Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  After sunset he went inside and ate dinner at his kitchen table, a bottle of refrigerated wine uncapped by his plate. A hand tapped on the back door, and he rose from his chair and pushed open the screen.

  A moment later he was crawling across the linoleum while a mattock tore into his spine and rib cage, his neck and scalp, exposing vertebrae, piercing kidneys and lungs, blinding him in one eye.

  Letty Labiche was arrested naked in her backyard, where she was burning a robe and work shoes in a trash barrel and washing Vachel Carmouche’s blood off her body and out of her hair with a garden hose.

  For the next eight years she would use every means possible to avoid the day she would be moved to the Death House at Angola Penitentiary and be strapped down on a table where a medical technician, perhaps even a physician, would inject her with drugs that sealed her eyes and congealed the muscles in her face and shut down her respiratory system, causing her to die inside her own skin with no sign of discomfort being transmitted to the spectators.

  I had witnessed two electrocutions at Angola. They sickened and repelled me, even though I was involved in the arrest and prosecution of both men. But neither affected me the way Letty Labiche’s fate would.

  2

  Clete Purcel still had his private investigator’s office in the Quarter, down on St. Ann, and ate breakfast every morning in the Café du Monde across from Jackson Square. That’s where I found him, the third Saturday in April, at a shady outdoor table, a cup of coffee and hot milk and pile of powdered beignets on a plate in front of him.

  He wore a blue silk shirt with huge red flowers on it, a porkpie hat, and Roman sandals and beige slacks. His coat was folded over an empty chair, the handkerchief pocket torn loose from the stitching. He had sandy hair that he combed straight back and a round Irish face and green eyes that always had a beam in them. His arms had the girth and hardness of fire plugs, the skin dry and scaling from the sunburn that never quite turned into a tan.

  At one time he was probably the best homicide investigator NOPD ever had. Now he ran down bail skips in the projects for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.

  “So I’m hooking up Little Face Dautrieve when her pimp comes out of the closet with a shank and almost cuts my nipple off,” he said. “I paid three hundred bucks for that suit two weeks ago.”

  “Where’s the pimp?” I asked.

  “I’ll let you know when I find him.”

  “Tell me again about Little Face.”

  “What’s to tell? She’s got clippings about Letty Labiche all over her living room. I ask her if she’s morbid and she goes, ‘No, I’m from New Iberia.’ So I go, ‘Being on death row makes people celebrities in New Iberia?’ She says, ‘Brush your teeth more often, Fat Man, and change your deodorant while you’re at it.’ ”

  He put a beignet in his mouth and looked at me while he chewed.

  “What’s she down on?” I asked.

  “Prostitution and possession. She says the vice cop who busted her got her to lay him first, then he planted some rock in her purse. He says he’ll make the possession charge go away if she’ll provide regular boomboom for him and a department liaison guy.”

  “I thought the department had been cleaned up.”

  “Right,” Clete said. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and picked up his coat. “Come on, I’ll drop this at the tailor’s and take you out to the project.”

  “You said you hooked her up.”

  “I called Nig and got her some slack … Don’t get the wrong idea, mon. Her pimp is Zipper Clum. Little Face stays on the street, he’ll be back around.”

  We parked under a tree at the welfare project and walked across a dirt playground toward the two-story brick apartment building with green window trim and small green wood porches where Little Face Dautrieve lived. We passed a screen window and Clete fanned the air in front of his face. He stared through the screen, then banged on the frame with his fist.

  “Lose the pipe and open the front door,” he said.

  “Anything for you, Fat Man. But don’t get on my bat’room scale again. You done broke all the springs,” a voice said from inside.

  “My next job is going to be at the zoo. I can’t take this anymore,” Clete said when we were on the front porch.

  Little Face pushed open the door and held it while we walked inside. She wore cut-off blue jeans and a white T-shirt and had very dark skin and lustrous, thick hair that she wore on her shoulders. Her eyes were no bigger than dimes.

  “This is Dave Robicheaux. He’s a homicide detective in Iberia Parish,” Clete said. “He’s a friend of Letty Labiche.”

