"I think you're out of your mind, is what I think," he replied.
"All your news stories featured my name as the shooter. The stories also mentioned I'd shot several suspects in the past. I think you also worked in the fact I'd been canned by NOPD. Is that standard procedure with you guys?"
"Excuse me," Val said to his friends. He picked up his telephone and called for security.
"This is about Ida Durbin, Val," I said. "Get used to hearing that name. She was a decent country girl who fell into the hands of white slavers. Ida Durbin was her name. Your family had money in Galveston whorehouses. She tried to get out of the life, then something happened to her. Ida Durbin, Val. You recognize the name. I can see it in your eyes. Ida Durbin and I are going to take you and your father down, partner. You're going to see Ida Durbin's name on your bedroom ceiling."
He rose from his chair and faced me. He wore a pink tie and a pale blue shirt with white cuffs. His hair was styled so that it was long on top and trim on the sides, which accentuated both his height and the leanness of his face. "Under that veneer of the blue-collar knight errant, you're a vulgarian and a bully, Robicheaux. You're tolerated around New Iberia because you've overcome some serious difficulties in your life, but in truth most people consider you an object of pity."
Two uniformed security men had entered Val's office and were now standing behind me. "On the job, fellows," I said.
"No, not on the job. You have no jurisdiction here," Val said. "You either walk out of here like a gentleman or you'll be escorted to the front door. Why not make a reasonable choice and stop degrading yourself?"
"Before I shot Bad Texas Bob, some guy in the Florida Keys called me and tried to warn me off an investigation into Ida Durbin's disappearance. I couldn't figure out who that guy was. But the voice was of a kind that sticks in your memory, like a dirty moment in your life you can never scrub out of your head. I think the guy was a Galveston pimp named Lou Kale. The name Lou Kale clang any bells for you, Val?"
He tried to hold his eyes impassively on mine, but I saw an indentation in his cheek, a twitch, as though an invisible fish hook had pricked his skin and pulled at it. Got you, you bastard, I thought.
"Take this man out of here," he said, lifting his chin.
But this time Val wasn't speaking to his security personnel. Three uniformed street cops had just walked through the door. They were Cajuns like myself, basically decent men who pumped iron at Red Lorille's Gym and had families and worked extra jobs to make ends meet. Their hands rested awkwardly at their sides, their eyes avoiding mine. Val Chalons waited for my removal from his office, as though it were a foregone conclusion. In the silence I was sure I heard my watch ticking. "Hey, Robicheaux, come have coffee wit' us," one of the cops said.
"Sounds great," I said.
"Yeah?" he said.
"I wouldn't have it any other way," I said.
He and his two colleagues were relaxed and confident as we left the building. A potentially embarrassing moment had come and gone, they had not had to arrest one of their own, and their world had become a comfortable place again. They told me they were glad my "IA. beef" had not jammed me up.
" 'Cause that was a righteous shoot, huh? That old dude tried to cap you and you smoked his sausage. You done what you had to do, wasn't no choice about it?" one of them said. His eyes searched mine as he waited for my answer.
That evening the sky was full of birds, the oaks deep in shade, and out on the bayou white ducks were wimpling the water among the reeds. I could smell meat fires in City Park and hear kids playing Softball. I thought I was through with Valentine Chalons for the day. But I should have known you don't publicly challenge a man whose ego is as tender as an infected gland and simply walk away from it. When the phone rang, I picked it up without glancing at the caller ID. Val began speaking as soon as he heard my voice. "You scum-sucking cretin, if it wasn't for your age, I'd break your jaw."
"Really?" I said.
"Honoria told me about your tryst and the handcuffs and a few other sickening details about your behavior. You don't seem to have any boundaries, do you?"
"Run that by me again?"
"You screwed my sister, you sorry sack of shit. She's an impaired person."
"You listen -"
"You're white trash, Robicheaux, the village fraud constantly presenting himself as suffering victim. You latch on to causes that give your life a legitimacy it doesn't rightfully possess. Now you're trying to drag my family through the mud. People like you should be bars of soap."
My hand was clenched tightly on the telephone receiver, my temples throbbing with a level of anger I was not ready for. I tried to disconnect from his words and speak in a dispassionate tone, but at the moment my only impulse was to hang up the phone and find Valentine Chalons.
"Ida Durbin and Lou Kale," I said.
"Good try, asshole," he said. The line went dead.
The rest of the evening I tried to free myself from my anger. I had already missed the 7:00 p.m. AA meeting at the Episcopalian cottage across from old New Iberia High, and now, left to my own resources, I could not sort through my own thoughts or get Valentine Chalons's words out of my head.
Was there a degree of truth in them? Was that why I was so bothered? The unarguable fact was I had blood on my hands and during most of my adult life I had placed myself in situations that allowed me to do enormous physical injury to others, even taking their lives, without being held legally accountable for my deeds.
It's no accident that both cops and recidivists have mutual understandings about the netherworld they share. The heart-pounding rush, the lack of complexity or societal restraint, the easy access to women who love a gladiator, it all waits for the participant like a glittering avenue in Las Vegas or a free-fire zone inside a green country that has been deemed expendable.
A therapist once told me that the id for some people is a quiet furnace that simply needs a jigger of whiskey as an accelerant.
He also told me I was one of those people.
I went to Clete's cottage, but he was not home. Jimmie was back in town, staying in my spare bedroom, now determined to rebuild the house we had been raised in. He had gone to Lake Charles to contract a builder who specialized in salvaged hardwoods from torn-down barns and farmhouses and what in South Louisiana is called recovered cypress – huge trees that were sunk in swamps or rivers over one hundred years ago, restored into beautiful, soft wood that seems to shine with an interior glow.
I think Jimmie believed he could correct the past and refashion it with nails and ancient wood, somehow cleansing it of bad memories and leaving only the events that should have defined our childhood. I would have given anything that evening if he had been home so I could talk with him. But he was not there, and Val Chalons's words still burned in my ears.
I drove to the graveyard in St. Martinville and under the rising moon said a rosary by Bootsie's tomb. Lightning crawled through the clouds overhead, and across the Teche I could hear music coming from a nightclub and see the neon beer signs in second-floor windows where a party was taking place. I sat for a long time beside Bootsie's tomb, then drove back to New Iberia and went to bed after midnight.
By Friday I was wired to the eyes, trying to find professional reasons which would allow me to confront Valentine for his insults. I told myself I was allowing pride to do the work of my enemies, but my best self-analysis was of no help to me. I didn't care if someone called me white trash or not, but that insult, when it is used in the South, is collective in nature, and Val Chalons had aimed his words at my origins, my mother and father, their illiteracy and poverty and hardship, and I wanted to back him into a corner and break him apart – bone, teeth, and joint.