"Clete says the entry wounds look like they came from a .22 or .25," I said.
"Thank him for his feedback on that."
"He didn't do it, Dana. It was a professional hit. I think we're talking about Johnny Remeta."
"Except Purcel has a way of stringing elephant shit behind him everywhere he goes."
"You want me to bring him in?"
"Take a guess."
"We'll be there in three hours."
There was a long silence and I knew Magelli's basic decency was having its way with him.
"IAD has been looking at Ritter for a month. Tell Purcel to come in and give a statement. Then get him out of town," he said.
"Pardon?"
"Janet Gish confirms his story. We don't need zoo creatures muddying up the water right now. You hearing me?"
"You're looking at some other cops?"
He ignored my question. "I mean it about Purcel. He's not just a pain in the ass. In my view he's one cut above the clientele in Angola. He mixes in our business again, I'll turn the key on him myself," Magelli said.
I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle on top of the counter in the bait shop. Through the screen window I could see Clete at a spool table, watching an outboard pass on the bayou, his face divided by sunlight and shadow. I walked outside the bait shop and looked down at him.
"That was Dana Magelli. You're going to skate," I said.
He beamed at me, and I realized all the lessons he should have learned had just blown away in the breeze.
The next day NOPD matched the .25-caliber rounds taken from Don Ritter's body to the .25-caliber round that was fired into Zipper Clum's forehead.
That night Alafair went with friends to the McDonald's on East Main. She came home later than we expected her and gave no explanation. I followed her into her bedroom. Tripod was outside the screen on the windowsill, but she had made no effort to let him in. The light was off in the room and Alafair’s face was covered with shadow.
"What happened tonight?" I asked.
"Whenever I tell you the truth about something, it makes you mad."
"I've shown bad judgment, Alafair. I'm just not a good learner sometimes."
"I saw Johnny. I took a ride with him."
I ran my hand along the side of my head. I could feel a tightening in my veins, as though I had a hat on. I took a breath before I spoke.
"With Remeta?" I said.
"Yes."
"He's wanted in another shooting. An execution at point-blank range in a car wash."
"I told him I couldn't see him again. I'm going to sleep now, Dave. I don't want to talk about Johnny anymore," she said.
She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for me to go out of the room. On the shelf above her bedstead I could see the painted ceramic vase Remeta had given to her, the Confederate soldier and his antebellum girlfriend glowing in the moonlight.
The call came at four in the morning.
"You told your daughter not to see me again?" the voice asked.
"Not in so many words," I replied.
"That was a chickenshit thing to do."
"You're too old for her, Johnny."
"People can't be friends because they're apart in years? Run your lies on somebody else."
"Your problems began long before we met. Don't take them out on us."
"What do you know about my problems?"
"I talked with the prison psychologist."
"I'm starting to construct a new image of you, Mr. Robicheaux. It's not a good one."
I didn't reply. The skin of my face felt flaccid and full of needles. Then, to change the subject, I said, "You should have lost the .25 you used on Zipper Clum. NOPD has made you for the Ritter hit."
"Ritter gave up your mother's killers, Mr. Robicheaux. I was gonna give you their names. Maybe even cap them for you. But you act like I'm the stink on shit. Now I say fuck you," he said, and hung up.
At 9 A.M. I sat in the sheriff's office and watched the sheriff core out the inside of his pipe with a penknife.
"So you got to see the other side of Johnny Remeta?" he said, and dropped the black buildup of ash off his knife blade into the wastebasket.
"He pumped Ritter for information, then blew out his light," I said.
"This guy is making us look like a collection of web-toed hicks, Dave. He comes and goes when he feels like it. He takes your daughter for rides. He murders a police officer and calls you up in the middle of the night and tells you about it. Forgive me for what I'm about to say next."
"Sir?"
"Do you want this guy out on the ground? It seems you and he and Purcel have the same enemies."
"I don't think that's a cool speculation to make, Sheriff."
"Let me put it this way. The next time I hear this guy's name, it had better be in conjunction with either his arrest or death. I don't want one of my detectives telling me about his phone conversations with a psychopath or his family's involvement with same. Are we clear?"
"There're pipe ashes on your boot," I said, and left the room.
Ten minutes later I received a phone call from a woman who did not identify herself but just started talking as though I already knew who she was. She had a heavy Cajun accent and her voice was knotted with anger and dismay and a need to injure.
"I t'ought you'd like to know what you done. Not that it makes no difference to somebody who t'inks he got the right to twist a sick man up wit' his words," she said.
"Who is this?" I asked.
But she kept wading in. "You was a lot smarter than him, you. You know how to put t'oughts in somebody's head, make him full of guilt, fix it so he cain't go nowhere in his head except t'rew one door. So it ain't enough leprosy eat him up and turn his hands to nutria feet. Man like you got to come along and push him and push him and push him till he so full of misery he gonna do what you want."
