Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  “I already did. Your prowler wore work-boots, size ten and a half. Our person of interest at the Chalons guesthouse probably had on rubber boots, around size eleven. No help there, Dave.”

  “Why’d you make the comparison?”

  “Probably for the same reason you wanted it done. We don’t have one clue indicating who might have gone into the Chalons guesthouse and chopped that sad girl to death. Let me run something else by you a second.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Raphael Chalons has called me three times. But I’m not quite sure what he wants.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “In one breath, he wants to know if there’s any evidence the Baton Rouge serial killer murdered his daughter. When I tell him no, he seems relieved, then he gets upset again.”

  “Why did you call Honoria Chalons a ‘sad girl’?”

  “She attended our church for a while. I always had the feeling she’d been raped or molested. But I’m not an expert on those things.”

  “Did she ever say anything on the subject?”

  “No, she just seemed to be one of those people who always have reflections inside their eyes, like ghosts or memories no one else can touch. Maybe I watch too much late-night television.”

  No, you don’t, Mack, I said to myself.

  I HAD SPOKEN BOLDLY to both Molly and Helen Soileau about wiping up the floor with Val Chalons. But my casual attitude was a poor disguise for my real feelings. It was ten minutes to nine now and my stomach was roiling, in the same way it does when an airplane drops unexpectedly through an air pocket. My scalp felt tight against my head and I could smell a vinegary odor rising from my body, like sweat that has been ironed into fabric. I bought a can of Dr Pepper in the department waiting room, ate two aspirin, and called Dana Magelli at NOPD.

  “Do you have casts from the area where Holly Blankenship’s body was dumped?” I asked.

  “Yeah, there were footprints all over the place. Some homeless guys use it for a hobo jungle. What are you looking for?” he said.

  “Size eleven rubber boots or ten-and-a-half workboots?”

  “Why don’t you call the task force in Baton Rouge?”

  “My prints showed up at a crime scene they were investigating. They’re not big fans.”

  “Hang on a minute,” he said. He set the phone down, then picked it up again. “Yeah, there was one set of footprints that could have been made by rubber boots, around size eleven or twelve. Wal-Mart sells them by the thousands. What was that about your prints at a crime scene?”

  I started to tell Dana the whole story, but I had finally grown tired of revisiting my own bad behavior in order to publicly excoriate myself. So I simply said, “Come on over and catch some green trout.”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” he replied.

  I wished I had come to appreciate the value of reticence earlier in life.

  MOLLY AND I MET with my attorney outside the court at 10:45 a.m. He was a Tulane law graduate and a good-natured, intelligent man by the name of Porteus O’Malley. He was a student of the classics and liberal thought, and came from an old and distinguished family on the bayou, one known for its generosity and also its penchant for losing everything the family owned. Because our fathers had been friends, he seldom charged me a fee for the work he did on my behalf.

  I was sweating in the shade of the oak where we stood, my eyes stinging with the humidity. Porteus placed his hand on my shoulder and looked into my face. He was larger than I and had to stoop slightly to be eye-level with me. “You gonna make it?” he said.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  But I could tell something else besides his client’s anxiety was bothering him. When Molly went inside City Hall to use the restroom, he said, “Ever hear of a woman by the name of Mabel Poche?”

  “No, who is she?”

  “She’s hired an oilcan to sue you. The oilcan also happens to do legal grunt work for the Chalons family. She’s also filing criminal charges.”

  “For what?”

  “She claims you took her four-year-old son into a restroom at Molly’s place and molested him.” His eyes shifted off my face.

  “It’s a lie,” I said.

  “Of course it is. But that’s how Val Chalons and his friends operate. Screw with them and they’ll make a speed bump out of you.”

