Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  His hand rested on the end of my shoulder and he kept massaging it like a baseball coach working a stiff place out of his pitcher’s arm.

  That night a fisherman on Calcasieu Lake, over by the Texas border, saw a man park a white automobile by the water’s edge and start to walk away. Then the man looked back at the car as though he had forgotten something, or as though he’d had an argument with someone and could not quite bear to leave the other party with the last word. The man gathered an armload of creek wood and dry weeds and yellowed newspaper and sifted it through the windows on the seats, his face averted from the dust. He brushed his hands and shirt clean and took an emergency flare from the glove box and popped it alight. Then he methodically fired the inside of the car and stepped back from his work just before flames curled out over the roof. He tossed the flare hissing into the lake and walked down the road.

  The next morning, which was Friday, the car was identified as the one stolen from NOPD by Johnny Remeta.

  But he had dumped it over on the Texas border, I told myself. Which meant he was probably fleeing Louisiana and did not want to add a federal beef for interstate transportation of stolen property to the charges already pending against him.

  Good. I was sick of Johnny Remeta.

  I tried to forget that he had a 160 I.Q. That he was just the kind of perp who would burn a stolen car on the state line to let people think he was gone.

  The call came at noon.

  “Why’d you do that out there in that glade? I mean, walk into all that shooting and cut me loose?” he said.

  “It’s none of your business why I do anything,” I replied.

  “I never saw anybody do anything like that.”

  “You’re an escaped felon. I’m a police officer. Don’t get the wrong idea, Johnny.”

  “I called to say thank you. You don’t want my thanks, it’s on you. But we got a mutual interest, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “No, we don’t. Get that out of your head. You come around here again and you’re going to be back in custody.”

  “You want the guys who killed your mother. That’s the word on the street. You think they’re the same guys who’re trying to pop me.”

  While he was talking I was waving my hand at Helen Soileau out in the hall, pointing at the phone so she would start a trace on the call.

  “I met Jimmy Figorelli when I first got to New Orleans. He said if I wanted some work, I should rent a post office box and leave the box number for somebody named M.G. at a café across from the open-air market on Decatur. I wrote the box number down on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope and wrote M.G. on the outside and gave it to a black lady behind the register at the café. When I was going out, she said, ‘Maggie only eats here on the weekend. I’ll give it to her then, okay?’ ”

  “I’m writing all this down. You’ve got to go slower,” I said.

  “Good try.”

  Change the subject, I thought.

  “What was the front money?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say I got any front money. Sir, I didn’t say anything that indicates I committed a crime.”

  “Did you burn the car to make us think you’d blown the state?”

  “I started thinking about those cops leaving me chained up while a sniper tried to cut all my motors. That’s what they call it. They use a hollow point or a steel-claw bullet to core a plug out of your head. If the target is armed, his motors shut down and all his muscles die … Anyway, their car got burned. They can buy a new one … Say, forget about waving to that woman cop to trace this call. I’m on a cell phone.”

  He broke the connection.

  I dropped the receiver on the desk blotter and went to the window.

  The parking lot was full of cars and noon-hour traffic was backed up on the streets from a passing freight train. Then the caboose of the train clicked down the track, the red-and-white-striped mechanical guard rose into the air, and the traffic flowed out of the side streets and the parking lot, the white sun reflecting blindingly off the windows like the swimming, mismatched eyes of the mythological Argus.

  I went into Helen’s office.

  “He was outside?” she said.

  “He had to be.”

  “He knows the drill. He was guessing. Every one of these morons wants us to think he’s a criminal genius.”

  “He knew I waved to a ‘woman cop.’ ”

  “You put out an APB?”

  “Yeah. No luck.”

  She put a stick of gum in her mouth and chewed it while she read the notes on my legal pad. Her hair was bright yellow and waved and molded into place with chemical spray.

  “The go-between on the hit is somebody with the initials M.G.?” she said.

  “First name Maggie,” I said.

  Our eyes locked on each other’s.

  “Maggie Glick? I thought Maggie Glick was doing fifteen in St. Gabriel,” Helen said.

  “Let’s take a ride to New Orleans Monday morning.”

  She stood a ballpoint pen upside down on its cap and studied it.

  “I’ve got a lot of work in my basket, Dave. I think right now this guy is NOPD’s headache.”

  I nodded and went back out in the hall and closed her door softly behind me.

  She followed me into my office.

  “I know I said I’d help, but this stuff is starting to eat you up,” she said.

  “What stuff?”

  “About your mother. Sometimes you just have to let the bad guys drown in their own shit.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  Ten minutes before 5 P.M. she opened the door to my office and leaned inside.

  “Did you see the B&E report on Passion Labiche’s house?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I didn’t know about it, either, not till a few minutes ago. Somebody came through a screen and tore her house up but didn’t take anything except a box of old photos.”

  “Photos?”

  “Remember I told you about Passion saying she’d seen Connie Deshotel’s face in an old photo?”

  “Yeah, but Passion and Connie Deshotel just don’t connect for me,” I said.

  “You still want to go to the Big Sleazy?”

  “With you, always,” I said.

