Crusader's Cross (12 page)

“What’s she got on you, partner?”

He put his hands on his hips, like a drill instructor, and looked sideways out a window, as though the room was too small for the level of anger he needed to express. Then he snuffed down in his nose and shook it off. “Give my dad a break, will you?”

“He’s a heart patient but he smokes cigars?” I said.

“You’re a beaut, Dave,” he said.

Molly Boyle’s note was a simple one:
Please call. Thanks
—
Molly B.
I rang her office number and was told she was mowing the grass and would return my call later. But why wait, I asked myself, and headed down the road in a cruiser toward Jeanerette.

Then I had to ask myself a more serious question: What was so urgent about seeing Molly Boyle? Why not just wait for her call? The answer that started to suggest itself was one I quickly put out of my mind.

When I pulled in to her agency I saw her seated on a tractor, towing a grass-cutter though a field of buttercups, a little black boy in the seat with her. She turned at the end of a long swath, then saw me walking toward her and shut off the engine. She wore a baseball cap and cotton gloves and a sleeveless blouse that was peppered with sweat. The tops of her arms were dusty and sprinkled with sun freckles. She introduced the little black boy as Tee Bleu Bergeron. “His daddy is our best birdhouse builder,” she said.

“Your father works for the Chalons family?” I said.

“Yes, suh, he work for Mr. Raphael. We live right up the bayou from the big house,” he replied.

The little boy was many generations removed from antebellum days, but he still obeyed the same custom of referring to the main building on a plantation as “the big house,” just as his antecedents had. Sister Molly asked him to go to her office and wait for her. “You’ve been a good helper, Tee Bleu. I’ll drive you home in a little bit,” she said.

“Why is he called ‘Little Blue’?” I asked.

“His daddy says the umbilical cord was wrapped around his throat when he was born. I think he has some brain damage. But he’s a sweet little guy. Why’d you ask?” Sister Molly said.

“I was just curious.” But my answer was not an honest one. The little boy did not look like his father, the black man named Andre Bergeron. He was light-skinned, with high cheekbones, and liquid brown eyes and jet-black straight hair. He looked like Honoria Chalons.

“You asked me yesterday about a woman named Ida —” Sister Molly began.

“Ida Durbin,” I said.

“Yes. Did something happen to her?”

“I think she may have been murdered many years ago.”

“Was she a prostitute?”

“How did you know?” I asked.

“I didn’t. But you said the Chalonses would like to forget about her. I think the Chalonses have secrets. I think one of their secrets is their involvement with prostitution. So I should have spoken up when you asked about this Durbin woman.”

“What do you know about the Chalonses and prostitution, Sister?”

“Call me Molly. I grew up in Port Arthur. My father was career army and a policeman. He always said the brothels in Galveston were owned by the Chalons and Giacano families. Raphael Chalons is infamous for his sexual behavior.” She stopped, obviously conflicted with herself and her own
motivations. “I don’t feel very comfortable with any of this, Detective Robicheaux. I think I’ve said too much.”

“Call me Dave.”

The field fell into shadow and the wind came up and wrinkled the bayou and flattened the uncut wildflowers in the field. She removed her cap and blew a wisp of hair out of one eye. Her face looked dilated in the heat. There were beads of field dirt around her neck and a throbbing insect bite on one cheek. She reminded me of a countrywoman of years ago. In a way, she reminded me of my mother.

“I think you’ve done a lot for poor people in this area, Sister Molly. I think you and your friends are what the Church is all about,” I said, realizing I still could not bring myself to call her by her first name.

Her eyes fastened on mine and her mouth parted slightly. “Thank you,” she said.

The silent moment that followed was one neither of us had chosen. I looked out at the bayou and the Spanish moss straightening in the trees along the banks. She fitted her cap back on her head and took the keys out of the ignition for no reason, then tried to reinsert them in the slot. They dropped from her fingers into the uncut grass below the tractor.

“I’m all thumbs some days,” she said.

I found the keys for her and placed them in her hand, my fingertips touching the graininess of her skin and the wetness in the cup of her palm. On the way back to New Iberia, I tried to keep an empty place in the center of my mind and not think the thoughts I was thinking.

Question: What can dumb and fearful people always be counted on to do?

Answer: To try to control and manipulate everyone in their environment.

Question: What is the tactic used by these same dumb people as they try to control others?

