James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"Is he going to pull through?" I said.

"You say you're with the sheriff's department?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"He's been in bad health for some time," he said.

A half hour later Mack Bertrand called from the lab. "I don't know if this is good news or bad news," he said. "The casts I made out at the Trajan crime scene this morning? I'm reasonably sure we've got a match with the casts I made under your bedroom window."

"You say 'reasonably sure'?"

"You ever watch this TV show where guys are always examining used Q-tips or a Kleenex some gal wiped her lipstick on?"

"I'm lost," I said.

"None of this stuff is nuclear science. We're talking about muddy boots," he said.

I called Molly at her agency and told her the voyeur at our house may have been the Baton Rouge serial killer.

"Well, he'd better not come around again," she said. "I'm going to pick up some steaks on the way home. Is there anything else you want from the store?"

You want a stand-up woman in your life? Marry a nun.

I bought flowers at the Winn-Dixie and took them to the nurse's station in the intensive-care unit at Iberia General. "They're for Mr. Raphael," I said.

"He can't have flowers in his room now. But I can keep them here at the station and put them in his room when he's moved," she said. She was a pleasant-looking older woman, with soft pink skin and blue-tinted white hair.

"That would be fine," I said. "Can I talk to him?"

"No, I'm afraid not," she replied. "Who did you say you are?"

"Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Sheriff's Department."

"Are you the one who -"

"Mr. Chalons's son insulted my wife and I tore him up. I'm the one."

"I see." She had set my flowers on a shelf under the counter. She retrieved them and pushed them toward me. "You need to talk to the resident about these," she said, holding her eyes on mine. "Sometimes the water in the container forms bacteria and creates problems for us."

I walked off and left the flowers where they were. Through a partially opened door I saw the comatose face of Raphael Chalons, his head sunk deep in the pillow, his leaded eyes and hooked nose strangely suggestive of a carrion bird's.

That evening, while Snuggs and Tripod watched Molly flip a pair of sirloin steaks on the grill in the backyard, I called Jimmie at his apartment and asked for the address and phone number of the home on Lake Pontchartrain where Ida Durbin was staying with Jimmie's friends.

"What for?" he asked.

"I'm being hung out to dry by her son. That might have something to do with it."

"Why blame her?"

"I'm not. So lose the attitude."

"She's not in New Orleans."

"Jimmie -"

"She's in Lafayette. Out on Pinhook Road. So is Lou Kale. Stay away from Kale. He's a real shithead."

"You figured that out?"

After I hung up the phone, I joined Molly at our picnic table in the backyard and we ate supper under the trees with Tripod and Snuggs, who had their own bowls at the end of the table. Then she and I walked downtown and had ice cream, as couples do on a late-summer evening, and I said nothing about Ida Durbin or the Baton Rouge serial killer.

At sunup the next day I drove to Lafayette.

I don't know what I expected. My experience with age is that it instills a degree of patience in some, leaves the virtuous spiritually unchanged, feeds the character defects in others, and brings little wisdom to any of us. Perhaps I'm wrong. I wanted to be wrong when I met Ida Durbin. I also wanted to believe I would not act on an old resentment should I have the bad luck to run into her estranged husband, Lou Kale.

They were staying in separate rooms in a lovely old motel built of historic brick on a part of Pinhook Road that had not been blighted by urban development and was still shrouded by spreading live oaks. It was not yet 7:00 a.m. when I showed my badge at the desk and asked for the room number of Ms. Connie Coyne. I had not called in advance.

"We don't have anyone by that name staying here," the clerk said.

"Look again," I said.

"No one by that name is staying here, sir," he repeated, looking past me at someone waiting to check out.

"Don't tell me that. She's here. So is her husband. His name is Lou Coyne."

"Oh, yes. They're both registered under his name. I just saw her go into the dining room," the clerk said.

"Thank you," I said.

According to Jimmie, Ida and her husband kept separate homes in Miami and obviously separate accommodations when they traveled. But the fact they were both registered at the motel under his name, indicating the charges were probably billed to the same credit card, made me wonder how separate in reality Ida's life was from her husband's.

Few people were in the dining room and it wasn't hard to pick out Ida from the other motel guests eating breakfast by the French doors, not far from the buffet table. Her hair still had its natural reddish tone and the years had not taken away her height or the thin, well-defined features of her face. The dramatic change was in her complexion. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, but in the broken light from the terrace her skin seemed etiolated, the freckles drained of color.

She was nibbling on a piece of dry toast while she read from a hardbound book. The only food on her plate consisted of a few melon slices, a half dozen grapes, and a piece of Swiss cheese. Her cup was filled with hot tea. She wore a flowered sundress that I suspected came from an expensive shop on Biscayne Boulevard.

She glanced up at me only when my shadow fell across her reading page. "Why, Dave," she said. "I never could get over how much you and Jimmie looked alike."

"How's the life, Ida?" I said.

"Oh, I hope that's not meant to injure. It's not, is it?"

I sat down without being asked. "Why didn't you write and tell us you were okay, Ida?"

"Because I wasn't okay. Because I was a kid. Because I told myself Jimmie would be fine without me. Pick one you like."

"A guy named Troy Bordelon went to the grave thinking he was partly responsible for your death," I said.

"I never heard of this person. I didn't choose the life I've lived, Dave. It was chosen for me. But others may see it differently."

"I happen be in the latter category, Ida. Val Chalons is trying to frame me on a child molestation charge. He also defamed my wife. That's why he's in Iberia General Hospital. I stomped the shit out of him. If I had it to do over again, I'd rip up his whole ticket. The only regret I have is that his father may have had a seizure because of the damage I did to his son."

If she took any offense at my remarks, it disappeared inside her face. "You seem to be handling the pressures of life well enough," she said, gazing at the terrace and the moss that was lifting in the oak trees by the pool.

I said earlier that in my view age is not a magic agency in our lives. But perhaps Ida was the exception after all. The country girl who had paddled an inner tube far out from shore and saved Jimmie and me from sharks was gone; the woman who had replaced her possessed the timeless and inured hauteur of a successful medieval courtesan. Jimmie had said she had wanted to see her son, Valentine. But where had she been all those years? Raphael Chalons had raised him, not she. Had Mr. Raphael excluded her from her son's life? I doubted it.

"Lost in thought?" she said.

"Why has your son done so much to harm me and my wife? Is he that fearful people will discover who his mother is? Is he that cowardly and insecure?"

She drank from her teacup, then set it back down in the saucer. The freckles on her shoulders seemed to disappear in the glaze of sunlight through the French doors. "It was good seeing you, Dave. I hope things work out for you and your wife," she said.