Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  It’s no accident that both cops and recidivists have mutual understandings about the netherworld they share. The heart-pounding rush, the lack of complexity or societal restraint, the easy access to women who love a gladiator, it all waits for the participant like a glittering avenue in Las Vegas or a free-fire zone inside a green country that has been deemed expendable.

  A therapist once told me that the id for some people is a quiet furnace that simply needs a jigger of whiskey as an accelerant. He also told me I was one of those people.

  I went to Clete’s cottage, but he was not home. Jimmie was back in town, staying in my spare bedroom, now determined to rebuild the house we had been raised in. He had gone to Lake Charles to contract a builder who specialized in salvaged hardwoods from torn-down barns and farmhouses and what in South Louisiana is called recovered cypress—huge trees that were sunk in swamps or rivers over one hundred years ago, restored into beautiful, soft wood that seems to shine with an interior glow.

  I think Jimmie believed he could correct the past and refashion it with nails and ancient wood, somehow cleansing it of bad memories and leaving only the events that should have defined our childhood. I would have given anything that evening if he had been home so I could talk with him. But he was not there, and Val Chalons’s words still burned in my ears.

  I drove to the graveyard in St. Martinville and under the rising moon said a rosary by Bootsie’s tomb. Lightning crawled through the clouds overhead, and across the Teche I could hear music coming from a nightclub and see the neon beer signs in second-floor windows where a party was taking place. I sat for a long time beside Bootsie’s tomb, then drove back to New Iberia and went to bed after midnight.

  BY FRIDAY I was wired to the eyes, trying to find professional reasons which would allow me to confront Valentine for his insults. I told myself I was allowing pride to do the work of my enemies, but my best self-analysis was of no help to me. I didn’t care if someone called me white trash or not, but that insult, when it is used in the South, is collective in nature, and Val Chalons had aimed his words at my origins, my mother and father, their illiteracy and poverty and hardship, and I wanted to back him into a corner and break him apart—bone, teeth, and joint.

  At noon, I drove out to Molly Boyle’s office on the bayou. She was behind her desk, the air-conditioning unit in the window blowing on the side of her face.

  “Go to lunch with me,” I said.

  “Dave—”

  “We’ll take someone with us.”

  “You’re suggesting we’re doing something illicit,” she said.

  “It’s what we did before. Don’t shine me on.”

  She pressed her fingers against her temples. “You roll in here like a hurricane, then accuse me of being disingenuous. It’s a bit hard to take.”

  “So drink a Dr Pepper with me.”

  “No!”

  I was standing in the middle of the room, drowning in my own ineptitude and heavy-handedness.

  She put on a pair of reading glasses, then took them off again. “Is this about the man you had to shoot?”

  I felt my right hand open and close at my side, a drop of sweat form and run from my armpit. “He wasn’t the first,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve killed others.”

  “Have you talked to somebody about this?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I can’t have lunch with you,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  She looked straight ahead, out the window, her skin flushed, her eyes filming. Then she propped her forehead on the ends of her fingers so I could not see her face. “I can’t be of any help to you. I wish I could. I’m sorry,” she said. When she looked at me again, there were tiny red threads in the whites of her eyes.

  THAT EVENING, after work, I went shopping at the Winn-Dixie. I filled the basket with items I didn’t need, and told myself that perhaps I should invite friends over, maybe barbecue in the backyard or cook a huge gumbo for the people Jimmie and I had grown up with. I dropped frozen packs of veined shrimp and crawfish into the basket, along with gourmet cheese and a smoked ham, a chocolate cake, a gallon of ice cream, crackers and cans of smoked oysters, ginger ale, diet drinks, big jars of fruit juice, a case of Corona, a fat green bottle of Burgundy, and a quart of Jim Beam and one of Black Jack Daniel’s.

  I could hear a whirring sound in my ears, like wind blowing in a conch shell, as I stacked my purchases on the conveyor belt at the checkout stand. Then the black teenage girl working behind the register, whom I had deliberately chosen, went on break, and the assistant manager, a man my age, took her place. “Fixing to have a party at your house, Dave?” he said.

