James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"Where do you live?" I asked.

"Down the block, next to the grocery store," she replied.

"I'll take you there," I said.

"Do I know you?" she said.

"I'm a friend of Johnny's," I said.

She was very old, quite feeble, and even with her hand on my arm she had to take small steps as we walked toward the front door.

"Where you going?" Jericho Johnny said from behind the bar.

I explained I was taking the elderly woman home.

His toothpick flexed in the corner of his mouth and his eyes looked at a neutral space between us. "Come back when you're done," he said.

A few minutes later I reentered the saloon and finished my coffee. The kids who had been shooting pool bought a bagful of cold long-neck beers to go and went out the door. The wind was blowing through the screen doors, and the inside of the saloon smelled like rain and sawdust.

Jericho Johnny leaned on his arms. "Here's the deal, Robicheaux. That guy Pitts wasn't trying to put a kite on just Purcel. He wanted a twofer – seventy-five hundred for the whole job."

"Who was the other hit?" I asked.

"Who you think?" he said.

"Pitts used my name specifically?"

"He said it was a friend of Purcel. An Iberia Parish plainclothes. He said the guy had been an NOPD Homicide roach, but got kicked off the force because he was a drunk. He said if this guy gets smoked, no cops around here are gonna be burning candles. Sound like anybody you know?"

"You willing to wear a wire?"

He laughed to himself and began stacking bottles of Bacardi and Beam and Jack Daniel's on a shelf.

"Why'd you tell me all this, Johnny?" I said.

"That was my mother you drove home. I don't like to owe people. You mixed up with politics?"

"No."

"I think the juice on this deal is coming from up high. Watch your ass. This city is full of dirtbags. It ain't like the old days," he said.

The next morning was Friday. As soon as I came into the office I told Helen of my visit to Jericho Johnny's saloon.

A deep line cut across her brow. "You want to have Wineburger picked up?" she said.

"Waste of time. Plus, I'd lose him as an informant," I replied.

"He said the juice was coming from up high? Who are you a threat to? I don't think this goes any higher than Billy Joe Pitts."

"Maybe not," I said.

"Raphael Chalons is not behind this, Dave, if that's what you're thinking."

"I'm just reporting what happened."

"I'm going to call Pitts's boss and tell him what we have."

"Mistake," I said.

"My life is full of them," she replied.

Jimmie had been out of town for a day, without telling me where he had gone. Friday evening his Lincoln pulled into the drive, shotgunned with dried mud. He was beaming when he came through the front door. "Guess where I've been," he said.

"Galveston," I said.

"Galveston, then I got a lead on an old guy over in Beaumont. He used to play backup for Floyd Tillman and Ernest Tubb. Remember Floyd Tillman, wrote 'Slipping Around'?"

"Jim -"

"This old-timer used to play in a lot of beer joints along the Texas coast. He said a girl from one of the hot pillow houses used to sit in with his band. He said she played the mandolin and guitar."

I tried to look attentive, but I could not get my mind off Jericho Johnny Wineburger. Jimmie held up a 45-rpm record in a water-stained paper jacket. "The old man gave me this. One side is titled 'Ida's Jump.' He said this gal always played a song by that name. He always thought this recording must have been her song."

"Can I see that?" I said.

The group was called the Texas Tumbleweeds. The recording had been made at a small studio in Corpus Christi, the same studio where Harry Choates had made his famous recording of "Jolie Blon" in 1946.

"It was cut in 1960, two years after she disappeared," Jimmie said.

"The name Ida Durbin is nowhere on the label, Jim."

"Does that phonograph in the living room work?"

The people who had sold me my house had left behind an ancient combination radio and high-fidelity console, with a three-speed turntable and a mechanical arm that made use of reversible needles. The top squeaked on a rusted hinge when Jimmie raised it up and fitted the small 45-rpm recording on the spindle.

The groves in the record were filled with static, but I could hear a string band of the kind you associate with country music of the 1940s and '50s – a fiddle, stand-up bass, Dobro, muted drums, an acoustical guitar outfitted with an electronic pickup, and a mandolin. Then a woman and two or three men began singing. They reminded me of Rose and the Maddox Brothers or Wilma Lee and Stony Cooper. Their harmony was beautiful.

"It's her," Jimmie said.

"How can you be sure?" I said.

"It's her," he repeated.

I gave up. I told him about my conversation with Jericho Johnny Wineburger. "Are you hearing me?" I said.

"You're talking about Whiplash Wineburger's brother? He's a meltdown. He was cleaning his gun on the toilet and ricocheted a round into his own head," he replied.

"I don't want you getting mistaken for me again," I said.

But he'd already blown me off and moved on. "My friend at UL can re-create an old record through a digital process that removes all the static and leaves only the music. It's Ida, Dave. We didn't get that poor girl killed. Why don't you be happy about something once in a while?"

"Even if that's Ida's voice, there's no way to determine when the recording was made. It could have been recorded on tape, then put on wax later," I said.

"Why would the studio sit on a tape for two years? You can think up more bad news than any person I've ever known. Are you going to your AA meetings?" he said.

Maybe he was right, I told myself. Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice. Who was I to steal it from him?

The days went by uneventfully. I made two weekend trips to Galveston and talked to retired cops, checked death records in the coroner's office, interviewed a madam who had run a house on Post Office Street, called the state attorney in Austin, and found out absolutely nothing about the fate of Ida Durbin. The studio that had cut the recording of "Ida's Jump" had gone out of business many years ago, and the musician who had told Jimmie a girl named Ida had sat in with his band during the late 1950s turned out to be a lonely old fellow who became more and more confused and contradictory in his account the more I talked with him.

If Ida Durbin was alive, she had left no paper trail of any kind.

I also began to wonder if Jimmie wasn't right about Jericho Johnny. Jericho Johnny's brother was Whiplash Wineburger, a part-time Mob lawyer and full-time gasbag who, when accused by his wife in divorce court of sleeping with the Puerto Rican maid, exclaimed, "I'm no snob, Your Honor! Guilty as charged!" At best, Jericho Johnny was a sociopath with blood up to his elbows. Why believe anything he said?

For a few nights I slept with my.45 automatic under my bed and kept my cut-down twelve-gauge Remington behind the couch in the living room. But after a while I no longer looked with caution upon the arrival of a deliveryman or a meter reader from the utility company. The world was a good place, the early dawn announced by birdsong and blue shadows on the lawn and fog puffing off the bayou. Why let fear and suspicion invade the heart and lay claim on your life?

Then on a windswept, burning Friday afternoon, when the sky was yellow with dust, Helen called me into her office. The Baton Rouge Advocate was spread open on her desk. "Looks like Billy Joe Pitts won't be bothering you anymore," she said.

"Say again?"

She tapped her finger on a back-page article. "A boating accident. He was drunk in an outboard on his old man's lake. He fell out of the boat and it circled around and hit him in the head. I just got off the phone with the sheriff," she said. She tilted her weight back in her chair and watched my face. "What bwana say?"