Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  “Why not?”

  “He’s transported two vics eighty miles into Iberia Parish. Both were alive during the trip. That means he incurred risks he didn’t have to. It was for a reason. My guess is he lives not far from Baton Rouge, maybe around Port Allen or Denham Springs. He’s squeezing his big-boy every time he sees us scratching our heads on TV.”

  “Maybe he had another reason,” I said.

  Koko lit a cigarette and studied the lake, either lost in his own thoughts or out of indifference to anything I had to say. Twenty feet out from the bank, I saw the gnarled, green-black tail of a gator roil the lily pads. Koko exhaled his cigarette smoke into the wind. “Yeah?” he said.

  “What if dropping the vic here is a ‘fuck-you’ card for people he knows?” I said.

  Koko continued to puff on his cigarette, his eyes veiled. I walked back toward the cruiser, then heard him laboring his way up the slope behind me.

  “Know anything about anthropology, primitive man’s behavior, that kind of crap?” he said.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Sometimes serial killers mark their territory, particularly when it has some kind of personal meaning to them. It looks like there’re piss stripes on a tree back there. There were also piss stripes on a tree by the pond where we found the Belloc woman. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time because we had the semen on the vic.

  “I’ve read through all the forensics on the Baton Rouge crime scenes. None of them makes mention of the perpetrator marking the area with urine. I think our guy is telling us something.”

  “Why didn’t he disfigure this one?” I asked.

  “He did. Inside. I told you to wait on the post, but you don’t listen. If you ever get this demented fuck in your sights, ask God to look the other way.”

  IT WAS NOT A MORNING to think about what I had seen.

  Any inner-city street cop, homicide investigator, or member of a sex crimes unit carries images in his head that never go away, not unless he wants to burn them out of his skull with booze or yellow jackets or black speed. But what if the problem is not him or even the job? What if the problem is the simple fact that there is something bestial and cruel at work in the human race? What if his perception as a police officer is not a jaded but an accurate one?

  When I was on loan to Miami P.D. I saw a black mob in Liberty City drag three Cuban kids from a car and crush their heads into pulp with curbstones. I also saw five uniformed cops in Opa Locka beat a black motorcyclist to death with batons. Clete and I cut a corpse dancing with maggots out of a brick wall and had our unmarked car Molotoved in the same night. I’ve worked child abuse cases I will never discuss with anyone.

  But the expression on the face of the Trajan woman, her neck and head trapped helplessly in the fork of a tree, contained a suggestion about the human condition I couldn’t get out of my mind. I suspected she was a brave woman and fought her attacker to the end. I also suspected she was not undone by either her fear or the pain and sexual humiliation he visited upon her. But what I had seen in her eyes was worse. “Loss” is not the right word for it. It was a realization that she was alone and powerless, and that beyond the perimeter of her vision a sadist was about to steal everything of value she owned—her dignity, her self-respect, her husband, her children, her career as an aerobics instructor, the quiet home she returned to daily, and finally her life. All to satisfy the libidinous pleasure of a deviate to whom she had as much importance as a stick of chewing gum.

  What sociological factors could produce a man like this?

  I felt almost as though I could see his face, like a figure moving around on the edge of a dream. Maybe I had seen him the night Honoria Chalons was murdered. Maybe I had processed him into jail, held each of his fingers in mine and rolled them on an ink pad, pressing the whorls in his skin onto paper, as though I were creating a dermatological artwork. Maybe the oil in his skin was transferred to mine.

  But I knew with certainty that he was not far away, and that he would strike again soon, perhaps much closer to home, and that his intention was to deliver as much injury as possible to our community. I knew this in a way that was not demonstrable, not even to myself. But I knew it just the same, perhaps because I could not deny the cathartic, hard-pounding rush that violence had always brought me, one that was as pure and bright as a glass of ninety-proof whiskey flung onto a fire.

  I went into Helen’s office. She was gazing out the window at the cemetery, her hands in her back pockets, her breasts as firm as grapefruit against her shirt. “How’s it rockin’, Pops?” she said.