  “Yeah, I thought I might,” I said.

  “Good weather for a cookout, huh?” he said, scanning the beer and whiskey and wine on the belt, his face empty of expression.

  “It’s supposed to rain, but who knows?” I said.

  “Could be. Everyt’ing all right with you, Dave?” he said.

  “Just great,” I said.

  “That’s good. That’s real good,” he said. For the first time, he looked directly at me, his feigned cheerfulness carefully held in place.

  I rolled the basket through the parking lot to my truck and began loading my groceries in back, the sky overhead gray and crackling with dry thunder. Then Molly Boyle passed me in a rusted compact, looked back at me, and made a U-turn, almost running over a man on a bicycle. She stopped abreast of me, her windows down, the front windshield spotted with raindrops. “I want to talk to you,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” I replied.

  Her eyes lighted on the packages in the bed of my pickup. “Not here. I’ll follow you to your house,” she said.

  “I’m kind of tied up right now,” I said.

  “No, you’re not,” she said.

  I tried to lose her in the traffic and reach my house with enough time to unload the pickup and put everything away before I had to invite her inside. But Molly Boyle was a determined adversary. She stayed right behind my pickup, all the way down Main, past the antebellum and Victorian homes that lined the street, past the city library and the grotto dedicated to Jesus’s mother, right into my porte cochere.

  The rain was ticking on the trees and my tin roof as I hefted up two bags of groceries and started in the house, leaving the case of Corona and bottles of Black Jack and Beam and Burgundy in the truck.

  She did not wait on an invitation. She picked up an armload of booze and followed me into the kitchen and set it down with a clunk on the drainboard, pushing a strand of hair out of her eye. “You wouldn’t want to leave this in the rain, would you?” she said.

  “I buy it for guests sometimes,” I said.

  She raised a finger at me before the words were hardly out of my mouth. “Lie to others or lie to God, and you’re only human. Do it to yourself and you never wash out the stain,” she said.

  “How about taking it out of overdrive?” I said.

  “I acted in a cowardly fashion this afternoon,” she said.

  “I don’t under—”

  “You were obviously in need of a friend, or you wouldn’t have come to my office. I’ve been a hypocrite, Dave.”

  “No need for a confession here. Everything is copacetic,” I said, my gaze drifting back to the booze on the drainboard.

  “I led you on, then I sent you away. Please don’t drink. You’re a good man. Everyone seems to know that except you.”

  The light had gone out of the sky, and I could hear hailstones on the roof and see them bouncing in the backyard. Out on the bayou a willow tree turned white when lightning struck in the park. When I looked back at Molly, her face was close to mine, as though it had floated there, out of dream. I put my mouth to hers, then felt her arms around my neck, her stomach against me. I could feel the smoothness and warmth in her skin and smell a fragrance in her hair, like night-blooming flowers. I squeezed her against me, hard, perhaps harder than I should have,
but she had the firm, muscular body of a countrywoman and I realized that Molly Boyle was probably not daunted by anyone or anything.

  She walked ahead of me into the bedroom and let down the blinds, a look of determination on her face, as though she had set aside the counsel of others for reasons she would probably never share with anyone. Then she did something I had never seen a woman do in my life—she made the sign of the cross on my person, as though I were incapable of doing it myself, touching my forehead, my breastbone, and each of my shoulders. Then she undressed with her back to me, lay down on the bed, and waited.

  The hail clattered on the roof and in the trees, and the attic fan drew the breeze across the sheets and rattled the metal blinds. I heard the phone ring and lightning crash in City Park and someone blowing a car horn in the rain, but I could not think about anything except Molly Boyle’s hair spread out like points of fire on the pillow, and the rise and fall of her breasts, and the grace and invitation of her thighs, and the heated whisper of my name, over and over, in my own ear.

  CHAPTER

  13

  CLETE HAD NOT BEEN DOING WELL since the shooting death of Bob Cobb. He blamed himself and his own reckless attitudes for bringing Bad Texas Bob back to the fishing camp, putting both of us in harm’s way and ultimately causing me to take on the burden of Bob Cobb’s exit from the world.

