Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  “You saved my life. I owe you. It’s a matter of honor, Mr. Robicheaux. You got a cell phone in case I can’t reach you at home?”

  After I‘d hung up on him I punched in Clete’s apartment number.

  “You know anybody named Axel?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Axel Jennings. He’s Don Ritter’s buddy, the one who hit me in the back of the head with a set of brass knuckles.”

  “Johnny Remeta just called me again. Maybe Jennings is the shooter who did Burgoyne by mistake.”

  “I’ve got some plans about this guy Jennings. Worry about Remeta. He’s got you mixed up with his father or something.”

  “What do you mean you’ve got plans for Jennings?” I asked.

  “How about I take y’all to dinner tonight? Dave, Remeta’s a head case. Ritter and Axel Jennings are windups. Don’t lose the distinction.”

  17

  A storm had moved into the Gulf and the morning broke gray and cool and shrouded with mist, then it began to rain. I glanced out my office window and saw Passion Labiche get out of a car and step over the flooded curb and run up the front walk of the courthouse. Her hair and skin were shiny with water when she knocked on my office glass. Under her right arm she carried a scrapbook or photo album wrapped in a cellophane bag.

  “You want to dry off?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry for the way I talked to you at my house. I have days I don’t feel too good,” she said.

  “It’s all right. How about some coffee?”

  She shook her head. “I found that picture of Ms. Deshotel. The one I told her about when she came to my club. It was in the attic. My parents kept all the pictures of the places they lived and visited.”

  She sat down in front of my desk and took a handkerchief from her purse and touched at her face.

  “Why’d you decide to bring it in?” I asked.

  “ ’Cause you axed about it. ’Cause you been good to us.”

  Passion turned the stiff pages of the album to a large black-and-white photo taken in a nightclub. The bar mirror was hung with Santa sleighs and reindeer and Styrofoam snowballs, and a group of five people, including Passion’s parents, sat on stools looking back at the camera, their drinks balanced on their knees, their faces glowing with the occasion.

  Someone had inked “Christmas, 1967” in the corner of the photo, but there was no mistaking Connie Deshotel. She was one of those women whose facial features change little with time and are defined by their natural loveliness rather than by age or youth. She wore a black, sequined evening dress with straps and a corsage, and her champagne glass was empty and tilted at an angle in her hand. She was smiling, but, unlike the others, at someone outside the picture.

  “Why should this picture be important to anybody?” Passion asked.

  “Your folks were in the life. Connie Deshotel is attorney general.”

  “They owned three or four dance halls. All kinds of people came in there. The governor, Earl K. Long, used to go in there.”

  “Can I keep the photo?”

  She popped the glued edges loose from the backing and handed it to me. Her consciousness of its content, or any importance it might have, seemed to be already lost by the time I had taken it from her hand.

  “My sister’s got only one lawyer working on her case now. He’s twenty-five years old,” she said.

  “I think you helped Letty kill Vachel Carmouche. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere until that fact is flopping around on the table,” I said.

  She stared back at me with the transfixed expression of an animal caught in a truck’s headlights.

  She literally ran from the building.

  I hated my own words.

  I grew up in the South Louisiana of the 1940s and ’50s. I remember the slot and racehorse machines, their chromium and electric glitter among the potted palms in the old Frederic Hotel on Main Street, and the cribs on each side of the train tracks that ran the length of Railroad Avenue. I collected for the newspaper on Saturday afternoons, and the prostitutes would be sitting on their galleries, smoking the new filter-tipped cigarettes and sometimes dipping draft beer out of a bucket a pimp would bring them from Broussard’s Bar. They were unattractive and physically dissolute women, and they wore no makeup and their hair was uncombed and looked dirty. Sometimes they laughed like deranged people, a high, cackling sound that climbed emptily, without meaning, into the brassy sky.

