DR11 - Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  "Excuse me for seeming impatient, but why didn't you tell me that?"

  "You didn't ask. Is there anything else?" I called the federal lockup at Marion, Illinois, and got Dr. Louvas on the phone. His was a different cut from his colleague in Florida.

  "Yeah, I remember Johnny well. Actually I liked him. I wouldn't suggest having him over for dinner, though," he said.

  "How's that?"

  "He has two or three personalities. Oh, I don't mean he suffers dissociation, or any of that Three Faces of Eve stuff. He has an abiding sense of anger that he refuses to deal with. If he'd gotten help earlier, he might have turned out to be a writer or artist instead of a candidate for a lobotomy."

  "Because he was raped in prison?"

  "His father would take him to a blind pig on skid row. That's what they call after-hours places in Detroit. According to Johnny, a couple of pedophiles would use him while the old man got drunk on their tab. Family values hadn't made a big splash in the Detroit area yet."

  "So he's hung up over his father?"

  "You got it all wrong, Mr. Robicheaux. He doesn't blame the father for what happened to him. He thinks the mother betrayed him. He's never gotten over what he perceives as her failure."

  "He's making overtures to my daughter."

  There was no response.

  "Are you there?" I asked.

  "You're asking me to tell you his future? My bet is Johnny will do himself in one day. But he'll probably take others with him," the psychologist said.

  The next morning I drove to Baton Rouge and went to Connie Deshotel's office. The secretary told me Connie used her lunch hour on Thursdays to play racquet-ball at a nearby club.

  The club was dazzling white, surrounded with palm trees that were planted in white gravel; the swimming pool in back was an electric blue under the noon sun. Inside the building, I looked down through a viewing glass onto the hardwood floor of a racquetball court and watched Connie take apart her male opponent. She wore tennis shoes with green tubes of compressed air molded into the rubber soles, a pleated tennis skirt, and a sleeveless yellow jersey that was ringed under the neck and arms with sweat. Her tanned calves hardened with muscle when she bent to make a kill shot.

  Her opponent, a tall, graying, athletic man, gave it up, shook hands good-naturedly, and left. She bounced the rubber ball once, served the ball to herself off the wall, then fired it into a low ricochet that sent it arching over her head, as though she were involved in a private celebration of her victory. Her eyes followed the ball's trajectory until they met mine. Then her face tightened, and she pushed her hair out of her eyes and left the court through a door in the back wall, slamming it behind her. I went down the stairs and intercepted her in the lounge area.

  "I have some information about my mother's death,"

  I said.

  "Not here."

  "You're not going to put me off, Connie."

  "What is it?"

  I gestured at a table.

  "I'm leaving here in two minutes. But I'll make you a promise. You follow me anywhere again and I'll have you arrested," she said.

  "I have a witness."

  "To what?"

  "My mother's murder. Two cops in uniform did it. In front of a cabin a few miles off Purple Cane Road in Lafourche Parish. One of them called her an ignorant bitch before he knocked her down."

  Her eyes stared into mine, unblinking, her lashes like black wire. Then they broke and she looked at nothing and pulled the dampness of her jersey off the tops of her breasts.

  "Bring your witness forward," she said.

  "Nope."

  "Why not?"

  "I think the individual would end up dead," I said.

  "You don't want to indicate the person's gender to me? I'm the attorney general of the state. What's the matter with you?"

  "You trust Don Ritter. I don't. I think he tried to have both me and Johnny Remeta killed."

  She motioned at a black waiter in a white jacket. He nodded and began pouring a club soda into a glass of ice for her. She touched the sweat off her eyes with a towel and hung the towel around her neck.

  "I'll say it again. My office is at your disposal. But a lot of this sounds like paranoia and conspiratorial obsession," she said.

  "The cops were NOPD." "How do you know this?"

  "They killed a Lafourche Parish nightclub owner named Ladrine Theriot and made a local constable take the weight. They weren't backwoods coon-asses, either. They were enforcers and bagmen for the Giacanos. So if they weren't New Orleans cops, where did they come from?"

  She took the club soda from the waiter's hand and drank it half-empty. The heat seemed to go out of her face but not her eyes.

  "You have a larger agenda, Dave. I think it has something to do with me," she said.

  "Not me. By the way, you play a mean game of racquetball for a woman who smokes."

  "How kind."

  "The other day I noticed your gold and leather cigarette lighter. Did Jim Gable give you that? Y'all must be pretty tight."

  She got up from the table with her club soda in her hand.

  "My apologies to Bootsie for saying this, but you're the most annoying person I've ever met," she said, and walked toward the dressing room, her pleated skirt swishing across the tops of her thighs.

  "You READ my MAIL?" Alafair said. It was evening, the sun deep down in the trees now, and she was grooming Tex, her Appaloosa, in the railed lot by his shed. She stared at me across his back.

