Purple Cane Road

7

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, just before quitting time, Clete came into my office.

"The jigger's name is Steve Andropolis. He worked for the Giacanos and did freelance stuff in Miami when it was an open city. You remember him?" he said.

"Vaguely."

"I had the wrong address last night. He agreed to show up again tonight. The guy's a shitbag, Streak, but he's a gold mine of information."

"Why's he want to help us?"

"He's into Wee Willie Bimstine for four large. I got him a one-month extension with no vig."

"It sounds good, Cletus," I said.

He smiled and put a breath mint on his tongue.

We drove south to Morgan City as the evening cooled and the clouds over the Gulf turned a deeper red in the sunset. The man named Steve Andropolis was waiting for us in the back of a diner set on pilings by the water's edge. A half-empty green beer bottle and a white plate filled with fried shrimp tails sat in front of him.

The hard, rounded surfaces of his face reminded me of an old baseball. He wore a new golf cap and a bright yellow golf shirt and gray slacks and tan loafers, as though affecting the appearance of a Florida retiree, but he had big-knuckled hands, a faded blue tattoo of a nude girl on his forearm, and close-set, pig's eyes that took the inventory of everyone in the diner.

When Clete introduced me, I didn't take his hand. He let his hand remain in the air a moment, then parted his lips slightly and wiped at something on the corner of his mouth.

"I know you?" he said.

"From a long time ago. You had a DWI and the court sent you to a twelve-step program in the Quarter. You stole two-hundred dollars from the group's treasury."

Andropolis turned to Clete. "What's the deal?" he asked.

"There's no problem here, Steve. We just want to know what you've heard about this guy who did Zipper Clum," Clete said.

"His name's Johnny Remeta. He's out of Michigan. They say he's got a lot of talent," Andropolis said.

"A lot of talent?" Isaid.

"Is there an echo in here?" Andropolis said.

"This doesn't fit, Steve. The guy we're looking for is a hillbilly," Clete said.

"You wanted to know who was the new kid in town, I told you. He's done hits for the greaseballs out on the coast, maybe a couple of pops in Houston. He don't have a sheet, either," Andropolis said.

"Where is he?" Clete asked.

"A guy who blows heads? He ain't like other people. He does the whack, gets his ashes hauled, and visits Disneyland."

Andropolis' eyes kept returning to my face as he spoke.

"Why's he looking at me like that?" he asked Clete.

"Streaks just being attentive. Right, Dave?" Clete said, and gave me a deliberate look.

"Right," I said.

"Y'all want to know anything else?" Andropolis asked.

"I think I remember some other things about you, Steve. Weren't you in the Witness Protection Program? What happened on that deal?" I said.

"What do you mean 'what happened'?"

"You were one of the guys who gave up Didi Gee. But you're obviously not a federally protected witness anymore."

"Because that tub of guts had his insides eaten out by the Big C. I heard the mortuary had to stuff his fat ass into a piano crate," he replied.

"You go way back with the Giacano family?" I asked.

"Yeah, I knew Didi when he used to carry a bloodstained baseball bat in the backseat of his convertible."

"Ever hear about a couple of cops on a pad snuffing a woman in Lafourche Parish back in the sixties?" I asked.

His eyes cut sideways out the window. He seemed to study the swirls of color in the sky. The sun was almost down now, and small waves from a passing tugboat rippled back over the mudflat under the diner's pilings.

"Yeah, I remember that. A whore?" he said.

"Yeah, Zipper said the same thing. They killed a whore," I said, my face expressionless, the skin tight against the bone, my hands folded one on top of the other.

"She had something on them. That's all I remember," he said.

"No names?" I said.

"No, I don't know anything else about it."

"But you're sure she was a whore? That's what you called her, right?" I said.

"You got some trouble with that word?" he asked.

"No, not really," I said, and took my eyes off his and scratched a place on my forehead.

He raised a finger to the counterman to order a beer for himself, then said, "I got to take a drain."

Clete leaned forward in the booth.

"Quit baiting the guy," he said.

"He knows more," I said.

"He's a gumball. You get what you see. Be thankful. We got the name of the shooter."

"Excuse me," I said, and followed Steve Andropolis into the men's room and shot the dead bolt behind me. The room was small, the air fetid and warm, with a wood enclosure around the toilet. I reached under my seersucker coat and slipped my.45 from its clip-on holster. I pulled back the slide and released it, chambering the top round on the magazine.

