Crusader's Cross (30 page)

“Do any of you gentlemen care to tell me what happened here?” Chalons said.

“Somebody got carried away. There’s no good hat to put on it,” Bob Cobb said.

“I won’t abide this.”

“Sir?” Bob Cobb said.

“I won’t have a young woman held in captivity or beaten on my property,” Chalons said, his eyes lighting in a way that made Bob Cobb blink. He mentioned the name of an infamous Cosa Nostra figure in New Orleans, a man who was literally given the state of Louisiana by Frank Costello and United States Senator Huey P. Long. “This woman and Lou Kale are going to leave with me today. You gentlemen can use the house through tonight. But by ten in the morning you’ll be gone. I have no hard feelings against any of you.
But you will not have use of this property again. Thank you for your courtesy in listening to me.”

An hour later, Lou Kale and Ida Durbin were aboard Raphael Chalons’s cabin cruiser, headed southwest through a squall toward the Florida coast, the waves bursting into ropes of foam on the bow. The cabin in which she slept that night vibrated with the reassuring throb of the engines, and when she woke in the early hours, unsure of where she was, she looked through a porthole and saw the sleek, steel-skin bodies of porpoises sliding through the water next to the boat. Their steadiness of purpose, the hardness of their bodies inside the waves, the fact they were on the same course as she, filled her with a sense of harmony and confidence and power.

Lou Kale slept in the bunk across from her. His sheet had fallen down over his hip, and his exposed arm and naked back and boylike face gave him an aura of vulnerability that she had never associated with the Lou Kale she had known on Post Office Street. She rose from her bunk and lifted the sheet carefully so as not to wake him and replaced it on his back, then looked again at the immensity and mystery of the night.

The Gulf was green and black, domed by a sky bursting with stars, so cold in their configurations they seemed to smoke like dry ice. She saw coconuts tumbling out of a wave, and an enormous sea turtle, its shell encrusted with barnacles, bobbing in a swell. A waterspout, its belly swollen with light, wobbled on the southern horizon, sucking thousands of gallons and hundreds of fish out of the waves into the clouds. She opened the porthole glass and felt the salt on her tongue, like the taste of iodine, and she knew she would not sleep again that night. She longed for the sunrise, to be up on deck, to eat breakfast in a breeze that contained the green heaviness of the ocean and the hint of islands banked with coconut palms. She longed to be a young girl and to fall in love with the world again.

Jimmie Robicheaux had already disappeared from her mind. What a trick life had played on her, she thought. Jimmie was gone and ironically her future was now wed to Lou Kale, the man she had tried to flee and who in turn had probably saved her from a terrible fate.

But when the boat docked in Key West, Lou hung around only long enough to refuel the gas tanks and restock the larder in the galley.

“Where you headed?” she asked.

All morning he had been morose, vaguely resentful, his eyes evasive, his speech unusually laconic. “Up to Lauderdale on the Greyhound,” he said, a duffel bag packed with his clothes balanced on his shoulder.

“What about me?” she said.

“I got to get things set up. I’ll see you when you get back.”

“Back from where?”

“You’re going fishing in the Dry Tortugas with Mr. Chalons.”

“Lou, I didn’t take care of myself at the farmhouse. I had all that dope in me.”

“You’re all right. You’ve always been all right,” he said. “Everything is extremely solid. I never lied to you, right? Keep saying, ‘Everything is righteously solid.’ Just don’t let no problems get in your head. It’s all a matter of attitude.”

“Get what things set up?”

But he walked up the dock and did not reply, staring wide-eyed at the gulls that glided over the dock, his back knotted under his see-through shirt with the weight of the duffel.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Jimmie told me all this late Tuesday afternoon, at my house, just after arriving back in New Iberia. Outside, the sunlight was gold inside the trees, more like autumn than late summer, and there was a tannic smell in the air that I only associated with fall and the coming of winter. I could hear Molly nailing up a birdhouse that had been blown out of live oak, like a reassuring presence who told me I still had another season to run.

“So Ida and Lou Kale have been in the prostitution business ever since?” I said.

“More or less,” he replied. “You actually married a nun?”

