserves to be tortured.

  I have to tell someone about the secrets nobody in our family will deal with. My father won’t admit the harm our silence has caused. Maybe our souls are damned. My prayer today is that hell is oblivion and not a place of torment.

  You must call me. I can tell you about Ida Durbin.

  Love,

  H.

  Was she insane? Twisted on coke and booze? Or perhaps touched with an insight into evil that would make most of us shudder? Whatever the answer, she had taken her secrets to the grave.

  After I shaved and showered and changed clothes, I placed Honoria’s note in one Ziploc bag and put the CD with the blood smear on the surface in another, and drove to the department. Helen was waiting for me, her mood still rumpled. “What’s that?” she said, indicating Honoria’s note.

  I placed it on her desk. She was standing up, her palms propped on her desk blotter as she read Honoria’s words, her chest rising and falling. The door was closed now, the blinds open, and people passing in the corridor made a point of not glancing inside. The room seemed to grow warmer, the sunlight through the window more intense.

  “This was in your yard?” Helen said.

  “Right.”

  “This is your parachute on a murder beef?”

  “I don’t know what it is. My guess is Honoria was an incest victim.”

  “Where in the name of God do you get these ideas?”

  “Koko Hebert says Honoria had intercourse in the twenty-four-hour period before she died. She was about to shower in the guesthouse, where Val Chalons lives, not in the main house, where she lived. She had every behavioral characteristic of someone who has been the long-term victim of a sexual predator.”

  “Dave, AFIS came back with only one match that didn’t belong in that guesthouse—yours.”

  “Except I had no motive to murder her. There was DNA in her genital area. I’ll bet the lab will show it was left there by a relative. My guess is it belongs either to the father or the brother.”

  But I had already lost her attention. “I must have had two dozen calls this morning,” she said. “They want you skinned, salted, and hung in a gibbet.”

  “Am I suspended?”

  “Suspension might be the least of it.”

  “What do you want me to do, Helen?”

  “Lose the nun.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Then please go somewhere else for a while.”

  And that’s what I did. As far as the water cooler, my face burning as though I had been slapped. Then I went back into her office, the door hanging open behind me.

  “You want my shield, just say it.”

  “You’re always psychoanalyzing other people. Why don’t you look inside your own head for a change?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Bootsie died on you and it made you madder than hell. Your daughter is gone and every day you wake up, you’re scared you’ll drink again. So you figured out a way to climb on a cross, a place where it’s safe and people can’t do anything else to you. I don’t think you’re going to like it up there, bwana.”

  THE WEEK WAS NOT GOING WELL. Worse, Clete had called early the previous morning and, without thinking, I told him Jimmie had gotten a lead on Lou Kale and that Kale might be running an escort service out of Miami. That was a mistake.

  CHAPTER

  19

  BY TUESDAY AFTERNOON Clete was standing at the registration desk in the lobby of an old ten-story stucco hotel on the beach in Hollywood, Florida, decked out in shades, his pale blue porkpie hat, a tropical shirt printed with bare-breasted hula girls, white polyester Bermuda shorts, and blue tennis shoes threaded with brand-new white laces. He carried a set of golf clubs on one shoulder, a flight bag on the other, registered as C. T. Perkins from Gulfport, Mississippi, and paid cash for his room.

  The walls of the hotel were spiderwebbed with cracks, the patio in the center of the building spiked with weeds, the potted jacaranda dying from lack of water. But the view of the ocean from his open window on the top floor was magnificent, the overhead fan adequate to cool the room, the salt air wonderful. Clete propped his feet on the windowsill and punched in the telephone number of the Sea Breeze Escort Service. Down below, the tide was sliding high up on the sand and children were running into the waves, leaping in the froth that sucked back over their tanned bodies. On the third ring Clete found himself talking to a man who called himself Lou Coyne.

  “You got the referral where?” Coyne said.

  “Stevie Giacano, in New Orleans,” Clete replied.

  “Oh yeah, Stevie Gee. In the Teamsters, right? How’s ole Stevie doin’?”

  “Not too good. He’s dead. But he always said your service was tops.”

  “We like to think so. So you’re hosting a convention, that’s what you’re saying?”

  “I’m about three blocks away from your office. What if I come on down there and maybe we work out a group rate? You give finder fees? I’ll take mine in trade.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll meet you in a half hour at that little outdoor joint by your hotel, the one looks like a straw hut.”

  “How will I know you?”

  “You won’t,” the man who called himself Lou Coyne said, and hung up.

  Clete read the newspaper in the lobby, then strolled down the boardwalk to a frozen daiquiri stand, one with a thatched roof, set among a grove of coconut palms. A red-headed woman with a Hawaiian skirt hooked over her bikini sat on the stool next to him and ordered a daiquiri. She looked around at the beach, then said, “Hi.”