  "The letter was lying on your bed. Bootsie saw Johnny's name on it. It was inadvertent," I replied.

  "You didn't have the right to read it." "Maybe not. Maybe you know what you're doing. But I believe he's a dangerous man."

  "Not the Johnny O'Roarke I know."

  "You always stood up for your friends, Alafair. But this guy is not a friend. The prison psychologist said he's a sick man who will probably die by his own hand and take other people with him."

  "Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit."

  "How about it on the language?"

  "You admit he saved our lives, but you run him down and take his head apart, a person you don't know anything about, then you tell me to watch my language. I just don't expect crap like that from my father."

  "Has he tried to see you?"

  "I'm not going to tell you. It's none of your business."

  "Remeta's a meltdown, Alf."

  "Don't call me that stupid name! God!" she said, and threw down the brush she had been using on Tex and stormed inside the house.

  That night I DREAMED about a sugar harvest in the late fall and mule-drawn wagons loaded with cane moving through the fog toward the mill. The dirt road was frozen hard and littered with stalks of sugarcane, and the fog rolled out of the unharvested cane on each side of the road like colorless cotton candy and coated the mules' and drivers' backs with moisture. Up ahead the tin outline of the mill loomed against the grayness of the sky, and inside I could hear the sounds of boilers overheating and iron machines that pulverized the cane into pulp. Immediately behind the mill a stubble fire burned in a field, creeping in serpentine red lines through the mist.

  The dream filled me with a fear I could not explain. But I knew, with a terrible sense of urgency, I could not allow myself to go farther down the road, into the mill and the grinding sounds of its machinery and the fire and curds of yellow smoke that rose from the field beyond.

  The scene changed, and I was on board my cabin cruiser at dawn, on West Cote Blanche Bay, and the fogbank was heavy and cold on the skin, sliding with the tide into the coastline. To the north I could see Avery Island, like two green humps in the mist, as smooth and firm-looking as a woman's breasts. The waves burst in strings of foam against the white sleekness of the bow, and I could smell the salt spray inside my head and bait fish in a bucket and the speckled trout that arched out of the waves and left circles like rain rings in the stillness of the swells.

  When I woke I went into the kitchen and sat in the dark, my lo
ins aching and my palms tingling on my thighs. I held a damp hand towel to my eyes and tried to think but couldn't. Even though I was awake now, I did not want to look at the meaning behind the dreams. I went back to bed and felt Bootsie stir, then touch my chest and turn on her hip and mold her body against me. She was already wet when I entered her, and she widened her thighs and hooked her feet loosely inside my legs, slipping one hand down to the small of my back while she moved in a slow, circular fashion under me, as she always did when she wanted to preserve the moment for both of us as long as she could.

  But I felt the heat rise in me, like fire climbing upward along a hard, bare surface, then my mouth opened involuntarily and I closed my eyes and pressed my face between her breasts.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, depleted, my face in shadow, one hand still covering the tops of Bootsie's fingers, ashamed that I had used my -wife to hide from the violent act I knew my alcoholic mind was planning.

  24

  EARLY SUNDAY MORNING I heard a car with a blown muffler pull into the drive and continue to the back of the house before the driver cut the engine. I slipped on my khakis and went into the kitchen and looked into the backyard and saw Clete Purcel sitting alone at the redwood picnic table, his Marine Corps utility cap on his head. He had a take-out cup of coffee between his hands, and he kept looking over his shoulder at the dirt road.

  I went outside and eased the screen shut so as not to wake Bootsie and Alafair.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  He looked sideways, then pulled on his nose and let his breath out.

  "I went after Ritter. Nobody's been by?"

  "No."

  "The shit went through the fan."

  "I don't want to know about it."

  "I was trying to help. You got somebody else willing to cover your back on a daily basis?"

  He looked miserable. He rubbed his face, then knocked over his paper cup and spilled coffee on his hands.

  "Tell me," I said.

  "Ritter had dials on this stripper, Janet Gish. She'd been washing stolen money at the Indian casinos for some Jersey wise guys. Ritter nailed the wise guys but he left her out of the bust. The deal was she had to come across for him at least once a month. Guess what? Janet developed the hots for Ritter, can you believe it? So he knew he had a good thing and he played along with her and said he was going to marry her as soon as he could dump his wife. In the meantime he was bopping Janet every Friday afternoon at a motel on Airline.

  "Last week she's in the supermarket and who does she see? Ritter and his old lady. Ritter looks right through Janet and studies these cans of beans on the shelf like he's never seen one before. But what's Ritter supposed to do? she asks herself. Introduce her? Except she's in the next aisle now and she hears Ritter's old lady say, 'Did you see that? She's got jugs like gallon milk bottles. With tattoos yet. You didn't notice?'

  "Ritter says, 'I was never attracted to Elsie the Cow types.' They both thought that was a real laugh.

