Purple Cane Road

  After a long moment, as though he had reviewed his judgment, he said, “You’re just a little traitor. That’s all you ever were.”

  She waited until he had driven out of the parking lot, then went to the pay phone and dialed 911.

  Two days later Wally, the dispatcher, buzzed my office phone.

  “There’s a guy out here says he’s Goldie Bierbaum from New Orleans,” he said.

  “Send him back.”

  “Didn’t he fight Cleveland Williams?”

  “Goldie fought everybody.”

  A minute later I saw Goldie at my door. Even though he was almost seventy, his chest was still flat-plated, his muscular thighs wider than his waist. Before he had opened his saloon on Magazine back in the 1960s, he had fought in three weight divisions and had been a contender in two.

  Goldie sat down and put a gumball in his mouth and offered the remaining one in his palm to me.

  “Not right now,” I said.

  “That button man you were looking for, the one who did Zipper Clum, you still after him?” he asked. His few strands of hair were coated with gel and looked like copper wire stretched across his scalp.

  “Yeah, he’s a real headache,” I said.

  “I hear he’s been living on Camp Street. He boosts cars all over the neighborhood, like the Garden District is the Hertz company.”

  “Thanks, anyway, Goldie. That place burned down last week. Our man has moved on.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Why didn’t you report him to NOPD?”

  “I don’t have a good history with those guys.”

  “Tell me, you remember a cop named Jim Gable, from back in the sixties?”

  “Sure. He was a bum.”

  “In what way?”

  “He did scut work for the Giacanos.”

  “You positive about that?”

  “Hey, Dave, I got into Didoni Giacano for ten large. The vig was four hundred a week. You know how it works. The principal don’t ever go down. I was late a couple of times and Gable came by and picked it up. He’d leave the woman in the cruiser and drink a cup of coffee in back and talk about the weather like we were old friends. But he was a bum.”

  “What woman?”

  “She was a rookie. Maybe she didn’t know what was going on. She’s big shit in Baton Rouge. You know, what’s-her-name, Deshotel, she’s the attorney general now.”

  That same evening Jim Gable told his wife he was going to cut his losses, take early retirement, and move the two of them to New Mexico. Dana Magelli had actually sicced IAD on him. Could you believe it? Two plainclothes picked him up in the mayor’s office and grilled him down at the district like a perp. A pair of polyester desk pilots who smelled like hair oil and made grade by jamming up other cops.

  “What’s your association with Maggie Glick?” one of them asked.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “That’s not what she says.”

  “Let me give you guys a short history lesson,” Gable said. “This used to be a good city. We knew who and where everybody was. People say they don’t like vice. What they mean is they don’t like it uncontrolled. We’d tell the dagos somebody was out of line and they’d throw him off a roof. Muggers got their noses broken with a blackjack. The whores didn’t spread clap through the tourist trade. That’s the way the old days were, boys. Go back to Dana Magelli and tell him to open a fruit stand.”

  Jim Gable stood in his den, surrounded by his collection of ordnance, and drank from a glass of whiskey and ice. He opened a mahogany humidor and took a plump cigar from it and gingerly bit off the tip and lit it.

  He could probably get around the IAD investigation. He was too high up in the department, too long term, and he knew too many secrets about the misdeeds of others to be a sacrificial offering now. When a police department got hosed, a few street cops and midlevel functionaries took the heat and did the time, if any indeed was ever forthcoming.

  The real problem was this guy Johnny Remeta. How did he, Jim Gable, get mixed up with a psychopath, particularly one who could boost cars all over the state, smoke two police officers, and walk through walls as though he were invisible?

  He didn’t like to think about Remeta. Perps and lowlifes were predictable as a class. Most of them were dumb and did everything in their power to get caught. They sought authority in their lives and attention from father figures and were too stupid to know it. Remeta was different. He brought both intelligence and genuine psychosis to his work, a combination that made Gable swallow unconsciously when he thought about it.

