Purple Cane Road

15

THE SHERIFF PACED back and forth in his office, reading from the folded-back front page of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate. While he paced and read, he kept touching one eyebrow with a fingernail and widening his eyes, as though denying himself the luxury of an emotion that would turn his face crimson.

The story was a long one, of the kind written by a journalist who has learned the advantages of professional credulity over skepticism:

Henderson -In what authorities believe was an attempted gangland assassination gone awry, a New Orleans city police officer was killed and a murder suspect escaped custody by stealing an unmarked police vehicle and driving it through a hail of gunfire.

Dead upon arrival at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Lafayette was Detective Sergeant James F. Burgoyne. Burgoyne and an Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department detective, David Robicheaux, tried to save the life of the intended victim, John Remeta, a suspect in a New Orleans homicide, investigators on the scene said.

The shooting took place in an 1-10 rest area close by the Atchafalaya River. Remeta was being transported in chains from New Iberia to New Orleans.

Both officers advanced across an open field into sniper fire while Remeta huddled on the backseat of the unmarked police vehicle. When the officers freed Remeta of his handcuffs, Remeta escaped in the confusion and a bullet meant for him struck Burgoyne in the head, according to the crime scene investigator.

Authorities believe Remeta has ties to organized crime and that a contract was placed on his life. A second New Orleans police officer, Lieutenant Don Ritter, is credited with coming to the assistance of Robicheaux and Burgoyne, putting himself in the line of fire.

A St. Martin Parish deputy sheriff on the scene said the behavior of all three officers was the bravest he had seen in his twenty years of police experience.

And on and on.

The sheriff tossed the newspaper on his desk and continued pacing, twisting the stem of his pipe in and out of the bowl.

Then he picked up a fax of the scene investigator's report and reread it and let it drift from his hand on top of the newspaper.

"The dead cop, what's his name, Burgoyne? He still had his piece in his holster. How do you explain that?" the sheriff said.

"Ask the scene investigator."

"I'm asking you."

"I'm not sure you want to know." I looked at a spot on the wall.

"Ritter impressed me as a self-serving asswipe. He had a sudden conversion and ran into incoming fire to help you out?"

"I never saw Ritter. Not until the state police were coming down the ramp."

"You'd better tell me what happened out there."

"I made Burgoyne walk in front of me and give Remeta his cuff key. If Remeta hadn't taken off in the unmarked vehicle, the shooter would have nailed us both."

The sheriff ran one hand through his hair. "I don't believe this," he said.

"Ritter fabricated the story to cover himself. I didn't contradict him. If I had, I would have been in custody myself."

"Did you hold a gun on Burgoyne?"

"Yes."

"You got a cop killed, Dave."

"They had that kid staked out like a goat under a tree stand."

The sheriff was breathing hard through his nostrils. His face was dark, his candy-striped snap-button shirt tight across his chest.

"I can't quite describe how angry this makes me," he said.

"You wanted the truth."

"You're damn right I do. Stay right there."

He went out the door and down the corridor, then came back five minutes later, his blood pressure glowing in his face, the lines around his eyes like white thread.

"I’ve got Don Ritter and an IAD man in New Orleans on the line," he said, and hit the button on his conference phone.

"What are you doing, skipper?" I said.

He held up his hand for me to be quiet. "Ritter?" he said, standing erect in the middle of the office.

"What can I do for you, Sheriff?" Ritter's voice said through the speaker.

"Listen and keep your mouth shut. You set up a prisoner from my jail to be murdered and you almost got one of my people killed. You set foot in my parish again and I'm going to find a way to bury your sorry ass on Angola Farm. In the meantime, you'd better pray I don't get my hands on you… Is that IAD man still there?"

There was a pause, then a second voice said through the speaker, "Yes, sir, I'm right here."

"If the media want to buy that pig flop you people put out about y'all cleaning up your act, that's their business. But you either get to the bottom of this or I'm going to put an open letter on the Internet and notify every law enforcement agency in the country of the kind of bullshit you pass off as police work. By the way, spell your full name for me," the sheriff said.

After the sheriff hung up, his throat was blotched with color.

"Hypertension is going to put me in a box," he said.

"I wish it had worked out different. I never got a clear shot."

He drank a glass of water and took a deep breath, then his eyes settled on my face.

