Purple Cane Road

14

FARTHER TO THE SOUTH of us, in the working-class community of Grand Bois, a young attorney, two years out of law school, filed suit on behalf of the local residents against a large oil corporation. The locals were by and large Cajuns and Houma Indians, uneducated, semiskilled, poor, without political power, and bewildered by the legal apparatus, the perfect community to target as the open-pit depository of oil sludge trucked in from a petroleum treatment plant in Alabama.

Company officials didn't argue with the contention the pits contained benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and arsenic. They didn't have to. Years ago, during a time of gas shortages, the U.S. Congress had granted the oil industry blanket exemptions from the regulations that govern most toxic wastes. Secondly, the state of Louisiana does not define oil waste as hazardous material.

The state, the oil corporation, and the community of Grand Bois were now in court, and Connie Deshotel's office was taking depositions from the people in Grand Bois who claimed their children were afflicted with vertigo, red eyes, skin rashes, and diarrhea that was so severe they had to keep buckets in their automobiles.

Two of those Grand Bois families had moved to New Iberia and were now living up on the bayou road, not far from Passion Labiche's nightclub. On Monday Helen Soileau was assigned to drive Connie Deshotel and her assistant out to their homes.

Later she told me of Connie Deshotel's bizarre behavior, although she could offer no explanation as to its cause.

It had rained hard that morning, then the sun had become a white orb in the center of a windless sky, evaporating the water out of the fields, creating a superheated dome of humidity that made you feel like ants were crawling inside your clothes.

The air-conditioning unit in the cruiser began clanking, then gasped once and gave out. Connie Deshotel had removed her white suit coat and folded it on her lap, trying to keep her composure while her male assistant talked without stop in the backseat. Her armpits were ringed with sweat and a hostile light was growing in her eyes.

Her assistant paused a moment in his monologue, then cracked a mint between his molars and began again.

"Why don't the people of Grand Bois move to a place where there's no oil industry? Get jobs as whalers in Japan. Could it be they've done scut work all their lives in the oil industry and couldn't fix ice water without a diagram?" he said.

He took the silence in the cruiser as indication his point was not understood.

"The Houma Indians have a problem with oil waste. But they want to build casinos and addict their own people to gambling. I think the whole bunch is ripe for a hydrogen bomb," he said.

"I don't want to add to your irritability, Malcolm, but would you please shut up?" Connie said.

"Y'all want something cool to drink?" Helen asked.

"Yes, please," Connie said.

They pulled into Passion's nightclub just as a storm cloud covered the sun and the landscape dropped into shadow. Inside, electric fans vibrated on the four corners of the dance floor, and an ancient air-conditioning unit inserted in a sawed-out hole in the back wall blew a stream of refrigerated coolness across the bar.

Connie sat on a barstool and closed her eyes in the wind stream.

Helen whistled through the door that gave onto the cafe side of the building.

"Hey, Passion, you've got some customers in here," she called.

Connie's eyes opened and she turned her blank face on Helen.

"Letty Labiche's sister owns this place. You know her?" Helen said.

"No."

"From the way you looked, I thought you recognized the name or something."

"Yes, I did recognize the name. That doesn't mean I know her," Connie said.

"Yes, ma'am," Helen said.

"I'd like to leave now," Connie said.

"I thought you wanted a cold drink."

"I just wanted to get out of the heat a few minutes. I'm fine now. We should make at least one other stop today," Connie said.

"Too late," her assistant, Malcolm, said, grinning from behind the bar. He opened two ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola and set them in front of Helen and Connie just as Passion walked in from the cafe and tilted her head at the presence of the man behind her bar.

"Could I hep y'all?" she asked.

"Sorry, miss. I'm so dry I'm a fire hazard. I left the money on the register," Malcolm said. He opened a long-neck bottle of beer for himself and stepped back from the foam as it slid over the neck.

Passion rang up the purchase, her back to them. "Sorry I couldn't get over here to wait on y'all," she said.

Connie's face looked stricken. She stared helplessly at the back of Passion's head, as though an element from a nightmare had just forced its way inexorably into her waking day.

Passion turned and placed a quarter and two dimes in front of the male assistant. Then her eyes fell on Connie's.

"You all right, ma'am?" she asked.

