Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  “He used to keep a shotgun,” Passion said.

  “He put his hand on it, I’ll shove it up his ass. You coming or not?” Letty said.

  They went out the back door, into the twilight, into the smell of spring and cut grass and newly turned dirt and night-blooming flowers opening in the cool of the evening. They crossed into Vachel Carmouche’s property, expecting to see him on his back porch with the little girl, expecting to confront and verbally lacerate him for a deed he had committed out in the open, upon the person of a third victim, a deed he could not possibly deny, as though Passion’s and Letty’s knowledge of their own molestation had long ago lost its viability and had to be corroborated by the suffering of another in order to make it believable.

  But Carmouche was nowhere in sight. The little girl sat on the back step, coloring in a crayon book.

  “What did he do to you, honey?” Letty said.

  “Ain’t done nothing. He gone inside to eat his dinner,” the girl replied.

  “Did he touch you?” Passion said.

  The little girl did not look back at them. A bright silver dime was on the step by her shoe.

  “Mr. Vachel gonna take me up to the video store to get some cartoons,” she said.

  “You come home wit’ us. We’ll call your auntie,” Letty said.

  “She at work. I ain’t suppose to go nowhere except Mr. Vachel’s.”

  Letty mounted the steps and shoved open the back door. Carmouche was sitting at the kitchen table, his back erect, his whole posture as rectangular as his chair, a fork poised in front of his mouth. He laid the fork down and picked up a glass of yellow wine.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d show some respect toward my home,” he said.

  “You sonofabitch,” she said, and stepped inside the room. When she did, the belt around her waist came loose and her terry-cloth robe fell open on her body.

  Carmouche’s eyes moved over her breasts and stomach and thighs. He sipped from his wine and pushed back his chair and crossed his legs.

  “Some say love’s the other side of hate. You’re a beautiful woman, Letty. An older man can bring a woman pleasure a younger man cain’t,” he said, his voice growing more hoarse with each word.

  He rose from his chair and approached her, his eyes liquid and warm under the bare electric light. She clutched her robe with one hand and stepped backwards, then felt her work shoe come down on the iron head of the mattock that was propped against the wall, knocking the handle into her back.

  She reached behind her and picked the mattock up with both hands, her robe falling open again, and swung it into his face.

  His nose broke and slung a string of blood across his shoulder. He stared at her in disbelief and she hit him again, this time directly in his overbite, breaking his upper teeth at the gums. His face quivered as though he had been electrically shocked, then the thousands of tiny wrinkles in his face flattened with rage and he attacked her with his fists.

  He swung wildly, like a girl, but he was strong and driven by his pain and the disfigurement she had already done his face and she knew it was only a matter of time until he wrested the mattock from her.

  His hands locked on the handle, his nose draining blood across his mouth, his broken teeth like ragged pieces of ceramic in his gums. She closed her eyes against the stench of his breath.

  Passion picked up the weed sickle from the porch step and came through the door and drove the curved point into Carmouche’s back, pushing with the heel of her hand against the dull side of the blade. His mouth fell open and his chin jutted upward like a man who had been garroted. He fell backwards, stumbling, reaching behind him with one hand as though he could insert a thumb in the hole that was stealing the air from his lung.

  He collapsed on one knee, his eyes suddenly luminous, like a man kneeling inside a cave filled with specters whose existence he had long ago forgotten.

  Letty hit him again and again with the mattock while Passion shut the back door so the little girl could not see inside the house. Letty’s robe and work shoes and arms and thighs were splattered with Carmouche’s blood, but her violence and anger found no satiation, and a muted, impotent cry came from between her teeth each time she swung the mattock.

  Passion put her hand on her sister’s shoulder and moved her away from Carmouche’s body.

  “What? What is it?” Letty said, as though awakening from a trance.

  Passion didn’t reply. Instead, she lifted the sickle above her head and looked into Carmouche’s eyes.

  “Don’t … please,” he said, his hand fluttering toward his cowboy belt buckle.

  Then Passion’s arm came down and Letty pressed both her forearms against her ears so she would not hear the sound that came from his throat.

  23

  I went home instead of returning to the office. I sat at one of the spool tables on the dock, the Cinzano umbrella popping in the breeze above my head, and looked at the blue jays flying in and out of the cypress and willow trees. I watched the clouds marble the swamp with shadow and light, and the wind from the Gulf straightening the moss on the dead snags. I stayed there a long time, although I didn’t look at my watch, like a person who has strayed unknowingly into the showing of a pornographic film and would like to rinse himself of a new and unwanted awareness about human behavior.

  The story of Carmouche’s death was repellent. I wished I had not heard it, and I wished I did not have to make decisions about it.

  I walked up to the house and told Bootsie of my morning with Passion Labiche.

  She didn’t say anything for perhaps a full minute. She got up from the kitchen table and stood at the sink and looked into the yard.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, her back to me.

  “Nothing she told me can help her sister.”

  “You have the sickle in the truck?”

  “I put it back under the house.”

  I went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee. She turned around and followed me with her eyes.

