Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  Clete did not try to follow her reasoning. He waited for her to ask him for money. But she didn’t. “I need to use the bathroom. Then I’ll clean the birdcage and we can go,” she said.

  The inside of the house was clean and squared away, the furniture bright, the rooms air-conditioned by two window units. Through a bedroom door he could see a water bed and a lava lamp on the nightstand. Babette went into the bathroom, then Clete heard the toilet flush and the faucet running before she came back out.

  “Why do you have that funny look on your face?” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “You think this is a fuck pad?”

  “Hey—” he said.

  “If that’s what you think, say so.”

  “Not me,” he said, and tried to smile.

  “I’ve got a pitcher of rum punch in the fridge. You want some?” she said.

  “I’m good,” Clete said.

  “I can’t find my aspirin. My head is coming off. Somebody is always hiding my aspirin,” she said, opening and slamming cabinets all over the kitchen.

  “I thought this was your cousin’s place.”

  “It is. I just visit here sometimes.”

  Clete decided he would have a drink after all. Babette broke apart a tray of ice, dropped cubes into two tall glasses that had been standing straight up in the dry rack, and filled them with rum punch from the pitcher. She took a long drink and the color bloomed in her face. “Oh, that’s a lot better,” she said.

  “You got a pretty heavy jones?” Clete said.

  “I got into smoking China white because I didn’t want to infect. But I ended up using needles anyway. I’ve got it down to two balloons a day. They say if you can get it down to one, it’s mostly manageable.”

  Clete drank from the punch, crunching ice between his molars, and tried to look attentive. He put a cigarette in his mouth and asked to borrow her cigarette lighter.

  “I didn’t think you smoked,” she said.

  “Just once in a while.” He opened and closed his mouth to clear a popping sound from his ears. “You never heard of a hooker name of Ida Durbin?”

  “I already told you. You think I’m lying?”

  “No, I just feel kind of weird,” he replied.

  He reached out to take the lighter from her hand, but the gold surface seemed to turn soft and sink in the middle, like a lump of butter inside the warmth of a stove. His fingers went past her hand and knocked over a salt shaker, as though his motors had been snipped in half at the back of his brain. His mouth and throat became instantly dry; the overhead lighting caused his eyes to well with tears.

  “What’s happening?” he said.

  She stared at him mutely, her expression caught between fear and guilt. “I have a little girl. I’ve got to get clean. Just don’t lie to them. It makes them really mad,” she said.

  “Come here,” he said, catching a piece of fabric with one hand.

  But she pulled her canvas tote from him, looked back once, and rushed out the back door into the darkness.

  Clete felt himself slip from the chair and crash on the linoleum, his drink glass shattering inches from his face.

  Both the men who came through the front door carried lengths of chain and looked Hispanic. One wore a formfitting strap undershirt and had shaved armpits and the tapered lats and flat chest of a boxer. The other man was much bigger, his skin slick with black hair. The fingers of his right hand were inserted in the holes of a pair of brass knuckles.

  A third man entered the house. He wore white slacks belted high up on his waist and a western shirt sewn with chains of purple and red flowers. “We tossed your room and found your P.I. buzzer. Sorry to do this to you, big man, but it’s out of my control,” Lou Coyne said.

  “Yeah, you came here to get fucked, and that’s what you got, spermo—fucked,” the man in the formfitting undershirt said. Both he and the other Hispanic man laughed.

  Lou Coyne squatted down eye-level with Clete. “You working for Robicheaux? You working for some political people? These guys here are serious. Don’t underestimate their potential,” he said.

  Clete tried to rise to his feet, then collapsed again, pieces of broken glass knifing into his back.

  “This ain’t my way, big man. Please don’t do this to either one of us,” Coyne said.