  She tilted up her profile and pursed her lips and brushed back her hair with her fingers. She had on heels, and her rump and the backs of her thighs were taut against her shorts.

  “How about flexing your brain instead of your stuff for a change?” Clete said.

  “What he want wit’ me?” she said.

  “Why would you keep all those newspaper clippings about Letty?” I asked.

  “They for Zipper,” she replied.

  “You know how Zipper got his name? He carved all over a girl’s face with a razor blade,” Clete said to her.

  “We still love you, Fat Man. Everybody down here do,” she said.

  “I hate this job,” Clete said.

  I placed my hands lightly on the tops of Little Face’s arms. For a moment the cocaine glaze went out of her eyes.

  “Letty Labiche is probably going to be executed. A lot of people think that shouldn’t happen. Do you know something that can help her?” I said.

  Her mouth was small and red, and she puckered her lips uncertainly, her eyes starting to water now. She pulled out of my grasp and turned away.

  “I got an allergy. It makes me sneeze all the time,” she said.

  The mantel over the small fireplace was decorated with blue and red glass candle containers. I stooped down and picked up a burned newspaper photo of Letty from the hearth. Her image looked like it was trapped inside a charcoal-stained transparency. A puff of wind blew through the door, and the newspaper broke into ash that rose in the chimney like gray moths.

  “You been working some juju, Little Face?” I asked.

  “ ’Cause I sell out of my pants don’t mean I’m stupid and superstitious.” Then she said to Clete, “You better go, Fat Man. Take your friend wit’ you, too. You ain’t funny no more.”

  Sunday morning I went to Mass with my wife, Bootsie, and my adopted daughter, Alafair, then I drove out to the Labiche home on the bayou.

  Passion Labiche was raking pecan leaves in the backyard and burning them in a rusty barrel. She wore men’s shoes and work pants and a rumpled cotton shirt tied under her breasts. She heard my footsteps behind her and grinned at me over her shoulder. Her olive skin was freckled, her back muscular from years of field work. In looking at the brightness of her face, you would not think she grieved daily on the plight of her sister. But grieve she did, and I believed few people knew to what degree.

  She dropped a rake-load of wet leaves and pecan husks on the fire, and the smoke curled out of the barrel in thick curds like damp sulfur burning. She fanned her face with a magazine.

  “I found a twenty-year-old hooker in New Orleans who seems to have a big emotional investment in your sister’s case. Her name’s Little Face Dautrieve. She’s originally from New Iberia,” I said.

  “I don’t guess I know her,” she said.

  “How about a pimp named Zipper Clum?”

  “Oh, yes. You forget Zipper about as easy as face warts,” she said, and made a clicking sound and started raking again.

  “Where do you know him from?” I said.

  “My parents were in the life. Zipper Clum’s been at it a long time.” Then her eyes seemed to go empty as though she were looking at a thought in the center of her mind. “What’d you find out from this black girl?”

  “Nothing.”

  She nodded, her eyes still translucent, empty of anyth
ing I could read. Then she said, “The lawyers say we still got a chance with the Supreme Court. I wake up in the morning and think maybe it’s all gonna be okay. We’ll get a new trial, a new jury, the kind you see on television, full of people who turn abused women loose. Then I fix coffee and the day’s full of spiders.”

  I stared at her back while she raked. She stopped and turned around.

  “Something wrong?” she said.

  “I didn’t mention Little Face Dautrieve was black,” I said.

  She removed a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth. Her skin looked dry and cool inside the smoke from the fire, her hands resting on the rake, her shoulders erect.

  “What are the odds she work for Zipper and she white?” she said.

  When I didn’t reply her eyes wandered out into the yard.

  “I’ll stay in touch,” I said finally.

  “You bet, good-looking man, you.”

