Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  “You gonna tell me?” Clete said.

  “What?”

  “How it went in there.” His face was round and softly focused, an alcoholic shine in his eyes.

  “I told her if Don Ritter ever repeats those lies about my mother, I’m going to jam that tape up his ass with a chain saw.”

  “Gee, I wonder if she got your meaning,” he said, then clasped his huge hand around the back of my neck, his breath welling into my face like a layer of malt. “We’re going to find out who hurt your mother, Streak. But you’re no executioner. When those guys go down, it’s not going to be on your conscience. My old podjo had better not try to go against me on this one,” he said, his fingers tightening into my neck.

  The next morning I woke before dawn to the sounds of rain and a boat engine on the bayou. I fixed a cup of coffee and a bowl of Grape-Nuts and ate breakfast at the kitchen table, then put on my raincoat and hat and walked down to the bait shop in the grayness of the morning to help Batist open up.

  “Dave, I seen a man wit’ a boat trailer by the ramp when I drove up,” Batist said. “I got out of my truck and he started to walk toward me, then he turned around and drove off. Later a boat gone on by the shop. I t’ink it was him.”

  “Who was he?” I asked.

  “I ain’t seen him befo’. It was like he t’ought I was somebody else. Maybe he was looking for you, huh?”

  “Why’s this guy so important, Batist?”

  “My eyes ain’t that good no more. But there was somet’ing shiny on his dashboard. Like chrome. Like a pistol, maybe.”

  I turned on the string of lights over the dock and looked out the screen window at the rain denting the bayou and the mist blowing out of the cypress and willow trees in the swamp. Then I saw one of my rental boats that had broken loose from its chain floating sideways past the window.

  “I’ll go for it,” Batist said behind me.

  “I’m already wet,” I said.

  I unlocked an outboard by the concrete ramp and headed downstream. When I went around the bend, I saw the loose boat tangled in an island of hyacinths close-in to a stand of flooded cypress.

  But I wasn’t alone.

  An outboard roared to life behind me, and the green-painted aluminum bow came out of a cut in the swamp and turned into my wake.

  The man in the stern was tall, dark-haired, his skin pale, his jeans and T-shirt soaked. He wore a straw hat, with a black ribbon tied around the crown, and his face was beaded with water. He cut his engine and floated up onto the pad of hyacinths, his bow inches from the side of my boat.

  He placed both of his palms on his thighs and looked at me and waited, his features flat, as though expecting a response to a question.

  “That’s an interesting shotgun you have on the seat,” I said.

  “A Remington twelve. It’s modified a little bit,” he replied.

  “When you saw them off at the pump, they’re illegal,” I said, and grinned at him. I caught the painter on the boat that had broken loose and began tying it to the stern of my outboard.

  “You know who I am?” he asked. His eyes were a dark blue, the color of ink. He took a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face with it, then glanced upward at the grayness in the sky and the water dripping out of the canopy.

  “We don’t hear a Kentucky accent around here very often,” I said.

  “Somebody shot at me yesterday. Outside New Orleans.”

  “Why tell me?”

  “You made them think I was gonna turn them in. That’s a rotten thing to do, sir.”

  “I hear you killed people for the wise guys out on the coast. You had problems a long time before you came to Louisiana, Johnny.”

  His eyes narrowed at my use of his name. His mouth was effeminate and did not seem to go with his wide shoulders and heavy upper arms. He picked at his fingernails and looked at nothing, his lips pursing before he spoke again.

  “This is a pretty place. I’d like to live somewhere like this. This guy who got killed in Santa Barbara? He raped a fourteen-year-old girl at an amusement park in Tennessee. She almost bled to death. The judge gave him two years probation. What would you do if you were her father?”

  “You were just helping out the family?”

  “I’ve tried to treat you with respect, Mr. Robicheaux. I heard you’re not a bad guy for a roach.”

  “You came here with a sawed-off shotgun.”

  “It’s not for you.”

  “Who were the other people you did?”

  The rain had slackened, then it stopped altogether and the water dripping out of trees was loud on the bayou’s surface. He removed his straw hat and stared reflectively into the cypress and willows and air vines, his eyes full of light that seemed to have no origin.

  “A greaseball’s wife found out her husband was gonna have her popped. By a degenerate who specialized in women. So the wife brought in an out-of-state guy to blow up her husband’s shit. The degenerate could have walked away, but some guys just got to try. Nobody in Pacific Palisades is losing sleep.”

  “Who paid you to do Zipper Clum and Little Face Dautrieve?”

  “The money was at a drop. All I know is they tried to pop me yesterday. So maybe that puts me and you on the same team.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  His eyes seemed to go out of focus, as though he were refusing to recognize the insult that hung in the air. He pulled at his T-shirt, lifting the wetness of the cloth off his skin.

  “You gonna try to take me down?” he asked.

  “You’re the man with the gun,” I replied, grinning again.

  “It’s not loaded.”

  “I’m not going to find out,” I said.

  He lifted the cut-down shotgun off the seat and lay it across his thighs, then worked his boat alongside my engine. He ripped out the gas line and tossed it like a severed snake into the cattails.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” I said.