I stood back from the door on the toilet enclosure and kicked it open. Andropolis had been tucking his shirt into his trousers when the door hit him in the back and knocked him off balance against the wall. He tried to push the door back into my face, but I stomped it again, harder this time, ripping the top hinge and screws loose, pinning him in a half-crumpled position against the toilet bowl. I held on to the side of the stall with my left hand and drove my shoe through the door, again and again, splintering plywood into his face.

Then I flung the door off him and pointed the.45 at his mouth. A twelve-inch strip of desiccated wood was affixed to his cheek with three rusty nails.

"I wanted to apologize to you, Steve. I lied out there. I was bothered by the word 'whore.' When a subhuman sack of shit calls my dead mother a whore, that bothers me. Does that make sense to you, Steve?"

He closed his eyes painfully and pulled loose the splintered board that was nailed to his cheek.

"I've heard about you, you crazy sonofabitch. What do I know about your mother? I'm a spotter. I never capped anybody in my life."

"You tell me who killed her, Steve, or your brainpan is going to be emptied into that toilet bowl in ten seconds."

He began getting to his feet, blood draining in a long streak from his cheek.

"Fuck you, Zeke," he said, and drove his fist into my scrotum.

My knees buckled, and a wave of pain rose like a gray, red-veined balloon out of my loins, took all the air from my lungs, and spread into my hands. I fell against the wall, the backs of my legs quivering, the.45 on the floor by my foot, the hammer on full cock.

Andropolis kicked the screen out of the window, placed one foot on the jamb, and leaped outside.

He stared back at me, the clouds etched with purple fire behind his head.

"When your mother died? I hope it didn't go like I think it probably did. I hope they hurt her," he said.

He ran through the shallow water across the mudflat toward a distant clump of willow trees. The water splashing from under the impact of his feet had the same amber brilliance in the sunlight as whiskey splashed in a thick beer glass. I sighted the.45 on the middle of his back and felt my finger begin to tighten inside the trigger guard.

Clete Purcel exploded the dead bolt off the men's room door frame with one thrust of his massive shoulder.

"What are you doing, Dave?" he said incredulously.

I lay my forehead down on my arms and closed my eyes, my heart thundering in my ears, a vinegar-like odor rising from my armpits.

The next afternoon I drove out to the Labiche house on the bayou and was told by a black kid watering down the azaleas in front that Passion was at the cafe and nightclub she owned outside St. Martinville. I drove to the club, a flat-roofed, green building with rusty screens and a fan-ventilated, hardwood dance floor. The sun's glare ofFthe shale parking lot was blinding. I went in the side door and walked across the dance floor to the bar, where Passion was breaking rolls of quarters and dumping them into her cash drawer.

In the far corner stood the ancient piano that Letty used to play nightly. The keys were yellow, the walnut edges of the casement burned by cigarettes. Letty was one of the best rhythm-and-blues and boogie-woogie piano players I had ever seen perform. You could hear Albert Ammons, Moon Mulligan, and Jerry Lee Lewis in her music, and whenever she did "Pine Top's Boogie," the dance floor erupted into levels of erotic behavior that would have received applause at the baths of Caracalla.

Passion sometimes played in the house band as a bass guitarist, but she had never possessed her sister's talent. To my knowledge, no one had sat seriously at the piano since Letty had been arrested for the murder of Vachel Carmouche. At least not until today.

"You're walking with a list, chief," Passion said.

"Really?" I said.

"You get hurt or something?"

"I'm doing fine. How about you, Passion?"

I sat at the bar and looked at an empty, oversized beer mug in front of me. The near side of the mug was coated with a thick, orange residue of some kind.

"The governor of Louisiana just drank out of that. I'm not sure if I should boil it for germs or not," Passion said. She wore a white cotton dress printed with flowers. The light colors made her look even bigger than she was, and, in a peculiar way, more attractive and forceful.

"Belmont Pugh was here?" I said.

"He played Letty's piano. He's not bad."

"What did he want from you?"

"What makes you think he wanted anything?" she asked.

"Because I know Belmont Pugh."

Then she told me. It was vintage Belmont.

