Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Val Chalons is your son, isn’t he?”

  “That’s what this is about? Are you nuts? You make me pull the trigger on a cop over—”

  I clenched my left hand on his throat and jammed the .38 into his mouth with my right, forcing the cylinder over his teeth. He gagged, spittle running from the corners of his mouth. I pulled the trigger and heard the hammer snap again on an empty chamber.

  “Oh Jesus,” he said, trembling all over when I slid the barrel from his mouth.

  “Is Val Chalons your—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we found out when the old man needed a kidney donation. He had to get the kidney from the girl.”

  “Honoria?”

  He nodded, blotting the spittle and blood on his mouth with the bedsheet.

  “Val put the contract on me?” I said.

  “Figure it out. How many people want you snuffed?”

  “I wouldn’t be clever.”

  “He don’t consult with me. He’s an educated man. People get in his face, he deals with it. That he gets from me.”

  I looked at him a long time. There were other questions I could have asked him, but the surge of terror that had robbed him of his defenses was gone and I had no inclination to restore it. In fact, I wondered if the moral insanity that characterizes terminal alcoholism had not taken up presence in my own life. I wiped the .38 clean on a towel and opened the curtain on the sliding glass door. Hailstones were bouncing on the St. Augustine grass and the cement by the pool.

  “I can’t force you out of the area, Lou, but I’m going to make life as uncomfortable for you as I can,” I said.

  “You did a switcherroo on that gun, didn’t you? You palmed the shell?”

  I flipped open the cylinder on the .38 and shucked out the cartridge I had loaded earlier. It had been one chamber removed from rotating under the firing pin.

  “You got a lot of luck, Lou. Wear this on your key chain,” I said, and bounced the cartridge off his chest.

  As I turned to walk out, I heard him scrape the steak knife off his dinner plate and charge at my back. I drove my elbow into his face and left him on the carpet, holding his nose with both hands.

  A moment later I stopped at the desk in the lobby. “I owe you an apology, Miss,” I said.

  “What for?” the girl behind the desk said, smiling.

  “One day I’ll tell you. Here are a couple of gift certificates for a dinner at the Patio in New Iberia. The owner gave them to me, so it’s no big deal.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night,” she replied.

  I got in my truck and drove out from under the spreading oak where I had parked. A blue and pink neon sign in the shape of a martini glass and a reclining nude inside it was stenciled against the sky. I floored the truck through a broken chain of puddles and swerved out onto the old two-lane to New Iberia, the road ahead black with rain.

  CHAPTER

  30

  AT 8:01 A.M. FRIDAY I called Koko Hebert at his office. “Was Honoria Chalons a kidney donor?” I said.

  He put down the receiver, then scraped it up a moment later. “Neither a donor nor a recipient,” he said. “Why?”

  “Val Chalons was asked to be a kidney donor for his father. It turned out they weren’t related. Supposedly Honoria bailed out the old man.”

  “Honoria took all her parts into the grave.”

  “You know how to say it, Koko.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Where do we start a search on a kidney transplant for Raphael Chalons?”

  “No, where do you start a search,” he corrected, and hung up.

  Outside, the rain was twisting in sheets, cars inching along in water up to the doors. The phone on my desk rang in less than thirty seconds after Koko had broken the connection. “What are you trying to tell me?” he said.

  “Val is not the son of Raphael Chalons. The old man didn’t leave a will. The Chalons estate is probably up for grabs.”

  “He sliced up his sister?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. But I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t have the guts.”

  “How does this figure into anything, except the fact you hate Valentine Chalons?”

  “He tried to have me killed. I’m getting tired of your social outrage, partner.”

  For the first time I could remember, Koko Hebert had nothing acerbic to say.

  “The old man always went to Houston for his serious medical work. We need to get the judge involved,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll process some stuff on the computer. Organ transplants involve lots of agencies. Maybe I can take a shortcut. I used to know the Chalons family physician in Lafayette. But I think he might be dead,” he said.