  But Clete was not at fault. Cobb was evil and long ago should have been rejected by the system for the pathological creature he was. I told Clete these things, but they seemed to do him no good. He tried to get out of his melancholy mood by smacking the heavy bag at Red Lorille’s Gym in Lafayette, clanking iron, and staying in the steam room until he looked like a boiled crab.

  Sometimes I believed an incident in the present acted as a catalyst that took him back to Vietnam. But I never could be sure. Clete seldom spoke of Vietnam, even with me, dismissing his experience there as an aberration not worth resurrecting. I knew better, though. Even when we were patrolmen together, he’d fall into the thousand-yard stare, then snap out of it and tell me he couldn’t sleep because his wife was hooking up with an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Boulder, Colorado, and was probably going to dump him for love beads and Rocky Mountain weed.

  Clete felt he had let me down. I tried to dissuade him by telling him his own attitude was arrogant, that he wasn’t the controller and centerpiece of other people’s lives. His reply was, “Leave the church-basement psychobabble at home, Streak.” Clete had many faults, but a lack of devotion to his friends was not among them.

  So on Saturday morning I took my troubles to my best friend at his cottage at the motor court and told him about everything that had happened in the last week—particularly my encounter at the television studio with Val Chalons and my experience with Molly Boyle the previous evening. The rain had stopped in the predawn hours, and the morning was bright and cool, the trees dripping behind the cottage. Clete sat outside in a metal chair, dressed in a strap undershirt and oversized scarlet boxing trunks, shining a bagful of shoes. I thought he would react histrionically to the story I told him, but he kept his attention fixed on the shoes he was softly brushing, his face never changing expression.

  When I finished, he set down the shoes and looked at them. “You got it on with a nun?”

  “I wouldn’t put it in those terms,” I replied.

  His eyes lifted into mine. “But you were in the sack with a Catholic nun?”

  “She never took vows.”

  “People don’t make those kinds of distinctions, big mon.”

  “I was going to get loaded. She knew it. So she got in my way.”

  His eyes were unblinking, the scar through one eyebrow and across the top of his nose like a flattened pink worm. “You want advice?”

  “I don’t know. What is it?”

  “Get a lot of gone between you and this situation.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to.”

  “I’m stunned,” he said. And for first time that morning he grinned.

  He went into the cottage and showered and changed clothes. Out on the Teche a barge heaped with glistening piles of mud dredged from the middle of the bayou was being towed downstream, then a speedboat passed, towing water-skiers who sent waves up into the trees along the bank. Clete came back outside combing his hair, dressed in sharkskin slacks, oxblood loafers with tassels, and a starched sports shirt printed with flowers, the sleeves folded up in one neat turn on each of his huge biceps.

  “Let’s talk about this guy Lou Kale. You told Chalons it was Kale who called your house and tried to warn you off the Ida Durbin disappearance?”

  “More or less.”

  “How’d you know it was Kale?”

  “The guy who called me talked like a pimp. But I wasn’t sure it was Kale until I saw Val Chalons’s reaction to the name.”

  “And you got the feeling Ida Durbin was alive?”

  “Yep.”

  “This is the way I see it. Somebody hired Bad Texas Bob to leave both of us dead in my fish camp. That’s known as a violation of the Eleventh Commandment, which is, don’t screw with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Time to get back on the full-tilt boogie, noble mon. Y’all got a fix on Kale’s cell phone?”

  “It bounced off a tower down in the Keys.”

  “Hmmm,” Clete said. “One way or another, all this stuff is connected to organized prostitution. Doing anything today?”

  JACKSON SQUARE, across from the Café du Monde, is a fine place to be on Saturday afternoon, as is the rest of the French Quarter. It’s a transitional time of day, caught between the tropical freshness of morning when families are exiting St. Louis Cathedral and sidewalk artists are setting up their easels, and the coming of twilight and the tourists and revelers on Bourbon Street, who in their mind’s eye probably see themselves as aloof visitors at the Baths of Caracalla—in control, faintly amused by its pernicious influences.