  None of them had Cajun accents, and I wondered where they came from. I wondered if they had ever gone to church, or if they had parents anywhere, or perhaps children. I saw a pimp strike one of them on the gallery once, the first time I had ever seen a man hit a woman. Her nose bled on her hand. Her pimp had oiled black hair and wore purple slacks that fitted him as tightly as a matador’s pants.

  “You got your money, kid?” he said to me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Better get on it, then,” he said.

  I rode away on my bike. When I passed the crib again, she was sitting on a swing next to him, weeping into a red-spotted dish towel, while he consoled her with one arm around her shoulders.

  I also remembered the gambling clubs in St. Martin and St. Landry parishes during the 1950s. Bartenders, bouncers, and blackjack dealers wore the badges of sheriff’s deputies. No kid was ever turned away from the bar or a table. The women were brought in by the Giacanos in New Orleans and a Syrian family in Lafayette and worked out of air-conditioned trailers behind the clubs. The head of the state police who tried to enforce the law and shut down gambling and prostitution in Louisiana became the most hated man in the state.

  Most of those same clubs stayed in business into the 1960s. Passion was right. People of every stripe visited them. Would Connie Deshotel need to hire someone to steal an old photograph showing her in the company of people whom she may have known in only a casual way?

  I decided to find out.

  “I’m sorry to bother you with a minor situation here,” I said when I got her on the phone.

  “I’m happy you called, Dave,” she replied.

  “There was a B&E at Passion Labiche’s house. Somebody stole a box of photographs out of her closet.”

  “Yes?”

  “Passion says she’d told you about seeing you in an old photo she had. Is there any reason anybody would want to steal something like that? A political enemy, perhaps?”

  “You got me.”

  “I see. Anyway, I thought I’d ask. How you doin’?”

  “Fine. Busy. All that sort of thing,” she said.

  “By the way, the thief didn’t get the photo. I have it here. It shows you with Passion’s parents sometime around Christmas of 1967.”

  “Could be. I don’t know much about her family. Maybe I met them at one time. Dave, when my political enemies want to do me damage with pictures, they put them on dartboards. Say hello to Bootsie.”

  The next afternoon Dana Magelli at NOPD returned a call I had placed earlier in the day.

  “Can you pull the jacket of a cop named Axel Jennings?” I said.

  “Why?”

  “He and Don Ritter and another guy worked over Clete Purcel down by Cocodrie. I also think this Jennings character is a good guy to look at for the Burgoyne shooting.”

  “Jennings shot his own partner on the Atchafalaya? You come up with some novel ideas, Dave.”

  “Can you get his jacket?”

  “I have it sitting in front of me. I was just going to call you about Purcel. Where is he?”

  I had put my foot in it.

  Axel Jennings lived uptown in the small yellow bungalow on Baronne in which he had grown up. It had a neat green yard, a stone porch, and an alleyway with palm trees that grew between the garages. The neighborhood was like neighborhoods had been during World War II, places where people cut the grass on Saturday evening and listened to the ball game on radios that sat in open windows. At least that’s what his father had said.

  Axel’s father had flown with General Curtis L
eMay on incendiary raids against Japanese targets between the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay’s raids didn’t do any good. It took a second atom bomb to vaporize another city to bring the war to an end. Most civilians, particularly these peace types, didn’t know squat about what went on over there. That’s what Axel’s father had said.

  Axel had three loves: firearms, model railroading, and the memory of his father, whose picture in uniform he kept on the mantel.

  He was a member at a gun range in St. Charles Parish, and almost every weekend he packed up his boxes of hand-loaded ammunition and his three favorite weapons—his .45 auto, a scoped ’03 Springfield, and the civilian equivalent of the M-14 rifle—and fired them from under a wood shed at paper targets clipped to wires in front of a dirt embankment.

  His father used to say marksmanship was simply the coordination of angles with the beat of your heart and the rise and fall of your lungs. The bullet’s behavior was mathematically predictable and was governed by no rules other than physical principles. You simply had to make the weapon an extension of blood and sinew and thought so that the squeeze of your finger created a geometric certainty for your target.

