Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  The home was weathered, the woodwork termite-eaten and the white paint cracked by the sun and dulled by smoke from stubble fires, but it was still a fine place in which to live, a piece of history from antebellum times, if only Letty were here to enjoy it, if only she had not traded off her life in order to kill a worthless man like Vachel Carmouche.

  “You prowling ’round my house for a reason?” someone said behind me.

  “What’s the haps, Passion?” I said.

  She wore sandals and baggy jeans and stood with her big-boned hands on her hips.

  “Clete says you think he’s a cradle robber, that I’m too young a chick for a man his age.”

  “He tells that to women all the time. It makes them feel sorry for him,” I replied.

  “What were you doing over at Carmouche’s place?” she asked.

  “An elderly black friend of mine was mentioning how you and Letty were inseparable. How if somebody saw one of you, he automatically saw the other.”

  “So?”

  “What were you doing the night Carmouche got it?”

  “Read the trial report. I’m not interested in covering that same old territory again. Tell me something. You got a problem with your friend seeing me ’cause I’m Creole?”

  “You’ll have to find another pincushion, Passion. See you around,” I said, and walked across the yard under the shade trees toward my truck.

  “Yeah, you, too, big stuff,” she said.

  When I drove back up the road, she was carrying a loaded trash can in each hand to the roadside, her chest and heavy arms swollen with her physical power. I waved, but my truck seemed to slide past her gaze without her ever seeing it.

  That afternoon Governor Belmont Pugh held a news conference, supposedly to talk about casinos, slot machines at the state’s racetracks, and the percentage of the gambling revenue that should go into a pay raise for schoolteachers.

  But Belmont did not look comfortable. His tie was askew, the point of one collar bent upward, his eyes scorched, his face the color and texture of a boiled ham. He kept gulping water, as though he were dehydrated or forcing down the regurgitated taste of last night’s whiskey.

  Then one reporter stood up and asked Belmont the question he feared: “What are you going to do about Letty Labiche, Governor?”

  Belmont rubbed his mouth with the flat of his hand, and the microphone picked up the sound of his calluses scraping across whiskers.

  “Excuse me, I got a sore throat today and cain’t talk right. I’m granting an indefinite stay of execution. Long as she’s got her appeals up there in the courts. That’s what the law requires,” he said.

  “What do you mean ‘indefinite,’ Governor?”

  “I got corn fritters in my mouth? It means what I said.”

  “Are you saying even after her Supreme Court appeal, you’re going to continue the stay, or do you plan to see her executed? It’s not a complicated question, sir,” another reporter, a man in a bow tie, said, smiling to make the insult acceptable.

  Then, for just a moment, Belmont rose to a level of candor and integrity I hadn’t thought him capable of.

  “Y’all need to understand something. That’s a human life we’re talking about. Not just a story in your papers or on your TV show. Y’all can take my remarks any damn way you want, but by God I’m gonna do what my conscience tells me. If that don’t sit right with somebody, they can chase a possum up a gum stump.”

  An aide stepped close to Belmont and spoke into his ear. Belmont’s face had the flatness of a guilty man staring into a strobe light. It didn’t take long for the viewer to realize that a rare moment had come and gone.

  Belmont blinked and his mouth flexed uncertainly before he spoke again.

  “I’m an elected official. I’m gonna do my duty to the people of Lou’sana. That means when the appeals is over, I got to uphold the law. I don’t got personal choices … That’s it. There’s complimentary food and drink on a table in the back of the room.” He swallowed and looked into space, his face empty and bloodless, as though the words he had just spoken had been said by someone else.

  The next morning I read the coroner’s report on the death of Vachel Carmouche. It was signed by a retired pathologist named Ezra Cole, a wizened, part-time deacon in a fundamentalist congregation made up mostly of Texas oil people and North Louisiana transplants. He had worked for the parish only a short time eight or nine years ago. But I still remembered the pharmacy he had owned in the Lafayette Medical Center back in the 1960s. He would not allow people of color to even stand in line with whites, requiring them instead to wait in the concourse until no other customers were inside.

  I found him at his neat gray and red bungalow out by Spanish Lake, sanding a boat that was inverted on sawhorses. His wife was working in the garden behind the picket fence, a sunbonnet on her head. Their lawn was emerald green from soak hoses and liquid nitrogen, their bamboo and banana trees bending in their backyard against the blueness of the lake. But in the midst of this bucolic tranquillity, Ezra Cole waged war against all fashion and what he saw as the erosion of moral tradition.

  “You’re asking me how blood got on the ceiling and the wall by the stove? The woman slung it all over the place,” he said.

  He wore suspenders over a white dress shirt and rubber boots with the pants tucked inside. His face was narrow and choleric, his eyes busy with angry thoughts that seemed to have less to do with my questions than concerns he carried with him as a daily burden.

  “The pattern was too thin. Also, I don’t know how she could throw blood on the ceiling from a heavy tool like a mattock,” I said.

  “Ask me how she knocked the eyeball out of his head. The answer is she probably has the strength of three men. Maybe she was full of dope.”

