Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  He removed the comic book from his pocket and tapped it in his palm, his anger seeming to rise and fall, as though it could not find an acceptable target.

  “Doesn’t seem like that’s enough to get a person fired,” I said.

  “Gable’s been acting good to her lately. I think she’s gonna let him have the money to build that racetrack out in New Mexico. I had to be a smart-ass at the wrong time and give him what he needed to get me canned.”

  “You cut up Axel Jennings, Micah?”

  He opened his comic book and flopped the pages back on his knee, thinking, his deformed face like a melted candied apple in the glow from the midway.

  “You’re always trying to get another inch, aren’t you? I’ll give you something better to chew on,” he said. “You know a woman named Maggie Glick, runs a bar full of colored whores in Algiers? It was Jim Gable got her out of prison. Gable’s got a whole network of whores and dope peddlers working for him. That’s the man gonna be head of your state police, Mr. Robicheaux. Play your cards right and there might be a little pissant job in it for you somewhere.”

  He smiled at the corner of his mouth, a glint in his good eye.

  “Some people enjoy the role of victim. Maybe you’ve found what you were looking for, after all,” I said, and walked away, wondering if I, too, possessed a potential for cruelty I had chosen not to recognize.

  When I returned to the pavilion I realized I had made a mistake. Belmont Pugh had cornered Connie Deshotel and Bootsie and there was no easy way of getting away from the situation. Belmont had launched into one of his oratorical performances, guffawing, gesturing at the air like Huey Long, slinging shrimp tails out into the darkness, the damp rawness of his body reaching out like a fist. He squeezed Connie with one arm while his wife, a black-haired woman with recessed dark eyes and a neck like a hog, looked on sternly, as though her disapproval of Belmont’s behavior somehow removed her from all the machinations and carnival vulgarity that had placed her and her husband in the governor’s mansion.

  Sookie Motrie stood at Belmont’s elbow, dressed in the two-tone boots and clothes of a horse tout at a western track, his salt-and-pepper mustache clipped and trim, his snubbed, hawk nose moving about like a weather vane. For years he had been an ambulance chaser in Baton Rouge and had self-published a detective novel that he tried to unload on every movie representative who visited the area. But he had found his true level as well as success when he became a lobbyist for Vegas and Chicago gambling interests. Even though he had been indicted twice on RICO charges, no door in the state legislature or at any of the regulatory agencies was closed to him.

  He laughed when Belmont did and listened attentively to Belmont’s coarse jokes, but still managed to watch everyone passing by and to shake the hand, even if quickly, of anyone he deemed important.

  Jim and Cora Gable stood at the makeshift plank bar that sold mint juleps in plastic cups for three dollars. He wore a pale pink shirt and dark tie with roses on it and a white sports coat, his face glowing with the perfection of the evening. No, that’s too simple. I had to hand it to Gable. He exuded the confidence and self-satisfaction of those who know that real power lies in not having to demonstrate its possession. Every gesture, every mannerism, was like an extension of his will and his ability to charm, a statement about a meticulous personality that allowed no exception to its own rules. He walked toward Belmont’s circle and lifted a sprig of mint from his drink and shook the drops from the leaves, bending slightly so as not to spot his shoes.

  Cora Gable started to raise her hand, her lipsticked mouth twisting with alarm, like someone left behind unexpectedly at a bus stop. But almost on cue, as though Gable were privy to all the unconscious anxieties that drove her life, he turned and said, “I’ll be just a minute, sweetheart. Order another julep.”

  Belmont asked Connie if she knew Jim Gable.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe we met years ago,” she replied.

  “How do you do, Miss Connie? It’s good to see you,” Gable said.

  They did not look directly at each other again; they even stepped backwards at the same time, like people who have nothing in common.

  I stared at the two of them, as though the moment had been caught inside a cropped photograph whose meaning lay outside the borders of the camera’s lens. Both Gable and Connie had come up through the ranks at NOPD back in the late 1960s. How could they have no specific memory of each other?

  Then Connie Deshotel lit a cigarette, as though she were distracted by thoughts that would not come together in her mind. But she did not have the lighter I had seen her use by her swimming pool, the one that was identical to the thin leather and gold lighter owned by Jim Gable.

  His face split with his gap-toothed smile.

  “It’s the Davester,” he said.

  “I was just talking with your chauffeur about your friendship with Maggie Glick,” I said.

  “Maggie, my favorite madam,” he said.

  “You got her out of prison?” I said.

  “Right again, Davester. A wrong narc planted crystal on her. It’s a new day in the department. Too bad you’re not with us anymore,” he replied.

  It started to rain, thudding on top of the tents, misting on the neon and the strings of electric lights over the rides. A barman dropped a tarp on one side of the drink pavilion, and the air was sweet and cool in the dryness of the enclosure and I could smell the draft beer and whiskey and mint and sweet syrup and melted ice in the plastic cups along the bar.

