I ordered coffee at the end of the bar, where I could see through a wide door into the dining room. Val was with a group of well-dressed people, his back to me. He was the only man at the table without a jacket. His hair had just been barbered, the sides clipped close to the head, which accented the severity of his angular features. He wore a starched white shirt, but without a tie and with the collar unbuttoned, as though he were demonstrating a deliberate disregard for the decorum of the evening. The austerity in his expression and posture made me think of a photograph I had once seen of the Confederate guerrilla leader, William Clarke Quantrill.
In fact, I think he was assuming a persona I had seen him play before. He had been a guest narrator on a Louisiana Public Television broadcast regarding the activities of the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction. He had spoken of his ancestors' participation in the White League with veiled pride, even dismissing their moral culpability for the execution of fifty black soldiers in what came to be known as the Colfax Massacre. "It was a violent era. My great-grandfather did what he had to. It's facile to impose our standards on the past," Val had explained.
Now, in the glow of candlelight at his table, he was holding forth about contemporary wars, his rhetoric threaded with moral certitude, although he himself had never heard a shot fired in anger.
I had resolved earlier to approach Val Chalons with a new and objective attitude. But my thought processes were deteriorating rapidly. I saw him excuse himself from the table and walk through the back hall toward the restrooms, which were housed on the terrace.
Don't confront him here, not in this state of mind, I told myself.
But if not here, where? Val Chalons wouldn't change and I wouldn't, either. Just stick to principles and keep personalities out of it, I thought. The fate of the world didn't hang on what I might say to a member of the Chalons family.
As chance would have it, Clete Purcel came through the front door, just as I got up from the bar stool. "Where you going?" he asked.
"To the head," I replied.
"Did I just see Val Chalons?"
"Maybe," I said.
"Why waste your time bird-dogging a bucket of shit?"
"I dropped in for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie."
"Yeah, I used to go on skivvy runs in Cherry Alley to play the piano. Let me handle this, Streak."
"There's no problem here. Stay out of it," I replied.
I followed Chalons out onto the terrace, into a fragrance of flowers and bourbon and grilled steaks and the fecund summertime odor of the Teche. He was at the urinal when I entered the restroom.
"Unless you're in here to hang out your dick, I suggest you leave," he said.
"You seem to have many personalities, Val," I said.
"Don't think your current environment protects you, Robicheaux. I'm going to boil you in your own grease."
He continued to urinate, his chin tilted slightly upward, his fingers cupped under his phallus.
"I think there's reason to believe your sister may have been murdered by the Baton Rouge serial killer," I said. "I had dismissed that possibility because I was carrying a personal resentment against you. I was wrong in doing that, both as a police officer and as an AA member."
He laughed to himself and shook off his phallus. "God, I love you people," he said.
"Which people is that, Val?"
"Guys who constantly confess their guilt in public with doleful faces. Why is it I always feel you're up to something?" He brushed past me and began washing his hands in the basin.
"It's called 'transfer.' The person assumes other people think in the same duplicitous fashion as himself," I said.
"You still don't get it, do you?" he said, drying his hands on a paper towel.
"Get what?"
"You're our local Attila. A little campfire smoke and animal grease in your hair and you'd be perfect. You're shit, Robicheaux. So is your wife. She's a poseur and a cunt. You just haven't figured it out yet."
He was standing within arm's reach of me now. He balled up the paper towel and dropped it in the waste can. I started to speak, but instead stepped back from him and looked into empty space, my thumbs hooked into the sides of my belt. The heavy metal door slammed behind him.
Don't take the bait, I told myself.
But there are instances when that old-time rock 'n' roll is the only music on the jukebox.
I followed Val Chalons through the bar area into the dining room. He had taken his chair and was spreading his napkin on his lap. His friends looked up at me, expecting to be introduced.
"We finally got to the bottom of Ida Durbin's disappearance, Val," I said. "Your father rescued her from a whorehouse he had money in. So out of either obligation or reasons of opportunity, Ida became his regular punch. Then you came along about nine months later. If you'd like to check out the story, your mother is staying with a friend of my brother on Lake Pontchartrain. Your mother is married to her former pimp, Lou Kale. They run an escort service together in Miami."
He rose from his chair and threw his martini in my face. I hit him high up on the cheekbone, so hard that his opposite eye bulged from the socket. He crashed through empty chairs into the wall, then caught me with a sliding blow on the forehead and one on the ear that I could feel burn right through the cartilage into the bone. But he was off balance, his feet tangled up by an oil painting that had clattered to the floor. I slipped his next punch, felt another glance off my head, then got under his reach and hooked him just below the heart. He wasn't ready for it and I saw his mouth drop open and heard a sound like a dying animal's come from deep inside his chest.
People from the bar crowded through the entranceway to watch. A waiter's loaded tray exploded on the floor and I saw a strobe light flare in the gloom and burn away all the shadows in the room. I hooked Val Chalons in the eye, then drove a right cross directly into his mouth, bursting his lips against his teeth. I knew it was time to back away, in the same way a fighter in the ring knows when he has taken his opponent's heart. A woman I had never seen was screaming incoherently and an elderly man was patting the air with his hands, as though his years had given him the power to impart wisdom and restraint to a dervish.
I started to step back, but Val Chalons tried to clench me, his mouth draining blood and spittle on my cheek and neck, the thickness of his phallus pressing against me. He forced us both against a table, his mouth as close to my ear as a lover's. "My father screwed your wife, Robicheaux," he said.
In my naivete, I had believed the succubus that had governed my life for decades had been exorcised by the coming of old age. But it was still there, like a feral presence hiding in the subconscious, red-black in color, shiny with glandular fluids, waiting for the right moment to have its way. Some call it a chemical assault upon the brain. I can't say what it is. But the consequence for me was always the same: I committed acts as though I were watching them on film rather than participating in them. When it was over, I was not only filled with disgust and shame and self-loathing but genuinely frightened by the gargoyle that held sway over my soul.
In this case, that meant I genuinely invested myself in the deconstruction of Val Chalons. I buried my fist up to my wrist in his stomach and drove his head into the wall, clubbed him to the floor, and stomped his face when he was down. Then I felt Clete Purcel's huge arms lock around me, pinning my hands at my sides, dragging me backward through the tables and broken dishware and spilled food into the bar area, where someone pointed a camera strobe straight into my eyes.