Chapter 17
THAT EVENING, at dusk, Clete Purcel and I sat in canvas chairs on the edge of Henderson Swamp, pole-fishing with corks and cut-bait like a pair of over-the-hill duffers who cared less about catching fish than just being close by a cypress-dotted swamp while the sun turned into a red ember on the horizon.
I told him of the bender I had gone on and the discovery that morning of Honoria Chalons’s body. I also told him of the compact disk I had found in my truck and the fact I had no memory at all of what I had done from Friday night to Sunday morning.
I thought he would take me to task, but sometimes I didn’t give Clete enough credit and would forget that he was the man who once carried me down a fire escape with two .22 rounds cored in his back.
“This Ida Durbin broad’s voice was on the CD and she was singing a song that wasn’t written until years after she disappeared?” He had taken off his Hawaiian shirt and sprayed himself with mosquito repellent, and in the shadows the skin across his massive chest looked as gray as elephant hide.
“You got it,” I said.
“But that’s not what’s bothering you, is it?”
“At the crime scene, I felt I’d been there before. I knew where everything was in Chalons’s guesthouse.”
“It’s called déjà vu. Look at me, Streak. You were drunk all weekend. You clean those kinds of thoughts out of your head.”
“There’s blood on the CD. Chalons’s stereo was turned on but the CD slot was empty.”
“You’re incapable of hurting a woman. Somebody is setting you up. Don’t buy into it.”
“Nobody set me up, Clete. I got drunk and had a blackout. I could have done anything.”
“Shut up and give me time to think. This punk Chalons actually hit you in the face?”
That night, just before going to bed, I received a call from Jimmie. He was on his cell phone, and in the background I could hear the sounds of wind blowing and waves bursting against a hard surface. “Where are you?” I said.
“At the southern tip of the island in Key West. That dude Lou Kale is down here,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“A couple of girls I used to know work the yacht trade here. They say Kale and his wife run an escort service out of Miami. Or at least a guy who sounds like a lot like Kale.”
“What about Ida?”
“Hit a dead end. I got to be back in New Orleans tomorrow. I’ll see you later in the week. Anything happening there?”
I had to wet my lips before I spoke. “I had a slip. But I’m all right now.” I cleared my throat and waited for his response, my fingers opening and closing on the receiver.
“You get in any trouble?” he asked.
“I can’t remember what I did or where I was. Honoria Chalons is dead. I think maybe I was there when she died. I can’t remember and I don’t know how to get inside my own head.”
In the silence I could hear the waves smacking against a beach, then receding with a sucking sound, like the underpinnings of the earth itself sliding down the continental shelf.
THE FIRST PERSON I SAW in my office Tuesday morning was Koko Hebert. He may have showered since the previous day, but I couldn’t tell it. Twenty seconds after he closed the door behind him, the entirety of the room smelled like testosterone and beer sweat.
He sat on a chair with the posture of a man sitting on a toilet. “The post indicates the Chalons girl wasn’t raped, although she did have sexual intercourse with someone in the twenty-four period before she died,” he said. “She also had enough cocaine in her to anesthetize the city of New York.”
“Anything that could connect her homicide to the Baton Rouge guy?”
“I would have already told you that, wouldn’t I?” he said.
“I guess so, Koko,” I replied. I tried to be patient and remember that the autopsy had been performed by the forensic pathologist in St. Mary Parish, and that Koko was probably doing the best he could.
“There was an incision at the top of her forehead, just inside the hairline. It was done postmortem, in the shape of a cross,” he said.
His eyes were fixed on mine, his nostrils swelling as he breathed.
“The Chalons family coat of arms?” I said.
“You’re the detective. I just run the meat lockers.”
Don’t say anything more, I told myself. “I’ll probably regret this, but did I ever do anything to offend you?” I said.
“Let me work up a list and I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks for coming by,” I said.
