Purple Cane Road

  “She’s strange.”

  “She’s a nice person. Stop being psychoanalytical,” Bootsie said.

  “She was having lunch in Baton Rouge with an NOPD cop named Don Ritter. He’s a genuine lowlife.”

  She hung a dishrag over the faucet and turned toward me and let her eyes rove over my face.

  “What did he do?” she asked.

  “He twists dials on black hookers. Helen says he used to extort gays in the Quarter.”

  “So he’s a dirty cop. He’s not the only one you’ve known.”

  “He’s buds with Jim Gable.”

  “I see. That’s the real subject of our conversation. Maybe you should warn me in advance.”

  “Gable has personal knowledge about my mother’s death. I’m absolutely convinced of that, Boots.”

  She nodded, almost to herself, or to the room, rather than to me, then began slicing a roast on the counter for our sandwiches. She cut harder, faster, one hand slipping on the knob of bone she used for a grip, the blade of the butcher knife knocking against the chopping board. She slid the knife in a long cut through a flat piece of meat and halved and quartered a bloodred tomato next to it, her knuckles whitening. Then she turned around and faced me. “What can I tell you? That I loathe myself for the fact I slept with him? What is it you want me to say, Dave?”

  At the end of the week I received a call from Connie Deshotel at the office.

  “Dave, maybe we’ve had some luck. Do you know of a recidivist named Steve Andropolis?” she said.

  “He’s a spotter, what used to be called a jigger.”

  “He’s in custody in Morgan City.”

  “What for?”

  “Possession of stolen weapons. He says he knows you. This is his fourth time down. He wants to cut a deal.”

  “Andropolis is a pathological liar.”

  “Maybe. He says he has information on the Zipper Clum murder. He also says he knows how your mother died.”

  The sun was high and bright in the sky, the tinted windows of the cars in the parking lot hammered with white daggers. I felt my hand tighten on the telephone receiver.

  “How did he come by his information?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Two detectives from NOPD are going to interview him this afternoon. You want to meet them there?”

  “Is one of them Ritter?”

  “Probably. He caught the case.”

  “What’s Andropolis’ bond?”

  “None. He’s a flight risk.”

  “I’ll make arrangements to go over there in the next two or three days. Thanks for passing this on, Ms. Deshotel,” I said.

  “You seem pretty casual.”

  “His crime isn’t in our jurisdiction. I don’t have the legal power to do anything for him. That means he wants to use me against somebody else. Let him sweat awhile.”

  “You should have been a prosecutor,” she said.

  “What’s he have to offer on Remeta?” I said as an afterthought.

  “Ritter thinks he might have sold Remeta the weapon used in the Clum killing. Maybe he knows who ordered the hit.”

  “The piece came from a sporting goods break-in. The thieves were black kids from the St. Thomas Project. Andropolis is taking Ritter over the hurdles.”

  “I thought I might be of help. Good luck with it, Dave. Give my best to your wife,” she said, and quietly hung up.

  That evening the sky was filled with yellow and red clouds when Clete Purcel and I put a boat in the water at Lake Fausse Pointe. I opened up the outboard down a long canal that was thickly wooded on each side. Green logs rolled against the bank in our wake and cranes and snow egrets and great blue herons lifted into the light and glided on extended wings out over the bay.

  We passed acres of floating lilies and lotus flowers that had just gone into bloom, then crossed another bay that flowed into a willow swamp and anchored the outboard off a stand of flooded cypress and tupelo gums and watched our wake slide between the trunks that were as gray as elephant hide.

  Clete sat on a swivel chair close to the bow, his porkpie hat low on his eyes, his blue denim shirt damp with sweat between the shoulder blades. He flipped his casting rod with his wrist and sent his treble-hooked balsa-wood lure arching through the air.

  “How’s it going with you and Passion?” I asked.

  “Very solid, big mon,” he replied, turning the handle on his spinning reel, the lure zigzagging through the water toward the boat.

