DR11 - Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  "It's all a trade-off. People want money for schools but don't like taxes. I say use the devil's money against him. So a guy like Sookie gets to be a player."

  When I didn't reply, he said, "A lot of folks think Earl K. Long was just an ignorant redneck. But Earl did good things people don't know about. A whole bunch of Negro women graduated from a new nursing program and found out right quick they couldn't get jobs nowhere. So Earl hears about it and says he wants a tour of the state hospital. He pumps hands all over the building, sticks his head in operating rooms, flushes toilets, then gets all the hospital's administrators in one room and locks the door.

  "He says, 'I just seen a shameful spectacle here. Y'all got white nurses hand-waiting on nigra patients, carrying out their bedpans and I don't know what all, and I ain't gonna stand for it. You either hire nigra nurses in those wards or every damn one of you is gonna be out of a job.'

  "The next week the state hospital had two dozen black nurses on staff."

  "Makes a good story," I said.

  "Stories are all the human race has got, Dave. You just got to find the one you like and stay with it," he replied.

  "Are you going to execute Letty Labiche?"

  He replaced his hat on his head and walked down the slope to rejoin his entourage, jiggling his hands in the air like a minstrel man.

  14

  FARTHER TO THE SOUTH of us, in the working-class community of Grand Bois, a young attorney, two years out of law school, filed suit on behalf of the local residents against a large oil corporation. The locals were by and large Cajuns and Houma Indians, uneducated, semiskilled, poor, without political power, and bewildered by the legal apparatus, the perfect community to target as the open-pit depository of oil sludge trucked in from a petroleum treatment plant in Alabama.

  Company officials didn't argue with the contention the pits contained benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and arsenic. They didn't have to. Years ago, during a time of gas shortages, the U.S. Congress had granted the oil industry blanket exemptions from the regulations that govern most toxic wastes. Secondly, the state of Louisiana does not define oil waste as hazardous material.

  The state, the oil corporation, and the community of Grand Bois were now in court, and Connie Deshotel's office was taking depositions from the people in Grand Bois who claimed their children were afflicted with vertigo, red eyes, skin rashes, and diarrhea that was so severe they had to keep buckets in their automobiles.

  Two of those Grand Bois families had moved to New Iberia and were now living up on the bayou road, not far from Passion Labiche's nightclub. On Monday Helen Soileau was assigned to drive Connie Deshotel and her assistant out to their homes.

  Later she told me of Connie Deshotel's bizarre behavior, although she could offer no explanation as to its cause.

  It had rained hard that morning, then the sun had become a white orb in the center of a windless sky, evaporating the water out of the fields, creating a superheated dome of humidity that made you feel like ants were crawling inside your clothes.

  The air-conditioning unit in the cruiser began clanking, then gasped once and gave out. Connie Deshotel had removed her white suit coat and folded it on her lap, trying to keep her composure while her male assistant talked without stop in the backseat. Her armpits were ringed with sweat and a hostile light was growing in her eyes.

  Her assistant paused a moment in his monologue, then cracked a mint between his molars and began again.

  "Why don't the people of Grand Bois move to a place where there's no oil industry? Get jobs as whalers in Japan. Could it be they've done scut work all their lives in the oil industry and couldn't fix ice water without a diagram?" he said.

  He took the silence in the cruiser as indication his point was not understood.

  "The Houma Indians have a problem with oil waste. But they want to build casinos and addict their own people to gambling. I think the whole bunch is ripe for a hydrogen bomb," he said.

  "I don't want to add to your irritability, Malcolm, but would you please shut up?" Connie said.

  "Y'all want something cool to drink?" Helen asked.

  "Yes, please," Connie said.

  They pulled into Passion's nightclub just as a storm cloud covered the sun and the landscape dropped into shadow. Inside, electric fans vibrated on the four corners of the dance floor, and an ancient air-conditioning unit inserted in a sawed-out hole in the back wall blew a stream of refrigerated coolness across the bar.

  Connie sat on a barstool and closed her eyes in the wind stream.

  Helen whistled through the door that gave onto the cafe side of the building.

  "Hey, Passion, you've got some customers in here," she called.

  Connie's eyes opened and she turned her blank face on Helen.

  "Letty Labiche's sister owns this place. You know her?" Helen said.

  "No."

  "From the way you looked, I thought you recognized the name or something."

  "Yes, I did recognize the name. That doesn't mean I know her," Connie said.

  "Yes, ma'am," Helen said.

  "I'd like to leave now," Connie said.

  "I thought you wanted a cold drink."

  "I just wanted to get out of the heat a few minutes. I'm fine now. We should make at least one other stop today," Connie said.

  "Too late," her assistant, Malcolm, said, grinning from behind the bar. He opened two ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola and set them in front of Helen and Connie just as Passion walked in from the cafe and tilted her head at the presence of the man behind her bar.