I turned my attention back to the paperwork on my desk. I thought he would be gone by the time I looked up again. Instead, he stood in the center of the room, breathing loudly, emanating an odor that was close to eye-watering. “My son by my first marriage was a private first class in the United States Marine Corps. He was killed two months ago outside Baghdad. What was left of his Humvee wouldn’t make a bucket of bolts. He was nineteen fucking years old.”
He stared into space, as though he were trying to puzzle out the implication of his own words.
AT 10:00 a.m., Helen and I and the Jeanerette chief of police and two St. Mary Parish detectives watched the videotape from the surveillance camera that had been mounted on an oak tree in the Chalonses’ backyard. The frames from Saturday night showed Honoria Chalons going to and coming from the guesthouse several times. The footage was grainy, the images and sense of movement elliptic, lit intermittently by the electricity in the clouds, the lens sometimes obscured by rain and blowing leaves. At 9:04 p.m. a man wearing an abbreviated rain slicker with a hood entered the guesthouse. What occurred next would remain a matter of conjecture.
The camera had been positioned so that its lens covered most of the yard but only part of the house. Shadows seemed to break across the house’s windows, indicating activity inside but little else. At 9:09 the figure in the raincoat left by the French doors and disappeared from the film. There was a momentary glint of light on metal inside the figure’s open raincoat, but the reflection could have been from a belt buckle.
Then, at 11:05 p.m., a second figure crossed the yard, tapped on the door, and entered the house. The figure wore a dark hat with a brim wilted by rainwater, and a coat with a hood that hung loosely down the back. At 11:13 the figure left. It was impossible to tell the gender of either visitor. Neither had looked up at the camera. The hand of the second visitor, who had tapped on the door, appeared to be white.
Doogie Dugas, the Jeanerette chief of police, clicked on the overhead light. He was a middle-aged, close-cropped, gray-haired man who affected the dress and manner of a western lawman. The fact that he was wise enough to avoid speaking in front of microphones had allowed him a long administrative career in small-town law enforcement. But now his taciturnity was of no service to him and it was obvious he was having trouble dealing with the magnitude of the case that had been dropped into his lap. It was also obvious he had not talked to his own forensic pathologist.
“Koko Hebert told you the killer cut a cross in Miss Honoria’s head?” he said.
“Right,” Helen said.
“’Cause maybe the killer don’t like the Chalonses and he put the cross on Miss Honoria ’cause the cross is on Mr. Raphael’s family seal?” he said.
“Right,” Helen said.
Doogie pursed his mouth and closed and opened his eyes, like a man for whom the world was simply too much. “Cooh,” he said, using the favorite Cajun expression for surprise or awe. “Know how many people that might be?”
Then he winced at his own show of candor about the people whom he loyally served.
But I didn’t care about the problems Doogie Dugas might be experiencing. I could not get out of my mind the type of raincoat worn by both visitors to Val Chalons’s guesthouse, nor the wilted flop hat the second figure had worn. They were exactly of the kind stuffed behind the front seat of my truck.
I WENT TO AN AA MEETING at noon and another after work. But by sunset I was
back into my problems regarding Molly Boyle. For the first time in my life I felt the abiding sense of shame and hypocrisy that I suspect accompanies the ethos of the occasional adulterer. But desire and need, coupled with genuine love of another, are not easily argued out of the room by morality.
If I genuinely loved Molly Boyle, why had I taken her to an off-road motel that almost advertised itself as the perfect situation for a sweaty tryst? If you loved a woman, you didn’t make her a partner in what others would inevitably deem a seedy and scandalous affair, I told myself. Most women have a level of trust in the men whom they love that men seldom earn or deserve. As a rule, we do not appreciate that level of trust until it’s destroyed. In my case, the fact that I had put Molly’s career and reputation at risk indicated that desire and need had not only trumped morality but also concern for the woman I said I loved.
