The camera had been positioned so that its lens covered most of the yard but only part of the house. Shadows seemed to break across the house’s windows, indicating activity inside but little else. At 9:09 the figure in the raincoat left by the French doors and disappeared from the film. There was a momentary glint of light on metal inside the figure’s open raincoat, but the reflection could have been from a belt buckle.
Then, at 11:05 p.m., a second figure crossed the yard, tapped on the door, and entered the house. The figure wore a dark hat with a brim wilted by rainwater, and a coat with a hood that hung loosely down the back. At 11:13 the figure left. It was impossible to tell the gender of either visitor. Neither had looked up at the camera. The hand of the second visitor, who had tapped on the door, appeared to be white.
Doogie Dugas, the Jeanerette chief of police, clicked on the overhead light. He was a middle-aged, close-cropped, gray-haired man who affected the dress and manner of a western lawman. The fact that he was wise enough to avoid speaking in front of microphones had allowed him a long administrative career in smalltown law enforcement. But now his taciturnity was of no service to him and it was obvious he was having trouble dealing with the magnitude of the case that had been dropped into his lap. It was also obvious he had not talked to his own forensic pathologist.
“Koko Hebert told you the killer cut a cross in Miss Honoria’s head?” he said.
“Right,” Helen said.
“ ’Cause maybe the killer don’t like the Chalonses and he put the cross on Miss Honoria ’cause the cross is on Mr. Raphael’s family seal?” he said.
“Right,” Helen said.
Doogie pursed his mouth and closed and opened his eyes, like a man for whom the world was simply too much. “Cooh,” he said, using the favorite Cajun expression for surprise or awe. “Know how many people that might be?”
Then he winced at his own show of candor about the people whom he loyally served.
But I didn’t care about the problems Doogie Dugas might be experiencing. I could not get out of my mind the type of raincoat worn by both visitors to Val Chalons’s guesthouse, nor the wilted flop hat the second figure had worn. They were exactly of the kind stuffed behind the front seat of my truck.
I WENT TO AN AA MEETING at noon and another after work. But by sunset I was back into my problems regarding Molly Boyle. For the first time in my life I felt the abiding sense of shame and hypocrisy that I suspect accompanies the ethos of the occasional adulterer. But desire and need, coupled with genuine love of another, are not easily argued out of the room by morality.
If I genuinely loved Molly Boyle, why had I taken her to an off-road motel that almost advertised itself as the perfect situation for a sweaty tryst? If you loved a woman, you didn’t make her a partner in what others would inevitably deem a seedy and scandalous affair, I told myself. Most women have a level of trust in the men whom they love that men seldom earn or deserve. As a rule, we do not appreciate that level of trust until it’s destroyed. In my case, the fact that I had put Molly’s career and reputation at risk indicated that desire and need had not only trumped morality but also concern for the woman I said I loved.
I kept those lofty thoughts in my mind for about fifteen minutes, then picked up the phone and called her. I talked about the meetings I had attended that day, about the fine weather we were having, about the fact my system seemed to be free of booze. But it was quickly apparent that neither of us was entirely focused on what I was saying. “Do you want me to come over?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, my voice weak.
“If you don’t feel comfortable with that, we can go to the motel in Morgan City,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
What I was doing was no good. It was foolish to try and convince myself that it was. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“I’m leaving the Order, Dave. I’ve already talked with the bishop. My leaving doesn’t have anything to do with us. It’s been coming a long time. Stay there. I’ll be over shortly.”
She hung up before I could reply. But I was out front, in the yard, when she arrived a half hour later, happy in a way that perhaps I shouldn’t have been. She looked beautiful stepping out of her car, too, in straw sandals and pleated khakis and a blouse stitched with cacti and flowers, a big hand-tooled leather purse slung over her shoulder.
“Hi, big stuff,” she said.
“Hi, yourself,” I replied.
