James Burke - Crusader's Cross

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?

I attend meetings at the Insanity Group and still have not learned how to sleep through the night. Every Sunday, Clete picks me up in his Caddie and we fish for speckled trout out on West Cote Blanche Bay. Molly, Snuggs, Tripod, and I live on Bayou Teche and in the early-morning hours often see two pelicans sailing low over the water, their extended wings touched by the sunrise. For me, these are gifts enough.