  Judge Cecil Gautreaux was an ill-tempered, vituperative man, disliked and feared by prosecutors and defense lawyers alike. He was also a moralist who liked to bait the ACLU by making references to Scripture while handing down severe sentences. A wrongheaded remark by a defense attorney could make his face tremble with quiet rage. He lectured rape victims and showed contempt for the collection of indigent drunks who were brought daily into morning court on a long wrist chain. Huey Long once said that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would come in the name of anticommunism. I had always believed that Huey had the likes of Judge Gautreaux in mind when he made his remark, and that Judge Gautreaux, given the opportunity, could make the ovens sing.

  “You’re entering a plea of not guilty?” he said.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I replied.

  He rubbed his little, round chin. His eyes were sky-blue, the size of dimes, and they stayed riveted on mine. His facial skin was soft, translucent, with nests of green veins at the temples, his nostrils thin, as though the air he breathed contained an offensive odor. “Just to satisfy my own curiosity, can you tell me why you had to destroy a man’s place of business in order to satisfy a personal grudge?”

  Porteus O’Malley started to speak.

  “You be silent, Counselor. I’m talking to your client. Would you please answer my question, Mr. Robicheaux?” the judge said.

  “It’s a bit complicated, Your Honor,” I said.

  “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  “I guess there are some occasions when words are not quite adequate, Your Honor. I guess there are occasions when you just have to say ‘Fuck it,’ “ I replied.

  “I don’t think you’re a wise man, Mr. Robicheaux. Bail is set at fifty thousand dollars,” the judge said. He snapped his gavel down on a wood block.

  I put up my house as a property bond and was back at the department at 1:00 p.m. Helen was waiting by my office door. I started to recount my experience in court, but she held up a hand to stop me.

  “I’ve already heard about it. You’d better pray Cecil Gautreaux doesn’t preside over your trial,” she said.

  I waited for her to go on. Instead, she looked into space, a sad light in her eyes.

  “Come on, Helen. Say it.”

  “I tried to get you modified duty. Suspension without pay was as good as I could do. The D.A. and others want you canned.”

  “Without an I.A. review?”

  “The problem isn’t just the beef at Clementine’s. It’s you, Dave. You don’t like rules and you hate authority. You wage a personal war against guys like Val Chalons and take the rest of us down with you. No amount of pleading with you works. People are tired of following you around with a dustpan and broom.”

  My face felt small and tight, my throat constricted, as though a chicken bone were caught in it. Helen snuffed down in her nose and touched at one nostril, her jawbone flexing.

  “I’ll clean out my desk,” I said.

  “I got a call from a TV producer who does exposés on small cities,” she said. “They’re doing one on New Iberia and you’re the centerpiece. They’ve got you on tape at Clementine’s. I also got the feeling your wife is going to be portrayed as a bleeding-heart nun pumping it with a rogue cop.”

  “We’ve always wanted film careers,” I said.

  “You force your friends to hurt you, Dave. I think that’s a sickness. But you act like it’s funny,” she said.

  “My lawyer says I’m about to be charged with child molestation. I’m also going to be sued. The lawyer for the plaintiff is a stooge for Val Chalons.”

  “Shit,” she said. She walke
d away, her fists on her hips, breathing through her nose. Then she walked back toward me, her expression set. “I’m not going to be party to this. You’re on the desk, full pay, until I say otherwise.”

  “I don’t think you should—”

  She pressed her finger against my lips. “You got that?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Good,” she said.

  TWO HOURS LATER a woman detective who worked sex crimes notified me that Mrs. Mabel Poche had filed molestation charges against me. The location of the alleged crime was the restroom inside Molly’s administrative offices. The date was the day Molly’s agency had sponsored a hot dog roast and a race of hundreds of plastic ducks down Bayou Teche. An incident I hardly remembered—a lost child about to wet his pants, needing someone to take him into the restroom—was now aimed at my breast like a crossbow. The woman detective scheduled an interview with me for Friday morning. The Daily Iberian had already picked up the story.

  I signed out of the office early and drove to Molly’s agency. She was under the pole shed, a gunnysack in one hand, picking up chicken heads that had been lopped off on a butcher stump.

  “Who’s the ax murderer?” I said.