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  “No, you’re like all drunks, Dave. You just want your way,” he replied.

  He was probably right, but at that point I didn’t care. I attended the noon meeting of the Insanity Group, then drove back to the department through streets where the storm sewers had backed up and cars had flooded out and been left abandoned by their owners. At the noon meeting I made no allusion to the fact that the previous night I had forced a terrified man to point a revolver into my chest and pull the trigger and that I in turn had jammed the weapon down his throat and done the same to him. I began to wonder if in fact there were some deeds you confessed only to God, because no one else would believe them.

  At 1:36 p.m. Dana Magelli called from NOPD. “There’s no DNA match on Ernest Fogel,” he said. “We’ve got him on the abduction of the fifteen-year-old, but that’s it. You got anything at your end?”

  “Nothing I haven’t already told you,” I replied.

  “You remember the story about the abduction and murder of John Walsh’s kid?” he said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “The partner of that serial killer in Texas, Henry Lucas? He might have murdered Walsh’s boy. But we’ll never know. The guy died of AIDS in the Broward County Stockade.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what his point was and in truth I was afraid to ask. The story he had alluded to was one of the saddest I had ever encountered as a law officer.

  “I think Ernest Fogel is like that guy in the Broward County Stockade. We’ll never know the extent of his crimes,” Dana said. “He’ll be out in a few years and keep killing people, maybe children, and it won’t stop until mortality catches up with him. My wife says that’s why I don’t sleep at night. How about you? You get a full night’s sleep?”

  THE RADIO SAID the hurricane churning out in the Gulf might make landfall between New Orleans and Mobile. Down in Plaquemines Parish, whose narrow extremities dangle like a severed umbilical cord far out in the salt, most reasonable people had already begun heading up Highway 1 toward Red Cross shelters in New Orleans. But by midafternoon the wind and rain had stopped in New Iberia and a dripping stillness had descended upon the town. Molly had said she was going to stop at the grocery store after work, but I thought it might be a fine evening to go out for dinner. Before leaving the office for the day, I called Molly at her agency and got the message machine.

  When I parked in the driveway, Snuggs was waiting for me on the gallery railing, his paws tucked under his chest, his thick, short-haired tail flipping and curling and uncurling in the air like a magician’s rope.

  “How’s it hangin’, Snuggs?” I said, picking him up.

  He rested on his back against the crook of my arm, purring, tightening his feet against me for extra purchase. The two of us went inside. Molly was still not home. I called again at the agency. This time the message machine did not pick up.

  I fed Snuggs and Tripod, then walked down to the bayou. The water had risen into the trees along the bank and was swollen with mud and cluttered with broken tre
e limbs and floating islands of green hyacinths that had torn loose from their root systems and were now blooming incongruently with yellow flowers. In the middle of the bayou an upside-down pirogue spun in an eddy, its hull shining dully in the overcast. The air was as cool and clean and fresh-smelling as spring, the trees dripping chains of rain rings into the bayou. Out of nowhere, two brown pelicans sailed past me and landed on the water not thirty feet from me.

  I heard Tripod waddling down the bank behind me. I scooped him up and folded his tail down and rested his seat on my palm so he could have a good overview of the bayou. “Check it out, Tripod,” I said. “The pelicans are back on the Teche, just like Bootsie said they would be. You happen to know these two guys?”

  If he did, he wasn’t saying.

  The pelicans floated past me, their feathers necklaced with raindrops, their long beaks pulled into their breasts. I flipped Tripod up on my shoulder and walked back toward the house, an unexpected sense of serenity singing in my soul.

  Squirrels were chasing one another around the tree trunks and robins and mockingbirds were picking insects out of the new leaves on the ground. The birdhouse I had bought from Andre Bergeron hung suspended on a wire over my head, canting slightly in the breeze, its perch empty. I remembered I had still not poured birdseed into it. “Time to fill her up, huh, Tripod?” I said, setting him down.

