DR11 - Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  "Little Face?" I said when I opened the door.

  "I'm moving back here. Out at my auntie's place in the quarters at Loreauville. I got to tell you something," she said, and walked past me and sat down before I could reply.

  "What's up?" I said.

  "Zipper Clum is what's up. He say he gonna do you and Fat Man both."

  "Clete Purcel is 'Fat Man'?"

  "Fat Man shamed him, slapped his face up on that roof, throwed his pimp friends crashing down through a tree. I ax Zipper why he want to hurt you. He say you tole some people Zipper was snitching them off."

  "Which people?"

  She rolled her eyes. "Zipper's gonna tell me that? He's scared. Somebody done tole him he better clean up his own mess or Zipper ain't gonna be working his street corners no more. Anybody who can scare Zipper Clum is people I wouldn't want on my case."

  She shifted her baby to her other shoulder.

  "You're an intelligent lady, Little Face."

  "That's why I'm on welfare and living with my auntie in the quarters."

  "The day Vachel Carmouche was killed a black girl of about twelve was turning an ice cream crank on his gallery. That was eight years ago. You're twenty, aren't you?"

  "You been thinking too much. You ought to go jogging with Fat Man, hep him lose weight, find something useful for you to do so you don't tire out your brain all the time."

  "What happened inside Vachel Carmouche's house that night? Why won't you tell me?"

  "He wanted to live real bad, that's what happened. But he didn't find no mercy 'cause he didn't deserve none. You ax me, a man like that don't find no mercy in the next world, either."

  "You saw him killed, didn't you?"

  "Mine to know."

  "Did he molest you? Is that why Letty came to Carmouche's back door that night?"

  Her small face seemed to cloud with thought.

  "I got to come up wit' a name for you. Maybe an Indian one, something like 'Man Who's Always Axing Questions and Don't Listen.' That's probably too long, though, huh? I'll work on it."

  "That's real wit," I said.

  "It ain't your grief, Sad Man. Stay out of it before you do real damage to somebody. About Zipper? Some snakes rattle before they bite. Zipper don't. He's left-handed. So he's gonna be doing something wit' his right hand, waving it around in the air, taking things in and out of his pockets. You gonna be watching that hand while he's grinning and talking. Then his left hand gonna come at you just like a snake's head. Pow, pow, pow. I ain't lyin', Sad Man."

  "If Vachel Carmouche molested you, we'd have corroborating evidence that he molested Letty and Passion," I said.

  "I got to feed my baby now. Tell Fat Man what I said. It won't be no fun if he ain't around no more," she said.

  She rose from her chair and hefted her baby higher on her shoulder and walked back out the door, her face oblivious to the cops in the hall whose eyes cut sideways at her figure.

  Connie Deshotel was the attorney general of Louisiana. Newspaper accounts about her career always mentioned her blue-collar background and the fact she had attended night school at the University of New Orleans while working days as a patrolwoman. She graduated in the upper five percent of her law class at LSU. She never married, and instead became one of those for whom civil service is an endless ladder into higher and higher levels of success.

  I had met her only once, but when I called her office in Baton Rouge Wednesday afternoon she agreed to see me the next day. Like her boss, Belmont Pugh, Connie Deshotel was known as an egalitarian. Or at least that was the image she worked hard to convey.

  Olive-skinned, with metallic-colored hair that had been burned blond on the ends by the sun, she was dressed in a gray suit with a silver angel pinned on her lapel. When I entered her office, her legs were crossed and her hand was poised with a pen above a document on her desk, like a figure in a painting who emanates a sense of control, repose, and activity at the same time.

  But unlike Belmont Pugh, the sharecropper populist who was so untraveled and naive he believed the national party would put a bumbling peckerwood on its ticket, Connie Deshotel's eyes took your inventory, openly, with no apology for the invasion of your person and the fact you were being considered as a possible adversary.

  "We met once, years ago, during Mardi Gras," she said.

  My gaze shifted off hers. "Yeah, I was still with NOPD. You were in the city administration," I said.

  She touched a mole at the corner of her mouth with a fingertip.

  "I was drunk. I was escorted out of a meeting you were chairing," I said.

  She smiled faintly, but her eyes hazed over, as though I were already disappearing as a serious event in her day.

  "What can I do for you, Detective Robicheaux? That's your grade, detective, right?" she asked.

  "Yeah. An informant told me two cops on a pad for the Giacanos killed a woman in Lafourche Parish in 1966 or '67. Her maiden name was Mae Guillory."

  "Which department were they with?"

  "He didn't know."

  "Did you find a record of the crime?"

  "None."

  "How about the body?"

  "To my knowledge, none was ever found."

  "Missing person reports?"

  "There's no paperwork on this at all, Ms. Deshotel."

  She put down her pen and sat forward in her swivel chair. She looked into space.

  "I'll call the authorities in Lafourche Parish. It sounds like a blind alley, though. Who's the informant?"