  He picked up the jar containing the head of a Viet Cong from the table and set it on the mantel in front of the mirror. The head wobbled slightly in the yellow fluid and nudged against the glass, the slitted eyes staring up at Gable. It gave him a sense of comfort to be able to pick up the jar and move it wherever he wanted, although he wasn’t sure why. He looked out the window at the fall colors in the trees and the glitter of the sunset on the bay, and he wanted to wedge a revolver in the mouth of Johnny Remeta and blow the back of his head off.

  His mood was broken by the sound of his wife dropping something in the bedroom.

  “Dear, would you come in, please? I can’t bend over to get my cane,” she called.

  He went into her bedroom and picked it up for her, then had to help her out of bed. She had not dressed that day and was still in her nightgown, and she smelled like Vicks VapoRub and sour milk. Her hand clung to his wrist after she was on her feet and in her slippers.

  “Let’s have dinner out on the terrace. It’s such a lovely evening. I’ll order from the restaurant and have them bring it down,” she said.

  “That’ll be fine, Cora.”

  “Would you do a favor for me?” she asked, smiling wistfully. She wore no makeup, but there were gin roses in her cheeks and a merry light in her eyes. He nodded, then shivered at the prospect of what she might ask.

  “Would you rub my feet? They ache terribly when the season changes,” she said.

  But he knew what that meant. At first it would be her feet, then her back and neck, and at some point she would touch him on the cheek and let her fingers trail down his sternum and come to rest on his thigh. A visceral sensation washed through him and made his scalp tighten against the bone.

  “I’m going through the accounts now. Can I fix you another drink and join you later on the terrace?” he said.

  That was smart, he thought. She couldn’t expect him to perform romantically on the terrace.

  But when he looked at her face, the pinched mouth, the eyes that were suddenly masked, he knew she had seen through him.

  “I’ll call the restaurant now. But do fix me a drink, and bring my medicine from the cabinet, would you, please? I hate to be a bother. I am a bother, aren’t I?” she said.

  He hated the tone in her voice. She was the cloying victim and martyr now, a role she was a master at. Her entire personality was a snake pit of neurotic aberrations. He never knew which one was going to slither out on the floor.

  He took a bottle of vodka out of the icebox and placed it on a silver tray with a Gibson glass and a jar of tiny pearl onions and a demitasse spoon and set the tray out on the terrace. In the distance he could see a boat with a red sail disappearing over the horizon, and he wanted to be on the boat, the salt breeze in his face, a new life waiting for him somewhere in the Caribbean.

  He just had to be patient. Every quart of gin or vodka she drank was like lighting a Chinese firecracker in her heart. She probably had over nine million in her portfolio at Piper, Jaffray. Even after he paid the tax on the capital gains, he could begin construction on his quarter horse track in New Mexico and still be able to live on a ranch in the high desert country and keep a cabin cruiser on the Texas coast.

  Not bad for a working-class kid who actually walked a night beat in the Irish Channel.

  He went back into the den and picked up his whiskey and ice and sipped from it. Through the window he heard Cora
on the remote phone, calling the restaurant for a delivery. He just didn’t know if he could bear another evening at home with her. He pulled open a side drawer on his cherrywood desk and removed an address book and thumbed through the names inside. He had entered only the initials beside the telephone numbers of the Mexican, Puerto Rican, and black girls who one way or another had come under his sway. There were over three dozen sets of initials in the book.

  Some might consider him profligate, he thought. But so what? Long ago he had learned that most people admired the pagan virtues rather than the Christian ones, particularly in their leaders, no matter what they said. Libido and power and success and creativity were interchangeable characteristics of the human personality. Ask any woman whether she preferred a lover who radiated a quiet sense of power and confidence or one who was self-effacing and pliant. If he was lucky, Cora would drink herself unconscious and he could make a call and meet a woman at a motel in Grand Isle. Why not? He could be back in three hours.