  “Hey, bwana?”

  “What?”

  “Connie Deshotel’s dirty.”

  The next morning, Saturday, I drove out to Passion Labiche’s house. She unlatched the front door and asked me to follow her into the kitchen, where she was canning tomatoes. She lifted a boiling cauldron off the stove with hot pads, pouring into the preserve jars on the drainboard while the steam rose into her face. She had placed a spoon into each of the jars to prevent the glass from cracking, but one of them suddenly popped and stewed tomatoes burst in a pattern like a broken artery on her arm and the front of her dress.

  She dropped the cauldron into the sink, her face bright with pain.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, wiping at her arm and dress with a dishrag.

  She continued to wash her arm and scrub at her dress, rubbing the stain deeper into the fabric, spreading a huge damp area under her breasts.

  “I have to change. Fix yourself something, or do whatever you feel like,” she said, her face sweating, her eyes dilated.

  She ran up the stairs. When she came back down she had washed her face and tied her hair up on her head and put on a yellow dress. She cleaned off the drainboard with the heavy-breathing, self-enforced detachment of someone who might have just stepped back from a car wreck.

  “I went over the breaking-and-entering report on your house. The intruder took nothing but a box of photos?” I said.

  “That’s all I’m missing so far. I wouldn’t have known they were gone, except some shoes fell down from the shelf,” she said.

  “You told Connie Deshotel you’d seen her in an old photo. Is there any reason she wouldn’t want you to have a photograph of her?”

&nb
sp; “It was probably kids. Who cares? Why you spending time on this, anyway? None of this got anything to do with my sister.”

  “Was there a picture of Connie in the box that was stolen?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. You stop bothering me with this.” She rubbed butter on the place where she had scalded herself with stewed tomatoes.

  “Why’d that stain on your dress disturb you, Passion?”

  She looked out the window at her garden and barn and the pecan trees down by the bayou, the skin twitching at the corner of her mouth.

  “You better go about your business, Dave. I don’t make good company some days. Funny how a policeman gives the grief to the person he can get his hands on, huh?” she said.

  Monday morning Helen and I took an unmarked car to New Orleans and parked behind the old U.S. Mint on the river and cut through the open-air market on Decatur. The pavilion was crowded with people, and farther up the street a Dixieland band was playing in a courtyard and a man was selling snowballs from an umbrella-shaded cart on the sidewalk. We crossed Decatur to the café where Johnny Remeta had dropped off the number of his post office box.

  It was not a place for the conventional tourist, particularly not someone with a history of coronary or vascular trouble. It had screen doors, electric fans instead of air-conditioning, an interior that looked painted with fingernail polish, and cuisine that featured sausage, bacon, cob corn glistening with butter, deep-fried pork chops, greens cooked in ham fat, potatoes floating in grease, and mounds of scrambled eggs that lay in bubbling heaps on a grill that probably hadn’t been scraped clean since World War II.

  “Does Maggie Glick come in here?” I asked the black woman who sat behind the counter, fanning herself with a magazine.

  “Who want to know, darlin’?” she said.

  I opened my shield.

  “She eat breakfast here on the weekend,” the woman said.

  “Do you remember somebody leaving a note for her a while back, one with the initials M.G. on the envelope?” I said.

  “Could be. Don’t remember.”

  “I think it’s a good time to focus on your memory skills,” Helen said.

  The black woman kept flapping the magazine in her face. Her hair was threaded with gray and it rose and fell in the current of warm air generated by the magazine. She did not look at us when she spoke again.

  “You see, Maggie comes over here to eat breakfast on the weekend ’cause she don’t like the place where she lives or the work she do. When she was a li’l girl, she belonged to the same church as me over in Algiers. I still remember the li’l girl. Every time Maggie comes in here, I still remember that same li’l girl, I surely do. That enough for you, ma’am?”

  We drove across the river into Algiers and parked on a narrow street lined with ancient buildings that looked like impacted teeth. The foundations had settled and the upper stories leaned into the sidewalks, the rooftops tipping downward against the light like the brim of a man’s fedora. The hotels were walk-ups with stained sacks of garbage propped by the entrances, the taverns joyless, dark places where fortified wine was sold by the glass and where a person, if he truly wanted to slip loose his moorings, could create for himself the most violent denouement imaginable with a casual flick of the eyes at the bikers rubbing talcum into their pool cues.

  But the real business on this street was to provide a sanctuary that precluded comparisons, in the same way that prisons provide a safe place for recidivists for whom setting time in abeyance is not a punishment but an end. The mulatto and black girls inside Maggie Glick’s bar rejected no one. No behavior was too shameful, no level of physical or hygienic impairment unacceptable at the door. The Christmas tinsel and wreaths and paper bells wrapped with gold and silver foil stayed up year round. Inside Maggie Glick’s, every day was New Year’s morning, sunless, refrigerated, the red neon clock indicating either the A.M. or the P.M., as you wished, the future as meaningless and unthreatening as the past.

