Purple Cane Road

“How?”

  “Vachel Carmouche was a shithead and everybody knew it. That whole trial sucked. I get pissed off every time somebody tells me Carmouche was a lawman … Why the face?”

  “I found evidence she didn’t do it by herself.”

  “You’re telling me Passion helped her?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “Big revelation,” Helen said. “What else is bothering you today?”

  “I set up an ambush on Johnny Remeta last night.”

  “You did what?”

  “I was going to flush his grits. I couldn’t pull the trigger.”

  She cleaned up our mess from the table and walked to the trash basket and stuffed it inside and came back to the table.

  “This is a noisy place full of teenagers and echoes and cooks yelling and I couldn’t quite make out what you were saying. See you around, bwana,” she said.

  She walked out to her cruiser and drove away.

  I slept that night with the remote phone under the bed. It rang just after 11 P.M. I picked it up and went into the kitchen before I clicked it on.

  “You’re in it for the long haul,” I said without waiting for him to speak.

  “I figured you wrong last night. I thought honor required I tell you that, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Honor?”

  “I said you didn’t have in it you to drop the hammer on me. I know who popped your mother. That’s why you let me live.”

  “You’re not even close, partner.”

  I could hear him breathing on the mouth of the receiver. “We’re alike. I’ve seen it in your eyes,” he said.

  “I always thought my mother betrayed me, Johnny. But I learned to forgive her. I did that so I don’t have to be a drunk anymore.”

  “You saying something about my mother now?”

  “You’re smart. Read Chaucer’s story about the three guys who set out to find Death and slay him once and for all. They found him, all right. But things didn’t work out as they expected.”

  “Let me tell you what real revenge is. I’m gonna shake down the people who did your mother, then I’m gonna leave the country and have them killed by somebody else. But you’ll never know for sure who they were.”

  “Pull on your own pud, Johnny. This stuff is a real drag,” I said, and clicked off the phone. Then I walked through the house and pulled the phone connections from all the wall jacks.

  The sheriff lived up Bayou Teche in a yellow and gray frame house with a wide gallery, set back under huge cedar and oak trees. When I drove out there Saturday afternoon, he was trimming back the climbing roses in his flower bed while his grandchildren played in the side yard. He wore a tattered straw hat to protect his head from the thorns, and his stomach hung heavily over his belt. In his home setting, clipping flowers and placing them gingerly in a bowl of water, his clothes stained with fungicide and house paint, the sheriff looked much older than he did at the department and nothing like a law officer.

  I sat down on the front steps and picked up some pieces of bark from a bag of mulch and flicked them out into the grass.

  “I made an ass out of myself when I attacked Jim Gable. I also brought shame on the department. I want to apologize,” I said.

  “You got to rein it in, Dave.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Five-day suspension without pay, effective last Monday. A letter of reprimand in your jacket. Is that fair?”

  “There’s something else I have to tell you,” I said. “Passion Labiche told me she helped her sister kill Vachel Carmouche.” I waited for him to speak but he didn’t. “Number two, I had the chance to plant one in Johnny Remeta’s cauliflower and didn’t do it.”

  He paused in his work but his face showed no expression.

  “You froze?” he asked.

  “I had him set up. I was going to cut all his motors.”

  A mosquito buzzed at his face and he rubbed his cheek with the back of his wrist.

  “I’m going to retire soon. I’m glad you told me what you did.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’d like you to be my successor,” he said.

  “Come again?”

  “What are you going to do with Passion’s confession?” he asked, ignoring my incredulity.

  “It’ll be dismissed as an eleventh-hour attempt to stop Letty’s execution,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s just what it is. You think of that? Where’s Remeta now?”

  “He inasmuch told me my mother’s killers are the same people who tried to have him killed on the Atchafalaya. He says he’s going to extort them, then hire a button man to take them out.”

  “You actually had that guy locked down in your sights? Then didn’t say anything about it till today?”

  “That’s it, more or less.”

  He locked the clasp on his clippers and dropped them in his pants pocket and looked at his grandchildren playing.

  “Remeta is going to take you to your mother’s killers, isn’t he?” he said.

  “That wasn’t the reason, Sheriff.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, scratching inside his shirt. “Yeah—” But he didn’t bother to continue, as though he were weary of contending with the self-serving machinations of others.

  I ate an early dinner with Bootsie, then drove to New Orleans through Morgan City. The evening light still reached high into the dome of sky overhead when I parked my pickup truck down the block from Maggie Glick’s bar across the river in Algiers. The street was busy with the type of people whose Saturday nights were spent in a facsimile of the places their fellow countrymen enjoyed: elderly pensioners who ate in decrepit diners that served a free glass of domestic wine with the special; young white couples without geographical origins or means of support who lived in walk-ups with no air-conditioning and strolled the sidewalks with no apparent destination; and the men whose thoughts made them wake each morning with a longing that seldom found satiation.