"Yes. Why do you ask?" Connie said.

"On days like this the tar on the road melts. You look like you got dehydrated. I got some aspirin."

"Thank you. I don't need any."

Passion started to turn away, then a look of vague recognition swam into her face.

"I seen you somewhere before, ma'am?" she asked.

"Perhaps. I'm the attorney general."

"No, I seen you in an old photograph. Or somebody sure do look like you. You got nice features. They don't change with time," Passion said.

"I'm sure that's a compliment, but I don't know what you're talking about."

"It's gonna come. Y'all visiting New Iberia?" Passion asked.

Connie rose from her chair and extended her hand across the bar.

"It was very nice meeting you," she said, even though they had not exchanged names or been introduced by a third party.

She walked out to the cruiser, her chin tilted upward, her face bloodless. The wind raked the branches of a live-oak tree against the side of the club and another rain shower burst from the heavens, clattering like marbles on the tin roof.

"I'm going to finish my beer. Who plays that piano?" Malcolm said.

Button man OR not, Johnny Remeta obviously didn't fall easily into a predictable category.

The off-duty New Orleans cop who worked security at the historical museum on Jackson Square watched a lithe young man in shades and knife-creased khakis and half-topped boots and a form-fitting ribbed T-shirt with the sleeves rolled over the shoulders cross from the Cafe du Monde and walk through the park, past a string band playing in front of Pirates Alley, wrap his chewing gum in a piece of foil and drop it in a waste can, comb his hair and enter the museum's doorway.

Where had the off-duty cop seen that face?

A mug shot passed around at roll call?

No, he was imagining things. The mug shot was of a guy who was wanted in a shooting off Magazine. Yeah, the hit on Zipper Clum. A white shooter, which meant it was probably a contract job, somebody the Giacanos hired to wipe out an obnoxious black pimp. Contract shooters didn't wander around in museums under a cop's nose. Besides, this kid looked like he just got out of high school.

"You visiting from out of town?" the cop asked.

The young man still wore his shades and was looking at a battle-rent Confederate flag that was pressed under glass.

"No, I live here. I'm an artist," he replied. He did not turn his head when he spoke.

"You come here often?"

"About every three days." He removed his shades and looked the cop full in the face, grinning now. "Something wrong?"

"Yeah, my feet hurt," the cop said.

But later the cop was still bothered. He followed the young man across Jackson Square to Decatur, took down the license number of his pickup truck, and called it in.

One block away, a police cruiser fell in behind the pickup truck. Just as the uniformed cop behind the wheel was about to hit his flasher, the pickup truck turned back into the Quarter on Bienville and drove the short two-block distance to the police station at Royal and Conti.

The young man in shades parked his truck and went inside.

The cop in the cruiser kept going, shaking his head disgustedly at the cavalier misuse of his time.

Inside the police station, the young man gazed idly at Wanted posters on a corkboard, then asked the desk sergeant for directions to the battlefield at Chalmette.

The desk sergeant watched the young man walk out of the door of the station and get in his truck and drive down Conti toward the river. Then the sergeant was out the door himself, his arms waving in the air at two motorcycle cops who were coming up the walk.

"The guy in the black pickup! You can still get him!" he yelled.

Wrong.

Johnny Remeta cut across the Mississippi bridge onto the West Bank, caught Highway 90, wove five miles through residential neighborhoods and strip malls, and dumped the pickup in St. Charles Parish and boosted an Oldsmobile out of a used-car lot.

He took back roads through Chacahoula and Amelia, crossed the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya at Morgan City, and hot-wired an ancient Volkswagen bus at the casino on the Chettimanchi Indian Reservation.

He created a one-man grand-auto crime wave across southwestern Louisiana, driving off idling automobiles from a Jiffy Lube and a daiquiri take-out window, blowing out tires and engines, lighting up emergency dispatcher screens in six parishes.

He almost eluded the army of state police and sheriff's deputies that was crisscrossing Highway 90, virtually colliding into one another. He swung onto a side road in St. Mary Parish, floored the souped-up stock-car racer he had stolen out of a mechanic's shed, scoured a balloon of dust out of a dirt road for two miles through sugarcane fields that shielded the car from view, then swung back onto 90, a half mile beyond a police barricade, and looked down the long corridor of oaks and pines that led into New Iberia.

