Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

I don't know what I expected. My experience with age is that it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us. Perhaps I'm wrong. I wanted to be wrong when I met Ida Durbin. I also wanted to believe I would not act on an old resentment should I have the bad luck to run into her estranged husband, Lou Kale.

They were staying in separate rooms in a lovely old motel built of historic brick on a part of Pinhook Road that had not been blighted by urban development and was still shrouded by spreading live oaks. It was not yet 7:00 a.m. when I showed my badge at the desk and asked for the room number of Ms. Connie Coyne. I had not called in advance.

"We don't have anyone by that name staying here," the clerk said.

"Look again," I said.

"No one by that name is staying here, sir," he repeated, looking past me at someone waiting to check out.

"Don't tell me that. She's here. So is her husband. His name is Lou Coyne."

"Oh, yes. They're both registered under his name. I just saw her go into the dining room," the clerk said.

"Thank you," I said.

According to Jimmie, Ida and her husband kept separate homes in Miami and obviously separate accommodations when they traveled. But the fact they were both registered at the motel under his name, indicating the charges were probably billed to the same credit card, made me wonder how separate in reality Ida's life was from her husband's.

Few people were in the dining room and it wasn't hard to pick out Ida from the other motel guests eating breakfast by the French doors, not far from the buffet table. Her hair still had its natural reddish tone and the years had not taken away her height or the thin, well-defined features of her face. The dramatic change was in her complexion. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, but in the broken light from the terrace her skin seemed etiolated, the freckles drained of color.

She was nibbling on a piece of dry toast while she read from a hardbound book. The only food on her plate consisted of a few melon slices, a half dozen grapes, and a piece of Swiss cheese. Her cup was filled with hot tea. She wore a flowered sundress that I suspected came from an expensive shop on Biscayne Boulevard.

She glanced up at me only when my shadow fell across her reading page. "Why, Dave," she said. "I never could get over how much you and Jimmie looked alike."

"How's the life, Ida?" I said.

"Oh, I hope that's not meant to injure. It's not, is it?"

I sat down without being asked. "Why didn't you write and tell us you were okay, Ida?"

"Because I wasn't okay. Because I was a kid. Because I told myself Jimmie would be fine without me. Pick one you like."

"A guy named Troy Bordelon went to the grave thinking he was partly responsible for your death," I said.

"I never heard of this person. I didn't choose the life I've lived, Dave. It was chosen for me. But others may see it differently."

"I happen be in the latter category, Ida. Val Chalons is trying to frame me on a child molestation charge. He also defamed my wife. That's why he's in Iberia General Hospital. I stomped the shit out of him. If I had it to do over again, I'd rip up his whole ticket. The only regret I have is that his father may have had a seizure because of the damage I did to his son."

If she took any offense at my remarks, it disappeared inside her face. "You seem to be handling the pressures of life well enough," she said, gazing at the terrace and the moss that was lifting in the oak trees by the pool.

I said earlier that in my view age is not a magic agency in our lives. But perhaps Ida was the exception after all. The country girl who had paddled an inner tube far out from shore and saved Jimmie and me from sharks was gone; the woman who had replaced her possessed the timeless and inured hauteur of a successful medieval courtesan. Jimmie had said she had wanted to see her son, Valentine. But where had she been all those years? Raphael Chalons had raised him, not she. Had Mr. Raphael excluded her from her son's life? I doubted it.

"Lost in thought?" she said.

"Why has your son done so much to harm me and my wife? Is he that fearful people will discover who his mother is? Is he that cowardly and insecure?"

She drank from her teacup, then set it back down in the saucer. The freckles on her shoulders seemed to disappear in the glaze of sunlight through the French doors. "It was good seeing you, Dave. I hope things work out for you and your wife," she said.

"Next time you want to wish me well, Ida, put it on a postcard and drop it in a mailbox," I said.

"You're a bitter man," she said.

"Just a realistic one," I replied.

But my failed effort at reconciliation with Ida Durbin and the past was not over. On my way out of the lobby into the porte cochere, I almost knocked down a man dressed in a blazer, an open-collar print shirt, knife-creased slacks, and oxblood loafers. He was a muscularly compact man, his skin deeply tanned, his iron-gray hair slick with gel. When I collided with him, he had been holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a gold lighter in the other. He apologized, lit his cigarette in an expansive fashion, and started to walk around me.

"You pointed a gun at me in a Galveston motel in 1958, Mr. Kale," I said. "You really scared me. You called yourself the butter and egg man."

"Some people are walking memory banks. Me? I can't remember what I ate for supper last night," he said.