Purple Cane Road

33

ON THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY the early edition of the Daily Iberian said Letty Labiche had been moved from St. Gabriel Prison to the Death House at Angola. Belmont Pugh held what he said was his "last TV news conference on the matter" on the steps of the capitol building. He used the passive voice and told reporters "the death warrant has been signed and will be carried out tomorrow at midnight. It's out of my hands. But I'll be waiting by the telephone up to the last second." He turned his face into the sunrise and presented a solemn profile to the camera.

Helen and I went to lunch together and were walking back from the parking lot to the department when a deputy in uniform passed us.

"The old man's looking for you," he said.

"What's up?"

"Nothing much. Your man Purcel is trying to destroy St. Martinville. They use animal darts on people?" he replied.

Inside, I stopped by my mailbox. It was filled with pink message slips. Three of them were from the St.

Martin Parish Sheriff's Department. Two others were from Dana Magelli. Another simply stated, in capital letters, "SEE ME!" The sheriff's initials were at the bottom. I walked down to his office and opened the door.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"I don't quite know where to start. Where's your beeper?"

"Wally sat on it. That's not a joke."

"Dana Magelli called. Remeta got into Jim Gable's house, locked the wife in the garage, and kidnapped Gable."

"Too bad. What's the deal with Purcel?"

"I knew you'd be torn up over Gable."

"Come on, skipper. What's Clete done?"

"He's in a bar in St. Martinville. Three bikers are already in the hospital." I started to speak, but he held his hand up. "He broke a pool cue across a city cop's face. It's not the barroom follies anymore, Dave. He might get his light blown out. Everybody around here, including me, is sick of this guy."

Helen Soileau and I drove the nine miles to St. Martinville in under ten minutes. The square by the old French church and the Evangeline Oak was rilled with emergency vehicles, and the feeder streets were blocked to keep out traffic. We parked the cruiser a hundred feet from the bar where Clete was barricaded and walked up to a black police lieutenant with a thin mustache who stood with a bullhorn behind the open door of his vehicle. The windows of the bar were shattered, and the wall above one of them was scorched black and dripping with fire retardant.

I fanned the reek of tear gas out of my face.

"The shell hit the windowsill and started a fire. You're friends with this character?" the lieutenant said.

"Yeah. He's generally harmless," I said.

"Oh, I can see that," the lieutenant said. His name was Picard and he was a Vietnam veteran who had gone away to school on the GI Bill and earned a degree in criminal justice. "I've got an officer in the hospital. The inside of that bar is totally destroyed. He beat those bikers till they cried and got down on their knees. You either get your friend out of there, and I mean in cuffs, or we cool him out."

"I think we're overreacting to the situation, Loot," I said.

"Are you hearing anything I say? He has the bartender's shotgun," Picard replied.

"Bullshit," Helen said, and pulled the bullhorn from Picard's hand. "Hey, Clete. It's Helen Soileau. Dave and I are coming in," she said into the horn, its echo resonating under the bar's colonnade. Then she threw the horn back into Picard's hands.

We pushed open the front door and went inside. Chairs and tables were broken; glass Uttered the floor; the liquor bottles on the counter behind the bar had been smashed into jagged shells. In one corner, by the pool table, was the unconscious form of a head-shaved and tattooed man dressed in jeans and a leather vest with no shirt underneath.

Clete sat at the end of the bar, grinning, his scalp bleeding on his face, his slacks and tropical shirt stained with tobacco juice and talc, a can of Budweiser by his fingers. A twenty-gauge, single-load shotgun rested against the inside of his thigh, the barrel pointed toward his chest.

"Is there a safety on that thing?" I asked.

"I haven't checked," he replied.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" Helen said, glass snapping under her shoes.

"It's just been that kind of morning," he said.

"We need to hook you up," I said.

"Bad idea, Streak."

"Beats being dead. That's the itinerary outside," Helen said.

He touched the corner of his mouth with the ball of one finger and looked at the wet spot on his skin. His eyes were lighted, his cheeks filled with color.

"The cop I took down with the cue? He tried to rip my head off with a baton," he said.

Helen removed her handcuffs from the leather case on her belt, her eyes never leaving Clete's, and threw them on the bar.

"Hook yourself up, handsome," she said.

"Nope," he said, and smiled at her with his eyes and lifted his beer can to his mouth.

I stepped beyond Clete's angle of vision and made a motion with my head toward the front of the building. Helen walked with me across the broken glass until we were at the door. Clete salted his beer can, the shotgun still resting between his legs, as though the events taking place around him had no application in his life.

