Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I had to get out of New Orleans for a while. This homicide guy Magelli was bugging me yesterday about Zipper Clum getting popped. Like I have knowledge about every crime committed in Orleans and Jefferson parishes,” Clete said.

  “You usually do.”

  “Thanks. Let’s get something to go and eat in the park. I want to have a talk with you, big mon.”

  “About what?”

  “I’ll tell you in the park.”

  We ordered two Styrofoam containers of fried catfish and coleslaw and dirty rice and drove across the drawbridge that spanned Bayou Teche at Burke Street. The bayou was dented with rain rings. Clete parked the Cadillac by one of the picnic shelters under the oaks in City Park, and we sat under the tin roof in the rain and warm breeze and ate lunch. Inside all of Clete’s outrageous behavior was the secular priest, always determined to bail his friend out of trouble, no matter how unwanted his help was. I waited for the sermon to begin.

  “Will you either say it or stop looking at me like that?” I said finally.

  “This homicide hotshot, Magelli? He’s heard you’ve been moving the furniture around about your mother’s death. He thinks you might just do a number on somebody.”

  “Who cares what he thinks?”

  “I think he’s right on. You’re going to coast along, not saying anything, stonewalling people, then when you think you’ve found out enough, you’re going to blow up their shit.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “It’s not your style, noble mon. That’s why I’m going to be in town for a little while. I was out at Passion Labiche’s place early this morning.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I’m not sure the hit on Zipper Clum is related to your mother’s death. These political fucks in Baton Rouge want Letty Labiche executed, body in the ground, case closed, so they can get back full-time to the trough. You keep turning over rocks, starting with sticking a gun in Zipper Clum’s mouth up on that roof.”

  “Me?”

  “So I helped a little bit. That Passion Labiche is one hot-ass-looking broad, isn’t she? Is she involved with anybody?”

  “Why don’t you give some thought to the way you talk about women?”

  “It was a compliment. Anyway, you’re right, she’s hiding something. Which makes no sense. What do she and her sister have to lose at this point?”

  I shook my head.

  “I think we should start with the hitter, the cracker on the tape,” I said.

  “I got a question for you. Jack Abbott, this mainline con a writer got out of the Utah Pen some years back? Where’d he go after he knifed a waiter to death in New York?”

  “Morgan City.”

  “What can I say? Great minds think alike. I already put in a couple of calls,” Clete said, grinning while he wiped food off his mouth.

  But I didn’t have great faith in finding the killer of Zipper Clum in Morgan City, even though it was known as a place for a man on the run to disappear among the army of blue-collar laborers who worked out of there on fishing vessels and offshore drilling rigs. Clete had not heard the tape on which Zipper had said his killer had never done outside work and had skin like milk. I also believed Clete was more interested in monitoring me than the investigation into my mother’s death. He came to the sheriff’s department at quitting time, expecting to drive down together to Morgan City.

  “I can’t go today,” I said.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Commitments at home.”

  “Yeah?” He was standing in the middle of my office, his porkpie hat slanted down on his head, his stomach hanging over his belt, an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth. He tossed the cigarette end over end into the wastebasket. “I refuse to light one of these things ever again. Why are you giving me this bullshit, Streak?”

  “Come have dinner with us.”

  “No, I’m meeting this retired jigger an hour from now. You coming or not?”

  “A bank jigger?”

  “More serious. He was the lookout man for a couple of hit teams working out of Miami and New Orleans.”

  “Not interested.”

  “Where do you think we’re supposed to get information from, the library?”

  When I didn’t reply, he said, “Dave, if you want me out of town, just say so.”

  “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

  “You talk about it. I’m meeting the jigger. You don’t want to hear what I find out, no problem.”

  After he closed the door behind him, his heat and anger remained like a visible presence in the room’s silence.

  That evening Alafair, Bootsie, and I were eating supper in the kitchen when we heard a heavy car on the gravel in the driveway. Alafair got up from the table and peered out the window. She was in high school now and seemed to have no memory anymore of the civil war in El Salvador that had brought her here as an illegal refugee, nor of the day I pulled her from the submerged wreckage of an airplane out on the salt. Her Indian-black hair was tied up on her head with a blue bandanna, and from the back, when she raised up on the balls of her feet to see better through the blinds, her body looked like that of a woman ten years her senior.

  “It’s somebody in a limousine, with a chauffeur. She’s rolling down the window. It’s an old woman, Dave,” she said.

  I went out the back door and walked around the side of the house to the limousine. It was white, with charcoal-tinted windows, and the chauffeur wore a black suit and cap and tie and white shirt. Oddly, his face was turned away, as though he did not want me to see it.

  Through the limousine’s open back window I saw Jim Gable’s wife, in a white dress and gloves, drinking sparkling burgundy from a crystal glass with a long stem. The late sun’s glow through the trees gave her skin a rosy tone it did not naturally possess, and her mouth was soft, full of wrinkles, when she smiled at me. What was her name? Corrine? Colinda?

  “Micah, open the door so Mr. Robicheaux can get in,” she said to the chauffeur.