He shifted down, turned across a stone bridge over the bayou, arching a crick out of his neck, knotting his T-shirt in his hand, wiping the sweat off his face with it.

He'd outrun them all. He filled his lungs with air. The smoke from meat fires drifted through the oaks on people's lawns; the evening sky glowed like a purple rose. Now, to dump this car and find a rooming house where he could watch a lot of television for a few days. Man, it was good to be alive.

That's when the First Assembly of God church bus hit him broadside, springing his doors, and propelled him through the air like a stone, right through a canebrake into Bayou Teche.

He sat on a steel bunk in the holding cell, barefoot, his khakis and T-shirt splattered with mud, a bandage wrapped around his head. He pulled a thin strand of bamboo leaf from his hair and watched it tumble in a shaft of light to the cement floor.

The sheriff and I looked at him through the bars. "Why didn't you get out of New Orleans when you had the chance?" I asked.

"It's a free country," he replied.

"Not when you kill people," I said.

"I'll ask you a better question. Why didn't you stay where you were?" the sheriff said.

Johnny Remeta's eyes lifted into the sheriff's face, then they emptied of any perception or thought. He looked at the wall, stifling a yawn.

"Get him processed. I want those detectives from New Orleans to have him out of here by noon tomorrow," the sheriff said, and walked down the corridor and banged the heavy door behind him.

"What's his problem?" Remeta said.

"Our space is full up with local wise guys. We don't need imports. Why'd you come to New Iberia?"

"A guy looks for friends where he can."

"I'm not your friend. You were hanging around New Orleans to pop the guys who took a shot at you, weren't you?"

"You blame me?"

"You know who they are?"

"No. That's why I hung around." I looked at him a long time. He dropped his eyes to the floor.

"You told the cop at the museum you were an artist," I said.

"I paint ceramics. I've done a mess of them."

"Good luck, kid. I think you're going to need it," I said, and started to go.

He rose from the bunk and stood at the bars. His face was no more than three inches from mine.

"I've got money put away for a lawyer. I can beat the beef on Zipper Clum," he said.

"So?"

"I have a feeling my kite's going down before I ever see that lawyer."

His breath was like the stale odor of dead flowers.

His grief was his own, I told myself as I went home later that evening.

But I couldn't rest. Zipper Clum's dying statement, taped on the boom box in the lawn-mower shop off Magazine, said Johnny Remeta was the trail back to my mother's death.

I ate a late supper with Bootsie on the picnic table in the backyard and told her about Johnny Remeta's fears. I expected her to take issue with my concerns, which I seemed to bring home as a matter of course from my job. After I stopped talking, she was pensive, one tooth biting into her bottom lip.

"I think Remeta's right. Zipper Clum was killed because of what he knew about your mother's death. Now Connie Deshotel has taken a special interest in you. She called again, by the way."

"What about?"

"She said she wanted to tell you Clete Purcel's license problems have been straightened out. How nice of her to call us rather than him."

"Forget her."

"I'd like to. Dave, I didn't tell you everything about my relationship with Jim Gable. He's perverse. Oh, not with me. Just in things he said, in his manner, the way he'd stand in his undershorts in front of the mirror and comb his hair, the cruelty that was threaded through his remarks."

The blood had risen in her face, and her eyes were shiny with embarrassment.

"You didn't know what he was like, Boots."

"It doesn't help. I think about him and want to wash my body with peroxide."

"I'm going to help Batist close up, then we'll go for some ice cream," I said.

I walked down to the bait shop and called Dana Magelli, my NOPD friend, at his home and got the unlisted number for Jim Gable's condo in New Orleans.

"Why are you messing with Gable?" Magelli asked. "Cleaning up some paperwork, interdepartmental cooperation, that sort of thing."

"Gable leaves shit prints on everything he touches. Stay away from him. It's a matter of time till somebody scrambles his eggs."

"It's not soon enough."

I punched in Jim Gable's number. I could hear opera music playing in the background -when he answered the phone.

"Y'all are picking up Johnny Remeta tomorrow," I said.

"Who is this?" he asked.

"Dave Robicheaux. Remeta thinks somebody might want to blow up his shit."