  “The drug screen says she wasn’t.”

  “Then I don’t know.”

  “Was there a second weapon, Doctor?”

  “It’s all in the report. If you want to help that woman, pray for her soul, ’cause I don’t buy death row conversions.”

  “I think the blood on the ceiling was thrown there by a knife or barber’s razor or weed sickle,” I said.

  His face darkened; his eyes glanced sideways at his wife. His hand pinched hard into my arm.

  “Step over here with me,” he said, pushing and walking with me toward my truck.

  “Excuse me, but take your hand off my person, Dr. Cole.”

  “You hear my words, Mr. Robicheaux. I know Vachel Carmouche’s relatives. They don’t need to suffer any more than they have. There’s nothing that requires a pathologist to exacerbate the pain of the survivors. Are you understanding me, sir?”

  “You mean you lied on an autopsy?”

  “Watch your tongue.”

  “There was a second weapon? Which means there might have been a second killer.”

  “He was sexually mutilated. While he was still alive. What difference does it make what kind of weapon she used? The woman’s depraved. You’re trying to get her off? Where’s your common sense, man?”

  At sunset that same day Batist phoned up from the dock.

  “Dave, there’s a man down here don’t want to come up to the house,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Hang on.” I heard Batist put the receiver down on the counter, walk away from it, then scrape it up in his hand again. “He’s outside where he cain’t hear me. I t’ink he’s a sad fellow ’cause of his face.”

  “Is his name Mike or Micah or something like that?”

  “I’ll go ax.”

  “Never mind. I’ll be right down.”

  I walked down the slope toward the dock. A purple haze hung in the trees, and birds lifted on the wind that blew across the dead cypress in the swamp. The man who was the chauffeur for Cora Gable was leaning on the rail at the end of the dock, looking out at the bayou, his face turned into the shadows. His shirtsleeves were rolled and his biceps were tattooed with coiled green and red snakes whose fangs we
re arched into their own tails.

  “You’re Micah?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Maybe you can Ms. Perez.”

  “Jim Gable’s wife?”

  “I call her by her screen name. The man who marries her ought to take her name, not the other way around.”

  His right eye glimmered, barely visible behind the nodulous growth that deformed the side of his face and exposed the teeth at the corner of his mouth. His hair was straw-colored and neatly barbered and combed, as though his personal grooming could negate the joke nature had played upon him.

  “It’s all about a racetrack. Outside of Luna Mescalero, New Mexico,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Mr. Gable got her to buy a spread out there. He’s building a racetrack. He’s been trying to do it for years. That’s where I’m from. I was a drunkard, a carnival man, what they call the geek act, before that woman come into my life.”

  “She seems like a special person,” I said.

  He turned his face into the glow of the electric lights and looked me directly in the eyes.

  “I did nine months on a county road gang, Mr. Robicheaux. One day I sassed a hack and he pulled me behind the van and caned knots all over my head. When I tried to get up he spit on me and jabbed me in the ribs and whipped me till I cried. Ms. Perez seen it from her front porch. She called the governor of New Mexico and threatened to walk in his office with a reporter and slap his face unless I was released from jail. She give me a job and an air-conditioned brick cottage to live in when other people would hide their children from me.”

  “I don’t know what I can do, Micah. Not unless Jim Gable has committed a crime of some kind.”

  He chewed the skin on the ball of his thumb.

  “A man who doesn’t respect one woman, won’t respect another,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  He looked out into the shadows again, his head twisting back and forth on his neck, as though searching for words that would not injure.

  “He speaks disrespectfully of Ms. Perez in front of other men. She’s not the only one. Is your wife’s first name Bootsie?”

  “Yes,” I replied, the skin tightening around my temples.

  “He said dirty things about her to a cop named Ritter. They laughed about her.”

  “I think it’s time for you to go.”

  He splayed open his hand, like a fielder’s glove, and stared at it and wiped dirt off the heel with the tips of his fingers.

  “I’ve been told to get off better places. I come here on account of Ms. Perez. If you won’t stand up for your wife, it’s your own damn business,” he said, and brushed past me, his arm grazing against mine.

  “You hold on,” I said, and lifted my finger at him. “If you’ve got a beef to square with Jim Gable, you do it on your own hook.”

  He walked back toward me, the teeth at the corner of his mouth glinting in the purple dusk.

  “People come to the geek act so they can look on the outside of a man like me and not look at the inside of themselves. You stick your finger in my face again and I’ll break it, policeman be damned,” he said.

  It stormed that night. The rain blew against the house and ran off the eaves and braided and whipped in the light that fell from the windows. Just as the ten o’clock news came on, the phone rang in the kitchen.

  The accent was East Kentucky or Tennessee, the pronunciation soft, the “r” sound almost gone from the words, the vowels round and deep-throated.

  “There’s no point in trying to trace this call. I’m not using a ground line,” he said.

  “I’m going to take a guess. Johnny Remeta?” I said.

  “I got a hit on me. Maybe you’re responsible. I can’t be sure.”

  “Then get out of town.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “Why’d you call me?”