“Stick to the subject. Both of us have felt guilty all these years about a woman who didn’t have the courtesy to drop a postcard indicating she was alive. Do you feel like you’ve been had, maybe just a little bit?”

“What do you guys say at meetings? Live and let live?” he said.

“She was Raphael Chalons’s punch?”

“More than that,” he said. We were in the guest bedroom, where he was packing his clothes in a suitcase, preparing to move to an apartment he planned to use while he supervised the reconstruction of our destroyed home south of town. “She had a kid. Almost nine months to the day after Chalons rescued her at that farmhouse.”

“What happened to the kid?”

“Guess?”

I stared at his back as he bent over his suitcase, arranging his shirts and balled-up socks. “Valentine Chalons?” I said.

“That’s the way I’d read it.” He straightened up, his long-sleeve white shirt still fresh and clean, even after a long drive from New Orleans through heavy traffic.

“And Raphael Chalons raised him? And that’s what all this bullshit has been about — the Chalons family doesn’t want anyone to know Val’s mother was a prostitute?”

“You don’t buy it?” Jimmie said.

“No.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“The old man doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.”

“Maybe Val does.”

“It’s something else.”

“Why not ask Ida?” he said.

“I don’t plan on seeing Ida.”

“You might see her whether you want to or not. She’s in New Orleans. I put her up at a friend’s house on the lake.”

“Don’t you ever tire of grief?” I said.

“She wants to see her son. Whores have souls, too,” he replied.

“What was the cost of a postage stamp in 1958?” I said.

He straightened up from packing his suitcase and looked at me, a ray of sunlight falling across his prosthetic eye, which remained fixed and staring in the socket, like the eye of a stranger. “Thanks for the use of the room,” he said.

That night the temperature dropped suddenly and chains of dry lightning pulsed inside the clouds, flooding our yard with a white brilliance that turned the tree trunks the pale color of old bone. On the edges of sleep I kept waiting to hear the small pet door in the back entrance swing on its hinges, signaling that Snuggs and Tripod had sought shelter from the impending storm. I got up and pushed open the back door and immediately felt the weight of a tree branch that had fallen on the steps. I cleared it away and went out into the yard in my skivvies, the canopy flickering whitely above my head. Both Snuggs and Tripod were inside the hutch, which I left open at night so Tripod could come and go as he wished.

“Let’s go, fellows,” I said, and hefted up one in each arm. They both lay back against the crook of my arms, content, enjoying the ride, their feet in the air, heavy and compact as cannon balls.

Then at the corner of my vision I saw a shadow move behind a row of camellia bushes in my side yard. I started to turn my head but instead looked straight ahead and went inside the house. I removed my .45 from the dresser drawer and, still in my skivvies, went out the front door and circled around the side of the house.

Lightning rolled silently through the clouds overhead, flaring suddenly in a yellow ball, as though igniting a trapped pocket of white gas inside each individual cloud. “Come out,” I called to the darkness.

The wind gusted off the bayou and all the shadows in the yard thrashed against one another except one. A figure stood at the rear of my property, his silhouette framed against the bands of light on the bayou’s surface.

“I can drop you from here,” I said.

The figure hesitated, measuring his chances, a sheaf of compacted leaves cracking under his weight. Then a tremendous explosion of thunder shook the trees, the electricity died in the clouds, and the figure’s silhouette disappeared inside the shadows.

A voyeur? A disoriented reveler from one of the bars downtown? An imaginary visitor from a sea of elephant grass in a forgotten war? It was possible. I searched along the bank of the bayou and saw no footprints, although someone had recently broken down a banana tree on the edge of my neighbor’s property.

I called in a 911 and lay back down. Molly had slept through it all. Those who live with insomnia and who consider sleep both an enemy and a gift will understand the following. Some of us cannot comprehend how anyone except the very good or those who have no conscience at all can sleep from dark to dawn without dreaming or waking. We hear William Blake’s tiger padding softly through a green jungle, his stripes glowing, his whiskers spotted with gore. Psychoanalysis does no good. Neither does a health regimen that induces physical exhaustion. The only solution that is guaranteed is the one provided by our old friend Morpheus, who requires our souls in the bargain.

