Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

“When the loupgarou come, somebody gonna die. Old folks use to burn blood to run it back in the trees.”

  “Thanks for putting up the meat, Batist,” I said, and went inside the house.

  Bootsie sat at the kitchen table reading from two sheets of lined paper. She wore blue jeans and loafers and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut away at the shoulders; wisps of her hair had fallen loose from her barrette and hung on the back of her neck. Her fingers were pressed to her temples while she read.

  “Is that from Remeta?” I said.

  “No. I went to an Al-Anon meeting today. Judy Theriot, my sponsor, was there. She said I had a problem with anger.”

  “She did?” I said, my voice neutral.

  “She made me do a Fourth Step and write out an inventory. Now that I’ve read it again I’d like to wad it up and throw it away.”

  I went to the icebox and took out a pitcher of iced tea and poured a glass at the sink. I raised the glass to my mouth, then lowered it and set it back on the drainboard.

  “Would you care for one?” I asked.

  “You want to know what’s in my inventory?” Bootsie asked.

  “I’m a little bit afraid of what’s coming.”

  “My first statement has to do with absolute rage.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “Hold your water, Streak, before I get charged up again. Judy made me write out a list of all the things you did that angered me. It’s quite long.”

  I looked out the window at Batist chopping meat on the wood table by the coulee. He had started a trash fire of leaves, and the smoke was blowing into my neighbor’s cane field. I could feel my scalp tightening as I waited for Bootsie to recite her written complaint, and I wanted to be outside, in the wind, in the autumnal smell of smoldering leaves, away from the words that would force me to look again at the ongoing insanity of my behavior.

  Then, rather than wait for her to speak again and quietly accept criticism, I took the easier, softer way and tried to preempt it. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s the violence. Nobody should have to live around it. I drag it home with me like an animal on a chain,” I said.

  “Judy made me look at something I didn’t want to see. I was often angry when you were protective of someone else. You beat up Gable because you thought he was treating me disrespectfully in public. Then I lectured you about your violent feelings toward Remeta.”

  “You weren’t wrong,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I set Remeta up the other night. I was going to dust him and take him out of Alafair’s life.”

  She was quiet a long time, staring into space, her cheeks spotted with color. Her mouth was parted slightly and I kept waiting for her to speak.

  “Boots?” I said.

  “You were actually going to kill him?”

  “Yes.”

  I could see the anger climbing into her face. “In front of our home, just blow him away?” she said.

  “I couldn’t do it. So he’ll be back. We can count on it.”

  I could hear the wall clock in the silence. Her face was covered with shadow and I couldn’t see her expression. I waited a moment longer, then rinsed out my glass and dried it and put it in the cupboard and went out on the front gallery. The screen opened behind me.

  “He’s coming back?” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “I wish you had killed him. That’s what I really feel. I wish Johnny Remeta was dead. If he comes around Alafair again, I’ll do it myself. Get either in or out of the game, Streak,” she said.

  “Your sponsor would call that rigorous honesty,” I said.

  She tried to hold the anger in her face, then mashed her foot on top of mine.

  The bedroom was filled with shadows and the curtains twisted and popped in the wind when Bootsie sat on my thighs and lowered her hand, then raised herself and placed me inside her. A few minutes later her mouth opened silently and her eyes became unfocused, her hair hanging in her face, and she began to say something that broke and dissolved in her throat; then I felt myself joining her, my hands slipping off her breasts onto her back, and in my mind’s eye I saw a waterfall cascading over pink rocks and a marbled boulder tearing loose from its moorings, rolling heavily, faster and faster in the current, its weight pressing deeply into the soft pebbly bottom of the stream.

  She kissed me and cupped her hand on my forehead as though she were checking to see if I had a fever, then pushed my hair up on my head.

  “Alafair will be home soon. Let’s take her to dinner at the Patio. We can afford an extra night out, can’t we?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  I watched her as she put on her panties and bra; her back was firm with muscle, her skin as free of wrinkles as a young woman’s. She was reaching for her shirt on the chair when an odor like scorched hair and burning garbage struck her face.

  “Good Lord, what is that?” she said.

  I put on my khakis and the two of us went into the kitchen and looked through the window into the backyard. The sun had dropped below the horizon, but the light had not gone out of the sky, and the full moon hung like a sliver of partially melted ice above my neighbor’s cane. Batist flung a bucket filled with hog’s blood onto the trash fire, and a cloud of black smoke with fire inside it billowed up into the wind and drifted back against the house.

  “What’s Batist doing? Has he lost his mind?” Bootsie said.

  I rubbed the small of her back, my fingers touching the line of elastic across the top of her panties.

  “It’s a primitive form of sacrifice. He believes he saw the loupgarou in the swamp,” I said.

  “Sacrifice?”

  “It keeps the monster back in the trees.”

  “You thinking about Letty Labiche?”

  “About all of us, I guess,” I said.

