{"id":2024,"date":"2026-01-03T22:06:52","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T22:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/robicheaux-14-burke-james-lee\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T22:06:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T22:06:52","slug":"robicheaux-14-burke-james-lee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/robicheaux-14-burke-james-lee\/","title":{"rendered":"Robicheaux 14 – Burke, James Lee"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Book Preview<\/h3>\n
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A Dave Robicheaux Novel<\/span><\/p>\n

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Crusader’s Cross<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 by JAMES LEE BURKE<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For Linda and Roger Grainger<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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acknowledgments<\/span><\/p>\n

I would like to thank George Schiro and the other staff members at the Acadiana Crime Lab in New Iberia, Louisiana, and also Jim Hutchison, Judi Hoffman, Annalivia Harris, Bahne Klietz, Maureen Kocisko, and Debbie Lewis at the Montana State Crime Lab in Missoula for their patience and kind assistance over the years.<\/p>\n

Thanks also to David Rosenthal, Michael Korda, and Chuck Adams for their support and editorial help.<\/p>\n

My thanks again to Patricia Mulcahy and my agent Philip G. Spitzer and his assistant Lukas Ortiz for their loyalty and friendship and goodwill.<\/p>\n

Lastly, I wish to acknowledge those who have been with me for the long haul \u2014 my wife, Pearl, and our children, James L. Burke, Jr., Andree Walsh, Pamela McDavid, and Alafair Burke.<\/p>\n

God bless all creatures and things, large and small.<\/p>\n

chapter ONE<\/span><\/p>\n

It was the end of an era, one that I suspect historians may look upon as the last decade of American innocence. It was a time we remember in terms of images and sounds rather than historical events \u2014 pink Cadillacs, drive-in movies, stylized street hoods, rock ‘n’ roll, Hank and Lefty on the jukebox, the dirty bop, daylight baseball, chopped-down ’32 Fords with Merc engines drag-racing in a roar of thunder past drive-in restaurants, all of it backdropped by palm trees, a curling surf, and a purple sky that had obviously been created as a cinematic tribute to our youth.<\/p>\n

The season seemed eternal, not subject to the laws of mutability. At best, it was improbable that the spring of our graduation year would ever be stained by the tannic smell of winter. If we experienced visions of mortality, we needed only to look into one another’s faces to reassure ourselves that none of us would ever die, that rumors of distant wars had nothing to do with our own lives.<\/p>\n

My half brother was Jimmie Robicheaux. He was a hothead, an idealist, and a ferocious fistfighter in a beer-glass brawl, but often vulnerable and badly used by those who knew how to take advantage of his basic goodness. In 1958, he and I worked ten days on and five days off for what was called a doodlebug outfit, or seismograph crew, laying out rubber cable and seismic jugs in bays and swamps all along the Louisiana-Texas coastline. During the off-hitch, when we were back on land, we hung out at Galveston Island, fishing at night on the jetties, swimming in the morning, eating fried shrimp in a caf\u00e9 on the amusement pier where the seagulls fluttered and squeaked just outside the open windows.<\/p>\n

The Fourth of July that year was a peculiar day. The barometer dropped and the sky turned a chemical green, and the breakers were full of sand and dead baitfish when they smacked on the beach. The swells were smooth-surfaced and rain-dented between the waves, but down below, the undertow was terrific, almost like steel cable around the thighs, the sand rushing out from under our feet as the waves sucked back upon themselves.<\/p>\n

Most swimmers got out of the water.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Perhaps because of our youth or the fact Jimmie and I had drunk too much beer, we swam far out from the beach, to the third sandbar, the last one that provided a barrier between the island itself and the precipitous descent off the edge of the continental shelf. But the sandbar was hard-packed, the crest only two feet below the surface, which allowed the swimmer to sit safely above the tidal current and enjoy a panoramic view of both the southern horizon and the lights that were going on all over the island.<\/p>\n

The sun broke through the thunderheads in the west, just above the earth’s rim, like liquid fire pooled up inside the clouds. For the first time that day we could see our shadows on the water’s surface. Then we realized we were not alone.<\/p>\n

Thirty yards out a shark fin, steel-gray, triangular in shape, cut across the swell, then disappeared under a wave. Jimmie and I stood up on the sandbar, our hearts beating, and waited for the fin to resurface. Behind us we could hear the crackle of lightning in the clouds.<\/p>\n

“It’s probably a sand shark,” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

But we both knew that most sand sharks were small, yellowish in hue, and didn’t cruise at sunset on the outer shelf. We stared at the water for a long time, then saw a school of baitfish scatter in panic across the surface. The baitfish seemed to sink like silver coins into the depths, then the swell became smooth-surfaced and dark green again, wrinkling slightly when the wind gusted. I could hear Jimmie breathing as though he had labored up a hill.<\/p>\n

“You want to swim for it?” I asked.<\/p>\n

“They think people are sea turtles. They look up and see a silhouette and see our arms and legs splashing around and think we’re turtles,” he said.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t cold, but his skin looked hard and prickled in the wind.<\/p>\n

“Let’s wait him out,” I said.<\/p>\n

I saw Jimmie take a deep breath and his mouth form a cone, as though a sliver of dry ice were evaporating on his tongue. Then his face turned gray and his eyes looked into mine.<\/p>\n

“What?” I said.<\/p>\n

Jimmie pointed southward, at two o’clock from where we stood. A fin, larger than the first one, sliced diagonally across a swell and cut through a cresting wave. Then we saw the shark’s back break the surface, a skein of water sliding off skin that was the color of scorched pewter.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

There was nothing for it. The sun was setting, like a molten planet descending into its own smoke. In a half hour the tide would be coming in, lifting us off the sandbar, giving us no option except to swim for the beach, our bodies in stark silhouette against the evening sky.<\/p>\n

We could hear music and the popping of fireworks on the amusement pier and see rockets and star shells exploding above the line of old U.S. Army officers’ quarters along the beachfront. A wave slid across my chest, and inside it I saw the pinkish blue air sac and long tendril-like stingers of a Portuguese man-of-war. It drifted away, then another one, and another fell out of a wave and twisted in an eddy like half-inflated balloons.<\/p>\n

It was going to be a long haul to the beach.<\/p>\n

“There’s sharks in the water! Didn’t you fellers see the lifeguard’s flag?” a voice called.<\/p>\n

I didn’t know where the girl had come from. She sat astride an inner tube that was roped to two others, a short wood paddle in her hands. She wore a one-piece black swimsuit and had sandy reddish hair, and her shoulders glowed with sunburn. Behind her, in the distance, I could see the tip of a rock jetty that jutted far out into the breakers.<\/p>\n

She paddled her makeshift raft until it had floated directly above the sandbar and we could wade to it.<\/p>\n

“Where did you come from?” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“Who cares? Better jump on. Those jellyfish can sting the daylights out of you” she said.<\/p>\n

She was tall and slight of build and not much older than we were, her accent hardcore East Texas. A wave broke against my back, pushing me off balance. “Are you fellers deaf? Y’all sure don’t act like you care somebody is trying to hep you out of the big mess you got yourself into,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We’re coming!” Jimmie said, and climbed onto one of the inner tubes.<\/p>\n

Waves knocked us over twice and it took us almost a half hour to cross the trough between the third and second sandbars. I thought I saw a fin break the surface and slide across the sun’s afterglow, and, once, a hard-bodied object bumped against my leg, like a dull-witted bully pushing past you on a crowded bus. But after we floated past the second sandbar, we entered another environment, one connected to predictability where we could touch bottom with the ends of our toes and smell smoke from meat fires and hear children playing tag in the darkness.<\/p>\n

We told ourselves a seascape that could contain predators and the visitation of arbitrary violence upon the unsuspecting no longer held any sway in our lives. As we emerged from the surf the wind was as sweet as a woman’s kiss against the skin.<\/p>\n

The girl said her name was Ida Durbin and she had seen us through binoculars from the jetty and paddled after us because a shark had already attacked a child farther up the beach. “You’d do that for anybody?” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“There’s always some folks who need looking after, at least those who haven’t figured out sharks live in deep water,” she said.<\/p>\n

Jimmie and I owned a 1946 canary-yellow Ford convertible, with whitewall tires and twin Hollywood mufflers. We drove Ida back to the jetty, where she retrieved her beach bag and used a cabana to change into a sundress and sandals. Then we went to a beer garden that also sold watermelon and fried shrimp. The palm trees in the garden were strung with tiny white lights, and we sat under the palms and ate shrimp and watched the fireworks explode over the water.<\/p>\n

“Are y’all twins?” she asked.<\/p>\n

“I’m eighteen months older,” I said.<\/p>\n

She looked at both of us. “Y’all sure favor for brothers who aren’t twins. Maybe your mama just liked the way y’all looked and decided she’d use just one face,” she said. She smiled at her own joke, then looked away and studied the tops of her hands when Jimmie’s eyes tried to hold hers.<\/p>\n

“Where you live, Ida?” he asked.<\/p>\n

“Over yonder,” she said, nodding vaguely up the main drag.<\/p>\n

“You work here in Galveston?” he said.<\/p>\n

“For a little while, I am. I got to go now,” she replied.<\/p>\n

“We’ll drive you,” he said.<\/p>\n

“I’ll take a cab. I do it all the time. It’s only fifty cents,” she said.<\/p>\n

Jimmie started to protest. But she got up and brushed crumbs of fried shrimp off her dress. “You boys don’t get in no more trouble,” she said.<\/p>\n

“Boys?” Jimmie said, after she was gone.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Galveston Island was a strange place back in those days. The town was blue-collar, the beaches segregated, the Jax brewery its most prominent industry, the old Victorian homes salt-bitten and peeling. It was a vacation spot for the poor and the marginal and a cultural enclave where the hard-shell Baptist traditions of Texas had little application. Every beer joint on the beach featured slot and racehorse machines. For more serious gamblers, usually oil people from Houston, there were supper clubs that offered blackjack, craps, and roulette. One Sicilian family ran it all. Several of their minions moved out to Vegas in ’47 with Benjamin Siegel. One of them, in fact, built the Sands.<\/p>\n

But nonetheless there was an air of both trust and innocence about the island. The roller coaster in the amusement park had been officially condemned by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the notice of condemnation nailed on a post hard by the ticket booth. But every night during the summer, vacationers packed the open cars that plummeted down warped tracks and around wooden turns whose spars and rusted bolts vibrated like a junkyard.<\/p>\n

Churchgoing families filled the bingo parlors and ate boiled crabs that sometimes had black oil inside the shells. At daybreak, huge garbage scows sailed southward for the horizon, gulls creaking overhead, to dump tons of untreated waste that somehow, in the mind’s eye, were refined into inert molecules of harmless matter.<\/p>\n

But inland from the carnival rides, the fishing jetties, and the beachfront beer joints and seafood restaurants, there was another Galveston, and another industry, that made no pretense to innocence.<\/p>\n

During the next two days we didn’t see Ida Durbin on the main drag or on the amusement pier or on any of the jetties, and we had no idea where she lived, either. Then, on Saturday morning, while we were in a barbershop a block from the beach, we saw her walk past the window, wearing a floppy straw hat and a print dress, with a lavender Mexican frill around the hem, a drawstring bag slung from her shoulder.<\/p>\n

Jimmie was out the door like a shot.<\/p>\n

She told him she had to buy a money order for her grandmother in Northeast Texas, that she had to pick up her mail at the post office, that she had to buy sunburn lotion for her back, that she was tied up all day and evening.<\/p>\n

“Tomorrow is Sunday. Everything is closed. What are you doing then?” he said, grinning.<\/p>\n

She looked quizzically at nothing, her mouth squeezed into a button. “I reckon I could fix some sandwiches and meet y’all at the amusement pier,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We’ll pick you up,” he said.<\/p>\n

“No, you won’t,” she replied.<\/p>\n

The next day we discovered a picnic with Ida Durbin meant Vienna sausage sandwiches, sliced carrots, a jar of sun tea, and three Milky Way bars.<\/p>\n

“Some folks don’t like Viennas,” she said, and she pronounced the word “Vy-ennas.” “But with lettuce and mayonnaise, I think they’re real good.”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, these are a treat. Aren’t they, Dave?” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“You bet,” I said, trying to wash down a piece of simulated sausage that was like a chunk of rubber.<\/p>\n

We were on the amusement pier, sitting on a wood bench in the shade of a huge outdoor movie screen. In the background I could hear pinball machines and popping sounds from a shooting gallery. Ida wore a pink skirt and a white blouse with lace on the collar; her arms and the top of her chest were powdered with strawberry freckles.<\/p>\n

“Dave and I go back on the quarter boat in the morning,” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

She chewed on the end of a carrot stick, her eyes staring blankly at the beach and the surf sliding up on the sand.<\/p>\n

“We’ll be back on land in ten days,” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“That’s good. Maybe I’ll see y’all again,” she said.<\/p>\n

But if there was any conviction in her voice, I did not hear it. Down below, a huge wave crashed against the pilings, shuddering the planks under our feet.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

chapter TWO<\/span><\/p>\n

After the next hitch we went back to the motel where our cousin, the manager, who was confined to a wheelchair, let us stay free in return for running a few errands. For the next five days Jimmie had nothing on his mind except seeing Ida. We cruised the main drag in our convertible, night-fished on the jetties, went to a street dance in a Mexican neighborhood, and played shuffleboard in a couple of beer joints on the beach, but nobody we talked to had ever heard of Ida Durbin.<\/p>\n

“It’s my fault. I should have given her the motel number,” he said.<\/p>\n

“She’s older than us, Jimmie.”<\/p>\n

“So what?” he said.<\/p>\n

“That’s the way girls are when they’re older. They don’t want to hurt our feelings, but they got their own lives to live, like they want to be around older men, know what I mean? It’s a put-down for them to be seen with young guys,” I said.<\/p>\n

Wrong choice.<\/p>\n

“I don’t believe that at all. She wouldn’t have made sandwiches for us. You calling her a hypocrite or something?” he said.<\/p>\n

We went back on the quarter boat and worked a job south of Beaumont, stringing rubber cable and seismic jugs through a swamp, stepping over cottonmouths and swatting at mosquitoes that hung as thick as black gauze inside the shade. When we came off the hitch we were sick with sunburn and insect bites and spoiled food the cooks had served after the refrigeration system had failed. But as soon as we got to our motel, Jimmie showered and changed into fresh clothes and started looking for Ida again.<\/p>\n

“I found her,” he said our second day back. “She’s at a music store. She was piddling around with a mandolin, plink, plink, plink, <\/span>then she started singing, with just me and the owner there. She sounds like Kitty Wells. She promised she’d wait. Come on, Dave.”<\/p>\n

“Why’d you come back to the motel?”<\/p>\n

“To get my wallet. I’m gonna buy us all a meal.”<\/p>\n

Jimmie had said she was waiting in a music store. It was actually a pawnshop, a dirt-smudged orange building sandwiched between a pool hall and a bar on the edge of the black district. She was sitting on a bench, under the canvas awning, twisting a peg on a Gibson mandolin that rested in her lap. Most of the finish below the sound hole had been worn away by years of plectrum strokes across the wood.<\/p>\n

The street was hot, full of noise and dust and smoke from junker cars. “Oh, hi, fellers,” she said, looking up from under her straw hat. “I thought you weren’t coming back. I was just fixing to leave.”<\/p>\n

“Did you buy the mandolin?” Jimmie asked.<\/p>\n

“It’s already mine. I pay the interest on it so Mr. Pearl doesn’t have to sell it. He lets me come in and play it whenever I want.”<\/p>\n

She returned the mandolin to the pawnshop owner, then came outside again. “Well, I’d better get going,” she said.<\/p>\n

“I’m taking us to lunch,” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“That’s nice, Jimmie, but I got to get ready for work,” she said.<\/p>\n

“Where you work?” he asked.<\/p>\n

She smiled, her eyes green and empty in the sunlight, her attention drifting to a car backfiring in the street.<\/p>\n

“This time we’ll drive you,” I said.<\/p>\n

“My bus stops right on the corner. See, there it comes now, right on time,” she said, and started walking toward the intersection. A throwaway shopper’s magazine was tucked under her arm. She looked back over her shoulder. “I’ve got your phone number now. I’ll call you. I promise.”<\/p>\n

Jimmie stared after her. “You should have heard her sing,” he said.<\/p>\n

When the bus pulled away from the curb, Ida was sitting up front, in the whites-only section, totally absorbed with her magazine.<\/p>\n

Just as we got into our convertible, the owner of the pawnshop came out on the sidewalk. He was a tall, white-haired man with a sloping girth and big hands and cigars stuffed in his shirt pocket. “Hey, you two,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Sir?” I said.<\/p>\n

“That girl has enough trouble in her life. Don’t you be adding to it,” the owner said.<\/p>\n

Jimmie’s hands were on top of the steering wheel, his head bent forward. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Sass me again and I’ll explain it to you,” the owner said.<\/p>\n

“Screw that. What do you mean she’s got trouble?” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

But the pawnshop owner only turned and went back inside his building.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The next night Jimmie came in drunk and fell down in the tin shower stall. He pushed me away when I tried to help him up; his muscular body beaded with water, a rivulet of blood running from his hairline.<\/p>\n

“What happened?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Nothing,” he replied.<\/p>\n

