Purple Cane Road

16

"HE USED A BATON on you?" I said.

"Mostly on the shins," Clete said. He lay propped up in the hospital bed. There was a neat row of black stitches above his right eye and another one inside a shaved place in the back of his head.

"How'd you get out of it?"

"Some other cops stopped it." He took a sip from a glass of ice water. His green eyes roved around the room and avoided mine and showed no emotion. He pulled one knee up under the sheet and his face flinched.

"This happened on Saturday. Where have you been since then?" I said.

"Laid up. A lot of Valium, too much booze. I ran off the road tonight. The state trooper let me slide."

"You weren't laid up. You were hunting those guys, weren't you?"

"The one in canvas pants and suspenders, the dude who gave Ritter the baton? He was buds with that plainclothes, Burgoyne. I bet they were the two guys who beat the shit out of Cora Gable's chauffeur. By the way, I called the chauffeur and shared my thoughts."

"Don't do this, Clete."

"It's only rock 'n' roll."

"They're going to put you in a box one day."

"Ritter called me a skell."

Tuesday morning the sheriff came into my office.

"I need you to help me with some PR.," he said.

"On what?"

"It's a favor to the mayor. We can't have an ongoing war with the city of New Orleans. She and I are having lunch with some people to try and establish a little goodwill. You want to meet us at Lerosier?"

"Bootsie's meeting me in the park."

"Bring her along."

"Who are these people we're having lunch with?"

"P.R. types, who else? Come on, Dave, give me a hand here."

Bootsie picked me UP at noon and we drove down East Main and parked up from the Shadows and crossed the street and walked under the canopy of oaks toward the restaurant, which had been created out of a rambling nineteenth-century home with a wide gallery and ventilated green shutters.

I saw the sheriff's cruiser parked in front of the restaurant, and, farther down, a white limousine with charcoal-tinted windows. I put my hand on Bootsie's arm.

"That's Cora Gable's limo," I said.

She slowed her walk for just a moment, glancing at the flowers in the beds along the edge of the cement.

"I just wish I could get my hydrangeas to bloom like that," she said.

We walked up the steps and into a foyer that served as a waiting area. I could see our newly elected woman mayor and the sheriff and three men in business suits and Cora Gable at a table in a banquet room. At the head of the table, his face obscured by the angle of the door, sat a man in a blue blazer, with French cuffs and a heavy gold watch on his wrist.

"I have to go into the ladies' room a minute," Bootsie said.

A moment later I looked through the glass in the front door and saw Micah, the chauffeur, come up the walk and sit in a wicker chair at the far end of the gallery and light a cigarette.

I went back outside and stood by the arm of his chair. He smoked with his face averted and showed no recognition of my presence. Even though his forehead was freckled with perspiration, he did not remove his black coat or loosen his tie or unbutton his starched collar.

"Miss Cora said you won't press charges against the two NOPD cops who worked you over," I said.

"I'm not sure who they were. Waste of time, anyway," he replied, and tipped his ashes into his cupped palm.

"Why?"

He moved his neck slightly, so that the skin brushed like sandpaper against the stiff edges of his collar.

"I got a sheet," he said.

"People with records sue the system all the time. It's a way of life around here."

" New Orleans cops have murdered their own snitches. They've committed robberies and murdered the witnesses to the robberies. Go work your joint somewhere else," he said, and leaned over the railing and raked the ashes off his palm.

"You afraid of Gable?" I asked.

He brushed at the ashes that had blown back on his black clothes. Sweat leaked out of his hair; the right side of his face glistened like a broken strawberry cake.

I went back inside just as Bootsie was emerging from the ladies' room. We walked through the tables in the main dining area to the banquet room in back where Jim Gable stood at the head of the table, pouring white wine into his wife's glass.

"Jim says y'all know each other," the sheriff said to me.

"We sure do," I said.

"Bootsie's an old acquaintance, too. From when she lived in New Orleans," Gable said, the corners of his eyes threading with lines.

"You look overheated, Dave. Take off your coat. We're not formal here," the mayor said. She was an attractive and gentle and intelligent woman, and her manners were sincere and not political. But the way she smiled pleasantly at Jim Gable while he poured wine into her glass made me wonder in awe at the willingness of good people to suspend all their self-protective instincts and accept the worst members of the human race into their midst.

There was something obscene about his manner that I couldn't translate into words. His mouth constricted to a slight pucker when he lifted the neck of the wine bottle from the mayor's glass. He removed a rose that was floating in a silver center bowl and shook the water from it and placed it by her plate, his feigned boyishness an insult to a mature woman's intelligence. During the luncheon conversation his tongue often lolled on his teeth, as though he were about to speak; then his eyes would smile with an unspoken, mischievous thought and he would remain silent while his listener tried to guess at what had been left unsaid.

With regularity his eyes came back to Bootsie, examining her profile, her clothes, a morsel of food she was about to place on her lips.

When he realized I was looking at him, his face became suffused with an avuncular warmth, like an old friend of the family sharing a mutual affection.

"Y'all are fine people, Dave," he said.

