Purple Cane Road

23

I WENT HOME instead of returning to the office. I sat at one of the spool tables on the dock, the Cinzano umbrella popping in the breeze above my head, and looked at the blue jays flying in and out of the cypress and willow trees. I watched the clouds marble the swamp with shadow and light, and the wind from the Gulf straightening the moss on the dead snags. I stayed there a long time, although I didn't look at my watch, like a person who has strayed unknowingly into the showing of a pornographic film and would like to rinse himself of a new and unwanted awareness about human behavior.

The story of Carmouche's death was repellent. I wished I had not heard it, and I wished I did not have to make decisions about it.

I walked up to the house and told Bootsie of my morning with Passion Labiche.

She didn't say anything for perhaps a full minute. She got up from the kitchen table and stood at the sink and looked into the yard.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, her back to me.

"Nothing she told me can help her sister."

"You have the sickle in the truck?"

"I put it back under the house." I went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee. She turned around and followed me with her eyes.

"You're going across a line, Dave," she said.

"I virtually coerced a confession out of her. I don't know if Carmouche deserved to die the way he did, but I know the girls didn't deserve what happened to them." She walked to the stove and slipped her hand down my forearm and hooked her fingers under my palm.

"You know what I would do?" she said.

"What?" I said, turning to look at her.

"Start the day over. You set out to help Passion and Letty. Why bring them more harm? If Letty were tried today, she might go free. You want to enable a process that's already ignored the injury done to two innocent children?"

Bootsie was forever the loyal friend and knew what to say in order to make me feel better. But the real problem was one that went beyond suppression of nonexculpatory evidence in a crime of eight years ago. I was tired of daily convincing myself that what I did for a living made a difference.

I fixed a ham and onion sandwich for myself and ate it on the picnic table in the backyard. A few minutes later Bootsie came outside and sat down across from me, a small cardboard box in her hand.

"I hate to hit you with this right now, but this came in the morning mail. Alafair left it on her bed. I shouldn't have read the letter, but I did when I saw the name at the bottom," she said.

The box was packed with tissue paper and contained a six-inch-high ceramic vase that was painted with miniature climbing roses and a Confederate soldier and a woman in a hoop dress holding each other's hands in an arbor of live oaks. The detail and the contrast of gray and red and green were beautiful inside the glazed finish.

The letter, handwritten on expensive stationery and folded in a neat square, read:

Dear Alafair,

I hope you don't think too badly of me by this time. Your father cares for you and wants to protect you, so I don't hold his feelings toward me against him. This is the vase I was working on. I tried to make the girl look like you. What do you think? You can't see the face of the Confederate soldier. I'll let you imagine who he is.

I wish I could have lived in a time like the soldier and the girl on the vase did. People back then were decent and had honor and looked after each other.

You're one of the best people I ever met. If you ever need me, I promise I will be there for you. Nobody will ever make me break that promise.

Your devoted friend from the library,

Johnny

"Where is she?" I asked.

"At the swimming pool." Bootsie watched my face. "What are you thinking?"

"That boy is definitely not a listener."

I went back to the office and placed another call to the psychologist at the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford. It wasn't long before I knew I was talking to one of those condescending, incompetent bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to hold on to their jobs and hide their paucity of credentials.

"You're asking me if he has obsessions?" the psychologist said.

"In a word, yeah."

"We don't have an adequate vocabulary to describe what some of these people have."

"You don't have to convince me of that," I said. "He was a suspect in a killing here. A gasoline bomb thrown inside another inmate's cell. Your man was probably raped. You were faxed everything we have. I don't know what else to tell you about him."

"Wait a minute. You didn't know him?"

"No. I thought you all understood that. Dr. Louvas worked with O'Roarke, or Remeta, as you call him. Dr. Louvas is at Marion now."

"Excuse me for seeming impatient, but why didn't you tell me that?"

"You didn't ask. Is there anything else?" I called the federal lockup at Marion, Illinois, and got Dr. Louvas on the phone. His was a different cut from his colleague in Florida.

"Yeah, I remember Johnny well. Actually I liked him. I wouldn't suggest having him over for dinner, though," he said.

"How's that?"

"He has two or three personalities. Oh, I don't mean he suffers dissociation, or any of that Three Faces of Eve stuff. He has an abiding sense of anger that he refuses to deal with. If he'd gotten help earlier, he might have turned out to be a writer or artist instead of a candidate for a lobotomy."

"Because he was raped in prison?"

"His father would take him to a blind pig on skid row. That's what they call after-hours places in Detroit. According to Johnny, a couple of pedophiles would use him while the old man got drunk on their tab. Family values hadn't made a big splash in the Detroit area yet."

"So he's hung up over his father?"

"You got it all wrong, Mr. Robicheaux. He doesn't blame the father for what happened to him. He thinks the mother betrayed him. He's never gotten over what he perceives as her failure."

"He's making overtures to my daughter."

There was no response.

"Are you there?" I asked.

"You're asking me to tell you his future? My bet is Johnny will do himself in one day. But he'll probably take others with him," the psychologist said.

The next morning I drove to Baton Rouge and went to Connie Deshotel's office. The secretary told me Connie used her lunch hour on Thursdays to play racquet-ball at a nearby club.

The club was dazzling white, surrounded with palm trees that were planted in white gravel; the swimming pool in back was an electric blue under the noon sun. Inside the building, I looked down through a viewing glass onto the hardwood floor of a racquetball court and watched Connie take apart her male opponent. She wore tennis shoes with green tubes of compressed air molded into the rubber soles, a pleated tennis skirt, and a sleeveless yellow jersey that was ringed under the neck and arms with sweat. Her tanned calves hardened with muscle when she bent to make a kill shot.

