James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"My lawyer says I'm about to be charged with child molestation. I'm also going to be sued. The lawyer for the plaintiff is a stooge for Val Chalons."

"Shit," she said. She walked away, her fists on her hips, breathing through her nose. Then she walked back toward me, her expression set. "I'm not going to be party to this. You're on the desk, full pay, until I say otherwise."

"I don't think you should -"

She pressed her finger against my lips. "You got that?" she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"Good," she said.

Two hours later a woman detective who worked sex crimes notified me that Mrs. Mabel Poche had filed molestation charges against me. The location of the alleged crime was the restroom inside Molly's administrative offices. The date was the day Molly's agency had sponsored a hot dog roast and a race of hundreds of plastic ducks down Bayou Teche. An incident I hardly remembered – a lost child about to wet his pants, needing someone to take him into the restroom – was now aimed at my breast like a crossbow. The woman detective scheduled an interview with me for Friday morning. The Daily Iberian had already picked up the story.

I signed out of the office early and drove to Molly's agency. She was under the pole shed, a gunnysack in one hand, picking up chicken heads that had been lopped off on a butcher stump.

"Who's the ax murderer?" I said.

"We're going to have a chicken fry tomorrow night. I think one of the kids hijacked my weed cutter. Look at that." She nodded at a machete that lay across the stump, its blade matted with blood and feathers.

"You remember a white woman by the name of Mabel Poche?" I asked.

"I haven't seen her in a while. I think she stopped coming around."

"She says I molested her child in your office building. She's filing criminal charges as well as a civil suit."

"It's been quite a day, huh?" she said.

"I suspect she'll sue your agency as well."

"Oh, yes indeed. You can count on Mrs. Poche."

"Helen Soileau stood up for me. I've still got my job. Things could be worse."

She picked up the machete and knocked it clean of bloody feathers against the stump. "You want to go out for dinner tonight and maybe fool around later?" She tossed a strand of hair out of her eye and waited for my reply.

Saturday morning my lawyer, Porteus O'Malley, called the house. "A couple of lowlifes came by my office yesterday," he said. "They claim they were at Clementine's when you remodeled Val Chalons's head. They're willing to testify Chalons tried to pick up a steak knife from a table."

"Who are these guys?" I said.

He told me their names. "They say they're from around here, but they sound like they grew up in New Orleans," he said.

"They used to peel safes with Stevie Giacano. Both of them have bonds with Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine."

He paused. "Is Clete Purcel behind this?"

"His heart is in the right place," I said.

"It's called subornation of perjury. How bad do you want to do time in Angola, Dave?"

The cable show whose intention supposedly was to expose the underside of our little town on the Teche aired that night. It had probably been in the can for weeks, but the producers had managed to bleed in footage of me destroying Val Chalons's face and half of Clementine's Restaurant. Actually, I had to give them credit. The show's juxtaposition of photography was splendidly done. The documentary began with aerial footage of the Louisiana wetlands, serpentine bayous shadowed by cypress and live oak trees, and huge tracts of young sugar cane bending in the wind, followed by land-based, wide-angle shots of plantation homes, street festivals, and sugar refineries shrouded at night inside clouds of electrified steam.

Then a camera obviously mounted on the window of a moving vehicle, as though the subject material had suddenly became a source of danger to the journalists, panned across New Iberia's inner-city slum, showing black dope dealers and white crack whores working the trade on Hopkins Avenue. A moment later the scene shifted to my house and Doogie Dugas and several uniformed cops going through the front entrance, while a woman identified as a Catholic nun stood half-undressed in the bedroom doorway, clutching a shirt against her breasts.

Clete Purcel watched the show in a blue-collar bar on the west end of town, made a call on a pay phone, then drove to my house and threw a pecan hard against my front window.

"What's up, Cletus?" I said, stepping out on the gallery.

"You see the molestation story in the morning paper?"

"Nope."

"You see yourself on television tonight?" he said.

"Yep."

"Stop waiting for Chalons to fall in his own shit. It's time to take this lying cocksucker off at the neck. I've got a call in to Jericho Johnny Wineburger."

I walked into the yard. The wind in the trees caused shadows to slide across Clete's face, like water running down a window glass. He was wearing his porkpie hat and a wilted tropical shirt and gray slacks, and I could smell weed and beer-sweat trapped in his clothes.

"You're kidding, aren't you?" I said.

"You think you can beat these guys playing by the rules? Wake up. They own the ballpark. We're just the humps who carry out the garbage."

"Been toking on a little Mexican gage tonight?"

"No, what I've been doing is wrapping a 'drop' in black tape and filing off a few serial numbers."

"Come on in and eat something."

"I'm going to take Chalons down. Nobody is calling my partner a perve. You see Jericho Johnny around town, pretend you don't."

He climbed in his pink Cadillac and roared off, a tape deck blasting out Bob Seeger's "The Horizontal Bop," leaves blowing from under the wire wheels.

Would Clete actually try to pop Val Chalons? Or was that just a mixture of weed and beer talking? I thought about it. Clete's Caddy swerved at the corner in front of the Shadows, flattening a garbage can into a building.

The 911 call from a fisherman out by Lake Dautrieve came in at 5:43 Monday morning. "She don't have no clothes on. I t'ought maybe it was some kind of accident. Like maybe she fallen out of a tree or somet'ing," he said.

"Sir, calm down. Is the person injured?" the female dispatcher said.

"Injured? What you talkin' about?" the caller replied.

Helen picked me up in my front yard. The sun was just striking the brick buildings on Main as we crossed the drawbridge and headed up Loreauville Road toward the lake.

"I thought I was on the desk," I said.

"This cruiser is your desk, so shut up," she said.

We arrived at the crime scene just behind the coroner's van. Uniformed sheriff's deputies from both Iberia and St. Martin parishes were already there, stringing yellow tape through scrub oaks and gum and willow trees on the edge of the lake.

The shallows were carpeted with hyacinths, and I could see the black heads of moccasins between the lily pads, barely breaking the water. High up on the windstream, turkey buzzards circled like ragged-edged oriental kites. I watched Koko Hebert stoop under the tape and walk toward a forked oak tree with the plodding ennui of a man who has long given up on the world.

Helen took a call on a hand-held radio, then tossed it on the seat of the cruiser. "The boys from Baton Rouge are on their way," she said.

"They think it's the Baton Rouge guy?" I said.

"A tattoo on the vie is the same as on a woman who was abducted by LSU Sunday afternoon," she replied.

The abduction had taken place in a middle-income neighborhood a few blocks off Highland Road. The victim, Barbara Trajan, was the mother of two children, an aerobics instructor at a health club, and the wife of a high school football coach. She had a tattoo of an orange and purple butterfly on her abdomen, just below her navel. The previous afternoon, she had been working in her flower bed, one that paralleled the driveway. Her husband had taken the children to a church softball game. When they returned home, Barbara Trajan had disappeared. Her gardening trowel and one cotton glove lay on the concrete.