  It was all about control and order.

  The same way with life, his father had said. People didn’t respect authority anymore. You had to find a leader, a man you could respect, and put your faith in him, just as he placed his faith in you. His father called it a reciprocity of personal honor.

  Axel’s sunporch and guest room were covered with electric trains. The tracks ran across floors and tables and sections of plywood screwed down on sawhorses. The tracks wound through papier-mâché mountains and tiny forests, past water towers and freight depots and miniature communities; there were toy brakemen and gandy walkers along the tracks and switches that diverted locomotives past each other at the last possible moment, and warning bells and flashing lights at the crossings.

  When Axel cranked up all his trains at once, the smells of warm metal and oil and overheated electrical circuits reminded him of the clean acrid smell of gunpowder at the range.

  Two kills with a department-issue M-16, a third kill shared with Burgoyne.

  He thought he might feel bad about the first barricaded suspect he popped.

  He didn’t. The guy had every opportunity to come out of the building. Instead, he turned on the gas jets and was going to take his child out with him. Just as the guy was about to light the match, Axel, in a prone position on a rooftop, sucked in his breath, exhaled slowly, and drilled a round through a glass pane and nailed him through both temples.

  You believed in what you did. You trusted the man you took orders from. And you didn’t look back. That’s what his father had said.

  It must have been grand to be around during World War II. Working people made good money and for fun went bowling and played shuffleboard in a tavern and didn’t snort lines off toilet tanks; you walked a girl home from a café without gang bangers yelling at her from a car; blacks lived in their own part of town. Kids collected old newspapers and coat hangers and automobile tires and hauled them on their wagons down to the firehouse for the war effort. The enemy was overseas. Not in the streets of your own city.

  Axel’s occasional girlfriend, a barmaid named Cherry Butera, said he’d been depressed since Jimmy Burgoyne was killed in that shooting on the Atchafalaya. He’d taken a couple of vacation days, and he and the girlfriend had driven down to Grand Isle. A storm was tearing up the Gulf and the sky had turned green and the surf was wild and yellow with churning sand.

  “There’s a Nazi sub out there. The Coast Guard sunk it with planes in ’42,” he said. “I wish I’d been alive back then.”

  “What for?” she asked.

  “I would have been there. I would have been part of all that,” he replied.

  They drove back to New Orleans in the rain and drank beer in a small pizza joint two blocks from his house. Banana trees thrashed against the side of the building, and the shadows from the neon signs in the windows cascaded like water down Axel’s face.

  “Somebody’s following me,” he said.

  “You’re blaming yourself because you weren’t there when Jimmy was killed,” his girlfriend said.

  He looked at her a moment, then his eyes disconnected from hers and looked at nothing. He peeled the gold and green label off his beer bottle and rolled it into tiny balls.

  “I saw somebody outside my window. He was behind us on the road tonight,” he said.

  “The road was empty, hon. The bad guys are afraid of you. Everybody knows that.”

  “I wish Jimmy was here. I wish he wasn’t dead,” he said.

  At 11 P.M. they went out the back of the café and walked down the alley toward his car. Rain blew in a vortex from a streetlight out by the sidewalk, and the palm trees between the garages filled with wind and raked against the wood walls.

  The man waiting in the shadows wore a wide hat and a black raincoat with the collar up. The piece of lumber he held in his hands was thick and square and probably three feet long. Leaves clung wetly to his shoulders and hat, so that he looked like an extension of the hedge when he stepped into the alley. He swung the piece of lumber with both hands, as he would a baseball bat, into Axel’s face.

  Axel crashed backwards into a row of garbage cans, his forehead veined with blood and water. Then the man in the wide hat leaned over and drove the piece of lumber into Axel’s throat and the side of his head.

  The man stood erect, water sluicing off his hat brim, his face a dark oval against the streetlight at the end of the alley.

