"He saw blood on a chair. He said they smashed her mandolin. He wasn't sure what happened to her."
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?"
"That about sums it up."
"I'm coming over there."
"Not a good idea," I said.
"You want me to stay at a motel?" he said.
chapter SIX
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.
"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."
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.
"I just talked with Pitts. He says Chalons fishes at his father's lake. Chalons was lying."
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 —"
"Guys like Pitts don't operate without sanction, Helen. Why did Chalons lie?"
"Maybe he isn't interested in the subject. Maybe he couldn't care less about you or Pitts. Maybe everything isn't about you."
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."
"Good," she said, her face coloring with embarrassment at her own level of irritation.
I nodded at her desktop. "I went over those this morning. Pretty grim."
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."
"I'll read it and check with you later."
"Do that," she said.
I started out the door.
"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?"
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.
"Because he looks like a regular guy, cooking hot dogs on the grill next door," I said.
After five o'clock, I drove into St. Mary Parish and resumed my own investigation into the fate of Ida Durbin.
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.
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.
Or maybe I just didn't like the romantic legends that seemed to attach themselves to the Chalons family.
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.