“Is this about Ida Durbin?”<\/p>\n

“That’s not what they call her,” he said.<\/p>\n

“What?”<\/p>\n

“Shut up about Ida,” he said.<\/p>\n

The next morning he was gone before I woke up, but our car was still in the carport. I crossed Seawall Boulevard to the beach and saw him sitting on the sand, shirtless and barefoot, surrounded by the collapsed air sacs of jellyfish.<\/p>\n

“They call her Connie where she works. They don’t have last names there,” he said.<\/p>\n

The previous afternoon Ida had called him at the motel and told him that he was a nice fellow, that she knew he would do well in college, and maybe years from now they’d see one another again when he was a rich and successful man. But in the meantime this was good-bye and he mustn’t get her confused in his mind with the girl who was right for him.<\/p>\n

After she rang off, Jimmie went straight to the pawnshop and told the owner he wanted to buy Ida’s mandolin.<\/p>\n

“It’s not for sale,” the owner said. <\/p>\n

“I’m going to give it to Ida as a present. Now, how much is it?” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“What do you think you’re gonna get out of this, son?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Get out of what?”<\/p>\n

The owner clicked his fingers on the glass display case. “It’s thirty-five dollars on the loan, two dollars for the closing charge.”<\/p>\n

Jimmie counted out the money from his billfold. The owner placed the mandolin in a double paper sack and set it on the display case.<\/p>\n

“Can you tell me where she works or lives?” Jimmie asked.<\/p>\n

The owner looked at him as though a lunatic had walked into his shop.<\/p>\n

“Thought you were a put-on, boy, but I guess you’re for real. She lives and works in the same place. On Post Office Street. You figured it out by now?”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The paint on the two-story houses was blistered, the dirt yards weedless and hard-packed, the bedsheets on the clotheslines flapping in a hot wind. Jimmie parked the convertible and looked uncertainly at the houses, the neck of the mandolin clutched in one hand. A city police car passed by, with two uniformed officers in the front seat. They were talking to one another and neither paid attention to his presence on the street. “I’m looking for Ida Durbin,” Jimmie said to a black girl who was hanging wash in a side yard.<\/p>\n

The girl was frail and wore a dusty yellow blouse with loops of sweat in the armpits. Her forearms were wrapped with a mottled pink and white discoloration, as though her natural color had been leached out of the skin. She shook her head.<\/p>\n

“She has freckles and sandy red hair. Her name is Ida,” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“This is a colored house. White mens don’t come in the daytime,” she said. The wind flapped a sheet that was gray from washing across her face, but she seemed not to notice.<\/p>\n

Jimmie stepped closer to her. “Listen, if this girl works in a place for white people, where would I \u2014” he began.<\/p>\n

Then Jimmie felt rather than saw a presence at the window behind him. The black girl picked up her basket of wash and walked quickly away. “You don’t look like the gas man,” the man in the window said.<\/p>\n

He was white, with small ears, sunken cheeks, and hair that was as black and shiny as patent leather, oiled and combed into a slight curl on the neck. <\/p>\n

“I’m looking for Ida Durbin,” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

The man leaned on the sill and thought about it. He wore a creamy cowboy shirt with stitched pockets and chains of roses sewn on the shoulders. “Four doors down. Ask for Connie. Tell you what, I’ll walk you there.” he said.<\/p>\n

“That’s all right,” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“I’m here to serve,” the man said.<\/p>\n

On the way down the street, the man extended his hand. It was small and hard, the knuckles pronounced. “I’m Lou Kale. Connie’s your heartthrob?” he said.<\/p>\n

“The girl I’m looking for is named Ida.”<\/p>\n

“On this street, nobody uses their own name. That is, except me,” Lou Kale said, and winked. “I was gonna call her Ida Red, after the girl in the song. Except she didn’t think that was respectful, so she made up her own name. What’s your <\/span>name?”<\/p>\n

Jimmie hesitated, touching his bottom lip with his tongue.<\/p>\n

“See what I mean?” Lou Kale said. “Soon as people set foot on Post Office Street, their names fly away.”<\/p>\n

Lou Kale escorted Jimmie through the front door of a two-story Victorian house with hollow wood pillars on the gallery and a veranda on the second floor. The shades were drawn in the living room to keep out the dust, and the air inside the heated walls was stifling. The couches and straight-back chairs were empty; the only color in the room came from the plastic casing of a Wurlitzer jukebox plugged into the far wall. Lou Kale told a heavyset white woman in the kitchen that Connie had a caller.<\/p>\n

The woman labored up a stairs that groaned with her weight and shouted down a hallway.<\/p>\n

“Look at me, kid,” Lou Kale said. He seemed to lose his train of thought. He touched at his nostril with one knuckle, then huffed air out his nose, perhaps reorganizing his words. He was shorter than Jimmie, firmly built, flat-stomached, with thick veins in his arms, his dark jeans belted high on his hips. His face seemed full of play now. “You’re not here to get your ashes hauled, are you?”<\/p>\n

“Who cares why I’m here. It’s a free country, ain’t it?” Jimmie replied. Then wondered why he had just used bad grammar.<\/p>\n

Lou Kale made a sucking sound with his teeth, his eyelids fluttering as he watched a fly buzzing on the wall. Then he jiggled his fingers in the air, as though surrendering to a situation beyond his control. “You give your present to Connie, then you beat feet. This place is off limits for you and so is Connie. That means you find your own girlfriend and you don’t try to get a punch on somebody else’s tab. We connecting here?”<\/p>\n

“No.”<\/p>\n

“That’s what I thought!” Lou Kale said. “Connie, get down here!”<\/p>\n

When Ida Durbin came down the stairs she was wearing a pair of tight, blue-jean shorts and a blouse that looked made of cheesecloth that outlined the black bra she wore underneath. She had been asleep, and her face was flushed from the stored-up heat in the upper levels of the building and marked with lines from the pillow she had been sleeping upon. Even in the gloom Jimmie could see the injury in her eyes when she realized who her visitor was.<\/p>\n

“Let’s have a quick exchange of pleasantries, then your friend is gonna be on his way,” Lou Kale said to her.<\/p>\n

Jimmie stepped toward her, his arm brushing Lou Kale’s shoulder. “I paid off your loan on the mandolin,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Jimmie, you shouldn’t be here,” she said.<\/p>\n

“I just thought I’d drop the mandolin by, that’s all!” he said. He handed it to her, his movements stiff, his voice tangled in his throat. Lou Kale clicked a fingernail on the glass cover of his wristwatch.<\/p>\n

“Thank you. You better go now,” she said.<\/p>\n

Then Jimmie couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Who is this guy?” he asked, pointing sideways at Lou Kale. “What are you doing here?”<\/p>\n

“Connie, two Panamanian tankers docked this morning. Go finish your nap,” Lou Kale said. “Everything is solid. Believe me, I like this guy. He’s a cute boy, that’s what he is.”<\/p>\n

She went up the stairs, glancing back once at Jimmie. Lou Kale moved into Jimmie’s line of sight. “You’ve done your good deed. That’s reward enough, right?” he said. “Right?”<\/span><\/p>\n

“Yeah,” Jimmie said. But he didn’t move from his position.<\/p>\n

“We don’t want insincerity here,” Lou Kale said, resting his hand on Jimmie’s shoulder, his breath touching Jimmie’s skin.<\/p>\n

Then Lou Kale walked him to the door, as though Jimmie had no volition of his own, and before Jimmie knew it, he was back outside, the door shutting loudly behind him. <\/p>\n

The sun was white and hot in the sky, and the humidity felt like damp wool on his skin. For a moment he could hear no sound, as though he were trapped inside a glass bell. Upstairs, someone turned on a radio, and from the window he heard the adenoidal voice of Kitty Wells singing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

After Jimmie told me of his visit to Post Office Street, I took him to breakfast and thought our misadventure with Ida Durbin was over. But I was wrong. She called him that afternoon and asked to meet him on the amusement pier.<\/p>\n

“Leave her alone,” I told him.<\/p>\n

“She paddled through sharks to get us off a sandbar,” he said.<\/p>\n

“She’s a prostitute. You can’t change that. Act like you have a brain,” I said.<\/p>\n

Once again, I had spoken without thinking. Our father, known as Big Aldous Robicheaux in the oil patch, had been a good-hearted, illiterate Cajun and notorious barroom brawler whose infidelities had included a prostitute in Abbeville. The prostitute died of Hansen’s disease in a federal facility at Carville, Louisiana. She was also Jimmie’s mother.<\/p>\n

I went to the pier with Jimmie and listened to Ida Durbin’s story about her background, a story that neither Jimmie nor I had the experience to deal with or even evaluate in terms of veracity. She told us she had been raised by her grandmother in a sawmill town just south of the Arkansas line, and that she had borrowed twenty-seven hundred dollars from the mortgage holder of their house to pay for the grandmother’s cancer treatment in Houston. When Ida couldn’t pay back the loan, she was offered a choice of either eviction or going to work in a hot pillow joint.<\/p>\n

“Stuff like that doesn’t happen, Ida. At least, not anymore,” Jimmie said. His eyes clicked sideways at her. “Does it?”<\/p>\n

She turned one cheek into the light. It was layered with makeup, but we could see the swelling along the jawline, like a chain of tiny dried grapes. “I talked to Lou Kale about getting out. He said if I worked what they call special trade, that’s girls who do everything, I can be even in a month,” she said.<\/p>\n

“He put those bruises on your face?” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“A cop did. He was drunk. It’s nothing,” she said.<\/p>\n

We were on the end of the pier, and we could see gulls dipping sand shrimp out of the waves. The sun was hot on the boards., the wind blowing, and blood had dried on the railing where someone had chopped up fish bait.<\/p>\n

“A cop?” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“They get free ones sometimes,” she said.<\/p>\n

I didn’t want to listen to it anymore. I went back to the motel by myself. Later., I heard Jimmie outside with Ida, then the two of them driving away in our convertible.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jimmie didn’t go back on the job with me the next day and instead hung out with Ida in Galveston. He bought her clothes and paid four dollars apiece for four recordings of her songs in a recording booth on the amusement pier. This was in an era when we were paid one dollar and ten cents an hour for work that, outside of building board roads in swamps, was considered the lowest and dirtiest in the oil field. He also withdrew his one hundred and twelve dollars in savings from the bank, money put away for his college tuition, and gave it to Ida. When I came back off the hitch, I wanted to punch him out.<\/p>\n

“What’d she do with it?” I said. He was doing push-ups on the floor in his underwear, his feet propped up on the window-sill. His hair was black and shiny, his wide shoulders as smooth as tallow.<\/p>\n

“Gave it to this guy Lou Kale to pay off her debt,” he replied. He dropped his feet from the sill and sat up. From outside I could hear the surf crashing on the beach. “Quit looking at me like that.”<\/p>\n

“Nobody is that stupid,” I said.<\/p>\n

“We sent one of her recordings to Sun Records in Memphis. That’s where Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley got started. Jerry Lee Lewis, too,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, I heard the Grand Ole Opry has a lot of openings for singing prostitutes.”<\/p>\n

“Why don’t you show a little respect for other people once in a while?” he said.<\/p>\n

Was I my brother’s keeper? I decided I was not. I also decided I did not want to be held hostage by what I considered the self-imposed victimhood of others. I let Jimmie take the convertible and I went back to Louisiana until it was time to rejoin the doodlebug crew on the quarter boat. I hoped by the end of the next hitch, Jimmie would be free of his entanglement with Ida Durbin.<\/p>\n

It was a hot, windblown day when Jimmie picked me up at the dock. A storm was building, and in the south the sky was the blue-black of gunmetal, the inland waters yellow with churned sand, the
waves capping as far as the eye could see. Jimmie had the top down on the convertible, and he grinned from behind his shades when he saw me walking toward him with my duffel bag over my shoulder. A bucket of iced-down Pearl and Jax sat on the backseat, the long-neck bottles sweating in the sunlight.<\/p>\n

“You look like a happy man,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Ida’s getting out of the life. I’m moving her out of that house tonight. We’re going to Mexico,” he said. He reached in back and slid a beer out of the ice. He cracked off the cap with a bottle opener that hung from a cord around his neck and handed the bottle to me. “You don’t have anything to say?”<\/p>\n

“It’s a little more than I can think my way through right now. How do you get somebody out of the life?” I said.<\/p>\n

“I went to the cops. This is a free country. People can’t make other people work in whorehouses,” he said.<\/p>\n

I didn’t speak until after he started the engine and began backing out of the parking area, the sun hot on the leather seats, the palm trees clattering in the wind. “The cops who get free ones are on the side of the good guys now?” I said.<\/p>\n

“There was one little bump in the road,” he said. “Remember the hundred and twelve bucks Ida and I gave this guy Lou Kale? He says the guys he works for consider that the interest, so Ida still owes the principal. I don’t quite know what to do about that.”<\/p>\n

He lifted a beer out of a wire holder on the dashboard and drank it while he steered with one hand, his sunglasses patterned with the reflected images of trees, sky, and asphalt, all of it rushing at him, like a film strip out of control, as he pushed the accelerator to the floor.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

That evening Jimmie went off with Ida in the car, supposedly to confront Lou Kale about the one hundred twelve dollars Kale had obviously stolen. I walked down on the amusement pier and ate a burrito for supper. The thunderheads in the south rippled with electricity and I could see the lights of freighters on the horizon and I wondered if Jimmie was actually serious about going to Mexico with Ida Durbin. In three weeks the fall term would be starting at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, in Lafayette, where we were both enrolled. We were three weeks away from normalcy and football games on crisp Saturday afternoons, the booming sounds of marching bands, the innocence of the freshman sock hop in the school gym, the smell of leaves burning and barbecues in the city park across the street from the campus. In my mind’s eye I saw my self-deluded half brother sinking in quicksand, while Ida Durbin sat astride his shoulders.<\/p>\n

My own mother had long ago disappeared into a world of low-rent bars and lower-rent men. Big Aldous, our father, had died in an oil well blowout when I was eighteen. Jimmie’d had little or no parental authority in his life, and I had obviously proved a poor substitute for one. I threw my burrito in a trash can, went to a beer joint down the beach, and drank until 2:00 a.m. while hailstones the size of mothballs pelted the surf.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I woke before dawn, trembling all over, the distorted voices and faces of the people from the bar more real than the room around me. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten back to the motel. Water was leaking through the ceiling, and a garbage can was tumbling end over end past the empty carport. I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands shaking, my throat so dry I couldn’t swallow. The window curtains were open, and a network of lightning bloomed over the Gulf, all the way to the top of the sky. Inside the momentary white brilliance that lit the clouds and waves I thought I saw a green-black lake where the naked bodies of the damned were submerged to their chests, their mouths crying out to any who would hear.<\/p>\n

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just booked my first passage on the SS Delirium Tremens.<\/span><\/p>\n

I buried my head under a pillow and fell into a sweaty dream. Thunder shook the walls and sheets of rain whipped against the windows. I thought I heard the door open and wind and a sudden infusion of dampness blow into the room. Maybe Jimmie had returned, safe and sound, and all my fears about him had been unjustified, I told myself in my sleep. But when I looked up, the room was quiet, his bed made, the carport empty. I felt myself descending into a vortex of nausea and fear, accompanied by a dilation of blood vessels in the brain that was like a strand of piano wire being slowly tightened around my head with a stick.<\/p>\n

When I woke a second time, I could hear no sound except the rain hitting on the roof. The thunder had stopped, the power in the motel was out, and the room was absolutely black. Then a tree of lightning crackled over the Gulf and I saw a man seated in a chair, no more than two feet from me. He wore sideburns and a striped western shirt, with pearl-colored snap buttons. His cheeks were sunken, pooled with shadow, his mouth small, filled with tiny teeth. A nickel-plated automatic with white grips rested on his thigh.<\/p>\n

He leaned forward, his eyes examining me, his breath moving across my face. “What’s your name?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Dave,” I said. “Dave Robicheaux.”<\/p>\n

“If you ain’t Jimmie, you’re his twin. Which is it?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Tell me who you are,” I said.<\/p>\n

He touched the pistol barrel to the center of my forehead. “I ask the questions, hoss. Lay back down,” he said.<\/p>\n

I saw a swelling above his left eye, a cut in his lip, a clot of blood in one nostril. He pulled back the receiver on the pistol and snicked a round into the chamber. “Put your hands on top of the covers,” he said.<\/p>\n

With one hand he felt my knuckles and the tops of my fingers, his eyes fastened on my face. Then he stood up, dropped the magazine from the butt of the automatic, and ejected the round in the chamber. He reached over, picked up the cartridge from the rug, and snugged it in his watch pocket. “You got a lot of luck, kid. When you get a break, real slack, like you’re getting now, don’t waste it. You heard it from the butter and egg man,” he said.<\/p>\n

Then he was gone. When I looked out the window I saw no sign of him, no automobile, not even footprints in the muddy area around the room’s entrance. I lay in bed, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach, my skin crawling with a sense of violation and the stale odor of copulation from the bedcovers.<\/p>\n

Unbelievably, I closed my eyes and fell asleep again, almost like entering an alcoholic blackout. When I woke it was midmorning, the sun shining, and I could hear children playing outside. Jimmie was packing an open suitcase on top of his bed. “Thought you were going to sleep all day,” he said.<\/p>\n