His black Chrysler had braked to a stop in the shell parking lot, drifting a dry, white cloud of dust across the building, and Belmont had come through the front door, stooping under the door frame, moisture leaking out of his hat, his silver shirt glued to his skin, a sweaty aura of libidinal crudeness and physical power emanating from his body.

"I'm in need of massive liquids, hon," he said, and sat with his face in his hands while Letty drew a draft beer for him. "Sweetheart, that little-bitty glass ain't gonna cut it. Give me that big'un yonder, bust three raw eggs in it, and tell my family I died in your arms."

She laughed, her arms folded across her chest.

"I always heard you were unusual," she said.

"That's why my wife throwed me out, God bless her.

Now what am I gonna do heartbroken, hungover, too old to have a beautiful, young Creole thing like you in his life? It's a misery, girl. Fill this up again, will you? Y'all got anything good to eat?"

He played the piano while she fixed him a sandwich in the cafe. She put the sandwich on a plate and set the plate on the end of the bar. He sat down on the stool again and removed his hat and mopped his face with a handkerchief. The skin across the top of his forehead was as pale as a cue ball.

"That record your sister cut in jail? She's a major talent, if you ask me. The minister at my church says she's a fine woman, too," he said.

Passion looked at him silently, her rump resting against the tin wash bin behind her.

"You wondering why I'm here? I don't want to see a good woman die. It's that simple. But y'all gotta hep me and give me something I can use," he said.

"How?" Passion asked.

"That story y'all told the jury didn't do nothing but leave skid marks on the bowl. There wasn't no evidence Carmouche ever molested anybody else. It's hard to believe after all those years your sister would suddenly decide to take the man apart with a mattock. Like she was bored and it just come to mind as the thing to do."

"Would you like me to describe what he did to me and Letty?"

"Lord, it's hot in here. Why don't you fix your air conditioner? No, I don't want you to describe it. I suspect the man was everything you say he was. That's why I want you to find somebody who can support your story. Round up a mess of black people, talk to 'em, you hear what I'm saying, sometimes folks shut out bad memories, you gotta remind them of what happened.

They call it 'recovered memory.' People get rich suing over it."

"You want me to get some black people to lie for us?"

"Girl, please don't use that word. And I don't care if they're white or black. I'll get state investigators down here to take their deposition. But y'all gotta understand my situation. I cain't give clemency to a woman 'cause I like the way she plays the piano. People in the last election was already calling me the Silver Zipper."

"Letty won't go along with it."

"You better hear what I'm saying, Miss Passion, or it's gonna be on y'all's own self. Them sonsofbitches in Baton Rouge is serious."

"You want a refill, Governor?"

His face was tired and poached-looking in the warm gloom of the bar. He pulled his shirt out from his chest with his fingers and shook the cloth, his mouth down-turned at the corners. "Damn if I can ever find the right words to use to people anymore," he said, and pushed his Stetson on his head and walked back out of the club, the electric fan by the door flapping back his coat just before he stepped into the heated whiteness of the day outside.

Passion walked to the door.

"I'll tell her," she said as his car scoured dust out of the parking lot.

But Belmont did not hear her.

"Maybe Belmont's a little corrupt, but he's got his hand on it," I said.

"Meaning?" she said, her face in a pout.

"Nobody bought y'all's story. Vachel Carmouche had been gone from here for years. The very night he returned, your sister killed him. Over deeds done to her as a child?"

"You came out here to put this in my face?"

"No. Little Face Dautrieve inasmuch told me she was there that night. But that's all she'll say. What happened that night? Is Little Face protecting somebody?"

"Ax her."

"You want it this way?" I said.

"Pardon?"

"That I be your adversary? The guy you don't trust, the guy who makes a nuisance of himself?"

"I didn't mean to make you mad," she said.

"Give me a Dr Pepper, will you?"

"There isn't no way out for us, Dave. My sister's gonna die. Somebody got to pay for that nasty old piece of white trash."

She walked on the duckboards to the end of the bar, her back turned toward me so I couldn't see her face. Her large body was framed against the white glare of the parking lot, her smoke-colored hair wispy with light. She picked a rose out of a green bottle on the liquor counter and stared at it dumbly. The petals were dead, the color of a bruise, and they fell off the stem of their own weight and drifted downward onto the duck-boards.

