Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  She stood behind him, kneading his shoulders with her large hands, her breasts touching the back of his head.

  “I have to go to the doctor in the morning. Then I want to visit my sister,” she said.

  Clete drank out of his julep and stirred the ice in the bottom of the glass.

  “She told me all the details about what Carmouche did to her and Letty. Somebody should dig that guy up and chain-drag the corpse through Baton Rouge,” he said. Then he seemed to look at a thought inside his head and his face went out of focus. “Passion would let him exhaust himself on her so he’d go easier on her sister.”

  “Get this stuff out of your mind, Clete.”

  “You think she’s playing me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Give me another julep,” he said to the bartender.

  Bootsie was waiting for me in the parking lot after work.

  “How about I buy you dinner, big boy?” she said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I just like to see if I can pick up a cop once in a while.”

  We drove to Lerosier, across from the Shadows, and ate in the back room. Behind us was a courtyard full of roses and bamboo, and in the shade mint grew between the bricks.

  “Something happen today?” I said.

  “Two messages on the machine from Connie Deshotel. I’m not sure I like other women calling you up.”

  “She probably has my number mixed up with her Orkin man’s.”

  “She says she’s sorry she offended you. What’s she talking about?”

  “This vice cop, Ritter, taped an interview with a perpetrator by the name of Steve Andropolis. The tape contained a bunch of lies about my mother.”

  Bootsie put a small piece of food in her mouth and chewed it slowly, the light hardening in her eyes.

  “Why would she do that?” she said.

  “Ask her.”

  “Count on it,” she said.

  I started to reply, then looked at her face and thought better of it.

  But Connie Deshotel was a willful and determined woman and was not easily discouraged from revising a situation that was somehow detrimental to her interests.

  The next evening Belmont Pugh’s black Chrysler, followed by a caravan of political sycophants and revelers, parked by the boat ramp. They got out and stood in the road, blinking at the summer light in the sky, the dust from their cars drifting over them. All of them had been drinking, except apparently Belmont. While his friends wandered down toward the bait shop for food and beer, Belmont walked up the slope, among the oaks, where I was raking leaves, his face composed and somber, his pinstripe suit and gray Stetson checkered with broken sunlight.

  “Why won’t you accept that woman’s apology?” he asked.

  “You’re talking about Connie Deshotel?”

  “She didn’t mean to cast an aspersion on your mother. She thought she was doing her job. Give her a little credit, son.”

  “All right, I accept her apology. Make sure you tell her that for me, will you? She actually got the governor of the state to drive out here and deliver a message for her?”

  He removed his hat and wiped the liner out with a handkerchief. His back was straight, his profile etched against the glare off the bayou. His hair had grown out on his neck, and it gave him a distinguished, rustic look. For some reason he reminded me of the idealistic young man I had known years ago, the one who daily did a good deed and learned a new word from his thesaurus.

  “You’re a hard man, Dave. I wish I had your toughness. I wouldn’t be fretting my mind from morning to night about that woman on death row,” he said.

  I rested the rake and popped my palms on the handle’s end. It was cool in the shade and the wind was blowing the tree limbs above our heads.

  “I remember when a guy offered you ten dollars to take a math test for him, Belmont. You really needed the money. But you chased him out of your room,” I said.

  “The cafeteria didn’t serve on weekends. You and me could make a can of Vienna sausage and a jar of peanut butter and a box of crackers go from Friday noon to Sunday night,” he said.

  “I’ve witnessed two executions. I wish I hadn’t. You put your hand in one and you’re never the same,” I said.

  “A long time ago my daddy said I was gonna be either a preacher or a drunk and womanizer. I wake up in the morning and have no idea of who I am. Don’t lecture at me, son.” His voice was husky, his tone subdued in a way that wasn’t like Belmont.

  I looked beyond him, out on the dock, where his friends were drinking can beer under the canvas awning. One of them was a small, sun-browned, mustached man with no chin and an oiled pate and the snubbed nose of a hawk.