“A guy was looking for you. I think it was that pimp from Post Office Street,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Lou Kale? I don’t think so,” Jimmie replied.<\/p>\n

“He had a gun,” I said. “What do you mean you don’t think so?”<\/p>\n

“He didn’t want to pay back the hundred and twelve bucks he stole. He pulled a shiv on me. So I cleaned his clock. I took the money off him, too,” he said. He dropped his folded underwear in the suitcase and flattened it down, his eyes concentrated on his work. I couldn’t believe what he had just said.<\/p>\n

“Where’s Ida?” I asked.<\/p>\n

“Waiting for me at the bus depot. Get dressed, you got to drive me down there. We’ll be eating Mexican food in ole Monterrey tonight. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” he said. He touched at the tops of his swollen hands, then grinned at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Quit worrying! Guys like Kale are all bluff.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Ida was not at the bus depot, nor, when the cops checked, was she at the brothel on Post Office Street. In fact, she had disappeared as though she had been vacuumed off the face of the earth. We didn’t know the name of the town she came from, nor could we even be sure her real name was Ida Durbin. The cops treated our visits to the police station as a nuisance and said Lou Kale had no criminal record, that he denied having a confrontation with Jimmie and denied ever knowing a woman by the name of Ida Durbin. The prostitutes in the house where she had worked said a cleaning girl named Connie had been around there for a while, but that she had gone back home to either Arkansas or Northeast Texas.<\/p>\n

The years passed and I tried not to think about Ida Durbin and her fate. As I began my long odyssey through low-bottom bars and drunk tanks and skin joints of every stripe \u2014 in the Deep South, the Philippines, and Vietnam \u2014 I would sometimes hear a voice on the jukebox that reminded me of Kitty Wells. I wanted to believe the voice was Ida’s, that somehow the four-dollar discs she and Jimmie had sent to Sun Records had worked a special magic in her life and opened a career for her in Nashville and that she was out there now, under another name, singing in roadhouses where a sunburst guitar and a sequined western costume were proof enough of one’s celebrity.<\/p>\n

But I knew better, and when my booze-induced fantasy faded, I saw Ida in the backseat of a car, a man on either side of her, speeding down a dirt road at night, toward a destination where no human being ever wishes to go.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

chapter THREE<\/span><\/p>\n

I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that’s what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree \u2014 it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade.<\/p>\n

Troy Bordelon was a bully when I knew him at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette. SLI, as it was called, had been the first integrated college in the South. As far as I knew, there were no incidents when the first black students enrolled, and by and large the students, both white and black, treated one another respectfully. Except for Troy Bordelon. His name was French, but he came from a sawmill town north of Alexandria, an area where the deeds of the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia were burned into Reconstruction history with a hot iron.<\/p>\n

Troy kept the tradition alive and well.<\/p>\n

A black kid from Abbeville by the name of Simon Labiche was the only person of color in my ROTC unit. Troy did everything in his power to make Simon’s life miserable. During drill he stepped on Simon’s heels, throwing him off-step, constantly murmuring racial and sexual insults in his ear. When Simon made the drill team and was scheduled to perform at the halftime ceremonies during the homecoming game, Troy brought him a goodwill offering of a cold drink from the refreshment stand. It was loaded with a high-powered laxative that can cause the red scours in cattle.<\/p>\n

Simon, dressed in chrome-plated helmet, white scarf, and white leggings, fouled himself in front of twenty thousand people, dropped his M-l in the mud, and fled the field in shame.<\/p>\n

But Troy did not confine his abuse to minorities. He bullied anyone who exposed a chink in his armor, and most often these were people who reminded Troy of himself. Nor did the passage of time bring him the wisdom that would allow him to understand the origins of his sadistic inclinations. He returned to his hometown, where he was related to the sheriff and the president of the parish police jury, and went to work for a finance company, one that was owned by the same family who owned the cotton gin and the lumberyards in town. <\/p>\n

His power over poor whites and people of color was enormous. He was loud, imperious, and unflagging in his ridicule of the vulnerable and the weak. For Troy, an act of mercy was an act of identification with his victim.<\/p>\n

Oddly, when traveling through New Iberia, he would always call me up for coffee or to share a meal. I suspected I belonged in Troy’s mind to a self-manufactured memory about his college days in Lafayette, a time he evidently looked back upon with nostalgia. Or maybe because I was a police officer, he enjoyed being in the company of someone who represented power and authority.<\/p>\n

“We had some real fun back then, didn’t we?” he’d say, and slap me hard on the arm. “Dances and all that. Playing jokes on each other in the dorm. Hey, you remember when \u2014”<\/p>\n

I’d try to smile and avoid looking at my watch.<\/p>\n

Then one fine day in early June, after I had hung it up with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, I got a call from Troy’s estranged wife, a schoolteacher named Zerelda. Years ago, at age thirty-five, she had looked sixty. I couldn’t even imagine what she probably looked like today. “He wants to see you. Can you drive up this afternoon?” she said.<\/p>\n

“He doesn’t have a telephone?” I said.<\/p>\n

“He’s at Baptist Hospital. As far as I’m concerned, you can rip out his life-support system. But the poor fuck is scared shitless of dying. So what’s a Christian girl to do?” she said.<\/p>\n

Evidently Troy’s denouement began with the new waitress in the Blue Fish Caf\u00e9 \u2014 an overweight, big-boned country girl whose mouth was painted bright red, her hair shampooed and blow-dried for her first day on the job. She was eager to please and thought of her new situation as an opportunity to be a cashier or a hostess, a big jump up from her old job at the Wal-Mart. When Troy came in for his breakfast he lit up a cigarette in the nonsmoking section, sent his coffee back because it was not hot enough, and told the waitress there were dishwater spots on his silverware. When his food was served, he complained his steak was pink in the middle, his eggs runny, and he had been given whole wheat rather than rye toast.<\/p>\n

When the girl spilled his water, he asked if she was an outpatient at the epileptic rehabilitation center. By the end of his meal she was a nervous wreck. While she was bent over his table, clearing his dishes, he told others a loud joke about a big-breasted woman and a farm equipment salesman who sold milking machines. The girl’s face burned like a red lightbulb.<\/p>\n

Then one of those moments occurred that no one in a small town ever expects. The owner of the restaurant was a hard-packed, rotund Lebanese man who attended the Assembly of God Church and whose taciturn manner seldom drew attention to him. Without saying a word, he picked up a Silex of scalding hot coffee and poured it over the crown of Troy Bordelon’s head.<\/p>\n

After Troy stopped screaming, he attacked the owner with his fists and the fight cascaded through the dining area into the kitchen. It should have ended there, with two over-the-hill men walking away in shame and embarrassment at their behavior. Instead, when they had stopped fighting and a peacemaker asked both men to apologize, Troy gathered the blood and spittle in his mouth and spat it in the owner’s face. The owner responded by plunging a razor-edged butcher knife four times through Troy’s chest.<\/p>\n

It was dusk when I arrived at the hospital in the little town where Troy had spent most of his life. It was a beautiful evening, the summer light high in the sky, the moon rising over red cotton land and a long bank of green trees on the western horizon. The air smelled of chemical fertilizer, distant rain, night-blooming flowers, and the fecund odor of the ponds on a catfish farm. I didn’t want to go into the hospital. I was never good at deathbed visits, nor at funerals, and now, with age, I resented more and more the selfish claims the dead and dying lay on the quick.<\/p>\n

Troy was spread out on his bed in the intensive-care unit like a pregnant whale that had been dropped from a high altitude, his blond hair still cut in a 1950s flattop, now stiff with burn ointment. What his wife had referred to as his life-support system was a tangle of translucent tubes, oxygen bottles, IV sacs, a catheter, and electronic monitors that, upon first glance, made me think that perhaps technology might give Troy another season to run.<\/p>\n

Then he took a breath and a sucking noise came from inside his chest that I never wanted to hear again.<\/p>\n

He had vomited into his oxygen mask, and a nurse was wiping off his face and throat. He wrapped a meaty hand around mine, squeezing with a power and strength I didn’t think him capable of.<\/p>\n

“Sir, you’ll need to lean down to hear your friend,” the nurse said.<\/p>\n

I put my ear close to Troy’s mouth. His breath rose against my skin like a puff of gas from a sewer grate. ” ‘Member that colored . . . that black kid, the one we played the joke on with the laxative?” he whispered.<\/p>\n

“I do,” I said, although the word “we” had not been part of what happened.<\/p>\n

“I feel bad about that. But that’s the way it was back then, huh? You reckon he knows I’m sorry?”<\/p>\n

“Sure he does,” I replied.<\/p>\n

I heard him swallowing, the saliva clicking in his windpipe.<\/p>\n

“Years ago, you knew a girl who was a whore,” he said. “They snatched her up. My uncle was a cop in Galveston. He was one of the guys who snatched her. I saw where they took her. I saw the room she
was in.”<\/p>\n

I looked down at him. His eyes were wide-set, round, his youthful haircut and porcine face like a grotesque caricature of the decade he never allowed himself to grow out of. “What was the name of the girl?” I said.<\/p>\n

He wet his lips, his hand knotting my shirt. “I don’t know. She burned some people for a lot of money. You and your brother took her out of a cathouse. So they snatched her up.”<\/p>\n

I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. “Your uncle and who?” I asked.<\/p>\n

He shook his head. “Cops and a pimp. She had a mandolin. They busted it up.”<\/p>\n

“Did they kill her?”<\/p>\n

“I don’t know. I saw blood on a chair. I was just a kid. Just like you and Jimmie. What’s a kid s’pposed to do? I took off. My uncle’s dead now. Nobody probably even remembers that girl now ‘cept me.”<\/p>\n

He was the saddest-looking human being I think I had ever seen. His eyes were liquid, receded in his face. His body was encased in beer fat that seemed to be squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He let go of my shirt and waited for me to speak, as though my words could exorcise the succubus that had probably fed at his heart all his life.<\/p>\n

“That’s right, we were all just kids back then, Troy,” I said, and winked at him.<\/p>\n

He tried to smile, his skin puckering around his mouth. Without his consent, the nurse fitted the oxygen mask back on his face. Through the window I saw a TV news van in the parking lot, with the call letters and logo of an aggressive Shreveport television station painted on the side. But if the news crew was there to cover some element in the passing of Troy Bordelon, it was of little import to Troy. He looked out the window at the sun’s last red ember on the horizon. A flock of crows rose from the limbs of cypress trees in a lake, lifting into the sky like ashes off a dead fire. The look in his eyes made me think of a drowning man whose voice cannot reach a would-be rescuer.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Outside, I walked toward my truck, my head filled with nightmarish images about what may have been Ida Durbin’s last moments. How had Troy put it? He had seen “blood on a chair.”<\/p>\n

“Hold on there, Robo,” a voice called out behind me.<\/p>\n

Robo?<\/span><\/p>\n

There were two of them, angular in build, squared away, military in bearing, their uniforms starched and creased, wearing shades, even though it was almost dark, their gold badges and name tags buffed, their shoes spit-shined into mirrors. I had seen them at various times at law enforcement gatherings in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I didn’t remember their names, but I remembered their manner. It was of a kind every career lawman or military officer recognizes. These were men you never place in situations where they have unsupervised authority over others.<\/p>\n

I nodded hello but didn’t speak.<\/p>\n

“On the job?” one of them said. His name tag read Shockly, J. W. <\/span>He tilted his head slightly with his question.<\/p>\n

“Not me. I hung it up,” I replied.<\/p>\n

“I saw you go into Troy Bordelon’s room. You guys were buds?” he said.<\/p>\n

“I went to school with him,” I said.<\/p>\n

The second deputy was grinning from behind his shades, as though the three of us were in a private club and the inappropriateness of his expression was acceptable. The name engraved on his tag was Pitts, B. J. <\/span>“Poor bastard was a real pistol, wasn’t he? Half the blacks in the parish are probably drunk right now,” he said.<\/p>\n

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Ole Troy didn’t want to unburden his sins?” the second deputy, the one named Pitts, said.<\/p>\n

Shockly pulled on his nose to hide his irritation at his friend’s revelation of their shared agenda.<\/p>\n

“Nice seeing you guys,” I said.<\/p>\n

Neither one of them said good-bye as I walked away. When I glanced in my rearview mirror, they were still standing in the parking lot, wondering, I suspect, if they had said too much or too little.<\/p>\n

I decided I needed to talk to Troy again, when the two sheriff’s deputies were not around. I checked into a motel in the next town, then returned to the hospital at sunrise, but Troy had died during the night.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was a widower and lived by myself in New Iberia, a city of twenty-five thousand people on Bayou Teche in the southwestern part of the state. For years I had been a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and also the owner of a bait shop and boat rental business outside of town. But after Alafair, my adopted daughter, went away to college and the home my father built in 1935 burned to the ground, I sold the baitshop and dock to an elderly black man named Batist and moved into a shotgun house on East Main, on the banks of the Teche, in a neighborhood where the oak and pecan trees, the azaleas, Confederate roses, and philodendron managed to both hide and accentuate the decayed elegance of a bygone era.<\/p>\n

After I returned from my visit to Troy’s bedside, I could not get Ida Durbin out of my head. I tried to convince myself that the past was the past, that Ida had involved herself with violent and predatory people and that her fate was neither my doing nor Jimmie’s.<\/p>\n

But over the years I had seen the file drawer slammed on too many unsolved disappearances. These cases almost always involved people who had no voice and whose families had no power. Sometimes a determined cop would try to keep the investigation alive, revisiting his files and chasing leads on his own time, but ultimately he, too, would make his separate peace and try not to think, as I was now, about voices that can cry out for help in our sleep.<\/p>\n

I had no demonstrable evidence that a crime had actually been committed, nothing except the statement of a guilt-driven man who said he had seen blood on a chair decades ago. Even if I wanted to initiate an investigation, where would I start? In a Texas coastal town where most of the players were probably dead?<\/p>\n

I had another problem, too. For a recovering alcoholic, introspection and solitude are the perfect combination for a dry drunk, a condition that for me was like putting a nail gun in the center of my forehead and pulling the trigger. <\/p>\n

I mowed the grass in the front yard and began raking up layers of blackened leaves on the shady side of the house, burning them in a rusty oil barrel under the oak trees down by the bayou. A speedboat went by with water-skiers in tow, churning a frothy yellow trough down the center of the bayou. On the far bank, in City Park, the camellias were in bloom, kids were playing baseball, and families were fixing lunch in the picnic shelters. But I couldn’t shake the gloom that had clung to me like cobwebs since I had listened to Troy Bordelon’s deathbed statement.<\/p>\n

I went back in the house and read the newspaper. The lead story was not a happy one. Thirty miles from New Iberia, the body of a young black woman, bound at the wrists and ankles, had been found in a cane field, not far from the convent in Grand Coteau. Her car was discovered only two miles away, at a rural cemetery where she had been visiting her brother’s grave site, the driver’s door ajar, the engine still idling.<\/p>\n

In the last six months two women had been abducted in Baton Rouge and their bodies dumped in wetlands areas. The murder of the black woman in Grand Coteau bore similarities to the homicides
in Baton Rouge, except this was the first time the killer, if indeed the same perpetrator murdered all three women, had struck in the area we call Acadiana.<\/p>\n

A one-paragraph addendum to the wire-service story mentioned that over thirty women in the Baton Rouge area had been murdered by unknown perpetrators in the last decade.<\/p>\n

Clete Purcel, my old friend from NOPD, had opened a branch of his P.I. business in New Iberia, and was now dividing his time between here and his office on St. Ann in New Orleans. He claimed he was simply expanding his business parameters, but in truth Clete’s shaky legal status and his penchant for creating chaos and mayhem wherever he went made instant mobility an imperative in his day-to-day existence.<\/p>\n

How many cops have longer rap sheets than most of the criminals they put in the can? Over the years, some of Clete’s antics have included the following: forcing an entire dispenser of liquid hand soap down a button man’s mouth in the men’s room of the Greyhound bus depot; leaving a drunk U.S. congressman handcuffed to a fire hydrant on St. Charles Avenue; filling a gangster’s convertible with cement; dangling a gang-banger by his ankles off a fire escape five stories above the street; driving an earthmover back and forth through Max Calveci’s palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain; stuffing a billiard ball inside the mouth of a child molester; parking a nine-Mike round in the brainpan of a federal snitch; and, top this, possibly pouring sand in the fuel tank of an airplane, causing the deaths of a Galveston mobster by the name of Sally Dio and a few of his hired gumballs.<\/p>\n

More unbelievably, Clete did all these things, and many others, in a blithe, carefree spirit, like a unicorn on purple acid crashing good-naturedly through a clock shop. He was out of sync with the world, filled with self-destructive energies, addicted to every vice, still ridden with dreams from Vietnam, incredibly brave, generous, and decent, the most loyal man I ever knew, and ultimately the most tragic.<\/p>\n

What Victor Charles and the NVA couldn’t do to him, or the Mob or his enemies inside NOPD, Clete had done to himself with fried food, booze, weed, whites on the half shell, and calamitous affairs with strippers, junkies, and women who seemed to glow with both rut and neurosis. Sometimes I believed his dreams were not about Vietnam but about his father, a milkman in the Garden District who thought parental love and discipline, the latter administrated with a whistling razor strop, were one and the same. But no amount of pain, either inflicted by himself or others, ever stole his grin or robbed him of his spirit. For Clete, life was an ongoing party, and if you wanted to be a participant, you wore your scars like crimson beads at Mardi Gras.<\/p>\n