I fixed coffee and hot milk and slices of pound cake for us, and served it on a tray in the living room. We sat on the couch and watched part of a movie on television, while the streetlights came on outside and kids sailed by on bicycles. I touched the back of her neck and clasped her hand, and we sat there like married people do, with no sense of urgency about the passage of time.
She told me about her missionary years in Nicaragua and Guatemala. But without being told I already knew the nature of her experience there, in the same way you intuitively know when people have seen organized murder on a large scale, or have stood with hundreds of others inside a barbed-wire compound or languished in a cell run by individuals who are probably not made from the same glue as the rest of us. Their eyes contain memories they seldom share; they seem to exemplify Herodotus’ depiction of man’s greatest burden, namely, that foreknowledge of human folly never saves us from its consequences.
But why brood upon the bloody work of neocolonial empires on a summer night on a leaf-blown street that belongs back in the year 1945? Why not fall in love with the world all over again and not contend so vigorously with it? Outside, the night was unseasonably cool, scented with shade-blooming flowers, the giant live oaks along the sidewalks lit by streetlamps, Spanish moss lifting in the breeze. Molly Boyle and I made love in the bedroom, in the slow and unhurried fashion of people who are secure in the knowledge the two of them, together, have legitimate claim on the next day, and that mortality and the demands of the world are no longer of great importance. What better moment could human beings create for themselves? Let the world, at least for tonight, find its own answers for a change, I told myself.
I never asked Molly about other men or other lives she might have led. But her attitudes and manner reminded me of other nuns I had known over the years, particularly those who had gone to jail for their political beliefs or been exposed to the risk of martyrdom in Central America. They seemed to have no fear, or least none that I could see. As a consequence, they didn’t argue or defend, and the church to which they belonged was one they carried silently inside themselves.
Molly Boyle might have been educated, but she was a blue-collar girl at heart, her body thick from work, her breasts full, her nipples as big as half dollars, the honesty and love in her face as she looked down at me untouched by any mark of vanity or self-interest. When she came, her face softened and her eyes seemed to look inward, as though she were experiencing a tender thought that was almost unbearable; then her body grew tense, her mouth opening, and she came a second time, her arms propped stiffly on each side of me, her skin moist and ruddy, her womb scalding.
I put her nipples in my mouth and kissed the two red moles on her stomach, just below her navel. Her head lay on the pillow, the points of her hair damp with perspiration, her breath loud in the silence. She ran her hand through my hair and cupped it on the back of my neck.
“Was it Ernest Hemingway who wrote about feeling the earth move?” she said.
“That was the guy,” I replied.
“Boy, he had it right,” she said.
Our faces were turned one to the other on the pillow. I could hear the wind in the trees, Tripod running on his chain, a boat blowing its horn as it approached the drawbridge on Burke Street. Then I heard other sounds—car doors slamming, feet running through the yard, someone shouting unintelligibly behind the house.
Molly raised up on one elbow, her eyes fastened on mine. “What’s that?” she said.
A shadow went past the win
dow, then another one. “Cops,” I replied.
I got up from the bed and put on my khakis. A fist hammered on the front door. When I jerked it open, I looked into the slightly distended oval face of Doogie Dugas, who stood on the gallery, with two uniformed Jeanerette cops behind him. The yard was full of television cameras and lights.
“I got a search warrant for the premises,” Doogie said.
“You don’t have any jurisdiction here. Get off my property,” I said.
“It’s signed by an Iberia judge. Step aside,” Doogie said, as though performing on a stage set.
“Have you gone crazy?” I said.
“Your fingerprints was all over the crime scene, Dave. I ain’t got no control over this,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Two television cameramen followed him in, their battery-powered lights flooding the inside of my home, their lenses focusing now on Molly Boyle, who stood speechless, half-undressed, in the bedroom doorway.
Then I saw Val Chalons walk into the apron of light surrounding the gallery, his face suffused with good cheer. “This is just for openers, rumdum,” he said.