  "Janet decides it's payback time. She's got a bond on a soliciting charge with Nig and Wee Willie and she calls me up and asks if I can get the DA. to cut her loose on the soliciting beef if she gives up Ritter. I told her that was a possibility but the D.A. would probably make her take the weight on the money laundering deal and maybe there was a better way to spike Ritter's cannon.

  "I got her to call up Ritter's old lady at midnight and tell her she was sorry Don didn't introduce the two of them at the supermarket because they probably have a lot in common. Then Janet goes into detail about Ritter's sex habits and says it's too bad Ritter uses the same old tired line with all his broads, namely that his wife is a drag at home and an embarrassment at departmental social functions and he's shit-canning her as soon as he can make sure all the bills and charge accounts are under her name.

  "It took about ten minutes for Ritter to come tearing across the bridge to Janet's place on the West Bank. She dead-bolted the back door on him and he got a ball peen hammer out of his convertible and started smashing the glass out of the door and trying to get his hand on the lock. That's when I clocked him with the birdbath."

  "You hit him with a cement birdbath?" I said.

  "Hear me out, okay? Janet’s brother owns this car wash behind the apartment. Ritter's half out of it, so I put him in the passenger seat of his convertible and hooked him up to the door handle with his cuffs and drove him up to the car wash entrance.

  "I go, 'Don, you're a dirty cop. Now's the time to rinse your sins, start over again, try keeping your flopper in your pants for a change. You set up that gig on the Atchafalaya and almost got my podjo, Dave, killed, didn't you?'

  "He goes, 'No matter how this comes out, you're still a skell, Purcel.'

  "So I drove his convertible onto the conveyor and pushed all the buttons for the super clean and hot wax job. The pressure hoses came on and those big brushes dipped down inside the car and were scouring Ritter into the seats. I shut it down and gave him another chance, but he started yelling and blowing the horn, so I turned everything back on and stalled the conveyor and left him there with the steam blowing out both ends of the building."

  "You're telling me Ritter's still in there?" I said.

  "Yes and no." His mouth was cone-shaped when he breathed through it. "I had my hands full. Janet was getting hysterical and breaking things and throwing her clothes in a suitcase. Then I heard two popping sounds, like firecrackers in the rain. I went back to the car wash but there wasn't anybody around. Except Ritter floating face-down in all that soap and wax. He'd taken one in the ear and one through the mouth."

  I got up from the table and looked out at my neighbor's field and at the fog rising out of the coulee, my back turned to Clete so he couldn't see my face.

  When I turned around again Clete's eyes were jittering with light, his lips moving uncertainly, like a drunk coming off a bender when he doesn't know whether he should laugh or not at what he has done.

  Then his eyes fixed on mine and his expression went flat and he said, as though by explanation, "This one went south on me."

  "Yeah, I guess it did, Clete."

  "That's all you're going to say?"

  "Come inside. I'll fix you something to eat," I said as I walked past him toward the house.

  "Streak? . . . Damn it, don't give me that look."

  But I went through the kitchen into the bath and brushed my teeth and put cold water on my face and tried not to think the thoughts I was thinking or take my anger out on a friend who had put himself in harm's way on my account. But I believed Ritter'd had knowledge about my mother's death and now it was gone.

  I dried my face and went back into the kitchen.

  "You want me to boogie?" Clete said.

  "Get the skillet out of the cabinet, then call Nig and Wee Willie and tell them you'll need a bond," I said as I took a carton of eggs and a slab of bacon from the icebox.

  After we ate breakfast, Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to Mass. When we got back, Clete was down at the dock, sitting at a spool table under an umbrella, reading the newspaper. From a distance he looked like a relaxed and content man enjoying the fine day, but I knew better. Clete had no doubt about the gravity of his actions. Once again his recklessness had empowered his enemies and he now hung by a spider's thread over the maw of the system.

  Television programs treat the legal process as an intelligent and orderly series of events that eventually punishes the guilty and exonerates the innocent. The reality is otherwise. The day you get involved with the law is the day you lose all control over your life. What is dismissed by the uninitiated as "a night in jail" means sitting for an indeterminable amount of time in a holding cell, with a drain hole in the floor, looking at hand-soiled walls scrawled with pictures of genitalia, listening to other inmates yell incoherently down the corridors while cops yell back and clang their batons on the bars.

  You ask permission to use a toilet. When you run out of cigarettes or matches, you beg them off a screw through t
he bars. Your persona, your identity, and all the social courtesy you take for granted are removed from your existence like the skin being pulled off a banana. When you look through a window onto the street, you realize you do not register on the periphery of what are called free people. Your best hope of getting back outside lies with a bondsman who secretes Vitalis through his pores or a twenty-four-hour Yellow Pages lawyer who wears zircon rings on his fingers and keeps a breath mint on his tongue. We're only talking about day one.

  That afternoon I finally got Dana Magelli on the phone.