Crusader's Cross (22 page)

“Any sign of semen?”

“Traces in the pubic hair. St. Mary’s forensic pathologist will call me after he gets inside her.”

“Mack says her blood trail doesn’t make any sense. The assailant attacked her at least three times, but she made no attempt to run away. There were no defensive wounds, either.”

“Maybe she dug it.”

“You enjoy pissing people off, Koko?”

“Yeah, when they still got booze on their breath and they’re blowing it in my face while they’re asking stupid questions,” he replied.

A crime scene team from state police headquarters in Baton Rouge had just landed in a helicopter across the bayou, and a St. Mary Parish sheriff’s cruiser was bringing them across the drawbridge to the Chalonses’ house. The crime scene area had been soggy from the weekend rains, and now the St. Augustine grass had been trod into green mulch. Plainclothes detectives, cops in uniform, and crime scene investigators came and went with the freedom of people for whom the gates of an amusement park had suddenly been opened. I wondered how Raphael Chalons would deal with the intrusion of the twenty-first century into his cloistered domain.

A brief shower rolled across the sugar cane fields and pattered on the trees, then a few minutes later the sun came out and the trees were green and dripping like crystal against a brilliant blue sky. But still I had seen no sign of Valentine Chalons.

It had not been easy looking at Honoria. She had been a bizarre person, but probably no more so than any true artist is. In fact, I believe her pulp fiction sexual behavior and feigned iconoclastic attitudes hid a fragility and childlike emotional need that ultimately was harmful to no one but herself. She had also died with dignity under the worst of circumstances and proved she was capable of extraordinary courage.

Then I saw Val coming through the trees. I started to offer condolences but did not get the chance. His shoulder glazed across mine, as though I were not there, as he charged inside the guesthouse. “You left her uncovered?” he shouted. “The next one of you who points a camera at her is going to have it stuffed down his mouth!”

Mack Bertrand tried to explain that a sheet had been placed over Honoria’s body but it had been removed upon the arrival of the investigative team from Baton Rouge.

“You’re finished taking pictures, fellow. You want me to say it again?” Val said.

The entire crime scene became quiet. Not one person offered a rejoinder, less out of respect or embarrassment than collective acceptance that the Chalons family operated in rarefied air. Then, after a long beat, a Baton Rouge detective said, “We got all we need, Mr. Chalons. We’re sorry about your loss.”

But Val was not finished. He emerged from the guesthouse and pointed a finger at me. “You degenerate piece of shit! You dare come into my home?”

“Dial it down, Mr. Val,” Helen said.

“He screwed my sister, for God’s sakes, a girl who was ten years old inside,” he said.

“If you have a charge to make about one of our personnel, you need to come into the office,” Helen said.

“Maybe I’ll just do this instead,” he said. He advanced three steps in less time than I could blink and swung his fist into my face.

The blow knocked me across a garden sprinkler and against a glider that was suspended from a thick oak limb. My nose felt as though hundreds of needles had been shoved up it and into my brain. I grabbed a rope on the glider and sat down, my eyes watering uncontrollably.

“Get a towel,” I heard Helen say.

I saw two St. Mary sheriff’s deputies holding Val Chalons by his arms, his wrists cuffed behind him. Someone pushed a clutch of ice cubes wrapped in paper towels into my hands. I held the coldness against my face until my skin began to numb. When I looked at the ice it was speckled with blood. The yard, the trees, the flowers, and Honoria’s body inside the open guesthouse door kept warping in the sunlight.

“You call it, bwana,” Helen said.

Val glared at me, his cheeks splotched with color, his hair hanging in his eyes, the rims of his nostrils white, as though he were breathing subzero air.

“Cut him loose,” I said.

“A little time in an isolation cell might take some of that prissiness out of him,” Helen said.

“Val Chalons is a coward and a liar and has guilt painted all over him. Let him go,” I said, loud enough for everyone in the yard to hear.

In the background I saw a uniformed deputy climb down a ladder with a security camera that had been mounted high in the fork of an oak tree.

I went home, changed shirts, and returned to the office. Helen was waiting for me, as I knew she would be, her hands stuck in her back pockets, a quizzical look in her eye, one tooth chewing on the corner of her lip. “You pumped Honoria Chalons?” she said.