  “Hello,” Clete replied.

  “Beautiful day,” she said.

  “They don’t get any better.”

  “On vacation?” she said.

  “I wish. With me it’s all business,” Clete said. He paid for her drink, pushing the five-dollar bill across the counter to the bartender with the heel of his hand, not asking the woman if it was all right. “C. T. Perkins is the name. I’m staying at the hotel, down the boardwalk there.”

  Her eyes were green and there was a smear of lipstick on her teeth. Her breath smelled heavily of cigarettes, and she had a habit of repetitively touching the pads of each of her fingers with her thumb on her left hand while she sipped from her drink.

&nbs
p; “I bet you’re in the construction business,” she said.

  “How’d you know?”

  “You’ve been out in the sun a lot. You have big arms. There’re calluses on your hands. But you’re probably a supervisor or engineer.”

  “I used to be a general contractor. Now I put shopping mall deals together. Whatever blows up their skirt, that’s what I do.”

  “You up for anything this afternoon?”

  “Could be. You got a cell?” he said.

  She took a gold retractable pen from a canvas tote and wrote a number on a napkin. “Thanks for the drink. Keep that number under your hat, will you?” she said.

  “They couldn’t get it from me at gunpoint,” he replied.

  Clete watched her walk away, her face turned in a regal fashion toward the ocean, her hooked skirt molded tightly across her rump. She passed close to a man who wore linen slacks and a purple shirt with white suspenders, and who combed his hair as he walked toward the daiquiri stand. The two of them seemed to exchange glances, then the man sat at a table among the coconut palms, grinned, and pointed a finger at Clete. “Come talk to me, big man,” he said.

  Clete carried his daiquiri to the table and sat down. Lou Coyne’s hair was the color of gunmetal, greased, long on the neck. His facial skin had an unnatural shine and hardness to it, as though his youth had been surgically restored at the cost of the softening influences purchased by age.

  “If you knew Stevie Gee, you must know his old sidekick, Benny Frizola. Some people call him Benny Freeze,” the man named Lou Coyne said.

  “Never heard of him,” Clete replied.

  Lou Coyne grinned again. “So if I understand you, you’re organizing a convention here—builders, Teamsters, subcontractors, those kinds of guys—and you need some escorts to show them the city?”

  “Not exactly a convention, just a little P.R., get everybody lubricated and in a free-spending mood. Maybe around Thanksgiving. We’ll be in town for five days,” Clete said.

  Lou Coyne’s cheeks were sunken, as though he were sucking the spittle out of his mouth. His ears were small, the way a club fighter’s get when he’s been too long in the ring. “So, up front, you know an escort service offers nothing besides sightseeing, companionship, a walk on the beach if you want it, these are nice girls we’re talking about here, we’re clear on all this?”

  “I respect what you got to do, but I don’t have time for people’s bullshit,” Clete said.

  “What’d you say?”

  “I can put together a package in Vegas for the same prices I get here. Except some of the guys like to go deep-sea fishing. Besides, the seafood is better here. What can you do for me, Lou?”

  Lou Coyne pulled on his nose. “Slip on a swimsuit. Let’s take a dip,” he said.

  Clete went back to his hotel and changed into his Everlast boxing trunks and rejoined Lou Coyne on the beach.

  “You going to swim in your clothes?” Clete asked.

  Coyne began walking toward the surf, dropping his suspenders, pulling off his shirt as he went. “I ain’t got a problem with the human body. Other people do, it’s on them,” he replied.

  He removed a weighted-down copy of the Miami Herald from someone’s beach blanket and laid his shirt, shoes, socks, and finally his folded slacks on top of it. He stood raw and white in the sunlight, wearing only a black silk thong that was little more than a sling for his phallus. While other bathers gaped, he flexed his back and rolled his shoulders. “Let’s hit the waves, big man,” he said.

  They crashed through the breakers until they were chest-deep in the water, in a flat space between the swells, the beach behind them biscuit-colored and lined with palm trees and hotels that had fallen into decay.

  “You thought I was a cop?” Clete said.

  “Me? I love cops. I got all the original episodes of Miami Vice.”

  “Need your prices, Lou.”

  Lou Coyne pursed his mouth and thought. “I can give you ten, no, fifteen percent discount on the item. In terms of girls, I got the whole rainbow. The client acts like a gentleman or the service is discontinued. Before the discount, the various prices are as follows—”

  Clete waited until Coyne finished, then said, “Sounds okay. You remind me of a guy I used to know.”

  “Yeah?” Coyne said.

  “But his name was Kale. It was back when I was subcontracting on the Texas coast. The guy’s name was Lou Kale.”

  “No kidding? You never know, huh?”

  “Know what?” Clete said.

  “Who you’re talking to these days. Hey, one other thing? We don’t take coupons from Screw magazine.”

  Clete stared at him blankly.

