Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  “Nope,” he said, and smiled at her with his eyes and lifted his beer can to his mouth.

  I stepped beyond Clete’s angle of vision and made a motion with my head toward the front of the building. Helen walked with me across the broken glass until we were at the door. Clete salted his beer can, the shotgun still resting between his legs, as though the events taking place around him had no application in his life.

  “When you hear it start, come running. Tell the locals we swarm him. If one of them draws a weapon, I’m going to stuff it sideways down his throat,” I said.

  I walked behind the bar, across the duckboards, and opened a bottle of carbonated water and sat down next to Clete. I glanced at the biker who lay unconscious in the corner.

  “You didn’t kill him, did you?” I said.

  “They were eating reds in the john. It was like beating up on cripples. I don’t see the big deal here,” Clete said.

  “The big deal is I think you want to go to jail. You’re trying to fix it so you won’t get bail, either.”

  There was a self-amused light in his face. “Save the psychobabble for meetings,” he said.

  “You’ll be in lockup. Which means no trip up to the Death House tomorrow night.”

  He lowered his head and combed his hair back with his nails.

  “I’ve already been. This weekend. I took Passion. Letty got to have a dinner with some of her relatives,” he said.

  The whites of his eyes looked yellow, as though he had jaundice. I waited for him to go on. He picked up his beer can, but it was empty.

  “I need some whiskey,” he said.

  “Get it yourself.”

  He got up and tripped, stumbling with the shotgun against the stool. Unconsciously he started to hand me the gun, then he grinned sleepily and took it with him behind the bar.

  “Up on the top shelf. You broke everything down below,” I said.

  He dragged a chair onto the duckboards. When he mounted the chair, he propped the shotgun against a tin sink. I leaned over the bar and grabbed the barrel and jerked the shotgun up over the sink. He looked down curiously at me.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Dave?” he asked.

  I broke open the breech, pulled out the twenty-gauge shell, and tossed the shotgun out the front door onto the sidewalk.

  Helen came through the door with one city cop and two sheriff’s deputies. I went over the top of the bar just as Clete was climbing down from the chair and locked my arms around his rib cage. I could smell the sweat and beer in his clothes and the oily heat in his skin and the blood in his hair. I wrestled with him the length of the duckboards, then we both fell to the floor and the others swarmed over him. Even drunk and dissipated, his strength was enormous. Helen kept her knee across the back of his neck, while the rest of us bent his arms into the center of his back. But I had the feeling that, had he chosen, he could have shaken all five of us off him like an elephant in musth.

  Twenty minutes later I sat with him in a holding cell at the city police station. His shirt was ripped down the back, and one shoe was gone, but he looked strangely serene.

  Then I said, “It’s not just the execution, is it?”

  “No,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m a drunk. I have malarial dreams. I still get night visits from a mamasan I killed by accident. What’s a guy with my record know about anything?” he answered.

  I woke before dawn on Wednesday, the last scheduled day of Letty Labiche’s life, and walked down the slope through the trees to help Batist open up the shop. A Lincoln was parked by the boat ramp in the fog, its doors locked.

  “Whose car is that up there?” I asked Batist.

  “It was here when I come to work,” he said.

  I unchained our rental boats and hosed down the dock and started the fire in the barbecue pit. The sunlight broke through the trees and turned the Lincoln the color of an overly ripe plum. Water had begun streaming from the trunk. I touched the water, which felt like it had come from a refrigerator, and smelled my hand. At 8 A.M. I called the department and asked Helen Soileau to run the tag.

  She called back ten minutes later.

  “It was stolen out of a parking lot in Metairie two days ago,” she said.

  “Get ahold of the locksmith, would you, and ask the sheriff if he’d mind coming out to my house,” I said.

  “Has this got something to do with Remeta?” she asked.

  The sun was hot and bright by the time the sheriff and the locksmith and a tow truck got to the dock. The sheriff and I stood at the trunk of the Lincoln while the locksmith worked on it. Then the sheriff blew his nose and turned his face into the wind.

