Purple Cane Road

  She was already wet when I entered her, and she widened her thighs and hooked her feet loosely inside my legs, slipping one hand down to the small of my back while she moved in a slow, circular fashion under me, as she always did when she wanted to preserve the moment for both of us as long as she could.

  But I felt the heat rise in me, like fire climbing upward along a hard, bare surface, then my mouth opened involuntarily and I closed my eyes and pressed my face between her breasts.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, depleted, my face in shadow, one hand still covering the tops of Bootsie’s fingers, ashamed that I had used my wife to hide from the violent act I knew my alcoholic mind was planning.

  24

  Early Sunday morning I heard a car with a blown muffler pull into the drive and continue to the back of the house before the driver cut the engine. I slipped on my khakis and went into the kitchen and looked into the backyard and saw Clete Purcel sitting alone at the redwood picnic table, his Marine Corps utility cap on his head. He had a take-out cup of coffee between his hands, and he kept looking over his shoulder at the dirt road.

  I went outside and eased the screen shut so as not to wake Bootsie and Alafair.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He looked sideways, then pulled on his nose and let his breath out.

  “I went after Ritter. Nobody’s been by?”

  “No.”

  “The shit went through the fan.”

  “I don’t want to know about it.”

  “I was trying to help. You got somebody else willing to cover your back on a daily basis?”

  He looked miserable. He rubbed his face, then knocked over his paper cup and spilled coffee on his hands.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Ritter had dials on this stripper, Janet Gish. She’d been washing stolen money at the Indian casinos for some Jersey wise guys. Ritter nailed the wise guys but he left her out of the bust. The deal was she had to come across for him at least once a month. Guess what? Janet developed the hots for Ritter, can you believe it? So he knew he had a good thing and he played along with her and said he was going to marry her as soon as he could dump his wife. In the meantime he was bopping Janet every Friday afternoon at a motel on Airline.

  “Last week she’s in the supermarket and who does she see? Ritter and his old lady. Ritter looks right through Janet and studies these cans of beans on the shelf like he’s never seen one before. But what’s Ritter supposed to do? she asks herself. Introduce her? Except she’s in the next aisle now and she hears Ritter’s old lady say, ‘Did you see that? She’s got jugs like gallon milk bottles. With tattoos yet. You didn’t notice?’

  “Ritter says, ‘I was never attracted to Elsie the Cow types.’ They both thought that was a real laugh.

  “Janet decides it’s payback time. She’s got a bond on a soliciting charge with Nig and Wee Willie and she calls me up and asks if I can get the D.A. to cut her loose on the soliciting beef if she gives up Ritter. I told her that was a possibility but the D.A. would probably make her take the weight on the money laundering deal and maybe there was a better way to spike Ritter’s cannon.

  “I got her to call up Ritter’s old lady at midnight and tell her she was sorry Don didn’t introduce the two of them at the supermarket because they probably have a lot in common. Then Janet goes into detail about Ritter’s sex habits and says it’s too bad Ritter uses the same old tired line with all his broads, namely that his wife is a drag at home and an embarrassment at departmental social functions and he’s shit-canning her as soon as he can make sure all the bills and charge accounts are under her name.

  “It took about ten minutes for Ritter to come tearing across the bridge to Janet’s place on the West Bank. She dead-bolted the back door on him and he got a ball peen hammer out of his convertible and started smashing the glass out of the door and trying to get his hand on the lock. That’s when I clocked him with the birdbath.”

  “You hit him with a cement birdbath?” I said.

  “Hear me out, okay? Janet’s brother owns this car wash behind the apartment. Ritter’s half out of it, so I put him in the passenger seat of his convertible and hooked him up to the door handle with his cuffs and drove him up to the car wash entrance.

  “I go, ‘Don, you’re a dirty cop. Now’s the time to rinse your sins, start over again, try keeping your flopper in your pants for a change. You set up that gig on the Atchafalaya and almost got my podjo, Dave, killed, didn’t you?’