  I got a sack of seed and a stepladder from the shed, and climbed up to the birdhouse. I pulled the beveled plug from the roof and began pouring seed down into the feeder compartment inside. The plug swung back and forth on a tiny brass chain that was affixed to the plug’s bottom and pinned inside the roof, so that the chain didn’t dangle outside the hole and impair the clean structural lines of the wood. The birdhouse, with its pegs and hand-notched joints and sanded surfaces stained with vegetable oil, was a fine example of craftsmanship and obviously the work of someone who had an aesthetic eye.

  But my attention was diverted away from my activity when I happened to glance back through my kitchen window. Inside, I could see the red light flashing on my message machine. Molly must have called when I had been watching the pelicans with Tripod, I thought. I climbed down from the ladder and went through the back door.

  I pushed the “play” button on the machine. “I might be late. I’ll pick up some frozen gumbo for supper at the Winn-Dixie on the way home, but first I need to take care of a problem,” Molly’s voice said. Then after a pause, as though she were trying to restrain a vexation she didn’t want to vent, she added, “I’m disappointed in someone. He borrowed my tools again without asking. I need to straighten this guy out. Some people, huh, troop?”

  I called the agency, but no one answered and the machine was still off. I tried her cell phone but got her voice-mail recording. The time was 5:43 p.m.

  Straighten which guy out?

  I stared out the kitchen window at the birdhouse suspended on a wire above my stepladder, the plug from the feeder hole dangling from its tiny chain.

  Good God, I thought, and shut my eyes at my own stupidity.

  I looked up Koko Hebert’s phone number in the directory and punched it in on my cell phone as I headed out the door. “Koko, can you go to the evidence locker and find the piece of chain that was on the body of Fontaine Belloc?”

  I heard him sigh. “How about tomorrow?”

  “I bought a birdhouse from Andre Bergeron. Inside the construction is a length of brass chain that looks like the piece you found on the Belloc woman . . . You there?”

  “Why don’t you take care of it?”

  “Because I think Bergeron may be with my wife now,” I replied.

  I got into my truck and began backing up into the East Main. But a pearly limo with charcoal-tinted windows pulled to the curb and blocked my way. Someone in the backseat rolled a window down on its electrical motor.

  “Get out of the driveway, Val,” I said.

  He sat on the rolled white leather seat, dressed in pleated beige slacks and a golfing shirt, a bottle of Cold Duck balanced on his knee. On the far side of him was a woman I didn’t know. Her face was stiff with makeup, her blouse unbuttoned on the tops of her breasts. I saw her take the last hit on a roach and drop it out of the top of her window onto the street.

  “Your wife shouldn’t make remarks about Andre,” Val said. “Big mistake.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Somebody told Andre how your wife made fun of him. Not good, Davey boy. No, no, not at all good,” he said.

  “You move your fucking car before I pull your teeth out,” I said.

  He laughed, spoke to his chauffeur, then rolled up his window while handing the bottle of Cold Duck to the woman, as though the world beyond the boundaries of his limo no longer existed.

  I backed into the street, cars swerving and blowing around me, then ran the red light down by the Shadows and headed for Molly’s agency.

  On the way I punched in a 911 on my cell phone and asked the dispatcher to send a cruiser to the agency and one to Andre Bergeron’s house in Jeanerette.

  “What’s the nature of the emergency, sir?” she asked.

  “My wife’s life could be in danger. Who is this?” I said.

  She gave me her name. She was new on the job and obviously swamped with calls reporting traffic accidents and power outages. “Two of the bridges have been hit by boats and are closed,” she said. “The bridge at Nelson’s Canal might be open in a few minutes. But we can’t be certain.”

  “Call Jeanerette. Ask them to send a city car to the Chalons property. Tell them to place the black man, Andre Bergeron, in custody.”

  “Sir, I can’t do that without an explanation,” she said.

  “He’s the Baton Rouge serial killer.”

