Crusader's Cross (21 page)

“No, that’s not necessary. Tee Neg, did you hear me?”

But he had already hung up. I swallowed, already envisioning his arrival and the hours if not days of abstinence before my metabolism would have any semblance of normalcy.

Some people say you pick up the dirty boogie where you left it off. Others say you pick it up where you would have been had you never gotten off it. I signed out of the office before Tee Neg arrived and drove through a blinding rainstorm to a bar in the Atchafalaya Basin, where people still spoke French, did not travel farther than two parishes from the place of their birth, and believed, in their incurable innocence, that the smokey, green-canopied swamplands of South Louisiana would always be there for them.

I do not remember Saturday at all. At least twenty-four hours of my life had disappeared, just like a large decayed tooth excised from the gums. Later, the odometer on my truck would show I had driven sixty-three miles I could not account for. When I woke Sunday morning, I was in a cabin that was dry and snug, cool from a breeze that inched along the floor. Through the window was a vast, stump-filled lake dimpled by rain. The sky was gray, and when the wind blew the cypress trees on the far side of the lake, the canopy turned a bright green against the somberness of the day, as though the trees drew their color from the wind.

Inside my head I could hear the original 1946 recording of Harry Choates’s “Jolie Blon,” the song that will always remain for me the most haunting, unforgettable lament ever recorded. Had I dreamed the song? Had I been with someone who had played it over and over again? I had no idea.

I sat for a long time on the side of the bunk bed in the cabin. The flop hat I wore on fishing trips and my raincoat lay on a chair. My skin had no sensation, as though it had been refrigerated or dry-frozen; my hands were stiff and as thick-feeling as cardboard. I didn’t have the shakes or sweats, nor were there nightmarish images painted on the backs of my eyelids. Instead, I felt nothing — no hunger, thirst, or erotic need, neither guilt nor remorse, as though I had simply ceased to exist.

My holstered .45 rested on a table, next to a bottle of Scotch, a paper plate containing the remains of a fried-shrimp dinner, a scattered deck of playing cards, and three empty glasses. The .45 was mine; the rest I had no memory of.

I stood up from the bed, then felt my knees cave and the blood drain from my head. I lay back down, my head buried in a pillow that smelled of unwashed hair, my jaws like emery paper.

I slept until early afternoon, and woke trembling and sick, willing to cut off my fingers one at a time with tin snips for the Scotch I had seen earlier.

Except it was gone.

A Creole woman, with one eye that looked like a milky-blue marble pushed deep into the side of her face, sat on a chair by the door, her feet in flip-flops, her wash-faded print dress puffing from a floor fan under her. “Where you going?” she said.

“To the restroom,” I replied.

“There ain’t no restroom. The privy’s in back. Don’t go up to the bar, Mr. Dave.”

“How do you know me?”

“I belong to your church in Jeanerette. I see you at Mass every Sunday,” she replied. Her face was lopsided, perhaps misshaped at birth. Her good eye held on me just a moment, then looked away.

“Why are you here? Why are you watching me?” I said.

“You had bad men in here. Poachers and men carrying knives. What you doin’ to yourself, a Christian man, you?”

I used the outbuilding in back. My truck was parked in a clump of gum trees, the paint and body unmarked by an accident. My credit cards and most of my money were still in my wallet. On the lakefront was a bar nailed together from unpainted scrap wood and corrugated tin. I could hear music inside and through a window see men drinking long-necked beers. The wind shifted, and I could smell the fish in the lake, barbecue grease dripping into an outdoor fire, ozone from another storm building out on the Gulf.

Perhaps it was a happy day after all. Maybe nothing truly bad had happened because of my brief fling with the dirty boogie. Maybe all I needed was a couple of beers to straighten out the kinks, medicate the snakes a bit, whisk the spiders back into a dusty corner. What was wrong with that? I was not sure where I was, but the woods were hung with air vines, the oaks and swamp maples and persimmon trees widely spaced, the coulees layered with yellow and black leaves. It was Louisiana before someone decided to insert it in the grinder.

