Crusader's Cross (26 page)

“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 possession 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.

But he was three places in front of me at the cash register, dressed in a dark suit and a tie and starched white shirt, even though the temperature had been in the nineties all day. His hair was as sleek and black as a seal’s pelt, his face that of a stricken man.

In one hand he held a jar of peanut brittle while he stared out the front window. In his tailored suit and shined shoes, he looked like a visitor from an alien world.

“You got to put it on the counter, suh,” the cashier said. She was a short, overweight Cajun woman, with a round face and thick glasses and hair pulled back tightly on her head.

“Pardon?” he said.

“You got to put the peanut brittle down so’s I can scan it,” she said.

“Yes, I see,” he replied.

“Wit’ the tax, that’s fo’ dol’ars and t’ree cents,” she said.

“It’s what?”
 

She repeated the amount. But he didn’t take his wallet from his pocket. She tried to smile. Her eyes seemed unnaturally large behind the magnification of her glasses and it was obvious she knew something was wrong and that she could not correct it. The two people waiting in line immediately behind Raphael Chalons took their purchases to another counter.

“Suh, you want to pay me? It’s fo’ dol’ars and t’ree cents,” the cashier said.

“Oh yes, excuse me. I’m sure I have my wallet here somewhere. How much did you say?”

I pushed a five-dollar bill across the counter to the cashier. She took it without speaking, returned my change, and dropped Raphael Chalons’s jar of peanut brittle in a plastic sack. I picked it up and handed it to him. He walked a short distance away, then stopped in the concourse and removed the jar from the sack and read the label on it, oblivious to the shoppers who had to walk around him.

“Can I offer you a ride to your automobile, Mr. Chalons?” I said.

“No, I’m quite all right. But thank you for your courtesy,” he replied, looking at me as though my face were not quite in focus.
 

“May I speak with you outside?” I asked.

He walked ahead of me, the jar of peanut brittle clasped in his hand, the sack with the receipt inside it blowing away in the draft through the sliding doors. The woman who checked purchases at the entrance held up her hand to stop him. I knew her and placed my palm on Mr. Raphael’s shoulder and gestured at her in a reassuring way.

He entered the crosswalk and was almost hit by an SUV.

“Let me arrange to have someone drive you home,” I said.

He stared at the label on the jar and either did not hear me or chose to ignore the content of my words. “The store didn’t have the kind she liked,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Honoria loved peanut brittle and pralines. I was going to bring her back some from New Orleans, but I forgot. It was such a small gift. But I forgot to buy it.”

“Mr. Chalons, I know your family bears me enmity, but I want to offer my sympathies. I also want you to understand that I never had a romantic liaison with your daughter and that I always respected her. Both my mother and my second wife, Annie, died at the hands of violent men, and for that reason I think I can understand the nature of your loss. I thought your daughter was a good person. It was an honor to have been her friend.”

He looked at the parking lot, the heat shimmering on the rows of vehicles, an American flag popping on an iron pole.

“That’s very kind of you,” he said. “But you’re a police officer, and you were in our guesthouse for reasons of a romantic nature or to make use of my daughter in a legal investigation. Whichever it was, sir, it belies your statement now.”

I should have walked away. But there are certain moments in our lives that even the saints would probably not abide, and I suspect being impugned as a liar is one of them. “I think your son is at the heart of a great iniquity,” I said.

“My son?” he said, one eye narrowing with confusion. “Which son are you talking about? What are you saying to me? My son is —”

He pinched his temples and broke off in midsentence, as though both his words and thoughts had been stolen from him. A gust of hot wind blew a fast-food container tumbling past the cuffs of his trousers, splattering the fabric and the tops of his shoes.

Later, I went to Molly’s cottage on the bayou. There was probably every reason not to go there, but I had tired of wearing the scarlet letter and seeing others try to sew it upon Molly’s blouse as well. The truth was Molly had no official or theological status as a nun and in the eyes of the Church was a member of the laity. Let Val Chalons and those who served him do as they wished. I’d take my chances with the Man on High, I told myself.