DR11 - Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  Also the twenty-three-hour lockdown crowd: sadists, serial killers, necrophiliacs, sex predators, and people who defy classification, what we used to call the criminally insane, those whose deeds are so dark their specifics are only hinted at in news accounts.

  I could have interviewed the jigger named Steve Andropolis on Friday, the same day that Don Ritter did. But what was the point? At best Ritter was a self-serving bumbler who would try to control the interview for his own purposes, probably buy into Andropolis' manipulations, and taint any possibility of obtaining legitimate information from him. Moreover, Ritter was investigating a homicide and had a legal reach that I did not.

  So I waited over the weekend and drove to Morgan City on Monday.

  Just in time to see Andropolis' body being wheeled out of the jail on a gurney by two paramedics.

  "What happened?" I asked the jailer.

  '"What happened?' he asks," the jailer replied, as though a third party were in the room. He was a huge, head-shaved, granite-jawed man whose oversized pale blue suit looked like it was tailored from cardboard.

  "I got people hanging out the windows. I got escapees going through air ducts. I got prisoners walking out the door with 'time served,' when they're not the guys supposed to be walking out the door," he said.

  He took a breath and picked up his cigar from his ashtray, then set it back down and cracked his knuckles like walnuts.

  "I locked Andropolis in with eleven other prisoners. The cell's supposed to hold five. There's three bikers in that cell the devil wouldn't let scrub his toilet. There's a kid who puts broken glass in pet bowls. One guy shoots up speedballs with malt liquor. Those are the normal ones. You ask what happened? Somebody broke his thorax. The rest of them watched while he suffocated. Got any other questions?"

  He scratched a kitchen match across the wood surface of his desk and relit his cigar, staring through the flame at my face.

  The truth was I didn't care how Andropolis had died or even if he was dead. He was evil. He had been a jigger on hit teams, a supplier of guns to assassins, a man who, like a pimp or an eel attached to the side of a shark, thrived parasitically on both the suffering and darkness of others.

  The following day Connie Deshotel called me at my office.

  "I'm at my camp on the lake. Would you like to meet me here?" she said.

  "What for?"

  "I have a tape. A copy of Don Ritter's interview with Andropolis."

  "Ritter and Andropolis are a waste of time."

  "It's about your mother. Andropolis was there when she died. Listen to the details on the tape. If he's lying you'll know . . . Would you rather not do this, Dave? Tell me now."

  12

  THAT EVENING CLETE and I drove to a boat landing outside Loreauville and put my outboard in the water and headed down the long, treelined canal into Lake Fausse Pointe. A sun shower peppered the lake, then the wind dropped and the air became still and birds rose out of the cypress and willows and gum trees against a blood-red sky.

  The alligators sleeping on the banks were slick with mud and looked like they were sculpted out of black and green stone. The back of my neck felt hot, as though it had been burned by the sun, and my mouth was dry for no reason that I could explain, the way it used to be when I woke up with a whiskey hangover. Clete cut the engine and let the outboard float on its wake through a stand of cypress toward a levee and a tin-roofed stilt house that was shadowed by live oaks that must have been over a hundred years old.

  "I'd shit-can this broad now. She's jerking your chain, Streak," he said.

  "What's she got to gain?"

  "She was with NOPD in the old days. She's tight with that greasebag Ritter. You don't let Victor Charles get inside your wire."

  "What am I supposed to do, refuse to hear her tape?"

  "Maybe I ought to shut up on this one," he replied, and speared the paddle down through the hyacinths, pushing us in a cloud of mud onto the bank.

  I walked up the slope of the levee, under the mossy overhang of the live oaks, and climbed the steps to the stilt house's elevated gallery. She met me at the door, dressed in a pair of platform sandals and designer jeans and a yellow pullover that hung on the points of her breasts. She held a spoon and a round, open container of yellow ice cream in her hands.

  She looked past me down the slope to the water.

  "Where's Bootsie?" she said.

  "I figured this was business, Ms. Deshotel."

  "Would you please call me 'Connie'? . . . Is that Clete Purcel down there?"

  "Yep."

  "Has he been house-trained?" she said, raising up on her tiptoes to see him better.

  "Beg your pardon?" I said.

  "He's unzippering himself in my philodendron."

  I followed her into her house. It was cheerful inside, filled with potted plants and bright surfaces to catch the sparse light through the trees. In the kitchen she spooned ice cream into the blender and added pitted cherries and bitters and orange slices and a cup of brandy. She flipped on the switch, smiling at me.

  "I can't stay long, Connie," I said.

  "You have to try this."

  "I don't drink."

  "It's a dessert."

  "I'd like to hear the tape, please."

  "Boy, you are a pill," she replied. Then her face seemed to grow with concern, almost as though it were manufactured for the moment. "What's on that tape probably won't be pleasant for you to hear. I thought I'd make it a little easier somehow."