Her opponent, a tall, graying, athletic man, gave it up, shook hands good-naturedly, and left. She bounced the rubber ball once, served the ball to herself off the wall, then fired it into a low ricochet that sent it arching over her head, as though she were involved in a private celebration of her victory. Her eyes followed the ball's trajectory until they met mine. Then her face tightened, and she pushed her hair out of her eyes and left the court through a door in the back wall, slamming it behind her. I went down the stairs and intercepted her in the lounge area.

"I have some information about my mother's death,"

I said.

"Not here."

"You're not going to put me off, Connie."

"What is it?"

I gestured at a table.

"I'm leaving here in two minutes. But I'll make you a promise. You follow me anywhere again and I'll have you arrested," she said.

"I have a witness."

"To what?"

"My mother's murder. Two cops in uniform did it. In front of a cabin a few miles off Purple Cane Road in Lafourche Parish. One of them called her an ignorant bitch before he knocked her down."

Her eyes stared into mine, unblinking, her lashes like black wire. Then they broke and she looked at nothing and pulled the dampness of her jersey off the tops of her breasts.

"Bring your witness forward," she said.

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"I think the individual would end up dead," I said.

"You don't want to indicate the person's gender to me? I'm the attorney general of the state. What's the matter with you?"

"You trust Don Ritter. I don't. I think he tried to have both me and Johnny Remeta killed."

She motioned at a black waiter in a white jacket. He nodded and began pouring a club soda into a glass of ice for her. She touched the sweat off her eyes with a towel and hung the towel around her neck.

"I'll say it again. My office is at your disposal. But a lot of this sounds like paranoia and conspiratorial obsession," she said.

"The cops were NOPD." "How do you know this?"

"They killed a Lafourche Parish nightclub owner named Ladrine Theriot and made a local constable take the weight. They weren't backwoods coon-asses, either. They were enforcers and bagmen for the Giacanos. So if they weren't New Orleans cops, where did they come from?"

She took the club soda from the waiter's hand and drank it half-empty. The heat seemed to go out of her face but not her eyes.

"You have a larger agenda, Dave. I think it has something to do with me," she said.

"Not me. By the way, you play a mean game of racquetball for a woman who smokes."

"How kind."

"The other day I noticed your gold and leather cigarette lighter. Did Jim Gable give you that? Y'all must be pretty tight."

She got up from the table with her club soda in her hand.

"My apologies to Bootsie for saying this, but you're the most annoying person I've ever met," she said, and walked toward the dressing room, her pleated skirt swishing across the tops of her thighs.

"You READ my MAIL?" Alafair said. It was evening, the sun deep down in the trees now, and she was grooming Tex, her Appaloosa, in the railed lot by his shed. She stared at me across his back.

"The letter was lying on your bed. Bootsie saw Johnny's name on it. It was inadvertent," I replied.

"You didn't have the right to read it." "Maybe not. Maybe you know what you're doing. But I believe he's a dangerous man."

"Not the Johnny O'Roarke I know."

"You always stood up for your friends, Alafair. But this guy is not a friend. The prison psychologist said he's a sick man who will probably die by his own hand and take other people with him."

"Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit."

"How about it on the language?"

"You admit he saved our lives, but you run him down and take his head apart, a person you don't know anything about, then you tell me to watch my language. I just don't expect crap like that from my father."

"Has he tried to see you?"

"I'm not going to tell you. It's none of your business."

"Remeta's a meltdown, Alf."

"Don't call me that stupid name! God!" she said, and threw down the brush she had been using on Tex and stormed inside the house.

That night I DREAMED about a sugar harvest in the late fall and mule-drawn wagons loaded with cane moving through the fog toward the mill. The dirt road was frozen hard and littered with stalks of sugarcane, and the fog rolled out of the unharvested cane on each side of the road like colorless cotton candy and coated the mules' and drivers' backs with moisture. Up ahead the tin outline of the mill loomed against the grayness of the sky, and inside I could hear the sounds of boilers overheating and iron machines that pulverized the cane into pulp. Immediately behind the mill a stubble fire burned in a field, creeping in serpentine red lines through the mist.

The dream filled me with a fear I could not explain. But I knew, with a terrible sense of urgency, I could not allow myself to go farther down the road, into the mill and the grinding sounds of its machinery and the fire and curds of yellow smoke that rose from the field beyond.

The scene changed, and I was on board my cabin cruiser at dawn, on West Cote Blanche Bay, and the fogbank was heavy and cold on the skin, sliding with the tide into the coastline. To the north I could see Avery Island, like two green humps in the mist, as smooth and firm-looking as a woman's breasts. The waves burst in strings of foam against the white sleekness of the bow, and I could smell the salt spray inside my head and bait fish in a bucket and the speckled trout that arched out of the waves and left circles like rain rings in the stillness of the swells.

When I woke I went into the kitchen and sat in the dark, my loins aching and my palms tingling on my thighs. I held a damp hand towel to my eyes and tried to think but couldn't. Even though I was awake now, I did not want to look at the meaning behind the dreams. I went back to bed and felt Bootsie stir, then touch my chest and turn on her hip and mold her body against me. She was already wet when I entered her, and she widened her thighs and hooked her feet loosely inside my legs, slipping one hand down to the small of my back while she moved in a slow, circular fashion under me, as she always did when she wanted to preserve the moment for both of us as long as she could.

But I felt the heat rise in me, like fire climbing upward along a hard, bare surface, then my mouth opened involuntarily and I closed my eyes and pressed my face between her breasts.

I sat on the edge of the bed, depleted, my face in shadow, one hand still covering the tops of Bootsie's fingers, ashamed that I had used my -wife to hide from the violent act I knew my alcoholic mind was planning.