  “I don’t lie, sir. Not like some I’ve met.” He pumped open the shotgun and inserted his thumb in the empty chamber. Then he removed a Ziploc bag with three shells in it from his back pocket and began fitting them into the magazine. “I dropped my gun in the water and got my other shells wet. That’s why it was empty.”

  “You said ‘not like some.’ You calling me a liar?” I said.

  “You spread rumors I was a snitch. I was in the Flat Top at Raiford. I never gave anybody up.”

  “Listen, Johnny, you backed out on the Little Face Dautrieve contract. You’re still on this side of the line.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t understand. Look at me.”

  “I don’t like people talking to me like that, Mr. Robicheaux. Let go of my boat.”

  I looked hard into his face. His eyes were dark, his cheeks pooled with shadow, like a death mask, his mouth compressed into a small flower. I shoved his boat out into the current.

  “You got it, kid,” I said.

  He cranked the engine and roared down the bayou, glancing back at me once, the bow of his boat swerving wildly to avoid hitting a nutria that was swimming toward the bank.

  13

  Later that morning I called the prison psychologist at Raiford in Florida, a social worker in Letcher County, Kentucky, and a high school counselor in Detroit. By quitting time I had received at least three dozen fax sheets concerning Johnny Remeta.

  That afternoon Clete Purcel sat next to me on a wood bench at the end of the dock and read through the file I had put together on Remeta.

  “He’s got a 160 I.Q. and he’s a button man?” Clete said.

  “No early indications of violence, either. Not until he got out of Raiford.”

  “You’re saying he got spread-eagled in the shower a few times and decided to get even?”

  “I’m just saying he’s probably not a sociopath.”

  Clete closed the manila folder and han
ded it back to me. The wind ruffled and popped the canvas awning over our heads.

  “Who cares what he is? He was on your turf. I’d put one through his kneecap if he comes back again,” Clete said.

  I didn’t reply. I felt Clete’s eyes on the side of my face.

  “The guy’s of no value to you. He doesn’t know who hired him,” Clete said. “Splash this psychological stuff in the bowl.”

  “The social worker told me the kid’s father was a drunk. She thinks the old man sold the kid a couple of times for booze.”

  Clete was already shaking his head with exasperation before I finished the sentence.

  “He looked Zipper Clum in the eyes while he drilled a round through his forehead. This is the kind of guy the air force trains to launch nuclear weapons,” he said.

  He stood up and gripped his hands on the dock railing. The back of his neck was red, his big arms swollen with energy.

  “I’m pissed off at myself. I shouldn’t have helped you fire this guy up,” he said.

  “How’s Passion?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Waiting for me to pick her up.” He let out his breath. “I’ve got baling wire wrapped around my head. I can’t think straight.”

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “I’m going to drive her to the women’s prison tomorrow to visit her sister.”

  “You feel like you’re involving yourself with the other side?”

  “Something like that. I always figured most people on death row had it coming. You watch Larry King last night? He had some shock-jock on there laughing about executing a woman in Texas. The same guy who made fun of Clinton at a banquet. These are America’s heroes.”

  He went inside the bait shop and came back out with a sixteen-ounce can of beer wrapped in a paper towel. He took two long drinks out of the can, tilting his head back, swallowing until the can was almost empty. He blew out his breath and the heat and tension went out of his face.

  “Dave, I dreamed about the Death House at Angola. Except it wasn’t Letty Labiche being taken there. It was Passion. Why would I have a dream like that?” he said, squeezing his thumb and forefinger on his temples.

  But I was to hear Letty Labiche’s name more than once that day.

  Cora Gable had volunteered her chauffeur, Micah, to deliver a thousand-name petition on behalf of Letty to the governor’s mansion. After he had picked up several friends of Cora’s in New Orleans, driven them to the capitol at Baton Rouge, and dropped them off again in New Orleans, he ate dinner by himself in a café by the river, on the other side of the Huey Long Bridge, then headed down a dusky two-lane road into Lafourche Parish.

  He passed through a small settlement, then entered a long stretch of empty road surrounded by sugarcane fields. A white car closed behind him; a man in the passenger’s seat glanced back over his shoulder and clapped a battery-powered flashing red light on the roof.

  The cops looked like off-duty narcs or perhaps SWAT members. They were thick-bodied and vascular, young, unshaved, clad in jeans and sneakers and dark-colored T-shirts, their arms ridged with hair, handcuffs looped through the backs of their belts.

  They walked up on each side of the limo. Micah’s windows were down now, and he heard the Velcro strap peeling loose on the holster of the man approaching the passenger door.

  “Could I see your driver’s license, please?” the man at Micah’s window said. He wore pilot’s sunglasses and seemed bored, looking away at the sunset over the cane fields, his palm extended as he waited for Micah to pull his license from his wallet.

  “What’s the problem?”

  The man in sunglasses looked at the photo on the license, then at Micah’s face.

  “You see what it says over your picture? ‘Don’t drink and drive … Don’t litter Louisiana,’ ” he said. “Every driver’s license in Louisiana has that on it. We’re trying to keep drunks off the road and the highways clean. You threw a beer can out the window back there.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Step out of the car, please.”