  But the quickening of his heart already told him why not.

  In his mind’s eye he saw himself on an empty stretch of highway, in the dark, the walls of sugarcane twelve feet high on each side of him. Then a tire went flat or a fan belt broke, and while he was jacking up the car or staring down at a steaming radiator a car pulled in behind him, the high beams on, but the driver remained behind the wheel, faceless, letting him burn with apprehension in the headlights’ glare.

  A film of perspiration had formed on his forehead and he drank from his whiskey. But the ice had melted and the whiskey tasted as though it had been aged inside oily wood. Why was his heart beating so rapidly? Was he a coward, afraid to go down the road because of this kid Remeta?

  No. He was just using his judgment. Remeta was a cop killer. The odds were good that if cornered Remeta would never make the jail. All Jim Gable had to do was wait.

  He was hungry. He washed his face and hands and combed his hair in the bathroom mirror and went into the kitchen and opened the icebox. It was virtually empty. He pulled back the sliding door on the terrace and went outside. She lay supine on a reclining chair, her face rosy with vodka, her teeth yellow in the waning light.

  “Hungry, dear?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve always been a hungry little boy, haven’t you?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk to me like that, Cora.”

  “Well, your dinner will be here shortly. You’ll see.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and went back inside and slid the glass door shut.

  How long had her mother lived? Ninety-six years? Good God! Maybe not even a quart of booze a day could kill genes like that. What a horrible thought. No, he was not going to have thoughts like that.

  To hell with Johnny Remeta, he told himself. He called the beeper number of a woman in New Orleans, and a half hour later she called him back. Her nickname was Safety Pin Sue, a mindless, totally dependent addict who took a narcissistic pleasure in her own self-destruction.

  “Meet me in Grand Isle tonight,” he said.

  “For you, Jim, anywhere, anytime,” she said, her voice warm with crack.

  That was more like it, he thought.

  He tonged fresh ice into his drink and gazed out the high window at the darkening greenness of the land, the gold light trapped on the bay’s horizon, the sailboat that had turned around and was tacking for home. He raised his drink in salute to the evening.

  That’s when he heard a vehicle under the porte cochere. He opened the middle drawer of his desk and removed a blue-black .38 revolver and let it hang loosely from his hand.

  The house puffed with wind when Cora opened the side door onto the drive.

  “That smells delicious. Bring it into the kitchen, would you? My purse is on the table,” Cora’s voice said.

  Jim Gable replaced the revolver in the drawer and closed it and finished his drink. The wind was picking up, and a red leaf tore loose from a maple and plastered itself against the window. For some reason the leaf, its symmetrical perfection arbitrarily terminated by a gust of cold air, made Jim Gable brood upon an old prospect that he had tried to bury on the edges of his consciousness for many years. Was it just mortality? No, it was the darkness that lay beyond it and the possibilities the darkness contained.

  Don’t have those thoughts. They’re the products of wives’ tales, he told himself, and turned to the mirror above the mantel and started to comb his hair, then realized he had just combed it.

  He heard Cora’s stoppered cane scudding softly on the floor behind him.

  “This is my husband,” she said. “Jim, this is the young man who delivered our dinner. I can’t find my checkbook. Do you have some cash?”

  Gable looked into the mirror and saw his own startled expression and the floating head of the Vietnamese soldier and the reflected face of Johnny Remeta, like three friends gathered together for a photograph. The teeth of the dead Vietnamese were exposed at the corner of his mouth, as though he were trying to smile.

  33

  On the following Tuesday the early edition of the Daily Iberian said Letty Labiche had been moved from St. Gabriel Prison to the Death House at Angola. Belmont Pugh held what he said was his “last TV news conference on the matter” on the steps of the capitol building. He used the passive voice and told reporters “the death warrant has been signed and will be carried out tomorrow at midnight. It’s out of my hands. But I’ll be waiting by the telephone up to the last second.” He turned his face into the sunrise and presented a solemn profile to the camera.