"Burgoyne's brains splattered on you?" he said.

"Yes."

"It happened to me in Korea. The guy was a prisoner I was taking back to the rear. I used to get up in the middle of the night and take showers and wash my hair and swim in the ocean and all kinds of crazy stuff. What's the lesson? Better him than me."

His hand rested on the end of my shoulder and he kept massaging it like a baseball coach working a stiff place out of his pitcher's arm.

That night a fisherman on Calcasieu Lake, over by the Texas border, saw a man park a white automobile by the water's edge and start to walk away. Then the man looked back at the car as though he had forgotten something, or as though he'd had an argument with someone and could not quite bear to leave the other party with the last word. The man gathered an armload of creek wood and dry weeds and yellowed newspaper and sifted it through the windows on the seats, his face averted from the dust. He brushed his hands and shirt clean and took an emergency flare from the glove box and popped it alight. Then he methodically fired the inside of the car and stepped back from his work just before flames curled out over the roof. He tossed the flare hissing into the lake and "walked down the road.

The next morning, which was Friday, the car was identified as the one stolen from NOPD by Johnny Remeta.

But he had dumped it over on the Texas border, I told myself. Which meant he was probably fleeing Louisiana and did not want to add a federal beef for interstate transportation of stolen property to the charges already pending against him.

Good. I was sick of Johnny Remeta.

I tried to forget that he had a 160 I.Q. That he was just the kind of perp who would burn a stolen car on the state line to let people think he was gone.

The call came at noon.

"Why'd you do that out there in that glade? I mean, walk into all that shooting and cut me loose?" he said.

"It's none of your business why I do anything," I replied.

"I never saw anybody do anything like that."

"You're an escaped felon. I'm a police officer. Don't get the wrong idea, Johnny."

"I called to say thank you. You don't want my thanks, it's on you. But we got a mutual interest, Mr. Robicheaux."

"No, we don't. Get that out of your head. You come around here again and you're going to be back in custody."

"You want the guys who killed your mother. That's the word on the street. You think they're the same guys who're trying to pop me."

While he was talking I was waving my hand at Helen Soileau out in the hall, pointing at the phone so she would start a trace on the call.

"I met Jimmy Figorelli when I first got to New Orleans. He said if I wanted some work, I should rent a post office box and leave the box number for somebody named M.G. at a cafe across from the open-air market on Decatur. I wrote the box number down on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope and wrote M.G. on the outside and gave it to a black lady behind the register at the cafe. When I was going out, she said, 'Maggie only eats here on the weekend. I'll give it to her then, okay?'"

"I'm writing all this down. You've got to go slower," I said.

"Good try."

Change the subject, I thought.

"What was the front money?" I asked.

"I didn't say I got any front money. Sir, I didn't say anything that indicates I committed a crime."

"Did you burn the car to make us think you'd blown the state?"

"I started thinking about those cops leaving me chained up while a sniper tried to cut all my motors. That's what they call it. They use a hollow point or a steel-claw bullet to core a plug out of your head. If the target is armed, his motors shut down and all his muscles die…Anyway, their car got burned. They can buy a new one… Say, forget about waving to that woman cop to trace this call. I'm on a cell phone."

He broke the connection.

I dropped the receiver on the desk blotter and went to the window.

The parking lot was full of cars and noon-hour traffic was backed up on the streets from a passing freight train. Then the caboose of the train clicked down the track, the red-and-white-striped mechanical guard rose into the air, and the traffic flowed out of the side streets and the parking lot, the white sun reflecting blindingly off the windows like the swimming, mismatched eyes of the mythological Argus.

I went into Helen's office.

"He was outside?" she said.

"He had to be."

"He knows the drill. He was guessing. Every one of these morons wants us to think he's a criminal genius."

"He knew I waved to a 'woman cop.'"

"You put out an APB?"

"Yeah. No luck."

She put a stick of gum in her mouth and chewed it while she read the notes on my legal pad. Her hair was bright yellow and waved and molded into place with chemical spray.

"The go-between on the hit is somebody with the initials M.G.?" she said.

"First name Maggie," I said. Our eyes locked on each other's.

"Maggie Glick? I thought Maggie Glick was doing fifteen in St. Gabriel," Helen said.

