Crusader's Cross (17 page)

I think it was my second or third round that punched through his hand and sheared off three of his fingers and part of his palm, but I cannot be sure. My ears were ringing, my heart pounding with fear, my wrists bucking upwards with the recoil of my weapon. Then I saw Bad Texas Bob’s face come apart, jaw and teeth and brain matter dissolving like wax held too close to a flame.

Bob crashed across the table and rolled dead-up in the center of the floor, while Clete stared at him, openmouthed, his beer splattered on his pants leg.

I kicked open the front door and walked outside, my weapon hanging from my hand, the rain driving into my eyes. I could smell ozone and fish spawn and the salty odor of dead animals in the marsh, but I could hear no sound, as though both earth and sky had been struck dumb. Clete was shaking me, lifting my weapon from my hand, saying words that were lost in the wind. The marsh was flat and long and green in the mist, and it made me think of elephant grass in a distant country, denting and swirling under helicopters that were painted with shark’s teeth and flown by boys who only last season had played American Legion baseball.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I was on the desk a week while Internal Affairs investigated the shooting death of Robert Cobb. During that time my colleagues stopped by to shake hands and chat,, perhaps about baseball or fishing, or they’d inquire about Alafair and her life in Portland, then they’d go away.

The same was true at Victor’s Cafeteria and at the Winn-Dixie store up the street, the golf course where I sometimes bought a bucket of balls and hacked them into trees, and at my church down the bayou in Jeanerette. People went out of their way to show both respect and goodwill toward me. They shook hands and patted me on the shoulder or back, as they would do to a family member of the deceased at a funeral.

But if you have ever been seriously ill or have received life-threatening injuries in a war, you know what I am about to say is true. People may be kind to you, but they also fear you because you remind them of their own mortality. The insularity they seem to create around themselves is not in your imagination. We have an atavistic sense about death, and we can smell it on others as surely as a carrion bird can.

The same applies to those who shed blood on our behalf. We collectively absolve them and, if they wear uniforms, we may even give them medals, because, after all, they took human life while defending us, didn’t they? But we do not, under any circumstances, want to know the details of what they did or how they did it; nor do we want to know about the images that will come aborning forever in their dreams.

On a Wednesday in July I was cleared by I.A. But I could not shake a pall of depression that seemed to have descended upon me. There were too many shootings and too many dead people in my jacket. With age I had come to believe that each of us is diminished by the death of another. No one is God and no one should have the power of life or death over his brother. Those who say otherwise may have their point of view, but I just don’t share it anymore.

But I also knew enough about depression and Sigmund Freud to understand that insomnia, guilt, and night sweats are forms of impotent rage aimed at the self.

Time to change the target, I thought.

Somebody had contracted Bad Texas Bob Cobb to take me and, if necessary, Clete Purcel off the board. Why should I carry Cain’s mark because of what others had wrought? There was no mystery about where all this started. One way or another, the Chalonses were connected with the story of Ida Durbin, and that connection was one they did not want the world to know about.

On the day IA. cleared me I checked out a cruiser and headed to Lafayette and the television station and offices of Valentine Chalons. I kept it at eighty all the way up the four-lane, my flasher on, my chest and arms pumped with an adrenal-like energy, a martial band playing in my head. In AA it’s called a dry drunk. Some just call it terminal assholeitis. The bottom line is it bodes well for no one.

I hung my badge holder on my belt and went past Valentine’s secretary into his office, thrusting back the door without knocking. His office was huge, done with white furniture and a lustrous black floor and a full glass wall that looked onto an atrium containing a live oak tree circled by a bed of pink and gray caladiums. Several men and women in business suits were sitting in plastic chairs, listening to Valentine Chalons speak to them from behind his desk. Their faces made me think of ceramic that had been painted with flesh tones.

“I’ve got a story you can put your investigative reporters on, Val,” I said. “The guy I dusted, Robert Cobb? He was a disgraced state police officer who killed eight escaped convicts and used to get free blow jobs at Vicki Rochon’s cathouse in Baton Rouge. Then he ended up doing security work at a casino your family has money in. Is that just coincidence? What do you think about doing a human interest story on ole Bob?”

“I think you’re out of your mind, is what I think,” he replied.

“All your news stories featured my name as the shooter. The stories also mentioned I’d shot several suspects in the past. I think you also worked in the fact I’d been canned by NOPD. Is that standard procedure with you guys?”

“Excuse me,” Val said to his friends. He picked up his telephone and called for security.

