Purple Cane Road

10

ON SATURDAY I WOKE early, before sunrise, to help Batist, the elderly black man who worked for me, open the bait shop and fire the barbecue pit on which we prepared chickens and links for our midday customers. I unhooked Tripod, Alafair's pet three-legged coon, from his chain and set him on top of the rabbit hutch with a bowl of water and a bowl of fish scraps. But he hopped down on the ground and walked ahead of me through the pecan and oak trees and across the dirt road to the dock, his tail and rear end swaying.

He and Batist had been at war for years, Tripod flinging boudin all over the counter, destroying boxes of fried pies and candy bars, Batist chasing him down the dock with a broom, threatening to cook him in a pot. But finally they had declared a truce, either out of their growing age or their recognition of their mutual intractability. Now, whenever Alafair or I turned Tripod loose, he usually headed for the dock and worked the screen open and slept on top of the icebox behind the counter. Last week I saw Batist roaring down the bayou in an outboard, with Tripod sitting on the bow, his face pointed into the breeze like a hood ornament.

When I went inside the shop Batist was drinking a cup of coffee, looking out the screen window at the swamp.

"You ever seen a red moon like that this time of year?" he said.

"The wind's up. There's a lot of dust in the air," I said.

He was a big man, the muscles in his upper arms like croquet balls; his bell-bottomed dungarees and white T-shirt looked sewn to his skin.

"Old people say back in slave days they poured hog blood in the ground under a moon like this," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Make the corn and cane bigger. Same reason people kill a gator and plant it in the field," he replied. "I seen Clete Purcel with Passion Labiche."

"Really?"

"Them girls are trouble, Dave. Their folks was pimps."

"A good apple can come off a bad tree," I said.

"Tell that to the man got his parts chopped up all over the flo'."

"I think he had it coming," I replied.

Tripod had crawled up on the counter and was sniffing ajar of pickles. Batist hefted him up in the crook of his arm. Tripod's tail was ringed with silver bands and it flipped back and forth between his upended legs.

"We was ten of us when I was growing up. My mama made a big pan of biscuits for breakfast every morning but we didn't have nothing to put on them. So she kept a jar of fig preserves on the table. We rubbed the biscuit on the side of the jar, then ate it. We all laughed when we done that. Everybody's road got glass on it, Dave. Don't mean you got the right to kill nobody," he said.

"What does that have to do with Clete seeing Passion, Batist?"

"I knowed them girls since they was little. You seen one, you seen the other. They wasn't never more than a broom handle apart."

"It's too early in the morning to argue with you, partner," I said.

"I ain't arguing. The troot's the troot. I ain't got to prove nothing, me."

He walked outside into the soft blue light and set Tripod on the handrail and began hosing down the spool tables on the dock, the moon dull red behind his head.

Later that morning I filled an envelope full of black-and-white photos taken at the Vachel Carmouche murder scene and drove out to Carmouche's boarded-up house on the bayou. The property itself seemed physically stricken by the deed that had been committed there. The yard was waist-high in weeds, the gallery stacked with old tires and hay bales that had gone gray with rot. Nests of yellow jackets and dirtdobbers buzzed under the eaves and a broken windmill clanged uselessly in a dry, hot wind.

I walked around back, re-creating in my mind's eye the path that Letty must have taken from the back porch to the rear of her house, where she stripped off her shoes and robe and washed the blood from her hair and body with a garden hose. The lock was already broken on the back door of Carmouche's house, and I pushed the door open, scraping it back on the buckled linoleum.

The air was stifling, like the inside of a privy in summer, rife with the smell of bat guano and pools of settled water under the floor, superheated by the tin roof and the closed windows. A green plant, as dark as spinach, had blossomed from the drain in the sink.

But the signs of Carmouche's agony from his crawl were still visible on the linoleum, like smeared reddish black paint that had dried and taken on the crisp, razored design of broken leaves. But there were other stains in the kitchen, too-a tentacle of connected dots on the wall by the stove and two similar streakings on the ceiling. I touched my fingers on the dots by the stove and felt what I was sure were the crusted, physical remains of Louisiana 's most famous electrician.

I looked through the crime scene photos again. Blood had been slung all over the floor, the walls, the curtains on the cabinets, the icebox, and even the screen of the television set, which had been tuned to an old Laurel and Hardy comedy when the photo was taken. But how would blood from a mattock, a heavy, two-handed tool used to bust up stumps and root systems, create whipped patterns like those on the ceiling and the wall?

I walked across the yard to the back of the Labiche house. The faucet where Letty had washed herself dripped water into the dust; the oil drum she had tried to destroy her robe and shoes in now smoldered with burning leaves; the house she had grown up in was ringed with roses and gardenias, and red squirrels leaped from the branches of the live oaks and clattered across the roof.

The home was weathered, the woodwork termite-eaten and the white paint cracked by the sun and dulled by smoke from stubble fires, but it was still a fine place in which to live, a piece of history from antebellum times, if only Letty were here to enjoy it, if only she had not traded off her life in order to kill a worthless man like Vachel Carmouche.