  “That’s Sookie Motrie out there. I hear he’s the money behind video poker at the tracks,” I said.

  “It’s all a trade-off. People want money for schools but don’t like taxes. I say use the devil’s money against him. So a guy like Sookie gets to be a player.”

  When I didn’t reply, he said, “A lot of folks think Earl K. Long was just an ignorant redneck. But Earl did good things people don’t know about. A whole bunch of Negro women graduated from a new nursing program and found out right quick they couldn’t get jobs nowhere. So Earl hears about it and says he wants a tour of the state hospital. He pumps hands all over the building, sticks his head in operating rooms, flushes toilets, then gets all the hospital’s administrators in one room and locks the door.

  “He says, ‘I just seen a shameful spectacle here. Y’all got white nurses hand-waiting on nigra patients, carrying out their bedpans and I don’t know what all, and I ain’t gonna stand for it. You either hire nigra nurses in those wards or every damn one of you is gonna be out of a job.’

  “The next week the state hospital had two dozen black nurses on staff.”

  “Makes a good story,” I said.

  “Stories are all the human race has got, Dave. You just got to find the one you like and stay with it,” he replied.

  “Are you going to execute Letty Labiche?”

  He replaced his hat on his head and walked down the slope to rejoin his entourage, jiggling his hands in the air like a minstrel man.

  14

  Farther to the south of us, in the working-class community of Grand Bois, a young attorney, two years out of law school, filed suit on behalf of the local residents against a large oil corporation. The locals were by and large Cajuns and Houma Indians, uneducated, semiskilled, poor, without political power, and bewildered by the legal apparatus, the perfect community to target as the open-pit depository of oil sludge trucked in from a petroleum treatment plant in Alabama.

  Company officials didn’t argue with the contention the pits contained benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and arsenic. They didn’t have to. Years ago, during a time of gas shortages, the U.S. Congress had granted the oil industry blanket exemptions from the regulations that govern most toxic wastes. Secondly, the state of Louisiana does not define oil waste as hazardous material.

  The state, the oil corporation, and the community of Grand Bois were now in court, and Connie Deshotel’s office was taking depositions from the people in Grand Bois who claimed their children were afflicted with vertigo, red eyes, skin rashes, and diarrhea that was so severe they had to keep buckets in their automobiles.

  Two of those Grand Bois families had moved to New Iberia and were now living up on the bayou road, not far from Passion Labiche’s nightclub. On Monday Helen Soileau was assigned to drive Connie Deshotel and her assistant out to their homes.

  Later she told me of Connie Deshotel’s bizarre behavior, although she could offer no explanation as to its cause.

  It had rained hard that morning, then the sun had become a white orb in the center of a windless sky, evaporating the water out of the fields, creating a superheated dome of humidity that made you feel like ants were crawling inside your clothes.

  The air-conditioning unit in the cruiser began clanking, then gasped once and gave out. Conn
ie Deshotel had removed her white suit coat and folded it on her lap, trying to keep her composure while her male assistant talked without stop in the backseat. Her armpits were ringed with sweat and a hostile light was growing in her eyes.

  Her assistant paused a moment in his monologue, then cracked a mint between his molars and began again.

  “Why don’t the people of Grand Bois move to a place where there’s no oil industry? Get jobs as whalers in Japan. Could it be they’ve done scut work all their lives in the oil industry and couldn’t fix ice water without a diagram?” he said.

  He took the silence in the cruiser as indication his point was not understood.

  “The Houma Indians have a problem with oil waste. But they want to build casinos and addict their own people to gambling. I think the whole bunch is ripe for a hydrogen bomb,” he said.

  “I don’t want to add to your irritability, Malcolm, but would you please shut up?” Connie said.

  “Y’all want something cool to drink?” Helen asked.

  “Yes, please,” Connie said.