  “That was a joke,” the man who called himself Lou Coyne said.

  CLETE CALLED ME that night from his hotel room and told me of what he had done.

  “Get out of there. He’s made you,” I said.

  “No, the phony name I gave him will check out on the Internet. He bought it. But tell you the truth, I’m not sure he’s our guy.”

  “Why not?”

  “The broad he sent ahead of him to scope me out came by the hotel and asked me to dinner. If they were jobbing me, she would have gone straight for my Johnson.”

  “They made you, Cletus.”

  “You never worked Vice. These people are not that complicated. Dave, you and I got inside the Mob and they were never on to us. Coyne or whatever bought it. I think this broad Babette is just a working girl.”

  “Babette?”

  “Kind of cute, don’t you think?”

  How do you tell your best friend that his old enemy, a weakness for female validation, has just deep-sixed his brains?

  “Call me on your cell in three hours,” I said.

  “Everything is solid. I’m going to exclude Lou Coyne as our Galveston pimp or find Ida Durbin. Now, pull your dork out of the wall socket.”

  But I did not hear from Clete again that evening and he did not respond to my calls.

  SHE GAZED OUT at the ocean, her chin tilted up in the breeze, and said she was originally from Hawaii, that she had been a bookkeeper before coming to Miami to work as a hostess at a supper club. But after her ex had blown town on a bigamy charge and stopped her alimony payments, she had drifted into the life. She said Babette was her real name, and that it had been the name of her grandmother, who had been born in Tahiti. Her knees touched Clete’s under the table as she said these things, on a fishing pier that was framed darkly against the ocean and the wan summer light that still hung in the sky, even though it was after 9:00 p.m.

  She had paid for the hamburgers and beer herself, and had made no commercial proposition to him of any kind. Her hair was mahogany-colored, bleached on the tips by the sun, and hung loosely on her bare shoulders. She lit a cigarette with a tiny gold lighter, crossed her legs, and smoked with her spine hunched, her posture like a question mark, as though she were cold.

  “Want to get out of the wind?” Clete said.

  “No, I like it here. I come here often to be by myself. I write poetry sometimes.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s not very good. But I’m gonna take a creative writing class at Miami-Dade Community College this fall. I showed my poems to a professor there. He said I had talent but I needed to study.”

  “I bet your poems are good,” Clete said.

  The sun had sunk beyond the Everglades, and the ocean was dark and flecked with whitecaps. At the end of the pier some Cuban kids had hooked a hammerhead shark and were fighting to hoist it clear of the water and over the guardrail. The woman smoked her cigarette and watched them, the thumb on her left hand repeatedly tapping the tips of her fingers. One of the kids drove a knife into the shark’s head, impaling it on a plank. “Yuk,” Babette said.

  “I got to ask you something,” Clete said.

  “Go ahead,” she replied, screwing her cigarette out inside a bottle cap.

  “You work for Lou Coyne?”

  “Y
es, I do,” she said, smiling in a self-deprecating way.

  “You were checking me out at the daiquiri stand?” he said.

  “It comes with my paycheck.”

  “I’m not knocking it.”

  “I know you’re not,” she said.

  “I just thought Coyne might be a guy I knew a long time ago, a Galveston guy by the name of Lou Kale.”

  “He’s always used the name ‘Coyne’ since I’ve worked for him. He’s a pretty good guy, actually. He’s just got to be careful.”

  “Dude I knew was hooked up with a gal by the name of Ida Durbin.”

  “You got me. Ask Lou. You like the hamburgers?”

  “They’re swell.”

  “You seem like a sweet guy. Look, I’ve got to check on my cousin’s house. I’m taking care of her parakeet while she’s out of town. You want to come?”

  They drove in her compact down I-95 and took an exit into a neighborhood of cinder-block apartment buildings and one-story wood-frame homes that looked like they had been built during the Depression years. Babette entered a dark street and turned into the driveway of a paintless house. The front porch was lit and the screens on it were stained with rust, the yard filled with waving shadows from clusters of untrimmed banana trees.

  “Your cousin lives in Little Havana?” Clete said.

  “She’s not Hispanic, if that’s what you mean,” Babette replied.

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said.

  “Before we go in, I need to tell you something. The cell number I gave you, it wasn’t mine. It belongs to a dial-in prayer service.”

  “Really?”

  “See, Lou took a bunch of us to Lake Charles, to the hotel and casino on the lake there. We met this famous evangelical leader. It was like a spiritual experience for me. I think for the first time in a long while I can stop living the way I do. But I don’t have enough money to quit yet and plus I got a little drug problem.”

  “That’s why they have Twelve-Step programs,” Clete said.

  She had cut the engine and now she opened the door partway, lighting the interior of the compact. “I just wanted you to know how it is with me and why I gave you the prayer number,” she said. “I’m just trying to be honest.”