  “Haul freight, unless you want the same,” he said to the woman.

  She turned and ran, twisting her face back toward the hatted man, her flats splashing through puddles that were iridescent with engine oil. The hatted man tossed the piece of lumber in the hedge, then picked up a whiskey bottle and broke it against the side of a garage.

  He stooped over Axel’s body, the streetlight glinting on the jagged shell of the bottle, his extended arm probing downward into the darkness, soundlessly, like a man doing a deed he had conceived in private and now performed without heat or surprise.

  “It’d take a real sonofabitch to do something like that, Dave,” Magelli said.

  “It wasn’t Clete.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Check out Jim Gable’s chauffeur. He’s an ex-carnival man named Micah. His face is disfigured.”

  “Why don’t you let Purcel cover his own ass for a change?”

  “Jennings is a rogue cop. He brought this down on himself. Lay off of Clete,” I said.

  “Tell it to Jennings. The doctor had the mirrors taken out of his hospital room.”

  18

  A week passed, and I didn’t hear anything more from Dana Magelli. The night Jennings had been attacked Clete was picking up a bail skip for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater in Baton Rouge, which didn’t mean he couldn’t have attacked Jennings after he dumped the skip in Willie and Nig’s office. But Clete Purcel had boundaries, even though they were a little arbitrary, and they didn’t include mutilating a half-conscious man who was already on the ground.

  I wanted to empty my head and caseload and go to Key West with Bootsie and Alafair and fish for three weeks. I was tired of other people’s problems, of breaking up domestic arguments, of hosing vomit out of a cruiser, of washing spittle off my face, of cutting slack to junkies because they had the virus, only later to have one try to bite me when I cuffed him.

  I was tired of seeing the despair in the faces of black parents when I told them their children had overdosed on meth or heroin or had been gunned down in a robbery. Or vainly trying to reassure a store owner of his self-worth after he had been forced at gunpoint to kneel and beg for his life. Nor did I ever again want to look into the faces of women who had been raped, sodomized, burned with cigarettes, and beaten with fists, every ounce of dignity and self-respect they once possessed systematically ripped out of their bodi
es.

  If you meet longtime street cops who don’t drink or use, they’re usually either in twelve-step programs or brain-dead or they have criminal propensities themselves.

  But each time I cleared my head and tried to concentrate on all the potential that every day could bring—the sun showers that blew in from the Gulf, Bootsie’s meeting me for lunch at Victor’s or in the park, the long summer evenings and the way the light climbed high into the sky at sunset, picking up Alafair at night at the City Library and going for ice cream with her high school creative writing group—my mind returned again and again to thoughts about my mother’s fate, the pleas for help she must have uttered, and the fact her killers were still out there.

  But it was more than my mother’s death that obsessed me. Long ago I had accepted the loss of my natal family and my childhood and the innocence of the Cajun world I had been born into. You treat loss just like death. It visits everyone and you don’t let it prevail in your life.

  What I felt now was not loss but theft and violation. My mother’s memory, the sad respect I had always felt for her, had been stolen from me. Now the tape-recorded lie left behind by a dead jigger in the Morgan City jail, that my mother was a whore and a thief, had become part of a file at the New Orleans Police Department and I had no way to change it.

  “Something on your mind?” Helen Soileau said in my office.

  “No, not really,” I replied.

  She stood at the window and rubbed the back of her neck and looked out at the street.

  “Connie Deshotel just kind of disappeared? Being photographed with a couple of procurers didn’t rattle her?” she said.

  “Not that I could tell,” I said, tilting back in my chair.

  “She was in her office. All her power was right there at her fingertips. Don’t let her fool you, Dave. That broad’s got you in her bombsights.”

  But it was Friday afternoon and I didn’t want to think any more about Connie Deshotel. I signed out of the office, bought a loaf of French bread at the market, and drove down the dirt road toward my house, the sun flashing like pieces of hammered brass in the oak limbs overhead.