  “Remember me, Dave?” Sookie Motrie said, and put out his hand. After my hand was firmly inside his, he locked down on my fingers and winked and said, “When I used to write bonds for Wee Willie Bimstine, I went to see you in the lockup once. I think you were doing extracurricular research. Back in your days of wine and roses.”

  I took my hand from his and looked out into the rain, then said to Bootsie, “I promised Alf we’d be back early. I’ll get the car and swing around behind the pavilion.”

  I didn’t wait for her to answer. I walked into the rain, out beyond the noise of the revelers in the tents and the rides whose buckets and gondolas spun and dipped emptily under the electric lights.

  You just walk away. It’s easy, I thought. You don’t provoke, you don’t engage. You keep it simple and your adversaries never have power over you.

  I started Bootsie’s car and drove through the mud toward the drink pavilion. Cora Gable had disappeared, but Jim Gable was at the plank bar, standing just behind Bootsie.

  I kept working my twelve-step program inside my head, the way a long-distance ocean swimmer breathes with a concentrated effort to ensure he does not swallow water out of a wave and drown. I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that used to come aborning like a sulfurous match flaring off a thumbnail.

  Through the rain and the beating of the windshield wipers I saw Jim Gable standing so close behind Bootsie that his shadow seemed to envelop her body. She was dabbing with a napkin at a spot on the plank bar where she had spilled a drink and was evidently not aware of his closeness, or the way his loins hovered just behind her buttocks, the glaze that was on his face.

  I stopped the car and stepped out into the rain, the car door yawing behind me.

  Gable’s nostrils were dilated as he breathed in the smell of Bootsie’s shampoo, the perfume behind her ears, the soap from her bath, the heat off her skin, the hint of her sex in her underthings. I could see the cloth of his slacks tightening across his loins.

  Then I was running out of the rain toward him. I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman’s blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table.

  A man I didn’t know grabbed my arm, and a big uniformed policeman crashed into me from the other side, wres
tling with both of his big meaty hands to get his arms around me and smother me against his girth. But even while the two men tried to pull me off of Gable, I kicked him in the side of the head and kicked at him once more and missed his face and shattered his watch on the cement.

  I fell over a chair and stared stupidly at the faces looking down at me, like a derelict who has collapsed on a sidewalk and must witness from the cement the pity and revulsion he inspires in his fellowman. Bootsie was between me and Gable now, her face incredulous. A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable’s blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time of need.

  Through the sweat and water that dripped out of my hair I saw the governor and people from the crowd lifting Jim Gable to his feet. He was smiling at me, his teeth like pink tombstones in his mouth.

  26

  My hands still hurt the next morning. I ran cold water over them in the kitchen sink, then drank coffee out on the picnic table in the blueness of the dawn and tried not to think about last night. I walked along the coulee that traversed the back of our property and looked at the periwinkles along the bank, the caladiums and elephant ears beaded with moisture, the willows swelling in the breeze. I wanted to stay in that spot forever and not go into the department on Monday morning, not look at the early edition of the Daily Iberian, not deal with the people who would speak politely to me on a sidewalk or in a courthouse corridor, then whisper to one another after they thought I was out of earshot.

  I walked back up toward the house just as the sun rose behind the cypress trees and seemed to flatten like fire inside the swamp. The back of the house was still deep in shadow, but I could see a white envelope taped to Alafair’s screen. I pulled it loose and looked at her name written across the front in a flowing calligraphy. The flap was glued, with tiny felt-pen marks that transected both the flap and the body of the envelope so the dried glue could not be broken without the addressee knowing it.

  I opened my pocketknife and slit the envelope all the way across the top and removed the folded sheet of stationery inside.

  I went down to the bait shop and called Wally, our 275-pound dispatcher at the department, and told him I was taking a vacation day on Monday and not coming in.

  “You axed the old man?” he said.

  “I have a feeling he’ll get in touch,” I said.

  “Hey, Dave, if I pass the detectives exam, can I hang around wit’ y’all, solve big cases, mop the shrimp tails off the floor with New Orleans cops?”

  But as I went back on the dock, I wasn’t thinking about Wally’s sardonic humor or my eventual encounter with the sheriff. I sat at a spool table and read again the letter that was written with the symmetry and baroque curlicues of a self-absorbed artist or what a psychologist would simply call a megalomaniac.

  It read:

  Dear Alafair,

  I had a harsh conversation with your father. But he has tried to destroy our friendship and has also been asking people about my private life, about things that are none of his business.

  At first I could not believe your words when you said you couldn’t see me again. Did you really mean that? I would never betray you. Would you do that to me? I already know what the answer is.

  Remember all our secret meeting places? Just be at any one of them and I’ll find you. You’re the best person I’ve ever known, Alafair. We’re like the soldier and the girl on the vase. Even though they lived long ago and have probably moldered in the grave, they’re still alive inside the arbor on the vase. Death can be beautiful, just like art, and once you’re inside either of them, you stay young forever and your love never dies.

  See you soon.

  As ever, Your loyal friend,

  Johnny

  I walked up the slope to the house and went into the bedroom with the letter and showed it to Bootsie.

  “My God,” she said.