"Let's take a ride to New Orleans Monday morning."

She stood a ballpoint pen upside down on its cap and studied it. "I've got a lot of work in my basket, Dave. I think right now this guy is NOPD's headache."

I nodded and went back out in the hall and closed her door softly behind me.

She followed me into my office. "I know I said I'd help, but this stuff is starting to eat you up," she said.

"What stuff?"

"About your mother. Sometimes you just have to let the bad guys drown in their own shit."

"You're probably right," I said.

Ten minutes before 5 P.M. she opened the door to my office and leaned inside.

"Did you see the B amp;E report on Passion Labiche's house?" she asked. "No."

"I didn't know about it, either, not till a few minutes ago. Somebody came through a screen and tore her house up but didn't take anything except a box of old photos."

"Photos?"

"Remember I told you about Passion saying she'd seen Connie Deshotel's face in an old photo?"

"Yeah, but Passion and Connie Deshotel just don't connect for me," I said.

"You still want to go to the Big Sleazy?"

"With you, always," I said.

"Hey, bwana?"

"What?"

"Connie Deshotel's dirty."

The next morning, Saturday, I drove out to Passion Labiche's house. She unlatched the front door and asked me to follow her into the kitchen, where she was canning tomatoes. She lifted a boiling cauldron off the stove with hot pads, pouring into the preserve jars on the drainboard while the steam rose into her face. She had placed a spoon into each of the jars to prevent the glass from cracking, but one of them suddenly popped and stewed tomatoes burst in a pattern like a broken artery on her arm and the front of her dress.

She dropped the cauldron into the sink, her face bright with pain.

"You okay?" I said.

"Sure," she said, wiping at her arm and dress with a dishrag.

She continued to wash her arm and scrub at her dress, rubbing the stain deeper into the fabric, spreading a huge damp area under her breasts.

"I have to change. Fix yourself something, or do whatever you feel like," she said, her face sweating, her eyes dilated.

She ran up the stairs. When she came back down she had washed her face and tied her hair up on her head and put on a yellow dress. She cleaned off the drain-board with the heavy-breathing, self-enforced detachment of someone who might have just stepped back from a car wreck.

"I went over the breaking-and-entering report on your house. The intruder took nothing but a box of photos?" I said.

"That's all I'm missing so far. I wouldn't have known they were gone, except some shoes fell down from the shelf," she said.

"You told Connie Deshotel you'd seen her in an old photo. Is there any reason she wouldn't want you to have a photograph of her?"

"It was probably kids. Who cares? Why you spending time on this, anyway? None of this got anything to do with my sister."

"Was there a picture of Connie in the box that was stolen?"

"I don't know and I don't care. You stop bothering me with this." She rubbed butter on the place where she had scalded herself with stewed tomatoes.

"Why'd that stain on your dress disturb you, Passion?"

She looked out the window at her garden and barn and the pecan trees down by the bayou, the skin twitching at the corner of her mouth.

"You better go about your business, Dave. I don't make good company some days. Funny how a policeman gives the grief to the person he can get his hands on, huh?" she said.

Monday morning Helen and I took an unmarked car to New Orleans and parked behind the old U.S. Mint on the river and cut through the open-air market on Decatur. The pavilion was crowded with people, and farther up the street a Dixieland band was playing in a courtyard and a man was selling snowballs from an umbrella-shaded cart on the sidewalk. We crossed Decatur to the cafe where Johnny Remeta had dropped off the number of his post office box.

It was not a place for the conventional tourist, particularly not someone with a history of coronary or vascular trouble. It had screen doors, electric fans instead of air-conditioning, an interior that looked painted with fingernail polish, and cuisine that featured sausage, bacon, cob corn glistening with butter, deep-fried pork chops, greens cooked in ham fat, potatoes floating in grease, and mounds of scrambled eggs that lay in bubbling heaps on a grill that probably hadn't been scraped clean since World War II.

"Does Maggie Glick come in here?" I asked the black woman who sat behind the counter, fanning herself with a magazine.

"Who want to know, darlin'?" she said. I opened my shield.

"She eat breakfast here on the weekend," the woman said.

"Do you remember somebody leaving a note for her a while back, one with the initials M.G. on the envelope?" I said.

"Could be. Don't remember."