  “Sir, I have to have verification of who you are,” she replied.

  I dropped the cell phone on the seat and steered around a truck from the electric company and a repair crew that was working on a downed power line. Up ahead, I could see the turnbridge at the confluence of Nelson’s Canal and Bayou Teche. Evidently the huge sprockets on the bridge had jammed when it was partially opened, and now traffic had backed up for hundreds of yards on both sides of the bayou.

  There was only one thing for it. I abandoned my truck and began running by the side of the road toward the bridge, my hand tight on my holstered .45. But even as I was running past the line of idling cars and the faces of the curious and the bemused, the image of Val Chalons seated in the back of his limo would not go out of my head. No, it was not his imperious or insulting manner that bothered me, or that he seemed to be embracing and flaunting the meretricious world represented by his mother and Lou Kale. It went beyond that, something that was raw, designing, inhuman, genuinely evil.

  But what?

  You’re being set up again, I told myself.

  But sometimes your only option is to play out the hand, no matter what the consequences. Sometimes when you’re deep in Indian country, the only speeds available are full throttle and fuck it.

  The bridge’s rotary system had locked against itself when the steel grid was only five feet from the asphalt. I backed off, then jumped into space and landed upright with a loud ping on the metal. People were starting to get out of their cars and stare. I raced to the other end of the bridge and jumped again, this time skinning my elbow and tearing the knee of my trousers on the road surface.

  I got up and starting running toward the rear of the traffic jam. A fat man wearing a silver suit and a Stetson short-brim was getting out of a huge purple Cadillac. The factory hood ornament on the Cadillac had been replaced with a pair of needlepointed brass cattle horns. “What the hell is going on?” the fat man said.

  “How much gas is in your car?” I said.

  “Gas?”

  “This is an emergency situation,” I said, opening my badge holder in his face. “I’m taking your vehicle.”

  “Not my car, you’re not. I’ve got to be at the Oil Center in Lafayette in thirty minutes.�
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  “In about thirty seconds you’re going to be on the ground in cuffs,” I said.

  I got behind the wheel, and with the driver’s door still open I backed straight down the two-lane to the next intersection, cut the wheel, then floored the accelerator down Old Jeanerette Road toward Molly’s agency, slamming the door as the cement raced by me.

  I ran a stop sign at eighty, clipped a mailbox and a garbage can, passed a tractor-drawn cane wagon, and forced an oncoming truck into a rain ditch. Water oaks along the road and collapsed barbed-wire fences and shacks and singlewide trailers with broken windows sped by me, then I saw Molly’s compound up ahead.

  The grounds were empty, the blinds drawn in the administration building, the St. Augustine grass green and stiff with the rain, an inch higher since yesterday. I pulled into the entrance, my heart hammering, sweat breaking on my forehead. I saw no sign of Molly’s car, nor any other vehicle.

  Think, I told myself. Would Molly have gone to Andre Bergeron’s house to confront him about the unauthorized use of her farm tools? No, she did things in a measured way and was not a compulsive person. Normally, she would have telephoned a person who had wronged her, asked him to explain himself, perhaps invited him to come by and have coffee and talk with her. That was Molly Boyle’s way.

  But Molly’s recorded telephone message had mentioned that she was “disappointed” and the fact that someone had borrowed her tools without permission “again.” She may not have been an obsessive person, but she had a low level of tolerance for people who lied or violated the trust of others, which she always referred to as an act of spiritual theft.

  I parked by the administration building and rattled the doors, then walked next door to the cypress cottage which Molly used to share with a nun who had returned to the Midwest to care for her mother. The nun’s car was parked under a pecan tree, covered by a clear plastic tarp fogged with humidity and pooled with wet leaves and bird droppings.

  I wiped my face with my shirt. The air stank of stagnant mud, raw sewage backed up from the treatment plant, the bloated body of a drowned cow that gars were feeding on in the shallows. I could hear bottle flies buzzing inside the plastic tarp on the nun’s car.