  “He goes, ‘No matter how this comes out, you’re still a skell, Purcel.’

  “So I drove his convertible onto the conveyor and pushed all the buttons for the super clean and hot wax job. The pressure hoses came on and those big brushes dipped down inside the car and were scouring Ritter into the seats. I shut it down and gave him another chance, but he started yelling and blowing the horn, so I turned everything back on and stalled the conveyor and left him there with the steam blowing out both ends of the building.”

  “You’re telling me Ritter’s still in there?” I said.

  “Yes and no.” His mouth was cone-shaped when he breathed through it. “I had my hands full. Janet was getting hysterical and breaking things and throwing her clothes in a suitcase. Then I heard two popping sounds, like firecrackers in the rain. I went back to the car wash but there wasn’t anybody around. Except Ritter floating face-down in all that soap and wax. He’d taken one in the ear and one through the mouth.”

  I got up from the table and looked out at my neighbor’s field and at the fog rising out of the coulee, my back turned to Clete so he couldn’t see my face.

  When I turned around again Clete’s eyes were jittering with light, his lips moving uncertainly, like a drunk coming off a bender when he doesn’t know whether he should laugh or not at what he has done.

  Then his eyes fixed on mine and his expression went flat and he said, as though by explanation, “This one went south on me.”

  “Yeah, I guess it did, Clete.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “Come inside. I’ll fix you something to eat,” I said as I walked past him toward the house.

  “Streak?… Damn it, don’t give me that look.”

  But I went through the kitchen into the bath and brushed my teeth and put cold water on my face and tried not to think the thoughts I was thinking or take my anger out on a friend who had put himself in harm’s way on my account. But I believed Ritter’d had knowledge about my mother’s death and now it was gone.

  I dried my face and went back into the kitchen.

  “You want me to boogie?” Clete said.

  “Get the skillet out of the cabinet, then call Nig and Wee Willie and tell them you’ll need a bond,” I said as I took a carton of eggs and a slab of bacon from the icebox.

  After we ate breakfast, Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to Mass. When we got back, Clete was down at the dock, sitting at a spool table under an umbrella, reading the newspaper. From a distance he looked like a relaxed and content man enjoying the fine day, but I knew better. Clete had no doubt about the gravity of his actions. Once again his recklessness had empowered his enemies and he now hung by a spider’s thread over the maw of the system.

  Television programs treat the legal process as an intelligent and orderly series of events that eventually punishes the guilty and exonerates the innocent. The reality is otherwise. The day you get involved with the law is the day you lose all control over your life. What is dismissed by the uninitiated as “a night in jail” means sitting for an indeterminable amount of time in a holding cell, with a drain hole in the floor, looking at hand-soiled walls scrawled with pictures of genitalia, listening to other inmates yell incoherently down the corridors while cops yell back and clang their batons on the bars.

  You ask permission to use a toilet. When you run out of cigarettes or matches, you beg them off a screw through the bars. Your persona, your identity, and all the social courtesy you take for granted are remo
ved from your existence like the skin being pulled off a banana. When you look through a window onto the street, you realize you do not register on the periphery of what are called free people. Your best hope of getting back outside lies with a bondsman who secretes Vitalis through his pores or a twenty-four-hour Yellow Pages lawyer who wears zircon rings on his fingers and keeps a breath mint on his tongue. We’re only talking about day one.

  That afternoon I finally got Dana Magelli on the phone.

  “Clete says the entry wounds look like they came from a .22 or .25,” I said.

  “Thank him for his feedback on that.”

  “He didn’t do it, Dana. It was a professional hit. I think we’re talking about Johnny Remeta.”

  “Except Purcel has a way of stringing elephant shit behind him everywhere he goes.”

  “You want me to bring him in?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “We’ll be there in three hours.”

  There was a long silence and I knew Magelli’s basic decency was having its way with him.