"When you hear it start, come running. Tell the locals we swarm him. If one of them draws a weapon, I'm going to stuff it sideways down his throat," I said.

I walked behind the bar, across the duckboards, and opened a bottle of carbonated water and sat down next to Clete. I glanced at the biker who lay unconscious in the corner.

"You didn't kill him, did you?" I said.

"They were eating reds in the John. It was like beating up on cripples. I don't see the big deal here," Clete said.

"The big deal is I think you want to go to jail. You're trying to fix it so you won't get bail, either."

There was a self-amused light in his face. "Save the psychobabble for meetings," he said.

"You'll be in lockup. Which means no trip up to the Death House tomorrow night."

He lowered his head and combed his hair back with his nails.

"I've already been. This weekend. I took Passion. Letty got to have a dinner with some of her relatives," he said.

The whites of his eyes looked yellow, as though he had jaundice. I waited for him to go on. He picked up his beer can, but it was empty.

"I need some whiskey," he said.

"Get it yourself."

He got up and tripped, stumbling with the shotgun against the stool. Unconsciously he started to hand me the gun, then he grinned sleepily and took it with him behind the bar.

"Up on the top shelf. You broke everything down below," I said.

He dragged a chair onto the duckboards. When he mounted the chair, he propped the shotgun against a tin sink. I leaned over the bar and grabbed the barrel and jerked the shotgun up over the sink. He looked down curiously at me.

"What do you think you're doing, Dave?" he asked.

I broke open the breech, pulled out the twenty-gauge shell, and tossed the shotgun out the front door onto the sidewalk.

Helen came through the door with one city cop and two sheriff's deputies. I went over the top of the bar just as Clete was climbing down from the chair and locked my arms around his rib cage. I could smell the sweat and beer in his clothes and the oily heat in his skin and the blood in his hair. I wrestled with him the length of the duckboards, then we both fell to the floor and the others swarmed over him. Even drunk and dissipated, his strength was enormous. Helen kept her knee across the back of his neck, while the rest of us bent his arms into the center of his back. But I had the feeling that, had he chosen, he could have shaken all five of us off him like an elephant in musth.

Twenty minutes later I sat with him in a holding cell at the city police station. His shirt was ripped down the back, and one shoe was gone, but he looked strangely serene.

Then I said, "It's not just the execution, is it?"

"No," he said.

"What is it?"

"I'm a drunk. I have malarial dreams. I still get night visits from a mamasan I killed by accident. What's a guy with my record know about anything?" he answered.

I woke before dawn on Wednesday, the last scheduled day of Letty Labiche's life, and walked down the slope through the trees to help Batist open up the shop. A Lincoln was parked by the boat ramp in the fog, its doors locked.

"Whose car is that up there?" I asked Batist.

"It was here when I come to work," he said.

I unchained our rental boats and hosed down the dock and started the fire in the barbecue pit. The sunlight broke through the trees and turned the Lincoln the color of an overly ripe plum. Water had begun streaming from the trunk. I touched the water, which felt like it had come from a refrigerator, and smelled my hand. At 8 a.m. I called the department and asked Helen Soileau to run the tag.

She called back ten minutes later.

"It was stolen out of a parking lot in Metairie two days ago," she said.

"Get ahold of the locksmith, would you, and ask the sheriff if he'd mind coming out to my house," I said.

"Has this got something to do with Remeta?" she asked.

The sun was hot and bright by the time the sheriff and the locksmith and a tow truck got to the dock. The sheriff and I stood at the trunk of the Lincoln while the locksmith worked on it. Then the sheriff blew his nose and turned his face into the wind.

"I hope we'll be laughing about a string of bigmouth bass," he said.

The locksmith popped the hatch but didn't raise it.

"Y'all be my guests," he said, and walked toward his vehicle.

I flipped the hatch up in the air.

Jim Gable rested on his hip inside a clear-plastic wardrobe bag that was pooled at the bottom with water and pieces of melting ice the size of dimes. His ankles and arms were pulled behind him, laced to a strand of piano wire that was looped around his throat. He had inhaled the bag into his mouth, so that he looked like a guppy trying to breathe air at the top of an aquarium.

"Why'd Remeta leave him here?" the sheriff asked.

"To show me up."

"Gable was one of the cops who killed your mother?"

"He told me I didn't know what was going on. He knew Johnny had cut a deal with somebody."

"With who?"

When I didn't reply, the sheriff said, "What a day. A molested and raped girl is going to be executed, and it takes a psychopath to get rid of a bad cop. Does any of that make sense to you?"

I slammed the hatch on the trunk.

"Yeah, if you think of the planet as a big blue mental asylum," I said.