"I think it's a good time to focus on your memory skills," Helen said.

The black woman kept flapping the magazine in her face. Her hair was threaded with gray and it rose and fell in the current of warm air generated by the magazine. She did not look at us when she spoke again.

"You see, Maggie comes over here to eat breakfast on the weekend 'cause she don't like the place where she lives or the work she do. When she was a li'l girl, she belonged to the same church as me over in Algiers. I still remember the li'l girl. Every time Maggie comes in here, I still remember that same li'l girl, I surely do. That enough for you, ma'am?"

We drove across the river into Algiers and parked on a narrow street lined with ancient buildings that looked like impacted teeth. The foundations had settled and the upper stories leaned into the sidewalks, the rooftops tipping downward against the light like the brim of a man's fedora. The hotels were walk-ups with stained sacks of garbage propped by the entrances, the taverns joyless, dark places where fortified wine was sold by the glass and where a person, if he truly wanted to slip loose his moorings, could create for himself the most violent denouement imaginable with a casual flick of the eyes at the bikers rubbing talcum into their pool cues.

But the real business on this street was to provide a sanctuary that precluded comparisons, in the same way that prisons provide a safe place for recidivists for whom setting time in abeyance is not a punishment but an end. The mulatto and black girls inside Maggie Glick's bar rejected no one. No behavior was too shameful, no level of physical or hygienic impairment unacceptable at the door. The Christmas tinsel and wreaths and paper bells wrapped with gold and silver foil stayed up year round. Inside Maggie Glick's, every day was New Year's morning, sunless, refrigerated, the red neon clock indicating either the a.m. or the P.M., as you wished, the future as meaningless and unthreatening as the past.

Maggie’s father had been a Lithuanian peddler who sold shoestrings from door to door and her mother a washerwoman in an Algiers brothel. The tops of Maggie's gold breasts were tattooed with roses and her hair was the same shiny black as the satin blouse she wore with her flesh-tight jeans and purple heels. She was lean and hard-edged, and like most longtime prostitutes, withdrawn, solipsistic, bored with others and with what she did, and curiously asexual in her manner and behavior, particularly around Johns.

Maggie sat at the far corner of the bar, a cup of tea on a napkin in front of her. She glanced at me, then at Helen, her eyes neutral, then picked up her cup and blew on her tea.

"You don't have to show me your badge. I know who you are," she said.

"I thought you were in St. Gabriel," I said.

"Those cops who got fired or went to jail themselves? One of them was the narc who planted crystal in my apartment. He's in Seagoville, I'm outside. Everybody feeling good about the system now."

"The word is you set up the drop for the contract on Zipper Clum. When'd you start fronting points for button men?" I said.

"Johnny Remeta told you that?"

"How do you know about Johnny Remeta?" Helen asked.

" 'Cause I read y'all had him in y'all's jail. 'Cause everybody on the street knows he did Zipper Clum. 'Cause he used to come in here. The boy has some serious sexual problems. But who want to go into details about that kind of thing?"

"That's so good of you," Helen said, stepping close-in to the elbow of the bar, her forearm pressed flat on the wood. "Is there something wrong about the words we use you don't understand? We're talking about conspiracy to commit murder for hire. There's a woman on death row right now. Would you like to join her there?"

Maggie picked up her cup again and drank from it. She watched her bartender break open a roll of quarters and spill the coins into the drawer of the cash register, then watched a man redeem a marker by counting out a stack of one-dollar bills one at a time on the bar. A young black woman sitting next to a white man in a suit quietly picked up her purse and went out the front door. Maggie Glick looked at the clock on the wall.

"The lady at the cafe across from the French Market said you used to go to her church when you were a little girl," I said.

Maggie Glick's eyes cut sideways at me, her lips parting slightly.

"You're not a killer, Maggie. But somebody used you to set up a hit. I think the person who used you may have been involved in the murder of my mother," I said.

Her eyes stayed fixed on mine, clouding, her brow wrinkling for the first time.

"Your mother?" she said.

"Two cops killed her. Zipper Clum was going to dime them. You're a smart lady. Put the rest of it together," I said.