  “I hope we’ll be laughing about a string of bigmouth bass,” he said.

  The locksmith popped the hatch but didn’t raise it.

  “Y’all be my guests,” he said, and walked toward his vehicle.

  I flipped the hatch up in the air.

  Jim Gable rested on his hip inside a clear-plastic wardrobe bag that was pooled at the bottom with water and pieces of melting ice the size of dimes. His ankles and arms were pulled behind him, laced to a strand of piano wire that was looped around his throat. He had inhaled the bag into his mouth, so that he looked like a guppy trying to breathe air at the top of an aquarium.

  “Why’d Remeta leave him here?” the sheriff asked.

  “To show me up.”

  “Gable was one of the cops who killed your mother?”

  “He told me I didn’t know what was going on. He knew Johnny had cut a deal with somebody.”

  “With who?”

  When I didn’t reply, the sheriff said, “What a day. A molested and raped girl is going to be executed, and it takes a psychopath to get rid of a bad cop. Does any of that make sense to you?”

  I slammed the hatch on the trunk.

  “Yeah, if you think of the planet as a big blue mental asylum,” I said.

  34

  As a police officer I had learned years ago a basic truth about all aberrant people: They’re predictable. Their nemesis is not a lack of intelligence or creativity. Like the moth that wishes to live inside flame, the obsession that drives them is never satiated, the revenge against the world never adequate.

  Johnny Remeta called the office at two o’clock that afternoon.

  “How’d you like your boy?” he asked.

  “You’ve killed three cops, Johnny. I don’t think you’re going to make the jail.”

  “They all had it coming. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’ve been set up, kid.”

  After a beat, he said, “Alafair wants to be a screen writer. Tell her to write better lines for you.”

  “You cut a deal. You thought you were going to pop Gable and have it all,” I said.

  “Good try,” he said. But the confidence had slipped in his voice.

  “Yeah? The same person who sent you to kill Gable gave orders to the Louisiana State Police to shoot you on sight. There are two Texas Rangers sitting outside my office right now. Why is that? you ask yourself. Because you whacked a couple of people in Houston, and these two Rangers are mean-spirited peckerwoods who can’t wait to blow up your shit. You wonder why your mother dumped you? It’s no mystery. You’re a born loser, kid.”

  “You listen—” he said, his voice starting to shake. “Think I’m lying? Ask yourself how I know all this stuff. I’m just not that smart.”

  He began to curse and threaten me, but the transmission was breaking up and his voice sounded like that of a man trying to shout down an electric storm.

  I hung up the receiver and looked out the glass partition in my office at the empty corridor, then began filling out some of the endless paperwork that found its way to my basket on an hourly basis.

  I tried to keep my head empty the rest of the afternoon, or to occupy myself with any task that kept my mind off the fate of Letty Labiche or the razor wire I had deliberately wrapped around Johnny Remeta’s soul.
I called the jail in St. Martinville and was told Clete Purcel had thrown his food tray in a hack’s face and had been moved into an isolation cell.

  “Has he been arraigned yet?” I asked.

  “Arraigned?” the deputy said. “We had to Mace and cuff and leg-chain him to do a body search. You want this prick? We’ll transfer him to Iberia Prison.”

  At 4:30 I went outside and walked through St. Peter’s Cemetery. My head was thundering, the veins tightening in my scalp. The sky was like a bronze bowl, and dark, broad-winged birds that made no sound drifted across it. I wanted this day to be over; I wanted to look at the rain-worn grave markers of Eighth and Eighteenth Louisiana Infantry who had fought at Shiloh Church; I wanted to stay in a vacuum until Letty Labiche was executed; I wanted to slay my conscience.

  I went back into the department and called Connie Deshotel’s office in Baton Rouge.

  “She’s taken a few vacation days, Mr. Robicheaux. What with the demonstrations and all outside,” the secretary said.

  “Is she at Lake Fausse Pointe?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to say,” the secretary replied.