I kept those lofty thoughts in my mind for about fifteen minutes, then picked up the phone and called her. I talked about the meetings I had attended that day, about the fine weather we were having, about the fact my system seemed to be free of booze. But it was quickly apparent that neither of us was entirely focused on what I was saying. “Do you want me to come over?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, my voice weak.
“If you don’t feel comfortable with that, we can go to the motel in Morgan City,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
What I was doing was no good. It was foolish to try and convince myself that it was. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“I’m leaving the Order, Dave. I’ve already talked with the bishop. My leaving doesn’t have anything to do with us. It’s been coming a long time. Stay there. I’ll be over shortly.”
She hung up before I could reply. But I was out front, in the yard, when she arrived a half hour later, happy in a way that perhaps I shouldn’t have been. She looked beautiful stepping out of her car, too, in straw sandals and pleated khakis and a blouse stitched with cacti and flowers, a big hand-tooled leather purse slung over her shoulder.
“Hi, big stuff,” she said.
“Hi, yourself,” I replied.
I fixed coffee and hot milk and slices of pound cake for us, and served it on a tray in the living room. We sat on the couch and watched part of a movie on television, while the streetlights came on outside and kids sailed by on bicycles. I touched the back of her neck and clasped her hand, and we sat there like married people do, with no sense of urgency about the passage of time.
She told me about her missionary years in Nicaragua and Guatemala. But without being told I already knew the nature of her experience there, in the same way you intuitively know when people have seen organized murder on a large scale, or have stood with hundreds of others inside a barbed-wire compound or languished in a cell run by individuals who are probably not made from the same glue as the rest of us. Their eyes contain memories they seldom share; they seem to exemplify Herodotus’ depiction of man’s greatest burden, namely, that foreknowledge of human folly never saves us from its consequences.
But why brood upon the bloody work of neocolonial empires on a summer night on a leaf-blown street that belongs back in the year 1945? Why not fall in love with the world all over again and not contend so vigorously with it? Outside, the night was unseasonably cool, scented with shade-blooming flowers, the giant live oaks along the sidewalks lit by streetlamps, Spanish moss lifting in the breeze. Molly Boyle and I made love in the bedroom, in the slow and unhurried fashion of people who are secure in the knowledge the two of them, together, have legitimate claim on the next day, and that mortality and the demands of the world are no longer of great importance. What better moment could human beings create for themselves? Let the world, at least for tonight, find its own answers for a change, I told myself.
I never asked Molly about other men or other lives she might have led. But her attitudes and manner reminded me of other nuns I had known over the years, particularly those who had gone to jail for their political beliefs or been exposed to the risk of martyrdom in Central America. They seem to have no fear, or least none that I could see. As a consequence, they didn’t argue or defend, and the church to which they belonged was one they carried silently inside themselves.
Molly Boyle might have been educated, but she was a blue-collar girl at heart, her body thick from work, her breasts full, her nipples as big as half dollars, the honesty and love in her face as she looked down at me untouched by any mark of vanity or self-interest. When she came, her face softened and her eyes seemed to look inward, as though she were experiencing a tender thought that was almost unbearable; then her body grew tense, her mouth opening, and she came a second time, her arms propped stiffly on each side of me, her skin moist and ruddy, her womb scalding.
I put her nipples in my mouth and kissed the two red moles on her stomach, just below her navel. Her head lay on the pillow, the points of her hair damp with perspiration, her breath loud in the silence. She ran her hand through my hair and cupped it on the back of my neck.
“Was it Ernest Hemingway who wrote about feeling the earth move?” she said.
“That was the guy,” I replied.
“Boy, he had it right,” she said.
Our faces were turned one to the other on the pillow. I could hear the wind in the trees, Tripod running on his chain, a boat blowing its horn as it approached the drawbridge on Burke Street. Then I heard other sounds—car doors slamming, feet running through the yard, someone shouting unintelligibly behind the house.
Molly raised up on one elbow, her eyes fastened on mine. “What’s that?” she said.