  She took a battery-powered tape player out of a drawer and placed it on the kitchen table and snapped down the play button with her thumb, her eyes watching my face as the recorded voices of Don Ritter and the dead jigger Steve Andropolis came through the speaker.

  I stood by the screen window and gazed out at the lake while Andropolis described my mother's last hours and the hooker and pimp scam that brought about her death.

  I wanted to shut out the words, live inside the wind in the trees and the light ruffling the lake's surface, listen to the hollow thunking of a pirogue rocking against a wood piling, or just watch Clete's broad back and thick arms and boyish expression as he flipped a lure with his spinning rod out into the dusk and retrieved it back toward the bank.

  But even though he had been a parasite, an adverb and never a noun, Andropolis had proved in death his evil was sufficient to wound from beyond the grave.

  "The guys who whacked her weren't cops. They were off-duty security guards or something. She had this dude named Mack with her. He told everybody he was a bouree dealer but he was her pimp. Him and Robicheaux's mother, if that's what she was, just worked the wrong two guys," Andropolis' voice said.

  As through a sepia-tinted lens I saw wind gusting on a dirt road that lay like a trench inside a sea of sugarcane. Black clouds roiled in the sky; a red and white neon Jax sign swung on a metal pole in front of a dance hall. Behind the dance hall was a row of cabins that resembled ancient slave quarters, and each tiny gallery was lit with a blue bulb. In slow motion I saw my mother, her body obese with beer fat, lead a drunk man from the back of the dance hall to a cabin door. He wore a polished brass badge on his shirt pocket, and she kissed him under the light, once, twice, working her hand down to his loins when he momentarily wavered.

  Then they were inside the cabin, the security guard naked now, mounted between her legs, rearing on his stiffened arms, buckling her body into the stained mattress, bouncing the iron bed frame against the planked wall. A freight train loaded with refined sugar from the mill roared past the window.

  Just as the security guard reached orgasm, his lips twisting back on his teeth like a monkey's, the door to the cabin drifted back on its hinges and Mack stepped inside and clicked on the light switch, his narrow, mustached face bright with purpose. He wore pointed boots and striped pants and a two-tone sports coat and cocked fedora like a horse trainer might. He slipped a small, nickel-plated revolver out of his belt and pointed it to the side, away from the startled couple in the cen
ter of the bed.

  "You just waiting tables, you?" he said to my mother.

  "Look, bud. This is cash and carry. Nothing personal," the security guard said, rolling to one side now, pulling the sheet over his genitalia, removing himself from the line of fire.

  "You ain't seen that band on her finger? You didn't know you was milking t'rew another man's fence?" Mack said.

  "Hey, don't point that at me. Hey, there ain't no problem here. I just got paid. It's in my wallet. Take it."

  "I'll t'ink about it, me. Get down on your knees."

  "Don't do this, man."

  "I was in the bat'room. I splashed on my boots. Right there on the toe. I want that spot to shine . . . No, you use your tongue, you."

  Then Mack leaned over and pressed the barrel of the revolver into the sweat-soaked hair of the naked man while the man cleaned Mack's boot and his bladder broke in a shower on the floor.

  Connie Deshotel pushed the off button on the tape player.

  "It looks like a variation of the Murphy scam gone bad," she said. "The security guard came back with his friend and got even."

  "It's bullshit," I said.

  "Why?" She set two bowls of her ice cream and brandy dessert on the table.

  "Andropolis originally told me the killers were cops, not security guards. Andropolis worked for the Giacanos. Anything he knew had to come from them. We're talking about dirty cops."

  "This is from another tape. The security guard was a Giacano, a distant cousin, but a Giacano. He was killed in a car accident about ten years ago. He worked for a security service in Algiers about the time your mother supposedly died."

  Far across the lake, the sun was just a red ember among the trees. "I tell you what, Ms. Deshotel," I said, turning from the screen.

  "Connie," she said, smiling with her eyes.

  Then her mouth parted and her face drained when she heard my words.

  I walked down the incline through the shadows and stepped into the outboard and cranked the engine. Clete climbed in, rocking the boat from side to side as I turned us around without waiting for him to sit down.

  "What happened in there?" he asked.

  I reached into the ice chest and lifted out a can of Budweiser and tossed it to him, then opened up the throttle.

  It was almost dark when we entered the canal that led to the boat landing. The air was heated, the sky crisscrossed with birds, dense with the distant smell that rain makes in a dry sugarcane field. I ran the boat up onto the ramp and cut the engine and tilted the propeller out of the water and flung our life vests up onto the bank and lifted the ice chest up by the handles and waded through the shallows.

  "You gonna tell me?" Clete said.

  "What?"

  "How it went in there." His face was round and softly focused, an alcoholic shine in his eyes.

  "I told her if Don Ritter ever repeats those lies about my mother, I'm going to jam that tape up his ass with a chain saw."