  “You’re going across a line, Dave,” she said.

  “I virtually coerced a confession out of her. I don’t know if Carmouche deserved to die the way he did, but I know the girls didn’t deserve what happened to them.”

  She walked to the stove and slipped her hand down my forearm and hooked her fingers under my palm.

  “You know what I would do?” she said.

  “What?” I said, turning to look at her.

  “Start the day over. You set out to help Passion and Letty. Why bring them more harm? If Letty were tried today, she might go free. You want to enable a process that’s already ignored the injury done to two innocent children?”

  Bootsie was forever the loyal friend and knew what to say in order to make me feel better. But the real problem was one that went beyond suppression of nonexculpatory evidence in a crime of eight years ago. I was tired of daily convincing myself that what I did for a living made a difference.

  I fixed a ham and onion sandwich for myself and ate it on the picnic table in the backyard. A few minutes later Bootsie came outside and sat down across from me, a small cardboard box in her hand.

  “I hate to hit you with this right now, but this came in the morning mail. Alafair left it on her bed. I shouldn’t have read the letter, but I did when I saw the name at the bottom,” she said.

  The box was packed with tissue paper and contained a six-inch-high ceramic vase that was painted with miniature climbing roses and a Confederate soldier and a woman in a hoop dress holding each other’s hands in an arbor of live oaks. The detail and the contrast of gray and red and green were beautiful inside the glazed finish.

  The letter, handwritten on expensive stationery and folded in a neat square, read:

  Dear Alafair,

  I hope you don’t think too badly of me by this time. Your father cares for you and wants to protect you, so I don’t hold his feelings toward me against him. This is the vase I was working on. I tried to make the girl l
ook like you. What do you think? You can’t see the face of the Confederate soldier. I’ll let you imagine who he is.

  I wish I could have lived in a time like the soldier and the girl on the vase did. People back then were decent and had honor and looked after each other.

  You’re one of the best people I ever met. If you ever need me, I promise I will be there for you. Nobody will ever make me break that promise.

  Your devoted friend from the library,

  Johnny

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “At the swimming pool.” Bootsie watched my face. “What are you thinking?”

  “That boy is definitely not a listener.”

  I went back to the office and placed another call to the psychologist at the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford. It wasn’t long before I knew I was talking to one of those condescending, incompetent bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to hold on to their jobs and hide their paucity of credentials.

  “You’re asking me if he has obsessions?” the psychologist said.

  “In a word, yeah.”

  “We don’t have an adequate vocabulary to describe what some of these people have.”

  “You don’t have to convince me of that,” I said.

  “He was a suspect in a killing here. A gasoline bomb thrown inside another inmate’s cell. Your man was probably raped. You were faxed everything we have. I don’t know what else to tell you about him.”

  “Wait a minute. You didn’t know him?”

  “No. I thought you all understood that. Dr. Louvas worked with O’Roarke, or Remeta, as you call him. Dr. Louvas is at Marion now.”

  “Excuse me for seeming impatient, but why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “You didn’t ask. Is there anything else?”

  I called the federal lockup at Marion, Illinois, and got Dr. Louvas on the phone. His was a different cut from his colleague in Florida.

  “Yeah, I remember Johnny well. Actually I liked him. I wouldn’t suggest having him over for dinner, though,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He has two or three personalities. Oh, I don’t mean he suffers dissociation, or any of that Three Faces of Eve stuff. He has an abiding sense of anger that he refuses to deal with. If he’d gotten help earlier, he might have turned out to be a writer or artist instead of a candidate for a lobotomy.”

  “Because he was raped in prison?”

  “His father would take him to a blind pig on skid row. That’s what they call after-hours places in Detroit. According to Johnny, a couple of pedophiles would use him while the old man got drunk on their tab. Family values hadn’t made a big splash in the Detroit area yet.”

  “So he’s hung up over his father?”

  “You got it all wrong, Mr. Robicheaux. He doesn’t blame the father for what happened to him. He thinks the mother betrayed him. He’s never gotten over what he perceives as her failure.”

  “He’s making overtures to my daughter.”

  There was no response.

  “Are you there?” I asked.

  “You’re asking me to tell you his future? My bet is Johnny will do himself in one day. But he’ll probably take others with him,” the psychologist said.

  The next morning I drove to Baton Rouge and went to Connie Deshotel’s office. The secretary told me Connie used her lunch hour on Thursdays to play racquetball at a nearby club.

  The club was dazzling white, surrounded with palm trees that were planted in white gravel; the swimming pool in back was an electric blue under the noon sun. Inside the building, I looked down through a viewing glass onto the hardwood floor of a racquetball court and watched Connie take apart her male opponent. She wore tennis shoes with green tubes of compressed air molded into the rubber soles, a pleated tennis skirt, and a sleeveless yellow jersey that was ringed under the neck and arms with sweat. Her tanned calves hardened with muscle when she bent to make a kill shot.

