Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  I opened a bottle of Talking Rain and drank it empty, then showered, put on my pajama bottoms, and tried to read, my shield, handcuffs, slapjack, and .45 on the nightstand beside me. The last of the summer light had gone out of the sky, and in the yard I could hear the bamboo rattling in the breeze and the first patter of rain on the trees. Sometime just before midnight I fell asleep with my hand over my eyes. I had not locked the front door.

  When I woke, the room was black. I went to the bathroom and got back in bed. Outside, dry lightning flickered on the trees. I drifted off to sleep and dreamed I was inside a cave, my arm twisted behind me. That’s when I heard the rocking chair moving back and forth in the corner.

  I opened my eyes and saw a silhouette seated in the chair. When I tried to sit up, my right wrist came tight against the handcuffs that were clipped around it and the brass bedstead. I reached with my left hand for the nightstand, where my .45 should have been. It was gone, along with my slapjack. The figure in the chair stopped rocking.

  “I was watching you sleep,” a woman’s voice said.

  “Honoria?” I said.

  “Your front door was unlocked. That’s a dangerous thing to do,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came in to see you.”

  My eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, but I could see her face now, a pale orb wrapped in shadow. “Where’s my piece?” I said.

  “Your what?”

  “My forty-five, where is it?”

  She stood up from the chair and walked to the side of the bed. She wore Mexican-style jeans, gold sandals, hoop earrings, and a white blouse that was fluffy with lace. She sat down beside me, her rump pressing deep into the mattress. “I hid it,” she said.

  I couldn’t smell alcohol on her, nor even cigarette smoke, which meant she had probably not been in a bar. “My handcuff key is in my pants. You need to unhook me, Honoria,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because friends don’t do this to one another,” I replied.

  She looked into my face and brushed back my hair, then leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. “You like me, don’t you?” she said.

  “I’m too old for you.”

  “No, you’re not.” She placed her hand on my stomach and leaned down again.

  “What you’re doing is no good for either of us, Honoria,” I said.

  She took her hand away and sat very still. I could see her breasts rising and falling against the light from the street.

  “I think the devil lives under the bayou. I think the devil lives in my father, too,” she said.

  “I believe you need some help with this stuff. I know a doctor in Lafayette,” I said.

  “A therapist?”

  “I used to see him after my wife Annie was killed. He helped me a lot,” I said.

  She looked at nothing, her small hand by my hip. “Do you mind if I stay with you a while?”

  “No, but I—”

  “Just say yes or no.”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “I didn’t think you would. I always liked you, Dave. You’re a misplaced figure from Elizabethan theater, you know. Your tragedy is the fact no one ever explained that to you.”

  And with that, she curled up next to me, her face on my shoulder, her arm across my stomach, and went to sleep.

  THE SUN WAS ABOVE the rooftops when I woke. The space beside me was empty and my right wrist was free of the handcuffs that hung from the bedstead. My .45 and slapjack had been replaced on the nightstand, along with the key to my cuffs. From the kitchen I could hear someone clattering pots or pans on the stove.

  After I used the bathroom, I pulled on my khakis and went into the kitchen. Honoria was dripping coffee, heating a pan of milk and stirring a pot of oatmeal. Both Snuggs and Tripod were eating out of their pet bowls on the floor. Honoria’s hair was brushed and her face made up, but when she glanced in my direction her face had the stark expression of someone who has been caught unawares by a photographer’s flash.

  “There was no water in the cat’s bowl,” she said.

  “He drinks out of the toilet,” I said.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling him,” I said. But she saw no humor in my remark. She served oatmeal in two bowls and placed them on the breakfast table, then began hunting for spoons and coffee cups. I looked at my watch. “I’m running a little bit late for Mass,” I lied.

  “Where’s your butter dish?”

  “I don’t have one. Look, Honoria—”

  “The oatmeal is getting cold. I fixed it for you. It would be nice if you ate it.”

  “Sure,” I said, and sat down at the table.

  She poured coffee, and placed toast, jam, and sugar in front of me, preoccupied, her eyes darting about the room, as though somehow she needed to impose order on it. “Your cat is climbing in the sink,” she said.

  “Snuggs is his own man,” I said.

  “You should train your animals,” she said, lifting him off the drainboard and scooting him out the back door. “Don’t you ever rake your leaves? A couple of days’ work and this place would look fine.”

  “Last night you said the devil lived under the bayou and also inside your father.”

  “Where’d you get that?” she said, smiling for the first time that morning.

  I studied her eyes. They were dark brown, like warm chocolate, possessed of visions and privy to voices and sounds that I believed only she saw and heard. They were the eyes of someone who would never be changed by therapy, analysis, Twelve-Step programs, religion, or medical treatment.

  “Do you know what you did in your sleep last night?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Have it your way. I don’t kiss and tell,” she said.

  “This bullshit ends now, kiddo. The Robicheaux Fun House is officially closed. Thanks for fixing breakfast,” I said, and dumped my food into a sack under the sink.

  She took a half pint of gin from her purse, poured a three-finger shot into a glass, and drank it at the back door, staring in a desultory fashion at the yard. “Have you ever spent the spring in Paris? I fell in love there with a boy who was gay. My father hounded him without mercy. He drowned himself in the Seine,” she said.

