Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  But none of my friends had ever heard of Lou Kale or Ida Durbin. Nor had they heard of anyone going by the names of Connie and Lou Coyne. I began to wonder if I had been too hard on Ida. She may have saved Clete Purcel’s life, I told myself, and according to Clete’s account, even Lou Kale had seemed a reluctant participant in his interrogation and beating.

  Or was I being romantic and foolish about people who had invested their lives in the use of others?

  I drove back to New Iberia, unable to think straight. Helen had left a Post-it on my door. SEE ME, it said.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, looking up from her desk.

  “I took some personal time in Lafayette. I called Wally before eight,” I replied.

  “What kind of ‘personal time’?”

  “I saw Ida Durbin.”

  “I have to meet this woman.”

  “What is it, Helen?”

  “Raphael Chalons wants to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “You got me. Unless he thinks you’re a priest.” She looked at her watch. “It sounded to me like he was already on the bus.”

  I HAVE HEARD both hospice personnel and psychologists maintain that human beings lose body weight at the moment of death, that the dimensions of the skeleton and the tissue visibly shrink before the eye, as though the escape of the soul leaves behind a cavity swirling with atoms. Raphael Chalons was not dead when I reached Iberia General, but his stricken face and hollow eyes and the sag of his flesh on his bones made me wonder if the Angel of Death was not deliberately casting a slow shadow on the haunted man who stared back at me from the hospital bed.

  “I tried to bring you flowers earlier, Mr. Raphael. But the nurse felt my visit wasn’t an appropriate one,” I said.

  My words and their banality were obviously of no interest to him. His eyes were as black as a raven’s wing, his facial skin oily, spiked with whiskers, furrowed around the mouth. One hand lay palm-up on top of the sheet. He crooked his fingers at me.

  I did not want to approach him. I did not want to inhale his breath. I did not want his words to put talons in my breast. I did not want to be held captive by another dying man.

  But I leaned over him just the same. His fingers rose up and tapped my chest, as though he could convey meaning through my skin to compensate for the failure of his vocal cords. His lips moved, but his words were only pinpricks of spittle on my face.

  “I can’t understand you, sir,” I said.

  A flame burned in his cheeks and his eyes rolled up at mine, as a dependent lover’s might. A clot broke in his throat. “Not his fault,” he said.

  “Sir?” I said.

  His fingers tore a button on my shirt. His breath was dank, earth-smelling, like dirt spaded from a tree-covered grave. “The fault is mine. All my fault. Everything,” he whispered. “Please stop my son.”

  “From doing what, Mr. Raphael?”

  But his hand released my shirt and his gaze receded from mine, as though he were sinking into a black well and I was now only a marginal figure on its perimeter.

  The nurse came in and closed the blinds. It was only then I noticed that my flowers were on the windowsill. “Don’t worry, he’s only sleeping,” she said. “He has bursts of energy, then he falls asleep. He liked your flowers.”

  “Has he talked about his son?” I asked.

  “No, not at all,” she replied. She nodded toward the door, indicating she wanted to finish the conversation in the corridor. “May I be frank? I was very disturbed by something I saw take place here. It was very distressing.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Mr. Val came into the room with two lawyers. They tried to get Mr. Raphael to dictate a will. But he wouldn’t do it. Mr. Val was quite upset. No, the better term is irate.”

  “Thank you for telling me this,” I said.

  “You and Mr. Raphael must be very close.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He only asked to see one other person. Someone named Ida. Fortunately, she showed up here about an hour ago. I saw her stroking his hair on the pillow. She seemed a very elegant person. Do you know her, Detective Robicheaux?”

  At three that afternoon a nurse’s aide found Raphael Chalons half out of his bed, his sightless eyes staring out of his head as though he had looked into a camera’s flash. The blanket and sheet had cascaded over his shoulders, like the mantle a medieval lord might wear as he walked toward a blade of light on the earth’s rim.