CHAPTER
18
WHILE DOOGIE DUGAS and his minions tore my house apart, I was transported to jail in St. Mary Parish. It was extralegal, almost a kidnapping, but legality can be a matter of definition, particularly when some of the players own vast amounts of money. Actually, few of the events that night were aimed at solving the murder of Honoria Chalons. I believed the agenda was to dismember my life.
Television programming in Acadiana was interrupted to show live coverage of my house being searched. I was shown being spread-eagled against a cruiser, shaken down, and hooked up. Molly was captured on camera leaving the house, her clothes and hair in disarray, refusing to answer questions asked by reporters who identified her as a Catholic nun. A plainclothes state police officer was interviewed on site about the possible connection between the death of Honoria Chalons and the homicides committed by the Baton Rouge serial killer.
The sweep of the tarbrush didn’t end there, either. The cameras were waiting when I was taken into the parish prison at Franklin. A television newsman, holding a microphone in my face, said, “Is it true you’re being called a person of interest in the death by strangulation of a New Orleans prostitute by the name of Holly Blankenship?”
Another asked, “Can you comment on the fact that under questionable circumstances you have shot and killed at least five people while serving as a police officer?”
The aim of the reporters, none of whom I knew, was obviously to slander. They were good at it, too. Their questions were predicated on distortions or flawed syllogisms that were presented as given facts. To try to defend oneself in those circumstances is to legitimize the question. To remain silent seems an admission of guilt. I was beginning to understand how character assassination can be a telecommunications art form. “Can you explain why a Catholic nun was in your home at the time of your arrest?” the first reporter asked.
“I’m under arrest because I shoved a Jeanerette detective who was wrecking my house,” I said.
But my attempt at evasion was that of an amateur. “Was the nun Sister Molly Boyle?” the reporter said, working Molly’s name into the story for the second time.
I pushed by him, my wrists cuffed behind me, my unshaved jaws like coal smut inside the blinding glare of strobe lights.
A jail is not a geographical place. A jail is a condition. It rings with the sounds of steel clanging against steel, people yelling down stone corridors, toilets flushing, a screw losing it after an inmate throws feces through the bars into his face. Sometimes a gigantic biker arrives wrapped in leg and waist chains, wiped out on meth, his body crawling with stink, his beard and hair as wild as a lion’s mane. The elevator stalls between floors. Later, the cops say he went apeshit. The walls shake, and when the elevator doors open, the biker is curled on the floor, bleeding from the mouth and ears, his eyes rolled up in his head from the voltage injected into him by a stun gun.
The external world and the inside of a can—state, federal, city, county, or parish—do not have connection points based on reason, humanity, psychiatry, or penology. Jails represent human and societal failure at its worst, nothing more, nothing less. Jails are a short-stop way of separating aberrant and undesirable people from the rest of us and rendering them as invisible as possible. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there. The people who believe jails rehabilitate usually need jobs.
In any slammer, powerlessness is the norm. You defecate in full view of others; you eat when you’re fed. If you’re truly unlucky, or young and very frightened and physically weak, you will be the daily punch of sexual predators, a bar of soap passed around in the shower, an item gambled away in a card game or rented out for a deck of smokes.
But as I lay on a steel bunk suspended from chains screwed into the wall, I really didn’t care about any of these things. My nemesis was not jail, the unraveling of my career, or even the machinations of Val Chalons. It was me. I remembered a line written by Billy Joe Shaver: “The first time the devil made me do it / The second time I done it on my own.” I had stoked my resentments, fed my sense of loss over Bootsie, and turned my depression into a wardrobe of sackcloth and ashes in order to get drunk again.
I felt like a man who had set fire to his own home in order to warm up an unappetizing dinner.
Then I had a peculiar experience, not unlike one of many years ago when I heard a metallic sound, a brief klatch, on a night trail in a tropical country that no one talks about anymore. There was a moment’s silence, the kind you automatically know is a prelude to your entrance into eternity, just before a waist-high explosion cut a black PFC nicknamed “Doo-Doo Dogshit” in half and laced my side and thigh with shrapnel that looked like twisted steel fingers.