  He stepped out of the driver’s seat and opened the back, his face still averted. When I was inside, on the rolled leather seat, he walked down toward the dock just as a flight of snow egrets flew across the water, their wings pink in the sunset.

  “How you do, Miss Cora?” I said.

  “I couldn’t stand staying another day alone while Jim’s in the city. So I got Micah to drive me on a little tour of your lovely area. Join me in a glass of burgundy, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.

  I realized, listening to her voice, that her Deep South accent came and went arbitrarily, even though her eyes, which were violet, never seemed to vary in their level of warmth and sincerity.

  “No, thanks. Would you like to come in and have a bite to eat?” I replied.

  “I’m afraid I’ve intruded. I do that sometimes. Lack of an audience, that sort of thing.” She watched my face to see if I had inferred a second meaning. Obviously I had not.

  “Audience?” I said, confused.

  “It’s a vanity of mine. I assume everyone on the planet spends time thinking about old movies.” She opened a scrapbook and turned several pages that were thick and stiff with glued news articles and black-and-white photographs. She turned another page, and I looked down at a stunning color photograph of a woman with long blond hair in a black nightgown, reclining seductively on a divan with one arm behind her head. Her eyes were violet, her lipsticked mouth waiting to be kissed.

  “You’re Cora Perez. You were a movie star. I saw you in a film with Paul Muni,” I said.

  “That was at the end of Paul’s career. He was such a wonderful man to work with. He knew how nervous and unsure I was, and he used to bring a flower to me each morning at the set,” she said.

  “It’s an honor to know you, Miss Cora,” I said, still unsure of the reason for her visit. My eyes drifted to the kitchen window, where Alafair’s and Bootsie’s silhouettes were visible at the table.

 
; “I mustn’t keep you,” she said, and touched me lightly on the back of the hand. “Sometimes I just need someone to reassure me I’m not indeed of diminished capacity.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m being declared as such by the court. It’s not flattering, of course. But perhaps they’re right. How does one accused of being mentally impaired prove she is not mentally impaired? It’s like trying to prove a negative.”

  “I don’t think you’re impaired at all, Miss Cora. You strike me as a remarkable person.”

  “Why, you’re obviously a man of great wisdom, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  I thought she would say more and explain her presence or whatever need it was that hovered around the edges of her sentences, but she didn’t. I shook hands with her and got back out of the car, which the chauffeur took as his signal to walk back up from the dock. He fixed his cap down on his forehead and pretended he was studying the details of the dirt road and trees and canebrakes on either side of him as he approached the limousine.

  “Try not to stare at Micah. He has a deformity of the face. Jim calls him ‘Cyclops,’ even though I don’t allow him to do it in my presence,” Miss Cora said.

  Just as she finished speaking Micah tilted his chin into the light and I saw the nodulous skin growth that covered the right side of his face, like a strawberry-colored skein that had hardened and pinched the eye shut, tightening the cheek so that the teeth on the right side of the lip were exposed.

  I pulled my eyes away and looked deliberately through the back window into Miss Cora’s face.

  “Good-bye, Miss Cora,” I said.

  “Come see me. Please do. You impress me greatly, sir,” she replied.

  I went back inside the house and sat down at the table with Alafair and Bootsie.

  “Who was that?” Bootsie asked.

  “Her stage name was Cora Perez. She was pretty big stuff in Hollywood back in the late forties and early fifties,” I said.

  “I remember her. Where’d you meet her?” Bootsie said.

  “Clete and I had to run down some character by the name of Jim Gable. Clete says Gable married her for her money when he knew she had cancer.”

  Bootsie looked down at her plate and picked up her fork. Her hair was the color of honey and it moved in the breeze through the window.

  “Did I say something wrong?” I asked.

  “No, not at all,” she replied. She put a very small piece of food in her mouth with the tip of her fork and kept her eyes on her plate.

  That night, in bed, Bootsie rested her arm across her forehead and looked up at the ceiling. The moon was rising in the east and the revolving blades of the window fan marbled her body with shadows. I put my hand on her shoulder and she rolled toward me and rested her head under my chin. I raised her slip on her thigh and felt the tapered smoothness of her skin. But her hands were folded together and she didn’t respond as she normally did.

  “What’s the problem, Boots?” I asked.

  “This Jim Gable you were talking about? Was he a policeman in New Orleans at one time?” she said.

  “He still is. A liaison wheel with the mayor’s office.”

  “I used to know him,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “After my second husband was killed.”

  She didn’t continue. She seldom spoke of her earlier marriages. Her first husband had been an oil field helicopter pilot who crashed offshore, but the second one had been Ralph Giacano, nephew of Didi Gee, a gangster who held his enemies’ hands down in an aquarium filled with piranha and who some people believe was mixed up in the assassination of President Kennedy. The nephew, Ralph, was not only a degenerate gambler who bankrupted Bootsie, but he also tried to take the Colombians over the hurdles and was shotgunned to death, along with his mistress, in the parking lot of Hialeah racetrack.

  “What about Jim Gable?” I asked.

  “He came to the house a lot after Ralph was killed. He was part of a special unit that was assigned to watch the Mob. We started seeing each other … No, that’s not an honest way to put it. We had an affair.”