“Oh, there you are,” I heard Molly Boyle say behind me. She and the Chalons family handyman, Andre Bergeron, walked down a leafy knoll on the edge of the lake. “We were watching the alligators in the shallows. How about something to eat?” she said.

She drove with me in the truck back toward New Iberia. Her friend, the black man, followed. At Jeanerette, I saw his car turn off the highway. I had hardly spoken since leaving the fish camp deep in the Atchafalaya Basin. Each time we passed a bar I felt as though a life preserver were being pulled from my grasp. “How’d you know where I was?” I asked.

“The lady who was watching you called me. Her husband owns the bar,” she replied.

“Why was the Chalonses’ handyman with you?” I said.

“Andre helps me in any way he can. He’s always been protective of us,” she replied. “Don’t be angry, Dave.”

“I’m not. I just got jammed up,” I said irrationally, my hands tightening on the steering wheel, my breath a noxious fog.

Molly was silent. When I looked over at her, she was staring out the side window. “I’ll go to a meeting with you,” she said.

“I’d better drop you by your house,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen, trooper. If you try to pick up a drink today, I’m going to break your arm.”

I looked at her again, in a more cautious way.

We drove down East Main toward my house, the nineteenth-century homes and manicured lawns and wet trees rushing past me, all of it curiously unchanged, a study in Sunday-afternoon normalcy and permanence to which I had returned like an impaired outsider. I pulled the truck deep into the driveway, past the porte cochere, so that it was almost hidden from the street by the trees and bamboo. I cut the engine and opened the driver’s door. When I did, a shiny compact disk fell to the ground. Just next to the edge was a tiny reddish-brown smear that looked like blood.

“What’s that?” Molly said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what it is.” Vainly, I tried to explain to myself where the CD had come from or who could have placed it in my truck. I touched the crusted smear on the surface and was sure I was touching blood. I slipped the CD in my pants pocket and unlocked the back door, my hands shaking.

Even if Molly had not been with me, my home offered no succor for the drunk teetering on the edge of delirium tremens. I had returned all the booze I’d purchased at Winn-Dixie. There was not even a bottle of vanilla extract in a cabinet. But at least my brother was not home and did not have to see me in the condition I was in.

The only other consolation I had was the fact my bender had not hurt my animals. When I bought my house I had created a small swinging door in the back entrance so Tripod and Snuggs, in case of emergencies, could get to a bag of dry food on the floor. But I couldn’t take credit for having thought about them. A drunk on a drunk thinks about nothing except staying drunk.

I got in the shower, turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, and stayed there until the tank was almost empty. Then I dressed in fresh clothes and shaved while my hand trembled on the razor. I could hear Molly clanking pans in the kitchen.

I went into the living room and loaded the CD into my stereo. There was no seal or logo on it, and I suspected it contained nothing more than an Internet download of music someone had not bothered to pay for. But who had left it in my truck? The poachers the Creole woman had mentioned?

I pushed the “play” button on the stereo and the long-dead voice of Harry Choates, singing his signature song, “Jolie Blon,” filled the room. That’s why I had heard those words over and over in my head when I had woken up that morning, I told myself. Perhaps someone with a cut on his hand had given me Choates’s song and I had probably played it repeatedly in my truck’s stereo. A blackout didn’t necessarily mean I had committed monstrous acts. I had to control my imagination. Yes, that was it. It was all a matter of personal control.

Then a second song began to play, one titled “Two Bottles of Wine,” which had been written by Delbert McClinton for Emmylou Harris in the late 1970s. But the singer was not Emmylou. The band was raucous, the recording probably done in a bar or at a party, and the voice on it was the same voice as on the old 45-rpm recording Jimmie believed to have been cut by Ida Durbin.

“Everything in there okay, Dave?” Molly called from the kitchen.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Monday morning the Garden of Gethsemane was the 7:35 traffic backup at the railroad crossing. It also included a horn blowing like a shard of glass in the ear, the hot smell of tar and diesel fumes, undigested food that lay greasy and cold in the stomach, waiting to fountain out of my throat. Then, to demonstrate I was in control of things and not bothered by the metabolic disaster inside my body, I blew my horn at a passing streak of freight cars.