  I took a cold can of beer from the ice chest and touched the back of his arm with it. He took it from my hand without turning around. I opened a Dr Pepper and drank it and watched the breeze blow through the cypress, ruffling the leaves like green lace.

  “Why don’t you say what’s on your mind?” Clete said.

  “I went through the transcript of Letty Labiche’s trial. Both Letty and Passion testified that Passion was auditioning at a Lake Charles nightclub for a record company scout the night Vachel Carmouche got it.”

  “ ’Cause that’s where she was,” Clete said.

  “They always performed together. Why would she audition by herself?”

  Clete retrieved his lure and idly shook the water off it, rattling the two treble hooks against the tip of the rod.

  “What are you trying to do, Streak? Drag Passion into it? What’s to be gained?”

  “I think both sisters are lying about what happened that night. What’s that suggest to you? Letty is already on death row. She has nothing to lose.”

  “The state’s executioner got chopped into sausage links and somebody’s going to pay for it. You remember the Ricky Ray Rector case up in Arkansas? The guy had been lobotomized. He looked like black mush poured inside a prison jumpsuit. But he’d killed a cop. Clinton refused to commute the sentence. Rector told the warden he wanted to save out his pecan pie on his last meal so he could eat it after he was executed. Clinton’s president, Rector’s fertilizer. I bet nobody in Little Rock gave up their regular hump the night he got it, either.”

  Clete lit a Lucky Strike and set his Zippo on the top of his tackle box and blew smoke out across his cupped hand.

  “I thought you quit those,” I said.

  “I did. For some reason I just started again. Dave, it’s grim shit. Passion says her sister’s scared of the dark, scared of being alone, scared of her own dreams. I came out here to get away from listening about it. So how about lightening up?”

  He lay his rod across his thighs and stuck his hand behind him into the crushed ice for another beer, his face painted with the sun’s dying red light, his eyes avoiding mine.

  According to his obituary, Robert Mitchum, when released from jail after serving time for marijuana possession, was asked what it was like inside the slams.

  He replied, “Not bad. Kind of like Palm Springs without the riffraff.”

  It’s gone downhill since.

  Unless you’re a black kid hustling rock and unlucky enough to get nailed under the Three Strikes and You’re Out law, your chances of doing serious time are remote.

  Who are all these people in the jails?

  Meltdowns of every stripe, pipeheads and intravenous junkies who use public institutions to clean their systems out so they can re-addict, recidivists looking for the womb, armed robbers willing to risk ten years for a sixty-dollar score at a 7-Eleven.

  Also the twenty-three-hour lockdown crowd: sadists, serial killers, necrophiliacs, sex predators, and people who defy classification, what we used to call the criminally insane, those whose deeds are so dark their specifics are only hinted at in news accounts.

  I could have interviewed the jigger named Steve Andropolis on Friday, the same day that Don Ritter did. But what was the point? At best Ritter was a self-serving bumbler who would try to control the interview for his own purposes, probably buy into Andropolis’ manipulations, and taint any possibility of obtaining legitimate information from him. Moreover, Ritter was investigating a homicide and had a legal reach that I did not. r />
  So I waited over the weekend and drove to Morgan City on Monday.

  Just in time to see Andropolis’ body being wheeled out of the jail on a gurney by two paramedics.

  “What happened?” I asked the jailer.

  “ ‘What happened?’ he asks,” the jailer replied, as though a third party were in the room. He was a huge, head-shaved, granite-jawed man whose oversized pale blue suit looked like it was tailored from cardboard.

  “I got people hanging out the windows. I got escapees going through air ducts. I got prisoners walking out the door with ‘time served,’ when they’re not the guys supposed to be walking out the door,” he said.

  He took a breath and picked up his cigar from his ashtray, then set it back down and cracked his knuckles like walnuts.

  “I locked Andropolis in with eleven other prisoners. The cell’s supposed to hold five. There’s three bikers in that cell the devil wouldn’t let scrub his toilet. There’s a kid who puts broken glass in pet bowls. One guy shoots up speedballs with malt liquor. Those are the normal ones. You ask what happened? Somebody broke his thorax. The rest of them watched while he suffocated. Got any other questions?”