Her eyes shifted off mine and looked straight ahead into the gloom, the red glow of the neon tubing on the wall clock reflecting on the tops of her breasts. She tried to keep her face empty of expression, but I saw her throat swallow slightly, as though a piece of dry popcorn -were caught in it. Her chest rose briefly against her blouse, then the moment passed and her face turned to stone and the slashes of color died in her cheeks. She raised her cup again, balancing it between the fingers of both hands, so that it partially concealed her mouth and made her next statement an unintelligible whisper.

"What?" I said.

"Get out of here. Don't you be talking about the church I went to, either. What you know about how other people grew up? You used to come in here drunk, but you don't remember it. Now you think you got the right to wipe your feet on my life?" she said.

She wheeled the top of her barstool around and walked toward the fire exit in back, her long legs wobbling slightly on her heels.

Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought I saw a flash of wetness in the side of her eye.

That night Bootsie and I went to a movie in New Iberia, then bought ice cream on the way home and ate it on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in back. Clouds tumbled across the moon and my neighbor's cane field was green and channeled with wind.

"You look tired," she said.

"I can't see through this stuff," I said.

"About your mother?"

"All the roads lead back to prostitution of some kind: Zipper Clum, Little Face Dautrieve, this woman Maggie Glick, the story the jigger told about my mother working a scam with Mack-"

"It's the world they live in, Dave-prostitution, drugs, stealing, it's all part of the same web." She looked at my expression and squeezed the top of my hand. "I don't mean your mother."

"No, it's not coincidence. Jim Gable-" I hesitated when I used his name, then looked her evenly in the eyes and went ahead. "Gable and this vice cop Ritter are mixed up with hookers. Passion and Letty Labiche's parents were procurers. Connie Deshotel wet her pants when she thought Passion recognized her. Somehow it's all tied in together. I just don't know how."

"Your mother wasn't a prostitute. Don't ever let anyone tell you that."

"You're my buddy, Boots."

She picked up the dishes to take them inside, then stopped and set them down again and stood behind me. Her fingers touched my hair and neck, then she bent over me and slipped her hands down my chest and pressed her body against me, her stomach and thighs flattening into my back, her mouth on my ear.

Later, in bed, she lay against me. Her fingertips traced the shrapnel scars that were like a spray of raised arrowheads on my hip. She turned her head and looked at the limbs of the oaks and pecan trees moving against the sky and the shadows the moon made in the yard.

"We have a wonderful family," she said.

"We do," I replied.

That's when the phone rang. I went into the kitchen to answer it.

It was an intern at Iberia General. "An ambulance brought in a man named Clete Purcel. A gun fell out of his clothes," he said.

"He's a P.I. He has a license to carry it. What happened to him?"

"Maybe you'd better come down."

Clete had many enemies. Outside of the Mob, which bore him a special grudge, the worst were his ex-colleagues inside the New Orleans Police Department.

He had gone down to Cocodrie for the weekend, on Terrebonne Bay, where he still kept a rented cabin and a small boat. On Saturday morning he went south into the Gulf until the coast was only a low, green line on the horizon, then he floated with the tide and fished in the swells for white trout, baking shirtless under the sun all day, consuming one can of beer after another, his whole body glistening like an oiled ham.

At sunset, when he headed for shore, the crushed ice in his cooler was layered with trout, his empty beer cans floated in the bilge, and the flying fish leaping out of the crests of waves and the raindrops that dented the swells were the perfect end to a fine day.

He winched his boat onto his trailer and put on his tropical shirt, but his skin was stiff with sunburn and dried salt, and he was sure the only remedy for his discomfort was a foot-long chili dog and a six-pack of Dixie to go.

The 911 Club was built out of cinder blocks and plywood on a sandy flat by the side of the road. It was owned by an ex-Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff who supposedly welcomed everyone at his bar, but most of his clientele, particularly on weekends, was made up of police officers, male and female, or those who wished to imitate them.

A gathering of sports trappers was taking place at the bar and in the parking lot when Clete came down the road. The trappers wore olive-green T-shirts, dog tags, camouflage pants they tucked inside combat boots, goatees that bristled on the chin. They automatically crushed their aluminum cans in their hands after draining them, lit their cigarettes with Bic lighters, sucking in on the flame with the satisfaction of dragons breathing smoke, touching their genitalia when they laughed.