  But I was all out of Purple Hearts and had decided that Honoria was going to leave of her own accord or be picked up by a cruiser. My determination suddenly dissipated when I looked out the front window and saw the Chalonses’ handyman, with his son and Sister Molly next to him, turn into my driveway.

  “I’m going to talk to some people out front. There’s no need for you to leave right now,” I said to Honoria.

  “Too late, my love,” she said. She walked out the front door and down the street toward the Shadows, her purse swinging from a shoulder string.

  I stood on the gallery, barefoot, unshaved, looking down at Molly Boyle, my face burning.

  “I should have called first, I guess, but Tee Bleu says he knows where the boat is,” she said, speaking awkwardly and too fast, trying to hide her embarrassment at my situation.

  “Which boat?” I said.

  “The one the man with the gun was in. Tee Bleu says it’s moored in a canebrake the other side of the drawbridge.”

  But I couldn’t concentrate on her words. “There’s a misunderstanding about what you just saw here. The lady who just left has some mental problems. I left my door unlocked and she—”

  “I know who she is. You don’t have to explain.”

  “No, hear me out. She hooked me up to my bed with my cuffs. I was trying to get her out of the house when you arrived.”

  “Locked you in your own handcuffs?”

  “Right. I was asleep.”

  “I didn’t mean to intrude. I thought you should know about the boat.”

  “You didn’t intrude. Y’all come inside.”

  “No, we’d better run. Thank you. It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?�
��

  She tried to smile over her shoulder as she got into her car.

  Way to go again, Robicheaux, I thought, my stomach churning. “Give me ten minutes. I’d really appreciate it,” I said.

  I FOLLOWED MOLLY and the handyman and his son to the drawbridge south of Molly’s agency. The little boy pointed at a boat that had floated into a flooded clump of reeds and bamboo. I waded into the water and dragged the boat’s hull up on the mudbank. The boat was old, made of wood, the stern printed with rust where the engine mounts had been removed. There were no tags or registration numbers of any kind on it. “What makes you think this was the man’s boat, Tee Bleu?” I asked.

  “It got blue paint on the front end,” he replied.

  “Thanks for telling me about this,” I said.

  “I seen the gun. I ain’t made it up. Seen the man, too. He was old,” he said.

  “Y’all gonna dust the boat for fingerprints?” his father said.

  “It doesn’t work quite like that,” I said.

  The father’s half-moon eyebrows gave him a happy look, even when he wasn’t smiling. He had a habit of turning his whole head as he glanced about himself, like a curious owl on a tree branch. “I got to make my deliveries. Can y’all run Tee Bleu home for me?” he said.

  “Show Dave your birdhouses,” Molly said.

  “They ain’t that much to look at,” he said.

  “No, show him,” she said.

  He opened up the trunk of his car, exposing a half dozen or so notched and pegged cypress birdhouses lying on a blanket, each with a wood plug in the roof. “See, the trick is not to get no foreign smells inside the house. I stain the outside with vegetable oil and that way it don’t have no paint smell. I got a plug in the roof and a feeder shelf inside so you can pour the feed t’rew the hole and not get no human smells on it. If you stick this house up in your tree, every kind of bird there is gonna be flying around in your backyard. They’re t’irty-five dol’ars, if you want one.”

  Thanks, Molly, I thought.

  “I already have one. Maybe another time,” I said.

  “’Cause I got ’em, ready and waiting,” he replied.

  Molly Boyle and I dropped Tee Bleu off at the gated entrance to the Chalons property, where he lived in a small house down by the bayou with his father and mother. We watched him walk through the shade and around the side of the main house. I could not get over his resemblance to Honoria Chalons.

  “You didn’t want to take him down the driveway?” Molly said.

  I turned my truck back onto the highway and headed toward Jeanerette and New Iberia. “I don’t want any more contact with the Chalonses except in an official capacity. About this morning—” I said.

  “I believe what you told me. You don’t have to explain your life to others.”

  We recrossed the bayou and entered a tunnel of trees that separated the Teche from a row of antebellum homes that were so perfect in their detail and ambiance they looked like they had been constructed only yesterday. The windows in the truck were down, and Molly Boyle’s hair kept blowing in her face.

  “Can you have lunch with me?” I said.

  She continued to stare straight ahead. I could hear the truck keys jiggling against the dash, a flurry of leaves sucking across the windshield.

  “Do you like trouble?” she asked.

  “I don’t seek it out,” I said.

  “I heard you were a Twelve-Step person.”

  “I’m in AA, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Maybe that’s what you need to keep doing and not complicate things.”

  “I’d sure like to have lunch with you.”

  She looked out the window at Alice Plantation, the acres of clipped St. Augustine grass and the flowers growing along the brick base of the building. “Can we invite another person to join us, an elderly lady who volunteers at the agency?” she asked.

  “That’d be fine,” I said.

  I could feel her eyes on the side of my face. Up ahead, a black cloud moved across the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. “Do you have any idea who the man in the boat might have been?” she said.

