Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  “You are so crazy sometimes,” she said, and got back in bed, folding Tripod in the crook of her arm. She leaned over the side of the bed again and said, “Dave?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  I placed my arm across my eyes so she wouldn’t see the water welling up in them.

  The next morning was Sunday and Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to Mass together. After we returned home I went down to the dock and helped Batist in the bait shop. It was unusually cool, a fine day for going after bream and goggle-eye perch with popping bugs, and we had rented most of our boats. It showered just after lunch, and a number of fishermen came in and drank beer and ate links and chicken at our spool tables under the awning. But regardless of the balmy weather and the cheerful mood out on the dock, I knew it wouldn’t be long before Johnny Remeta came back into our lives.

  The call came at mid-afternoon.

  “I figure we’re square,” he said.

  “You got it,” I said.

  He was silent a moment. I picked up an empty Coke can and looked at the label on it, trying to slow my thoughts and avoid the anger that was always my undoing.

  “When you came after me in the library? How far were you willing to go?” he said.

  “That would have been up to you, Johnny.”

  “Gives me a bad feeling, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “That’s the way it is, I guess.”

  Again he was silent. Then he said. “Those things you said to me on the phone that night? My father talked to me like that.”

  “I can’t give you the help you need, partner. But no matter how you cut it, you have to stay away from us. I’m saying this with all respect.”

  “It’s over when I get the people who shot at me.”

  “That’s between you and others. We’re not involved.”

  “You thought maybe I had an improper attitude toward Alafair?”

  Hearing him use her name made my breath come hard in my throat.

  “I’m off the clock. I’m also off the phone. Have a good life, Johnny,” I said, and gently replaced the receiver in the cradle.

  I stared at the phone like it was a live snake, waiting for him to call back. I rang up a sale, served a customer an order of boudin on a paper plate, and scrubbed down the counter with a wet rag, the tension in my ears crackling with a sound like crushed cellophane.

  When the phone did ring, it was Bootsie, asking me to bring a quart of milk from the cooler up to the house.

  Johnny Remeta may have been temporarily out of the way, but Connie Deshotel’s possible involvement with Axel Jennings was not.

  In Vietnam I knew a self-declared Buddhist and quasi-psychotic warrant officer who would fly a Huey into places the devil wouldn’t go. He used to say, “The way to keep your house safe from tigers is to return the tiger to its owner’s house.”

  I got Connie Deshotel’s address from our local state representative, then drove to Baton Rouge late Sunday afternoon. She lived off Dalrymple, in the lake district north of the LSU campus, in a gabled two-story white house with azaleas and willows and blooming crepe myrtle in the yard. Her Sunday paper still lay on the front porch, wrapped tightly in a plastic rain bag.

  I didn’t try to call before I arrived. Even if she wasn’t home, I felt my business card in her mailbox would indicate, if indeed she was the money behind Axel Jennings, that her intentions were known, and another visit from one of her emissaries would lead right back to her door.

  I lifted the brass door knocker and heard chimes deep inside the house. But no one came to the door. I dropped my card through the mail slot and was headed back down the walk when I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash from the rear of the house.

  I walked through a side yard under a long trellis that was wrapped with trumpet vine. I opened the gate into the backyard and saw Connie Deshotel in a purple two-piece bathing suit, mounting the tile steps at the shallow end of her swimming pool.

  She picked a towel off a sun chair and shook out her hair, then dried her face and neck and blotted the towel on her thighs and the backs of her legs. She placed her feet inside her sandals and poured a Bloody Mary from a pitcher into a red-streaked glass with a stick of celery blossoming out of the ice.

  I started to speak, then realized she had seen me out of the corner of her eye.

  “Did you bring Bootsie with you this time?” she asked.

  “No, it’s still all business,” I replied.

  “Well,” she said, touching the towel to her forehead, her chin raised, as though taking pause with an unacceptable intrusion rather than allowing herself to be undone by it. “What is it that’s of such great concern to us this Sunday afternoon?”

  “Can I sit down?”