  But the words Clete heard were muffled, distorted, like someone shouting inside the downdraft of a helicopter. In his mind’s eye he saw a hooch burning brightly on the edge of a flooded rice field. Boxes of AK-47 rounds were exploding inside the heat, and in the distance, against a storm-sealed sky, he could see a Zippo-track with a Confederate battle flag tied to the radio antenna grinding over a dike that flanged the rice field, automatic-weapons fire dancing across the water’s surface.

  Clete got on his hands and knees and began crawling.

  That’s when a chain whipped out of the air and raked across his neck and the side of his face. Then the man with animal hair on his skin straddled him and drove the pair of brass knuckles deep into his back and a second time into his neck.

  What had they given him? Clete guessed it was chloral hydrate. Or maybe acid. Or maybe both. The room had melted, the colors in the walls and floor dissolving and running together. One of the men was now wrapping a chain around his forehead, tightening the links into his scalp. Clete drove his elbow into the man’s scrotum and heard him scream and the chain rattle to the floor.

  Clete crashed into a laundry room off the kitchen, knocking over an ironing board and a plastic basket filled with dried clothes. On his knees, he slammed the door behind him and shot the bolt. A cast-iron pipe, an old drain of some kind, extended four feet high up on one wall. He gripped it at the top, wrenched it back and forth until it broke loose from a rusted connection, then ripped it out of the floor.

  The pipe was heavy and thick in his palms. The floor seemed to be pitching under his feet, the roar of helicopter blades still thundering in his head. Or was that one of his attackers throwing his weight into the bolted door? The sounds in his head were so loud he couldn’t tell where they originated, but the door was shaking hard, vibrating through the walls and floor. Then the bolt splintered loose from the jamb and the door flew open in Clete’s face. Clete looked into the close-set pig-eyes of the man with brass knuckles, and drove the pipe into his mouth, breaking his lips against his teeth.

  The man held his hands to the lower portion of his face, his brass knuckles shiny with the blood and saliva that drained through his fingers. Clete lifted the pipe like a baseball bat and swung it into the other Hispanic man’s jaw, then across his back and rib cage. Both Hispanic men tried to shield their heads with their forearms and escape the blows raining down on them, but Clete followed them into the backyard, hitting them again and again, the pipe ringing in his palms.

  “They’re done! Jesus Christ! We’re done!” Lou Coyne said. “You’re gonna kill them guys! Hey, are you hearing me?”

  Clete stumbled out of the backyard, dropping the pipe on the front sidewalk. The air smelled of smoke, perhaps from outdoor barbecue pits, and mist was blowing off an elevated highway in the distance. He staggered down the street toward a clapboard bar that glowed with the hazy iridescence of a pistol flare burning inside fog. Again, he thought he heard the downdraft of helicopter blades and the labored breath of people running, clutching at his arms, speaking words to him that made no sense.

  Totally stoned, zoned, and shit-blown up the Mekong. I’m not going to make it, he thought.

  Then, while a Miami P.D. helicopter with a searchlight roared by overhead, the loving hands of women who made him think of black angels guided him into the backseat of a car. Their lips were arterial-red, their perfume like that of an enclosed garden inside the car, their hands cool and gentle as they wiped his face and hair and the cuts in his scalp.

  “What’s the haps, ladies?” Clete said, and passed out.

  CHAPTER

  20

  CLETE ARRIVED BACK in New Iberi
a the following evening on the Sunset Limited, ensconced in a Pullman bedroom with his flight bag and golf clubs, although he had little memory of being put aboard the train.

  “These were black hookers?” I asked as I drove him to his cottage at the motor court.

  “Except the woman driving. She was white. A beanpole with a corn bread accent, but definitely in charge,” he replied. “She got on the cell phone and gave hell to this guy Lou Whatever.”

  “The pimp asked you if you were hooked up politically?”

  “Yeah, that brings up another subject. Remember I told you Raphael Chalons had this televangelical character fronting points for his casino interests and you blew me off?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “The dial-a-prayer number Babette gave me belongs to a TV huckster named Colin Alridge. He’s the same guy who’s working for Chalons. Babette said she and Lou Whatever and some other whores visited the casino in Lake Charles and met him. He looks like a college kid out of the 1940s. I think Babette creamed her pants when she shook his hand.”