  Helen and I went to lunch together and were walking back from the parking lot to the department when a deputy in uniform passed us.

  “The old man’s looking for you,” he said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much. Your man Purcel is trying to destroy St. Martinville. They use animal darts on people?” he replied.

  Inside, I stopped by my mailbox. It was filled with pink message slips. Three of them were from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department. Two others were from Dana Magelli. Another simply stated, in capital letters, “SEE ME!” The sheriff’s initials were at the bottom. I walked down to his office and opened the door.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I don’t quite know where to start. Where’s your beeper?”

  “Wally sat on it. That’s not a joke.”

  “Dana Magelli called. Remeta got into Jim Gable’s house, locked the wife in the garage, and kidnapped Gable.”

  “Too bad. What’s the deal with Purcel?”

  “I knew you’d be torn up over Gable.”

  “Come on, skipper. What’s Clete done?”

  “He’s in a bar in St. Martinville. Three bikers are already in the hospital.” I started to speak, but he held his hand up. “He broke a pool cue across a city cop’s face. It’s not the barroom follies anymore, Dave. He might get his light blown out. Everybody around here, including me, is sick of this guy.”

  Helen Soileau and I drove the nine miles to St. Martinville in under ten minutes. The square by the old French church and the Evangeline Oak was filled with emergency vehicles, and the feeder streets were blocked to keep out traffic. We parked the cruiser a hundred feet from the bar where Clete was barricaded and walked up to a black police lieutenant with a thin mustache who stood with a bullhorn behind the open door of his vehicle. The windows of the bar were shattered, and the wall above one of them was scorched black and dripping with fire retardant.

  I fanned the reek of tear gas out of my face.

  “The shell hit the windowsill and started a fire. You’re friends with this character?” the lieutenant said.

  “Yeah. He’s generally harmless,” I said.

  “Oh, I can see that,” the lieutenant said. His name was Picard and he was a Vietnam veteran who had gone away to school on the GI Bill and earned a degree in criminal justice. “I’ve got an officer in the hospital. The inside of that bar is totally de
stroyed. He beat those bikers till they cried and got down on their knees. You either get your friend out of there, and I mean in cuffs, or we cool him out.”

  “I think we’re overreacting to the situation, Loot,” I said.

  “Are you hearing anything I say? He has the bartender’s shotgun,” Picard replied.

  “Bullshit,” Helen said, and pulled the bullhorn from Picard’s hand. “Hey, Clete. It’s Helen Soileau. Dave and I are coming in,” she said into the horn, its echo resonating under the bar’s colonnade. Then she threw the horn back into Picard’s hands.

  We pushed open the front door and went inside. Chairs and tables were broken; glass littered the floor; the liquor bottles on the counter behind the bar had been smashed into jagged shells. In one corner, by the pool table, was the unconscious form of a head-shaved and tattooed man dressed in jeans and a leather vest with no shirt underneath.

  Clete sat at the end of the bar, grinning, his scalp bleeding on his face, his slacks and tropical shirt stained with tobacco juice and talc, a can of Budweiser by his fingers. A twenty-gauge, single-load shotgun rested against the inside of his thigh, the barrel pointed toward his chest.

  “Is there a safety on that thing?”

  I asked. “I haven’t checked,” he replied.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Helen said, glass snapping under her shoes.

  “It’s just been that kind of morning,” he said.

  “We need to hook you up,” I said. “Bad idea, Streak.”

  “Beats being dead. That’s the itinerary outside,” Helen said.

  He touched the corner of his mouth with the ball of one finger and looked at the wet spot on his skin. His eyes were lighted, his cheeks filled with color.

  “The cop I took down with the cue? He tried to rip my head off with a baton,” he said.

  Helen removed her handcuffs from the leather case on her belt, her eyes never leaving Clete’s, and threw them on the bar.

  “Hook yourself up, handsome,” she said.