"You prowling round my house for a reason?" someone said behind me.

"What's the haps, Passion?" I said.

She wore sandals and baggy jeans and stood with her big-boned hands on her hips.

"Clete says you think he's a cradle robber, that I'm too young a chick for a man his age."

"He tells that to women all the time. It makes them feel sorry for him," I replied.

"What were you doing over at Carmouche's place?" she asked.

"An elderly black friend of mine was mentioning how you and Letty were inseparable. How if somebody saw one of you, he automatically saw the other."

"So?"

"What were you doing the night Carmouche got it?"

"Read the trial report. I'm not interested in covering that same old territory again. Tell me something. You got a problem with your friend seeing me 'cause I'm Creole?"

"You'll have to find another pincushion, Passion. See you around," I said, and walked across the yard under the shade trees toward my truck.

"Yeah, you, too, big stuff," she said.

When I drove back up the road, she was carrying a loaded trash can in each hand to the roadside, her chest and heavy arms swollen with her physical power. I waved, but my truck seemed to slide past her gaze without her ever seeing it.

That afternoon Governor Belmont Pugh held a news conference, supposedly to talk about casinos, slot machines at the state's racetracks, and the percentage of the gambling revenue that should go into a pay raise for schoolteachers.

But Belmont did not look comfortable. His tie was askew, the point of one collar bent upward, his eyes scorched, his face the color and texture of a boiled ham. He kept gulping water, as though he were dehydrated or forcing down the regurgitated taste of last night's whiskey.

Then one reporter stood up and asked Belmont the question he feared: "What are you going to do about Letty Labiche, Governor?"

Belmont rubbed his mouth with the flat of his hand, and the microphone picked up the sound of his calluses scraping across whiskers.

"Excuse me, I got a sore throat today and cain't talk right. I'm granting an indefinite stay of execution. Long as she's got her appeals up there in the courts. That's what the law requires," he said.

"What do you mean 'indefinite,' Governor?"

"I got corn fritters in my mouth? It means what I said."

"Are you saying even after her Supreme Court appeal, you're going to continue the stay, or do you plan to see her executed? It's not a complicated question, sir," another reporter, a man in a bow tie, said, smiling to make the insult acceptable.

Then, for just a moment, Belmont rose to a level of candor and integrity I hadn't thought him capable of.

"Y'all need to understand something. That's a human life we're talking about. Not just a story in your papers or on your TV show. Y'all can take my remarks any damn way you want, but by God I'm gonna do what my conscience tells me. If that don't sit right with somebody, they can chase a possum up a gum stump."

An aide stepped close to Belmont and spoke into his ear. Belmont 's face had the flatness of a guilty man staring into a strobe light. It didn't take long for the viewer to realize that a rare moment had come and gone.

Belmont blinked and his mouth flexed uncertainly before he spoke again.

"I'm an elected official. I'm gonna do my duty to the people of Lou'sana. That means when the appeals is over, I got to uphold the law. I don't got personal choices… That's it. There's complimentary food and drink on a table in the back of the room." He swallowed and looked into space, his face empty and bloodless, as though the words he had just spoken had been said by someone else.

The next morning I read the coroner's report on the death of Vachel Carmouche. It was signed by a retired pathologist named Ezra Cole, a wizened, part-time deacon in a fundamentalist congregation made up mostly of Texas oil people and North Louisiana transplants. He had worked for the parish only a short time eight or nine years ago. But I still remembered the pharmacy he had owned in the Lafayette Medical Center back in the 1960s. He would not allow people of color to even stand in line with whites, requiring them instead to wait in the concourse until no other customers were inside.

I found him at his neat gray and red bungalow out by Spanish Lake, sanding a boat that was inverted on saw-horses. His wife was working in the garden behind the picket fence, a sunbonnet on her head. Their lawn was emerald green from soak hoses and liquid nitrogen, their bamboo and banana trees bending in their backyard against the blueness of the lake. But in the midst of this bucolic tranquillity, Ezra Cole waged war against all fashion and what he saw as the erosion of moral tradition.

"You're asking me how blood got on the ceiling and the wall by the stove? The woman slung it all over the place," he said.

He wore suspenders over a white dress shirt and rubber boots with the pants tucked inside. His face was narrow and choleric, his eyes busy with angry thoughts that seemed to have less to do with my questions than concerns he carried with him as a daily burden.

"The pattern was too thin. Also, I don't know how she could throw blood on the ceiling from a heavy tool like a mattock," I said.

"Ask me how she knocked the eyeball out of his head. The answer is she probably has the strength of three men. Maybe she was full of dope."

"The drug screen says she wasn't."

"Then I don't know."

"Was there a second weapon, Doctor?"

"It's all in the report. If you want to help that woman, pray for her soul, 'cause I don't buy death row conversions.

"I think the blood on the ceiling was thrown there by a knife or barber's razor or weed sickle," I said.

His face darkened; his eyes glanced sideways at his wife. His hand pinched hard into my arm.

"Step over here with me," he said, pushing and walking with me toward my truck.

"Excuse me, but take your hand off my person, Dr. Cole."