  CHAPTER

  27

  WEDNESDAY EVENING Molly and I towed my boat to Henderson Swamp and fished at sunset inside a grove of flooded cypress trees. In the distance we could see car headlights flowing across the elevated highway that traverses a chain of bays and canals inside the center of the Atchafalaya Basin. The air was breathless, the moon rising above the cypress into a magenta sky, the water so still you could hear the hyacinths popping open back in the trees.

  We kept two largemouth bass that we caught on plugs and headed across a long bay toward the boat landing. In the dusk I could see cows standing on a green levee and lights inside the baitshop and restaurant at the landing. We winched the boat onto our trailer, then drove up the concrete ramp and went inside the baitshop for a cold drink. Through the window I saw a man on the gallery pouring a bag of crushed ice into his cooler, rearranging the fish inside. He put the plastic wrapper into a trash can and drank from a bottle of beer while he admired the sunset.

  “Wait here a minute,” I said to Molly.

  “Somebody you know?” she said.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  I approached the man on the gallery. The wind had come up, and I could see the leaves of the cypress trees lifting like green lace out on the water. The man felt my weight on the plank he was standing on. He lowered the bottle from his mouth without drinking from it and turned toward me. “Yeah, I remember you used to talk about fishing over here,” he said.

  “Always a pleasure to see you, Johnny,” I said.

  He nodded, as though a personal greeting did not require any other response.

  “How’s your mother?” I asked.

  “When you’re that old and you smell the grave, you’re thankful for little things. She don’t complain.”

  He slid another bottle of beer out of his cooler and twisted off the cap. The fish in the cooler were stiff and cold-looking and speckled with blood and ice under the overhead light. Jericho Johnny’s shirt puffed open in a gust of wind across the water. He turned his face toward the horizon, as though a fresh scent had invaded his environment. As he stood framed against a washed-out sky, his eyes devoid of any humanity that I could detect, his nose wrinkling slightly, I wondered if he wasn’t in fact the liege lord of Charon, his destroyed voice box whispering in the blue-collar dialect of the Irish Channel while he eased his victims quietly across the Styx.

  I leaned on the railing, my arm only inches from his. “You can’t do business in Iberia Parish, Johnny,” I said.

  He raised his beer bottle to his mouth and took a small sip off it. He glanced over his shoulder at Molly, who sat at a table in the baitshop, reading a magazine. “That your lady?” he said.

  “Look at me,” I said. “Val Chalons is off limits. I don’t care what kind of deal you cut with Clete Purcel.”

  He closed the lid on his cooler and latched it. “Purcel don’t have anything to do with me, Robicheaux. You were nice to my mother. I was nice to you. In fact, twice I was nice to you. That means I go where I want. I do what I want,” he said.

  He placed his unfinished beer on the railing and walked toward his car, his cooler balanced on his shoulder, ice water draining down his shirt-back as though his skin possessed no sensation.

  I WENT TO CLETE PURCEL’S OFFICE on Main Street during lunchtime the next day. His office had been a sports parlor during the 1940s, then had been gutted by a fire and turned into a drugstore that went bankrupt after the Wal-Mart store was built south of town. In the last week an
interior decorator had hung the ancient brick walls with historical photographs of New Iberia and antique firearms encrusted with rust that had been found in a pickle barrel under a nineteenth-century warehouse on the bayou. The new ambiance was stunning. So was the clientele going in and out of the office. Clete was now starting up his own bail bond service, and the utilitarian furniture in the front of the office was draped with people whose idea of a good day was the freedom to watch trash television without interruption.

  I walked through the litter and cigarette smoke and out the back door to the canvas-shaded brick patio where Clete often ate his lunch. He had planted palms and banana trees on the edge of the bricks, and had set up a huge electric fan by a spool table and sway-backed straw chair that served as his dining area. He was hunched over a crab burger, reading the Times-Picayune, the wind flapping the canvas over his head, when he heard me behind him.

  “What’s the gen, noble mon?” he said.

