"That's what he says. But he was still half-loaded when he got off the train."
"She was a beanpole with a peckerwood accent?"
"Something like that." I was beginning to regret I had brought up the possibility that Ida Durbin was indeed alive and in Miami and hooked up with Lou Kale. "Jim, if this woman is Ida, she's better forgotten. Let the past slide."
"That from you? I've had her death on my conscience since 1958." He had stopped eating. His eyes glistened, and he coughed slightly into his napkin to hide his emotion.
"I've got a couple of calls in to Miami P.D. to check out the house where Clete got knocked around. Give me some time before you do something rash," I said.
"I need to go back over there," Jimmie said, picking up the check, his lunch unfinished.
The technical processes involving DNA identification are complicated and time-consuming. There is often a long waiting list at both federal and state laboratories, particularly in an era when large numbers of homicide and rape cases are appealed based on evidence that was gathered and stored years ago, before DNA identification was possible. But Mack Bertrand at our crime lab had pushed through the work on Honoria Chalons in less than four days. He called me at the office just before five on F
riday.
"No match with the Baton Rouge serial killer, no match with anything in the national database," he said.
"I never thought the Baton Rouge guy did this," I said.
"What did you think?"
"Did the semen come from a relative?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"It speaks for itself," I replied.
"If you're talking about incest, this lab has no evidence of that." He paused a moment. "Dave, can I offer some advice?"
"What?"
"I'm not a fan of either Raphael or Valentine Chalons. But I think you're barking at the moon on this one."
"Thanks for your time."
"My wife and I are taking the kids to the Little League game tonight. Care to join us?"
"Tied up. But you're the best, Mack," I said.
I had learned long ago you can have all the friends you want when you're in tall cotton. But your real friends are the ones you meet during hard times, when you've blown out your doors and every sunrise comes to you like a testimony to personal failure. Mack Bertrand was a real friend.
It was Friday night and Molly was at a meeting of Pax Christi at Grand Coteau. I had deliberately stayed away from her since Doogie Dugas had arrested me on camera at my home and Val Chalons had used footage on his various news channels of Molly standing half-undressed in the bedroom doorway. She herself was undaunted by the experience and I suspect had long ago become inured to the wickedness that the socially respectable were capable of. But I did not want to see her hurt more than she already had been, and at the same time I wanted to see her terribly.
At sunset I took a long walk down Main, through the business district and out to the west side, where there is a neatly mowed green lot that is the only reminder of a smithy and wagonworks that was there when I was a child during World War II.
The wagonworks was a very old structure even then, its red paint cracked and faded by the elements, the wood planks shrunken and warped by the heat in the forge. The owner was Mr. Antoine, a small, wizened man who spoke beautiful French but little English. At that time in New Iberia there were black people still alive who remembered the Emancipation, what they came to call "Juneteenth," and there were white people who had seen General Banks's Federal soldiers, twenty thousand of them, march through town in pursuit of the chivalric Confederate general, Alfred Mouton. But our only surviving Confederate veteran was Mr. Antoine.
He loved to regale us with tales of what he always referred to as "La Guerre." He had served in Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign and had been with Jubal Early when Early had thrown twenty-five thousand men against the Union line just before Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Mr. Antoine's regiment was caught in a cornfield and blown into piles of gray and butternut rags by canister and grapeshot. But the point of Mr. Antoine's tale about the last days of the war was not the carnage, or the crows that pecked out the eyes of southern dead, or the snuffing sounds of feral hogs that would come at dusk. Instead, Mr. Antoine's story was about a fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama who found his regimental colors in the dust, tied them to a musket barrel, and mounted a terrified stray horse.
The Union soldiers two hundred yards up the slope could not believe what they saw next — a boy without shoes, clamped on the spine of a horse like a clothespin, charging across his own dead toward a line of pointed weapons that could have reduced him and his animal to a bloody mist.
But no soldier fired a shot. When the boy's horse leaped across their wall, they pulled him from the saddle and pinned him to the dirt, all the while laughing, one of them saying, "You ain't got to fight no more, son. You're on the Lord's side now." Mr. Antoine still carried a pistol ball in his forearm and would let us children run our fingers over the hard lump it made under his skin. Once, in a dark mood, he decried the war and described the bloody shuddering and gurgling sounds of a young Union soldier who had died on Mr. Antoine's bayonet. But the story he obviously took most pleasure in retelling was that of the Alabama drummer boy. Now, after many years, I think I understand why. Mr. Antoine did not let the evil of the world overcome him, just as the Union soldiers behind the limestone wall did not let the war rob them of their humanity; just as military defeat and fear of death could not undo the drummer boy who placed honor and loyalty to the dead above concern for his own life.
As I stood on the sidewalk, looking at a green lot bordered in back by live oaks and Bayou Teche, I could almost see Mr. Antoine's forge puff alight in the shadows and hear his burst of laughter at the completion of his story about the Alabama drummer boy. I wanted to tell him that flags were emblematic of much more than national boundaries. But I suspected Mr. Antoine had learned that lesson a long time ago.