"Hey, we owe you a big thanks on this one. You made the ID through that home invasion in Loreauville, didn't you?"

"He'd better arrive in New Orleans without any scratches on the freight."

"You're talking to the wrong man, my friend. Don Ritter's in charge of that case."

"Let me raise another subject. I understand you've made 'some remarks about my wife."

I could hear ice cubes rattle in a glass, as though he had just sipped from it and replaced it on a table.

"I don't know where you heard that, but it's not true. I have the greatest respect for your wife," he said.

I stared out the bait shop window. The flood lamps were on and the bayou was yellow and netted with torn strands of hyacinths, the air luminescent with insects. My temples were pounding. I felt like a jealous high school boy who had just challenged a rival in a locker room, only to learn that his own words were his worst enemy.

"Maybe we can take up the subject another time. On a more physical level," I said.

I thought I heard the voice of a young woman giggling in the background, then the tinkle of ice in the glass again.

"I've got to run. Get a good night's sleep. I don't think you mean what you say. Anyway, I don't hold grudges," Gable said.

The woman laughed again just before he hung up.

But the two New Orleans detectives who were assigned to take Johnny Remeta back to their jurisdiction,

Don Ritter and a man named Burgoyne, didn't show up in the morning. In fact, they didn't arrive at the department until almost 5 p.m.

I stayed late until the last of the paperwork was done. Ritter bent over my desk and signed his name on a custody form attached to a clipboard, then bounced the ballpoint pen on my desk blotter.

"Thanks for your help, Robicheaux. We won't forget it," he said.

"You taking the four-lane through Morgan City?" I said.

"No, 1-10 through Baton Rouge," Burgoyne, the other detective, said.

"The southern route is straight through now. You can be in New Orleans in two hours and fifteen minutes," I said.

"The department uses prescribed routes for all transportation of prisoners. This one happens to go through Baton Rouge," Burgoyne said. He grinned and chewed his gum.

He was young, unshaved, muscular, his arms padded with hair. He wore a faded black T-shirt and running shoes and Levi's with his handcuffs pulled through the back of his belt. He wore his shield on a cord around his neck, and a snub-nosed.38 in a clip-on holster on his belt.

"We've had Remeta in a holding cell since this morning. He didn't eat yet," I said.

"We'll feed him at the jail. I'll ask him to drop you a card and tell you about it," Burgoyne said, his eyes merry, his gum snapping in his jaw.

Ten minutes later I watched Ritter and Burgoyne lead Johnny Remeta, in waist and leg chains, to the back of a white Plymouth and lock him to a D-ring anchored on the floor. When they pulled out of the parking lot, Remeta stared out the side window into my face.

I went back inside the building, the residue of a burned-out, bad day like a visceral presence on my skin.

Why had they waited until quitting time to pick up Remeta? Why were they adamant about returning to New Orleans through Baton Rouge, which was the long way back? I was bothered also by the detective named Burgoyne. His clothes and looks and manner reminded me of the description that Micah, Cora Gable's chauffeur, had given of one of the cops who had beaten and terrorized him.

I signed out a cruiser, hit the flasher, and headed for the four-lane that led to Lafayette and Interstate 10 East.

It was almost sunset when I crossed Henderson Swamp on the causeway. There was no wind, and the miles of water on each side of the road were blood-red, absolutely still, the moss in the dead cypress gray and motionless against the trunks. I stayed in the passing lane, the blue, white, and red glow of the flasher rippling across the pavement and cement railings in the dying light.

Then I was on the bridge above the Atchafalaya River, rising above its wide breadth and swirling current and the deep green stands of gum trees along its banks. Only then did I realize the white Plymouth was behind me, off the highway, in the rest area on the west side of the river.

I'd blown it. I couldn't remember the distance to the next turnaround that would allow me to double back and recross the river. I pulled to the shoulder, put the cruiser in reverse, and backed over the bridge to the rest area exit while two tractor-trailers swerved around me into the passing lane.

The rest area was parklike, green and freshly mowed and watered, with picnic tables and clean rest rooms, and a fine view of the river from the levee.

But the Plymouth was not by the rest rooms. It was parked not far from the levee and a stand of trees, in a glade, its doors open, its parking lights on.