  30

  The next day was Wednesday. I don’t know why, but I woke with a sense of loss and emptiness I hadn’t experienced in many years. It was like the feelings I had as a child that I could never explain to priests or nuns or any other adults who tried to help me. But when that strange chemical presence would have its way with my heart, like weevil worms that had invaded my blood, I was convinced the world had become a gray, desolate place without purpose, with no source of heat other than a perpetual winter sun.

  I walked down through the mist in the trees to the road and took the newspaper out of the metal cylinder and opened it on the kitchen table.

  The lead story had a three-column headline that read: “Governor Sets Execution for Labiche.”

  Unless Belmont Pugh commuted her sentence, Letty had exactly three weeks to live.

  I drove to the department in the rain and talked to the sheriff, then went to the prosecutor’s office.

  The district attorney was out of town and would be gone for a week, and the ADA I caught was Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and was a good prosecutor, and I had always wanted to like her. But she seldom smiled and she went about her job with the abrasiveness of a carpenter building coffins with a nail gun.

  “Passion Labiche has confessed she participated in the murder of Vachel Carmouche?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The statement, the tape, whatever.”

  “I didn’t take a formal statement from her.”

  “So what is it you want from us?” she asked.

  “I’m apprising you of the situation.”

  “It sounds like you’re getting your chain jerked.”

  “The weed sickle she used is still under the house.”

  “I think you should get out of law enforcement. Become a public defender. Then you can clean up after these people on a regular basis. Talk to the D.A. when he gets back. He’s going to tell you the right perso
n is going to be injected three weeks from now. I suggest you learn to live with it,” she said.

  It was still raining outside, and through the window I could see the old crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery and the rain dancing on top of the bricks and plaster.

  “Passion was telling the truth,” I said.

  “Good. Make the case and we’ll indict for capital murder. Anything else you want?” she replied, and began sticking files in a cabinet, her back to me.

  But Barbara Shanahan surprised me. And so did Connie Deshotel, who rang my phone just before 5 P.M.

  “Your ADA called me. She says you have new evidence in the Carmouche case,” she said.

  “Both sisters killed him,” I said.

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put something together. I’ll take it to the governor.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “Because I’m the attorney general of Louisiana. Because I don’t want to overlook mitigating circumstances in a capital conviction.”

  “I want to offer Passion Labiche immunity,” I said.

  “That’s between you and the prosecutor’s office.”

  “Belmont thinks he’s going to be a vice-presidential candidate. He’s not going to be easy to move.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  After she hung up I put on my coat to leave the office. Through the window I could see rain and leaves blowing in the cemetery. Helen Soileau opened my office door and leaned inside.

  “Give me a ride, boss man?”

  “Sure. Why would Connie Deshotel want to help Letty Labiche?”

  “Simple. She’s humanitarian and is always willing to risk her ass for a cop killer,” Helen said.

  “Right,” I said.

  In the morning I drove out to Passion Labiche’s house, but she wasn’t home. I drove up the road, along the bayou, to her nightclub outside St. Martinville and saw her pickup truck parked by the back door under a dripping tree. She was unloading groceries from the bed and carrying them, two sacks at a time, through a puddle of water into the small kitchen in back. She wore baggy strap overalls and a gray T-shirt and a red bandanna tied around her neck. Her feet were wet up to her ankles.

  “Need a hand?” I asked.

  “I got it. What you want, Dave?” she said.

  I followed her through the screen door into the kitchen.

  “I talked to the attorney general. She wants to take your statement about Carmouche’s death to the governor,” I said.

  “What statement?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said what statement you talking about?”

  She put a huge gumbo pot on the gas range and split open a bag of okra on the drainboard and began rinsing the okra under hot water and rubbing it smooth with a dish towel. Her hair looked oily and unwashed and I could smell a sour odor in her clothes.

  “If you want immunity, we have to wait till the D.A. comes back from Washington,” I said.

  “I got scleroderma. He can give immunity from that?”

  “I’m telling you what’s available.”

  “It don’t matter what I do. They gonna kill my sister. Your friends, the attorney general and Belmont Pugh? I wish it was them gonna be strapped down on that table. I wish they could know what it feels like to sit in a cage and wait for people to tape a needle on your arm and steal the breath out of your chest. You don’t die easy on that table, no. You strangle to death.” She raised one arm from her work, her back still to me, and wiped at the corner of her face. “It’s over, Dave. Don’t be bothering me and Letty again.”

  When I drove back to the office, the sugarcane in the fields waving against the grayness of the sky, I kept thinking of Passion’s words. Was it just a matter of her peculiar use of the second person, or had she described the execution as though she were speaking of her own fate, not Letty’s?

  The following Monday I received a call from Dana Magelli in New Orleans.

  “I’m patched in on Camp Street. We got a ’911 shots-fired’ a half hour ago. The neighbors say a blond guy drove up in a Honda, went inside, then suddenly pow, pow, and the Honda drives back off. We showed the neighbors Remeta’s picture. They say he looks like the guy who’s been living upstairs.”

  “Somebody hit Remeta?”

  “I’m not sure,” Magelli said.

  “You haven’t gone into the house?”