  “IAD has been looking at Ritter for a month. Tell Purcel to come in and give a statement. Then get him out of town,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Janet Gish confirms his story. We don’t need zoo creatures muddying up the water right now. You hearing me?”

  “You’re looking at some other cops?”

  He ignored my question. “I mean it about Purcel. He’s not just a pain in the ass. In my view he’s one cut above the clientele in Angola. He mixes in our business again, I’ll turn the key on him myself,” Magelli said.

  I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle on top of the counter in the bait shop. Through the screen window I could see Clete at a spool table, watching an outboard pass on the bayou, his face divided by sunlight and shadow. I walked outside the bait shop and looked down at him.

  “That was Dana Magelli. You’re going to skate,” I said.

  He beamed at me, and I realized all the lessons he should have learned had just blown away in the breeze.

  The next day NOPD matched the .25-caliber rounds taken from Don Ritter’s body to the .25-caliber round that was fired into Zipper Clum’s forehead.

  That night Alafair went with friends to the McDonald’s on East Main. She came home later than we expected her and gave no explanation. I followed her into her bedroom. Tripod was outside the screen on the windowsill, but she had made no effort to let him in. The light was off in the room and Alafair’s face was covered with shadow.

  “What happened tonight?” I asked.

  “Whenever I tell you the truth about something, it makes you mad.”

  “I’ve shown bad judgment, Alafair. I’m just not a good learner sometimes.”

  “I saw Johnny. I took a ride with him.”

  I ran my hand along the side of my head. I could feel a tightening in my veins, as though I had a hat on. I took a breath before I spoke.

  “With Remeta?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s wanted in another shooting. An execution at point-blank range in a car wash.”

  “I told him I couldn’t see him again. I’m going to sleep now, Dave. I don’t want to talk about Johnny anymore,” she said.

  She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for me to go out of the room. On the shelf above her bedstead I could see the painted ceramic vase Remeta had given to her, the Confederate soldier and his antebellum girlfriend glowing in the moonlight.

  The call came at four in the morning.

  “You told your daughter not to see me again?” the voice asked.

  “Not in so many words,” I replied.

  “That was a chickenshit thing to do.”

  “You’re too old for her, Johnny.”

  “People can’t be friends because they’re apart in years? Run your lies on somebody else.”

  “Your problems began long before we met. Don’t take them out on us.”

  “What do you know about my problems?”

  “I talked with the prison psychologist.”

  “I’m starting to construct a new image of you, Mr. Robicheaux. It’s not a good one.”

  I didn’t reply. The skin of my face felt flaccid and full of needles. Then, to change the subject, I said, “You should have lost the .25 you used on Zipper Clum. NOPD has made you for the Ritter hit.”

  “Ritter gave up your mother’s killers, Mr. Robicheaux. I was gonna give you their names. Maybe even cap them for you. But you act like I’m the stink on shit. Now I say fuck you,” he said, and hung up.

  At 9 A.M. I sat in the sheriff’s office and watched the sheriff core out the inside of his pipe with a penknife.

  “So you got to see the other side of Johnny Remeta?” he said, and dropped the black buildup of ash off his knife blade into the wastebasket.

  “He pumped Ritter for information, then blew out his light,” I said.

  “This guy is making us look like a collection of web-toed hicks, Dave. He comes and goes when he feels like it. He takes your daughter for rides. He murders a police officer and calls you up in the middle of the night and tells you about it. Forgive me for what I’m about to say next.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do you want this guy out on the ground? It seems you and he and Purcel have the same enemies.”

  “I don’t think that’s a cool speculation to make, Sheriff.”

  “Let me put it this way. The next time I hear this guy’s name, it had better be in conjunction with either his arrest or death. I don’t want one of my detectives telling me about his phone conversations with a psychopath or his family’s involvement with same. Are we clear?”

  “There’re pipe ashes on your boot,” I said, and left the room.