  I walked down the alley and entered Maggie Glick’s through the back door. It was crowded and dark and unbearably frigid inside. She was behind the bar, fixing a drink in a Collins glass, talking to a white man in a business suit. She had woven glass Mardi Gras beads into her hair and she wore a white knit blouse that exposed the roses tattooed on the tops of her breasts. The man did not sit but stood and grinned while she talked, his back stiff, his eyes drifting down the bar to a mulatto girl who could not have been older than eighteen.

  His eyes met mine and he fiddled with a college or fraternity ring of some kind on his finger and turned his face away, as though he had heard a sudden noise outside, and walked down to the far end of the bar, then glanced back at me again and went out the door.

  “My competition send you ‘round?” Maggie asked.

  “Johnny Remeta says he was never in here. He says you were lying,” I said.

  “You a sober, thinking man now. Let me ax you a question. Why would I lie and tell you a man like that was a customer? ’Cause it gonna be good for my bidness?”

  “That’s why I believe you.”

  “Do say?”

  “Where can I find him?” I asked.

  “He used to come in here. He don’t now. Man shop for the trade in here got to be functional, know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “That boy get off with a gun. And it ain’t in his pants. Here, drink a free soda. I’ll bag it to go.”

  “Jim Gable sprung you from St. Gabriel, Maggie?”

  “I got sprung ’Cause I was innocent. Have a good night, darlin’,” she said, and turned her back to me, lighting a cigarette. Her hair was jet black, her skin as golden as a coin in the flare of light.

  I walked toward the front of the building and was about to push open the door onto the street when I saw a muscular blond man in a pale blue suit with white piping on the lapels at the corner of the bar. His hair was clipped and combed neatly on the side of his head, one eye like a small marble inside the nodulous skin growth on the right side of his face.
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  “I thought maybe you’d gone back to New Mexico, Micah,” I said.

  He had a long-neck bottle of beer and a shot glass in front of him, and he sipped from the shot, then drank a small amount of beer afterward, like a man who loves a vice so dearly he fears his appetite for it will one day force him to give it up.

  “The heavyweight champion of the Shrimp Festival,” he said.

  I sat down next to him and took a peanut out of a plastic bowl on the bar and cracked the shell and put the nut in my mouth.

  “You ever see a guy by the name of Johnny Remeta in here?” I asked.

  “What would you give to find out?”

  “Not much.”

  He lifted the shot glass again and tipped it into his mouth.

  “I might buy half of a carnival. What do you think of that?” he said.

  “Maybe you can give me a job. I got bumped from the department after I punched out Jim Gable.”

  He watched an overweight, topless girl in heels and a sequined G-string walk out on a tiny stage behind the bar.

  “Miss Cora give you a severance package?” I said.

  “The smart man squeezes the man who milks the cow. That don’t mean anything to you. But maybe one day it will,” he said.

  “Really?” I said.

  “You’re an ignorant man.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, and slapped him on the back and caused him to spill his drink on his wrist.

  I went outside and walked down to the old docks and pilings on the waterfront. It was dark now, and rain was falling on the river and I could see the nightglow of New Orleans on the far bank and, to the south, green trees flattening in the wind and the brown swirl of the current as it flowed around a wide bend toward the Gulf of Mexico.

  Somewhere down on that southern horizon my father’s rig had blown out and he had hooked his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and bailed off the top of the derrick into the darkness. His bones and hard hat and steel-toed boots were still out there, shifting in the tidal currents, and I truly believed that in one way or another his brave spirit was out there as well.

  The cops who had murdered my mother had rolled her body into a bayou, as contemptuous of her in death as they were of her in life. But eventually her body must have drifted southward into the salt water, and now I wanted to believe she and Big Al were together under the long, green roll of the Gulf, all their inadequacies washed away, their souls just beginning the journey they could not take together on earth.

  The rain was blowing hard in the streets when I walked back to my truck, and the neon above the bars looked like blue and red smoke in the mist. I heard men fighting in a poolroom and I thought of Big Aldous Robicheaux and Mae Guillory and the innocence of a world in which inarticulate people could not tell one another adequately of either their pain or the yearnings of their hearts.

  29

  That night I dreamed of roses. I saw the sheriff trimming them in his garden and I saw them tattooed on Maggie Glick’s breasts. I saw them painted in miniature on the vase Johnny Remeta had given Alafair. I also saw the rose with green leaves that was tattooed on the neck of Letty Labiche.

  But just as I woke and was momentarily between all the bright corridors of sleep and the grayness of the dawn, the flowers disappeared from the dream and I saw a collection of Civil War photographs on a library table, the pages flipping in the wind that blew through the open window.

  I wanted to dismiss the dream and its confused images, but it lingered with me through the day. And maybe because the change of the season was at hand, I could almost hear a clock ticking for a sexually abused woman waiting to die in St. Gabriel Prison.

  On Monday morning I was out at the firing range with Helen Soileau. I watched her empty her nine-millimeter at a paper target, her ear protectors clamped on her head. When the breech locked open, she pulled off her ear protectors and slipped a fresh magazine into the butt of her automatic and replaced it in her holster and began picking up her brass.

  “You’re dead-on this morning,” I said.