  “You heard about Raphael Chalons’s death?” I said.

  “Yeah, tragic loss.”

  “I saw him just before he died. He asked me to stop his son.”

  “From doing what?”

  “He didn’t get a chance to say.”

  Clete set down his food and wiped his mouth. He gazed out at the whiteness of the sun on the bayou. “You’re saying Val Chalons is a serial killer, maybe?”

  “You tell me.”

  “He’s a punk who thinks he can wipe his ass on other people. He made you out a perve and that’s why I—”

  “What?”

  “Called up Jericho Johnny Wineburger after I’d been toking on some substances I should have left alone.”

  “That’s the second reason I’m here. I saw him last night at Henderson Swamp.”

  Clete twisted in his chair, the straw weave creaking under his weight. “You saw Wineburger? Here?”

  “I told him he wasn’t going to do business in Iberia Parish. He told me to go screw myself.”

  “Dave, I called this guy back. I said I shouldn’t have bothered him, that I was wired, that we didn’t need his help, that Chalons is not worthy of his talents. We had an understanding.”

  “I didn’t get that impression.”

  “Look, here’s how it went down. Originally I told Johnny we didn’t need Val Chalons as a factor in our lives right now. Don’t look at me like that. Johnny owes twenty grand to a couple of shylocks. The vig is a point and a half a week. If he doesn’t get his act together, he’s going to lose his saloon. I told him the shylocks owe me a favor and I could get them to give him two free months on the vig if he could get the principal together. But I called him back when I was sober and told him it was hands-off on Chalons. I told him the deal with the shylocks was still solid—no vig for two months. But he doesn’t hurt Chalons. That was absolutely clear.”

  “Maybe his pride won’t let him take a free ride.”

  “Wineburger? That’s like a toilet bowl worrying about bad breath.”

  “Then what is he doing here?” I said.

  “With a guy like that—” Clete blew air up into his face and gave me a blank look. “Don’t let me roll any more Mexican imports, will you?”

  A THUNDERSTORM POUNDED through town that afternoon, then disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. When I got home from work, the lawn was scattered with wet leaves and the birdhouse Molly had nailed in the fork of a live oak had split across the nail holes and cracked apart on the ground, spilling all the birdseed in a yellow pile. I gathered up the broken pieces, dropped them in the garbage can, and found the listing for Andre Bergeron in the Jeanerette section of our local telephone directory.

  “This is Dave Robicheaux,” I said when he picked up the receiver. “I’d like to buy one of your birdhouses.”

  “You called at the right time. I got a sale on. One for twenty-five dol’ars or two for forty-nine ninety-five.”

  “I think I’ll stick with one.”

  “Installation is free.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just drop it off at Molly’s office and I’ll send you a check.”

  “No, suh, I give door-to-door complete service. That’s what you got to do to make a bidness a success today. Me and Tee Bleu got to go to the Wal-Mart. You gonna be home?”

  Twenty minutes later he was at the house, balancing on a stepladder while he wired the birdhouse to an oak limb. His son, Tee Bleu, was throwing pecans into the bayou. I wrote a check for Andre on the back steps.

  “Miss Molly at home?” he said.

  “No, she’s at the grocery store. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I just heard some people talking at the agency. Stuff they didn’t have no right to say.”

  His eyes fixed on me, then he began to look innocuously around the yard, his whole head turning from spot to spot, as though it were attached to a metal rod.

  “Spit it out,” I said.

  “A couple of ladies was saying they ain’t bringing their children to the agency no mo’ ’cause of what happened.”

  “You talking about the child molestation charge filed against me?”

  “Mr. Val behind that, suh. It ain’t right. No, suh. Ain’t right.”

  “You know much about Mr. Val?”

  “Know as much as I need to.”

  “You’re a mysterious man, Andre.” I tore the check out of my checkbook and handed it to him.