  “Please do. Yes, indeed,” she said.

  She sat across from me at a glass-topped table under an umbrella that was made from wide, multicolored strips of tin.

  “Friday the sheriff and I were talking about an interesting attribute everyone of our generation seems to share,” I said.

  “Oh?” she said, her interest wandering out into the yard.

  “What were you doing when you heard John Kennedy had been shot?”

  “I was coming out of gym class. Some girls were crying in the hallway.”

  “See?” I said, smiling. “Everybody remembers that exact moment in his or her life. They never hesitate when they’re asked.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “It’s that photo taken of you with the parents of the Labiche girls. It troubles the heck out of me. Here, I brought it along,” I said, and removed a manila envelope from the pocket of my coat.

  But before I could pull the photo out, she leaned forward and took both of my hands in hers, pressing down hard with her thumbs, her eyes fastened on mine.

  “Dave, give this up. You’re a good man. But you’ve developed a fixation about something that means absolutely nothing,” she said.

  I took my hands from hers and slipped the photo out of the envelope and lay it flat on the table.

  “You remember being with the Labiches?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “See, up here in the corner, someone wrote, ‘Christmas, 1967.’ So here you are in a nightclub, back in the civil rights era, in an evening dress, with a corsage on, at Christmastime, with a notorious mulatto couple who pimped for a living, and you have no memory of it. Does that seem strange to you?”

  She picked up a big leather bag with drawstrings on it from the flagstones and dug a package of cigarettes and a gold lighter out of it and set them on the tabletop.

  “I really don’t have anything more to say on the matter. Would you like a Diet Coke or lemonade or decaffeinated coffee or ice water or whatever it is you drink?”

  “In ’67 you hadn’t been out of the police academy too long. Does it make sense that a young cop could be around the Labiches, perhaps on Christmas Eve, and not remember it? Look me in the face and tell me that.”

  “Do me a great favor, Dave. Go home to your wife. Sell worms to your friends. Play mind games with your sheriff. Just … go.”

  “There’s a bad dude by the name of Johnny Remeta running loose. In case you haven’t heard, he’s the same perp who cut Axel Jennings’ kite string. He’s got an iron bolt through his head and thinks he’s my guardian angel. I wouldn’t want Remeta on my case. You get my drift, Connie?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, a strange transformation seemed to take place in her. She rose from her chair, an unlit cigarette dangling between her fingers, a gold lighter in her other hand, and studied the shadows that the banana trees and palm fronds created on her brick wall. Her face was bladed with the glare of the late afternoon sun reflecting off the pool; her eyes were narrow and hard, her lips crimped on the end of her unlit cigarette as she clicked her lighter several times without the flint igniting a flame. Her skin looked coarse and grained, like that of a countrywoman or someone who had stepped into a cold wind.
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  I replaced the photo in the envelope and put it in my pocket and walked across the flagstones toward the gate. I turned around and looked back at her once more before I entered the side yard.

  The gold lighter. It was an archaic type, thin and lightweight, with strips of veined, dark leather inset in the casement and a horizonal lever the smoker snapped downward on top and a tiny cap that automatically retracted from the flame.

  It was the same type of stylish gold lighter that Jim Gable used to light his cigars.

  She got her cigarette lit and blew her smoke at an upward angle, her sandaled feet slightly spread, one hand on her hip, a private thought buried in her eyes.

  21

  Monday morning Little Face Dautrieve came to see me at my office. She wore a dark dress with green flowers printed on it, and a hibiscus in her hair, and hose and lavender pumps.

  “You going somewhere special today?” I said.

  “Yeah, you driving me and you to New Orleans,” she replied.

  “Is that right?”

  “The reason I call you ‘Sad Man’ ain’t ’cause of the way you look. It’s ’cause you let Zipper Clum play you for a fool,” she said.

  “Say again?”

  “Zipper liked to make other people hate themselves. That’s how he got people like me to work for him. That and the rock he give me.”

  “You’re not making a whole lot of sense, Little Face.”

