Crusader's Cross (31 page)

In fact, I think he was assuming a persona I had seen him play before. He had been a guest narrator on a Louisiana Public Television broadcast regarding the activities of the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction. He had spoken of his ancestors’ participation in the White League with veiled pride, even dismissing their moral culpability for the execution of fifty black soldiers in what came to be known as the Colfax Massacre. “It was a violent era. My great-grandfather did what he had to. It’s facile to impose our standards on the past,” Val had explained.

Now, in the glow of candlelight at his table, he was holding forth about contemporary wars, his rhetoric threaded with moral certitude, although he himself had never heard a shot fired in anger.

I had resolved earlier to approach Val Chalons with a new and objective attitude. But my thought processes were deteriorating rapidly. I saw him excuse himself from the table and walk through the back hall toward the restrooms, which were housed on the terrace.

Don’t confront him here, not in this state of mind, I told myself.

But if not here, where? Val Chalons wouldn’t change and I wouldn’t, either. Just stick to principles and keep personalities out of it, I thought. The fate of the world didn’t hang on what I might say to a member of the Chalons family.

As chance would have it, Clete Purcel came through the front door, just as I got up from the bar stool. “Where you going?” he asked.

“To the head,” I replied.

“Did I just see Val Chalons?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Why waste your time bird-dogging a bucket of shit?”

“I dropped in for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.”

“Yeah, I used to go on skivvy runs in Cherry Alley to play the piano. Let me handle this, Streak.”

“There’s no problem here. Stay out of it,” I replied.

I followed Chalons out onto the terrace, into a fragrance of flowers and bourbon and grilled steaks and the fecund summertime odor of the Teche. He was at the urinal when I entered the restroom.

“Unless you’re in here to hang out your dick, I suggest you leave,” he said.

“You seem to have many personalities, Val,” I said.

“Don’t think your current environment protects you, Robicheaux. I’m going to boil you in your own grease.”

He continued to urinate, his chin tilted slightly upward, his fingers cupped under his phallus.

“I think there’s reason to believe your sister may have been murdered by the Baton Rouge serial killer,” I said. “I had dismissed that possibility because I was carrying a personal resentment against you. I was wrong in doing that, both as a police officer and as an AA member.”

He laughed to himself and shook off his phallus. “God, I love you people,” he said.

“Which people is that, Val?”

“Guys who constantly confess their guilt in public with doleful faces. Why is it I always feel you’re up to something?” He brushed past me and began washing his hands in the basin.

“It’s called ‘transfer.’ The person assumes other people think in the same duplicitous fashion as himself,” I said.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” he said, drying his hands on a paper towel.

“Get what?”

“You’re our local Attila. A little campfire smoke and animal grease in your hair and you’d be perfect. You’re shit, Robicheaux. So is your wife. She’s a poseur and a cunt. You just haven’t figured it out yet.”

He was standing within arm’s reach of me now. He balled up the paper towel and dropped it in the waste can. I started to speak, but instead stepped back from him and looked into empty space, my thumbs hooked into the sides of my belt. The heavy metal door slammed behind him.

Don’t take the bait, I told myself.

But there are instances when that old-time rock ‘n’ roll is the only music on the jukebox.

I followed Val Chalons through the bar area into the dining room. He had taken his chair and was spreading his napkin on his lap. His friends looked up at me, expecting to be introduced.

“We finally got to the bottom of Ida Durbin’s disappearance, Val,” I said. “Your father rescued her from a whorehouse he had money in. So out of either obligation or reasons of opportunity, Ida became his regular punch. Then you came along about nine months later. If you’d like to check out the story, your mother is staying with a friend of my brother on Lake Pontchartrain. Your mother is married to her former pimp, Lou Kale. They run an escort service together in Miami.”