Clete lived on Main, too, farther down the bayou, in a stucco, 1940s motor court, set back from the street in deep shade. Because it was Sunday, I found him at home, reading in a deck chair, his glasses perched on his nose, his leviathan body glistening with suntan oil. An iced tomato drink with a stick of celery floating in it rested on the gravel by his chair. “What’s the haps, noble mon?” he said.<\/p>\n

I told him about my visit to Troy’s bedside and how Jimmie and I met Ida Durbin in Galveston on the Fourth of July in 1958. I told him about the beating Jimmie gave the pimp, Lou Kale, and how Ida disappeared as though she had been sucked through a hole in the dimension.<\/p>\n

Clete was a good investigator because he was a good listener. While others spoke, his face seldom showed expression. His eyes, which were smoky green, always remained respectful, neutral, occasionally shifting sideways in a reflective way. After I had finished, he ticked a fingernail at a scar that ran diagonally through his left eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose. “This guy Troy was working with pimps?” he said.<\/p>\n

“The uncle was a cop on a pad. Troy was evidently a tagalong,” I said.<\/p>\n

“But he believed they killed the girl?”<\/p>\n

“He didn’t say that,” I replied.<\/p>\n

“House girls are full-time cash on the hoof. Their pimps usually don’t kill them.”<\/p>\n

But Clete knew better. He raised his eyebrows. “Dave, a thousand things could have happened. Why think the worst? Besides, if there’s any blame, it’s on your half-crazy brother. Remodeling a pimp’s face on behalf of a whore probably isn’t the best way to do RR. for her.”<\/p>\n

He laughed, then looked at my expression. “Okay, mon,” he said. “If you want to scope it out, I’d start with Bordelon’s ties to other people. Run that by me again about the two sheriff’s deputies.”<\/p>\n

“They braced me in the hospital parking lot.”<\/p>\n

“They thought Bordelon gave up somebody?”<\/p>\n

“That was my impression.”\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“So Troy Bordelon’s family is \u2014”<\/p>\n

“They do scut work for the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.”<\/p>\n

Clete removed the celery stalk from his drink and took a long swallow from the glass. His hair was sandy, with strands of white in it, cut like a little boy’s. When the vodka and tomato juice hit his stomach, the color seemed to bloom in his face. He looked up at me, squinting against the sunlight.<\/p>\n

“I have crazy thoughts about going back to ‘Nam sometimes, finding the family of a mamasan I killed, apologizing, giving them money, somehow making it right,” he said. He looked emptily out into the sunlight.<\/p>\n

“What are you saying?”<\/p>\n

“I’d let sleeping dogs lie. But you won’t do that. No, sir. No, sir. No, sir. Not ole Streak,” he replied, pressing the bottom of his glass hard into the moist gravel.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Clete was wrong. I disengaged from thoughts about Ida Durbin. During the week, I bass-fished on Bayou Benoit, repaired the roof on the shotgun house I had just taken a mortgage on, and each dawn jogged three miles through the mist-shrouded trees in City Park. In fact, listening to Clete’s advice and forgetting Ida was easier than I thought. I even wondered if my ability to give up an obsession was less a virtue than a sign of either age or a newly acquired callousness.<\/p>\n

But airliners crash because a twenty-cent lightbulb burns out on the instrument panel; a Civil War campaign is lost because a Confederate courier wraps three cigars in a secret communique; and a morally demented man takes a job in a Texas book depository and changes world history.<\/p>\n

It was early the next Monday, the rain hitting hard on the tin roof of my house, when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver on the kitchen counter, a cup of coffee in one hand. Between the trees on the back slope of my property, I could see the rain dancing on the bayou, the mist blowing into the cattails. “Hello?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Hey, Robicheaux. What do you say we buy you breakfast?” the voice said.<\/p>\n

“Who’s this?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.<\/p>\n

“J. W. Shockly. Talked to you outside Baptist Hospital last week? Billy Joe and I have to do a favor for the boss. I’d really appreciate your help on this.”<\/p>\n

“I’m pretty jammed up, partner.”<\/p>\n

“It’ll take ten minutes. We’re at the public library, a half block down the street. What’s to lose?”\u00a0 <\/p>\n

I put on a hat and raincoat and walked under the dripping limbs of the live oaks that formed a canopy over East Main. I passed the site of what had once been the residence of the writer and former Confederate soldier George Washington Cable and the grotto dedicated to Christ’s mother next to the city library. J. W. Shockly and the other sheriff’s deputy from the hospital parking lot, both in civilian clothes, were standing under the shelter at the library entrance, smiles fixed on their faces inside the mist, like brothers-in-arms happy to see an old friend.<\/p>\n

“Can we go somewhere?” Shockly said, extending his hand. “You remember Billy Joe Pitts.”<\/p>\n

So I had to shake hands with his partner as well. When I did, he squeezed hard on the ends of my fingers.<\/p>\n

“That’s quite a grip you’ve got,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Sorry,” he said. “How about coffee and a beignet down at Victor’s?”<\/p>\n

I shook my head.<\/p>\n

“Here’s what it is,” Shockly said. “The sheriff sent me down here because me and you go back. See, the nurse who was in Troy’s hospital room with you is the sheriff’s cousin. She says Troy was telling you some bullcrap about a crime involving a prostitute. The sheriff thinks maybe you’re working for the defense. That maybe the restaurant owner’s family has hired you to prove Troy was a lowlife or procurer or something, that maybe he was propositioning the waitress and the restaurant owner went apeshit. You following me?”<\/p>\n

“No, not at all,” I replied.<\/p>\n

Shockly’s hair was buzz-cut, his pale blue suit spotted with rain. His breath smelled like cigarettes and mints. His gaze seemed to search the mist for the right words to use. “Nobody wants to see the restaurant owner ride the needle. But he’s not going to skate, either. So how about it?”<\/p>\n

“How about what?” I said.<\/p>\n

“You working for the defense or not?” Billy Joe, his friend, said. He was a shorter man than Shockly, but tougher in appearance, his eye sockets recessed, the skin of his face grainy, his teeth too large for his mouth.<\/p>\n

“I already explained my purpose in visiting the hospital. I think we’re done here,” I said.<\/p>\n

Billy Joe raised his hands and grinned. “Enough said, then.” He popped me on the arm, hard enough to sting through my raincoat. <\/p>\n

When I got back home, I washed my hands and dried them on a dish towel. I fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and berries and milk and sat down to eat by the kitchen window. The air blowing through the screen was cool and smelled of flowers and wet trees and fish spawning in the bayou, and in a few minutes I had almost forgotten about Shockly and Pitts and their shabby attempt to convince me their visit to New Iberia was an innocuous one.<\/p>\n

But just as I started to wash my dishes I heard footsteps on the gallery. I opened the front door and looked down at Billy Joe Pitts, who was squatted on his haunches, scraping the contents from a pet food can onto a sheet of newspaper for my cat, Snuggs. J. W. Shockly waited at the curb in a black SUV, the exhaust pipe smoking in the rain. “What do you think you’re doing?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Had this can in the vehicle and saw your cat. Thought I’d treat him to a meal,” Pitts said, twisting around, his bottom teeth exposed with his grin.<\/p>\n

Snuggs had just started to eat, but I scooped him up and cradled him in one arm. He was a white, short-haired, unneutered male, thick-necked, heavy, ropy with muscle, his ears chewed, his head notched with pink scars. He was the best cat I ever owned. “Snuggs says thanks but he’s on a diet. And I say adios, <\/span>bud.”<\/p>\n

I kicked the pet food and newspaper into the flower bed.<\/p>\n

“Just trying to do a good deed. But to each his own,” Billy Joe Pitts said, getting to his feet, his face close to mine now, his skin as damp-smelling as mold.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

chapter FOUR<\/span><\/p>\n

It was still raining that afternoon when I drove across the train tracks and parked my pickup behind the courthouse, a short distance from the crumbling, whitewashed crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery. Helen Soileau, my old colleague, had become the parish’s first female sheriff. She was either bisexual or a lesbian, I was never sure which, and had the perfect physique for a man. I mention her sexuality not to define her but only to indicate that her life as a law officer was not always an easy one. She started her career as a meter maid at NOPD and became a patrolwoman in Gird Town and the neighborhood surrounding the Desire Project. The notoriety of the latter has no equal in the United States, except perhaps for Cabrini Green in Chicago and neighborhoods in the South Bronx. A white female cop who can enter the Desire at night, by herself, is an extraordinary person. Helen Soileau earned respect from people who do not grant it easily. After I told her the story about Troy
Bordelon’s death and the visit to my house by J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts, she leaned back in her swivel chair and looked at me for a long time. She wore blue slacks and a starched white shirt, with a gold badge hung on the pocket. Her hair was blond and natural but for some reason it had always looked like a wig when she wore it long. So now she had it cut short and tapered on the sides and back, and it gave her an attractive appearance that for the first time in her life caused men to turn and look at her. “You’re asking for your job back? Over these two characters coming to your house?” she said.<\/p>\n

“The income wouldn’t hurt,” I said.<\/p>\n

Helen’s eyes had a way of becoming lid-less when she asked questions of people. “Did you ever consider that maybe these two deputies were telling the truth? That they think you’re doing P.I. work for the defense in a homicide? That they’re just inept and not very bright?”<\/p>\n

“How many redneck cops stop by your house to feed your cat?”<\/p>\n

She pulled at an earlobe. “Yeah, that is a little weird,” she said. “But the real reason you want your shield back is to start looking into this disappearance in Galveston, right?”<\/p>\n

“Maybe.”\u00a0 <\/p>\n

She tapped the arms of her chair with her palms and made clucking sounds with her tongue. “Love you. Streak, but the answer is no.”<\/p>\n

I cleared my throat and looked out the window. Across the street I could see the mist blowing off the crypts in the cemetery, and the dull red texture of the bricks through the cracked places in the plaster. Someone was honking a horn angrily at the intersection, like an idiot railing at a television set. “Mind giving me an explanation?” I said.<\/p>\n

She leaned forward in her chair. “Yeah, I do mind, and that’s because I’m your friend,” she said.<\/p>\n

I didn’t try to sort out the meaning in her words. “Run those two cops for me.”<\/p>\n

“Why?”<\/p>\n

“They’re dirty.”<\/p>\n

She clicked her teeth together. “I forgot what it was like when you were around,” she said.<\/p>\n

“Would you clarify that?”<\/p>\n

“Not in your dreams,” she replied.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The church where I attended Mass was on the outskirts of Jeanerette, down the bayou, in St. Mary Parish. Most of the parishioners were people of color and desperately poor. But it was a fine church to attend, built on a green bend of the bayou by an oak-shaded graveyard, and the people in the church had a simplicity and dignity about them that belied the hardship and struggle that characterized their lives.<\/p>\n

That evening I drove down the bayou to attend a meeting of our church-annex committee. The back road to Jeanerette is like a geographical odyssey through Louisiana’s history and the disparities that make it less than real and difficult to categorize. The pastureland is emerald green in spring and summer, dotted with cattle and clumps of oak and gum trees, the early sugar cane waving in the richest alluvial soil in America. At sunset, Bayou Teche is high and dark from the spring rains; the air smells of gardenia and magnolia; and antebellum homes glow among the trees with a soft electrical whiteness that makes one wonder if perhaps the Confederacy should not have won the War Between the States after all.<\/p>\n

But inside that perfect bucolic moment, there is another reality at work, one that doesn’t stand examination in the harsh light of day. The rain ditches along that same road are strewn with bottles, beer cans, and raw garbage. Under the bayou’s rain-dented surface lie discarded paint and motor-oil cans, containers of industrial solvents, rubber tires, and construction debris that will never biologically degrade.<\/p>\n

Across the drawbridge from two of the most lovely historical homes in Louisiana is a trailer slum that probably has no equivalent outside the Third World. The juxtaposition seems almost contrived, like a set in a Marxist documentary meant to discredit capitalistic societies.<\/p>\n

But as I drive this road in the sunset, I try not to dwell upon the problems of the era in which we live. I try to remember the Louisiana of my youth and to convince myself that we can rehabilitate the land and ourselves and regain the past. It’s a debate which I seldom win.<\/p>\n

It was dark when I came out of the meeting at the church, the wind cool off the Gulf, the clouds in the south veined with lightning that gave off no sound. An elderly black man from the congregation came up to me in the parking lot. “That guy find you?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Which guy?” I asked.<\/p>\n

“He was looking at your truck and ax if it was yours. He said he t’ought it was for sale.” The elderly man was named Lemuel Melancon and he had muttonchop sideburns and wore a white shirt and tie.<\/p>\n

“It has been, but I took the sign out of the window when I drove here. This was a white or black guy?” I said.<\/p>\n

“White. Maybe he’ll come back. Pretty good meeting tonight, huh?”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, it was. See you Sunday, Lemuel.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I drove back to New Iberia, past a sugar mill on the far side of the bayou and through cane fields and a rural slum at the city limits, then I crossed the drawbridge onto Old Spanish Trail and entered the long tunnel of oaks that led to my home on East Main. The street behind me was empty, serpentine lines of dead leaves scudding across the asphalt.<\/p>\n

I parked the truck under my porte-cochere and replaced the FOR SALE placard in the back window. I unlocked the front door of my house, then paused in the gentle sweep of wind across the gallery. Normally, when Snuggs heard my truck, he ran to the front, particularly when he had not been fed. But there was no sign of him. I picked up his pet bowl and went inside, then looked for him in the backyard. Tripod, my three-legged raccoon, was on top of his hutch, staring at me.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“How’s it hangin’, Tripod? Have you seen Snuggs tonight?” I said.<\/p>\n

I patted his head and smoothed down the fur on his back and gave his tail a little tug. He rubbed his muzzle against my forearm.<\/p>\n

It was balmy inside the trees, the night alive with wind. A tugboat was passing on the bayou, its wake lit by its running lights. Decayed leaves and pecan husks that were soft with mold crunched under my shoes as I walked back toward the house. Dry thunder pealed slowly across the sky, then I heard Tripod climb down the side of his hutch and jump heavily inside.<\/p>\n

“What is it, ‘Pod? Thunder got you scared?” I said.<\/p>\n

I returned to his hutch and started to lift him up. The tree limbs overhead flickered with lightning, then I heard a sound or felt a presence that should not have been there, a twig snapping under the sole of a shoe, an inhalation of breath, like a man oxygenating his blood in preparation for an expenditure of enormous physical energy.<\/p>\n

I set Tripod down and straightened up, just in time to see a man with a nylon stocking over his face swing a two-by-four at the side of my head. I caught part of the blow with my arm, but not well enough. I felt my scalp split and wood splinters bite into my ear and my cheek. I crashed against the hutch, grabbing at the air, just as he hit me again, this time across the neck and shoulders.<\/p>\n

I tried to get to my feet, but he kicked me in the ribs with the point of his shoe, then in the armpit, and once right across the mouth. I tumbled backwards, trying to get the hutch between me and the man with the two-by-four. I could hear Tripod’s paws skittering on the floor and wire sides of his hutch. I grabbed a handful of dirt and leaves, threw it blindly at my attacker’s face, got my pocketknife loose from my pants, and pulled the blade open.<\/p>\n

But when I stood erect, I was alone, the yard suddenly gone silent, as though I had stepped outside of time and the world around me had been reconfigured without my consent. Blood was leaking from my hairline and there was a bitter, coppery taste, like wet pennies, in my mouth. Tripod had scampered up into the live oak above his hutch and was peering down at me, his body trembling.<\/p>\n

I had no idea where my attacker had gone. I walked off balance toward the house, as though a piece of membrane were torn loose inside my head. In the kitchen I had to sit down to punch in a 911 call on the telephone, then had to spit the blood out of my mouth into a paper towel before I could tell the dispatcher what had happened.<\/p>\n

In less than a minute I heard a siren coming hard down East Main. I looked through the kitchen window and saw Snuggs sitting on the outside sill, framed against the philodendron, pawing at the screen to come inside.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The emergency-room physician at Iberia General kept me overnight, and when I woke, the early-morning sun looked like pink smoke inside the oak trees. A nurse’s aide brought breakfast to me on a tray, then wheeled me down the corridor for an X ray. When I returned to the room, Helen Soileau was sitting by the window, reading the Baton Rouge Advocate. <\/span>The main story above the fold was about another abduction in Baton Rouge, this time the wife of a state environmental quality official who was serving time in a federal prison. Helen folded the paper and set it on the windowsill. “Bad night, huh, bwana?” she said.<\/p>\n

“Not really,” I said, sitting down on the side of the bed.<\/p>\n

“They going to kick you loose?”\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“Soon as the doc looks at my X ray.”<\/p>\n

“We couldn’t find the board your attacker used, so we got nothing we can lift latents off. You think he was the same guy asking about your truck at the church?”<\/p>\n

“Maybe.”<\/p>\n

“More specifically, you think it was one of those deputies \u2014 Shockly or Pitts?”<\/p>\n

“Who knows?”<\/p>\n

“I ran both of them and got a hit on Pitts. Four years back he was charged with planting coke on some Cambodians. They got pulled over at a traffic stop and their SUV and thirty thousand in cash seized. They’d saved the money to buy a restaurant in Baton Rouge.”<\/p>\n