  “We’re going to have a chicken fry tomorrow night. I think one of the kids hijacked my weed cutter. Look at that.” She nodded at a machete that lay across the stump, its blade matted with blood and feathers.

  “You remember a white woman by the name of Mabel Poche?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen her in a while. I think she stopped coming around.”

  “She says I molested her child in your office building. She’s filing criminal charges as well as a civil suit.”

  “It’s been quite a day, huh?” she said.

  “I suspect she’ll sue your agency as well.”

  “Oh, yes indeed. You can count on Mrs. Poche.”

  “Helen Soileau stood up for me. I’ve still got my job. Things could be worse.”

  She picked up the machete and knocked it clean of bloody feathers against the stump. “You want to go out for dinner tonight and maybe fool around later?” She tossed a strand of hair out of her eye and waited for my reply.

  SATURDAY MORNING MY LAWYER, Porteus O’Malley, called the house. “A couple of lowlifes came by my office yesterday,” he said. “They claim they were at Clementine’s when you remodeled Val Chalons’s head. They’re willing to testify Chalons tried to pick up a steak knife from a table.”

  “Who are these guys?” I said.

  He told me their names. “They say they’re from around here, but they sound like they grew up in New Orleans,” he said.

  “They used to peel safes with Stevie Giacano. Both of them have bonds with Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.”

  He paused. “Is Clete Purcel behind this?”

  “His heart is in the right place,” I said.

  “It’s called subornation of perjury. How bad do you want to do time in Angola, Dave?”

  THE CABLE SHOW whose intention supposedly was to expose the underside of our little town on the Teche aired that night. It had probably been in the can for weeks, but the producers had managed to bleed in footage of me destroying Val Chalons’s face and half of Clementine’s Restaurant. Actually, I had to give them credit. The show’s juxtaposition of photography was splendidly done. The documentary began with aerial footage of the Louisiana wetlands, serpentine bayous shadowed by cypress and live oak trees, and huge tracts of young sugar cane bending in the wind, followed by land-based, wide-angle shots of plantation homes, street festivals, and sugar refineries shrouded at night inside clouds of electrified steam.

  Then a camera obviously mounted on the window of a moving vehicle, as though the subject material had suddenly became a source of danger to the journalists, panned across New Iberia’s inner-city slum, showing black dope dealers and white crack whores working the trade on Hopkins Avenue. A moment later the scene shifted to my house and Doogie Dugas and several uniformed cops going through the front entrance, while a woman identified as a Catholic nun stood half-undressed in the bedroom doorway, clutching a shirt against her breasts.

  Clete Purcel watched the show in a blue-collar bar on the west end of town, made a call on a pay phone, then drove to my house and threw a pecan hard against my front window.

  “What’s up, Cletus?” I said, stepping out on the gallery.

  “You see the molestation story in the morning paper?”

  “Nope.”

  “You see yourself on television tonight?” he said.

  “Yep.”

  “Stop waiting for Chalons to fall in his own shit. It’s time to take this lying cocksucker off at the neck. I’ve got a call in to Jericho Johnny Wineburger.”

  I walked into the yard. The wind in the trees caused shadows to slide across Clete’s face, like water running down a window glass. He was wearing his porkpie hat and a wilted tropical shirt and gray slacks, and I could smell weed and beer-sweat trapped in his clothes.

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I said.

  “You think you can beat these guys playing by the rules? Wake up. They own the ballpark. We’re just the humps who carry out the garbage.”

  “Been toking on a little Mexican gage tonight?”

  “No, what I’ve been doing is wrapping a ‘drop’ in black tape and filing off a few serial numbers.”

  “Come on in and eat something.”

  “I’m going to take Chalons down. Nobody is calling my partner a perve. You see Jericho Johnny around town, pretend you don’t.”

  He climbed in his pink Cadillac and roared off, a tape deck blasting out Bob Seger’s “The Horizontal Bop,” leaves blowing from under the wire wheels.

  Would Clete actually try to pop Val Chalons? Or was that just a mixture of weed and beer talking? I thought about it. Clete’s Caddy swerved at the corner in front of the Shadows, flattening a garbage can into a building.