  “Will you call her for me and ask her to call me?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Her phone is out of order. I’ve reported it to the telephone company,” the secretary said.

  “How long has it been out of order?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand why you’re asking me these questions. Is this an emergency?”

  I thought about it, then said, “Thanks for your time.”

  I walked down to Helen Soileau’s office and opened her door without knocking. She looked up from her paperwork at my face. She was chewing gum and her eyes were bright and focused with a caffeinated intensity on mine. Then one finger pointed at an empty chair by the side of her desk.

  A few minutes later she said, “Go through that again. How’d you know Remeta was working for Connie Deshotel?”

  “The last time Alafair saw him he was sunburned. He said he’d been out on Lake Fausse Pointe. That’s where Connie’s camp is. Connie was Jim Gable’s partner at NOPD back in the sixties. When Remeta tried to shake her down, she got him to hit Gable.”

  “How?”

  “He’s a basket case. He’s always looking for the womb.”

  “You sure of all this, Dave?”

  “No. But Johnny went crazy when I convinced him he’d been betrayed.”

  “So you set Connie up?” Before I could reply, she picked up a ballpoint and drew lines on a piece of paper and said, “You’ll never prove she was one of the cops who killed your mother.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Maybe we should just let things play out,” she said. Her eyes drifted back on mine.

  I looked out the window. The sky was the color of brass and smoke, and the wind was gusting in the streets.

  “A storm is coming in. I have to get out on the lake,” I said.

  Helen remained seated in her chair.

  “You didn’t do Gable. You want to nail Connie Deshotel yourself,” she said.

  “The other side always deals the play. You coming or not?”

  “Let me be honest with you, bwana. I had a bad night last night. I couldn’t get Letty Labiche out of my mind. I guess it’s because I was molested myself. So lose the attitude.”

  Wally, the dispatcher, stopped us on the way out of the office. He had a pink memo slip in his hand.

  “You wasn’t in your office. I was fixing to put this in your pigeonhole,” he said to me.

  “What is it?”

  “A cop in St. Martinville said Clete Purcel wants to talk to you. It’s suppose to be important,” Wally said.

  “I’ll take care of it later,” I said.

  Wally shrugged and let the memo slip float from his fingers into my box.

  Helen and I towed a department outboard on the back of my truck to Loreauville, a few miles up the Teche, then drove through the sugarcane fields to the landing at Lake Fausse Pointe. The wind was blowing hard now, and I could see waves capping out on the lake and red leaves rising in the air against a golden sun.

  Helen laced on a life preserver and sat down in the bow of the boat, and I handed her a department-issue cut-down twelve-gauge pump loaded with double-ought buckshot. She kept studying my face, as though she were taking the measure of a man she didn’t know.

  “You’ve got to tell me, Dave,” she said.

  “What?” I smiled good-naturedly.

  “Don’t shine me on.”

  “If Remeta’s there, we call in backup and take him down.”

  “That’s it?”

  “She’s the attorney general of Louisiana. What do you think I’m going to do, kill her in cold blood?”

  “I know you, Dave. You figure out ways to make things happen.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Let’s get something straight. I don’t like that snooty cunt. I said she was dirty from the get-go. But don’t jerk me around.”

  I started to say something, then let it go and started the engine. We headed down the canal bordered by cypress and willow and gum trees, then entered the vast lily-dotted expanse of the lake itself.

  It was a strange evening. In the east and south the sky was like a black ink wash, but the clouds overhead were suffused with a sulfurous yellow light. In the distance I could see the grassy slope of the levee and the live oaks that shadowed Connie Deshotel’s stilt house and the waves from the lake sliding up into the grass and the wildflowers at the foot of her property. An outboard was tied to her dock, straining against its painter, knocking against one of the pilings. Helen sat hunched forward, the barrel of her shotgun tilted away from the spray of water off the bow.

  I cut the engine and we drifted on our wake into the shallows, then I speared the bottom with the boat paddle and the hull snugged onto the bank.

