Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"You guys are here to do business, aren't you? Your visit doesn't have anything to do with Val Chalons."

"We need to dial it down, my man. I need to get inside, too, if you'll step aside."

"I'm a sheriff's detective, Mr. Kale. You're a pimp. You want a trip down to the bag, that can be arranged. But regardless of what happens here, you keep your ass out of New Iberia, and you keep a lot of gone between you and Clete Purcel. You reading me on this, Mr. Kale?"

He removed his cigarette from his mouth and tipped his ashes away from his person so they didn't blow back on his coat. "The name is Coyne, Lou Coyne. And you got the wrong dude, buddy."

He went through the revolving door into the motel. It had rained that morning, and the breeze under the porte cochere smelled of wet flowers and leaves and the lichen that was crusted on the massive limbs of the live oaks. I didn't want to get any deeper into the world of Ida Durbin and Lou Kale, no more than you want to immerse yourself in the effluent that backs up from a sewage pipe. But I knew a predator when I saw one. Lou Kale and Ida Durbin were no longer symbols or milestones out of Jimmie's and my adolescent experience. Nor were they simply foils to the innocence of the postwar era in which we had grown up. They may have been upgraded from their origins and elevated by economic circumstance into a larger world, but Ida Durbin and Lou Kale were the emissaries of organized crime, no matter what they called themselves. They were real and they were here.

Want to find out who the closet boozers are in your neighborhood? Ask the garbage man. Want to check out the local politics? Talk with the barber. Want to find out what your neighbors are really like? Ask a kid. Want to find out who's washing money at the track, fencing stolen property, running dope, greasing the zoning board, providing hookers for conventioneers, or selling gang-bangers Technines modified with hell triggers? Forget news media and police pencil pushers and official sources of all kinds. Ask a beat cop who hasn't slept since 1965 or a street junkie whose head glows in the dark.

During the morning I talked with a retired DEA agent while he drove golf balls on a practice range; an ex-Air American pilot who flew nine years inside the Golden Triangle; an old-time Washington, D.C., hooker who operated a bar in North Lafayette; and a pharmaceutically addicted city Vice cop who had done two tours in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. They all shared one commonality — they had been witnesses to events of historical importance that few people knew about and they had seen forms of human behavior about which they never spoke. The latter quality alone, to my mind, made them exceptional human beings.

For generations all the vice in Louisiana had been run by a few individuals in New Orleans. Even when I was a beat cop, no one opened a brothel, set up a slot machine, or sold one lid of Afghan skunk without first kissing the ring of Didoni Giacano. But Didi Gee was pushing up mushrooms, gambling was a state-sponsored industry, and narcotics had become part of the culture. Louisiana, once a closed fiefdom operated by the appointees of Frank Costello, was now wide open to the entrepreneurial spirit. Drug mules hammered down Interstate 10, from both Houston and Miami, loaded with weed, meth, and coke. Pimps had their pick of crack whores, whose managerial costs were minimal.

But none of my friends had ever heard of Lou Kale or Ida Durbin. Nor had they heard of anyone going by the names of Connie and Lou Coyne. I began to wonder if I had been too hard on Ida. She may have saved Clete Purcel's life, I told myself, and according to Clete's account, even Lou Kale had seemed a reluctant participant in his interrogation and beating.

Or was I being romantic and foolish about people who had invested their lives in the use of others?

I drove back to New Iberia, unable to think straight. Helen had left a Post-it on my door. SEE ME, it said.

"Where have you been?" she asked, looking up from her desk.

"I took some personal time in Lafayette. I called Wally before eight," I replied.

"What kind of 'personal time'?"

"I saw Ida Durbin."

"I have to meet this woman."

"What is it, Helen?"

"Raphael Chalons wants to see you."

"Why?"

"You got me. Unless he thinks you're a priest." She looked at her watch. "It sounded to me like he was already on the bus."

I have heard both hospice personnel and psychologists maintain that human beings lose body weight at the moment of death,, that the dimensions of the skeleton and the tissue visibly shrink before the eye, as though the escape of the soul leaves behind a cavity swirling with atoms. Raphael Chalons was not dead when I reached Iberia General, but his stricken face and hollow eyes and the sag of his flesh on his bones made me wonder if the Angel of Death was not deliberately casting a slow shadow on the haunted man who stared back at me from the hospital bed.

"I tried to bring you flowers earlier, Mr. Raphael. But the nurse felt my visit wasn't an appropriate one," I said.

My words and their banality were obviously of no interest to him. His eyes were as black as a raven's wing, his facial skin oily, spiked with whiskers, furrowed around the mouth. One hand lay palm-up on top of the sheet. He crooked his fingers at me.

I did not want to approach him. I did not want to inhale his breath. I did not want his words to put talons in my breast. I did not want to be held captive by another dying man.

But I leaned over him just the same. His fingers rose up and tapped my chest, as though he could convey meaning through my skin to compensate for the failure of his vocal cords. His lips moved, but his words were only pinpricks of spittle on my face.

"I can't understand you, sir," I said.

A flame burned in his cheeks and his eyes rolled up at mine, as a dependent lover's might. A clot broke in his throat. "Not his fault," he said.

"Sir?" I said.

His lingers tore a button on my shirt. His breath was dank, earth-smelling, like dirt spaded from a tree-covered grave. "The fault is mine. All my fault. Everything," he whispered. "Please stop my son."

"From doing what, Mr. Raphael?"