“Why don’t you be more direct?” I said.

We were standing in front of her office door, and people were passing in the corridor. “Answer the question,” she said.

“Val Chalons believes what he needs to believe. End of discussion,” I said.

“Step inside,” she said.

She closed the door behind us. Through the window I could see the cemetery and a black kid trying to fly a red kite among the crypts. I wanted to be outside in the wind with him, away from all the sordid details that my life had taken on in only a few days. “Why would Val Chalons make up a story like that?” Helen asked.

“I believe there’s a form of evil at work inside the Chalons home that we can’t even guess at. Honoria tried to tell me about it. Now she’s dead.”

“You don’t think the Baton Rouge serial guy is involved in this?”

“Honoria’s death is connected to the Chalons family and the Chalons family only. Don’t let them put it off on somebody else, Helen.”

“That doesn’t sound like an entirely objective statement. At the crime scene you seemed a little nervous about something. Have you been inside that guesthouse before?”

“No,” I said, and felt my heart jump, just as though it had been touched with an electrical wire.

“Okay, bwana,” she said, her manner relaxing now. “By the way, I was proud of you out there.”

I left her office and washed my face in the men’s room. When I looked at my reflection, I felt as though I were looking at the disembodied head of a Judas, that it was I who was the liar, not Val Chalons. But I had no idea why I felt that way.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

That evening, at dusk, Clete Purcel and I sat in canvas chairs on the edge of Henderson Swamp, pole-fishing with corks and cut-bait like a pair of over-the-hill duffers who cared less about catching fish than just being close by a cypress-dotted swamp while the sun turned into a red ember on the horizon.

I told him of the bender I had gone on and the discovery that morning of Honoria Chalons’s body. I also told him of the compact disk I had found in my truck and the fact I had no memory at all of what I had done from Friday night to Sunday morning.

I thought he would take me to task, but sometimes I didn’t give Clete enough credit and would forget that he was the man who once carried me down a fire escape with two .22 rounds cored in his back.

“This Ida Durbin broad’s voice was on the CD and she was singing a song that wasn’t written until years after she disappeared?” He had taken off his Hawaiian shirt and sprayed himself with mosquito repellent, and in the shadows the skin across his massive chest looked as gray as elephant hide.

“You got it,” I said.

“But that’s not what’s bothering you, is it?”

“At the crime scene, I felt I’d been there before. I knew where everything was in Chalons’s guesthouse.”

“It’s called deja vu. Look at me, Streak. You were drunk all weekend. You clean those kinds of thoughts out of your head.”

“There’s blood on the CD. Chalons’s stereo was turned on but the CD slot was empty.”

“You’re incapable of hurting a woman. Somebody is setting you up. Don’t buy into it.”

“Nobody set me up, Clete. I got drunk and had a blackout. I could have done anything.”

“Shut up and give me time to think. This punk Chalons actually hit you in the face?”

That night, just before going to bed, I received a call from Jimmie. He was on his cell phone, and in the background I could hear the sounds of wind blowing and waves bursting against a hard surface.
 

“Where are you?” I said.

“At the southern tip of the island in Key West. That dude Lou Kale is down here,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“A couple of girls I used to know work the yacht trade here. They say Kale and his wife run an escort service out of Miami. Or at least a guy who sounds a lot like Kale.”

“What about Ida?”

“Hit a dead end. I got to be back in New Orleans tomorrow. I’ll see you later in the week. Anything happening there?”

I had to wet my lips before I spoke. “I had a slip. But I’m all right now.” I cleared my throat and waited for his response, my fingers opening and closing on the receiver.

“You get in any trouble?” he asked.

“I can’t remember what I did or where I was. Honoria Chalons is dead. I think maybe I was there when she died. I can’t remember and I don’t know how to get inside my own head.”

In the silence I could hear the waves smacking against a beach, then receding with a sucking sound, like the underpinnings of the earth itself sliding down the continental shelf.
 

The first person I saw in my office Tuesday morning was Koko Hebert. He may have showered since the previous day, but I couldn’t tell it. Twenty seconds after he closed the door behind him, the entirety of the room smelled like testosterone and beer sweat.