  "Gee, I wonder if she got your meaning," he said, then clasped his huge hand around the back of my neck, his breath welling into my face like a layer of malt. "We're going to find out who hurt your mother, Streak. But you're no executioner. When those guys go down, it's not going to be on your conscience. My old podjo had better not try to go against me on this one," he said, his fingers tightening into my neck.

  The next morning I woke before dawn to the sounds of rain and a boat engine on the bayou. I fixed a cup of coffee and a bowl of Grape-Nuts and ate breakfast at the kitchen table, then put on my raincoat and hat and walked down to the bait shop in the grayness of the morning to help Batist open up.

  "Dave, I seen a man wit' a boat trailer by the ramp when I drove up," Batist said. "I got out of my truck and he started to walk toward me, then he turned around and drove off. Later a boat gone on by the shop. I t'ink it was him."

  "Who was he?" I asked.

  "I ain't seen him befo'. It was like he t'ought I was somebody else. Maybe he was looking for you, huh?"

  "Why's this guy so important, Batist?"

  "My eyes ain't that good no more. But there was somet'ing shiny on his dashboard. Like chrome. Like a pistol, maybe."

  I turned on the string of lights over the dock and looked out the screen window at the rain denting the bayou and the mist blowing out of the cypress and willow trees in the swamp. Then I saw one of my rental boats that had broken loose from its chain floating sideways past the window.

  "I'll go for it," Batist said behind me.

  "I'm already wet," I said.

  I unlocked an outboard by the concrete ramp and headed downstream. When I went around the bend, I saw the loose boat tangled in an island of hyacinths close-in to a stand of flooded cypress. But I wasn't alone.

  An outboard roared to life behind me, and the green-painted aluminum bow came out of a cut in the swamp and turned into my wake.

  The man in the stern was tall, dark-haired, his skin pale, his jeans and T-shirt soaked. He wore a straw hat, with a black ribbon tied around the crown, and his face was beaded with water. He cut his engine and floated up onto the pad of hyacinths, his bow inches from the side of my boat.

  He placed both of his palms on his thighs and looked at me and waited, his features flat, as though expecting a response to a question.

  "That's an interesting shotgun you have on the seat," I said.

  "A Remington twelve. It's modified a little bit," he replied.

  "When you saw them off at the pump, they're illegal," I said, and grinned at him. I caught the painter on the boat that had broken loose and began tying it to the stern of my outboard.

  "You know who I am?" he asked. His eyes were a dark blue, the color of ink. He took a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face with it, then glanced upward at the grayness in the sky and the water dripping out of the canopy.

  "We don't hear a Kentucky accent around here very often," I said.

  "Somebody shot at me yesterday. Outside New Orleans."

  "Why tell me?"

  "You made them think I was gonna turn them in. That's a rotten thing to do, sir."

  "I hear you killed people for the wise guys out on the coast. You had problems a long time before you came to Louisiana, Johnny."

  His eyes narrowed at my use of his name. His mouth was effeminate and did not seem to go with his wide shoulders and heavy upper arms. He picked at his fingernails and looked at nothing, his lips pursing before he spoke again.

  "This is a pretty place. I'd like to live somewhere like this. This guy who got killed in Santa Barbara? He raped a fourteen-year-old girl at an amusement park in Tennessee. She almost bled to death. The judge gave him two years probation. What would you do if you were her father?"

  "You were just helping out the family?"

  "I've tried to treat you with respect, Mr. Robicheaux. I heard you're not a bad guy for a roach."

  "You came here with a sawed-off shotgun."

  "It's not for you."

  "Who were the other people you did?" The rain had slackened, then it stopped altogether and the water dripping out of trees was loud on the bayou's surface. He removed his straw hat and stared reflectively into the cypress and willows and air vines, his eyes full of light that seemed to have no origin.

  "A greaseball's wife found out her husband was gonna have her popped. By a degenerate who specialized in women. So the wife brought in an out-of-state guy to blow up her husband's shit. The degenerate could have walked away, but some guys just got to try. Nobody in Pacific Palisades is losing sleep."

  "Who paid you to do Zipper Clum and Little Face Dautrieve?"

  "The money was at a drop. All I know is they tried to pop me yesterday. So maybe that puts me and you on the same team."

  "Wrong."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  His eyes seemed to go out of focus, as though he were refusing to recognize the insult that hung in the air. He pulled at his T-shirt, lifting the wetness of the cloth off his skin.

  "You
gonna try to take me down?" he asked.

  "You're the man with the gun," I replied, grinning again.

  "It's not loaded."

  "I'm not going to find out," I said.

  He lifted the cut-down shotgun off the seat and lay it across his thighs, then worked his boat alongside my engine. He ripped out the gas line and tossed it like a severed snake into the cattails.

  "I wish you hadn't done that," I said.

  "I don't lie, sir. Not like some I've met." He pumped open the shotgun and inserted his thumb in the empty chamber. Then he removed a Ziploc bag with three shells in it from his back pocket and began fitting them into the magazine. "I dropped my gun in the water and got my other shells wet. That's why it was empty."