  “You never axed me how I got in the life. It was t’rew my auntie in New Orleans. She knowed Zipper. I visited my auntie this weekend. She say Zipper tole you a bunch of lies about your mother.”

  • • •

  I signed out a cruiser, and Little Face and I took the four-lane through Morgan City to New Orleans. The sugarcane was high and thickly clustered and pale green in the fields, and the cruiser was buffeting in the wind off the Gulf.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “I seen the story in the paper. People trying to shoot at you and Fat Man. He doin’ all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell Fat Man I been going to meetings,” she said, her face pointed straight ahead to hide whatever emotion was in it.

  “You still don’t trust me enough to tell me how Vachel Carmouche died?”

  “A lawman get killed in Lou’sana, somebody gonna pay. It don’t matter who. Give them peckerwoods a chance, they’ll strap another one down wit’ her. Tell me I be wrong, Sad Man.”

  The aunt lived on St. Andrew, in a white shotgun house, between the streetcar line and the Mississippi River levee. She had been a prostitute thirty years ago, but her skin was smooth, unwrinkled, like yellow tallow, her gray-streaked hair combed out on her shoulders, her turquoise eyes and red mouth still seductive. At least until she opened her mouth to speak and you saw her bad teeth and the gums that were black and eaten with snuff.

  She sat on the stuffed couch in her small living room, her hands clasped just below her knees to prevent the floor fan from puffing up her dress. From outside I could hear the streetcars grinding up and down the tracks on St. Charles.

  “You knew Mae Guillory?” I asked.

  “I worked in a club in Lafourche Parish. Down on Purple Cane Road, almost to the salt water,” she said.

  I repeated my question. The aunt, whose name was Caledonia Patout, looked at Little Face.

  “Robicheaux been good to me, Callie,” Little Face said, her eyes avoiding mine, as though she had broken a self-imposed rule.

  “The club was still for white people then. I worked out of the cribs in back. That’s how I knew Mae Guillory,” Caledonia said.

  “My mother worked out of the cribs?” I said, and coughed slightly in my palm, as though I had a mild cold or allergy.

  “No, your mother wasn’t no working girl. Zipper just putting some glass inside you. You seen that burn like a big ringworm on his cheek? Cops done that. Mae Guillory waited tables and hepped at the bar and cooked sometimes. She tole me she’d come there twenty years before with a man deal bouree. The bouree man got TB and died. So she just work there on and off. The rest of the time she work places around Morgan City and Thibodaux.”

  “What happened to her, Caledonia?”

  This is what she told me.

  It was 1967, way down in the fall, hurricane weather. The sky turned green at evening and the air was palpable with the heavy, wet smell of seaweed laden with fish eggs and Portuguese men-of-war whose air sacs had popped and dried in a crusty web on the beach; it was weather that smelled of a storm-swollen tide surging over the barrier islands, bursting in geysers against jetties and sandspits.

  The old owner of the nightclub had died and left his property to his half brother, a reckless, irreverent slaughterhouse butcher by the name of Ladrine Theriot. Ladrine had always wanted to be a professional cook, and he remodeled the kitchen of the club and began to serve gumbos and chicken and dirty rice dinners. He loved to cook; he loved women, and, like my father, he loved to fight with anyone foolish enough to accept his challenge.

  For Mae Guillory, Ladrine had walked right out of her past. But, unlike my father, Ladrine wasn’t an alcoholic.

  Mae was working at the bar the night the two police officers drove an unmarked vehicle to the back door and cut their lights and walked out of the darkness in rain slickers and hats. Through the door she could see Ladrine in an undershirt and apron, butchering a hog with a cleaver on top of an enormous wood block, chopping through ribs and vertebrae, his arms and shoulders curlicued with black hair that was flecked with tiny pieces of pink meat. She did not see the faces of the officers, only their shadows, which fell across the butcher block, but she clearly heard the conversation between one officer and Ladrine.