“This is about Ida Durbin, Val,” I said. “Get used to hearing that name. She was a decent country girl who fell into the hands of white slavers. Ida Durbin was her name. Your family had money in Galveston whorehouses. She tried to get out of the life, then something happened to her. Ida Durbin, Val. You recognize the name. I can see it in your eyes. Ida Durbin and I are going to take you and your father down, partner. You’re going to see Ida Durbin’s name on your bedroom ceiling.”

He rose from his chair and faced me. He wore a pink tie and a pale blue shirt with white cuffs. His hair was styled so that it was long on top and trim on the sides, which accentuated both his height and the leanness of his face. “Under that veneer of the blue-collar knight errant, you’re a vulgarian and a bully, Robicheaux. You’re tolerated around New Iberia because you’ve overcome some serious difficulties in your life, but in truth most people consider you an object of pity.”

Two uniformed security men had entered Val’s office and were now standing behind me. “On the job, fellows,” I said.

“No, not on the job. You have no jurisdiction here,” Val said. “You either walk out of here like a gentleman or you’ll be escorted to the front door. Why not make a reasonable choice and stop degrading yourself?”

“Before I shot Bad Texas Bob, some guy in the Florida Keys called me and tried to warn me off an investigation into Ida Durbin’s disappearance. I couldn’t figure out who that guy was. But the voice was of a kind that sticks in your memory, like a dirty moment in your life you can never scrub out of your head. I think the guy was a Galveston pimp named Lou Kale. The name Lou Kale clang any bells for you, Val?”

He tried to hold his eyes impassively on mine, but I saw an indentation in his cheek, a twitch, as though an invisible fish hook had pricked his skin and pulled at it.
Got you, you bastard,
I thought.

“Take this man out of here,” he said, lifting his chin.

But this time Val wasn’t speaking to his security personnel. Three uniformed street cops had just walked through the door. They were Cajuns like myself, basically decent men who pumped iron at Red Lorille’s Gym and had families and worked extra jobs to make ends meet. Their hands rested awkwardly at their sides, their eyes avoiding mine. Val Chalons waited for my removal from his office, as though it were a foregone conclusion. In the silence I was sure I heard my watch ticking. “Hey, Robicheaux, come have coffee wit’ us,” one of the cops said.

“Sounds great,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said.

He and his two colleagues were relaxed and confident as we left the building. A potentially embarrassing moment had come and gone, they had not had to arrest one of their own, and their world had become a comfortable place again. They told me they were glad my “IA. beef” had not jammed me up.

” ‘Cause that was a righteous shoot, huh? That old dude tried to cap you and you smoked his sausage. You done what you had to do, wasn’t no choice about it?” one of them said. His eyes searched mine as he waited for my answer.

That evening the sky was full of birds, the oaks deep in shade, and out on the bayou white ducks were wimpling the water among the reeds. I could smell meat fires in City Park and hear kids playing Softball. I thought I was through with Valentine Chalons for the day. But I should have known you don’t publicly challenge a man whose ego is as tender as an infected gland and simply walk away from it. When the phone rang, I picked it up without glancing at the caller ID. Val began speaking as soon as he heard my voice. “You scum-sucking cretin, if it wasn’t for your age, I’d break your jaw.”

“Really?” I said.

“Honoria told me about your tryst and the handcuffs and a few other sickening details about your behavior. You don’t seem to have any boundaries, do you?”

“Run that by me again?”

“You screwed my sister, you sorry sack of shit. She’s an impaired person.”

“You listen —”

“You’re white trash, Robicheaux, the village fraud constantly presenting himself as suffering victim. You latch on to causes that give your life a legitimacy it doesn’t rightfully possess. Now you’re trying to drag my family through the mud. People like you should be bars of soap.”

My hand was clenched tightly on the telephone receiver, my temples throbbing with a level of anger I was not ready for. I tried to disconnect from his words and speak in a dispassionate tone, but at the moment my only impulse was to hang up the phone and find Valentine Chalons.

“Ida Durbin and Lou Kale,” I said.

“Good try, asshole,” he said. The line went dead.

The rest of the evening I tried to free myself from my anger. I had already missed the 7:00 p.m. AA meeting at the Episcopalian cottage across from old New Iberia High, and now, left to my own resources, I could not sort through my own thoughts or get Valentine Chalons’s words out of my head.

Was there a degree of truth in them? Was that why I was so bothered? The unarguable fact was I had blood on my hands and during most of my adult life I had placed myself in situations that allowed me to do enormous physical injury to others, even taking their lives, without being held legally accountable for my deeds.

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?”