  “You guys are from New Orleans. You don’t have authority here,” Micah said.

  “Walk around the far side of the car, please, and we’ll discuss that with you.”

  They braced him against the roof, kicked his ankles apart, ran their hands up and down his legs, and pulled his pockets inside out, spilling his change and wallet onto the shale.

  A car passed with its lights on. The two cops watched it disappear between the cane fields. Then one of them swung a baton into the back of Micah’s thigh, crumpling it as though the tendon had been cut in half. He fell to one knee, his fingers trying to find purchase against the side of the limo.

  The second blow was ineffective, across his shoulders, but the third was whipped with two hands into his tailbone, driving a red shard of pain into his bowels. Micah rolled in the dirt, shuddering, trying to control his sphincter muscle.

  The cop who had taken his license dropped it like a playing card into his face, then kicked him in the kidney.

  “You got a sheet in New Mexico, Micah. Go back there. Don’t make us find you again,” he said.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said.

  The cop with the baton leaned over and inserted the round, wooden end into Micah’s mouth, pushing hard, until Micah gagged and choked on his own blood.

  “What’s that? Say again?” the cop said, bending down solicitously toward Micah’s deformed face.

  Clete called me the next afternoon and asked me to meet him in Armand’s on Main Street. It was cool and dark inside, and Clete sat at the antique, mirrored bar, a julep glass in his hand, an electric fan blowing across his face.

  But there was nothing cool or relaxed about his demeanor. His tropical shirt was damp against his skin, his face flushed as though he had a fever. One foot was propped on the runner of the barstool; his knee kept jiggling.

  “What is it, Clete?”

  “I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have called you. Maybe I should just drive up the stock price on Jack Daniel’s by three or four points.”

  “I got a call from Cora Gable. A couple of NOPD goons beat up her driver. She says they scared him so bad he won’t press charges.”

  “Jim Gable wants him out of town?”

  “The driver had just delivered a petition for Letty to Belmont Pugh. Maybe the message is for Cora.”

  “What’s Gable’s interest in Letty Labiche?”

  “I don’t know. You going to tell me why you called me down here?”

  • • •

  The affair had started casually enough. Clete had gone to her house at evening time and had found her working in back, carrying buckets of water in both hands from the house faucet to her garden.

  “Where’s your hose?” he asked.

  “The boy who cuts the grass ran the lawn mower over it,” she replied.

  They carried the water together, sloshing it on their clothes, pouring it along the rows of watermelons and strawberries, the sky aflame behind them. Her face was hot with her work, her dress blowing loosely on her body as she stooped over in the row. He walked back to the house and filled a glass of water for her and carried it to her in the garden.

  She watched his face over the top of the glass as she drank. Her skin was dusty, the tops of her breasts golden and filmed with perspiration in the dying light. She lifted her hair off her neck and pulled it on top of her head.

  He touched the roundness of her upper arm with his fingertips.

  “You’re a strong woman,” he said.

  “Overweight.”

  “Not to me,” he replied.

  She kept brushing her hair back from the corner of her mouth, not speaking, letting her eyes meet his as though she knew his thoughts.

  “I drink too much. I lost my badge in a bad shooting. I did security for Sally Dio in Reno,” he said.

  “I don’t care.”

  She tilted up her face and looked sideways with her eyes, the
wind blowing her hair back from her face.

  “My ex said she could have done better at the Humane Society,” he said.

  “What somebody else say got nothing to do wit’ me.”

  “You smell like strawberries.”

  “That’s ’cause we standing in them, Clete.”

  She pushed the soft curve of her sandal across the hardness of his shoe.

  They went upstairs to the third story of the house and made love in an oversized brass bed that was surrounded by three electric fans. She came before he did, then mounted him and came a second time, her hands caressing his face simultaneously. Later she lay close to him and traced his body with her fingertips, touching his sex as though it were a source of power, in a way that almost embarrassed him and made him look at her quizzically.

  She wanted to hear stories about the Marine Corps and Vietnam, about his pouring a container of liquid soap down a hood’s mouth in the men’s room of the Greyhound bus depot, about growing up in the Irish Channel, how he smashed a woman’s greenhouse with rocks after he found out her invitation for ice cream had been an act of charity she extended at her back door to raggedy street children.

  “I’m a professional screwup, Passion. That’s not humility, it’s fact. Dave’s the guy with the history,” he said.

  She pulled him against her and kissed his chest.

  He stayed away for two days, then returned to her house at sunrise, his heart beating with anticipation before she opened the door. She made love with him as though her need were insatiable, her thighs fastened hard around him, the small cry she made in his ear like a moment of exorcism.

  Two weeks later he sat in her kitchen, a blue and white coffeepot by his empty plate, while Passion rinsed a steak tray under the faucet.

  He ran his nails through his hair.

  “I think you’re looking for an answer in a guy who doesn’t have any,” he said.

  When she didn’t reply, he smiled wanly. “I’m lucky to have a P.I. license, Passion. New Orleans cops cross the street rather than talk to me. I’ve had the kind of jobs people do when they’re turned down by the foreign legion.”