Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

knew better. He raised his eyebrows. “Dave, a thousand things could have happened. Why think the worst? Besides, if there’s any blame, it’s on your half-crazy brother. Remodeling a pimp’s face on behalf of a whore probably isn’t the best way to do RR. for her.”
    He laughed, then looked at my expression. “Okay, mon,” he said. “If you want to scope it out, I’d start with Bordelon’s ties to other people. Run that by me again about the two sheriff’s deputies.”
    “They braced me in the hospital parking lot.”
    “They thought Bordelon gave up somebody?”
    “That was my impression.”  
    “So Troy Bordelon’s family is —”
    “They do scut work for the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.”
    Clete removed the celery stalk from his drink and took a long swallow from the glass. His hair was sandy, with strands of white in it, cut like a little boy’s. When the vodka and tomato juice hit his stomach, the color seemed to bloom in his face. He looked up at me, squinting against the sunlight.
    “I have crazy thoughts about going back to ‘Nam sometimes, finding the family of a mamasan I killed, apologizing, giving them money, somehow making it right,” he said. He looked emptily out into the sunlight.
    “What are you saying?”
    “I’d let sleeping dogs lie. But you won’t do that. No, sir. No, sir. No, sir. Not ole Streak,” he replied, pressing the bottom of his glass hard into the moist gravel.
     
    Clete was wrong. I disengaged from thoughts about Ida Durbin. During the week, I bass-fished on Bayou Benoit, repaired the roof on the shotgun house I had just taken a mortgage on, and each dawn jogged three miles through the mist-shrouded trees in City Park. In fact, listening to Clete’s advice and forgetting Ida was easier than I thought. I even wondered if my ability to give up an obsession was less a virtue than a sign of either age or a newly acquired callousness.
    But airliners crash because a twenty-cent lightbulb burns out on the instrument panel; a Civil War campaign is lost because a Confederate courier wraps three cigars in a secret communique; and a morally demented man takes a job in a Texas book depository and changes world history.
    It was early the next Monday, the rain hitting hard on the tin roof of my house, when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver on the kitchen counter, a cup of coffee in one hand. Between the trees on the back slope of my property, I could see the rain dancing on the bayou, the mist blowing into the cattails. “Hello?” I said.
    “Hey, Robicheaux. What do you say we buy you breakfast?” the voice said.
    “Who’s this?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
    “J. W. Shockly. Talked to you outside Baptist Hospital last week? Billy Joe and I have to do a favor for the boss. I’d really appreciate your help on this.”
    “I’m pretty jammed up, partner.”
    “It’ll take ten minutes. We’re at the public library, a half block down the street. What’s to lose?”  
    I put on a hat and raincoat and walked under the dripping limbs of the live oaks that formed a canopy over East Main. I passed the site of what had once been the residence of the writer and former Confederate soldier George Washington Cable and the grotto dedicated to Christ’s mother next to the city library. J. W. Shockly and the other sheriff’s deputy from the hospital parking lot, both in civilian clothes, were standing under the shelter at the library entrance, smiles fixed on their faces inside the mist, like brothers-in-arms happy to see an old friend.
    “Can we go somewhere?” Shockly said, extending his hand. “You remember Billy Joe Pitts.”
    So I had to shake hands with his partner as well. When I did, he squeezed hard on the ends of my fingers.
    “That’s quite a grip you’ve got,” I said.
    “Sorry,” he said. “How about coffee and a beignet down at Victor’s?”
    I shook my head.
    “Here’s what it is,” Shockly said. “The sheriff sent