  “I’m glad somebody is.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re off-planet. I have to say everything twice to you before you hear me,” she said, chewing gum.

  “Where’d you see Passion Labiche?”

  “I told you. Going into that fortune-telling and tattoo place in Lafayette.”

  “What for?”

  “Ask her.”

  “You brought up the subject, Helen.”

  “Yeah. And I dropped it. Two days ago,” she said.

  I went back to the office and called Dana Magelli at NOPD.

  “I’ve got a lead for you,” I said.

  “I see. You’re doing general oversight on our cases now?” he replied.

  “Hear me out, Dana. Johnny Remeta told me he was going to squeeze the people who killed my mother.”

  “Are you kidding me? You’re in personal contact with an escaped felon who’s murdered two police officers?”

  “Saturday night I was in Maggie Glick’s bar over in Algiers. I ran into Jim Gable’s ex-chauffeur, a guy named Micah something or another. He said he was going to come into some money by squeezing the man who was milking the cow.”

  “What?”

  “Those were his words. I think he was saying Remeta is shaking down Jim Gable.”

  “You’re saying Jim Gable killed your mother?” he said.

  “Remeta forced Don Ritter to give up the names of my mother’s killers before he executed him. At least that’s what he says.”

  “What am I supposed to do with information like this? I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Magelli said.

  “Put Micah under surveillance.”

  “Shake loose three or four detectives and follow a guy around who has no last name? This sounds like something Purcel thought up, maybe to get even with the department.”

  “I’m serious, Dana.”

  “No, you’re obsessed. You’re a good guy. I love you. But you’re stone nuts. That’s not a joke. Stay out of town.”

  The next day I drove to the City Library and found the collection of Civil War-era photographs that Johnny Remeta had been looking at just before he jumped out of the reading room window. I used the index, then flipped to the grainy black-and-white pictures taken at the Bloody Angle and Dunker Church.

  The images in the pictures told me nothing new about Remeta. He was simply a necromancer with broken glass in his head trying to find a historical context for the rage and pain his mother had bequeathed him. But if that was true, why had the image of the book, its pages turning in the wind, disturbed me in my dream?

  Because I hadn’t considered he was looking at something else in the collection, not just at the photos of Union and Confederate dead at Sharpsburg and Spotsylvania?

  I flipped back two pages and was suddenly looking at a photograph of a two-story, narrow, columned house, surrounded by a piked iron fence. The picture had been taken in 1864, in uptown New Orleans, after the Union occupation of the city by General Butler.

  According to the historical notes opposite the photograph, the house was owned by a young woman, believed to be a southern spy, who hid her lover, an escaped Confederate prisoner of war, from General Butler’s soldiers. The soldier was badly wounded, and when she discovered her own arrest was imminent, the two of them drank poison and died upstairs in a tester bed.

  I went back to the department and called Dana Magelli at NOPD again.

  “We haven’t found Remeta because he hides in plain sight,” I said.

  “I knew it was going to be that kind of day.”

  “Give it a rest, Dana. When he had a cop on his tail in the Quarter, he parked his truck and went inside the police station. How many perps have that kind of cool?”

  “Give me a street address and we’ll swing by.”

  “He’s imbued with this notion he’s a Confederate hero of some kind and my daughter is his girlfriend. He was reading an acc
ount in our library about two lovers who committed suicide during the Civil War in a home on Camp Street.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s living in New Orleans.”

  “You have something better to offer?”

  “Every cop in the city has a mug shot of this guy. What else can we do?”

  “Pull Jim Gable’s personnel records for me.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll handle our own people. Am I communicating here? Gable is none of your business.”

  That’s what you think, I thought as I lowered the receiver into the phone cradle.

  I worked late that evening, then drove home along the bayou road in the dusk. I could smell chrysanthemums and a smell like gas on the wind and see fireflies lighting in the gloom of the swamp. The house had already fallen into shadow when I turned into the drive and the television set was on in the living room, the sounds of canned laughter rising and falling in the air like an insult to the listener’s credulity. I tried not to think about the evening that awaited Bootsie and me as soon as I entered the house, hours of unrelieved tension, formality that hid our mutual anger, physical aversion, and periods of silence that were louder than a scream.

  I saw Batist chopping up hog meat on a butcher table he had set up by the coulee. He had taken off his shirt and put on a gray apron, and I could see the veins cord in his shoulder each time he raised the cleaver in the air. Behind him, the sky was still blue and the evening star was out and the moon rising, and his head was framed against the light like a glistening cannonball.

  “Sold thirty-five lunches today. We run out of poke chops,” he said.

  A cardboard box by his foot contained the hog’s head and loops of blue entrails.

  “You doin’ all right?” I asked.

  “Weather’s funny. The wind’s hard out of the west. I seen t’ings glowing in the swamp last night. My wife use to say that was the loupgarou.”

  “It’s swamp gas igniting or ball lightning, podna. You know that. Forget about werewolves.”

  “I run my trot line this morning. Had a big yellow mudcat on it. When I slit it open there was a snake in its stomach.”

  “I’ll see you later,” I said.