"You hear my words, Mr. Robicheaux. I know Vachel Carmouche's relatives. They don't need to suffer any more than they have. There's nothing that requires a pathologist to exacerbate the pain of the survivors. Are you understanding me, sir?"

"You mean you lied on an autopsy?"

"Watch your tongue."

"There was a second weapon? Which means there might have been a second killer."

"He was sexually mutilated. While he was still alive. What difference does it make what kind of weapon she used? The woman's depraved. You're trying to get her off? Where's your common sense, man?"

At sunset that same day Batist phoned up from the dock.

"Dave, there's a man down here don't want to come up to the house," he said.

"Why not?"

"Hang on." I heard Batist put the receiver down on the counter, walk away from it, then scrape it up in his hand again. "He's outside where he cain't hear me. I t'ink he's a sad fellow 'cause of his face."

"Is his name Mike or Micah or something like that?"

"I'll go ax."

"Never mind. I'll be right down."

I walked down the slope toward the dock. A purple haze hung in the trees, and birds lifted on the wind that blew across the dead cypress in the swamp. The man who was the chauffeur for Cora Gable was leaning on the rail at the end of the dock, looking out at the bayou, his face turned into the shadows. His shirtsleeves were rolled and his biceps were tattooed with coiled green and red snakes whose fangs were arched into their own tails.

"You're Micah?" I said.

"That's right."

"Can I help you?" I asked.

"Maybe you can Ms. Perez."

"Jim Gable's wife?"

"I call her by her screen name. The man who marries her ought to take her name, not the other way around."

His right eye glimmered, barely visible behind the nodulous growth that deformed the side of his face and exposed the teeth at the corner of his mouth. His hair was straw-colored and neatly barbered and combed, as though his personal grooming could negate the joke nature had played upon him.

"It's all about a racetrack. Outside of Luna Mescalero, New Mexico," he said.

"Pardon?"

"Mr. Gable got her to buy a spread out there. He's building a racetrack. He's been trying to do it for years. That's where I'm from. I was a drunkard, a carnival man, what they call the geek act, before that woman come into my life."

"She seems like a special person," I said.

He turned his face into the glow of the electric lights and looked me directly in the eyes.

"I did nine months on a county road gang, Mr. Robicheaux. One day I sassed a hack and he pulled me behind the van and caned knots all over my head. When I tried to get up he spit on me and jabbed me in the ribs and whipped me till I cried. Ms. Perez seen it from her front porch. She called the governor of New Mexico and threatened to walk in his office with a reporter and slap his face unless I was released from jail. She give me a job and an air-conditioned brick cottage to live in when other people would hide their children from me."

"I don't know what I can do, Micah. Not unless Jim Gable has committed a crime of some kind."

He chewed the skin on the ball of his thumb.

"A man who doesn't respect one woman, won't respect another," he said.

"Excuse me?"

He looked out into the shadows again, his head twisting back and forth on his neck, as though searching for words that would not injure.

"He speaks disrespectfully of Ms. Perez in front of other men. She's not the only one. Is your wife's first name Bootsie?"

"Yes," I replied, the skin tightening around my temples.

"He said dirty things about her to a cop named Rit-ter. They laughed about her."

"I think it's time for you to go."

He splayed open his hand, like a fielder's glove, and stared at it and wiped dirt off the heel with the tips of his fingers.

"I've been told to get off better places. I come here on account of Ms. Perez. If you won't stand up for your wife, it's your own damn business," he said, and brushed past me, his arm grazing against mine.

"You hold on," I said, and lifted my finger at him. "If you've got a beef to square with Jim Gable, you do it on your own hook."

He walked back toward me, the teeth at the corner of his mouth glinting in the purple dusk.

"People come to the geek act so they can look on the outside of a man like me and not look at the inside of themselves. You stick your finger in my face again and I'll break it, policeman be damned," he said.

It stormed that night. The rain blew against the house and ran off the eaves and braided and whipped in the light that fell from the windows. Just as the ten o'clock news came on, the phone rang in the kitchen.

The accent was East Kentucky or Tennessee, the pronunciation soft, the "r" sound almost gone from the words, the vowels round and deep-throated.

"There's no point in trying to trace this call. I'm not using a ground line," he said.

"I'm going to take a guess. Johnny Remeta?" I said.

"I got a hit on me. Maybe you're responsible. I can't be sure."

"Then get out of town."

"I don't do that."

"Why'd you call me?"

"Sir, you told folks I was a snitch. What gives you the right to lie like that? I don't even know you."

"Come in. It's not too late to turn it around. Nobody's mourning Zipper Clum."

"You've got to set straight what you've done, Mr. Robicheaux."

"You're in the wrong line of work to demand redress, partner."

"Demand what?"

"Listen, you wouldn't go through with the job at Little Face Dautrieve's place. Maybe you have qualities you haven't thought about. Meet me someplace."

"Are you kidding?"

I didn't reply. He waited in the silence, then cleared his throat as though he wanted to continue talking but didn't know what to say.

The line went dead.

A hit man who calls you "sir"?