  They pulled into Passion’s nightclub just as a storm cloud covered the sun and the landscape dropped into shadow. Inside, electric fans vibrated on the four corners of the dance floor, and an ancient air-conditioning unit inserted in a sawed-out hole in the back wall blew a stream of refrigerated coolness across the bar.

  Connie sat on a barstool and closed her eyes in the wind stream.

  Helen whistled through the door that gave onto the café side of the building.

  “Hey, Passion, you’ve got some customers in here,” she called.

  Connie’s eyes opened and she turned her blank face on Helen.

  “Letty Labiche’s sister owns this place. You know her?” Helen said.

  “No.”

  “From the way you looked, I thought you recognized the name or something.”

  “Yes, I did recognize the name. That doesn’t mean I know her,” Connie said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Helen said.

  “I’d like to leave now,” Connie said.

  “I thought you wanted a cold drink.”

  “I just wanted to get out of the heat a few minutes. I’m fine now. We should make at least one other stop today,” Connie said.

  “Too late,” her assistant, Malcolm, said, grinning from behind the bar. He opened two ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola and set them in front of Helen and Connie just as Passion walked in from the café and tilted her head at the presence of the man behind her bar.

  “Could I hep y’all?” she asked.

  “Sorry, miss. I’m so dry I’m a fire hazard. I left the money on the register,” Malcolm said. He opened a long-neck bottle of beer for himself and stepped back from the foam as it slid over the neck.

  Passion rang up the purchase, her back to them. “Sorry I couldn’t get over here to wait on y’all,” she said.

  Connie’s face looked stricken. She stared helplessly at the back of Passion’s head, as though an element from a nightmare had just forced its way inexorably into her waking day.

  Passion turned and placed a quarter and two dimes in front of the male assistant. Then her eyes fell on Connie’s.

  “You all right, ma’am?” she asked.

  “Yes. Why do you ask?” Connie said.

  “On days like this the tar on the road melts. You look like you got dehydrated. I got some aspirin.”

  “Thank you. I don’t need any.”

  Passion started to turn away, then a look of vague recognition swam into her face.

  “I seen you somewhere before, ma’am?” she asked.

  “Perhaps. I’m the attorney general.”

  “No, I seen you in an old photograph. Or somebody sure do look like you. You got nice features. They don’t change with time,” Passion said.

  “I’m sure that’s a compliment, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s gonna come. Y’all visiting New Iberia?” Passion asked.

  Connie rose from her stool and extended her hand across the bar.

  “It was very nice meeting you,” she said, even though they had not exchanged names or been introduced by a third party.

  She walked out to the cruiser, her chin tilted upward, her face bloodless. The wind raked the branches of a live-oak tree against the side of the club and another rain shower burst from the heavens, clattering like marbles on the tin roof.

  “I’m going to finish my beer. Who plays that piano?” Malcolm said.

  Button man or not, Johnny Remeta obviously didn’t fall easily into a predictable category.

  The off-duty New Orleans cop who worked security at the historical museum on Jackson Square watched a lithe young man in shades and knife-creased khakis and half-topped boots and a form-fitting ribbed T-shirt with the sleeves rolled over the shoulders cross from the Café du Monde and walk through the park, past a string band playing in front of Pirates Alley, wrap his chewing gum in a piece of foil and drop it in a waste can, comb his hair and enter the museum’s doorway.

  Where had the off-duty cop seen that face?

  A mug shot passed around at roll call?

  No, he was imagining things. The mug shot was of a guy who was wanted in a shooting off Magazine. Yeah, the hit on Zipper Clum. A white shooter, which meant it was probably a contract job, somebody the Giacanos hired to wipe out an obnoxious black pimp. Contract shooters didn’t wander around in museums under a cop’s nose. Besides, this kid looked like he just got out of high school.

  “You visiting from out of town?” the cop asked.

  The young man still wore his shades and was looking at a battle-rent Confederate flag that was pressed under glass.

  “No, I live here. I’m an artist,” he replied. He did not turn his head when he spoke.