Just before coffee was served, he tinked his glass with a spoon.

"Ms. Mayor and Sheriff, let me state the business side of our visit real quickly," he said. "Our people are looking into that mess on the Atchafalaya. Obviously some procedures weren't followed. That's our fault and not y'all's. We just want y'all to know we're doing everything possible to get to the bottom of what happened… Dave, you want to say something?"

"No," I said.

"Sure?" he said.

"I don't have anything to say, Gable."

"Friends don't call each other by their last names," he said.

"I apologize," I said.

He smiled and turned his attention away from the rest of the table. "You lift, don't you? I've always wanted to get into that," he said to me.

"I haven't had much time. I'm still tied up with that Little Face Dautrieve investigation. Remember Little Face? A black hooker who worked for Zipper Clum?" I said.

"No bells are going off," he said.

"We hope to have all of you to a lawn party as soon as the weather cools," Cora Gable said. "It's been frightfully hot this summer, hasn't it?"

But Gable wasn't listening to his wife. His arm rested on top of the tablecloth and his eyes were fixed indolently on mine. His nails were clipped and pink on his small fingers.

"I understand Clete Purcel had trouble with some off-duty cops. Is that what's bothering you, Dave?" he said.

I looked at my watch and didn't answer. Gable lit a thin black cigar with a gold lighter and put the lighter in his shirt pocket.

"What a character," he said, without identifying his reference. "You and Purcel must have made quite a pair."

"Please don't smoke at the table," Bootsie said.

Gable looked straight ahead in the silence, a smile frozen on his mouth. He rotated the burning tip of his cigar in the ashtray until it was out, and picked up his wineglass and drank from it, his hand not quite hiding the flush of color in his neck.

From behind the caked makeup on her face, Cora Gable watched her husband's discomfort the way a hawk on a telephone wire might watch a rabbit snared in a fence.

After lunch, as our group moved through the dining room and out onto the gallery and front walk, the sheriff hung back and gripped my arm.

"What the hell was going on in there?" he whispered.

"I guess I never told you about my relationship with Jim Gable," I said.

"You treated him like something cleaned out of a drainpipe," he said.

"Go on?" I said.

But Jim Gable was not the kind of man who simply went away after being publicly corrected and humiliated. While Micah was helping Cora Gable into the back of the limo, Gable stopped me and Bootsie as we were about to walk back to our car.

"It was really good to see y'all," he said.

"You'll see more of me, Jim. I guarantee it," I said, and once again started toward our car.

"You look wonderful, Boots," he said, and took her hand in his. When he released it, he let his fingers touch her wrist and trail like water down the inside of her palm. To make sure there was no mistaking the insult, he rubbed his thumb across her knuckles.

Suddenly I was standing inches from his face. The sheriff was out in the street and had just opened the driver's door of his cruiser and was now staring across the roof at us.

"Is there something wrong, Dave?" Gable asked.

"Would you like to have a chat over in the alley?" I said.

"You're a lot of fun," he said, and touched my arm good-naturedly. "Twenty-five years on the job and you spend your time chasing down pimps and whores and talking about it in front of your new mayor." He shook the humor out of his face and lit another cigar and clicked his lighter shut. "It's all right to smoke out here, isn't it?"

I went BACK to the office and spent most of the afternoon doing paperwork. But I kept thinking about Jim Gable. In A.A. we talk about putting principles before personalities. I kept repeating the admonition over and over to myself. Each time I did I saw Gable's fingers sliding across my wife's palm.

When the phone rang I hoped it was he.

"I thought I'd check in," the voice of Johnny Remeta said.

"You have a thinking disorder. You don't check in with me. You have no connection with my life."

"You know a New Orleans cop named Axel?"

"No."

"When I was chained up in that car, that cop Bur-goyne, the one who got smoked? He kept telling that other cop not to worry, that Axel was gonna be on time. He said, 'No fuss, no muss. Axel's an artist.'"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I found out Burgoyne partnered with a guy named Axel. He's a sharpshooter, the guy they use for, what do they call it, a barricaded suspect. He's got two or three kills."

"Maggie Glick says you used to come to her bar."

"I never heard of her. I don't even drink. Does everybody down here lie?"

"Don't call here again unless you want to surrender yourself. Do you understand that? Repeat my words back to me."

"You saved my life. I owe you. It's a matter of honor, Mr. Robicheaux. You got a cell phone in case I can't reach you at home?"

After I'd hung up on him I punched in Clete's apartment number.

"You know anybody named Axel?" I asked.

"Yeah, Axel Jennings. He's Don Ritter's buddy, the one who hit me in the back of the head with a set of brass knuckles."

"Johnny Remeta just called me again. Maybe Jennings is the shooter who did Burgoyne by mistake."

"I've got some plans about this guy Jennings. Worry about Remeta. He's got you mixed up with his father or something."

"What do you mean you've got plans for Jennings?" I asked.

"How about I take y'all to dinner tonight? Dave, Remeta's a head case. Ritter and Axel Jennings are windups. Don't lose the distinction."