  I operated a boat-rental and bait business on the bayou down toward Avery Island, south of New Iberia. The house my father had built of cypress sat up on a slope above the dirt road, its wide gallery and rusted corrugated roof shaded by live-oak and pecan trees. The beds were planted with roses, impatiens, hydrangeas, and hibiscus, and we had a horse lot for Alafair’s Appaloosa and a rabbit hutch and a duck pond at the foot of the backyard. From the gallery we could look down through the tree trunks in the yard to the dock and concrete boat ramp and the bait shop and the swamp on the far side. At sunset I pulled back the awning on the guy wires that ran above the dock and turned on the string of overhead lights and you could see the bream feeding on the insects around the pilings and the water hyacinths that grew in islands among the cypress knees. Every night the sky over the Gulf danced with heat lightning, white sheets of it that rippled silently through hundreds of miles of thunderheads in the wink of an eye.

  I loved the place where I lived and the house my father had built and notched and grooved and pegged with his hands, and I loved the people I lived with in the house.

  Sunday night Bootsie and I ate supper on the picnic table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. The wind was balmy and smelled of salt and fish spawning, and the moon was up and I could see the young sugarcane blowing in my neighbor’s field.

  Bootsie set out a tray of deviled eggs and sliced ham and onions and tomatoes on the table and poured two glasses full of crushed ice and sun tea and put sprigs of mint in them. Her hair was the color of honey and she had cut it so it was short and thick on the back of her neck. She had the most lovely complexion of any woman I had ever known. It had the pinkness of a rose petal when the rose first opens into light, and a faint flush came into her cheeks and throat when she made love or when she was angry.

  “You saw Passion Labiche today?” she asked.

  “Yeah. It bothered me a little bit, too,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “A hooker in New Orleans, a bail skip Clete ran down, had saved all these clippings about Letty. I asked Passion if she knew her. She said she didn’t, but then she slipped and referred to the girl as being black. Why would she want to lie?”

  “Maybe she was just making an assumption.”

  “People of color usually make derogatory assumptions about their own race?” I said.

  “All right, smart,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  She hit the top of my hand with her spoon. Just then the phone rang in the kitchen.

  I went inside and picked it up.

  “I got the word on Zipper Clum. He’s going to be in a fuck pad in Baton Rouge about two hours from now. Out towards where Highland Road runs into the highway … You there?” Clete said.

  “Yeah. I’m just a little tired.”

  “I thought you wanted the gen on those news clippings.”

  “Can we nail this guy another time?”

  “The Zip’s a moving target,” he said.

  I put my army-issue .45 that I had brought home from Vietnam on the seat of my truck and took the four-lane to Lafayette, then caught I-10 across the Atchafalaya Basin. The wind came up and it started to rain, dimpling the bays on each side of the causeway. The islands of willows and flooded cypress were in early leaf, whipping in the wind, and there was a hard chop in the bays that broke against the pilings of abandoned oil platforms. I crossed the Atchafalaya River, which had swollen over its banks into the woods, then the wetlands began to fall behind me and I was driving through pasture and farmland again and up ahead I could see the bridge across the Mississippi and the night glow of Baton Rouge against the sky.

  I drove through the city, then east on Highland, out into the country again, and turned on a shell road that led back into a grove of trees. I saw Clete’s maroon Cadillac parked by a white cinder-block apartment building whose windows were nailed over with plywood. A second car, a new Buick with tinted windows, was parked next to a cluster of untrimmed banana trees. A light burned behind the plywood on the second floor of the building, and another light was turned on inside a shed that had been built over the stairwell on the roof.

  I clipped my holster on my belt and got out of the truck and walked toward the front entrance. It had stopped raining now, and the wind puffed the trees over my head. The dark blue paint of the Buick was luminous with the rainwater that had beaded into drops as big as quarters on the wax.

  I heard feet scraping on the roof, then a man’s voice yell out and a sound like a heavy weight crashing through tree limbs.

  I slipped the .45 out of its holster and went to the side of the building and looked up toward the roof. I saw Clete Purcel lean over the half-wall that bordered the roof, stare at something down below, then disappear.