  The truth is that during times of high pedestrian traffic the Quarter is a safe place, its vice illusory, designed to titillate conventioneers from Omaha. The Quarter has always been a cash cow the city is not about to give over to jackrollers, crack dealers, Murphy artists, and indiscreet hookers. But after two in the morning, the glad-at-heart are gone, the nightclub and sidewalk bands have packed up, and the streetlamps seem coated with an iniquitous chemical vapor.

  If you’re really swacked, and without friends to care for you, you will in all probability have experiences you will not want to take with you into the daylight hours. A black pimp may step out of an alley and catch you by the sleeve, his face split with a lascivious grin, his breath as rife as a garbage can. A cabbie with a hooker in the back of his vehicle may pull to the curb and ask if he can help you find a motel room out on Airline Highway. A gang of kids coming out of Louis Armstrong Park may make you wonder if we all descend from the same tree.

  Before leaving New Iberia I tried to reach Molly, but her machine had been turned off. When Clete and I got to New Orleans, I called again and this time she answered. I told her I would probably not be back home until late Sunday afternoon.

  “Where are you now?” she said.

  “In Jackson Square, trying to get a lead on the man I had to shoot,” I replied.

  The line was quiet and I could tell Molly’s mind was on something else. “Do you feel any regret about last night?” she said.

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “Sometimes people think differently in the morning than they do at night.”

  “Can I see you tomorrow evening?” I said.

  “Yes,” she replied. Then she said it again. “Yes, we’ll go somewhere. We’ll take a boat ride maybe. We’ll do something good together, won’t we? I really want to see you, Dave.”

  After I closed my cell phone, I sat down on a bench in the square and listened to a street band knock out “The Yellow Dog Blues” while a juggler tossed wood balls in the air and an old man clutching a black umbrella peddled a unicycle in a circle. But the real song I heard
were Molly Boyle’s words through the cell phone, like an urgent whisper in the ear.

  During the next five hours Clete and I covered the Quarter, the lower end of Magazine, a strip of water-bed motels on Airline, and a half dozen bars across the river in Algiers. New Orleans’ tradition of vice and outlawry goes back almost two hundred years, when the French used southern Louisiana as a dumping ground for both criminals and prostitutes. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess at the kind of offspring they bred.

  The pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte and their business partner James Bowie made large sums smuggling slaves from the West Indies through the bayous, in violation of the federal prohibition of 1807, which forbade the importation of slaves into the United States. Brothels and gambling halls thrived, shootings and knifings were commonplace, and stolen goods from the Spanish Main could be found in the best homes along St. John’s Bayou. The woman considered the wisest person in old New Orleans was a witch by the name of Marie LeVeau. Outside of Mardi Gras, the most well-attended and festive celebrations in the city were the public hangings, conducted in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

  Those hedonistic and pagan traditions are still alive and well in contemporary New Orleans, modernity’s influence upon them cosmetic if non-extant. Crack cocaine hit the city like a hydrogen bomb in the 1980s, decimating black communities and the political viability they had gained during the Civil Rights era. Alcoholism is not a disease here but a venerated family heirloom. The Mafia introduced itself in New Orleans in 1890 by murdering the police commissioner and has been here ever since. Upscale brothels with baroque interiors and carriage houses may have become interesting anachronisms, but the industry of prostitution itself is more widespread, uncontrolled, disease-ridden, and dangerous than it has ever been.

  Pimps don’t have to seek recruits. Crack addicts, runaways, and desperate single mothers are everywhere, many of them glad to have the protection of a pimp who does not physically abuse them. Clete and I talked to a sixteen-year-old girl from Iowa, street name Holly, who had tracks on her arms, doll-like circles of orange rouge on her cheeks, and a black eye a john gave her after he tried to force her to perform oral sex on him without paying. The pimp, who posted bail for his girls regularly through Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, found the john and used a tire iron to extort three hundred dollars from him, half of which he gave to the girl.