  “I’m at a loss on this one.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Still asleep. I’d like to—”

  “What?” Bootsie said. She was still in her nightgown, propped on one elbow.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She sat up and took both my hands in hers. “We can’t solve all our problems with violence. Remeta’s a sick person,” she said.

  “It sounds like we’re talking about last night instead of Remeta.”

  She lay back down on the pillow, then turned her head and looked out the window at the pecan and oak trees in the yard, as though fearing that whatever she said next would be wrong.

  “You know why I don’t believe in capital punishment?” she said. “It empowers the people we execute. We allow them to remake us in their image.”

  “Gable’s a degenerate. You didn’t see him. I hope I ruptured his spleen.”

  “I can’t take this shit. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she said, and sat on the side of the bed, her back stiff with anger.

  • • •

  I found Clete that afternoon, drinking beer, half in the bag, in a St. Martinville bar. The bar had lath walls and a high, stamped ceiling, and because it was raining outside, someone had opened the back door to let in the cool air, and I could see the rain dripping on a banana tree that grew by a brick wall. A group of bikers and their girlfriends were shooting pool in back, yelling each time one of them made a difficult shot, slamming the butts of their cues on the floor.

  “Passion tell you I was here?” Clete said. His lap and the area around his stool were littered with popcorn.

  “Yeah. Y’all on the outs?”

  “She’s wrapped up in her own head all the time. I’m tired of guessing at what’s going on. I mean who needs it, right?”

  “If I wanted to have somebody capped, who would I call?”

  “A couple of the asswipes at that pool table would do it for a hand job.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “The major talent is still out of Miami. You’re actually talking about having somebody smoked? You must have had a bad day, Streak.”

  “It’s getting worse, too.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing. I want to throw a steel net over Johnny Remeta. Most button men know each other.”

  “I already tried. A stone killer in Little Havana, a guy who goes back to the days of Johnny Roselli? He hung up on me as soon as I mentioned Remeta’s name. What’s Remeta done now?”

  “He’s got a death wish. I think he wants to take Alafair with him.”

  Clete’s face was flushed and he wiped the heat and oil out of his eyes with a paper napkin. The pool players yelled at another extraordinary shot.

  “How about putting it under a glass bell, Jack?” Clete said to them, then looked back at me, a half-smile on his face, his eyes slightly out of focus. “Say all that again?”

  “I’ll catch you another time, Cletus.”

  He removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and stared at it.

  “What’s scareoderm mean? I couldn’t find it in the dictionary,” he said.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I took Passion to the doctor yesterday. I heard the nurses talking about her. I wrote that word down.”

  “You mean scleroderma?” I asked.

  “That’s it. That’s what she has. What is it?”

  His mouth was parted expectantly, his green eyes bleary with alcohol, while he waited for me to reply.

  It continued to rain through the afternoon into the night. Little Face Dautrieve put her baby to bed in his crib and watched television until midnight in the front room of her cabin in the Loreauville Quarters. Then she undressed and put on a pajama top and lay down on top of her bed under the fan and listened to the rain on the tin roof. The wind was blowing hard against the slat walls and she knew the storm would be a long one. The occasional headlights on the state road looked like spiderwebs flaring on
the windowpane.

  From the edges of sleep she heard a raw scraping sound, like a rat clawing inside the walls. When she raised her head from the pillow, she saw the dead bolt on the back door rotating in its socket, then sliding free of the door frame.

  The man other people called Johnny Remeta stepped into the room, water sliding off his hat and black raincoat, a metal nail file glinting in his right hand.

  “I t’ought you was my auntie. She fixing to be here any minute,” Little Face said.

  “Long drive from Lake Charles. Because that’s where she moved to.”

  Remeta sat down in a chair next to the bed and leaned forward on his hands, his hatted profile in silhouette against the lightning that leaped above the trees on the bayou.

  “Can I take off my things? They’re wet,” he said.

  “We ain’t got nothing you want, Rain Man. My baby’s got the croup. I melted Vicks in hot water. That’s how come the room smell like it do. You stay here, you get sick.”

  He removed his hat and set it crown-down on the floor, then pulled his raincoat off his shoulders and let it hang wet side out on the back of the chair. His eyes settled on her face and mouth and she saw his throat swallow. She pulled the sheet up to her stomach.

  “I ain’t in that life no more,” she said.

  He opened and closed his hands on top of his thighs, his veins cording under the skin.

  “You’ve been with white men?” he asked.

  “Down South the color line never got drawn when it come to the bedroom.”

  Then he said something that was lost in the thunder or the thickness that caused his words to bind in his throat.

  “I cain’t hear you,” she said.

  “What difference does one more make?”

  “I ain’t want your money. I ain’t want you, Rain Man. You got to go back where you come from.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” he said.

  The rain clattered on the roof and sluiced down over the windows. Little Face could feel her heart beating inside the thinness of her pajama top. The elastic of her nylon panties cut into her skin, but she knew she should not move in order to make herself more comfortable, although she could not explain why she knew this.