Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

My eyes had adjusted to the poor light and I could see him clearly now. He was standing on the opposite side of Molly, much of his body protected by hers. His skin was powdered with dust and bits of hay, his chest running with sweat, the top of his beltless trousers soaked with it. He tightened the machete against Molly's throat, lifting her chin upwards, the burlap stretching against her face.

"Okay, we'll work it out," I said, and began to lower my weapon.

I saw his lips part over the whiteness of his teeth. "That's more like it. Yes, suh, it gonna go smooth now," he said.

His back was slightly stooped, his arm probably stressed by the unnatural way he had to hold the machete under Molly's chin. He straightened up slightly, shifting a crick out of his back.

I locked my sights on the top of his sternum and pulled the trigger. The round hit him at an angle and spun him against the side of a stall. The round had cored through his back and blown a white swatch out of the wood. He lay on the floor, his head against the stall, his fingers spidered across the entry wound. Like most people who are the gunshot victims of a weapon like a .45 auto, his face could not register the amount of damage his body had just incurred. His mouth hung open, his stomach went soft and trembled like a bowl of Jell-O, his eyes fluttered and rolled as he went into shock.

Then he turned on his side and curled into an embryonic ball. Beneath one of his love handles was a half-moon incision, as thick as a night crawler, where he had given up a kidney for the father who had relegated him to a shack on the back of the family property.

But I didn't care about the fate of Andre Bergeron or the perverted genes or social injustices that had produced him. In fact, I didn't even care enough about him to hate him or deliver another round into his body, which I could have done and gotten away with. I uncinched the belt from Molly's neck and pulled the burlap bag from her head. I held her face against me and kissed the sweat in her hair and touched her eyes and mouth. I opened my pocketknife and sliced the plastic cuffs on her wrists and stroked her shoulders and arms and wiped the hair out of her eyes and lifted her to her feet, my hands shaking so badly she had to hold them tightly in hers.

In the distance I could hear a siren coming hard down Old Jeanerette Road.

Molly placed her forehead on my chest, and the two of us stood there a long time like that, not speaking, listening to the wind blow through the open door and out the back window, the green-gold splendor of the outside world beckoning like an old friend on the edges of our vision.

epilogue

Capitalists are hanged by the rope they sell their enemies. Mystics who help formulate great religious movements writhe in sexual torment over impure thoughts a shoe salesman leaves behind with adolescence. A Crusader knight in search of the True Cross returns to Marseilles from Palestine with a trunkful of Saracen robes, inside of which is a plague-infested mouse.

My experience had been, like George Orwell's, that human beings are possessed of much more courage and self-sacrifice than we give them credit for, and when the final test comes, they usually go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. Our moral failure lies in the frailty of our vision and not in our hearts. Our undoing is in our collective willingness to trust those whom we shouldn't, those who invariably used our best instincts against us. But as a police officer I also learned long ago that justice finds us in its own time and of its own accord, and in ways we never, and I mean absolutely never, anticipate.

I would like to say I tacked up Valentine Chalons with a nail gun. But I didn't. Not even close. Val's denouement began and ended with his own peers and his own machinations. First, there were rumors he was the son of a pimp, then suspicion spread that out of fear for his own reputation he had concealed his intuitions that Andre Bergeron was the Baton Rouge serial killer, allowing Bergeron to continue murdering innocent women, including Val's own sister, with whom some said Val had conducted an affair.

The woman who had filed molestation charges against me admitted she was paid by one of Val's employees. The photographer who had stuck a camera in my face after I gave Val a beating in Clementine's told an alternative news magazine he had been personally assigned by Val Chalons to take my life apart with vise grips.

Val tried to immerse himself in charity drives and the activities of a scholar who was above the fray. He hired a young woman named Thelma Lou Rooney to do research on his ancestors who had ridden with the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction. Evidently Val had long been possessed of a secret ambition to become a historical writer, an ambition that ironically he could have fulfilled without any help from anyone else. But Val was one of those who defined himself in terms of the control he exerted over others rather than in terms of what he accomplished as an individual.

Thelma Lou was pretty, blond, and extremely bright. She claimed a double degree in history and anthropology from the University of North Carolina, plus three summer sessions at the Sorbonne. She was a miracle worker when it came to extracting arcane information from decaying courthouse records. She was also an amazing filter for the Chalonses' participation in the activities of the White League, particularly the murder of blacks during the Colfax Massacre of 1873. Whatever information she dug up on the Chalons family either sanitized their roles or indicated that somehow they were victims themselves, or, as Val would say, "forced to take extreme measures in extreme times." The staff at Val's television stations loved her. So did Val.