  “Sir, you told folks I was a snitch. What gives you the right to lie like that? I don’t even know you.”

  “Come in. It’s not too late to turn it around. Nobody’s mourning Zipper Clum.”

  “You’ve got to set straight what you’ve done, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “You’re in the wrong line of work to demand redress, partner.”

  “Demand what?”

  “Listen, you wouldn’t go through with the job at Little Face Dautrieve’s place. Maybe you have qualities you haven’t thought about. Meet me someplace.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I didn’t reply. He waited in the silence, then cleared his throat as though he wanted to continue talking but didn’t know what to say.

  The line went dead.

  A hit man who calls you “sir”?

  11

  At eight o’clock Monday morning the sheriff stopped me just as I walked in the front door of the department. A small square of blood-crusted tissue paper was stuck to his jawbone where he had cut himself shaving.

  “Come down the hall and talk with me a minute,” he said.

  I followed him inside his office. He took off his coat and hung it on a chair and gazed out the window. He pressed his knuckles into his lower spine as though relieving himself of a sharp pain in his back.

  “Close the door. Pull the blind, too,” he said.

  “Is this about the other day?”

  “I told you I didn’t want Clete Purcel in here. I believe that to be a reasonable request. You interpreted that to mean I have problems of conscience over Letty Labiche.”

  “Maybe you just don’t like Purcel. I apologize for implying anything else,” I said.

  “You were on leave when Carmouche was killed. You didn’t have to put your hand in it.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “The prosecutor asked for the death penalty. The decision wasn’t ours.”

  “Carmouche was a pedophile and a sadist. One of his victims is on death row. That one just won’t go down, Sheriff.”

  The color climbed out of his neck into his face. He cut his head to speak, but no words came out of his mouth. His profile was as scissored as an Indian’s against the window.

  “Don’t lay this off on me, Dave. I won’t abide it,” he said.

  “I think we ought to reopen the case. I think a second killer is out there.”

  He widened his eyes and said, “You guys in A.A. have an expression, what is it, ‘dry drunks’? You’ve got a situation you can’t work your way out of, so you create another problem and get emotionally drunk on it. I’m talking about your mother’s death. That’s the only reason I’m not putting you on suspension.”

  “Is that it?” I said.

  “No. A New Orleans homicide cop named Don Ritter is waiting in your office,” he replied.

  “Ritter’s Vice.”

  “Good. Clear that up with him,” the sheriff said, and leaned against the windowsill on his palms, stretching out his frame to ease the pain in his lower back.

  Don Ritter, the plainclothes detective Helen called the gel head, was sitting in a chair in front of my desk, cleaning his nails over the wastebasket with a gold penknife. His eyes lifted up at me. Then he went back to work on his nails.

  “The sheriff says you’re Homicide,” I said.

  “Yeah, I just changed over. I caught the Zipper Clum case.”

  “Really?”

  “Who told you and Purcel to question people in New Orleans about Johnny Remeta?”

  “He’s a suspect in a house invasion.”

  “A house invasion, huh? Lovely. What are we supposed to do if you scare him out of town?”

  “He says that’s not his way.”

  “He says?”

  “Yeah, he called me up last night.”

  Ritter brushed the detritus from his nails into the basket and folded his penknife and put it in his pocket. He crossed his legs and rotated his ankle slightly, watching the light reflect on his shoe shine. His hair looked like gelled pieces of thick twine strung back
on his scalp.

  “The home invasion? That’s the break-in at Little Face Dautrieve’s place?” he said.

  “Little Face says you planted rock on her. She’s trying to turn her life around. Why don’t you stay away from her?”

  “I don’t know what bothers me worse, the bullshit about talking to Remeta or the injured-black-whore routine. You want to nail this guy or not?”

  “You see Jim Gable?”

  “What about it?”

  “Tell him I’m going to look him up on my next trip to New Orleans.”

  He chewed with his front teeth on something, a tiny piece of food perhaps.

  “So this is what happens when you start over again in a small town. Must make you feel like staying in bed some days. Thanks for your time, Robicheaux,” he said.

  I signed out of the office at noon and went home for lunch. As I drove down the dirt road toward the house, I saw a blue Lexus approach me under the long line of oak trees that bordered the bayou. The Lexus slowed and the driver rolled down her window.

  “How you doin’, Dave?” she said.

  “Hey, Ms. Deshotel. You visiting in the neighborhood?”

  “Your wife and I just had lunch. We’re old school chums.”

  She took off her sunglasses, and the shadows of leaves moved back and forth on her olive skin. It was hard to believe her career in law enforcement went back into the 1960s. Her heart-shaped face was radiant, her throat unlined, her dark hair a reminder of the health and latent energy and youthful good looks that her age didn’t seem to diminish.

  “I didn’t realize y’all knew each other,” I said.

  “She didn’t remember me at first, but … Anyway, we’ll be seeing you. Call me for anything you need.”

  She drove away with a casual wave of the hand.

  “You went to school with Connie Deshotel?” I asked Bootsie in the kitchen.

  “A night class at LSU-NO. She just bought a weekend place at Fausse Pointe. You look puzzled.”