  “Why should people be beating you up with chains because of Raphael Chalons’s connection to a lobbyist?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. He was quiet a long time, lost in thought, his back and neck marbled with bruises. “There’s one other thing I didn’t tell you.”

  I looked at him.

  “The white woman, the beanpole with corn fritters in her mouth? Before she and the black girls poured me into the Pullman, I’m pretty sure she said, ‘Tell Dave and Jimmie Robicheaux I said hello.’ What do you think of that, noble mon?”

  WAS THE WHITE WOMAN IDA DURBIN? There was no way to know. When Clete told me of his experience in Miami, he was still half-swacked on the drugs that the prostitute named Babette had probably dropped in his glass before she poured the rum punch into it.

  I also wondered if the story about Raphael Chalons’s connection with an evangelical political huckster had any relevance. If a political operative wired into the White House was on his payroll, Chalons’s breeding would probably restrain him from revealing that fact at a formal dinner, but he would not care if someone else did. He was jaded, corrupt, sexually profligate, politically pragmatic, but not a hypocrite, a gentleman in the same way the Prince of Darkness is.

  FRIDAY MORNING Jimmie got back to town from New Orleans and I met him for lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria.

  “The white woman who saved Clete’s butt said to tell you and me hello?” he said.

  “That’s what he says. But he was still half-loaded when he got off the train.”

  “She was a beanpole with a peckerwood accent?”

  “Something like that.” I was beginning to regret I had brought up the possibility that Ida Durbin was indeed alive and in Miami and hooked up with Lou Kale. “Jim, if this woman is Ida, she’s better forgotten. Let the past slide.”

  “That from you? I’ve had her death on my conscience since 1958.” He had stopped eating. His eyes glistened, and he coughed slightly into his napkin to hide his emotion.

  “I’ve got a couple of calls in to Miami P.D. to check out the house where Clete got knocked around. Give me some time before you do something rash,” I said.

  “I need to go back over there,” Jimmie said, picking up the check, his lunch unfinished.

  THE TECHNICAL PROCESSES involving DNA identification are complicated and time-consuming. There is often a long waiting list at both federal and state laboratories, particularly in an era when large numbers of homicide and rape cases are appealed based on evidence that was gathered and stored years ago, before DNA identification was possible. But Mack Bertrand at our crime lab had pushed through the work on Honoria Chalons in less than four days. He called me at the office just before five on Friday.

  “No match with the Baton Rouge serial killer, no match with anything in the national database,” he said.

  “I never thought the Baton Rouge guy did this,” I said.

  “What did you think?”

  “Did the semen come from a relative?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “It speaks for itself,” I replied.

  “If you’re talking about incest, this lab has no evidence of that.” He paused a moment. “Dave, can I offer some advice?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not a fan of either Raphael or Valentine Chalons. But I think you’re barking at the moon on this one.”

  “Thanks for your time.”

  “My wife and I are taking the kids to the Little League game tonight. Care to join us?”

  “Tied up. But you’re the best, Mack,” I said.

  I had learned long ago you can have all the friends you want when you’re in tall cotton. But your real friends are the ones you meet during hard times, when you’ve blown out your doors and every sunrise comes to you like a testimony to personal failure. Mack Bertrand was a real friend.

  IT WAS FRIDAY NIGHT and Molly was at a meeting of Pax Christi at Grand Coteau. I had deliberately stayed away from her since Doogie Dugas had arrested me on camera at my home and Val Chalons had used footage on his various news channels of Molly standing half-undressed in the bedroom doorway. She herself was undaunted by the experience and I suspect had long ago become inured to the wickedness that the socially respectable were capable of. But I did not want to see her hurt more than she already had been, and at the same time I wanted to see her terribly.

  At sunset I took a long walk down Main, through the business district and out to the west side, where there is a neatly mowed green lot that is the only reminder of a smithy and wagonworks that was there when I was a child during World War II.