  “The serial guy is somebody we know.”

  “Like down at the Kiwanis?”

  “He broke his pattern when he murdered the teenage street hooker in New Orleans. It’s not coincidence she talked to Clete and me a few hours before she died.”

  “I know all this, Dave. It’s not helpful.”

  “Answer me this: With all the power and influence that Val Chalons has, why would he waste his time trying to ruin my reputation instead of finding his sister’s killer?”

  “He thinks you did it?”

  “No, he doesn’t. He’s covering his own butt.”

  I could see the fatigue in her eyes and I felt like a fool. What was she supposed to do? Take me off the desk because I had an unprovable intuition? Then I realized she wasn’t thinking about our conversation at all.

  “Raphael Chalons just got the paddles at Iberia General. He may not make it,” she said.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “He was visiting his son and had a stroke.”

  I collected my mail from my box and went back to my office, dazed, unable to explain my feelings to myself about a man I had always thought of as corrupt and vaguely sinister. I found myself staring at the envelopes and memos in my hand without the words on them registering. I sat down at my desk and called the hospital. An intern in the intensive-care unit told me Raphael Chalons was alive but paralyzed down one side and unable to speak.

  “Is he going to pull through?” I said.

  “You say you’re with the sheriff’s department?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He’s been in bad health for some time,” he said.

  A half hour later Mack Bertrand called from the lab. “I don’t know if this is good news or bad news,” he said. “The casts I made out at the Trajan crime scene this morning? I’m reasonably sure we’ve got a match with the casts I made under your bedroom window.”

  “You say ‘reasonably sure’?”

  “You ever watch this TV show where guys are always examining used Q-tips or a Kleenex some gal wiped her lipstick on?”

  “I’m lost,” I said.

  “None of this stuff is nuclear science. We’re talking about muddy boots,” he said.

  I called Molly at her agency and told her the voyeur at our house may have been the Baton Rouge serial killer.

  “Well, he’d better not come around again,” she said. “I’m going to pick up some steaks on the way home. Is there anything else you want from the store?”

  You want a stand-up woman in your life? Marry a nun.

  I BOUGHT FLOWERS at the Winn-Dixie and took them to the nurses’ station in the intensive-care unit at Iberia General. “They’re for Mr. Raphael,” I said.

  “He can’t have flowers in his room now. But I can keep them here at the station and put them in his room when he’s moved,” she said. She was a pleasant-looking older woman, with soft pink skin and blue-tinted white hair.

  “That would be fine,” I said. “Can I talk to him?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” she replied. “Who did you say you are?”

  “Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Are you the one who—”

  “Mr. Chalons’s son insulted my wife and I tore him up. I’m the one.”

  “I see.” She had set my flowers on a shelf under the counter. She retrieved them and pushed t
hem toward me. “You need to talk to the resident about these,” she said, holding her eyes on mine. “Sometimes the water in the container forms bacteria and creates problems for us.”

  I walked off and left the flowers where they were. Through a partially opened door I saw the comatose face of Raphael Chalons, his head sunk deep in the pillow, his leaded eyes and hooked nose strangely suggestive of a carrion bird’s.

  THAT EVENING, while Snuggs and Tripod watched Molly flip a pair of sirloin steaks on the grill in the backyard, I called Jimmie at his apartment and asked for the address and phone number of the home on Lake Pontchartrain where Ida Durbin was staying with Jimmie’s friends.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “I’m being hung out to dry by her son. That might have something to do with it.”

  “Why blame her?”

  “I’m not. So lose the attitude.”

  “She’s not in New Orleans.”

  “Jimmie—”

  “She’s in Lafayette. Out on Pinhook Road. So is Lou Kale. Stay away from Kale. He’s a real shithead.”

  “You figured that out?”

  After I hung up the phone, I joined Molly at our picnic table in the backyard and we ate supper under the trees with Tripod and Snuggs, who had their own bowls at the end of the table. Then she and I walked downtown and had ice cream, as couples do on a late-summer evening, and I said nothing about Ida Durbin or the Baton Rouge serial killer.