Audie Murphy, the most decorated United States soldier of World War II, slept with a .45 under his pillow for twenty years. Ernest Hemingway slept with a night-light on all of his adult life.

But I sleep with Molly Robicheaux, I told myself. I sleep inside her goodness, the smell of her hair, the flush of her skin when I touch her rump and kiss the baby fat on her sides. I sleep inside a flowerlike odor that she leaves on the pillow. Let the devil have prowling tigers and the shadows in the yard.

The next day I assembled all the investigative material I could on the case of the Baton Rouge serial killer. I still believed the murder of Honoria Chalons was not related. But I had also believed Honoria was an incest victim, and that perhaps her brother was the predator, since she had died in his quarters. There was no doubt this was what I wanted to believe because I had come to personally despise Val Chalons and the self-righteous sneering arrogance that he represented. Unfortunately for me, the DNA evidence taken off Honoria’s body pointed away from Val Chalons as a current sexual partner and possible suspect in his sister’s death.

Koko Hebert had said a small cross had been incised postmortem inside Honoria’s hairline, forcing us to conclude the killer had not acted randomly and that he bore the Chalons family an enormous animus.

But the Chalons’s coat of arms hung in Val’s quarters as well as in the main house. In the past, the Baton Rouge serial killer had already demonstrated his proclivity and skill at making others besides his immediate victim suffer as long as possible. He made sure the rest of us knew he had sexually degraded the victim before killing her. He left the instruments of bondage and torture with the body. He mutilated the features after death. He hung a purse in a tree to ensure we would find his handiwork while it was still fresh. Why not mock the Chalons family by lifting the Cross of Jesus from their family seal, then leaving it as an insult to be discovered hours later by the probing fingers of a parish coroner?

But I still couldn’t figure out Val Chalons. Had he hired Bad Texas Bob Cobb through intermediaries to cancel my ticket and Clete’s as well, just to hide the fact he was illegitimate? It didn’t seem plausible.

Over the years I had known many people of his background. They revised the past on a daily basis and lived vicariously through their dead ancestors. Inside termite-eaten historical homes, they stayed drunk and talked endlessly of a grander time and thought of themselves as characters in a Greek tragedy. In their own minds, they were not dissolute or effete but simply bacchanal eccentrics living in an intolerable century. They absolved themselves of their own sins, believing them to be the price one paid for the gift of gentility. Robert Lee had long ago proved that penury and failure could be borne with the dignity of a battle-stained flag. They were not bad people and meant no harm to anyone, not unless you counted the loss they imposed upon themselves.

But my objectivity was gone and I couldn’t sort any of these things out. My anger toward Val Chalons had helped me get drunk once and I was sure my next slip would probably be my last. Maybe it was time to take it to Val on a different level, one that he would not be expecting.

I went to his home after work and was told by the handyman that Valentine was having dinner with friends at Clementine’s in New Iberia. I drove back to town and parked by the bayou and entered the supper club through the terrace. Clementine’s was once a saloon and pool hall called Provost’s, a workingman’s place with a sports wire and green sawdust and scrolls of ticker tape on the floor. On Thursday nights the owner covered the pool tables with dropcloths and served free sausage and robin gumbo. Those things are gone, but the cavernous rooms, the stamped tin ceilings, and the hand-carved mahogany bar remain. In the shadowy light I could almost see the ghost of my father. Big Aldous, knocking back two inches of Jack at the bar, bellowing at his own jokes, his pinstripe strap overalls still spotted with drilling mud.

I ordered coffee at the end of the bar, where I could see through a wide door into the dining room. Val was with a group of well-dressed people, his back to me. He was the only man at the table without a jacket. His hair had just been barbered, the sides clipped close to the head, which accented the severity of his angular features. He wore a starched white shirt, but without a tie and with the collar unbuttoned, as though he were demonstrating a deliberate disregard for the decorum of the evening. The austerity in his expression and posture made me think of a photograph I had once seen of the Confederate guerrilla leader, William Clarke Quantrill.