A shadow went past the window, then another one. “Cops,” I replied.
I got up from the bed and put on my khakis. A fist hammered on the front door. When I jerked it open, I looked into the slightly distended oval face of Doogie Dugas, who stood on the gallery, with two uniformed Jeanerette cops behind him. The yard was full of television cameras and lights.
“I got a search warrant for the premises,” Doogie said.
“You don’t have any jurisdiction here. Get off my property,” I said.
“It’s signed by an Iberia judge. Step aside,” Doogie said, as though performing on a stage set.
“Have you gone crazy?” I said.
“Your fingerprints was all over the crime scene, Dave. I ain’t got no control over this,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Two television cameramen followed him in, their battery-powered lights flooding the inside of my home, their lenses focusing now on Molly Boyle, who stood speechless, half-undressed, in the bedroom doorway.
Then I saw Val Chalons walk into the apron of light surrounding the gallery, his face suffused with good cheer. “This is just for openers, rumdum,” he said.
Chapter 18
WHILE DOOGIE DUGAS and his minions tore my house apart, I was transported to jail in St. Mary Parish. It was extralegal, almost a kidnapping, but legality can be a matter of definition, particularly when some of the players own vast amounts of money. Actually, few of the events that night were aimed at solving the murder of Honoria Chalons. I believed the agenda was to dismember my life.
Television programming in Acadiana was interrupted to show live coverage of my house being searched. I was shown being spread-eagled against a cruiser, shaken down, and hooked up. Molly was captured on camera leaving the house, her clothes and hair in disarray, refusing to answer questions asked by reporters who identified her as a Catholic nun. A plainclothes state police officer was interviewed on site about the possible connection between the death of Honoria Chalons and the homicides committed by the Baton Rouge serial killer.
The sweep of the tarbrush didn’t end there, either. The cameras were waiting when I was taken into the parish prison at Franklin. A television newsman, holding a microphone in my face, said, “Is it true you’re being called a person of interest in the death by strangulation of a New Orleans prostitute by the name of Holly Blankenship?
”
Another asked, “Can you comment on the fact that under questionable circumstances you have shot and killed at least five people while serving as a police officer?”
The aim of the reporters, none of whom I knew, was obviously to slander. They were good at it, too. Their questions were predicated on distortions or flawed syllogisms that were presented as given facts. To try to defend oneself in those circumstances is to legitimize the question. To remain silent seems an admission of guilt. I was beginning to understand how character assassination can be a telecommunications art form. “Can you explain why a Catholic nun was in your home at the time of your arrest?” the first reporter asked.
“I’m under arrest because I shoved a Jeanerette detective who was wrecking my house,” I said.
But my attempt at evasion was that of an amateur. “Was the nun Sister Molly Boyle?” the reporter said, working Molly’s name into the story for the second time.
I pushed by him, my wrists cuffed behind me, my unshaved jaws like coal smut inside the blinding glare of strobe lights.
A jail is not a geographical place. A jail is a condition. It rings with the sounds of steel clanging against steel, people yelling down stone corridors, toilets flushing, a screw losing it after an inmate throws feces through the bars into his face. Sometimes a gigantic biker arrives wrapped in leg and waist chains, wiped out on meth, his body crawling with stink, his beard and hair as wild as a lion’s mane. The elevator stalls between floors. Later, the cops say he went apeshit. The walls shake, and when the elevator doors open, the biker is curled on the floor, bleeding from the mouth and ears, his eyes rolled up in his head from the voltage injected into him by a stun gun.
The external world and the inside of a can—state, federal, city, county, or parish—do not have connection points based on reason, humanity, psychiatry, or penology. Jails represent human and societal failure at its worst, nothing more, nothing less. Jails are a shortstop way of separating aberrant and undesirable people from the rest of us and rendering them as invisible as possible. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there. The people who believe jails rehabilitate usually need jobs.
Last Car to Elysian Fields Page 87