  At sunup the next day I drove to Lafayette.

  CHAPTER

  26

  I DON’T KNOW what I expected. My experience with age is that it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us. Perhaps I’m wrong. I wanted to be wrong when I met Ida Durbin. I also wanted to believe I would not act on an old resentment should I have the bad luck to run into her estranged husband, Lou Kale.

  They were staying in separate rooms in a lovely old motel built of historic brick on a part of Pinhook Road that had not been blighted by urban development and was still shrouded by spreading live oaks. It was not yet 7:00 a.m. when I showed my badge at the desk and asked for the room number of Ms. Connie Coyne. I had not called in advance.

  “We don’t have anyone by that name staying here,” the clerk said.

  “Look again,” I said.

  “No one by that name is staying here, sir,” he repeated, looking past me at someone waiting to check out.

  “Don’t tell me that. She’s here. So is her husband. His name is Lou Coyne.”

  “Oh, yes. They’re both registered under his name. I just saw her go into the dining room,” the clerk said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  According to Jimmie, Ida and her husband kept separate homes in Miami and obviously separate accommodations when they traveled. But the fact they were both registered at the motel under his name, indicating the charges were probably billed to the same credit card, made me wonder how separate in reality Ida’s life was from her husband’s.

  Few people were in the dining room and it wasn’t hard to pick out Ida from the other motel guests eating breakfast by the French doors, not far from the buffet table. Her hair still had its natural reddish tone and the years had not taken away her height or the thin, well-defined features of her face. The dramatic change was in her complexion. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, but in the broken light from the terrace her skin seemed etiolated, the freckles drained of color.

  She was nibbling on a piece of dry toast while she read from a hardbound book. The only food on her plate consisted of a few melon slices, a half dozen grapes, and a piece of Swiss cheese. Her cup was filled with hot tea. She wore a flowered sundress that I suspected came from an expensive shop on Biscayne Boulevard.

  She glanced up at me only when my shadow fell across her reading page. “Why, Dave,” she said. “I never could get over how much you and Jimmie looked alike.”

  “How’s the life, Ida?” I said.

  “Oh, I hope that’s not meant to injure. It’s not, is it?”

  I sat down without being asked. “Why didn’t you write and tell us you were okay, Ida?”

  “Because I wasn’t okay. Because I was a kid. Because I told myself Jimmie would be fine without me. Pick one you like.”

  “A guy named Troy Bordelon went to the grave thinking he was partly responsible for your death,” I said.

  “I never heard of this person. I didn’t choose the life I’ve lived, Dave. It was chosen for me. But others may see it differently.”

  “I happen to be in the latter category, Ida. Val Chalons is trying to frame me on a child molestation charge. He also defamed my wife. That’s why he’s in Iberia General Hospital. I stomped the shit out of him. If I had it to do over again, I’d rip up his whole ticket. The only regret I have is that his father may have had a seizure because of the damage I did to his son.”

  If she took any offense at my remarks, it disappeared inside her face. “You seem to be handling the pressures of life well enough,” she said, gazing at the terrace and the moss that was lifting in the oak trees by the pool.

  I said earlier that in my view age is not a magic agency in our lives. But perhaps Ida was the exception after all. The country girl who had paddled an inner tube far out from shore and saved Jimmie and me from sharks was gone; the woman who had replaced her possessed the timeless and inured hauteur of a successful medieval courtesan. Jimmie had said she had wanted to see her son, Valentine. But where had she been all those years? Raphael Chalons had raised him, not she. Had Mr. Raphael excluded her from her son’s life? I doubted it.

  “Lost in thought?” she said.

  “Why has your son done so much to harm me and my wife? Is he that fearful people will discover who his mother is? Is he that cowardly and insecure?”

  She drank from her teacup, then set it back down in the saucer. The freckles on her shoulders seemed to disappear in the glaze of sunlight through the French doors. “It was good seeing you, Dave. I hope things work out for you and your wife,” she said.