I entered the access road and clicked off the flasher and parked behind a truck and saw Ritter and Burgoyne walking from the Plymouth to the men's room. Burgoyne went inside while Ritter smoked a cigarette and watched the Plymouth. Then Burgoyne came back outside and both of them sat at a picnic table, smoking, a thermos of coffee set between them. They watched the Plymouth and the T-shirted, waist-chained form of Johnny Remeta in the backseat.

I thought they would finish their coffee, unlock Remeta from the D-ring, and walk him to the men's room. The sodium lamps came on overhead and still they made no move toward the Plymouth.

Instead, Ritter went to a candy machine. He peeled off the wrapper on a candy bar and dropped the wrapper on the ground and strolled out toward the parking lot and used a pay phone.

The wind started to blow off the river, then I heard a solitary pop, like a firecracker, in a clump of trees by the levee.

Johnny Remeta pitched forward in the seat, his shoulders curled down toward the floor, his chained wrists jerking at the D-ring. There were three more reports inside the trees; now I could see a muzzle flash or light reflecting off a telescopic lens, and I heard the rounds biting into metal, blowing glass out the back of the car.

I pulled my.45 and ran toward the picnic table where Burgoyne still sat, his cigarette burning on the edge of the wood, his hands motionless in front of him. Ritter was nowhere in sight. The few travelers in the rest area had either taken cover or flattened themselves on the lawn.

I screwed the.45 into Burgoyne's spine.

"You set him up, you shitbag," I said, and hoisted him up by his T-shirt.

"What are you doing?"

"Walk in front of me. You're going to stop it. You touch your piece and I'll blow your liver out on the grass."

I knotted my fist in the back of his belt, pushing him ahead of me, into the mauve-colored twilight and the smell of cut grass and the wind that was filled with newspaper and dust and raindrops that stung like hail. I tried to see over his shoulder into the clump of trees by the levee, but the limbs were churning, the leaves rising into the air, and the light had washed out of the sky into a thin band on the earth's rim.

"I'm not part of this, Robicheaux. You got it all wrong," Burgoyne said.

"Shut up. Get your cuff key out. Throw it to Remeta."

We were on the lee side of the Plymouth now and Burgoyne's face had gone white. He thumbed his key out of his watch pocket and threw it inside the backseat. He tried to turn his head so he could see my face.

"Let me go, man. I'll give you whatever you want," he said.

The shooter in the trees let off two more rounds. One whanged off the door jamb and the second round seemed to go long. But I heard a hollow throp, just like someone casually plopping a watermelon with his fingers. Burgoyne's head slammed against mine and his knees collapsed under him. My hand was still hooked inside his belt, and his weight took me down with him.

I was kneeling in the grass now, behind the shelter of the car, the events of the last few seconds out of sequence in my head. Johnny Remeta was working furiously to unlock his hands and ankles from his chains. His eyes were riveted on me, a look of revulsion on his face. "What's the matter with you?" I said.

"The guy's brains are in your hair, man."

The shooter opened up again, firing indiscriminately, burning the whole magazine.

"Get out of here," I said.

"What?"

"The keys are in the ignition. When I put down masking fire, you get out of here."

I didn't wait for him to answer. I crawled to the front of the car, then extended one hand out beyond the fender and began firing the.45 into the clump of trees. The sparks flew into the darkness and the recoil snapped my wrist four inches up in the air with each shot. I fired eight rounds in a row, the brass casings flicking past my eyes, until the breech locked open. Then I released the empty magazine and shoved in a fresh one.

The Plymouth 's engine roared to life and the back tires spun in reverse on the wet grass. Johnny Remeta whipped the car around in the opposite direction, shifted into low, and floored the accelerator across the glade toward the entrance to the highway.

A full minute must have passed; there was no sound except a boat engine starting up on the river and the whir of tires on the bridge. The people by the rest rooms rose to their feet and stood like figures in a trance under the smoky glow of the sodium lamps. I pulled off my shirt, my hands trembling, and wiped my hair and face with it. Then I vomited into the grass. The detective named Burgoyne lay on his side, his head on one arm, his jaws locked open, his eyes looking vacuously into space, as though a terrible revelation about his life had just been whispered in his ear.