DR14 - Crusader's Cross Read online

  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 — in the Deep South, the Philippines, and Vietnam — 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.

  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.

  chapter THREE

  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 — it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade.

  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.

  Troy kept the tradition alive and well.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  "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 —"

  I'd try to smile and avoid looking at my watch.

  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.

  "He doesn't have a telephone?" I said.

  "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.

  Evidently Troy's denouement began with the new waitress in the Blue Fish Café — 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Then he took a breath and a sucking noise came from inside his chest that I never wanted to hear again.

  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.

  "Sir, you'll need to lean down to hear your friend," the nurse said.

  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.

  "I do," I said, although the word "we" had not been part of what happened.

  "I feel bad about that. But that's the way it was back then, huh? You reckon he knows I'm sorry?"

  "Sure he does," I replied.

  I heard him swallowing, the saliva clicking in his windpipe.

  "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 h
er. I saw where they took her. I saw the room she was in."

  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.

  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."

  I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. "Your uncle and who?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "Cops and a pimp. She had a mandolin. They busted it up."

  "Did they kill her?"

  "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."

  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.

  "That's right, we were all just kids back then, Troy," I said, and winked at him.

  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.

  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."

  "Hold on there, Robo," a voice called out behind me.

  Robo?

  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.

  I nodded hello but didn't speak.

  "On the job?" one of them said. His name tag read Shockly, J. W. He tilted his head slightly with his question.

  "Not me. I hung it up," I replied.

  "I saw you go into Troy Bordelon's room. You guys were buds?" he said.

  "I went to school with him," I said.

  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. "Poor bastard was a real pistol, wasn't he? Half the blacks in the parish are probably drunk right now," he said.

  "I wouldn't know," I said.

  "Ole Troy didn't want to unburden his sins?" the second deputy, the one named Pitts, said.

  Shockly pulled on his nose to hide his irritation at his friend's revelation of their shared agenda.

  "Nice seeing you guys," I said.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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?

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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; d
angling 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.