He sat on a chair with the posture of a man sitting on a toilet. “The post indicates the Chalons girl wasn’t raped, although she did have sexual intercourse with someone in the twenty-four period before she died,” he said. “She also had enough cocaine in her to anesthetize the city of New York.”

“Anything that could connect her homicide to the Baton Rouge guy?”

“I would have already told you that, wouldn’t I?” he said.

“I guess so, Koko,” I replied. I tried to be patient and remember that the autopsy had been performed by the forensic pathologist in St. Mary Parish, and that Koko was probably doing the best he could.

“There was an incision at the top of her forehead, just inside the hairline. It was done postmortem, in the shape of a cross,” he said.

His eyes were fixed on mine, his nostrils swelling as he breathed.

“The Chalons family coat of arms?” I said.

“You’re the detective. I just run the meat lockers.”

Don’t say anything more, I told myself. “I’ll probably regret this, but did I ever do anything to offend you?” I said.

“Let me work up a list and I’ll get back to you.”

“Thanks for coming by,” I said.

I turned my attention back to the paperwork on my desk. I thought he would be gone by the time I looked up again. Instead, he stood in the center of the room, breathing loudly, emanating an odor that was close to eye-watering. “My son by my first marriage was a private first class in the United States Marine Corps. He was killed two months ago outside Baghdad. What was left of his Humvee wouldn’t make a bucket of bolts. He was nineteen fucking years old.”

He stared into space, as though he were trying to puzzle out the implication of his own words.

At 10:00 a.m., Helen and I and the Jeanerette chief of police and two St. Mary Parish detectives watched the videotape from the surveillance camera that had been mounted on an oak tree in the Chalonses’ backyard. The frames from Saturday night showed Honoria Chalons going to and coming from the guesthouse several times. The footage was grainy, the images and sense of movement elliptic, lit intermittently by the electricity in the clouds, the lens sometimes obscured by rain and blowing leaves. At 9:04 p.m. a man wearing an abbreviated rain slicker with a hood entered the guesthouse. What occurred next would remain a matter of conjecture.

The camera had been positioned so that its lens covered most of the yard but only part of the house. Shadows seemed to break across the house’s windows, indicating activity inside but little else. At 9:09 the figure in the raincoat left by the French doors and disappeared from the film. There was a momentary glint of light on metal inside the figure’s open raincoat, but the reflection could have been from a belt buckle.

Then, at 11:05 p.m., a second figure crossed the yard, tapped on the door, and entered the house. The figure wore a dark hat with a brim wilted by rainwater, and a coat with a hood that hung loosely down
the back. At 11:13 the figure left. It was impossible to tell the gender of either visitor. Neither had looked up at the camera. The hand of the second visitor, who had tapped on the door, appeared to be white.

Doogie Dugas, the Jeanerette chief of police, clicked on the overhead light. He was a middle-aged, close-cropped, gray-haired man who affected the dress and manner of a western lawman. The fact that he was wise enough to avoid speaking in front of microphones had allowed him a long administrative career in small-town law enforcement. But now his taciturnity was of no service to him and it was obvious he was having trouble dealing with the magnitude of the case that had been dropped into his lap. It was also obvious he had not talked to his own forensic pathologist.

“Koko Hebert told you the killer cut a cross in Miss Honoria’s head?” he said.

“Right,” Helen said.

” ‘Cause maybe the killer don’t like the Chalonses and he put the cross on Miss Honoria ‘cause the cross is on Mr. Raphael’s family seal?” he said.

“Right,” Helen said.

Doogie pursed his mouth and closed and opened his eyes, like a man for whom the world was simply too much. “Cooh,” he said, using the favorite Cajun expression for surprise or awe. “Know how many people that might be?”

Then he winced at his own show of candor about the people whom he loyally served.

But I didn’t care about the problems Doogie Dugas might be experiencing. I could not get out of my mind the type of raincoat worn by both visitors to Val Chalons’s guesthouse, nor the wilted flop hat the second figure had worn. They were exactly of the kind stuffed behind the front seat of my truck.