  Her opponent, a tall, graying, athletic man, gave it up, shook hands good-naturedly, and left. She bounced the rubber ball once, served the ball to herself off the wall, then fired it into a low ricochet that sent it arching over her head, as though she were involved in a private celebration of her victory. Her eyes followed the ball’s trajectory until they met mine. Then her face tightened, and she pushed her hair out of her eyes and left the court through a door in the back wall, slamming it behind her.

  I went down the stairs and intercepted her in the lounge area.

  “I have some information about my mother’s death,” I said.

  “Not here.”

  “You’re not going to put me off, Connie.”

  “What is it?”

  I gestured at a table.

  “I’m leaving here in two minutes. But I’ll make you a promise. You follow me anywhere again and I’ll have you arrested,” she said.

  “I have a witness.”

  “To what?”

  “My mother’s murder. Two cops in uniform did it. In front of a cabin a few miles off Purple Cane Road in Lafourche Parish. One of them called her an ignorant bitch before he knocked her down.”

  Her eyes stared into mine, unblinking, her lashes like black wire. Then they broke and she looked at nothing and pulled the dampness of her jersey off the tops of her breasts.

  “Bring your witness forward,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think the individual would end up dead,” I said.

  “You don’t want to indicate the person’s gender to me? I’m the attorney general of the state. What’s the matter with you?”

  “You trust Don Ritter. I don’t. I think he tried to have both me and Johnny Remeta killed.”

  She motioned at a black waiter in a white jacket. He nodded and began pouring a club soda into a glass of ice for her. She touched the sweat off her eyes with a towel and hung the towel around her neck.

  “I’ll say it again. My office is at your disposal. But a lot of this sounds like paranoia and conspiratorial obsession,” she said.

  “The cops were NOPD.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “They killed a Lafourche Parish nightclub owner named Ladrine Theriot and made a local constable take the weight. They weren’t backwoods coon-asses, either. They were enforcers and bagmen for the Giacanos. So if they weren’t New Orleans cops, where did they come from?”

  She took the club soda from the waiter’s hand and drank it half-empty. The heat seemed to go out of her face but not her eyes.

  “You have a larger agenda, Dave. I think it has something to do with me,” she said.

  “Not me. By the way, you play a mean game of racquetball for a woman who smokes.”

  “How kind.”

  “The other day I noticed your gold and leather cigarette lighter. Did Jim Gable give you that? Y’all must be pretty tight.”

  She got up from the table with her club soda in her hand.

  “My apologies to Bootsie for saying this, but you’re the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” she said, and walked toward the dressing room, her pleated skirt swishing across the tops of her thighs.

  “You read my mail?” Alafair said. It was evening, the sun deep down in the trees now, and she was grooming Tex, her Appaloosa, in the railed lot by his shed. She stared at me across his back.

  “The letter was lying on your bed. Bootsie saw Johnny’s name on it. It was inadvertent,” I replied.

  “You didn’t have the right to read it.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe you know what you’re doing. But I believe he’s a dangerous man.”

  “Not the Johnny O’Roarke I know.”

  “You always stood up for your friends, Alafair. But this guy is not a friend. The prison psychologist said he’s a sick man who will probably die by his own hand and take other people with him.”

  “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

  “How about it on the language?”

  “You admit he saved our lives, but
you run him down and take his head apart, a person you don’t know anything about, then you tell me to watch my language. I just don’t expect crap like that from my father.”

  “Has he tried to see you?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. It’s none of your business.”

  “Remeta’s a meltdown, Alf.”

  “Don’t call me that stupid name! God!” she said, and threw down the brush she had been using on Tex and stormed inside the house.

  That night I dreamed about a sugar harvest in the late fall and mule-drawn wagons loaded with cane moving through the fog toward the mill. The dirt road was frozen hard and littered with stalks of sugarcane, and the fog rolled out of the unharvested cane on each side of the road like colorless cotton candy and coated the mules’ and drivers’ backs with moisture. Up ahead the tin outline of the mill loomed against the grayness of the sky, and inside I could hear the sounds of boilers overheating and iron machines that pulverized the cane into pulp. Immediately behind the mill a stubble fire burned in a field, creeping in serpentine red lines through the mist.

  The dream filled me with a fear I could not explain. But I knew, with a terrible sense of urgency, I could not allow myself to go farther down the road, into the mill and the grinding sounds of its machinery and the fire and curds of yellow smoke that rose from the field beyond.

  The scene changed, and I was on board my cabin cruiser at dawn, on West Cote Blanche Bay, and the fogbank was heavy and cold on the skin, sliding with the tide into the coastline. To the north I could see Avery Island, like two green humps in the mist, as smooth and firm-looking as a woman’s breasts. The waves burst in strings of foam against the white sleekness of the bow, and I could smell the salt spray inside my head and bait fish in a bucket and the speckled trout that arched out of the waves and left circles like rain rings in the stillness of the swells.

  When I woke I went into the kitchen and sat in the dark, my loins aching and my palms tingling on my thighs. I held a damp hand towel to my eyes and tried to think but couldn’t. Even though I was awake now, I did not want to look at the meaning behind the dreams. I went back to bed and felt Bootsie stir, then touch my chest and turn on her hip and mold her body against me.