A white light filled the inside of my head. I felt myself float up toward the canopy, then crash to the earth. Later, I would swear I saw Doo-Doo walking through the jungle, unharmed, strings of smoke rising from his clothes. He turned, gave me the peace sign in farewell, and said, Got to dee-dee, Loot. Big Boss Man upstairs need me to hep out. Hey, don’t you worry none. Chuck going back alive in ’65.
My men could have left me there. I’d screwed up and taken them down a night trail that was strung with bouncing betties and trip-wired 105 duds. But that was not their way. They came from barrios and southern shitholes and black northern slums and were the bravest and finest kids I ever knew. While I lay on a poncho liner and a mountain boy from North Georgia rigged up a litter with web gear, I could hear the rounds from an offshore battery arcing with a whooshing sound out of their trajectory, exploding in the jungle, shaking the earth under me. I was laced with morphine and blood-expander and knew I was going to die unless I got to battalion aid. I heard someone calling for the dust-off, then a voice whispering, “They can’t get the slick in. He’s fucked, man. Oh Jesus Christ, they’re coming through the grass.”
But they carried me all night, with no sleep, their arms straining against one hundred eighty pounds of deadweight, while they humped their own weapons and packs and radios and sweltered inside their flak vests, their exposed skin a feast for the mosquitoes that boiled out of the elephant grass.
That’s when I felt my long-held fear of death finally use itself up and lift from my soul the way ash floats off a dead fire. I closed my eyes in surrender to my fate and placed my trust in the tender mercies of those who bore me toward an uncertain destination, perhaps one that would be lit by flame and filled with explosions that sounded like ships’ boilers blowing apart.
But I was not a player any longer. The dice had rolled out of the cup, and if the numerical sum on them was snake-eyes or boxcars, the matter was out of my control, and that simple conclusion about my lifespan on earth set me free.
I fell asleep in the jail cell, even though a drunk snored loudly on the floor and a deranged man in sweatpants and a woman’s blouse kept shouting accusations through the
bars at a city cop he claimed had stolen his airline tickets to Paris.
When the sun came up, I realized I’d just had the first restful sleep since I had gotten drunk. With my cell partners I ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, tiny sausages, toast, jelly, and coffee. Then I heard Helen Soileau’s voice in a foyer and a moment later a screw unlocked my cell door and walked me to the front of the jail.
“Saw you on early-morning TV,” Helen said as she drove us back to New Iberia.
“Val Chalons doesn’t take prisoners,” I said.
“What were your latents doing at the crime scene, Dave?”
The sky was still pink with sunrise, the air sweet with the smell of flowers and rain, the cane waving in the fields. I started to lie, to say that perhaps indeed I had been at Val’s guesthouse on another occasion, even though earlier I had already denied that possibility to her. But I couldn’t do it. “I’m not sure how they got there. I got back on the juice. I was drunk all weekend,” I said.
She took a call on her radio, her expression frozen in place. Then she hung her microphone back on the dash. “What was that last part?”
“I’ve got two days sobriety now,” I said.
“Two days?”
I waited for her to go on. But she didn’t. In the silence I could hear the tires of the cruiser on the asphalt. “I think maybe I went to Val Chalons’s guesthouse in a blackout. I think I took a CD from his stereo, one with Ida Durbin’s voice on it,” I said.
“Ida Durbin again?”
“The CD is at the house. I think there’s a blood smear on it, maybe from my own hand.”
She rubbed at one temple with the ends of her fingers, as though an intolerable migraine had begun to eat its way through her head. “Maybe it’s time for you not to say any more without a lawyer.”
“I didn’t kill Honoria.”
“You don’t know what you did, so don’t give me your doodah. Dave, you make me so mad I want to stop the car and beat the shit out of you. Goddamn it!”
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