  "Could I hep y'all?" she asked.

  "Sorry, miss. I'm so dry I'm a fire hazard. I left the money on the register," Malcolm said. He opened a long-neck bottle of beer for himself and stepped back from the foam as it slid over the neck.

  Passion rang up the purchase, her back to them. "Sorry I couldn't get over here to wait on y'all," she said.

  Connie's face looked stricken. She stared helplessly at the back of Passion's head, as though an element from a nightmare had just forced its way inexorably into her waking day.

  Passion turned and placed a quarter and two dimes in front of the male assistant. Then her eyes fell on Connie's.

  "You all right, ma'am?" she asked.

  "Yes. Why do you ask?" Connie said.

  "On days like this the tar on the road melts. You look like you got dehydrated. I got some aspirin."

  "Thank you. I don't need any."

  Passion started to turn away, then a look of vague recognition swam into her face.

  "I seen you somewhere before, ma'am?" she asked.

  "Perhaps. I'm the attorney general."

  "No, I seen you in an old photograph. Or somebody sure do look like you. You got nice features. They don't change with time," Passion said.

  "I'm sure that's a compliment, but I don't know what you're talking about."

  "It's gonna come. Y'all visiting New Iberia?" Passion asked.

  Connie rose from her chair and extended her hand across the bar.

  "It was very nice meeting you," she said, even though they had not exchanged names or been introduced by a third party.

  She walked out to the cruiser, her chin tilted upward, her face bloodless. The wind raked the branches of a live-oak tree against the side of the club and another rain shower burst from the heavens, clattering like marbles on the tin roof.

  "I'm going to finish my beer. Who plays that piano?" Malcolm said.

  Button man OR not, Johnny Remeta obviously didn't fall easily into a predictable category.

  The off-duty New Orleans cop who worked security at the historical museum on Jackson Square watched a lithe young man in shades and knife-creased khakis and half-topped boots and a form-fitting ribbed T-shirt with the sleeves rolled over the shoulders cross from the Cafe du Monde and walk through the park, past a string band playing in front of Pirates Alley, wrap his chewing gum in a piece of foil and drop it in a waste can, comb his hair and enter the museum's doorway.


  Where had the off-duty cop seen that face?

  A mug shot passed around at roll call?

  No, he was imagining things. The mug shot was of a guy who was wanted in a shooting off Magazine. Yeah, the hit on Zipper Clum. A white shooter, which meant it was probably a contract job, somebody the Giacanos hired to wipe out an obnoxious black pimp. Contract shooters didn't wander around in museums under a cop's nose. Besides, this kid looked like he just got out of high school.

  "You visiting from out of town?" the cop asked.

  The young man still wore his shades and was looking at a battle-rent Confederate flag that was pressed under glass.

  "No, I live here. I'm an artist," he replied. He did not turn his head when he spoke.

  "You come here often?"

  "About every three days." He removed his shades and looked the cop full in the face, grinning now. "Something wrong?"

  "Yeah, my feet hurt," the cop said.

  But later the cop was still bothered. He followed the young man across Jackson Square to Decatur, took down the license number of his pickup truck, and called it in.

  One block away, a police cruiser fell in behind the pickup truck. Just as the uniformed cop behind the wheel was about to hit his flasher, the pickup truck turned back into the Quarter on Bienville and drove the short two-block distance to the police station at Royal and Conti.

  The young man in shades parked his truck and went inside.

  The cop in the cruiser kept going, shaking his head disgustedly at the cavalier misuse of his time.

  Inside the police station, the young man gazed idly at Wanted posters on a corkboard, then asked the desk sergeant for directions to the battlefield at Chalmette.

  The desk sergeant watched the young man walk out of the door of the station and get in his truck and drive down Conti toward the river. Then the sergeant was out the door himself, his arms waving in the air at two motorcycle cops who were coming up the walk.

  "The guy in the black pickup! You can still get him!" he yelled.

  Wrong.

  Johnny Remeta cut across the Mississippi bridge onto the West Bank, caught Highway 90, wove five miles through residential neighborhoods and strip malls, and dumped the pickup in St. Charles Parish and boosted an Oldsmobile out of a used-car lot.

  He took back roads through Chacahoula and Amelia, crossed the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya at Morgan City, and hot-wired an ancient Volkswagen bus at the casino on the Chettimanchi Indian Reservation.

  He created a one-man grand-auto crime wave across southwestern Louisiana, driving off idling automobiles from a Jiffy Lube and a daiquiri take-out window, blowing out tires and engines, lighting up emergency dispatcher screens in six parishes.