“How’d Pitts get out of it?” I asked.<\/p>\n

“Gave evidence against the other cops. Did you say a black man at your church got a look at the guy who was hanging around your truck?”<\/p>\n

“He talked to him.”<\/p>\n

“I got a mug shot of Pitts for him to look at.”<\/p>\n

I nodded and waited for her to go on. But she seemed distracted, as though several things were on her mind at once. She got up from her chair and gazed out the window. The tops of her arms were round and thick, her back stiff. “Did you read the story in the Advocate <\/span>about another abduction in Baton Rouge?” she asked.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, I saw it.”<\/p>\n

“I think the perp is using Baton Rouge as his personal hunting reserve. But I don’t think he’s from there,” she said.<\/p>\n

“Why not?”<\/p>\n

“I talked with Baton Rouge P.D. The DNA on the girl in Grand Coteau was just matched to DNA on at least five other victims.”<\/p>\n

“Five?”<\/p>\n

“The locals didn’t know they had a serial predator on their hands. They screwed up. It happens. I think the guy has deliberately confined himself to Baton Rouge for years, but he saw the black girl at the cemetery by herself and couldn’t resist the opportunity. I think he lives in a small town, maybe in Acadiana, and gets his jollies in Baton Rouge.”<\/p>\n

“Why you telling me all this?”<\/p>\n

“You still want your shield back?” she asked.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two days later after the swelling had gone out of my jaw and my mouth no longer bled when I ate, I reported to my old job at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I was assigned a corner office on the second floor, one that allowed me a view of the cemetery, trees that lined the railway tracks, and the ivy-scaled brick facades of several buildings that, with a little imagination at twilight, provided a glimpse back into nineteenth-century America.<\/p>\n

The previous night I had laid out a tie and sports coat, shined my shoes, and pressed a pair of slacks and a soft, long-sleeve blue shirt, pretending I had no anxiety about returning to a job for which I was perhaps too old or, worse, simply unfit to do well. Now, standing in my office by myself, the wire baskets on the desk empty, I felt like a guest who has said good night at a party but comes back later because he has nowhere else to go. But all morning uniformed deputies and plainclothes detectives stopped by and shook hands, and it felt wonderful.<\/p>\n

At noon I checked out a cruiser and drove down the bayou to Jeanerette and the community of shacks along the back road where Lemuel Melancon lived. He was sitting in a rocker on his tiny gallery, his body dappled with sunlight that fell through a pecan tree in his front yard. The wind was blowing in the cane behind his house, but his tin roof shimmered with heat.<\/p>\n

I showed him front and profile photos of Billy Joe Pitts. Pitts was wearing a starched sports shirt printed with a tropical design, the fabric stretched tight against the expansion of his chest. The booking time on the photo strip was 11:16 p.m., but Pitts’s face showed no expression, not even fatigue, like the head of an unrepentant criminal upon a platter. “Is this the guy who was looking at my truck?” I asked.<\/p>\n

Lemuel held the strip close to his face, then handed it back to me. “Could be. But it was dark. I can’t see good no more, me,” he said.<\/p>\n

“It’s important, Lemuel.”<\/p>\n

He took another look and shook his head. “What’d this guy do?” he asked.<\/p>\n

“Helped plant cocaine on some Cambodians so their vehicle and cash could be confiscated.”<\/p>\n

“I ain’t following you.”<\/p>\n

“He’s a cop. You see him again, you let me know.”<\/p>\n

Lemuel leaned back in his chair and looked out at the road, suddenly disconnected from me and a conversation involving a corrupt white police officer.<\/p>\n

“Lemuel?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Got to clean my li’l house now. Dust keep blowing out of the yard t’rew the screen, dirtying up my whole house. Just cain’t keep it clean, no matter what I do. See you another time, Dave.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We live in the New South. Legal segregation has slipped into history; the Klan has moved west, into white supremacist compounds, where they feel safe from the people whom they fear; and in Mississippi black state troopers ticket white motorists.<\/p>\n

But memories can be long, fear is fear, and race is at the heart of virtually every political issue in the states of the Old Confederacy, particularly in the realignment of the two national political parties. As I drove back to New Iberia, the fields of early sugar cane rippling in the breeze, the buttercups blooming along the rain ditches, I wondered about the memories of violence and injustice that my friend Lemuel Melancon would probably never share with me. But they obviously lived inside him, and I knew that as a white man it was presumptuous of me to ask that he set aside the cautionary instincts that had allowed him to be a survivor.<\/p>\n

This was St. Mary Parish, historically a fiefdom where a few individuals controlled mind-boggling amounts of wealth. In the 1970s a group of Catholic Worker nuns tried to organize the sugar cane workers here. Some of the blacks and poor whites who listened to them discovered they had thirty minutes to move their belongings out of their houses.<\/p>\n

A journey to the bedside of a dying school chum had led me back to the disappearance years ago of Ida Durbin. Had not two rogue deputies, Shockly and Pitts, tried to turn dials on me, my revisiting of a bad experience in my youth would probably have ended there, at a Baptist hospital, in a backward, piney-woods parish in central Louisiana.<\/p>\n

But that parish, its sawmills, corporate cotton and soy bean fields, its catfish farms, along with its politicians and sheriff’s department, had always been owned by the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.<\/p>\n

Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my scalp where my attacker had clubbed me with a two-by-four. Was he sent by the Chalonses, over the disappearance or death of a prostitute in 1958? No, that was my old class-conscious paranoia at work, I told myself.<\/p>\n

I kept telling myself that all the way back to New Iberia.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

That evening, Clete Purcel picked me up at the house and we had dinner at a bar-and-grill that served food on a deck overlooking the bayou. It was dusk, the western sky ribbed with strips of orange cloud, the turn bridge on the bayou open for a barge. Clete had been quiet all evening. “I think I need to make a home call on this Pitts character,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Nope,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Nothing dramatic. Maybe drive him out to a quiet spot and give him a chance to get some things off his chest.”<\/p>\n

“Clete \u2014”<\/p>\n

“Nobody messes with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Every lowlife in New Orleans always understood that, big mon. This dickhead doesn’t get slack because he’s a cop.”<\/p>\n

Some people at the next table stared at us.<\/p>\n

“I have no evidence Pitts was the guy,” I said.<\/p>\n

“You know <\/span>he was the guy.”<\/p>\n

“Maybe.”<\/p>\n

“Trust me, I’ll get the ‘maybe’ out of the equation. Quit worrying. He’ll probably thank me for it,” he said. He took a bite out of his po’boy sandwich. “These fried oysters are supposed to be aphrodisiacs, did you know that?”<\/p>\n

Talking with Clete Purcel about personal restraint or reasonable behavior was like a meteorologist telling an electrical storm it shouldn’t come to town. But I couldn’t be mad at Clete. He was the first person to whom I always took my problems, and in I truth his violence, recklessness, and vigilantism were simply the other side of my own personality. I felt his gaze wander over my face and the stitches I had tried to comb my hair over.<\/p>\n

“Will you stop that?” I said.<\/p>\n

“What’s your brother say about all this?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Haven’t talked with him about it.”<\/p>\n

He looked at me.<\/p>\n

“He’s got his own problems,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Jimmie the Gent is a stand-up guy. Why not treat him like one?” Clete said.<\/p>\n

Years ago my brother had taken a bullet for me and lost an eye. I didn’t feel like cluttering up his life with any more grief or the detritus of 1958. I started to tell Clete that when my cell phone rang. The caller number was Helen Soileau’s.<\/p>\n

“We got a floater out by the St. Martin line,” she said. “It may be the wife of that DEQ official who’s in Seagoville. We’ve got personal effects, but I don’t think we’ll get a visual ID.”<\/p>\n

“That bad?”<\/p>\n

“The guy who did this isn’t human.”<\/p>\n

“None of them are,” I replied.<\/p>\n

“Better see the vie,” she said.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

chapter FIVE<\/span><\/p>\n

The crime scene was only ten minutes from the bar-and-grill on the bayou. But the images there belonged in a medieval painting of a netherworld that should have existed only in the imagination. On a deadend dirt road lined with garbage was a black pond spiked by gum trees. The sky was tormented by birds, the sun a gush of red on the horizon. The victim lay on her back, her torso half in the water. I felt my stomach constrict when Helen shined her flashlight on the woman’s face.<\/p>\n

“Get this. The sonofabitch hung her purse in a tree,” she said. “Money, car keys, driver’s license, credit cards, everything was in there.”<\/p>\n

“Her husband was with the Department of Environmental Quality?”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, he was taking juice from a couple of petrochemical guys. So maybe this isn’t the Baton Rouge serial killer.”<\/p>\n

The coroner, Koko Hebert, had just arrived. He was a gelatinous, cynical man, a sweaty, foul-smelling chain smoker, given to baggy clothes, tropical shirts, and a trademark Panama hat. I always suspected a Rotarian lay hidden inside his enormous girth and wheezing breath and jaded manner, but, if so, he hid it well. He leaned over with a penlight and stared down at the body. “Jesus Christ,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Got any speculations?” Helen said.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, her face looks like a flower pot after a truck ran over it,” he said.<\/p>\n

Helen gave me a look. “Are those ligations around her throat?” she asked.<\/p>\n

He made a pained face, as though he were weighing a great decision. “Could be. But those knots could be the nodules associated with bubonic plague. Been a couple of outbreaks in East Texas. Squirrels and pack rats can carry it sometimes. You didn’t touch anything here, did you?” he said. He held Helen’s eyes somberly, then his mouth broke at the corners and his breath wheezed like air escaping from a ruptured tire. “Ligations, shit. The guy who did this had a boner on he couldn’t knock down with a baseball bat.”<\/p>\n

“The signature on the Baton Rouge serial killings is death by strangulation,” Helen said.<\/p>\n

But the coroner ignored her and motioned for two paramedics to bag up the body.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“Did you hear me?” she said.<\/p>\n

He stared into space, his eyes askance, a manufactured look of pensiveness on his face. “Our killer is not into methodology,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Say again?” Helen said.<\/p>\n

“Our killer is a horny prick who loves beating the shit out of people. He doesn’t care how he does it. Are we all better now?” Koko said.<\/p>\n

Helen’s face blanched. She started to speak, but I placed my hand on her shoulder. Her muscles felt like a bag of rocks. We watched Koko Hebert walk toward an ambulance, its emergency flashers blinking. It was hot and breathless inside the trees, and the air smelled of stagnant water and leaves that had turned black in damp shade.<\/p>\n

“Blow him off. He’s an unhappy fat man who tries to make other people as miserable as he is,” I said.<\/p>\n

She slapped a mosquito on her cheek and looked at the smear of blood on her hand. The paramedics lifted the body heavily out of the water, their latex-gloved hands sinking deep into the tissue. “Wrap it up for me, Pops?” Helen said.<\/p>\n

“Sure. You okay?” I said.<\/p>\n

“I will be after a hot bath and four inches of Jack Daniel’s. It’s God’s compensation for giving me this fucking job,” she said, then grimaced at her own remark.<\/p>\n

“Drink two inches of it for me,” I said.<\/p>\n

She hit me on the arm with the flat of her fist and walked to her cruiser., her eyes sliding off the face of the coroner.<\/p>\n

It was dark by the time the crime scene investigators finished their work. A wind came up and blew the mosquitoes out of the trees, and I could see heat lightning in the clouds over the Gulf and smell distant rain. I thought about four inches of Jack on ice, with a sprig of mint bruised inside the glass. I rubbed my mouth and swallowed dryly. Then I said good night to the other personnel at the scene and got back in my truck.<\/p>\n

Just in time to see a television news van rumble down the road and stop squarely in front of me, its headlights burning into my eyes. The first figure out of the van was none other than Valentine Chalons, the one certifiable celebrity in the Chalons family, the same people who owned cotton, sugar cane, oil, and timber interests all over Louisiana and East Texas, including the parish where my former college friend, Troy Bordelon, had lived.<\/p>\n

Valentine could have descended from Vikings rather than the chivalric Norman French ancestry his family claimed for themselves. He was tall, athletic-looking, and blue-eyed, with a bladed face and hair that had turned silver on the tips in his late thirties. Unlike the rest of the Chalons family, his views were ostensibly populist or libertarian, although I sensed that inside his populism was the soul of a snob.<\/p>\n

He had studied journalism at the University of Missouri, then had worked as a stringer and feature writer for the Associated Press before taking a news anchor position with a television station in New Orleans. But Valentine Chalons’s stops on the ladder of success were always temporary, and nobody doubted that he considered ambition a virtue rather than a vice.<\/p>\n

Before the 9\/11 attacks, he actually interviewed Osama bin Laden high up in the mountains on the Pakistan border. After hiking three days through burning moonscape and razor-edged rocks, Valentine and an interpreter finally trudged up a path to a cave opening, where the man who would help orchestrate the murder of almost three thousand people stood waiting for him, his robes swirling in the wind. According to what had become a folk legend among newsmen, the first words out of Val’s mouth were: “Why don’t you build a decent driveway Jack?”<\/p>\n

Now he owned a television station in Lafayette and one in Shreveport and was an editorial contributor on a national cable network. But regardless of his acquisitions, Val remained a hands-on journalist and took great pleasure in covering a story himself as well as immersing himself in the fray.<\/p>\n

“You’re too late, podna,” I said.<\/p>\n

“That’s what you think. I got a shot inside the ambulance at the intersection,” he replied. He motioned to his cameramen, who flooded the pond and the trees with light. One of them accidentally snapped the yellow crime scene tape that was wrapped around a pine trunk.<\/p>\n

“You guys step back,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Sorry,” the offending cameraman said.<\/p>\n

But Val didn’t miss a beat. He extended his microphone in front of my face. “Does the victim have a name yet?” he said.<\/p>\n

“No,” I replied.<\/p>\n

But he slogged on, undeterred, and repeated the question, using the name of the missing DEQ official’s wife.<\/p>\n

“Cut the bullshit, Val. You want information, talk to the sheriff,” I said.<\/p>\n

He lowered the mike. “How you been?” he said. <\/p>\n

“Great.” I slipped my hands into my back pockets and took a step closer to him, maybe because his aggressive manner had given me license I wouldn’t have had otherwise. “Did you know a guy by the name of Troy Bordelon?”<\/p>\n

“No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”<\/p>\n

“A dead guy who worked for your family.”<\/p>\n

“A dead guy?”<\/p>\n

“He gave me a deathbed statement about the disappearance of a prostitute named Ida Durbin. I think she was killed.” I held my eyes on his.<\/p>\n

“I’m listening,” he said.<\/p>\n

“A couple of rogue cops paid me a visit. Their names are J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts. These guys seemed worried about what Troy might have told me. Their names ring a bell?”<\/p>\n

“Nope.” He looked idly at one of his cameramen who was filming the pond and the drag marks where the paramedics had pulled the body out of the water.<\/p>\n

“And you never heard of Troy Bordelon?” I said.<\/p>\n

“I just told you.”<\/p>\n

“You’re a knowledgeable man, so I thought I’d ask,” I said.<\/p>\n

He inserted a piece of gum into his mouth and chewed it, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “You kill me, Dave. Come out to the plantation. We’ve got a cook from France now. I want him to fix a dinner especially for you.”<\/p>\n

“I’m off butter and cream,” I said.<\/p>\n

He laughed to himself and shook his head. “It was worth every minute of the drive out here. Have a good one.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked away, a self-amused grin on his face.<\/p>\n

Let it go, I told myself. But I couldn’t take his imperious, fraternity-boy manner. I caught up with him at the passenger window of his van. “Ida Durbin worked in a hot pillow joint on Post Office Street in Galveston in 1958. Would your old man know anything about those places?” I said.<\/p>\n

“You’re asking this about my father?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Want me to repeat the question?” I said.<\/p>\n

He touched at his nose and snapped his gum in his jaws. For a moment I thought he might step outside the vehicle. But he didn’t. “Dave, I’d love to get you your own show. The ratings would go through the roof. Let me make a couple of calls to New York. I’m not putting you on. I could swing it,” he said.<\/p>\n

Then the van pulled away, bouncing through the dips in the road, the high beams spearing through the underbrush and trees.<\/p>\n

You just blew it, bubba, I said under my breath.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I couldn’t find Clete for three days. The owner of the motor court where he lived said Clete had thrown a suitcase in his Cadillac early Friday morning, driven away with a wave of the hand, and had not returned.<\/p>\n

But at dawn the following Monday, Clete called the house on his cell phone.<\/p>\n

“Where are you?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Across the bayou. In City Park. I can see your backyard from here.”<\/p>\n

“Why the mystery?”<\/p>\n

“My situation is a little warm right now. Anybody been around?”<\/p>\n

“What have you done, Clete?”<\/p>\n

“It’s under control. Haul your butt over here, Streak. Over-and-out.”<\/p>\n

I drove down Main and across the drawbridge into the park. The sky was gray, the trees shrouded with mist, the surface of the bayou chained with rain rings. Clete was sitting on a table under a picnic shelter, his restored Cadillac parked back in the trees. But if he was trying to hide his Caddy from notice, he had taken on an impossible task. It was a beautiful automobile, with big fins, Frenched headlights, wire wheels and whitewalls, an immaculate cream-colored top, and a waxed finish that was the shade of a flamingo’s wing \u2014 all of it the gift of a pornographic actor and drug mule by the name of Gunner Ardoin, who credited Clete with turning his life around.<\/p>\n