He rose from his chair and threw his martini in my face. I hit him high up on the cheekbone, so hard that his opposite eye bulged from the socket. He crashed through empty chairs into the wall, then caught me with a sliding blow on the forehead and one on the ear that I could feel burn right through the cartilage into the bone. But he was off balance, his feet tangled up by an oil painting that had clattered to the floor. I slipped his next punch, felt another glance off my head, then got under his reach and hooked him just below the heart. He wasn’t ready for it and I saw his mouth drop open and heard a sound like a dying animal’s come from deep inside his chest.

People from the bar crowded through the entranceway to watch. A waiter’s loaded tray exploded on the floor and I saw a strobe light flare in the gloom and burn away all the shadows in the room. I hooked Val Chalons in the eye, then drove a right cross directly into his mouth, bursting his lips against his teeth. I knew it was time to back away, in the same way a fighter in the ring knows when he has taken his opponent’s heart. A woman I had never seen was screaming incoherently and an elderly man was patting the air with his hands, as though his years had given him the power to impart wisdom and restraint to a dervish.

I started to step back, but Val Chalons tried to clench me, his mouth draining blood and spittle on my cheek and neck, the thickness of his phallus pressing against me. He forced us both against a table, his mouth as close to my ear as a lover’s. “My father screwed your wife, Robicheaux,” he said.

In my naivete, I had believed the succubus that had governed my life for decades had been exorcised by the coming of old age. But it was still there, like a feral presence hiding in the subconscious, red-black in color, shiny with glandular fluids, waiting for the right moment to have its way. Some call it a chemical assault upon the brain. I can’t say what it is. But the consequence for me was always the same: I committed acts as though I were watching them on film rather than participating in them. When it was over, I was not only filled with disgust and shame and self-loathing but genuinely frightened by the gargoyle that held sway over my soul.

In this case, that meant I genuinely invested myself in the deconstruction of Val Chalons. I buried my fist up to my wrist in his stomach and drove his head into the wall, clubbed him to the floor, and stomped his face when he was down. Then I felt Clete Purcel’s huge arms lock around me, pinning my hands at my sides, dragging me backward through the tables and broken dishware and spilled food into the bar area, where someone pointed a camera strobe straight into my eyes.

Like a drowning man who has just popped to the surface of a vortex that has crushed his hearing, I saw Clete’s lips moving without sound, then heard his words become audible in midsentence: “… took us upcountry into Shitsville, Streak. Why you’d have to load their gun? Why you’d do it, big mon?” 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Valentine Chalons was taken by ambulance to Iberia General and I was taken by five policemen to a holding cell at the city jail. Molly got me out at midnight, but I was to be arraigned the next morning and I had no doubt about the seriousness of the charges. At the top of the list was felony assault.

At the house, Molly filled a tin pan with ice cubes and water for me to soak my hands in. Through the window I could see the humid glow of sodium lamps across the bayou and hear Tripod running up and down the clothesline on his chain.

“Were you trying to kill him?” she asked.

“Maybe.” Then I thought about it. “Yeah, I probably was.”

“Why?”

“He had it coming. He’s a fraternity pissant and should have been blown out of his socks a long time ago.”

“You can’t live with that kind of anger in you, Dave.”

“He threw his drink in my face. He dealt the play. He got his sticks broken. That’s the way it flushes sometimes. Can we give it a rest?”

She was at the sink, the water running loudly. She turned off the faucet and stared at me. “Why are you talking like this?”

“He said his old man screwed you.”

“Val Chalons said that?”

“I just told you.” I watched her face, my heart beating.

“Did you believe him?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then why did you tear him apart?”

“Because that’s what I’ll do to any sonofabitch who insults my wife.”

In the silence I could hear the creak of the trees in the yard. Snuggs rubbed himself against my leg, his tail stiff, his head butting into my calf. I picked him up, my hands numb from the ice water in the pan. I flipped him on his back and scratched him under the chin. “What do you think about it, Snuggs?” I said.

Molly took him from my lap and set him on the floor. Then she leaned over me and held my head tightly against her breasts, squeezing so hard it hurt, her mouth pressed into my hair. “I love you, Dave Robicheaux,” she said.

I felt Bootsie step inside her skin.