  He scratched a kitchen match across the wood surface of his desk and relit his cigar, staring through the flame at my face.

  The truth was I didn’t care how Andropolis had died or even if he was dead. He was evil. He had been a jigger on hit teams, a supplier of guns to assassins, a man who, like a pimp or an eel attached to the side of a shark, thrived parasitically on both the suffering and darkness of others.

  The following day Connie Deshotel called me at my office.

  “I’m at my camp on the lake. Would you like to meet me here?” she said.

  “What for?”

  “I have a tape. A copy of Don Ritter’s interview with Andropolis.”

  “Ritter and Andropolis are a waste of time.”

  “It’s about your mother. Andropolis was there when she died. Listen to the details on the tape. If he’s lying you’ll know … Would you rather not do this, Dave? Tell me now.”

  12

  That evening Clete and I drove to a boat landing outside Loreauville and put my outboard in the water and headed down the long, treelined canal into Lake Fausse Pointe. A sun shower peppered the lake, then the wind dropped and the air became still and birds rose out of the cypress and willows and gum trees against a bloodred sky.

  The alligators sleeping on the banks were slick with mud and looked like they were sculpted out of black and green stone. The back of my neck felt hot, as though it had been burned by the sun, and my mouth was dry for no reason that I could explain, the way it used to be when I woke up with a whiskey hangover. Clete cut the engine and let the outboard float on its wake through a stand of cypress toward a levee and a tin-roofed stilt house that was shadowed by live oaks that must have been over a hundred years old.

  “I’d shit-can this broad now. She’s jerking your chain, Streak,” he said.

  “What’s she got to gain?”

  “She was with NOPD in the old days. She’s tight with that greasebag Ritter. You don’t let Victor Charles get inside your wire.”

  “What am I supposed to do, refuse to hear her tape?”

  “Maybe I ought to shut up on this one,” he replied, and speared the paddle down through the hyacinths, pushing us in a cloud of mud onto the bank.

  I walked up the slope of the levee, under the mossy overhang of the live oaks, and climbed the steps to the stilt house’s elevated gallery. She met me at the door, dressed in a pair of platform sandals and designer jeans and a yellow pullover that hung on the points of her breasts. She held a spoon and a round, open container of yellow ice cream in her hands.

  She looked past me down the slope to the water.

  “Where’s Bootsie?” she said.

  “I figured this was business, Ms. Deshotel.”

  “Would you please call me ‘Connie’? … Is that Clete Purcel down there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Has he been house-trained?” she said, raising up on her tiptoes to see him better.

  “Beg your pardon?” I said.

  “He’s unzippering himself in my philodendron.”

  I followed her into her house. It was cheerful inside, filled with potted plants and bright surfaces to catch the sparse light through the trees. In the kitchen she spooned ice cream into the blender and added pitted cherries and bitters and orange slices and a cup of brandy. She flipped on the switch, smiling at me.

  “I can’t stay long, Connie,” I said.

  “You have to try this.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “It’s a dessert.”

  “I’d like to hear the tape, please.”

  “Boy, you are a pill,” she replied. Then her face seemed to grow with concern, almost as though it were manufactured for the moment. “What’s on that tape probably won’t be pleasant for you to hear. I thought I’d make it a little easier somehow.”

  She took a battery-powered tape player out of a drawer and placed it on the kitchen table and snapped down the play button with her thumb, her eyes watching my face as the recorded voices of Don Ritter and the dead jigger Steve Andropolis came through the speaker.

  I stood by the screen window and gazed out at the lake while Andropolis described my mother’s last hours and the hooker and pimp scam that brought about her death.

  I wanted to shut out the words, live inside the wind in the trees and the light ruffling the lake’s surface, listen to the hollow thunking of a pirogue rocking against a wood piling, or just watch Clete’s broad back and thick arms and boyish expression as he flipped a lure with his spinning rod out into the dusk and retrieved it back toward the bank.