I sat beside him under the shelter and unscrewed the cap on a thermos of coffee and hot milk I had brought from home.<\/p>\n

“You went after Billy Joe Pitts, didn’t you?” I said.<\/p>\n

“I found out he hangs around the casino in Lake Charles on the weekends. But that’s not all he does over there. He’s part owner of a motel that operates as a cat-house for high rollers.”<\/p>\n

Clete sipped his coffee, the steam rising into his face. He wore a rumpled suit with a white shirt and no tie, and a yellow straw cowboy hat that was bright with dew. The back of his neck was thick and red and pocked with scars below his hairline. I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.<\/p>\n

“What happened?” I said.<\/p>\n

“He made me at the casino and got me busted. I spent Saturday night in the Calcasieu Parish Jail. I’d still be in there if Nig and Willie hadn’t called in some IOUs for me. I was in a cell with a meth freak who tried to talk to his wife in the women’s section by yelling into the toilet bowl.”<\/p>\n

Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater were two New Orleans bondsmen Clete worked for, but I didn’t want to hear about them or Clete’s night in the can. When Clete’s stories digressed, he was usually trying to hide a disaster of some kind inside an incessant stream of minutiae. “What did you do when you got out, Clete?”<\/p>\n

“Hung around town, bought some books at Barnes and Noble, went swimming out at the lake. You ever been to Shell Beach?”<\/p>\n

“Clete \u2014”<\/p>\n

“Toward evening I made a house call out at Pitts’s motel. He was lifting weights in a cottage out back. He was also getting a blow job. The girl was black, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old.” Clete tossed the remainder of his coffee into the grass and stared at the bayou.<\/p>\n

“Go on,” I said.<\/p>\n

“The girl went into the motel, probably to scrub her teeth with Liquid Drano. So I ducked into the cottage. I was just going to have a motivational talk with the guy. He was lying on a bench, pressing a bar with maybe a hundred and seventy-five pounds on it. I waited till the bar was down on his chest, then I came up behind him and grabbed it and held it there so he couldn’t lift it up again.”<\/p>\n

“I go, ‘You busted up my podjo, motherfucker. That means you take the payback or give up the guy who sent you. Want a second to think it over’?”<\/p>\n

“He goes, ‘Oh, it’s Louisiana Fats again. I thought you were getting your cheeks oiled at the jail.’ “<\/p>\n

“I go, ‘Bad time to be a wiseass, Billy Joe,’ and roll the bar toward his throat.”<\/p>\n

“I thought he’d give it up. He was popping with sweat, his face starting to get a little purple. Then he says, ‘Does Robicheaux make you squat down for your nose lube?’ “<\/p>\n

Clete blew out his breath. “What was I supposed to do? The clock was running. The guy almost took your head off with a two-by-four. He made a teenage girl cop his swizzle stick. He’s a dirty cop. He should have had his spokes ripped out a long time ago. So I did it.”<\/p>\n

“What?<\/span>“<\/span><\/p>\n

“Maybe hurt him a little when I picked up the bar and dropped it on him.”<\/p>\n

Clete looked sideways at me, then back at the bayou again. I could hear the rain ticking on the trees and the camellias that grew along the water’s edge. I was afraid to ask the next question. “Is he \u2014”<\/p>\n

“I didn’t hang around. Last I saw, he was thrashing around on the floor, holding his throat. Red froth was kind of blowing out of his mouth,” Clete said. He looked at me again, waiting for me to speak, unable to hide the apprehension in his face.<\/p>\n

So I slipped back into my old role as Clete’s enabler and answered the question that was in his eyes. “To my knowledge no one has contacted the department. Did you check in with Willie and Nig?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Are you kidding? The last thing they want is their hired skip chaser bringing an A and B beef down on their heads.”<\/p>\n

He lit a Lucky Strike with an old Zippo and flicked the cap shut. He inhaled on the cigarette, blowing the smoke out through his fingers, then ground it out in the dirt. I could almost see his heart beating against his shirt.<\/p>\n

“I’ll make some calls. It’s probably not as bad as you think,” I said.<\/p>\n

St. Augustine said we should never use the truth to injure. Who was I to argue with a patristic saint? Besides, what else can you do when your best friend regularly allows his soul to be shot out of a cannon on your behalf?<\/p>\n

I changed the subject and told him about my encounter with Valentine Chalons at the homicide scene Thursday night. At first Clete’s eyes remained focused inward on his own thoughts, then I saw his attention begin to shift from his own troubles to mine.<\/p>\n

“You say this guy Chalons blew it?” he said.<\/p>\n

“He told me he never heard of Troy Bordelon. But his news crew was at the hospital. I’m sure they were covering the knife attack on Troy.”<\/p>\n

“That doesn’t mean Chalons knew about it,” Clete said.<\/p>\n

“He’s a good newsman. Nothing slides by him.”<\/p>\n

“We’re back to this Ida Durbin broad again? And rich people in St. Mary Parish you can’t stand. There’s a pattern here, big mon,” Clete said.<\/p>\n

“Clete, sometimes you can make me wish one of us was stone drunk or down at the methadon clinic,” I said.<\/p>\n

“What can I say? You’ll never change. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody who knows you.”<\/p>\n

I wanted to punch him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

I went to the office and buried myself in our newly opened investigation into the death by strangulation and massive head trauma of Fontaine Belloc, the wife of the DEQ officer serving federal time at Seagoville, Texas. She had been raped before she died., and the semen in her body had come back a match with the Baton Rouge serial killer’s, pulling us into an investigation that was now drawing national attention and every kind of meddlesome intrusion imaginable.<\/p>\n

A famous crime novelist from the East ensconced herself in the middle of the investigation and the attendant publicity; psychics came out of the woodwork; and psychological profilers were interviewed on state television almost daily. The revelation that the murders of over thirty Baton Rouge women had remained unsolved in the last decade left local people stunned and disbelieving. Sporting goods stores quickly ran out of pepper spray and handguns.<\/p>\n

Law enforcement agencies in other states began to contact Baton Rouge P.D. looking for ties to their own files of unsolved pattern homicides. The number of serial killings throughout the United States, as well as disappearances that were likely homicides, was a comment about the underside of our society that no humanist would care to dwell upon.<\/p>\n

In Wichita, Kansas, a psychopath who called himself BTK, for “bind, torture, and kill,” had committed crimes against whole families that were so cruel, depraved, and inhuman that police reporters as well as homicide investigators refused to reveal specific details to the public, even in the most euphemistic language.<\/p>\n

Baton Rouge P.D. received inquiries from Miami and Fort Lauderdale about a series of silk stocking strangulations back in the 1970s that came to be known as the “Canal Murders,” which may have been committed by one or several persons.<\/p>\n

Years ago, in Texas, a demented man by the name of Henry Lucas confessed to whatever crime police authorities wished to feed him information about. Now some of those same cops who had closed their files at Lucas’s expense privately acknowledged over the phone the real killer was probably still out there or, worse, in their midst.<\/p>\n

The names of celebrity monsters reentered our vocabulary, perhaps because they put a human face on a level of evil most of us cannot comprehend. Or perhaps, like Dahmer or Gacy or Bundy, they’re safely dead and their fate assures us that our legal apparatus will protect us against our present adversaries.<\/p>\n

But what troubled me most about this investigation, as well as two other serial killer cases I had been involved with, was the lack of collective knowledge we possess about the perpetrators. They take their secrets to the grave. In their last moments, with nothing to gain, they refuse to tell the victims’ families where their loved ones are buried. When a family member makes a special appeal to them, they gaze into space, as though someone is speaking to them in a foreign language.<\/p>\n

None I ever interviewed showed anger or resentment. Their speech is remarkably lucid and their syntax shows no evidence of a thought disorder, as in the case of paranoids and schizophrenics. They’re polite, not given to profanity, and disturbingly normal in appearance. Invariably they tell you their victims never had a clue as to the fate that was about to befall them.<\/p>\n

They look like your next-door neighbor, or a man selling Fuller brushes, or a hardware store employee grinding a spare key for your house. I believe their numbers are greater than we think. I believe the causes that create them are theological in nature rather than societal. I believe they make a conscious choice to erase God’s thumbprint from their souls. But that’s just one man’s opinion. The truth is, nobody knows.<\/p>\n

It was raining when I went to lunch. Our drought was broken and Bayou Teche was running high and dark under the drawbridge, and black people were fishing with bamboo poles in the lee of the bridge. Even though it was early summer, the wind was cool and smelled of salt and wet trees. When I got back to the office, I temporarily put away my expanding file on the murder of Fontaine Belloc and kept my promise to Clete, namely, to determine the fate of Billy Joe Pitts after Clete bounced one hundred and seventy-five pounds in iron weights off his sternum.<\/p>\n

I knew the police chief in Lake Charles, where Pitts evidently moonlighted as a pimp, but I decided to take the problem straight to its source and called the sheriff’s department in the parish north of Alexandria where Pitts lived and worked. The dispatcher said Pitts was off that day.<\/p>\n

“Give me his home number, please. This is in reference to a murder investigation,” I said.<\/p>\n

“I can’t do that,” the dispatcher said.<\/p>\n

“Call him and give him my number. I need to hear from him in the next half hour or I’ll go through the sheriff,” I said.<\/p>\n

Ten minutes later, my extension rang. “What do you want, Robicheaux?” Pitts said.<\/p>\n

“Sounds like you have an obstruction in your throat,” I said.<\/p>\n

“I said what do you want.”<\/p>\n

Actually his response had already given me the information I needed. Pitts was alive, not in a hospital, and he probably wasn’t filing charges against Clete. “I think Troy Bordelon may have been witness to the murder of a prostitute by the name of Ida Durbin. But I hit a dead end every time I mention her name. So I talked to Val Chalons, you know, the newsman? He told me you might have some helpful information.”<\/p>\n

“Me?”<\/p>\n

“He mentioned your name specifically,” I lied.<\/p>\n

“I see Val Chalons when he fishes up here on my dad’s lake. I don’t talk police business with him. He doesn’t give me tips on the stock market.”<\/p>\n

“But you know Val Chalons, right?”<\/p>\n

“Listen, I don’t know what you’re up to, but you tell rhino-butt it’s not over between us.” <\/p>\n

“Who would rhino-butt be?” I asked.<\/p>\n

“Duh,” he replied.<\/p>\n

“It’s been good talking with you, Billy Joe. Try gargling with some warm salt water. And the next time you come around my house with a weapon in your hand, be advised I’m going to blow your fucking head off,” I said.<\/p>\n

Then I made a call to my half brother, Jimmie, in New Orleans, where he owned one restaurant in the Quarter and another uptown, in the Carrollton district. Jimmie had never married, although any number of attractive and interesting women drifted in and out of his life. He was known in the life as “Jimmie the Gent” and over the years had acquired a kind of benign notoriety as a player in the city’s traditional vices \u2014 video poker machines, offtrack betting, card clubs, and trafficking in large amounts of illegal Mexican rum and gin. By their nature, all these enterprises took Jimmie into a working relationship with the Giacano family, who had run New Orleans since Governor Huey Long made a present of the state to Frank Costello.<\/p>\n

But the patriarch of the Giacanos, a Dumpster load of whaleshit by the name of Didi Gee, paid back Jimmie’s trust by putting a contract on me, except the button man mistakenly shot Jimmie and blinded him in one eye.<\/p>\n

“This guy Bordelon saw Ida die?” Jimmie said.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t say that,” I replied.<\/p>\n

“Then what <\/span>did you say?”<\/p>\n

“He saw blood on a chair. He said they smashed her mandolin. He wasn’t sure what happened to her.”<\/p>\n

The line was quiet a long time. “And some redneck cops came after you because they thought you knew too much? Cops who might work for the Chalons family?”<\/p>\n

“That about sums it up.”<\/p>\n

“I’m coming over there.”<\/p>\n

“Not a good idea,” I said.<\/p>\n

“You want me to stay at a motel?” he said.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n

chapter SIX<\/span><\/p>\n

After I had hung up I went downstairs and tapped on Helen’s door. Her desk was covered with photos of women who were thought to be victims of the Baton Rouge serial killer.<\/p>\n

“Val Chalons was covering the story on our DOA Thursday night,” I said. “I brought up the name of Billy Joe Pitts. He told me he never heard of him.”<\/p>\n

Helen was chewing on the corner of her lip, trying to concentrate on what I was saying, her fingers splayed on the photos of the dead women. “You lost me,” she said.<\/p>\n

“I just talked with Pitts. He says Chalons fishes at his father’s lake. Chalons was lying.”<\/p>\n

Helen closed her eyes and opened them. “Dave, we’ve got our hands full here. We’re going to get Pitts. We’re going to get that other jerk, what’s-his-name, Shockly. But right now \u2014”<\/p>\n

“Guys like Pitts don’t operate without sanction, Helen. Why did Chalons lie?”<\/p>\n

“Maybe he isn’t interested in the subject. Maybe he couldn’t care less about you or Pitts. Maybe everything isn’t about you.”<\/p>\n

It was quiet in the room. Outside, rain swept across the window. “The assault against my person is an open investigation. I was bringing you up to date.”<\/p>\n

“Good,” she said, her face coloring with embarrassment at her own level of irritation.<\/p>\n

I nodded at her desktop. “I went over those this morning. Pretty grim.”<\/p>\n

She stood up from her desk and tightened the tuck of her shirt with her thumbs, her shoulders flexing, her expression recomposing itself. She picked up a glossy plastic folder and handed it to me. “Here’s the Baton Rouge coroner’s file. A couple of the women were dead when most of the damage was done to them. Some of them weren’t.”<\/p>\n

“I’ll read it and check with you later.”<\/p>\n

“Do that,” she said.<\/p>\n

I started out the door.<\/p>\n

“Hold on a minute, bwana,” she said. “I apologize if I’m a little on edge. This is the worst case I’ve ever seen. How does a guy this sick go undetected for years?”<\/p>\n

In my mind’s eye I saw an image from years ago of a nineteen-year-old door gunner blowing apart a South Vietnamese wedding party inside a free-fire zone.<\/p>\n

“Because he looks like a regular guy, cooking hot dogs on the grill next door,” I said.<\/p>\n

After five o’clock, I drove into St. Mary Parish and resumed my own investigation into the fate of Ida Durbin.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

To say the Chalons family lived in an antebellum home on Bayou Teche does not go anywhere near an accurate description of the singularity that characterized their home and their way of life. The house was enormous, two and a half stories tall, and had been built in the 1850s inside oak trees that were already mature. Now the trees were centuries old and kept the house in perpetual shade. But rather than restore the home to its original grandeur, as the Chalons’s wealth would have allowed them to do, they seemed to treat modernity as an enemy to be kept in abeyance.<\/p>\n

According to the legend, the builder had mixed milk and hog’s blood in the paint, and it had dried on the cypress and oak planks as hard as iron. I suspected the truth was otherwise. The hardened texture and grayish-green color of the paint was probably due to the smoke from cane stubble fires and the mold and dampness caused by lack of sunlight inside the trees. <\/p>\n

Or maybe I just didn’t like the romantic legends that seemed to attach themselves to the Chalons family.<\/p>\n

Valentine’s father was named Raphael. He had become a widower twice and was notorious for his illegitimate children., erotic excursions to the Islands, and his affairs with married women in New Orleans. I wondered sometimes if his home did not mirror his soul. He hired no gardeners and let his grounds run riot. But the result was a rough kind of subtropical Edenic beauty, threaded with snakes and thorned plants that had no names. Even more incongruently, his magnolia trees grew to a huge size, dripping with flowers, his grapefruit trees bursting with golden orbs, without sunlight ever directly touching the leaves.<\/p>\n

Formosa termites had eaten through the outbuildings, the old slave quarters, and part of the house’s walls and lower veranda, robbing them of any sense of historical severity they might have once contained, as though their edges had been molded by the gentle forces of time and foliage rather than parasitical insects. Raphael had finally relented and allowed chemical treatment of his property, but the accumulative effect of his organized neglect was a tangle of air vines, wild persimmons, palmettos, pecan trees, blooming flowers, and desiccated wood that no film company could replicate.<\/p>\n

I stopped my pickup in front of the heavy iron gate that closed off the driveway and prevented tourists from entering the property and photographing it. But before I could get out of the truck, a black man emerged from the shadows and scraped back the gate for me. He was a heavyset, pie-faced man, with big, half-moon eyebrows and a cranium like an inverted pot. What was his name? Andrew? No, Andre. Andre Bergeron. He ran errands and did chores for the Chalons family and used to sell iced-down oysters off the tailgate of a pickup by the drawbridge near Burke Street.<\/p>\n

“Thank you,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Yes, suh,” he replied. “You here to see Mr. Val?”<\/p>\n

“How’d you know?” I said.<\/p>\n

” ‘Cause you a po-liceman in New Iberia. ‘Cause you probably working on a crime and you here to see Mr. Val ’cause he’s a TV newsman and he got a lot of information on them kind of t’ings.”<\/p>\n

“You got it pretty well figured out,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Yes, suh. I do.”<\/p>\n

I drove into the grounds, through towering oak trees that creaked with the wind. The rain had stopped and the sky was marbled with purple and gold clouds, and through the trees I could see the sunlight winking on the bayou.<\/p>\n

