Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke Page B

problem. You remember Honoria, don’t you?” he said.
    Honoria was hard to forget. She was dark-haired and dark-skinned, like her father, with brown eyes and a small red mouth, a mole at one corner. Honoria had received a doctorate from the Sorbonne and had taught music theory for three years at the university in Lafayette. But either her iconoclastic ways or rumors about her libertine behavior caused the university to deny her tenure. Sometimes I would see her in New Iberia’s public library, by herself, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, reading until closing time.
    “You want a soft drink?” Val asked.
    “No, just a word with you,” I replied.
    Honoria got up from the piano bench and started toward the kitchen. She wore a spaghetti-strap black dress with purple shoes, and the muscles in her back were deeply tanned and looked as hard as iron when she walked.
    “I didn’t mean for you to leave,” I said awkwardly.
    “I was going to see if there was any iced tea. I thought you might like that in place of a soft drink,” she said. She stared at me, waiting, the sepia-tinted light shining on the tops of her breasts.
    “Don’t bother,” I said.
    She walked away, leaving me with the illogical impression that somehow I had been rude.
    “What’s up?” Val said.
    “You told me you didn’t know Billy Joe Pitts. He says you fish on his father’s lake. Why would you want to jerk me around, Val?”
    “Yeah, I know Old Man Pitts. Maybe I didn’t put the names together. Square with me, Dave. What are you trying to prove here?”
    “I think Pitts tried to click off my switch. Your family owns the parish he works for.    A guy like that doesn’t take a dump without somebody’s permission.”
    “That’s a great line. You could be a screenwriter in a blink. I’m serious. I’d like to help you with that. Isn’t your daughter studying literature?”
    Valentine was slick. He didn’t defend or attack. He treated an insult like a compliment and an adversary like a misguided friend. I had acted foolishly in coming to his house. What had I expected? For a man to agree with me when I called him a liar?
    “Thanks for your time. I’ll let myself out,” I said.
    “Don’t go away mad. I’m glad you dropped by. Hey, I live in the guesthouse in back. Let’s throw a steak on the grill.”
    “Another time,” I said.
    He placed his arm across my shoulders. He was almost a half head taller than I, even with a slight slouch in his posture. I tried to step away from him, without being rude, but to no avail. He pointed to an ancient parchment sealed in a glass frame on the wall. “That’s our family coat of arms. The parchment is fifteenth century, but the seal goes back a thousand years earlier.”
    The coat of arms involved a shield, a gladius or sword a Roman legionnaire would have carried, the cross of the Crusades, and the visored helmet of a medieval knight errant.
    “The family name comes from the Battle of Chalons. My ancestors got rid of their own name and substituted the name of a great event,” he said. He removed his arm from my shoulder and gazed benevolently into my face. I couldn’t tell if he was feigning humility or actually offering up his family history to inspire awe in others.
    “Your ancestors fought against Attila the Hun?” I said.
    “We probably didn’t do a very good job of it. We had to fight his descendants in that delayed Teutonic migration known as World Wars One and Two.”
    I looked at him blankly. He had just lifted a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and used it as though it were of his own creation.
    “You’re not impressed?” he said.
    “I had a long day. I’ll be seeing you, Val.”
    When I shook hands with him, I felt his fingers wrap around my skin and squeeze, his eyes lingering on mine, as though he were trying to read my thoughts. “I like you, Dave,” he said.
    Out in the yard, I unconsciously rubbed my hand on my trousers.
    The