Then I remembered the duck-shaped blind woman who had been hanging wash behind the cabin of Bobby Cale, the ex-constable, down by Point au Fer.
"Did something happen to Bobby?" I said.
She couldn't answer. She started weeping into the phone.
"Ma'am, tell me what it is," I said.
"I smelled it on the wind. Out in the persimmon trees. He was gone t'ree days, then I found him and touched him and he swung in my hands, light as bird shell. You done this, suh. Don't be telling yourself you innocent, no. 'Cause you ain't."
The side of my head felt numb after I hung up, as though a dirty revelation about myself had just been whispered in my ear. But I wasn't sure if my sense of regret was over the possibility that I was a contributing factor in the suicide of Bobby Cale or the fact I had just lost my only tangible lead back to my mother's killers.
25
THE SHRIMP FESTIVAL was held each year at the end of summer down by the bay. On Friday, when the day cooled and the summer light rilled the evening sky, shrimp boats festooned with pennants and flags blew their horns in the canal and a cleric blessed the fleet while thousands wandered up and down a carnival midway, drinking from beer cups and eating shrimp off paper plates. College students, the working classes, and politicians from all over the state took part. Inside the cacophony of calliopes and the popping of .22 rifles in the shooting galleries and the happy shrieks that cascaded down from a Ferris wheel, the celebrants took on the characteristics of figures in a Brueghel painting, any intimations about mortality they may have possessed now lost in the balm of the season.
Belmont Pugh was there, and Jim Gable and his wife, and by the Tilt-A-Whirl I saw Connie Deshotel in an evening dress, carrying a pair of silver shoes in one hand, her other on her escort's arm for balance, her cleavage deep with shadow.
But the figure who caught my eye was outside the circle of noise and light that rose into the sky from the midway. Micah, Cora Gable's chauffeur, sat beside the Gables' limo on a folding canvas stool, tossing pieces of dirt at a beer can, his jaws slack, like a man who doesn't care what others think of his appearance
or state of mind. A rolled comic book protruded from the side pocket of his black coat.
I left Bootsie at the drink pavilion and walked into the parking area and stood no more than three feet in front of him. He raised his eyes, then tinked a dirt clod against the beer can, his face indifferent.
"Looks like you're in the dumps, partner," I said.
He flexed his mouth, as though working a bite of food out of his gums. "I'm finishing out my last week," he replied.
"You're not working for Ms. Gable anymore?"
"She thinks I sassed her. It was a misunderstanding. But I guess it helped her husband."
"Sassed her?"
"We were passing all these shacks where the sugarcane workers used to live. Ms. Perez says to herself, 'The glory that was Rome.'
"So I say, 'It sure wasn't any glory, was it?'
"She says, 'Beg your pardon?'
"I say, 'Rich man got the poor whites to fight with the coloreds so the whole bunch would work for near nothing while the rich man got richer.' It got real quiet in the car."
"Sounds like you got your hand on it, Micah," I said.
"Tell me about it," he said resentfully. "I looked in the rearview mirror and her face was tight as paper, like it had got slapped. She says, 'This land belonged to my family. So I suggest you keep your own counsel.'"
He removed the comic book from his pocket and tapped it in his palm, his anger seeming to rise and fall, as though it could not find an acceptable target.
"Doesn't seem like that's enough to get a person fired," I said.
"Gable's been acting good to her lately. I think she's gonna let him have the money to build that racetrack out in New Mexico. I had to be a smart-ass at the wrong time and give him what he needed to get me canned."
"You cut up Axel Jennings, Micah?"
He opened his comic book and flopped the pages back on his knee, thinking, his deformed face like a melted candied apple in the glow from the midway.
"You're always trying to get another inch, aren't you? I'll give you something better to chew on," he said. "You know a woman named Maggie Glick, runs a bar full of colored whores in Algiers? It was Jim Gable got her out of prison. Gable's got a whole network of whores and dope peddlers working for him. That's the man gonna be head of your state police, Mr. Robicheaux. Play your cards right and there might be a little pissant job in it for you somewhere."
He smiled at the corner of his mouth, a glint in his good eye.
"Some people enjoy the role of victim. Maybe you've found what you were looking for, after all," I said, and walked away, wondering if I, too, possessed a potential for cruelty I had chosen not to recognize.
When I returned to the pavilion I realized I had made a mistake. Belmont Pugh had cornered Connie Deshotel and Bootsie and there was no easy way of getting away from the situation. Belmont had launched into one of his oratorical performances, guffawing, gesturing at the air like Huey Long, slinging shrimp tails out into the darkness, the damp rawness of his body reaching out like a fist. He squeezed Connie with one arm while his wife, a black-haired woman with recessed dark eyes and a neck like a hog, looked on sternly, as though her disapproval of Belmont's behavior somehow removed her from all the machinations and carnival vulgarity that had placed her and her husband in the governor's mansion.