In fact, Val and Thelma Lou were soon in the sack. He flew with her to Dallas and New York and bought her clothes that were arguably the most beautiful on any woman in our area. Unfortunately for Val, Thelma Lou Rooney was a pathological liar and con artist who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

Her real name was Thelma Lou Watkins, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a bovine, peroxide-headed woman who operated a mail-order quilt company out of Jellico, Kentucky. Her mother showed up out of nowhere with a birth certificate and filed statutory rape charges against Val, followed one week later by a civil suit asking for millions in damages.

Val compounded his problem by denying on the air any knowledge of the girl's age, then apologizing for any emotional injury he may have caused her. He was repentant, paternal, and dignified. On camera he looked like the patrician he had always aspired to be. But the next day Thelma Lou caught him at a restaurant frequented by Chamber of Commerce and media people and let go with a dish-throwing tirade that had the waiters backed against the walls. Then Thelma Lou's mother produced a taped telephone conversation between her daughter and Val that was so lascivious only one Lafayette broadcaster, a scurrilous late-night shock jock, had the temerity to air it.

When Val thought his problems couldn't get any worse, the woman I had seen toking on a roach in the back of his limo sold a video to a cable channel of herself and Val going at it on a water bed.

The same people whom he had enlisted in his attempt to destroy Molly and me homed in on him like piranha on a drowning water buffalo.

The day Val died, his gardens were abloom with chrysanthemums, the air golden, the oaks in

his yard sculpted against a hard blue sky. But inside the guesthouse, where he had continued to live, the floors and counters and tables were cluttered with fast-food containers, the bathroom pungent with mildew, the trash baskets overflowing. For days he had not changed out of his pajamas or bathed or shaved. Evidently he rose early on the last morning of his life and dissolved a bottle of Seconal in a glass of bourbon, then sat down to listen to a CD on his stereo. The body of the man who had been the friend of the powerful, surrounded by sycophants, was not found for five days, when a meter reader reported an unusual odor to the city police department.

The song that had played on the stereo over and over again was "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels," sung by his mother, Ida Durbin.

The probate court that decided the disposition of the Chalons estate put its worth at nearly ninety-six million dollars. Attorneys whose only professional recommendation was the fact they were legally qualified to practice law under the Napoleonic Code appeared out of the woodwork from Shreveport to New Orleans. DNA testing proved that Andre Bergeron was the son of Raphael Chalons and that Val was not. Bergeron was convicted on three counts of capital murder and sentenced to death by injection, but this did not stop his wife from retaining a half dozen lawyers on contingency to represent her claim and her son Tee Bleu's. In the meantime, Lou Kale and Ida Durbin hired a private investigative group that, surprise, produced a last will and testament signed by Raphael Chalons, leaving his wealth to Honoria and Val.

The problem was the attorney who had notarized it was Sookie Motrie, a man so notorious for his various scams that an association of Louisiana trial lawyers introduced a bill in the legislature specifically designed to prevent Sookie from taking the state bar exam.

No matter, though. Sookie and his associates linked arms with Ida Durbin and Lou Kale, claiming that Ida and Lou were the parents of the only legal claimant to the estate. Valentine Chalons, now deceased.

The upshot was a settlement that awarded half of the estate to Mrs. Bergeron and Tee Bleu and the other half to Lou and Ida.

Guess who's living today in the big white house on the Teche but no longer singing the blues in B flat?

Jimmie finished reconstructing our birthplace south of town and spends weekends there, sometimes with friends from New Orleans. He invites Molly and me to his barbecues and lawn parties, but I find excuses not to attend. It has been my experience that age brings few gifts, but one of them is the acceptance that the past is the past, for good or bad, and if you are fortunate enough to have lived in an era that was truly exceptional, characterized by music, chopped-down Fords with chrome-plated engines roaring full out against purple sunsets, and drive-in restaurants where kids jitterbugged and did the dirty bop and knew they would never die, then those moments are forever inviolate, never to be shared or explained, and, like images on a Grecian urn, never subject to time and decay. Why make them less by trying to re-create them?