  “It’s burning. There’s another problem, too. Gunfire’s coming from the upstairs window. Whoever’s in there is going down with the ship.”

  Helen and I checked out a cruiser, hit the flasher, and took the four-lane through Morgan City into New Orleans. We made it in less than two hours. We came off I-10 onto St. Charles Avenue, passed Lee Circle, and headed uptown toward the Garden District. When we turned onto Camp, the street was sealed off with emergency vehicles and plumes of black smoke were still rising from the scorched brick shell and cratered roof of the building I had seen in the historical photograph.

  Magelli stood behind an NOPD cruiser, looking at the destroyed building, his face flinching slightly when a live round popped inside the heat.

  “You nail him?” Helen said.

  “We never saw him,” Magelli said.

  “You couldn’t get anybody into the first floor?” I asked.

  “We kept within our perimeter. We’ve got nobody down. Is that all right with you?” he said.

  “You bet,” I replied.

  The defensiveness went out of his face.

  “We’ve heard ammunition popping for two hours. How many were in a weapon is anybody’s guess. At least two rounds hit a fire truck. Another one went through a neighbor’s window,” he said.

  The wind changed, and he turned his head and cleared his throat slightly and spit in the gutter.

  “Well, you know what’s inside. You want to take a look?” he said.

  “I guess we won’t have ribs for lunch today,” Helen said.

  Magelli, two cops in uniform, and Helen and I went through the piked gate and started up the stairs to the second story, our weapons drawn. But the top of the stairs was partially blocked by a pile of burned laths and plaster. A raincoated fireman pushed his way past us and cleared a walkway, then kicked the door loose from the jamb.

  The smell inside did not fit in time and place; instead, I thought of a village across the seas and I heard ducks quacking in terror and the grinding sounds of steel tracks on an armored vehicle.

  The fire had probably started on or near the gas stove, and the entirety of the kitchen looked like a room carved out of soft coal. The canned goods in the pantry had superheated, and exploded glass from preserve or jelly jars had embedded like teeth in the walls. Portions of the roof had collapsed into the living room, half covering a desk by a front window. On the floor, among hundreds of brass shell casings and shards of broken window glass and a network of incinerated rug fibers, were the remains of two bolt-action rifles, their magazines filled with melted lead, and a .45 and a nine-millimeter pistol, the slides blown back and jammed open.

  We neared the front windows, and a fireman gagged behind his face shield. I pressed my handkerchief to my mouth and nose and thought of water buffalo and grass huts and rice in wicker baskets and penned hogs and the kerosene-like smell of a flame arching into a ville from a vehicle we called zippo tracks and another smell that was like the sweet, sickening stench a rendering plant makes. The fireman used the point of his ax to drag a pile of drenched debris off a desk, and the stench rose from the desk well as palpably and thick as a cloud of insects.

  “Sorry for the remark outside,” Helen said, her eyes deliberately unfocused as she looked down at the shape curled inside the well.

  “Is that Remeta?” Magelli asked.

  There was little left of the dead man’s features. The head was hairless, the skin burned black. His forearms were pressed against his ears, as though the flames had contained a sound he did not want to hear. The t
issue around his right eye looked like a scorched and shriveled biscuit.

  “He was a geek. I was wrong about him,” I said.

  Magelli raised his eyes to mine, not understanding.

  “It’s Micah, Jim Gable’s chauffeur. He used to be a carnival geek. He told me people paid to see the deformity on his face so they wouldn’t have to look at the ugliness inside themselves.”

  “So?” Magelli said.

  “He was a carnie man. He knew better than to shake down a man like Remeta. He was sent here to kill him,” I said.

  “You’re saying Gable hired him?” Magelli said.

  “A cop who had a whole family capped? Not a chance. I can’t believe I was a meter maid here,” Helen said.

  31

  The next morning I called Clete’s motel but no one answered. I tried again later and a woman picked up the phone.

  “Passion?” I said.

  “What you want?”

  “Where’s Clete?”

  “Asleep. Leave him alone.”

  “How about a little show of manners?” I said.

  “I’ll tell him you called. Right now he needs his rest,” she said, and hung up.

  That evening I drove to the motel. It had been hot all day, and the sky was purple and red in the west and it had just started to rain. When Clete opened the door his clothes looked like they had been slept in and I could smell alcohol deep down in his lungs.

  “What’s up, Streak?” he said.

  “Did Passion tell you I called?”

  “She must have forgot.”

  He closed the door behind me. The room was dark and in disarray. A red bandanna, like the one I had seen Passion wear around her neck, was on the nightstand. He took an open can of beer out of the icebox and drank the can empty and dropped it in a trash basket.

  “Jim Gable’s chauffeur tried to hit Remeta. Remeta put one in him and then set his own apartment on fire,” I said. I looked at the side of his face, his gaze that was focused on nothing. “Clete?”

  “Remeta wanted everybody to think the chauffeur was him?”

  “Or to buy time till he could find Gable and cook his hash.”

  “Gable set up the hit, huh?”

  “That’s my guess.”