  “You come here often?”

  “About every three days.” He removed his shades and looked the cop full in the face, grinning now. “Something wrong?”

  “Yeah, my feet hurt,” the cop said.

  But later the cop was still bothered. He followed the young man across Jackson Square to Decatur, took down the license number of his pickup truck, and called it in.

  One block away, a police cruiser fell in behind the pickup truck. Just as the uniformed cop behind the wheel was about to hit his flasher, the pickup truck turned back into the Quarter on Bienville and drove the short two-block distance to the police station at Royal and Conti.

  The young man in shades parked his truck and went inside.

  The cop in the cruiser kept going, shaking his head disgustedly at the cavalier misuse of his time.

  Inside the police station, the young man gazed idly at Wanted posters on a corkboard, then asked the desk sergeant for directions to the battlefield at Chalmette.

  The desk sergeant watched the young man walk out of the door of the station and get in his truck and drive down Conti toward the river. Then the sergeant was out the door himself, his arms waving in the air at two motorcycle cops who were coming up the walk.

  “The guy in the black pickup! You can still get him!” he yelled.

  Wrong.

  Johnny Remeta cut across the Mississippi bridge onto the West Bank, caught Highway 90, wove five miles through residential neighborhoods and strip malls, and dumped the pickup in St. Charles Parish and boosted an Oldsmobile out of a used-car lot.

  He took back roads through Chacahoula and Amelia, crossed the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya at Morgan City, and hot-wired an ancient Volkswagen bus at the casino on the Chettimanchi Indian Reservation.

  He created a one-man grand-auto crime wave across southwestern Louisiana, driving off idling automobiles from a Jiffy Lube and a daiquiri take-out window, blowing out tires and engines, lighting up emergency dispatcher screens in six parishes.

  He almost eluded the army of state police and sheriff’s deputies that was crisscrossing Highway 90, virtually colliding into one another. He swung onto a side road in St. Mary Parish, floored the souped-up stock-car racer h
e had stolen out of a mechanic’s shed, scoured a balloon of dust out of a dirt road for two miles through sugarcane fields that shielded the car from view, then swung back onto 90, a half mile beyond a police barricade, and looked down the long corridor of oaks and pines that led into New Iberia.

  He shifted down, turned across a stone bridge over the bayou, arching a crick out of his neck, knotting his T-shirt in his hand, wiping the sweat off his face with it.

  He’d outrun them all. He filled his lungs with air. The smoke from meat fires drifted through the oaks on people’s lawns; the evening sky glowed like a purple rose. Now, to dump this car and find a rooming house where he could watch a lot of television for a few days. Man, it was good to be alive.

  That’s when the First Assembly of God church bus hit him broadside, springing his doors, and propelled him through the air like a stone, right through a canebrake into Bayou Teche.

  He sat on a steel bunk in the holding cell, barefoot, his khakis and T-shirt splattered with mud, a bandage wrapped around his head. He pulled a thin strand of bamboo leaf from his hair and watched it tumble in a shaft of light to the cement floor.

  The sheriff and I looked at him through the bars.

  “Why didn’t you get out of New Orleans when you had the chance?” I asked.

  “It’s a free country,” he replied.

  “Not when you kill people,” I said.

  “I’ll ask you a better question. Why didn’t you stay where you were?” the sheriff said.

  Johnny Remeta’s eyes lifted into the sheriff’s face, then they emptied of any perception or thought. He looked at the wall, stifling a yawn.

  “Get him processed. I want those detectives from New Orleans to have him out of here by noon tomorrow,” the sheriff said, and walked down the corridor and banged the heavy door behind him.

  “What’s his problem?” Remeta said.

  “Our space is full up with local wise guys. We don’t need imports. Why’d you come to New Iberia?”

  “A guy looks for friends where he can.”

  “I’m not your friend. You were hanging around New Orleans to pop the guys who took a shot at you, weren’t you?”

  “You blame me?”