  "A pimp in New Orleans."

  "Why's he coming forward now?"

  "A friend of mine was going to throw him off a roof."

  "Ah, it's becoming a little more clear now. Is this friend Clete Purcel?"

  "You know Clete?"

  "Oh, yes. You might say there's a real groundswell for revocation of his P.I. license. In fact, I have his file right here." She opened a desk drawer and removed a manila folder filled with police reports, a thickly folded printout from the National Crime Information Center, and what looked like letters of complaint from all over the state. "Let's see, he shot and killed a government witness, stole a concrete mixer and filled a man's convertible with cement, and destroyed a half-million-dollar home on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth grader. He also slim-jimmed Bobby Earl's car at the Southern Yacht Club and urinated on the seats and dashboard. You say he's been throwing people off of roofs recently?"

  "Maybe I misspoke on that," I said.

  She glanced at her watch.

  "I'm sorry. I'm late for a luncheon. Give me your card and I'll call you with any information I can find," she said.

  "That's good of you," I said.

  "What was the victim's name again?"

  "Mae Guillory was her maiden name. Her married name was Robicheaux."

  "Are you related?"

  "She was my mother. So I'll be hanging around on this one, Ms. Deshotel."

  The inquisitory beam came back in her eyes, as though the earlier judgment she had passed on me had suddenly been set in abeyance.

  5

  AS A LITTLE BOY Zipper Clum tap-danced for coins on the sidewalks in the French Quarter. The heavy, clip-on taps he wore on his shoes clicked and rattled on the cement and echoed off the old buildings as though he were in a sound chamber. He only knew two steps in the routine, but his clicking feet made him part of the scene, part of the music coming from the nightclubs and strip joints, not just a raggedy black street hustler whose mother turned tricks in Jane's Alley.

  Later on, Zipper Clum came to fancy himself a jazz drummer. He took his first fall in Lake Charles, a one-bit in the Calcasieu Parish Prison, before the civil rights era, when the Negroes were kept in a separate section, away from the crackers, who were up on the top floor. That was all right with Zipper, though. It was cooler downstairs, particularly when it rained and the wind blew across the lake. He didn't like crackers, anyway, and at night he could hear the music from the juke joint on Ryan Street and groove on the cras
h of drums and the wail of horns and saxophones.

  His fall partner was a junkie drummer who had sat in with the Platters and Smiley Lewis. Zipper was awed by the fact that a rag-nose loser with infected hype punctures on his arms could turn two drumsticks into a white blur on top of a set of traps.

  In the jail the junkie created two makeshift drumsticks from the wood on a discarded window shade and showed Zipper everything he knew. There was only one problem: Zipper had desire but only marginal talent.

  He feigned musical confidence with noise and aggressiveness. He sat in with bands on Airline Highway and crashed the cymbals and bass drum and slapped the traps with the wire brushes. But he was an imitator, a fraud, and the musicians around him knew it.

  He envied and despised them for their gift. He was secretly pleased when crack hit New Orleans like a hurricane in 1981. Zipper was clean, living on his ladies, pumping iron and drinking liquid protein and running five miles a day while his pipehead musician friends were huffing rock and melting their brains.

  But he still loved to pretend. On Saturday mornings he sat in the back of his cousin's lawn-mower shop off Magazine and plugged in a cassette of Krupa or Jo Jones or Louie Bellson on his boom box, simultaneously recording himself on a blank tape while he flailed at his set of drums.

  Witnesses later said the white man who parked a pickup truck out front wore Levi's low on his hips, without a belt, a tight-fitting white T-shirt, cowboy boots, and combed his hair like a 1950s greaser. One witness said he was a teenager; two others described him as a man in his thirties. But when they talked to the police artist, they all agreed he had white skin, a mouth like a girl's, and that he looked harmless. He smiled and said hello to an elderly woman who was sitting under an awning, fanning herself.

  The bell tinkled over the front door and Zipper turned down the boom box and shouted from the back, "My cousin's next door."

  But some crackers just don't listen.

  "Hey, don't come around that counter, man," Zipper said. "Say, you not hearing me or something? The man who own this store ain't here right now."

  "Sorry."

  "Yeah, just stay out there in front. Everything gonna be cool."

  "When's he gonna be back?"

  "Maybe two or three minutes, like the sign on the door say."

  "You play drums?"

  There was a pause. "What you want in here, cracker?" Zipper asked.

  "Your cousin's got a big tab with Jimmy Fig. He's got to pay the vig to the Fig."

  Zipper got up from the stool he was sitting on and walked to the service counter. The counter was lined with secondhand garden tools that had been wire-brushed on a machine, sharpened, oiled, and repainted.

  "Jimmy Fig don't lend money. He sells cooze," Zipper said.

  "If you say so. I just go where they tell me."

  "Don't grin at me, man."

  "No problem."

  "Hey, take your hand out where I can see it," Zipper said.