Sookie Motrie stood at Belmont's elbow, dressed in the two-tone boots and clothes of a horse tout at a western track, his salt-and-pepper mustache clipped and trim, his snubbed, hawk nose moving about like a weather vane. For years he had been an ambulance chaser in Baton Rouge and had self-published a detective novel that he tried to unload on every movie representative who visited the area. But he had found his true level as well as success when he became a lobbyist for Vegas and Chicago gambling interests. Even though he had been indicted twice on RICO charges, no door in the state legislature or at any of the regulatory agencies was closed to him.
He laughed when Belmont did and listened attentively to Belmont's coarse jokes, but still managed to watch everyone passing by and to shake the hand, even if quickly, of anyone he deemed important.
Jim and Cora Gable stood at the makeshift plank bar that sold mint juleps in plastic cups for three dollars. He wore a pale pink shirt and dark tie with roses on it and a white sports coat, his face glowing with the perfection of the evening. No, that's too simple. I had to hand it to Gable. He exuded the confidence and self-satisfaction of those who know that real power lies in not having to demonstrate its possession. Every gesture, every mannerism, was like an extension of his will and his ability to charm, a statement about a meticulous personality that allowed no exception to its own rules. He walked toward Belmont's circle and lifted a sprig of mint from his drink and shook the drops from the leaves, bending slightly so as not to spot his shoes.
Cora Gable started to raise her hand, her lipsticked mouth twisting with alarm, like someone left behind unexpectedly at a bus stop. But almost on cue, as though Gable were privy to all the unconscious anxieties that drove her life, he turned and said, "I'll be just a minute, sweetheart. Order another julep."
Belmont asked Connie if she knew Jim Gable.
"I'm not sure. Maybe we met years ago," she replied.
"How do you do, Miss Connie? It's good to see you," Gable said.
They did not look directly at each other again; they even stepped backwards at the same time, like people who have nothing in common.
I stared at the two of them, as though the moment had been caught inside a cropped photograph whose meaning lay outside the borders of the camera's lens. Both Gable and Connie had come up through the ranks at NOPD back in the late 1960s. How could they have no specific memory of each other?
Then Connie Deshotel lit a cigarette, as though she were distracted by thoughts that would not come together in her mind. But she did not have the lighter I had seen her use by her swimming pool, the one that was identical to the thin leather and gold lighter owned by Jim Gable.
His face split with his gap-toothed smile.
"It's the Davester," he said.
"I was just talking with your chauffeur about your friendship with Maggie Glick," I said.
"Maggie, my favorite madam," he said.
"You got her out of prison?" I said.
"Right again, Davester. A wrong narc planted crystal on her. It's a new day in the department. Too bad you're not with us anymore," he replied.
It started to rain, thudding on top of the tents, misting on the neon and the strings of electric lights over the rides. A barman dropped a tarp on one side of the drink pavilion, and the air was sweet and cool in the dryness of the enclosure and I could smell the draft beer and whiskey and mint and sweet syrup and melted ice in the plastic cups along the bar.
"Remember me, Dave?" Sookie Motrie said, and put out his hand. After my hand was firmly inside his, he locked down on my fingers and winked and said, "When I used to write bonds for Wee Willie Bimstine, I went to see you in the lockup once. I think you were doing extracurricular research. Back in your days of wine and roses.
I took my hand from his and looked out into the rain, then said to Bootsie, "I promised Alf we'd be back early. I'll get the car and swing around behind the pavilion."
I didn't wait for her to answer. I walked into the rain, out beyond the noise of the revelers in the tents and the rides whose buckets and gondolas spun and dipped emptily under the electric lights.
You just walk away. It's easy, I thought. You don't provoke, you don't engage. You keep it simple and your adversaries never have power over you.
I started Bootsie’s car and drove through the mud toward the drink pavilion. Cora Gable had disappeared, but Jim Gable was at the plank bar, standing just behind Bootsie.
I kept working my twelve-step program inside my head, the way a long-distance ocean swimmer breathes with a concentrated effort to ensure he does not swallow water out of a wave and drown. I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent mo
ments that used to come aborning like a sul-furous match flaring off a thumbnail.
Through the rain and the beating of the windshield wipers I saw Jim Gable standing so close behind Bootsie that his shadow seemed to envelop her body. She was dabbing with a napkin at a spot on the plank bar where she had spilled a drink and was evidently not aware of his closeness, or the way his loins hovered just behind her buttocks, the glaze that was on his face.
I stopped the car and stepped out into the rain, the car door yawing behind me.
DR11 - Purple Cane Road Page 26