  “Probably just a guy shooting water moccasins,” I said.

  “That seems kind of cavalier,” she said.

  “When the pros punch your ticket, they’re at your throat before you know it. The guy in the boat was just a guy in a boat,” I said.

  “I worked at a mission in Guatemala during the civil war. Men with binoculars and guns didn’t use them to hunt snakes,” she replied.

  CHAPTER

  11

  THE PHONE on my kitchen counter rang early Monday morning. “Is this Mr. David Robicheaux?” a voice said.

  I looked at the caller ID. The number was blocked. “What can I help you with?” I said.

  “That one-eyed brother of yours cain’t let the past rest. Looks like you cain’t, either. Time to stop messing in other people’s berry patch.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “I knew this was a mistake.”

  Where had I heard the voice? Nowhere and everywhere, I thought. The speech pattern and accent were generic, the kind you hear in carnival people—laconic, faintly peckerwood with hard urban edges, the cynicism and private frame of reference always veiled. “I know you?” I asked.

  “Did you lose your cherry in a cathouse? Bet you did. Bet I can tell you the thoughts you had the night you done it. Fantasies about a big-titty girl with a soft ass an ax handle wide. Except she turned out to be a sack of flab that smelled bad and yawned in your face when you got off her. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Still haven’t figured out what you’re selling, partner, so I’d better ring off now. Thanks for your call.”

  “Ring off?”

  I hung up, then punched in 911 on my cell. Wally, our wheezing dispatcher, answered. “Call the phone company and open up my home line,” I said.

  “You got it, Dave,” he said.

  The phone on the counter rang again just as I clicked off the cell. “Hey, man, I ain’t your enemy,” the voice said. “Let Ida go. She don’t—”

  The transmission broke up and the connection went dead. Fifteen minutes later, Wally called. “It was from a cell phone, somewhere down in the Keys. What’s going on?” he said.

  “Some guy with too much time on his hands having dirty thoughts,” I said.

  “Anyt’ing I can get in on?” he replied.

  I walked to work that morning and decided not to tell Helen about the caller. She was sick of hearing the name Ida Durbin and also sick of hearing the kind of vague, uncentered information I had been offering her. In this instance, I had asked an anonymous caller if I knew him. He had answered my question with a reference to brothels. It wasn’t a complimentary response. Also it made little sense and hardly seemed worth passing on to anyone else.

  But in truth the caller had made one slip which I suspected he sorely regretted. He had spoken of Ida in the present tense. I also had a feeling I would hear from him again.

  MUCH IS WRITTEN about contract killers. Much of it is accurate. If they’re Mobbed-up, they tend to be ethnic, with tribal loyalties. But in the final analysis their race or nationality is coincidental. A button man is a sociopath first and an Italian, Jew, Latino, or Irishman second.

  Jericho Johnny Wineburger was a Jew who graduated from a Catholic high school and did hits for a Neapolitan crime family.

  The common denominators among professional assassins, at least in my experience, are greed, sometimes desperation, and total indifference to the fate of their victims and the pain visited upon their families. They possess neither anger nor curiosity and struggle with no problems of conscience whatsoever.

  Years ago, when Clete Purcel and I were at NOPD, we had to fly to New York and interview a man being held in the West Street Jail. He had admitted to murdering over thirty people for one of the major crime families, one based in both Queens and Hallandale, Florida. The only emotion he show
ed was concern about his own situation. He maintained he had cut a deal that should have allowed him to enter the federal Witness Protection Program but the United States Attorney had betrayed him.

  He droned on about governmental treachery and a life sentence without possibility of parole that had just been dropped on his head. I finally reached the point where I had to ask the question that lingers in the mind of every homicide cop who finds himself in a small room with a man whose handiwork he has seen up close, before the odors and the body fluids have been scrubbed out of the environment. “Did you ever have any regrets about the families of the guys you popped?” I said.

  “Who?” he said.

  “The families—their parents, their wives and kids.”

  “I didn’t know them,” he said. He shook his head and thought hard to make sure he was being honest. “No, I’m certain I didn’t know none of them. Why?”

  When I didn’t reply, he snuffed down in his nose, complained about the coolness of the room, and asked if I could get the screw to bring him a box of Kleenex.

  THE WEEK PASSED and I made no progress on the case of Fontaine Belloc, the woman the Baton Rouge serial killer had raped, bludgeoned, strangled, and dumped in a pond inside the Iberia Parish line. Sometimes in my dreams I thought I saw her ruined face speak to me. I had long ago learned the dead have their ways, and I was sure that a lady who was so brave that she would swallow her own wedding ring to keep it from the hands of her killer would find a way to tell me who he was.

  But on Friday night I decided to put away my cares and go fishing with Clete for two days out on the salt. At false dawn on Saturday morning, just as the trees were turning gray inside the fog, I hitched my boat to my truck, loaded my tackle and an ice chest in the bed, and was about to pull out of the backyard onto the street when I heard the phone ring inside.

  Ignore it, I told myself.

  But my daughter, Alafair, was attending the summer session at Reed College in Portland, and no father who loves his daughter ever ignores a call that might be related to her welfare. I cut the engine and went back inside the house.