Few people were in the dining room and it wasn't hard to pick out Ida from the other motel guests eating breakfast by the French doors, not far from the buffet table. Her hair still had its natural reddish tone and the years had not taken away her height or the thin, well-defined features of her face. The dramatic change was in her complexion. Perhaps it was an optical illusion, but in the broken light from the terrace her skin seemed etiolated, the freckles drained of color.
She was nibbling on a piece of dry toast while she read from a hardbound book. The only food on her plate consisted of a few melon slices, a half dozen grapes, and a piece of Swiss cheese. Her cup was filled with hot tea. She wore a flowered sundress that I suspected came from an expensive shop on Biscayne Boulevard.
She glanced up at me only when my shadow fell across her reading page. "Why, Dave," she said. "I never could get over how much you and Jimmie looked alike."
"How's the life, Ida?" I said.
"Oh, I hope that's not meant to injure. It's not, is it?"
I sat down without being asked. "Why didn't you write and tell us you were okay, Ida?"
"Because I wasn't okay. Because I was a kid. Because I told myself Jimmie would be fine without me. Pick one you like."
"A guy named Troy Bordelon went to the grave thinking he was partly responsible for your death," I said.
"I never heard of this person. I didn't choose the life I've lived, Dave. It was chosen for me. But others may see it differently."
"I happen be in the latter category, Ida. Val Chalons is trying to frame me on a child molestation charge. He also defamed my wife. That's why he's in Iberia General Hospital. I stomped the shit out of him. If I had it to do over again, I'd rip up his whole ticket. The only regret I have is that his father may have had a seizure because of the damage I did to his son."
If she took any offense at my remarks, it disappeared inside her face. "You seem to be handling the pressures of life well enough," she said, gazing at the terrace and the moss that was lifting in the oak trees by the pool.
I said earlier that in my view age is not a magic agency in our lives. But perhaps Ida was the exception after all. The country girl who had paddled an inner tube far out from shore and saved Jimmie and me from sharks was gone; the woman who had replaced her possessed the timeless and inured hauteur of a successful medieval courtesan. Jimmie had said she had wanted to see her son, Valentine. But where had she been all those years? Raphael Chalons had raised him, not she. Had Mr. Raphael excluded her from her son's life? I doubted it.
"Lost in thought?" she said.
"Why has your son done so much to harm me and my wife? Is he that fearful people will discover who his mother is? Is he that cowardly and insecure?"
She drank from her teacup, then set it back down in the saucer. The freckles on her shoulders seemed to disappear in the glaze of sunlight through the French doors. "It was good seeing you, Dave. I hope things work out for you and your wife," she said.
"Next time you want to wish me well, Ida, put it on a postcard and drop it in a mailbox," I said.
"You're a bitter man," she said.
"Just a realistic one," I replied.
But my failed effort at reconciliation with Ida Durbin and the past was not over. On my way out of the lobby into the porte cochere, I almost knocked down a man dressed in a blazer, an open-collar print shirt, knife-creased slacks, and oxblood loafers. He was a muscularly compact man, his skin deeply tanned, his iron-gray hair slick with gel. When I collided with him, he had been holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a gold lighter in the other. He apologized, lit his cigarette in an expansive fashion, and started to walk around me.
"You pointed a gun at me in a Galveston motel in 1958, Mr. Kale," I said. "You really scared me. You called yourself the butter and egg man."
"Some people are walking memory banks. Me? I can't remember what I ate for supper last night," he said.
"You guys are here to do business, aren't you? Your visit doesn't have anything to do with Val Chalons."
"We need to dial it down, my man. I need to get inside, too, if you'll step aside."
"I'm a sheriff's detective, Mr. Kale. You're a pimp. You want a trip down to the bag, that can be arranged. But regardless of what happens here, you keep your ass out of New Iberia, and you keep a lot of gone between you and Clete Purcel. You reading me on this, Mr. Kale?"
He removed his cigarette from his mouth and tipped his ashes away from his person so they didn't blow back on his coat. "The name is Coyne, Lou Coyne. And you got the wrong dude, buddy."
He went through the revolving door into the motel. It had rained that morning, and the breeze under the porte cochere smelled of wet flowers and leaves and the lichen that was crusted on the massive limbs of the live oaks. I didn't want to get any deeper into the world of Ida Durbin and Lou Kale, no more than you want to immerse yourself in the effluent that backs up from a sewage pipe. But I knew a predator when I saw one. Lou Kale and Ida Durbin were no longer symbols or milestones out of Jimmie's and my adolescent experience. Nor were they simply foils to the innocence of the postwar era in which we had grown up. They may have been upgraded from their origins and elevated by economic circumstance into a larger world, but Ida Durbin and Lou Kale were the emissaries of organized crime, no matter what they called themselves. They were real and they were here.
Want to find out who the closet boozers are in your neighborhood? Ask the garbage man. Want to check out the local politics? Talk with the barber. Want to find out what your neighbors are really like? Ask a kid. Want to find out who's washing money at the track, fencing stolen property, running dope, greasing the zoning board, providing hookers for conventioneers, or selling gang-bangers Technines modified with hell triggers? Forget news media and police pencil pushers and official sources of all kinds. Ask a beat cop who hasn't slept since 1965 or a street junkie whose head glows in the dark.
During the morning I talked with a retired DEA agent while he drove golf balls on a practice range; an ex-Air American pilot who flew nine years inside the Golden Triangle; an old-time Washington, D.C., hooker who operated a bar in North Lafayette; and a pharmaceutically addicted city Vice cop who had done two tours in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. They all shared one commonality – they had been witnesses to events of historical importance that few people knew about and they had seen forms of human behavior about which they never spoke. The latter quality alone, to my mind, made them exceptional human beings.
For generations all the vice in Louisiana had been run by a few individuals in New Orleans. Even when I was a beat cop, no one opened a brothel, set up a slot machine, or sold one lid of Afghan skunk without first kissing the ring of Didoni Giacano. But Didi Gee was pushing up mushrooms, gambling was a state-sponsored industry, and narcotics had become part of the culture. Louisiana, once a closed fiefdom operated by the appointees of Frank Costello, was now wide open to the entrepreneurial spirit. Drug mules hammered down Interstate 10, from both Houston and Miami, loaded with weed, meth, and coke. Pimps had their pick of crack whores, whose managerial costs were minimal.
But none of my friends had ever heard of Lou Kale or Ida Durbin. Nor had they heard of anyone going by the names of Connie and Lou Coyne. I began to wonder if I had been too hard on Ida. She may have saved Clete Purcel's life, I told myself, and according to Clete's account, even Lou Kale had seemed a reluctant participant in his interrogation and beating.
Or was I being romantic and foolish about people who had invested their lives in the use of others?