  Her knees were drawn up against me, her body motionless. I could feel her breath on my chest.

  “I see,” I said.

  “I don’t like hiding things from you.”

  “It was all a long time ago,” I replied. I tried to keep my voice neutral and ignore the tight feeling in my face and the needles in my throat.

  “Does Jim Gable bother you because Clete says he’s an opportunist?” she asked.

  “He keeps the head of a Vietnamese soldier in a jar of chemicals. He said he’d like to see Letty Labiche electrocuted in stages. I think he lied about his knowledge of my mother’s death,” I said.

  Bootsie lay very quiet in the dark, then rolled away from me and stared up at the ceiling. She sat on the side of the bed with her back to me for a long time. I started to touch her with my hand, but she reached behind her and picked up her pillow and went into the living room.

  7

  The next afternoon, just before quitting time, Clete came into my office.

  “The jigger’s name is Steve Andropolis. He worked for the Giacanos and did freelance stuff in Miami when it was an open city. You remember him?” he said.

  “Vaguely.”

  “I had the wrong address last night. He agreed to show up again tonight. The guy’s a shitbag, Streak, but he’s a gold mine of information.”

  “Why’s he want to help us?”

  “He’s into Wee Willie Bimstine for four large. I got him a one-month extension with no vig.”

  “It sounds good, Cletus,” I said.

  He smiled and put a breath mint on his tongue.

  We drove south to Morgan City as the evening cooled and the clouds over the Gulf turned a deeper red in the sunset. The man named Steve Andropolis was waiting for us in the back of a diner set on pilings by the water’s edge. A half-empty green beer bottle and a white plate filled with fried shrimp tails sat in front of him. The hard, rounded surfaces of his face reminded me of an old baseball. He wore a new golf cap and a bright yellow golf shirt and gray slacks and tan loafers, as though affecting the appearance of a Florida retiree, but he had big-knuckled hands, a faded blue tattoo of a nude girl on his forearm, and close-set, pig’s eyes that took the inventory of everyone in the diner.

  When Clete introduced me, I didn’t take his hand. He let his hand remain in the air a moment, then parted his lips slightly and wiped at something on the corner of his mouth.

  “I know you?” he said.

  “From a long time ago. You had a DWI and the court sent you to a twelve-step program in the Quarter. You stole two-hundred dollars from the group’s treasury.”

  Andropolis turned to Clete. “What’s the deal?” he asked.

  “There’s no problem here, Steve. We just want to know what you’ve heard about this guy who did Zipper Clum,” Clete said.

  “His name’s Johnny Remeta. He’s out of Michigan. They say he’s got a lot of talent,” Andropolis said.

  “A lot of talent?” I said.

  “Is there an echo in here?” Andropolis said.

  “This doesn’t fit, Steve. The guy we’re looking for is a hillbilly,” Clete said.

  “You wanted to know who was the new kid in town, I told you. He’s done hits for the greaseballs out on the coast, maybe a couple of pops in Houston. He don’t have a sheet, either,” Andropolis said.

  “Where is he?” Clete asked.

  “A guy who blows heads? He ain’t like other people. He does the whack, gets his ashes hauled, and visits Disneyland.”

  Andropolis’ eyes kept returning to my face as he spoke.

  “Why’s he looking at me like that?” he asked Clete.

  “Streak’s just being attentive. Right, Dave?” Clete said, and gave me a deliberate look.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Y’all want to know anything else?” Andropolis asked.

  “I think I remember some other thin
gs about you, Steve. Weren’t you in the Witness Protection Program? What happened on that deal?” I said.

  “What do you mean ‘what happened’?”

  “You were one of the guys who gave up Didi Gee. But you’re obviously not a federally protected witness anymore.”

  “Because that tub of guts had his insides eaten out by the Big C. I heard the mortuary had to stuff his fat ass into a piano crate,” he replied.

  “You go way back with the Giacano family?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I knew Didi when he used to carry a bloodstained baseball bat in the backseat of his convertible.”

  “Ever hear about a couple of cops on a pad snuffing a woman in Lafourche Parish back in the sixties?” I asked.

  His eyes cut sideways out the window. He seemed to study the swirls of color in the sky. The sun was almost down now, and small waves from a passing tugboat rippled back over the mudflat under the diner’s pilings.

  “Yeah, I remember that. A whore?” he said.

  “Yeah, Zipper said the same thing. They killed a whore,” I said, my face expressionless, the skin tight against the bone, my hands folded one on top of the other.

  “She had something on them. That’s all I remember,” he said.

  “No names?” I said.

  “No, I don’t know anything else about it.”

  “But you’re sure she was a whore? That’s what you called her, right?” I said.

  “You got some trouble with that word?” he asked.

  “No, not really,” I said, and took my eyes off his and scratched a place on my forehead.

  He raised a finger to the counterman to order a beer for himself, then said, “I got to take a drain.”

  Clete leaned forward in the booth.

  “Quit baiting the guy,” he said.

  “He knows more,” I said.

  “He’s a gumball. You get what you see. Be thankful. We got the name of the shooter.”