  “Next time you want to wish me well, Ida, put it on a postcard and drop it in a mailbox,” I said.

  “You’re a bitter man,” she said.

  “Just a realistic one,” I replied.

  But my failed effort at reconciliation with Ida Durbin and the past was not over. On my way out of the lobby into the porte cochere, I almost knocked down a man dressed in a blazer, an open-collar print shirt, knife-creased slacks, and oxblood loafers. He was a muscularly compact man, his skin deeply tanned, his iron-gray hair slick with gel. When I collided with him, he had been holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a gold lighter in the other. He apologized, lit his cigarette in an expansive fashion, and started to walk around me.

  “You pointed a gun at me in a Galveston motel in 1958, Mr. Kale,” I said. “You really scared me. You called yourself the butter and egg man.”

  “Some people are walking memory banks. Me? I can’t remember what I ate for supper last night,” he said.

  “You guys are here to do business, aren’t you? Your visit doesn’t have anything to do with Val Chalons.”

  “We need to dial it down, my man. I need to get inside, too, if you’ll step aside.”

  “I’m a sheriff’s detective, Mr. Kale. You’re a pimp. You want a trip down to the bag, that can be arranged. But regardless of what happens here, you keep your ass out of New Iberia, and you keep a lot of gone between you and Clete Purcel. You reading me on this, Mr. Kale?”

  He removed his cigarette from his mouth and tipped his ashes away from his person so they didn’t blow back on his coat. “The name is Coyne, Lou Coyne. And you got the wrong dude, buddy.”

  He went through the revolving door into the motel. It had rained that morning, and the breeze under the porte cochere smelled of wet flowers and leaves and the lichen that was crusted on the massive limbs of the live oaks. I didn’t want to get any deeper into th
e world of Ida Durbin and Lou Kale, no more than you want to immerse yourself in the effluent that backs up from a sewage pipe. But I knew a predator when I saw one. Lou Kale and Ida Durbin were no longer symbols or milestones out of Jimmie’s and my adolescent experience. Nor were they simply foils to the innocence of the postwar era in which we had grown up. They may have been upgraded from their origins and elevated by economic circumstance into a larger world, but Ida Durbin and Lou Kale were the emissaries of organized crime, no matter what they called themselves. They were real and they were here.

  WANT TO FIND OUT who the closet boozers are in your neighborhood? Ask the garbage man. Want to check out the local politics? Talk with the barber. Want to find out what your neighbors are really like? Ask a kid. Want to find out who’s washing money at the track, fencing stolen property, running dope, greasing the zoning board, providing hookers for conventioneers, or selling gangbangers Tec-nines modified with hell triggers? Forget news media and police pencil pushers and official sources of all kinds. Ask a beat cop who hasn’t slept since 1965 or a street junkie whose head glows in the dark.

  During the morning I talked with a retired DEA agent while he drove golf balls on a practice range; an ex–Air American pilot who flew nine years inside the Golden Triangle; an old-time Washington, D.C., hooker who operated a bar in North Lafayette; and a pharmaceutically addicted city Vice cop who had done two tours in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. They all shared one commonality—they had been witnesses to events of historical importance that few people knew about and they had seen forms of human behavior about which they never spoke. The latter quality alone, to my mind, made them exceptional human beings.

  For generations all the vice in Louisiana had been run by a few individuals in New Orleans. Even when I was a beat cop, no one opened a brothel, set up a slot machine, or sold one lid of Afghan skunk without first kissing the ring of Didoni Giacano. But Didi Gee was pushing up mushrooms, gambling was a state-sponsored industry, and narcotics had become part of the culture. Louisiana, once a closed fiefdom operated by the appointees of Frank Costello, was now wide open to the entrepreneurial spirit. Drug mules hammered down Interstate 10, from both Houston and Miami, loaded with weed, meth, and coke. Pimps had their pick of crack whores, whose managerial costs were minimal.