  His half-moon eyebrows could have been snipped out of black felt and pasted on his forehead. He studied his little boy playing down by the bayou, and shook his shirt on his chest to cool his skin. Through the trees we could see a dredge barge passing on the bayou, its hull low in the water, its decks loaded with piles of mud.

  “When I was a li’l boy about that size, I seen a gator come out of the bayou after a baby. Baby was in diapers, toddling along on the edge of the water. His mama was hanging wash up by the trees, probably t’inking about the worthless man who put that baby in her belly. Gator got the baby by his li’l leg and started dragging him toward the water. Wasn’t nothing nobody could do about it. That gator was long as your truck and two feet ’cross the head. The mother and the old folks was running ’round screaming, hitting at it wit’ buckets and crab nets and cane poles, but that gator just kept on moving down to the water, wit’ the baby hanging out its mouth, just like they was hitting on it with pieces of string.

  “Then Mr. Raphael run down from the big house wit’ a butcher knife and cut the gator’s t’roat. He drove the baby to Charity Hospital in Lafayette and saved his life. People couldn’t talk about nothing else for a year except how Mr. Raphael save that po’ child’s life.”

  Andre stopped his story and looked down the slope at his son. The late sun was a burnt orange through the trees, and blue jays were clattering in the canopy.

  “I’m not sure I get the point, Andre,” I said.

  “People loved Mr. Raphael. But they ain’t knowed him. Not like I knowed him. Not like I know Mr. Val. My li’l boy growing up in different times from the ones I growed up in. I’m real happy for that. That’s the only point I was making, Mr. Dave. I got birdseed out in my car. You want me to fill up your birdhouse?”

  “I have some in the shed. Thanks, anyway,” I said.

  On his way out, he helped Molly carry in her groceries from her car, his face jolly and full of cheer as he set the bags down heavily, one after another, on the kitchen table.

  After he was gone, I went inside and helped her put away the groceries. “Andre told me some ladies at your agency won’t bring their children there anymore,” I said.

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  “Man’s just reporting what he heard.”

  “I know who I married. That’s all I care about.”

  “You’re a pretty good gal to hang out with,” I said.

  I poured a glass of iced tea for both of us and sat down at the kitchen table to drink it. She leaned over me and hugged me under the neck and kissed me behind the ear.

  “W
hat was that for?” I said.

  “I felt like it,” she replied.

  THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of two brown pelicans sailing low and flat over an inland bay in late autumn, the pouches under their beaks plump with fish. In the dream they continued north in their flight, across miles of sawgrass stiff with frost and bays that looked like hammered copper. They passed over a cluster of shrimp boats tied up at the docks in a coastal town, then followed a winding bayou into the heart of the Teche country. The pelicans turned in a wide circle over a swamp thick with gum trees and cypress snags, and sailed right across the home where Jimmie and I grew up. Through the eyes of the birds I saw the purple rust on the tin roof of the house and the cypress boards that had turned the color of scorched iron from the dust and smoke of stubble fires in the cane fields. I saw my mother and father in the backyard, hoeing out their Victory garden during World War II. I saw Jimmie and me in tattered overalls, building a wood fire under the big iron pot in which we cooked hog cracklings after first frost.

  Then all the people in the yard looked up at the sky, like flowers turning into the sun, and waved at the pelicans.

  I woke up from the dream and went into the kitchen to make coffee. What did the dream mean? Bootsie had said that one day the brown pelicans would come back to the Teche. But I didn’t need dreams to tell me there were no pelicans on Bayou Teche, and that my parents were as dead as the world in which I grew up.

  “Up early?” I heard Molly say.

  “It’s a beautiful morning,” I said.

  She went outside and came back with both Tripod and Snuggs and filled their pet bowls. “There’s a robin standing on top of the new birdhouse,” she said.

  “Andre Bergeron told me a story yesterday about Mr. Raphael saving a baby from a gator. Except his story seemed to be about something else.”

  “A baby?”

  “Yeah, a black baby. A gator came after it. Bergeron said when he was a little boy he saw Mr. Raphael save the baby from the gator.”