Val opened the front door. He was expansive, jocular, a bourbon and crushed ice in his hand, his sister Honoria seated at the piano in the middle of the living room, a solitary lamp burning behind her. The woodwork was dark, the furniture heavy, the air musky-smelling. “How you doing, old buddy?” Val said.<\/p>\n

“Hope you’ll forgive me for not calling first,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Oh no, no, no, not a problem. You remember Honoria, don’t you?” he said.<\/p>\n

Honoria was hard to forget. She was dark-haired and dark-skinned, like her father, with brown eyes and a small red mouth, a mole at one corner. Honoria had received a doctorate from the Sorbonne and had taught music theory for three years at the university in Lafayette. But either her iconoclastic ways or rumors about her libertine behavior caused the university to deny her tenure. Sometimes I would see her in New Iberia’s public library, by herself, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, reading until closing time. <\/p>\n

“You want a soft drink?” Val asked.<\/p>\n

“No, just a word with you,” I replied.<\/p>\n

Honoria got up from the piano bench and started toward the kitchen. She wore a spaghetti-strap black dress with purple shoes, and the muscles in her back were deeply tanned and looked as hard as iron when she walked.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t mean for you to leave,” I said awkwardly.<\/p>\n

“I was going to see if there was any iced tea. I thought you might like that in place of a soft drink,” she said. She stared at me, waiting, the sepia-tinted light shining on the tops of her breasts.<\/p>\n

“Don’t bother,” I said.<\/p>\n

She walked away, leaving me with the illogical impression that somehow I had been rude.<\/p>\n

“What’s up?” Val said.<\/p>\n

“You told me you didn’t know Billy Joe Pitts. He says you fish on his father’s lake. Why would you want to jerk me around, Val?”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, I know Old Man Pitts. Maybe I didn’t put the names together. Square with me, Dave. What are you trying to prove here?”<\/p>\n

“I think Pitts tried to click off my switch. Your family owns the parish he works for.\u00a0\u00a0 A guy like that doesn’t take a dump without somebody’s permission.”<\/p>\n

“That’s a great line. You could be a screenwriter in a blink. I’m serious. I’d like to help you with that. Isn’t your daughter studying literature?”<\/p>\n

Valentine was slick. He didn’t defend or attack. He treated an insult like a compliment and an adversary like a misguided friend. I had acted foolishly in coming to his house. What had I expected? For a man to agree with me when I called him a liar?<\/p>\n

“Thanks for your time. I’ll let myself out,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Don’t go away mad. I’m glad you dropped by. Hey, I live in the guesthouse in back. Let’s throw a steak on the grill.”<\/p>\n

“Another time,” I said.<\/p>\n

He placed his arm across my shoulders. He was almost a half head taller than I, even with a slight slouch in his posture. I tried to step away from him, without being rude, but to no avail. He pointed to an ancient parchment sealed in a glass frame on the wall. “That’s our family coat of arms. The parchment is fifteenth century, but the seal goes back a thousand years earlier.”<\/p>\n

The coat of arms involved a shield, a gladius or sword a Roman legionnaire would have carried, the cross of the Crusades, and the visored helmet of a medieval knight errant.<\/p>\n

“The family name comes from the Battle of Chalons. My ancestors got rid of their own name and substituted the name of a great event,” he said. He removed his arm from my shoulder and gazed benevolently into my face. I couldn’t tell if he was feigning humility or actually offering up his family history to inspire awe in others.<\/p>\n

“Your ancestors fought against Attila the Hun?” I said.<\/p>\n

“We probably didn’t do a very good job of it. We had to fight his descendants in that delayed Teutonic migration known as World Wars One and Two.”<\/p>\n

I looked at him blankly. He had just lifted a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby <\/span>and used it as though it were of his own creation.<\/p>\n

“You’re not impressed?” he said.<\/p>\n

“I had a long day. I’ll be seeing you, Val.”<\/p>\n

When I shook hands with him, I felt his fingers wrap around my skin and squeeze, his eyes lingering on mine, as though he were trying to read my thoughts. “I like you, Dave,” he said.<\/p>\n

Out in the yard, I unconsciously rubbed my hand on my trousers.<\/p>\n

The black man named Andre was picking up litter that had blown into the drive from the highway. He waved at me and I waved back. Then, in the easy sweep of wind through the trees, I heard someone behind me. I turned, expecting to see Valentine Chalons again. But it was his sister, Honoria, her black hair curved under her cheeks, a gold chain and cross askew on her chest.<\/p>\n

Her eyes were liquid, almost luminous in the shade, her facial skin smooth, without a wrinkle or crease. She continued to look at me strangely, without speaking.<\/p>\n

“Could I help you?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Do you remember the night you drove me home from the dance at the country club?” she asked.<\/p>\n

“No, I don’t remember that.”<\/p>\n

“You probably wouldn’t. I had to put you to bed rather than the other way around.”<\/p>\n

“I used to have blackouts, Honoria. I did a lot of things that are still inside a dark box somewhere. I don’t know if I want to revisit them.”<\/p>\n

Her eyes went away from mine and came back. “My father and brother aren’t afraid of you. But they are afraid of the nun,” she said.<\/p>\n

“The nun?”<\/span> <\/p>\n

“The Buddhists believe the dead don’t know they’re dead. So maybe some people die and go to hell and never know it. It’s just another day. Like this one, now. Do you think that’s true? That hell is just a place you step into on an ordinary day?”<\/p>\n

The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria’s face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a windowpane.<\/p>\n

Honoria’s eyes remained fixed on mine, expectant, somehow trusting, the redness of her mouth and the mole next to it as inviting as a poisonous flower.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

chapter SEVEN<\/span><\/p>\n

When I got back home later that evening,, Jimmie had already arrived from New Orleans and installed himself in the spare bedroom. Jimmie was a funny guy. He had earned the nickname “Jimmie the Gent” for his manners, intelligence, and sharp dress, but his success in the world was also due to the fact that, like my father and mother, he could do many things well with his hands.<\/p>\n

As a Depression-era family we worked from what people used to call “cain’t-see to cain’t-see,” which meant from before first light to well after sunset. My father was a natural gas pipeliner and derrick man on drilling rigs out in the Gulf, but he considered industrial work, with regular hours and paychecks, a vacation. Real work was the enterprise you did on your own, with nobody to back you up but your family. We broke corn together, butchered and smoked our own meat, strung “trot” lines baited with chicken guts through the swamp across the road, milked cows and hoed out the vegetable garden before school, calved in the early spring, trapped muskrat in the winter, sold cracklins and blackberries off the tailgate of a pickup for two bits a quart.<\/p>\n

In the summer, Jimmie and I built board roads with our father through tidal marshland where you plodded all day through ooze that was like wet cement. In the spring, we caught crabs and crawfish by the washtub with chunks of skinned nutria, and sold them to restaurants in New Orleans for twice the price we could get in New Iberia or Lafayette.<\/p>\n

Before she fixed our breakfast, my mother would return from the barn smelling of manure and horse sweat, a pail of frothy milk in one hand and an armful of brown eggs smeared with chickenshit clutched against her chest. Then she would pull off her shirt, scrub her hands and arms with Lava soap under the pump in the sink, and in her bra fill our bowls with cush-cush and make ham-and-onion sandwiches for our lunches.<\/p>\n

Jimmie and I both had paper routes in New Iberia’s red-light district. We set pins in the bowling alley and with our mother washed bottles in the Tabasco factory on the bayou. My father hand-built the home we lived in, notching and pegging the oak beams with such seamless craftsmanship that it survived the full brunt of a half dozen hurricanes with no structural damage. My mother ironed clothes in a laundry nine hours a day in hundred-and-ten-degree heat. She scalded and picked chickens for five cents apiece in our backyard, and secretly saved money in a coffee can for two years in order to buy an electric ice grinder and start a snowball concession at the minor league baseball park.<\/p>\n

Our parents were illiterate and barely spoke English, but they were among the most brave and resourceful people I ever knew. Neither of them would consciously set about to do wrong. But they destroyed one another just the same \u2014 my father with his alcoholism, my mother with her lust and insatiable need for male attention. Then they destroyed their self-respect, their family, and their home. They did all this with the innocence of people who had never been farther away from their Cajun world than their weekend honeymoon trip to New Orleans.<\/p>\n

Jimmie’s suitcase lay unopened on the bed in the spare room, but through the kitchen window I saw him in the backyard, wearing shined shoes, pleated dark slacks, a pomegranate-colored tie, and dazzling white dress shirt, his Rolex watchband glinting on his wrist. He had folded his sleeves up on his forearms and was screwing down a new brass hasp on Tripod’s cage door. He stepped back and tested the door, then began pouring from a bag of Snuggs’s dry food into Tripod’s bowl.<\/p>\n

“Snuggs might not appreciate your expression of charity at his expense,” I said, walking down the steps into the yard.<\/p>\n

“I already checked with him. He said the eats you buy him are third-rate, anyway,” he replied.<\/p>\n

I was always amazed at how much we resembled one another, even though we were only half brothers. He didn’t have a white patch in his hair, as I did, and his prosthetic eye had a peculiar gleam trapped inside it, but our height, skin coloring, posture, facial structure, even the way we walked, were the same. I sometimes felt a reflection had stepped out of the mirror and would not allow me to be who I thought I was.<\/p>\n

“I just got back from talking with Valentine Chalons. I’ve caught him in at least two lies,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Why does he want to lie about Ida Durbin? He wasn’t even born in ‘fifty-eight.”\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“The Chalonses supposedly had business ties to the Giacanos. The Giacanos had part of the hot pillow action in Galveston. Ida was working in one of their joints,” I replied.<\/p>\n

“That doesn’t make sense. If Ida was killed by a pimp or some cops on a pad, why would the Chalonses care? They wouldn’t even know her name.”<\/p>\n

“When they lie, they’re guilty. Val Chalons is lying,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Maybe. Maybe not, Dave. You don’t like rich guys. I’m not sure how objective you are.”<\/p>\n

I picked up Tripod and set him inside his cage. He felt heavy and solid in my hands, his tail flipping in my face. I started to speak, but this time kept my own counsel.<\/p>\n

Jimmie latched Tripod’s cage door and poked one finger through the screen to scratch his head. Jimmie’s jaws were closely shaved, the small cleft in his chin filled with shadow. “I keep thinking maybe she got away from whoever abducted her. A few times I thought I heard her voice on a jukebox, singing backup maybe or even doing a solo. I always wanted to believe those demos we sent to Sun Records got her out of the life. Kind of a crazy way to think, huh?” <\/p>\n

No different from my thoughts, I started to say. He waited for me to speak. “What are you thinking?” he asked.<\/p>\n

“She’s dead. That’s why the Chalonses are running scared,” I said.<\/p>\n

“No, there’s some other explanation,” he replied, wagging one finger back and forth, as though he had the power to change the past.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

That night I dreamed of Galveston, Texas, in the year 1958. In the dream I saw the salt-eaten frame houses where girls with piney-woods accents took on all comers for five dollars a pop, while down by the beach snub-nosed hot rods roared past a drive-in restaurant, their exposed V-8 engines chrome-plated and iridescent with an oily sheen, their twin exhausts thundering in a dirty echo off the asphalt. The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality that I could not explain.<\/p>\n

In the darkness I drove to the cemetery in St. Martinville where my third wife, Bootsie, was buried. Bayou Teche was coated with fog, the crypts beaded with moisture as big as marbles. Downstream I could see the steeple of the old French church impaled against the stars, and the massive Evangeline oak under which I first kissed Bootsie Mouton and discovered how the world could become a cathedral in the time it takes for two people to press their mouths against one another.<\/p>\n

I sat on a steel bench by Bootsie’s tomb, my head in my hands, unable to pray or even to think. I did not want the sun to rise or the starlight to go out of the sky. I wanted to stay inside the darkness, the coolness of the fog, the smell of nightdamp and old brick stained with mold. I wanted to be with my dead wife.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

At eight o’clock I sat down at my desk and went to work again on the case of the Baton Rouge serial killer. So far, all of his known victims had been women. Almost all of them had been abducted from their homes or driveways in upscale neighborhoods, often in broad daylight. There were no eyewitnesses. With the exception of the black woman whose body had been found not far from the convent at Grand Coteau, all of the victims had been white and educated.<\/p>\n

One woman evidently was taken out of her front yard while she was watering her flowers. One had parked her SUV in the driveway and left a sack of groceries on the kitchen counter and another on the passenger seat of her vehicle before she disappeared. The door to the SUV was open; a solitary jar of gourmet barbecue sauce was broken on the cement.<\/p>\n

Another victim must have opened her front door to retrieve her mail, then had spilled a handful of envelopes down the brick steps. Her three-year-old daughter, who was playing in the sunroom, wandered out on the street, looking for her mother, and was stopped from walking into traffic by a passing police officer. A female graduate student jogging along the chain lakes north of the LSU campus rounded a bend, waved at friends eating lunch on a bench, and jogged up a path between a bank of azalea bushes. She was not seen again until her body, dressed only in underwear, was found floating in a pond under a railroad trestle in the Atchafalaya Basin.<\/p>\n

Each abduction took place when no male friend or adult family member was at the crime scene. Baton Rouge police and parish sheriff’s deputies had interviewed hundreds of people in the neighborhoods where the victims had lived. The interviews had contributed absolutely nothing to the investigation. Obviously an individual who inspired trust was threading himself in and out of residential enclaves where suspicion and exclusion came with the house deed. Could a black man walk up a driveway to a four-hundred-thousand-dollar home, at three in the afternoon, and drag a woman to his vehicle and not be noticed? Could a delivery man, a telephone worker, an inspector from the gas company? Could a police officer? Could a minister wearing a Roman collar?<\/p>\n

But no one saw a delivery or official vehicle parked near the crime scene. The black and Hispanic lawn men who worked nearby were questioned and excluded. Every known sex offender in the area was pulled in and run through the ringer. Oddly, the perpetrator had given a free pass to the groups who are usually the targets of misogynistic predators. None of his victims had been a prostitute, runaway, or barroom derelict.<\/p>\n

None of the crime scenes showed any sign of struggle or resistance. The broken jar of gourmet barbecue sauce and the spilled mail on a woman’s front steps were the only physical indications that in seconds someone’s life had turned into a visit to the Abyss.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The serial killer did not have a face or a history that we knew about. His DNA was not in the national database. He had hung Fontaine Belloc’s purse in a tree to taunt us and to show his contempt for her and her family. He sought out victims who were reasonably happy and at peace with the world and left society’s rejects alone. His body fluids were left behind as a toxic smear on the rest of us.<\/p>\n

I read through the autopsy report on Fontaine Belloc again. The details were not of a kind anyone wishes to remember. But one stuck in my mind and would not go away. I picked up my phone and called the office of Koko Hebert, our parish coroner. “She swallowed her wedding ring?” I said.<\/p>\n

“From its position, I’d say a couple of hours before she died,” he replied.<\/p>\n

“He forced her to eat it?”<\/p>\n

“Not in my opinion.”<\/p>\n

“Spell it out, will you, Koko?”<\/p>\n

“Her wrists were bound, probably with plastic cuffs. There were teeth marks on the ring finger. I think she used her teeth to work the ring off her finger and swallow it. What difference does it make?”<\/p>\n

“Because if she was that determined to keep this bastard from taking her ring, maybe she figured out a way to leave us a message about his identity,” I said, my blood rising.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, that’s a possibility, isn’t it?” he replied.<\/p>\n

I replaced the receiver in the cradle without saying good-bye.<\/p>\n

A mockingbird flew into my window glass, flecking it with a pinpoint of white matter. I got up from the desk and looked down onto the lawn. The bird lay still in the shade, one wing at a broken angle.<\/p>\n

It was not a good morning. And it was about to get worse.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just before noon, Honoria Chalons called the office to ask how I was feeling.<\/p>\n

“Excuse me?” I said.<\/p>\n

“My first husband is buried at the church cemetery in St. Martinville. I saw you there this morning. You didn’t look well. Are you all right?” she said.<\/p>\n

“Yes, I’m fine.”<\/p>\n

“Can you have a drink with me this afternoon?”<\/p>\n

“I traded in sour mash for AA. That was after it chewed me up and spit me out.”<\/p>\n

“So I’ll buy you an iced tea.”<\/p>\n

“Another time.”<\/p>\n

“You think I’m a mentally ill person?” <\/p>\n

“Guys like me don’t get to judge other people’s stability.”<\/p>\n

“The things I said to you about death yesterday? They’re all true.”<\/p>\n

“I believe you.”<\/p>\n

“What I said about the nun is true, too. My father and Val genuinely fear her. They won’t even go inside the little church she attends.”<\/p>\n

“Which nun are we talking about?”<\/p>\n

“Have that drink with me?”<\/p>\n

“Give me a number where I can call you after work,” I said.<\/p>\n

I went downstairs and caught Helen on her way to lunch. “You know a nun who’s had some run-ins with the Chalons family?” I said.<\/p>\n

She thought about it. “There’s one on Old Jeanerette Road. Years ago, she stoked up the sugar cane workers in St. Mary Parish. She runs a group that builds houses for the poor now. Why?”<\/p>\n

