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

me down here because me and you go back. See, the nurse who was in Troy’s hospital room with you is the sheriff’s cousin. She says Troy was telling you some bullcrap about a crime involving a prostitute. The sheriff thinks maybe you’re working for the defense. That maybe the restaurant owner’s family has hired you to prove Troy was a lowlife or procurer or something, that maybe he was propositioning the waitress and the restaurant owner went apeshit. You following me?”
    “No, not at all,” I replied.
    Shockly’s hair was buzz-cut, his pale blue suit spotted with rain. His breath smelled like cigarettes and mints. His gaze seemed to search the mist for the right words to use. “Nobody wants to see the restaurant owner ride the needle. But he’s not going to skate, either. So how about it?”
    “How about what?” I said.
    “You working for the defense or not?” Billy Joe, his friend, said. He was a shorter man than Shockly, but tougher in appearance, his eye sockets recessed, the skin of his face grainy, his teeth too large for his mouth.
    “I already explained my purpose in visiting the hospital. I think we’re done here,” I said.
    Billy Joe raised his hands and grinned. “Enough said, then.” He popped me on the arm, hard enough to sting through my raincoat.
    When I got back home, I washed my hands and dried them on a dish towel. I fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and berries and milk and sat down to eat by the kitchen window. The air blowing through the screen was cool and smelled of flowers and wet trees and fish spawning in the bayou, and in a few minutes I had almost forgotten about Shockly and Pitts and their shabby attempt to convince me their visit to New Iberia was an innocuous one.
    But just as I started to wash my dishes I heard footsteps on the gallery. I opened the front door and looked down at Billy Joe Pitts, who was squatted on his haunches, scraping the contents from a pet food can onto a sheet of newspaper for my cat, Snuggs. J. W. Shockly waited at the curb in a black SUV, the exhaust pipe smoking in the rain. “What do you think you’re doing?” I said.
    “Had this can in the vehicle and saw your cat. Thought I’d treat him to a meal,” Pitts said, twisting around, his bottom teeth exposed with his grin.
    Snuggs had just started to eat, but I scooped him up and cradled him in one arm. He was a white, short-haired, unneutered male, thick-necked, heavy, ropy with muscle, his ears chewed, his head notched with pink scars. He was the best cat I ever owned. “Snuggs says thanks but he’s on a diet. And I say adios, bud.”
    I kicked the pet food and newspaper into the flower bed.
    “Just trying to do a good deed. But to each his own,” Billy Joe Pitts said, getting to his feet, his face close to mine now, his skin as damp-smelling as mold.

CHAPTER FOUR
    It was still raining that afternoon when I drove across the train tracks and parked my pickup behind the courthouse, a short distance from the crumbling, whitewashed crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery. Helen Soileau, my old colleague, had become the parish’s first female sheriff. She was either bisexual or a lesbian, I was never sure which, and had the perfect physique for a man. I mention her sexuality not to define her but only to indicate that her life as a law officer was not always an easy one. She started her career as a meter maid at NOPD and became a patrolwoman in Gird Town and the neighborhood surrounding the Desire Project. The notoriety of the latter has no equal in the United States, except perhaps for Cabrini Green in Chicago and neighborhoods in the South Bronx. A white female cop who can enter the Desire at night, by herself, is an extraordinary person. Helen Soileau earned respect from people who do not grant it easily. After I told her the story about Troy
Bordelon’s death and the visit to my house by J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts, she leaned back in her swivel chair and looked at me for a long time. She wore