  But even though he had been a parasite, an adverb and never a noun, Andropolis had proved in death his evil was sufficient to wound from beyond the grave.

  “The guys who whacked her weren’t cops. They were off-duty security guards or something. She had this dude named Mack with her. He told everybody he was a bouree dealer but he was her pimp. Him and Robicheaux’s mother, if that’s what she was, just worked the wrong two guys,” Andropolis’ voice said.

  As through a sepia-tinted lens I saw wind gusting on a dirt road that lay like a trench inside a sea of sugarcane. Black clouds roiled in the sky; a red and white neon Jax sign swung on a metal pole in front of a dance hall. Behind the dance hall was a row of cabins that resembled ancient slave quarters, and each tiny gallery was lit with a blue bulb. In slow motion I saw my mother, her body obese with beer fat, lead a drunk man from the back of the dance hall to a cabin door. He wore a polished brass badge on his shirt pocket, and she kissed him under the light, once, twice, working her hand down to his loins when he momentarily wavered.

  Then they were inside the cabin, the security guard naked now, mounted between her legs, rearing on his stiffened arms, buckling her body into the stained mattress, bouncing the iron bed frame against the planked wall. A freight train loaded with refined sugar from the mill roared past the window.

  Just as the security guard reached orgasm, his lips twisting back on his teeth like a monkey’s, the door to the cabin drifted back on its hinges and Mack stepped inside and clicked on the light switch, his narrow, mustached face bright with purpose. He wore pointed boots and striped pants and a two-tone sports coat and cocked fedora like a horse trainer might. He slipped a small, nickel-plated revolver out of his belt and pointed it to the side, away from the startled couple in the center of the bed.

  “You just waiting tables, you?” he said to my mother.

  “Look, bud. This is cash and carry. Nothing personal,” the security guard said, rolling to one side now, pulling the sheet over his genitalia, removing himself from the line of fire.

  “You ain’t seen that band on her finger? You didn’t know you was milking t’rew another man’s fence?” Mack said.

  “Hey, don’t point that at me. Hey, there ain’t no problem here. I just g
ot paid. It’s in my wallet. Take it.”

  “I’ll t’ink about it, me. Get down on your knees.”

  “Don’t do this, man.”

  “I was in the bat’room. I splashed on my boots. Right there on the toe. I want that spot to shine … No, you use your tongue, you.”

  Then Mack leaned over and pressed the barrel of the revolver into the sweat-soaked hair of the naked man while the man cleaned Mack’s boot and his bladder broke in a shower on the floor.

  Connie Deshotel pushed the off button on the tape player.

  “It looks like a variation of the Murphy scam gone bad,” she said. “The security guard came back with his friend and got even.”

  “It’s bullshit,” I said.

  “Why?” She set two bowls of her ice cream and brandy dessert on the table.

  “Andropolis originally told me the killers were cops, not security guards. Andropolis worked for the Giacanos. Anything he knew had to come from them. We’re talking about dirty cops.”

  “This is from another tape. The security guard was a Giacano, a distant cousin, but a Giacano. He was killed in a car accident about ten years ago. He worked for a security service in Algiers about the time your mother supposedly died.”

  Far across the lake, the sun was just a red ember among the trees. “I tell you what, Ms. Deshotel,” I said, turning from the screen.

  “Connie,” she said, smiling with her eyes.

  Then her mouth parted and her face drained when she heard my words.

  I walked down the incline through the shadows and stepped into the outboard and cranked the engine. Clete climbed in, rocking the boat from side to side as I turned us around without waiting for him to sit down.

  “What happened in there?” he asked.

  I reached into the ice chest and lifted out a can of Budweiser and tossed it to him, then opened up the throttle.

  It was almost dark when we entered the canal that led to the boat landing. The air was heated, the sky crisscrossed with birds, dense with the distant smell that rain makes in a dry sugarcane field. I ran the boat up onto the ramp and cut the engine and tilted the propeller out of the water and flung our life vests up onto the bank and lifted the ice chest up by the handles and waded through the shallows.