“I was out to the Chalons house. The nun came up in the conversation.”<\/p>\n

Helen sucked in her cheeks, her eyes studying a dead space between us. “Nothing I say has any influence, does it?” she said.<\/p>\n

“Had you rather I not tell you what I’m doing?” <\/p>\n

Helen put her hand inside her shirt collar and picked at a mosquito bite on her shoulder, her gaze wandering along the corridor wall, her breath audible in the silence. “If I remember right, about two years back somebody slashed up her car tires. Check the file. Her name is Molly Boyle. Her middle name is ‘trouble.’ She’s your kind of gal.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I went to lunch at Bon Creole and tried not to think about my brief run-in with Helen. When I came out of the restaurant, the sun was like a white flame in the sky, the highway rippling with heat, the air smelling of salt, and water evaporating from backed-up storm ditches. At the office, I pulled a file on the nun and a series of complaints, all involving harassment and vandalism, that she had lodged with the sheriff’s department. The deputies’ entries in the file were matter-of-fact and made no conclusion about possible perpetrators, other than a mention that several black teenagers in the area had been questioned.<\/p>\n

I took a handful of loose mug shots from my desk drawer, dropped them in my shirt pocket, and went to find Sister Molly Boyle. <\/p>\n

She had created an administrative center in a restored nineteenth-century farmhouse on the bayou, eleven miles south of town, and lived next door with another nun in a cypress cottage. Ostensibly she worked under the auspices of the diocese in Lafayette, but as I turned into the gravel driveway I had the sense the archenemy of the Chalons family had staked out her own territory.<\/p>\n

The entire compound was about three acres in size. The lawn was bright green and freshly mowed, partially shaded by live oaks and pecan trees, the embankment along the Teche planted with elephant ears, caladiums, impatiens, and periwinkles. A large sunny area was devoted to vegetable gardens, beehives, and a huge compost heap piled inside a rectangle of railroad ties. A tractor was parked in a pole shed, and poultry pecked in a bare spot under a spreading oak that grew above the shed and the adjacent barn. A secretary in the office walked with me onto the gallery and said I would probably find Sister Molly in the barn.<\/p>\n

She was grinding a machete on an emery wheel, her eyes encased in machinist goggles, the heel of her hand pressed down close to the blade’s edge. I waited until she clicked off the toggle switch on the grinder before I spoke. “I didn’t want to startle you. Sister. I’m Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.<\/p>\n

She pulled her goggles off with one thumb and left a greasy smear by her eyebrow. Her hair was dark red and tied up on her head with a white kerchief, the tails of her denim shirt knotted across her stomach. The heat and trapped moisture inside the barn were stifling. Motes of dust and desiccated manure floated as thick as gnats in the shafts of sunlight through the cracks. But she seemed unbothered by any of it. “I go by Molly,” she said, and extended her hand.<\/p>\n

“It looks like some vandals were trying to give you a bad time a couple of years back. Have any idea who they were?” I said.<\/p>\n

“The deputies who came out thought they were kids from the neighborhood,” she replied.<\/p>\n

“But you don’t?”<\/p>\n

“Our dog was poisoned. Our car tires were cut into ribbons. Our secretary was shot in the back with an air rifle. We help impoverished people own their homes. Why would their children want to hurt us?”\u00a0 <\/p>\n

I blotted the perspiration out of my eyes on my arm. “Can we go outside?” I said.<\/p>\n

She hung the machete on a nail, the edge of its curved blade like a strip of blue ice. Then she pulled her kerchief loose from her head and shook out her hair. “How about some lemonade?” she said.<\/p>\n

I sat at a spool table on the back porch of her cottage while she went inside. Through the trees the sunlight looked hard and brittle and unrelenting on the bayou’s surface. She came back on the porch with a tray of cookies and two glasses of lemonade, with sprigs of mint in them.<\/p>\n

“You tried to unionize the farmworkers hereabouts?” I said.<\/p>\n

“For a while. Mechanization took the jobs away, so we turned to other things. We teach people folk crafts and carpentry now.”<\/p>\n

“Has the Chalons family ever tried to injure you?”<\/p>\n

She gazed at the bayou, her eyes blinking more than they should have. “They let us know they were around,” she said.<\/p>\n

I removed the handful of mug shots from my shirt pocket and placed them on the table. “Ever see any of these guys?” I asked.<\/p>\n

She separated the photos one from the other with her index finger. Then she tapped on the face of a man with grainy skin, recessed eyes, and teeth that were too big for his mouth. “That’s one I won’t forget,” she said.<\/p>\n

“His name is Billy Joe Pitts. He’s a sheriff’s deputy.”<\/p>\n

“He pulled me over to the side of the highway north of Alexandria. We’d been circulating a union petition among some cannery workers. He made some rather nasty remarks.”<\/p>\n

“He threatened you?”<\/p>\n

“His remarks were sexual in nature. That night our car was vandalized.”<\/p>\n

“Did you ever hear of a woman named Ida Durbin?”<\/p>\n

“No, I don’t recall that name. Who is she?”<\/p>\n

“Someone I believe the Chalons family would like to forget,” I said.<\/p>\n

She paused a moment. “You’re not really here about our troubles, are you?”<\/p>\n

I felt my face tighten. “Billy Joe Pitts is part of an ongoing assault-and-battery investigation. I think he takes his orders from the Chalonses.”<\/p>\n

“I see,” she said.<\/p>\n

“You’ve been very helpful.” But I had lost her attention and I believe her trust as well. <\/p>\n

She looked at her watch. “I have to make some deliveries now. We run a folk craft workshop and sell the birdhouses they make. A tough way to raise a dollar, huh?”<\/p>\n

Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.<\/p>\n

Just before I drove off the property onto the state road, I saw a group of black people leave the rehabilitated farmhouse that served as Sister Molly’s administrative center. They were laughing, clapping one another on the shoulder about a joke of some kind. A dome-headed black man recognized me through the windshield and raised a hand in greeting. It was Andre Bergeron, the handyman who did chores for the Chalons family. I waved out the window in response and headed back to New Iberia.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

After work, I fixed supper for Jimmie and me at the house. I was beginning to regret I had told him of Ida Durbin’s fate. He blamed himself and kept trying to recall details of their last day together, as though some clue could be extracted from an idle remark she made over forty years ago. He told me he was meeting a musicologist that night at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.<\/p>\n

“I know I’ve heard Ida’s voice on a record. I’m sure of it, Dave,” he said.<\/p>\n

I did the dishes and didn’t try to contend with Jimmie’s obsession. After he was gone, I showered and took a walk downtown in the twilight. From the drawbridge looking south I could see the gardens behind the Shadows, a plantation home built in 1831, and the receding corridor of oak and cypress trees along the banks of the Teche, a tidal stream that had been navigated by Spaniards in bladed helmets, French missionaries, displaced Acadians, pirates, Confederate and Yankee gun crews, and plantation revelers who toasted their own prosperity on paddle wheelers that floated through the night like candlelit wedding cakes.<\/p>\n

Jean Lafitte had auctioned off West Indian slaves a few hundred yards from where I stood. As a lesson in terror, Union soldiers under the command of General Nathaniel Banks had raped women, burned crops, and looted the homes of the rich up and down the bayou when they marched through New Iberia in April 1863. People still found minie balls in the heartwood of felled oak trees and pieces of broken china in chicken yards, green depressions carpeted with mushrooms in a woods where soldiers with no names were hurriedly buried.<\/p>\n

As the heat went out of the day, the summer light seemed to ascend higher into the sky, so that the bayou itself became a long amber ribbon between the green darkness of the trees, the surface creasing in the wind, somehow disconnected from the present, the alluvial soil along the banks filled with the bones of Indians, Europeans, and Reconstruction-empowered Africans, all of whom had thought their dominion over the land was forever.<\/p>\n

But in my reverie about the nature of history and collective vanity I had forgotten a more prosaic detail from my day at the office. Either Jimmie or I had accidentally turned off the message machine on my telephone, and when I returned home the phone was ringing without stop.<\/p>\n

“Hello?” I said.<\/p>\n

“I wasn’t going to call, but principle is principle, I think.”<\/p>\n

“Honoria?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Yes. Who did you think it was?” she said.<\/p>\n

I squeezed my eyes shut. “I was supposed to call you back after work,” I said.<\/p>\n

“To put it more accurately, you asked for my phone number. We were going to have a drink.”<\/p>\n

Not exactly, but it wasn’t a time to argue. “I got buried today. I’m terribly sorry,” I said.<\/p>\n

She didn’t speak, and I could feel my hand tightening on the receiver, my discomfort growing. I had meant to call her back, but not to have a drink. Instead, my whole agenda with Honoria had been about Sister Molly Boyle, whom I had been able to contact on my own. The consequence was I had forgotten about Honoria. The truth was I had tried to use her.<\/p>\n

“Where are you?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Down the street, at Clementine’s.”<\/p>\n

“Can I treat you to a dessert?”<\/p>\n

“Whatever you like, Dave. It’s a strange evening, isn’t it? The sky is purple and full of birds. When I think of the color purple, I always think of the passion of Christ or the robe of Agamemnon.”<\/p>\n

Don’t get mixed up with this one, I thought.<\/p>\n

But I was just buying her a dessert, obeying the tenets of basic charity, wasn’t I? Why turn a harmless act into self-flagellation? I told myself.<\/p>\n

And in that spirit I strolled down to Clementine’s and through the door into a bar and supper club where the glad-at-heart gathered and had drinks and etouffee and steaks two inches thick on a candlelit terrace overlooking the Teche, and where, in the cold smell of crushed ice stained with whiskey and bruised cherries, a half century could disappear with the ease of raising a glass to your mouth.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

chapter EIGHT<\/span><\/p>\n

“You can’t drink at all?” Honoria said.<\/p>\n

“I could but I choose not to,” I replied, and felt instantly stupid at my own rhetoric.<\/p>\n

“I thought if you went through the Twelve Steps, you were cured. It must be awful to know that about yourself.”<\/p>\n

“To know what?”<\/p>\n

“That you’re afraid of your own metabolism.”<\/p>\n

There was a black shine in both her hair and eyes, and she wore a white cotton dress with eyelets in the bodice that exposed the deep tan in her skin. When she ordered her third vodka collins I made a show of noticing the clock above the bar and told her I should be going. But you didn’t get off the hook that easily with Honoria Chalons. She gave the waiter a credit card to pay the check before I could, then asked him to put her drink in a Styrofoam cup. “Do me a favor?” she said to me.<\/p>\n

I waited for her to go on.<\/p>\n

“My car won’t start. I think it’ll have to be towed. Can you give me a lift?” she said. <\/p>\n

We walked back down East Main to my house and got in my pickup truck. She tripped once on a pitch in the sidewalk and I felt her body come hard against me. “I still haven’t eaten dinner. Want to stop somewhere?” she said.<\/p>\n

“I have work to do,” I said.<\/p>\n

“It’s a grand evening. I don’t want to waste it at home. The House of Chalons is a dark place. Few people know how dark it really is,” she said.<\/p>\n

I looked at her profile in the shadowy light of a streetlamp, and wondered if she was being deliberately grandiose. But she was not. Her eyes were fixed on the rooftops of the Victorian and antebellum homes along the street and the birds circling over the chimneys, as though they held the answer to a question she had never resolved.<\/p>\n

“Why are you staring at me?” she said.<\/p>\n

“I wonder why you live at home.”<\/p>\n

“To care for my father. He’s quite ill. I don’t think he’ll live long.”<\/p>\n

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.<\/p>\n

“He’ll handle it. He always does. God, I need a bath. Every time I come back to Louisiana, I can’t seem to scrub the dirt and humidity out of my skin.”<\/p>\n

In the shadows her cheeks were pooled with color, her eyes glazed with an alcoholic shine. She looked up into my face, almost like a little girl, perhaps faintly embarrassed at the visceral nature of her language. “Take me home?” she said.<\/p>\n

We drove down Old Spanish Trail and on through Jeanerette. The moon was low on the horizon, veiled with brown dust from the sugar cane fields, her house lit inside the massive live oaks that surrounded it. I drove through the gate and stopped in front of the porch. My truck windows were down and for a moment I thought I smelled cigar smoke.<\/p>\n

The decorum of the era in which Honoria and I were raised would have required me to walk her to the door, or at least offer to do so. But I had already decided Honoria needed to get on with her life, and she didn’t need me to help her with it. I was about to say good night, without getting out of the truck, when she placed her hand on my cheek, then tilted her head sideways and pressed her mouth to mine, using her tongue, threading her fingers tightly through the back of my hair.<\/p>\n

I could taste vodka and sweet syrup and orange slices and the tartness of crushed cherries in her mouth. I could even taste the coldness of the ice that had been poured from her collins glass into the Styrofoam cup. She took a breath and got up on her knees, then bent down to kiss me again.<\/p>\n

“Whoa, kiddo,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Kiddo yourself,” she said. She got out of the truck and walked inside, her back stiff, the porch light bright on her white dress.<\/p>\n

I turned the truck around and started back toward the gate. Not more than three feet from my window, I saw the red glow of a cigar among a tangle of persimmon trees. I slowed the truck, the tires creaking on the gravel, and looked into the spectral face of Honoria’s father, Raphael Chalons.<\/p>\n

“My daughter is a vulnerable woman, sir. Be advised I do not abide the man who would take advantage of that fact,” he said.<\/p>\n

Good evening to you, too, sir, I thought, and drove on without replying. I also decided that on some occasions good deeds and the obligations of charity should be heaved over the gunnels.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The next morning Jimmie was up before me, fixing breakfast for us, feeding Tripod and Snuggs, whistling a song.<\/p>\n

“You must have had a pretty good night,” I said.<\/p>\n

“This friend of mine, the professor at UL, he’s got this huge collection of country and bluegrass music. Remember we used to always say Ida sang just like Kitty Wells? That’s because Kitty Wells sang in B flat. See, my friend has put his whole record library in his computer and he came up with all these recordings that have somebody on them singing like Kitty Wells.”<\/p>\n

Jimmie had been cutting toast on the breadboard while he spoke. He turned around, his starched white shirt crinkling, his hair wet and combed, his face shiny with aftershave. “You know the best part? On a couple of those records somebody’s playing a mandolin just the way Ida did,” he said.<\/p>\n

I looked away so he could not see my eyes. “That’s good, Jimmie,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, Ida was smart. I always thought she got away from those guys. Why would they want to kill her, anyway? She was just a piney-woods country girl.”<\/p>\n

Because they’re sonsofbitches and they make examples of piney-woods girls, I thought.<\/p>\n

“What?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Nothing,” I replied. “I’d better get to the office.”<\/p>\n

“Hey, we’re going to find ole Ida. You’ll see,” he said. <\/p>\n

“You bet,” I said, knowing that Jimmie, like all brave people, would continue to believe in the world, regardless of what it did to him.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A little after nine, Wally, our overweight dispatcher and self-appointed departmental comic, buzzed my phone. “There’s a newsman down here wants to see you. Should I send him up?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Which newsman?”<\/p>\n

“The one on TV looks like an icicle.”<\/p>\n

“Valentine Chalons?”<\/p>\n

“That’s the one.”<\/p>\n

“Why don’t you just say so?”<\/p>\n

” ‘Cause he looks like an icicle. Or I could call him the TV guy wit’ a broom up his ass trying to give me a bad time. By the way, that nun left a note for you.”<\/p>\n

I couldn’t begin to follow his words. “Wally \u2014” I began.<\/p>\n

“That nun, the one who builds homes for poor people, she was here to see you. I buzzed your phone but you wasn’t at your desk. So she left a note. It’s in your mailbox. She went out when the TV guy was coming in. You want to see the TV guy or not?”<\/p>\n

Three minutes later Valentine Chalons opened my office door without knocking and closed it behind him., his eyes locked on mine. “I’ll make this simple. My sister is a grown woman and can associate with whomever she pleases. But I’ll be damned if you’ll use her to get at my father,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Sorry to see you interpret things that way, Val,” I said.<\/p>\n

“My father is a heart patient. He probably doesn’t have long to live. What are you trying to do to him?”<\/p>\n

“Your sister had a problem with her car. I gave her a ride home.”<\/p>\n

“You’re looking me in the face, telling me you have no issue with my father?”<\/p>\n

“If I do, it doesn’t involve your sister.”<\/p>\n

“How about Sister Molly? It’s just coincidence I saw her leaving here this morning?”<\/p>\n

“I don’t know what it is, because I didn’t see or talk with her.”<\/p>\n

“Our handyman told me he saw you at her office yesterday.”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, I did see her yesterday. But that’s none of your business.”<\/p>\n

“Let me set you straight about that hypocritical bitch. She’s a closet Marxist who uses the Church to stir up class hatred in ignorant and gullible people. Except she’s not a real nun. She’s got some kind of
half-ass status that doesn’t require her to take vows. So she hides behind the veil and gets to have it both ways.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Read the full book by downloading it below.<\/p>\n

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Book Preview \u00a0 A Dave Robicheaux Novel \u00a0 Crusader’s Cross \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 by JAMES LEE BURKE \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 For Linda and Roger Grainger acknowledgments I would like to thank George Schiro and the other staff members at the Acadiana Crime Lab in New Iberia, Louisiana, and also Jim Hutchison, Judi Hoffman, Annalivia Harris, Bahne … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-james-lee-burke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epub-book.com\/download\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}