But the expression on the face of the Trajan woman, her neck and head trapped helplessly in the fork of a tree, contained a suggestion about the human condition I couldn't get out of my mind. I suspected she was a brave woman and fought her attacker to the end. I also suspected she was not undone by either her fear or the pain and sexual humiliation he visited upon her. But what I had seen in her eyes was worse. "Loss" is not the right word for it. It was a realization that she was alone and powerless, and that beyond the perimeter of her vision a sadist was about to steal everything of value she owned – her dignity, her self-respect, her husband, her children, her career as an aerobics instructor, the quiet home she returned to daily, and finally her life. All to satisfy the libidinous pleasure of a deviate to whom she had as much importance as a stick of chewing gum.
What sociological factors could produce a man like this?
I felt almost as though I could see his face, like a figure moving around on the edge of a dream. Maybe I had seen him the night Honoria Chalons was murdered. Maybe I had processed him into jail, held each of his fingers in mine and rolled them on an ink pad, pressing the whorls in his skin onto paper, as though I were creating a dermatological artwork. Maybe the oil in his skin was transferred to mine.
But I knew with certainty that he was not far away, and that he would strike again soon, perhaps much closer to home, and that his intention was to deliver as much injury as possible to our community. I knew this in a way that was not demonstrable, not even to myself. But I knew it just the same, perhaps because I could not deny the cathartic, hard-pounding rush that violence had always brought me, one that was as pure and bright as a glass of ninety-proof whiskey flung onto a fire.
I went into Helen's office. She was gazing out the window at the cemetery, her hands in her back pockets, her breasts as firm as grapefruit against her shirt. "How's it rockin', Pops?" she said.
"The serial guy is somebody we know."
"Like down at the Kiwanis?"
"He broke his pattern when he murdered the teenage street hooker in New Orleans. It's not coincidence she talked to Clete and me a few hours before she died."
"I know all this, Dave. It's not helpful."
"Answer me this: With all the power and influence that Val Chalons has, why would he waste his time trying to ruin my reputation instead of finding his sister's killer?"
"He thinks you did it?"
"No, he doesn't. He's covering his own butt."
I could see the fatigue in her eyes and I felt like a fool. What was she supposed to do? Take me off the desk because I had an unprovable intuition? Then I realized she wasn't thinking about our conversation at all.
"Raphael Chalons just got the paddles at Iberia General. He may not make it," she said.
"What happened?" I said.
"He was visiting his son and had a stroke."
I collected my mail from my box and went back to my office, dazed, unable to explain my feelings to myself about a man I had always thought of as corrupt and vaguely sinister. I found myself staring at the envelopes and memos in my hand without the words on them registering. I sat down at my desk and called the hospital. An intern in the intensive-care unit told me Raphael Chalons was alive but paralyzed down one side and unable to speak.
"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.
chapter Twenty-six
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.