  The lights were on inside the house and I could hear music playing on a radio. A shadow crossed a screen window. Helen stepped out into the shallows and waded out to the moored boat and placed her hand on the engine’s housing.

  “It’s still warm,” she said, walking toward me, the twelve-gauge in both hands. She studied the house, the skin twitching slightly below her left eye.

  “You want to call for backup?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t feel right,” she said.

  “You call it, Helen.”

  She thought about it. “Fuck it,” she said, and pumped a round into the chamber, then inserted a replacement round into the magazine with her thumb.

  But she was wired. She had killed three perpetrators on the job, all three of them in situations in which she had unexpectedly walked into hostile fire.

  We walked up the slope in the shadows of the live oaks. The air was cool and tannic with the autumnal smell of flooded woods, the windows of the house gold with the western light. I took out my .45 and we mounted the steps and stood on each side of the door.

  “Iberia Sheriff’s Department, Ms. Deshotel. Please step out on the gallery,” I said.

  There was no response. I could hear shower water running in the back. I pulled open the screen, and Helen and I stepped inside, crossed the small living room, and looked in the kitchen and on the back porch. Then Helen moved into the hallway and the back bedroom. I saw her stop and lift the shotgun barrel so that it was pointed toward the ceiling.

  “You better come in here, Dave. Watch where you step,” she said.

  Johnny Remeta lay on top of a white throw rug in his Jockey undershorts, his chest, one cheek, and his arm peppered with five entry wounds. A cut-down Remington twelve-gauge was propped in the corner. It was the same pump shotgun he had been carrying when he first visited my dock. He had not gone down all at once. The blood splatter was on the walls, the floor, and the bed sheets, and he had torn one of the curtains on the doors that gave onto a roofed deck.

  The doors were open and I could see a redwood table on the deck, and on top of it a gre
en bottle of wine, a platter of sandwiches, a package of filter-tipped cigarettes, Connie’s gold-and-leather-encased lighter, and a big box of kitchen matches with a Glock automatic lying across it. The spent shell casings from the Glock were aluminum reloads and glinted on the deck like fat silver teeth.

  I heard a faucet squeak in the bathroom, then the sound of the shower water died inside the stall. Helen pushed open the bathroom door and I saw her eyes go up and down the form of someone inside.

  “Put a robe on and get out here, ma’am,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. I heard you long before you started banging around inside. Call in the report for me, please. My phone’s out of order,” Connie Deshotel’s voice said.

  Helen picked up a pink robe off the toilet tank and flung it at Connie.

  “Get your ass out here, ma’am,” she said.

  A moment later Connie emerged into the bedroom, flattening her hair back wetly on her head with a hairbrush. She wore no makeup, but her face was calm, dispassionate, ruddy from her warm shower.

  “I don’t know if I can prove this, Dave, but I think you sent this man after me,” she said.

  “You talked Remeta into the sack, then wasted him,” I said.

  “He tried to rape me, you idiot. I got my gun out of my bag and shot him through the door. Otherwise I’d be dead.” Then she said “God!” between her teeth, and started to walk past us, as though we were only incidental elements in her day. Her slippers tracked Remeta’s blood across the floor.

  Helen pushed her in the chest with her fingers. “You’re tainting a crime scene. You don’t do anything until we tell you,” she said.

  “Touch my person again and you’ll be charged with battery,” Connie said.

  “What?”

  “I’m the chief law officer of Louisiana. Does that register with you at all? A psychopath tried to rape and sodomize me. Do you think I’m going to let you come in here and treat me like a perpetrator? Now, get out of my way.”

  Helen’s face was bright with anger, a lump of cartilage flexing against her jaw. But no words came out of her mouth.

  “Are you deaf as well as stupid? I told you to get out of my way,” Connie said.

  Helen held the shotgun at port arms and shoved Connie through the side door onto the deck. “Sit in that chair, you prissy bitch,” she said, and snipped a cuff on Connie’s left wrist and hooked the other end to the handle on a huge earthen pot that was planted with bougainvillea.