Answer: They lie.

That night I got a call from a man out of my past, an anachronism from a more primitive time by the name of Robert Cobb, also known as Bad Texas Bob. Years ago in Louisiana, when a convict escaped from a work camp, the state police always assigned the recapture to Bad Texas Bob. Bob’s lifetime record was eight for eight, all DOA. He thrived on gunsmoke and blood splatter, and if he ever experienced remorse for his deeds, I never saw any indication of it.

There used to be an all-night café in New Orleans where cops of all kinds hung out. Pimps, wiseguys, junkies, and jackrollers knew to take their business up the street. One night an out-of-town black man walked in, laid a .38 inside a folded newspaper on the counter, and told the cashier to empty the register. Bad Texas Bob climbed out a side window, waited at the entrance for the stickup man to emerge, and blew his brains all over the glass panels of the revolving door.

Over the phone Bob’s voice sounded like wet sand sliding through a drainpipe. “Hear you’re working a cold case on a whore gone missing,” he said.

“Yeah, something like that,” I said.

“Galveston, about 1958 or ‘59?”

“You have some information for me, Bob?”

“Maybe. Galveston is where I started out. I’m having a couple of drinks in Broussard. Hey, guys like us were the real cops, weren’t we?”

No, we weren’t, I thought. But I had learned long ago not to argue with those who need to revise the past.

I drove on the old Lafayette highway to the little town of Broussard, crossed the train tracks, and parked in front of a low-roofed bar whose cracked windows were held together with silver tape and framed with Christmas tree lights. The interior was dark, the air refrigerated, the cigarette smoke curling through an exhaust fan in back. Bad Texas Bob was at the bar, hunkered over a shot glass and draft beer, wearing a gray suit, string tie, cowboy boots, and a short-brim Stetson canted on the side of his head.

He wore expensive jewelry, smoked gold-tipped, lavender cigarettes, and tried to affect an aura of contentment and prosperity. But the years had not been kind to Bob. His teeth were as long as a horse’s, his face emaciated, the backs of his hands brown with liver spots. Bad Texas Bob was the nightmare that every cop fears he might become.

“You still in the Dr Pepper club?” he said.

“No other place will have me. How you been doing, Bob?”

“I do a little consulting work. I work part-time at the casino in Lake Charles. Billy Joe Pitts says you were interested in a whore by the name of —” He snapped his fingers at the air.

“Ida Durbin,” I said.

He tossed back his whiskey and chased it with the draft beer, then wiped the salt from the beer glass off his mouth. “Yeah, that was her name. I knew her. What do you want to know?”

His eyes were level with mine — watery, iniquitous, harboring thoughts or memories of a kind you never want to guess at, the skin at the corners as wrinkled as a turtle’s.

“What happened to her, Bob?” I said.

“Nothing, as far as I know. People who run cathouses don’t kill their whores, if that’s what you were thinking.”

He pointed for the bartender to refill his shot glass. He seemed to be disconnected from our conversation now, but when I glanced at the bar mirror I saw his eyes looking back at me. “She had sandy hair, nice-looking, tall gal? I remember her. Didn’t nothing happen to her. I would have knowed about it,” he said.

But Bob’s confidence level had slipped and he was talking too fast.

“Her pimp was named Lou Kale. Remember a lowlife by that name?” I said.

“I never worked Vice. I just used to see this little gal around the island, is all.”

But I remembered another story connected to Bob and some of his colleagues, one I had always hoped was exaggerated or apocryphal, in the same way you hope that stories about pedophilia among the clergy or financial corruption in your own family are untrue.

A notorious Baton Rouge madam by the name of Vicki Rochon used to run a house specializing in oral sex. A fundamentalist Christian group was about to close her down when the local cops offered her a deal: Vicki and her girls could take a vacation in Panama City, then return to town in a couple of months and their business would not be interrupted again. No money was involved. Vicki became an invaluable snitch and personally provided free ones for the cops. As a bonus, her son, who was doing hard time in Angola’s Camp J, was transferred to an honor farm. Bad Texas Bob became one of Vicki’s most ardent free patrons.

“Thanks for passing on the information, Bob. But if I were you, I’d let your friend Pitts drown in his own shit. He’s on a pad for the Chalons family. Did you know that?” I said.