  He almost eluded the army of state police and sheriff's deputies that was crisscrossing Highway 90, virtually colliding into one another. He swung onto a side road in St. Mary Parish, floored the souped-up stock-car racer he had stolen out of a mechanic's shed, scoured a balloon of dust out of a dirt road for two miles through sugarcane fields that shielded the car from view, then swung back onto 90, a half mile beyond a police barricade, and looked down the long corridor of oaks and pines that led into New Iberia.

  He shifted down, turned across a stone bridge over the bayou, arching a crick out of his neck, knotting his T-shirt in his hand, wiping the sweat off his face with it.

  He'd outrun them all. He filled his lungs with air. The smoke from meat fires drifted through the oaks on people's lawns; the evening sky glowed like a purple rose. Now, to dump this car and find a rooming house where he could watch a lot of television for a few days. Man, it was good to be alive.

  That's when the First Assembly of God church bus hit him broadside, springing his doors, and propelled him through the air like a stone, right through a canebrake into Bayou Teche.

  He sat on a steel bunk in the holding cell, barefoot, his khakis and T-shirt splattered with mud, a bandage wrapped around his head. He pulled a thin strand of bamboo leaf from his hair and watched it tumble in a shaft of light to the cement floor.

  The sheriff and I looked at him through the bars. "Why didn't you get out of New Orleans when you had the chance?" I asked.

  "It's a free country," he replied.

  "Not when you kill people," I said.

  "I'll ask you a better question. Why didn't you stay where you were?" the sheriff said.

  Johnny Remeta's eyes lifted into the sheriff's face, then they emptied of any perception or thought. He looked at the wall, stifling a yawn.

  "Get him processed. I want those detectives from New Orleans to have him out of here by noon tomorrow," the sheriff said, and walked down the corridor and banged the heavy door behind him.

  "What's his problem?" Remeta said.

  "Our space is full up with local wise guys. We don't need imports. Why'd you come to New Iberia?"

  "A guy looks for friends where he can."

  "I'm not your friend. You were hanging around New Orleans to pop the guys who took a shot at you, weren't you?"

  "You blame me?"

  "You know who they are?"

  "No. That's why I hung around." I looked at him a long time. He dropped his eyes to the floor.

  "You told the cop at the museum you were an artist," I said.

  "I paint ceramics. I've done a mess of them."

  "Good luck, kid. I think you're going to need it," I said, and started to go.

  He rose from the bunk and stood at the bars. His face was no more than three inches from mine.

  "I've got money put away for a lawyer. I can beat the beef on Zipper Clum," he said.

  "So?"

  "I have a feeling my kite's going down before I ever see that lawyer."

  His breath was like the stale odor of dead flowers.

  His grief was his own, I told myself as I went home later that evening.

  But I couldn't rest. Zipper Clum's dying statement, taped on the boom box in the lawn-mower shop off Magazine, said Johnny Remeta was the trail back to my mother's death.

  I ate a late supper with Bootsie on the picnic table in the backyard and told her about Johnny Remeta's fears. I expected her to take issue with my concerns, which I seemed to bring home as a matter of course from my job. After I stopped talking, she was pensive, one tooth biting into her bottom lip.

  "I think Remeta's right. Zipper Clum was killed because of what he knew about your mother's death. Now Connie Deshotel has taken a special interest in you. She called again, by the way."

  "What about?"

  "She said she wanted to tell you Clete Purcel's license problems have been straightened out. How nice of her to call us rather than him."

  "Forget her."

  "I'd like to. Dave, I didn't tell you everything about my relationship with Jim Gable. He's perverse. Oh, not with me. Just in things he said, in his manner, the way he'd stand in his undershorts in front of the mirror and comb his hair, the cruelty that was threaded through his remarks."

  The blood had risen in her face, and her eyes were shiny with embarrassment.

  "You didn't know what he was like, Boots."

  "It doesn't help. I think about him and want to wash my body with peroxide."

  "I'm going to help Batist close up, then we'll go for some ice cream," I said.

  I walked down to the bait shop and called Dana Magelli, my NOPD friend, at his home and got the unlisted number for Jim Gable's condo in New Orleans.

  "Why are you messing with Gable?" Magelli asked. "Cleaning up some paperwork, interdepartmental cooperation, that sort of thing."

  "Gable leaves shit prints on everything he touches. Stay away from him. It's a matter of time till somebody scrambles his eggs."

  "It's not soon enough."

  I punched in Jim Gable's number. I could hear opera music playing in the background -when he answered the phone.

  "Y'all are picking up Johnny Remeta tomorrow," I said.

  "Who is this?" he asked.

  "Dave Robicheaux. Remeta thinks some
body might want to blow up his shit."

  "Hey, we owe you a big thanks on this one. You made the ID through that home invasion in Loreauville, didn't you?"

  "He'd better arrive in New Orleans without any scratches on the freight."

  "You're talking to the wrong man, my friend. Don Ritter's in charge of that case."

  "Let me raise another subject. I understand you've made 'some remarks about my wife."