  Ten minutes later I received a phone call from a woman who did not identify herself but just started talking as though I already knew who she was. She had a heavy Cajun accent and her voice was knotted with anger and dismay and a need to injure.

  “I t’ought you’d like to know what you done. Not that it makes no difference to somebody who t’inks he got the right to twist a sick man up wit’ his words,” she said.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  But she kept wading in. “You was a lot smarter than him, you. You know how to put t’oughts in somebody’s head, make him full of guilt, fix it so he cain’t go nowhere in his head except t’rew one door. So it ain’t enough leprosy eat him up and turn his hands to nutria feet. Man like you got to come along and push him and push him and push him till he so full of misery he gonna do what you want.”

  Then I remembered the duck-shaped blind woman who had been hanging wash behind the cabin of Bobby Cale, the ex-constable, down by Point au Fer.

  “Did something happen to Bobby?” I said.

  She couldn’t answer. She started weeping into the phone.

  “Ma’am, tell me what it is,” I said.

  “I smelled it on the wind. Out in the persimmon trees. He was gone t’ree days, then I found him and touched him and he swung in my hands, light as bird shell. You done this, suh. Don’t be telling yourself you innocent, no. ’Cause you ain’t.”

  The side of my head felt numb after I hung up, as though a dirty revelation about myself had just been whispered in my ear. But I wasn’t sure if my sense of regret was over the possibility that I was a contributing factor in the suicide of Bobby Cale or the fact I had just lost my only tangible lead back to my mother’s killers.

  25

  The Shrimp Festival was held each year at the end of summer down by the bay. On Friday, when the day cooled and the summer light filled the evening sky, shrimp boats festooned with pennants and flags blew their horns in the canal and a cleric blessed the fleet while thousands wandered up and down a carnival midway, drinking from beer cups and eating shrimp off paper plates. College students, the working classes, and politicians from all over the state took part. Inside the cacophony of calliopes and the popping of .22 rifles in the shooting galleries and the happy
shrieks that cascaded down from a Ferris wheel, the celebrants took on the characteristics of figures in a Brueghel painting, any intimations about mortality they may have possessed now lost in the balm of the season.

  Belmont Pugh was there, and Jim Gable and his wife, and by the Tilt-A-Whirl I saw Connie Deshotel in an evening dress, carrying a pair of silver shoes in one hand, her other on her escort’s arm for balance, her cleavage deep with shadow.

  But the figure who caught my eye was outside the circle of noise and light that rose into the sky from the midway. Micah, Cora Gable’s chauffeur, sat beside the Gables’ limo on a folding canvas stool, tossing pieces of dirt at a beer can, his jaws slack, like a man who doesn’t care what others think of his appearance or state of mind. A rolled comic book protruded from the side pocket of his black coat.

  I left Bootsie at the drink pavilion and walked into the parking area and stood no more than three feet in front of him. He raised his eyes, then tinked a dirt clod against the beer can, his face indifferent.

  “Looks like you’re in the dumps, partner,” I said.

  He flexed his mouth, as though working a bite of food out of his gums. “I’m finishing out my last week,” he replied.

  “You’re not working for Ms. Gable anymore?”

  “She thinks I sassed her. It was a misunderstanding. But I guess it helped her husband.”

  “Sassed her?”

  “We were passing all these shacks where the sugarcane workers used to live. Ms. Perez says to herself, ‘The glory that was Rome.’

  “So I say, ‘It sure wasn’t any glory, was it?’

  “She says, ‘Beg your pardon?’

  “I say, ‘Rich man got the poor whites to fight with the coloreds so the whole bunch would work for near nothing while the rich man got richer.’ It got real quiet in the car.”

  “Sounds like you got your hand on it, Micah,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” he said resentfully. “I looked in the rearview mirror and her face was tight as paper, like it had got slapped. She says, ‘This land belonged to my family. So I suggest you keep your own counsel.’ ”