But Clete didn't care about the trappers. He saw at least four men and two women, white and black, he knew from the Second and Third districts in New Orleans. They crossed the parking lot and went inside the double screen doors. They were carrying open cans of beer and laughing, the way people would at a private party.

Just go on up the road, Clete thought.

He did. For a hundred yards. But if he didn't buy beer and something to eat at the 911 Club, he would have to drive two miles farther up the road.

There was a difference between caution and driving two extra miles because you were afraid of the people you used to work with.

He made a U-turn and pulled his Cadillac and boat trailer onto the oyster shells of the 911 parking lot and went in the side door.

Don Ritter was at the bar, peeling a hard-boiled egg while he told a story to the men around him.

"The Kit Carsons were V.C. who'd gone over to our side," he said. "This one little sawed-off dude, we called him 'Bottles' because of his glasses, he kept saying, 'Boss, you leave me behind, VC. gonna make it real hard.'

"So I told him, 'I'd like to help you, little buddy, but you haven't showed us a lot. Let's face it. Your ville's V.C. Those are your relatives, right? A lot of people might question your loyalties.'

"He goes, 'Time running out, boss. Americans going home. Bottles gonna be in the shitter.' I go, 'Wish I could help. But you know how it is. You got to bring us something we can use.'"

Both of Ritter's elbows were propped on the bar while he picked tiny pieces of eggshell off his egg, grinning at the backs of his fingers.

"So what'd he bring you?" another man said.

"Can you believe this? He and his brother-in-law stole a slick from the ARVN and loaded it with these fifty-gallon drums of gasoline. They taped frags to the tops of the drums and flew over their own ville and burned it to the ground. He comes to me and says, 'Ville gone, boss. That good enough?'"

Ritter started laughing. He laughed so hard tears coursed down his cheeks and a violent cough hacked in his chest. He held a paper napkin to his mouth, then began laughing and coughing again.

The cops and trappers standing around Ritter waited.

"What happened to Bottles?" another man asked.

"You got me. I was on the Freedom Bird the next week… Oh, he probably did all right," Ritter said, wiping his eyes, lifting his glass to his mouth.

Clete ordered a chili dog and a draft and went to the men's room. Ritter's eyes followed him, then the eyes of the other men turned and followed him, too.

When Clete came back out, the jukebox was playing and someone was racking pool balls. At first he wasn't sure about the references he was now hearing in the story Ritter was telling his friends.

"His wife was a muff-diver. That's not exaggeration. My wife knew her. She dumped him for another dyke and went off to a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. Can you dig it? The guy comes home and thinks he's finally nailed her in the sack with the milkman and she's getting it on with another broad?" Ritter said.

They're shitheads. Walk away from it, Clete thought.

But the bartender had just set Clete's foot-long chili dog, smothered with melted cheese and chopped onions, in front of him and was now drawing a schooner of beer for him. So Clete hunched over his plate and ate with a spoon, his porkpie hat tilted over his forehead, and tried to ignore Ritter and his friends, whose conversation had already moved on to another subject.

When he had finished eating and had drained the last of his beer, he started to get up from the stool and leave. But he paused, like a man who can't make up his mind to get on the bus, then sat back down, his skin crawling with dried salt under his shirt. What was it he had to set straight? The lie that still hung in the air about his ex-wife? That was part of it. But the real problem was that Ritter could ridicule and sneer with impunity because he knew Clete was chained by denial to his past and would always be an object of contempt in the eyes of other cops.

"My ex left me because I was a drunk and I took juice and I popped a bucket of shit in Witness Protection," Clete said. "She wasn't a dyke, either. She just had the poor judgment to hang with your wife. The one who gave head to a couple of rookies at that party behind Mambo Joe's."

They caught him in the parking lot, as he was opening his car door, Ritter and one of the trappers and an unshaved man who wore canvas pants and rubber boots and firehouse suspenders on his bare torso.

The man in suspenders hit Clete in the back of the head with brass knuckles, then hooked him above the eye. As Clete bounced off the side of the Cadillac and crashed onto the shells, he saw the man in suspenders step away and Ritter take a long cylindrical object from him and pull a leather loop around his wrist.

"You think you're still a cop because you throw pimps off a roof? In Camden guys who look like you drive Frito trucks. Here's payback for that crack about my wife. How you like it, skell?" Ritter said.