“I was trying to do you a favor, for old times’ sake. Screw Pitts.” Bob knocked back his whiskey and drew in on his cigarette, the whites of his eyes threaded with tiny veins.

“Let me buy you a round,” I said.

“I’m covered.”

“See you around, partner,” I said.

“You might think I’m pulling your joint, but I remember a Galveston whore by the name of Ida Whatever. She played a fiddle. No, that wasn’t it. She played a mandolin. Played the fire out of it.”

“Say that again?”

But he had nothing to add. Bad Texas Bob had outsmarted me. Like all corrupt people, he had wrapped a piece of truth inside a lie. To try to discern the fact from the lie was to empower the agenda of a classical manipulator, I told myself. I left Bob to his booze in Broussard, wondering if I had just revisited my alcoholic past or seen my future.

CHAPTER NINE

The coroner, Koko Hebert, was waiting for me when I got to work Thursday morning. He dropped his great weight down ponderously in a chair and fanned his face with his hat. His skin was flushed, his beachball of a stomach rising up and down as he breathed. A package of cigarettes protruded from his shirt pocket. He was probably the most unhealthy-looking human specimen I had ever seen. “How’s life, Koko?” I said.

“Burning up out there,” he said.

He pulled his tropical shirt off his chest and shook the cloth. I could smell an odor like talcum and stale antiperspirant wafting off his skin. “The contents of the DOA’s purse, you got a list in your file?” he said.

“What about it?”

“Were there car keys in there, house keys on a chain, maybe a penlight on a chain, something like that?” he asked.

“Yeah, car keys,” I said.

“On a chain?”

“No, as I remember, they were on a ring. They’re in an evidence locker,” I replied.
 

He held up a small Ziploc bag. Inside it was a thin piece of brass chain, no more than an inch long, with very tiny links. “Maybe this fell out of her clothes. I’m not sure. One of the paramedics found it in the body bag,” he said.

“What are you getting at?”

“You said something about the DOA I couldn’t forget. You said a woman who’d swallow her own wedding ring might also figure a way to tell us who killed her. So I wondered about this chain.”

It was obvious humility did not come easily to Koko Hebert, and I was reminded of George Orwell’s admonition that people are always better than we think they are. Koko fiddled with his Panama hat, then flipped the Ziploc bag and chain on my desk. “Did Mack Bertrand get ahold of you yet?” he asked.

Mack was our forensic chemist out at the lab. I told Koko I had not heard from him.

“The DOA’s clothes had small traces of grease and rubber on them,” he said.

“She was inside the trunk of a car?” I said.

“That’d be my guess. Give me a call if you need anything else.” He stood up from his chair, the bottom of his stomach like a
giant watermelon inside his linen slacks.

“There is one other thing, Koko. Why do you always give Helen a bad time? Why not cut her some slack?” I said.

“She’s a dyke trying to do a man’s job. Get a life, Robicheaux,” he replied.

Lesson learned? Don’t expect too many miracles in one day.

Five minutes later, Helen buzzed my extension. “I just got a call from Raphael Chalons. Clete Purcel was out at his house. Know anything about that?” she said.

“No,” I replied.

“Then why was he out there?”

“Clete’s uncontrollable sometimes. I’ve already talked to him. He doesn’t listen.”

There was silence on the line. I wanted to bite my tongue off. “Talked to him about what? What’s he done, Dave?”

“Made a home call on Billy Joe Pitts.”

“And?”

“I think he might have dropped a set of weights on Pitts’s chest.”

“I just don’t believe this.”

“That Clete went after Pitts?”

“No, that I’m having this conversation. The next time I rehire you, just put a bullet in my brain. In the meantime, straighten out this shit with Chalons.”

“Why not tell Chalons to kiss your ass? He’s not even in our jurisdiction.”

“Bwana go now. Bwana write report and put it on my desk when he get back.”

Clete’s P.I. office was on Main, in an old brick building hard by the old jail, the front shaded by a solitary oak tree growing out of the sidewalk. A bell tinkled above the door when I went inside. He was sitting at a metal desk, in the middle of a large room that was bare except for two file cabinets, flipping through the pages of a notebook that he always carried in his shirt pocket. “Glad you dropped by. I did some more checking on Billy Joe Pitts and that casino over in Lake Charles.” He looked at the expression on my face and raised his eyebrows.
“What?”