  “Tell them dagos in New Orleans I ain’t buying from them no more. One man tole me the rubber he got out of the machine got holes in it. Their beer’s flat and the jukebox full of rock ‘n’ roll. Them people in New Orleans ain’t got no Cajun music?” Ladrine said.

  “You want to use another distributor, that’s fine.”

  Ladrine began paring the rinds off a stack of chops, his long, honed knife flicking the gray dissected pieces of fat sideways into a garbage barrel.

  “There’s another t’ing,” he said. “I’m closing up them cribs, me. Don’t be sending no more girls down here, no.”

  His knife paused over the meat and he raised his eyes to make his point.

  “That not a problem, Ladrine,” the officer said. “But your brother owed the people in New Orleans forty-three hundred dollars and change. The debt comes with the club. What they call the vig, the points, the interest, is running, tick-tock, tick-tock, all day, all night. I’d pay it if I was you.”

  “Oh, you need your money? Go to the graveyard. My brother’s got a bunch of gold teet’ in his mout’. You can have them. He don’t mind,” Ladrine said.

  He resumed his work, his knife going chop, chop, snick, snick against the wood.

  Two nights later they were back. A storm had made landfall immediately to the south, the tidal surge warping and twisting boat docks, rippling the loose planks like piano keys, and the cane in the fields was white with lightning, slashing back and forth as though the wind were blowing from four directions at once.

  The two police officers ran out of the rain into the dryness of the kitchen, and one of them loosened the bulb in the light socket that hung over the butcher block, dropping the kitchen into darkness.

  The nightclub was almost deserted. Mae stood behind the bar on the duckboards and stared at the kitchen door, her pulse jumping in her neck. “Callie and me need you to hep out here, Ladrine,” she said.

  “He’s all right. Go about your business,” one of the police officers said. “You can fix us some coffee, if you want. Set it on the chair by the door. I’ll get it.”

  “Ladrine ain’t caused no trouble,” Mae said.

  “He’s a good boy. He’s going to stay a good boy,” the officer said. “That’s right, isn’t it, Ladrine?”
r />   “Stay out of it, Mae,” Callie whispered in her ear.

  Mae could hear them talking now from inside the darkness, the lightning in the fields trembling like candle flame on their bodies. Ladrine was uncharacteristically subdued, perhaps even cowered by what he was being told, his shape like that of a haystack in the gloom.

  “It’s nothing personal. Debts have to be paid. We respect you. But you got to respect us,” the officer said.

  The officer picked up the demitasse of coffee and the saucer and spoon and sugar cube that Mae had set on the chair for him. He stood in the doorway and sipped from it, his back to Mae, his small hands extended out of the black folds of his slicker. His nails were clean, and his face looked rosy and handsome when the light played on it.

  “Them Giacanos pretty rough, huh?” Ladrine said.

  “I wouldn’t know. I stay on their good side,” the officer said.

  “I’ll t’ink about it, me,” Ladrine said.

  “I knew you’d say that,” the officer said, and placed his hand on Ladrine’s arm, then set down his empty cup and saucer and went out the door with his partner in a swirl of rain and wind.

  “You okay, Ladrine? They ain’t hurt you, huh?” Mae asked.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with me,” he replied, his face bloodless.

  The storm passed, but another was on its way. The next morning was dismal. The sky was the color of cardboard, the fields flooded, the dirt road like a long wet, yellow scar through the cane, and moccasins as thick as Mae’s arms crawled from the ditches and bumped under her tires when she drove to work. She mopped floors and hauled trash to the rusted metal barrels in back until 10 A.M., when she saw Ladrine drive a pickup into the parking lot with a hydraulic lift in the rear. He got out, slammed the door of the cab, and thumped a hand truck up the wood steps into the bar.

  Later, from in back, she heard him laboring with a heavy object, then she heard the hydraulic lift whining and his pickup truck driving away.

  He returned at noontime and opened the cash register and counted out several bills and pieces of silver on the bar. As an afterthought he went back to the register drawer and removed an additional ten-dollar bill and added it to the stack on the bar.