James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"If you have a charge to make about one of our personnel, you need to come into the office," Helen said.

"Maybe I'll just do this instead," he said. He advanced three steps in less time than I could blink and swung his fist into my face.

The blow knocked me across a garden sprinkler and against a glider that was suspended from a thick oak limb. My nose felt as though hundreds of needles had been shoved up it and into my brain. I grabbed a rope on the glider and sat down, my eyes watering uncontrollably.

"Get a towel," I heard Helen say.

I saw two St. Mary sheriff's deputies holding Val Chalons by his arms, his wrists cuffed behind him. Someone pushed a clutch of ice cubes wrapped in paper towels into my hands. I held the coldness against my face until my skin began to numb. When I looked at the ice it was speckled with blood. The yard, the trees, the flowers, and Honoria's body inside the open guesthouse door kept warping in the sunlight.

"You call it, bwana," Helen said.

Val glared at me, his cheeks splotched with color, his hair hanging in his eyes, the rims of his nostrils white, as though he were breathing subzero air.

"Cut him loose," I said.

"A little time in an isolation cell might take some of that prissiness out of him," Helen said.

"Val Chalons is a coward and a liar and has guilt painted all over him. Let him go," I said, loud enough for everyone in the yard to hear.

In the background I saw a uniformed deputy climb down a ladder with a security camera that had been mounted high in the fork of an oak tree.

I went home, changed shirts, and returned to the office. Helen was waiting for me, as I knew she would be, her hands stuck in her back pockets, a quizzical look in her eye, one tooth chewing on the corner of her lip. "You pumped Honoria Chalons?" she said.

"Why don't you be more direct?" I said.

We were standing in front of her office door, and people were passing in the corridor. "Answer the question," she said.

"Val Chalons believes what he needs to believe. End of discussion," I said.

"Step inside," she said.

She closed the door behind us. Through the window I could see the cemetery and a black kid trying to fly a red kite among the crypts. I wanted to be outside in the wind with him, away from all the sordid details that my life had taken on in only a few days. "Why would Val Chalons make up a story like that?" Helen asked.

"I believe there's a form of evil at work inside the Chalons home that we can't even guess at. Honoria tried to tell me about it. Now she's dead."

"You don't think the Baton Rouge serial guy is involved in this?"

"Honoria's death is connected to the Chalons family and the Chalons family only. Don't let them put it off on somebody else, Helen."

"That doesn't sound like an entirely objective statement. At the crime scene you seemed a little nervous about something. Have you been inside that guesthouse before?"

"No," I said, and felt my heart jump, just as though it had been touched with an electrical wire.

"Okay, bwana," she said, her manner relaxing now. "By the way, I was proud of you out there."

I left her office and washed my face in the men's room. When I looked at my reflection, I felt as though I were looking at the disembodied head of a Judas, that it was I who was the liar, not Val Chalons. But I had no idea why I felt that way.

That evening, at dusk, Clete Purcel and I sat in canvas chairs on the edge of Henderson Swamp, pole-fishing with corks and cut-bait like a pair of over-the-hill duffers who cared less about catching fish than just being close by a cypress-dotted swamp while the sun turned into a red ember on the horizon.

I told him of the bender I had gone on and the discovery that morning of Honoria Chalons's body. I also told him of the compact disk I had found in my truck and the fact I had no memory at all of what I had done from Friday night to Sunday morning.

I thought he would take me to task, but sometimes I didn't give Clete enough credit and would forget that he was the man who once carried me down a fire escape with two.22 rounds cored in his back.

"This Ida Durbin broad's voice was on the CD and she was singing a song that wasn't written until years after she disappeared?" He had taken off his Hawaiian shirt and sprayed himself with mosquito repellent, and in the shadows the skin across his massive chest looked as gray as elephant hide.

"You got it," I said.

"But that's not what's bothering you, is it?"

"At the crime scene, I felt I'd been there before. I knew where everything was in Chalons's guesthouse."

"It's called deja vu. Look at me, Streak. You were drunk all weekend. You clean those kinds of thoughts out of your head."

"There's blood on the CD. Chalons's stereo was turned on but the CD slot was empty."

"You're incapable of hurting a woman. Somebody is setting you up. Don't buy into it."

"Nobody set me up, Clete. I got drunk and had a blackout. I could have done anything."

"Shut up and give me time to think. This punk Chalons actually hit you in the face?"

That night, just before going to bed, I received a call from Jimmie. He was on his cell phone, and in the background I could hear the sounds of wind blowing and waves bursting against a hard surface.

"Where are you?" I said.

"At the southern tip of the island in Key West. That dude Lou Kale is down here," he said.

"How do you know?"

"A couple of girls I used to know work the yacht trade here. They say Kale and his wife run an escort service out of Miami. Or at least a guy who sounds a lot like Kale."

"What about Ida?"

"Hit a dead end. I got to be back in New Orleans tomorrow. I'll see you later in the week. Anything happening there?"

I had to wet my lips before I spoke. "I had a slip. But I'm all right now." I cleared my throat and waited for his response, my fingers opening and closing on the receiver.

"You get in any trouble?" he asked.

"I can't remember what I did or where I was. Honoria Chalons is dead. I think maybe I was there when she died. I can't remember and I don't know how to get inside my own head."

In the silence I could hear the waves smacking against a beach, then receding with a sucking sound, like the underpinnings of the earth itself sliding down the continental shelf.

The first person I saw in my office Tuesday morning was Koko Hebert. He may have showered since the previous day, but I couldn't tell it. Twenty seconds after he closed the door behind him, the entirety of the room smelled like testosterone and beer sweat.

He sat on a chair with the posture of a man sitting on a toilet. "The post indicates the Chalons girl wasn't raped, although she did have sexual intercourse with someone in the twenty-four period before she died," he said. "She also had enough cocaine in her to anesthetize the city of New York."

"Anything that could connect her homicide to the Baton Rouge guy?"

"I would have already told you that, wouldn't I?" he said.

"I guess so, Koko," I replied. I tried to be patient and remember that the autopsy had been performed by the forensic pathologist in St. Mary Parish, and that Koko was probably doing the best he could.

"There was an incision at the top of her forehead, just inside the hairline. It was done postmortem, in the shape of a cross," he said.

His eyes were fixed on mine, his nostrils swelling as he breathed.

"The Chalons family coat of arms?" I said.

"You're the detective. I just run the meat lockers."

Don't say anything more, I told myself. "I'll probably regret this, but did I ever do anything to offend you?" I said.

"Let me work up a list and I'll get back to you."

"Thanks for coming by," I said.