  I went in the front door and climbed the stairs to a hallway that was littered with garbage and broken plaster. Only one room was lighted. The door was open and a video camera on a tripod was propped up by a bed with a red satin sheet on it.

  I went up another stairwell to the roof. I stepped out on the gravel and tar surface and saw Clete grab a black man by his belt and the back of his collar and run him toward the wall, then fling him, arms churning, into a treetop down below.

  “What are you doing?” I said incredulously.

  “They were gang-banging a pair of sixteen-year-old girls down there and filming it. Zipper and his pals have gone into the movie business,” Clete said. He wore a blue-black .38 in a nylon and leather shoulder holster. A flat-sided sap stuck out of his back pocket. “Right, Zip?”

  He kicked the sole of a mulatto who was handcuffed by one wrist to a fire-escape rung. The mulatto’s eyes were turquoise, the irises ringed with a frosted discoloration. A puckered, concentric gray scar was burned into one cheek. His hair was almost white, straight, like a Caucasian’s, cut short, his body as taut and shiny as wrapped plastic, his arms scrolled with jailhouse art.

  “Robicheaux?” he said, focusing on my face.

  “Why’s Little Face Dautrieve collecting news articles on Letty Labiche?” I asked.

  “Her brains are in her ass. That’s where they suppose to be. Say, your man here kind of out of control. How ’bout a little intervention?”

  “I don’t have much influence with him,” I said.

  “It’s your flight time, Zipper. I’m not sure I can hit that tree again, though,” Clete said. He pulled his revolver from his shoulder holster and threw it to me, then leaned down and unlocked the cuff on Zipper’s wrist and jerked him to his feet.

  “Look over the side, Zipper. It’s going to break all your sticks, guaranteed. Last chance, my man,” Clete said.

  Zipper took a breath and raised both hands in front of him, as though placating an unteachable adversary.

  “I tole you, Little Face got her own groove. I don’t know why she do what she do,” he said.

  “Wrong answer, shithead,” Clete said, and hooked one hand under Zipper’s belt and clenched the other tightly on the back of his neck.

  Zipper’s face twisted toward mine, the rictus of his mouth filled with
gold and silver, his breath a fog of funk and decayed shrimp.

  “Robicheaux, your mama’s name was Mae … Wait, it was Guillory before she married. That was the name she went by … Mae Guillory. But she was your mama,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  He wet his lips uncertainly.

  “She dealt cards and still hooked a little bit. Behind a club in Lafourche Parish. This was maybe 1966 or ’67,” he said.

  Clete’s eyes were fixed on my face. “You’re in a dangerous area, sperm breath,” he said to Zipper.

  “They held her down in a mud puddle. They drowned her,” Zipper said.

  “They drowned my … Say that again,” I said, my left hand reaching for his shirt, my right lifting Clete’s .38 toward his face.

  “These cops were on a pad. For the Giacanos. She saw them kill somebody. They held her down in the mud, then rolled her into the bayou,” Zipper said.

  Then Clete was between me and Zipper Clum, shoving me in the chest, pushing away the gun in my hand as though it were attached to a spring. “Look at me, Streak! Get out of it! Don’t make me clock you, noble mon … Hey, that’s it. We’re copacetic here, yes indeedy. Nothing rattles the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.”

  3

  My father was an enormous, black-haired, illiterate Cajun whose saloon brawls were not only a terrifying experience for his adversaries but beautiful to watch. He would back against a wall in Provost’s or Slick’s or Mulate’s and take on all comers, his hamlike fists crashing against the heads of his opponents, while cops and bouncers tried to nail him with pool cues and chairs and batons before he destroyed the entire bar. Blood would well out of his scalp and glisten in his beard and wild, curly hair; the more his adversaries hit him, the more he would grin and beckon the brave and incautious into range of his fists.

  That was the Aldous Robicheaux people saw publicly, fighting, his shirt and striped overalls ripped off his back, his wrists handcuffed behind him while a half dozen cops escorted him to a police car. They never saw what my father and mother did to each other at home before my father went to the saloon to find a surrogate for the enemy he couldn’t deal with inside his own breast.