At 8:00 a.m. the next day I went directly into Helen Soileau’s office. The arrest report from the Iberia city police was already on her desk. “I just can’t believe this,” she said, picking up the typed pages and dropping them as though they were smeared with an obscene substance.

“Why not?” I said.

“You want to look at the photos of your handiwork? Val Chalons looks like he was chain-dragged behind a car.”

“He threw a glass of gin in my face. He made a filthy statement about my wife. I think he got off easy.”

“He set you up, bwana.”

“Am I on the desk?”

“Guess,” she said.

It was 8:16 a.m. My arraignment was at eleven. I knew my time as a viable member of the sheriff’s department was running out. I picked up my desk phone and called Mack Bertrand at the crime lab. “I got into some trouble last night,” I said.

“I heard about it,” he replied.

“I think I’m about to go on suspension. You remember those casts you made under my bedroom window?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Can you run some comparisons between them and the casts you made at the Chalons crime scene?”

“I already did. Your prowler wore workboots, size ten and a half. Our person of interest at the Chalons guesthouse probably had on rubber boots., around size eleven. No help there, Dave.”

“Why’d you make the comparison?”

“Probably for the same reason you wanted it done. We don’t have one clue indicating who might have gone into the Chalons guesthouse and chopped that sad girl to death. Let me run something else by you a second.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Raphael Chalons has called me three times. But I’m not quite sure what he wants.”

“I’m not following you.”

“In one breath, he wants to know if there’s any evidence the Baton Rouge serial killer murdered his daughter. When I tell him no, he seems relieved, then he gets upset again.”

“Why did you call Honoria Chalons a ‘sad girl’?”

“She attended our church for a while. I always had the feeling she’d been raped or molested. But I’m not an expert on those things.”

“Did she ever say anything on the subject?”

“No, she just seemed to be one of those people who always have reflections inside their eyes, like ghosts or memories no one else can touch. Maybe I watch too much late-night television.”

 No, you don’t, Mack, I said to myself.

I had spoken boldly to both Molly and Helen Soileau about wiping up the floor with Val Chalons. But my casual attitude was a poor disguise for my real feelings. It was ten minutes to nine now and my stomach was roiling, in the same way it does when an airplane drops unexpectedly through an air pocket. My scalp felt tight against my head and I could smell a vinegary odor rising from my body, like sweat that has been ironed into fabric. I bought a can of Dr Pepper in the department waiting room, ate two aspirin, and called Dana Magelli at NOPD.

“Do you have casts from the area where Holly Blankenship’s body was dumped?” I asked.

“Yeah, there were footprints all over the place. Some homeless guys use it for a hobo jungle. What are you looking for?” he said.

“Size eleven rubber boots or ten-and-a-half workboots?”

“Why don’t you call the task force in Baton Rouge?”

“My prints showed up at a crime scene they were investigating. They’re not big fans.”

“Hang on a minute,” he said. He set the phone down, then picked it up again. “Yeah, there was one set of footprints that could have been made by rubber boots, around size eleven or twelve. Wal-Mart sells them by the thousands. What was that about your prints at a crime scene?”

I started to tell Dana the whole story, but I had finally grown tired of revisiting my own bad behavior in order to publicly excoriate myself. So I simply said, “Come on over and catch some green trout.”

“Thought you’d never ask,” he replied.

I wished I had come to appreciate the value of reticence earlier in life.

Molly and I met with my attorney outside the court at 10:45 a.m. He was a Tulane law graduate and a good-natured, intelligent man by the name of Porteus O’Malley. He was a student of the classics and liberal thought, and came from an old and distinguished family on the bayou, one known for its generosity and also its penchant for losing everything the family owned. Because our fathers had been friends, he seldom charged me a fee for the work he did on my behalf.

I was sweating in the shade of the oak where we stood, my eyes stinging with the humidity. Porteus placed his hand on my shoulder and looked into my face. He was larger than I and had to stoop slightly to be eye-level with me. “You gonna make it?” he said.