I had attended an AA meeting the previous night, determined to leave my weekend bender behind, and this morning I had dressed in pressed slacks, shined shoes, a striped tie, and a white shirt that crinkled with light. But as I walked into the office I knew my affectation of freshness and confidence was the cheap ruse of a willful man who had thrown away years of sobriety, betrayed his friends in AA, and perhaps mortgaged a long series of tomorrows.

By midmorning I could feel a tension band begin to tighten on the right side of my head. I constantly touched at my scalp, as though I were wearing a hat that had begun to shrink. I chewed gum, washed my face with cold water in the lavatory, and tried not to think about where I might go when the clock finally struck noon. But that problem was about to be taken away from me.

The chief of police in Jeanerette was Doogie Dugas. He was not a bad fellow, simply a showboat and political sycophant. But like most sycophants he was inept and lived in fear of people who had power. I was walking past Helen’s open door when I saw her talking on the telephone, snapping her fingers at me. “Hang on, Chief, Dave Robicheaux just walked in,” she said. “I’m going to put you on the speakerphone. Dave’s the lead detective in our own investigation.”

“— get the impression Mr. Val isn’t a big fan of Dave Robicheaux,” Doogie’s voice said.

“Uh, you’re on the speakerphone now, Chief,” Helen said.

There was a pause. “You got any evidence this guy is local?” Doogie said.

“Which guy?” I said.

“The Baton Rouge serial killer,” he said.

“No, we don’t have any evidence to that effect. What’s going on?” I said.

“What’s going on is it looks like a butcher shop in there. The sheriff and me got road stops set up on the parish line, but I’m gonna need some lab hep here,” he replied.

“Sir, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Honoria Chalons, somebody cut all over her. I never seen anyt’ing like this. Y’all coming over here or not?” he said.

Helen and I and our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, drove to the Chalons home on the far side of Jeanerette. The homicide had taken place in the guesthouse sometime during the weekend, when Val and his father were in New Orleans on business. Val claimed he had returned shortly after nine on Monday morning and had found the body.

Crime scene tape had already been strung through the trees, sealing off the immediate area around the guesthouse, which was located by a swimming pool that had long ago been abandoned to mold and the scales of dead vines. Crime scene technicians from three parishes were already inside the guesthouse, photographing the body, the walls, the furniture, the tile floors., the glass in the windows, even the ceiling.

Honoria was nude, her body reclining on a white sofa, the incision in her throat so deep she was almost decapitated. But the wounds in the rest of her body had bled so profusely it was obvious that the mortal blow was not the first one the killer had struck.

“Good Lord,” I heard Mack say softly beside me.

The guesthouse was actually the residence of Val Chalons, and so far no one had offered an explanation for Honoria’s presence there. The initial assault seemed to have occurred just as she was about to enter the shower. One strip of blood angled down the wall mirror and there was a smear against the doorjamb, as though she had bumped against it on her way to the living room. A second attack must have taken place in front of a huge television screen and stereo center, causing her to lose large amounts of blood that probably drained over the tops of her feet.

The oddity that no one could explain was the pattern of the footprints. They were evenly spaced, firmly patterned in the rug, as though she had still been in control of her movements and was unhurried about her destination. Mack believed she had sat down with deliberation on the couch, and had lain back with her head on a cushion, perhaps even lifting her chin in anticipation of the blow across the throat.

The front door had been unlocked. There was no sign of a weapon on the premises.

I looked at the white furniture, the black marble in the wet bar, the gleaming stainless-steel perfection of the kitchen area, the stereo player that was still turned on, its dials glowing with a soft green luminescence, and I felt I had been there before. But perhaps I was just remembering the interior of Val Chalons’s office at the television station in Lafayette, which was similar in decor, I told myself.

Koko Hebert, our coroner, had gone outside, under a tree beyond the crime scene tape, to smoke a cigarette. His clothes smelled like an ashtray. His lungs made sounds as if he had just labored up a mountainside.

“Was she raped?” I said.

“No marks around the vagina or thighs that I can see,” he replied.