  Maggie’s father had been a Lithuanian peddler who sold shoestrings from door to door and her mother a washerwoman in an Algiers brothel. The tops of Maggie’s gold breasts were tattooed with roses and her hair was the same shiny black as the satin blouse she wore with her flesh-tight jeans and purple heels. She was lean and hard-edged, and like most longtime prostitutes, withdrawn, solipsistic, bored with others and with what she did, and curiously asexual in her manner and behavior, particularly around johns.

  Maggie sat at the far corner of the bar, a cup of tea on a napkin in front of her. She glanced at me, then at Helen, her eyes neutral, then picked up her cup and blew on her tea.

  “You don’t have to show me your badge. I know who you are,” she said.

  “I thought you were in St. Gabriel,” I said.

  “Those cops who got fired or went to jail themselves? One of them was the narc who planted crystal in my apartment. He’s in Seagoville, I’m outside. Everybody feeling good about the system now.”

  “The word is you set up the drop for the contract on Zipper Clum. When’d you start fronting points for button men?” I said.

  “Johnny Remeta told you that?”

  “How do you know about Johnny Remeta?” Helen asked.

  “ ’Cause I read y’all had him in y’all’s jail. ’Cause everybody on the street knows he did Zipper Clum. ’Cause he used to come in here. The boy has some serious sexual problems. But who want to go into details about that kind of thing?”

  “That’s so good of you,” Helen said, stepping close-in to the elbow of the bar, her forearm pressed flat on the wood. “Is there something wrong about the words we use you don’t understand? We’re talking about conspiracy to commit murder for hire. There’s a woman on death row right now. Would you like to join her there?”

  Maggie picked up her cup again and drank from it. She watched her bartender break open a roll of quarters and spill the coins into the drawer of the cash register, then watched a man redeem a marker by counting out a stack of one-dollar bills one at a time on the bar. A young black woman sitting next to a white man in a suit quietly picked up her purse and went out the front door. Maggie Glick looked at the clock on the wall.

  “The lady at the café across from the French Market said you used to go to her church when you were a little girl,” I said.

  Maggie Glick’s eyes cut sideways at me, her lips parting slightly.

  “You’re not a killer, Maggie. But somebody used you to set up a hit. I think the person who used you may have been involved in the murder of my mother,” I said.

  Her eyes stayed fixed on mine, clouding, her brow wrinkling for the first time.

  “Your mother?” she said.

  “Two cops killed her. Zipper Clum was going to dime them. You’re a smart lady. Put the rest of it together,” I said.

  Her eyes shifted off mine and looked straight ahead into the gloom, the red glow of the neon tubing on the wall clock reflecting on the tops of her breasts. She tried to keep her face empty of expression, but I saw her throat swallow slightly, as though a piece of dry popcorn were caught in it. Her chest rose briefly against her blouse, then the moment passed and her face turned to stone and the slashes of color died in her cheeks. She raised her cup again, balancing it between the fingers of both hands, so that it partially concealed her mouth and made her next statement an unintelligible whisper.

  “What?” I said.

  “Get out of here. Don’t you be talking about the church I went to, either. What you know about how other people grew up? You used to come in here drunk, but you don’t remember it. Now you think you got the right to wipe your feet on my life?” she said.

  She wheeled the top of her barstool around and walked toward the fire exit in back, her long legs wobbling slightly on her heels.

  Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought I saw a flash of wetness in the side of her eye.

  That night Bootsie and I went to a movie in New Iberia, then bought ice cream on the way home and ate it
on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in back. Clouds tumbled across the moon and my neighbor’s cane field was green and channeled with wind.

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “I can’t see through this stuff,” I said.

  “About your mother?”

  “All the roads lead back to prostitution of some kind: Zipper Clum, Little Face Dautrieve, this woman Maggie Glick, the story the jigger told about my mother working a scam with Mack—”

  “It’s the world they live in, Dave—prostitution, drugs, stealing, it’s all part of the same web.” She looked at my expression and squeezed the top of my hand. “I don’t mean your mother.”

  “No, it’s not coincidence. Jim Gable—” I hesitated when I used his name, then looked her evenly in the eyes and went ahead. “Gable and this vice cop Ritter are mixed up with hookers. Passion and Letty Labiche’s parents were procurers. Connie Deshotel wet her pants when she thought Passion recognized her. Somehow it’s all tied in together. I just don’t know how.”

  “Your mother wasn’t a prostitute. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that.”

  “You’re my buddy, Boots.”

  She picked up the dishes to take them inside, then stopped and set them down again and stood behind me. Her fingers touched my hair and neck, then she bent over me and slipped her hands down my chest and pressed her body against me, her stomach and thighs flattening into my back, her mouth on my ear.

  Later, in bed, she lay against me. Her fingertips traced the shrapnel scars that were like a spray of raised arrowheads on my hip. She turned her head and looked at the limbs of the oaks and pecan trees moving against the sky and the shadows the moon made in the yard.

  “We have a wonderful family,” she said.

  “We do,” I replied.

  That’s when the phone rang. I went into the kitchen to answer it.

  It was an intern at Iberia General. “An ambulance brought in a man named Clete Purcel. A gun fell out of his clothes,” he said.

  “He’s a P.I. He has a license to carry it. What happened to him?”