Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"It's signed by an Iberia judge. Step aside," Doogie said., as though performing on a stage set.

"Have you gone crazy?" I said.

"Your fingerprints was all over the crime scene, Dave. I ain't got no control over this," he said, almost in a whisper.

Two television cameramen followed him in, their battery-powered lights flooding the inside of my home, their lenses focusing now on Molly Boyle, who stood speechless, half-undressed, in the bedroom doorway.

Then I saw Val Chalons walk into the apron of light surrounding the gallery, his face suffused with good cheer. "This is just for openers, rumdum," he said.

chapter EIGHTEEN

While Doogie Dugas and his minions tore my house apart, I was transported to jail in St. Mary Parish. It was extralegal, almost a kidnapping, but legality can be a matter of definition, particularly when some of the players own vast amounts of money. Actually, few of the events that night were aimed at solving the murder of Honoria Chalons. I believed the agenda was to dismember my life.

Television programming in Acadiana was interrupted to show live coverage of my house being searched. I was shown being spread-eagled against a cruiser, shaken down, and hooked up. Molly was captured on camera leaving the house, her clothes and hair in disarray, refusing to answer questions asked by reporters who identified her as a Catholic nun. A plain-clothes state police officer was interviewed on site about the possible connection between the death of Honoria Chalons and the homicides committed by the Baton Rouge serial killer.

The sweep of the tarbrush didn't end there, either. The cameras were waiting when I was taken into the parish prison at Franklin. A television newsman, holding a microphone in my face, said, "Is it true you're being called a person of interest in the death by strangulation of a New Orleans prostitute by the name of Holly Blankenship?"

Another asked, "Can you comment on the fact that under questionable circumstances you have shot and killed at least five people while serving as a police officer?"

The aim of the reporters, none of whom I knew, was obviously to slander. They were good at it, too. Their questions were predicated on distortions or flawed syllogisms that were presented as given facts. To try to defend oneself in those circumstances is to legitimize the question. To remain silent seems an admission of guilt. I was beginning to understand how character assassination can be a telecommunications art form. "Can you explain why a Catholic nun was i

n your home at the time of your arrest?" the first reporter asked.

"I'm under arrest because I shoved a Jeanerette detective who was wrecking my house," I said.

But my attempt at evasion was that of an amateur. "Was the nun Sister Molly Boyle?" the reporter said, working Molly's name into the story for the second time.

I pushed by him, my wrists cuffed behind me, my unshaved jaws like coal smut inside the blinding glare of strobe lights.

A jail is not a geographical place. A jail is a condition. It rings with the sounds of steel clanging against steel, people yelling down stone corridors, toilets flushing, a screw losing it after an inmate throws feces through the bars into his face. Sometimes a gigantic biker arrives wrapped in leg and waist chains, wiped out on meth, his body crawling with stink, his beard and hair as wild as a lion's mane. The elevator stalls between floors. Later, the cops say he went apeshit. The walls shake, and when the elevator doors open, the biker is curled on the floor, bleeding from the mouth and ears, his eyes rolled up in his head from the voltage injected into him by a stun gun.

The external world and the inside of a can — state, federal, city, county, or parish — do not have connection points based on reason, humanity, psychiatry, or penology. Jails represent human and societal failure at its worst, nothing more, nothing less. Jails are a short-stop way of separating aberrant and undesirable people from the rest of us and rendering them as invisible as possible. Anyone who believes otherwise has never been there. The people who believe jails rehabilitate usually need jobs.

In any slammer, powerlessness is the norm. You defecate in full view of others; you eat when you're fed. If you're truly unlucky, or young and very frightened and physically weak, you will be the daily punch of sexual predators, a bar of soap passed around in the shower, an item gambled away in a card game or rented out for a deck of smokes.

But as I lay on a steel bunk suspended from chains screwed into the wall, I really didn't care about any of these things. My nemesis was not jail, the unraveling of my career, or even the machinations of Val Chalons. It was me. I remembered a line written by Billy Joe Shaver: "The first time the devil made me do it. The second time I done it on my own." I had stoked my resentments, fed my sense of loss over Bootsie, and turned my depression into a wardrobe of sackcloth and ashes in order to get drunk again.

I felt like a man who had set fire to his own home in order to warm up an unappetizing dinner.

Then I had a peculiar experience, not unlike one of many years ago when I heard a metallic sound, a brief klatch, on a night trail in a tropical country that no one talks about anymore. There was a moment's silence, the kind you automatically know is a prelude to your entrance into eternity, just before a waist-high explosion cut a black PFC nicknamed "Doo-Doo Dogshit" in half and laced my side and thigh with shrapnel that looked like twisted steel fingers.

A white light filled the inside of my head. I felt myself float up toward the canopy, then crash to the earth. Later, I would swear I saw Doo-Doo walking through the jungle, unharmed, strings of smoke rising from his clothes. He turned, gave me the peace sign in farewell, and said, Got to dee-dee, Loot. Big Boss Man upstairs need me to hep out. Hey, don't you worry none. Chuck going back alive in '65.

My men could have left me there. I'd screwed up and taken them down a night trail that was strung with bouncing betties and trip-wired 105 duds. But that was not their way. They came from barrios and southern shitholes and black northern slums and were the bravest and finest kids I ever knew. While I lay on a poncho liner and a mountain boy from North Georgia rigged up a litter with web gear, I could hear the rounds from an offshore battery arcing with a whooshing sound out of their trajectory, exploding in the jungle, shaking the earth under me. I was laced with morphine and blood-expander and knew I was going to die unless I got to battalion aid. I heard someone calling for the dust-off, then a voice whispering, "They can't get the slick in. He's fucked, man. Oh Jesus Christ, they're coming through the grass."

But they carried me all night, with no sleep, their arms straining against one hundred eighty pounds of dead weight, while they humped their own weapons and packs and radios and sweltered inside their flak vests, their exposed skin a feast for the mosquitoes that boiled out of the elephant grass.

That's when I felt my long-held fear of death finally use itself up and lift from my soul the way ash floats off a dead fire. I closed my eyes in surrender to my fate and placed my trust in the tender mercies of those who bore me toward an uncertain destination, perhaps one that would be lit by flame and filled with explosions that sounded like ships' boilers blowing apart.

But I was not a player any longer. The dice had rolled out of the cup, and if the numerical sum on them was snake-eyes or boxcars, the matter was out of my control, and that simple conclusion about my life-span on earth set me free.

I fell asleep in the jail cell, even though a drunk snored loudly on the floor and a deranged man in sweatpants and a woman's blouse kept shouting accusations through the bars at a city cop he claimed had stolen his airline tickets to Paris.

When the sun came up, I realized I'd just had the first restful sleep since I had gotten drunk. With my cell partners I ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, tiny sausages, toast, jelly, and coffee. Then I heard Helen Soileau's voice in a foyer and a moment later a screw unlocked my cell door and walked me to the front of the jail.

"Saw you on early-morning TV," Helen said as she drove us back to New Iberia.

"Val Chalons doesn't take prisoners," I said.