  "I delivered the message. I'm going now. Have a good day."

  "No, I want to show you something. This is a twenty-dollar gold piece. Bet you fifty dollars I can roll it across the top of my fingers three times without dropping it. I lose, I put in the gold piece, too. Damn, I just dropped it. You on, my man?"

  "Fifty dollars? "Without touching it with the other hand?"

  "You got it, bo."

  "You give me the gold piece, too?"

  "My word's solid, bo. Ask anybody about Zipper Clum."

  "All right, there's my fifty bucks. This isn't a hustle, is it?"

  Zipper smiled to himself and began working the gold piece across the tops of his fingers, the edges of the coin tucking into the crevices of skin and flipping over like magic. At the same time his left hand moved under the counter, where his cousin had nailed a leather holster containing a .38 revolver. Zipper felt his palm curve around the checkered wood handles and the smooth taper of the steel.

  "Oops, I dropped it again. I done made you rich, cracker," he said, and slipped the .38 from the leather.

  It was a good plan. It had always worked before, hadn't it? What was wrong?

  His mind could not assimilate what had just happened. The gold piece had dropped off the tops of his fingers and bounced on the counter and rolled dryly across the wood. But the cracker had not been watching the coin. He had just stood there with that stupid grin on his face, that same, arrogant, denigrating white grin Zipper had seen all his life, the one that told him he was a dancing monkey, the unwanted child of a Jane's Alley whore.

  He wanted to snap off a big one, right in the cracker's mouth, and blow the back of his head out like an exploding muskmelon.

  But something was wrong in a way he couldn't focus on, like a dream that should illuminate all the dark corners of your consciousness but in daylight eludes your memory. His left hand wouldn't function. The coldness of the steel, the checkering on the grips had separated themselves from his palm. One side of him was lighter than the other, and he was off balance, as though the floor had tilted under his feet. He closed his eyes and saw the scene take place again, watching it now through a red skein on the backs of his eyelids, the cracker lifting a machete off the counter, one his cousin had honed on an emery wheel, swinging it across Zipper's forearm, chopping through tendon and bone like a butcher's cleaver.

  Zipper stared down at the .38 and his severed arm and the fingers that now seemed to be trying to gather up the gold twenty-dollar piece from the countertop. Zipper's boom box was playing Louie Prima's "Sing, Sing, Sing," and he remembered a little boy on Bourbon Street stooping in mid-dance to catch the coins that bounced out of the cigar box by his feet and rolled across the sidewalk.

  "It was supposed to be a clean hit. That's the way I work. So it's on you," the cracker said, and came quickly behind the counter and shoved Zipper to the floor.

  The cracker pulled back the slide on a .25 automatic and bent over and pulled the trigger, straddling Zipper, his cowboy boots stenciling the floor with Zipper's blood. But the gun clicked and did not fire.

  The cracker ejected the shell, then aimed the muzzle an inch from Zipper's forehead and shielded his face with one hand to avoid the splatter.

  "You the trail back to Robicheaux's mama. You got a mouth like a girl. You got blue eyes. You got skin like milk. You never done no outside work. You six feet tall. Boy, you one badass motherfucker," Zipper said.

  "You got that last part right," the cracker said.

  It was funny how loud a .25 was. A couple of pops and you couldn't hear for an hour. The shooter recovered his empty brass and the ejected dud from the floor, pulled off his T-shirt, which was now splattered with blood, wiped off the machete's handle, and walked to his truck with his shirt wadded up in his hand.

  Then something bothered him. What was it? He went back inside and kicked the boom box on the floor and smashed its guts out with his boot heel. Still, something wasn't right. Why had the pimp started taking his inventory? A mouth like a girl's? What was that stuff about somebody's mama? Maybe the pimp was a latent fudge packer. There was a lot of weirdness around these days. Well, that's the way the toilet flushed sometimes.

  The old woman outside, who was deaf, waved to him as he twisted the steering wheel of his truck, a pocket comb in his teeth, and turned into the traffic.

  6

  MONDAY MORNING AN old-time NOPD homicide investigator named Dana Magelli sat down in my office and played the recording tape that had been recovered from the destroyed boom box at the murder scene off Magazine Street. Magelli had dark, close-clipped hair and dark skin and wore a neat mustache and still played an aggressive handball game three days a week at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Photos from the crime scene and a composite sketch of the shooter were spread on top of my desk.

  "Why would Zipper call the hitter the trail back to your mother?" he asked.

  "Zipper says 'Robicheaux' on the tape. He doesn't mention a first name. Why do you connect the tape to me?" I replied.


  "You and Clete Purcel were at First District asking questions about him."

  "He told me he saw two cops kill my mother back in the sixties."

  "I see," Magelli said, his eyes going flat. "Which leads you to conclude what?"

  "That maybe the guys who did it put the hitter on Zipper Clum."

  "Who might these guys be?"

  "Search me," I said, my eyes not quite meeting his.