  CHAPTER

  25

  THE 911 CALL from a fisherman out by Lake Dautrieve came in at 5:43 Monday morning. “She don’t have no clothes on. I t’ought maybe it was some kind of accident. Like maybe she fallen out of a tree or somet’ing,” he said.

  “Sir, calm down. Is the person injured?” the female dispatcher said.

  “Injured? What you talkin’ about?” the caller replied.

  Helen picked me up in my front yard. The sun was just striking the brick buildings on Main as we crossed the drawbridge and headed up Loreauville Road toward the lake.

  “I thought I was on the desk,” I said.

  “This cruiser is your desk, so shut up,” she said.

  We arrived at the crime scene just behind the coroner’s van. Uniformed sheriff’s deputies from both Iberia and St. Martin parishes were already there, stringing yellow tape through scrub oaks and gum and willow trees on the edge of the lake. The shallows were carpeted with hyacinths, and I could see the black heads of moccasins between the lily pads, barely breaking the water. High up on the windstream, turkey buzzards circled like ragged-edged oriental kites. I watched Koko Hebert stoop under the tape and walk toward a forked oak tree with the plodding ennui of a man who has long given up on the world.

  Helen took a call on a hand-held radio, then tossed it on the seat of the cruiser. “The boys from Baton Rouge are on their way,” she said.

  “They think it’s the Baton Rouge guy?” I said.

  “A tattoo on the vic is the same as on a woman who was abducted by LSU Sunday afternoon,” she replied.

  The abduction had taken place in a middle-income neighborhood a few blocks off Highland Road. The victim, Barbara Trajan, was the mother of two children, an aerobics instructor at a health club, and the wife of a high school football coach. She had a tattoo of an orange and purple butterfly on her abdomen, just below her navel. The previous afternoon, she had been working in her flower bed, one that paralleled the driveway. Her husband had taken the children to a church softball game. When they returned
home, Barbara Trajan had disappeared. Her gardening trowel and one cotton glove lay on the concrete.

  I looked across the lake at the sun. It was molten and watery, wrapped in vapor, just above the tree line. The previous night had been hot and dry, the clouds crackling with thunder that gave no rain. Now, a breeze suddenly sprang up in the south and riffled across the lake. A gray, salty odor that had been trapped inside the woods struck my face. Helen cleared her throat and spit to the side. “Oh boy,” she said.

  We pulled on latex gloves and went inside the tape. The ground was leaf strewn and soft, torn with drag marks, gouged by boots or heavy shoes, as though a man had been pulling a weight that resisted his grasp. The victim was nude, her chin fitted at an upward angle in the fork of a tree. Her wrists were bound behind her with plastic cuffs, her eyes open, as though they had been poached by a vision of human behavior she had never imagined. A white cotton work glove protruded from her mouth.

  Koko Hebert stood behind the dead woman, wiping mosquitoes out of his face. I saw him stoop over, reach out with his latex-gloved hand, then rise up again and jot something on a notepad. A moment later he walked past me, without speaking, his shoulders humped, his face flushed and oily in the heat. He ducked under the crime scene tape and went out by the lake, by himself, into the breeze. I followed him down by the lakeside. He was still writing on his notepad.

  “Wait for the postmortem and I’ll be able to speak with more specificity,” he said.

  “I’m on a short tether. I’m not sure how much time I have left with the department,” I said.

  “Entrance through the rear. Bite marks on the shoulders. Death by strangulation. With a chain of some kind. With tiny links in it.” He looked at me.

  “Like the little piece of chain Fontaine Belloc hid on her person before she died?”

  “That’d be my bet,” he said.

  “How do you read this guy? Don’t give me your cynical runaround, either, Koko. You’re an intelligent man.”

  “He’s a classic psychopath, which means we don’t have a clue about what goes on inside his head. But if you ask me, I think he’s trying to lead the hunt away from Baton Rouge. I don’t think he’s from around here.”