  The wagonworks was a very old structure even then, its red paint cracked and faded by the elements, the wood planks shrunken and warped by the heat in the forge. The owner was Mr. Antoine, a small, wizened man who spoke beautiful French but little English. At that time in New Iberia there were black people still alive who remembered the Emancipation, what they came to call “Juneteenth,” and there were white people who had seen General Banks’s Federal soldiers, twenty thousand of them, march through town in pursuit of the chivalric Confederate general, Alfred Mouton. But our only surviving Confederate veteran was Mr. Antoine.

  He loved to regale us with tales of what he always referred to as “La Guerre.” He had served in Jackson’s Shenandoah Campaign and had been with Jubal Early when Early had thrown twenty-five thousand men against the Union line just before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Mr. Antoine’s regiment was caught in a cornfield and blown into piles of gray and butternut rags by canister and grapeshot. But the point of Mr. Antoine’s tale about the last days of the war was not the carnage, or the crows that pecked out the eyes of southern dead, or the snuffing sounds of feral hogs that would come at dusk. Instead, Mr. Antoine’s story was about a fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama who found his regimental colors in the dust, tied them to a musket barrel, and mounted a terrified stray horse.

  The Union soldiers two hundred yards up the slope could not believe what they saw next—a boy without shoes, clamped on the spine of a horse like a clothespin, charging across his own dead toward a line of pointed weapons that could have reduced him and his animal to a bloody mist.

  But no soldier fired a shot. When the boy’s horse leaped across their wall, they pulled him from the saddle and pinned him to the dirt, all the while laughing, one of them saying, “You ain’t got to fight no more, son. You’re on the Lord’s side now.”

  Mr. Antoine still carried a pistol ball in his forearm and would let us children run our fingers over the hard lump it made under his skin. Once, in a dark mood, he decried the war and described the bloody shuddering and gurgling sounds of a young Union soldier who had died on Mr. Antoine’s bayonet. But the story he obviously took most pleasure in retelling was that of the Alabama drummer boy. Now, after many years, I think I understand why.

  Mr. Antoine
did not let the evil of the world overcome him, just as the Union soldiers behind the limestone wall did not let the war rob them of their humanity; just as military defeat and fear of death could not undo the drummer boy who placed honor and loyalty to the dead above concern for his own life.

  As I stood on the sidewalk, looking at a green lot bordered in back by live oaks and Bayou Teche, I could almost see Mr. Antoine’s forge puff alight in the shadows and hear his burst of laughter at the completion of his story about the Alabama drummer boy. I wanted to tell him that flags were emblematic of much more than national boundaries. But I suspected Mr. Antoine had learned that lesson a long time ago.

  THE FUNERAL MASS for Honoria Chalons was held Saturday morning in Jeanerette. I attended it, although I took a pew at the back of the church and made no attempt to offer condolences or to accompany the funeral procession to the cemetery. That afternoon I was at Wal-Mart and had one of those experiences that make me wonder if our commonality lies less in our humanity than the simple gravitational pull of the earth and a grave that is already dug and numbered.

  The sweeping breadth of the store’s interior was crowded with people for whom a Wal-Mart is a gift from God. In my hometown, most of these are poor and uneducated, and assume that the low-paying jobs that define their lives are commonplace throughout the country. The fact that the goods they buy are often shoddily made, the clothes sewn in Third World sweatshops by people not unlike themselves, is an abstraction that seems to have no application to the low price on the item.

  By late Saturday afternoon every trash can in front of the store is overflowing on the sidewalk. The parking lot is littered with dumped ashtrays, fast-food containers, chicken bones, half-eaten fruit, soft drink and beer cans, and disposable diapers that have been flattened into the asphalt by car tires. It’s the place where the poor go, or those who don’t want to drive twenty miles to Lafayette. It’s not where I expected to see Raphael Chalons on the day of his daughter’s burial.