I GOT HOME LATE from work that evening. Alafair had gone to the City Library and Bootsie had left a note on the kitchen blackboard that said she was shopping in town. I fixed a cup of coffee and stirred sugar in it and sat on the back steps in the twilight and watched the ducks wimpling the water on the pond at the foot of our property.

But sometimes I did not do well in solitude, particularly inside the home where my original family had come apart.

In the gathering shadows I could almost see the specters of my parents wounding each other daily, arguing bitterly in Cajun French, each accusing the other of their mutual sins.

The day my mother had gone off to Morgan City with Mack, the bouree dealer, my father had been hammering a chicken coop together in the side yard. Mack's Ford coupe was parked on the dirt road, the engine idling, and my mother had tried to talk to him before she left me in his care.

My father was heedless of her words and his eyes kept lifting from his work to Mack's car and the sunlight that reflected like a yellow flame off the front windows.

"That li'l gun he carry? See what good it gonna do him he step his foot on my property," he said.

The day was boiling hot, the air acrid with a smell like fresh tar and dust blowing off a gravel road. My father's skin was glazed with sweat, his veins swollen with blood, his size seeming to swell inside his overalls with the enormous range his anger was capable of when his pride had been injured.

I sat on the front steps and wanted to cover my ears and not hear the things my parents said to each other. I wanted to not see Mack out there on the road, in his fedora and two-tone shoes and zoot slacks, not think about the pearl-handled, two-shot derringer I had seen once in his glove box.

But my father looked from his work to me, then out at Mack and back at me again, and the moment went out of his face and he lay his ball peen hammer on a bench and picked up the side of the chicken coop and examined its squareness and felt its balance. I pushed my hands under my thighs to stop them from shaking.

When my mother drove away with Mack, I thought there might still be hope for our family. My father, Big Aldous, the grinning, irresponsible derrick man and saloon brawler, was still my father. Even at that age I knew he had chosen me over an act of violence. And my mother, Mae, was still my mother. Her lust and her inability to deal with my father's alcoholism made her the victim of bad men, but she was not bad herself. She loved me and she loved my father, or she would not have fought with him.

But now there were people who called my mother a whore.

I had never heard that word used in association with her. During my mother's lifetime whores didn't work in laundries for thirty cents an hour or wait tables in beer gardens and clapboard bars and hoe out victory gardens for a sack of string beans.

Had it not been for Clete Purcel, I would have squeezed off my.45 on the back of the jigger named Steve Andropolis because he called my mother a whore. In my mind's eye I still saw myself doing it. I saw a worthless, running, pitiful facsimile of a human being look back at me, his mouth round with a silent scream, his arms spread against a bloodred sky. I looked down at my hand, and it was tightened into a ball, the forefinger kneading against the thumb.

I threw my coffee into the flower bed and tried to rub the fatigue out of my face.

Bootsie's car turned into the drive and stopped in front, then I heard the crinkle of paper bags as she unloaded the groceries and carried them across the gallery. Normally she would have driven to the back of the house to unload, but our conversations had been few since the night of her revelation about her affair with Jim Gable.

Why had I demeaned him as Bootsie and I lay there in the dark? It had been the same as telling her she had somehow willingly shared her life and person with a degenerate. Her second husband, Ralph Giacano, had lied his way into her life, telling her he had a degree in accounting from Tulane, that he owned half of a vending machine company, that, in effect, he was an unexciting, ordinary but decent middle-class New Orleans businessman.

He was an accountant, all right, but as a bean counter for the Mob; the other half of the vending machine operation was owned by Didi Gee.

She had to fly to Miami to identify the body after the Colombians blew Ralph's face off. She also found out his dead mistress had been the bank officer who had set up the second mortgage on her house in the Garden District and had helped Ralph drain her accounts and the equity portfolio the bank managed for her.

She had been betrayed, degraded, and bankrupted. Was it any wonder a man like Gable, a police officer of detective grade, supposedly a man of integrity, could insinuate his way into her life?

Bootsie opened the screen door behind me and stood on the top step. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her ankles and the tops of her feet inside the moccasins she wore.

"Did you eat yet?" she said.

"I had that potato salad in the icebox."

"You might have to do an extra mile on your run," she replied.

I leaned forward on my forearms and folded my hands between my knees. The ducks were turning in circles on the pond, their wings fluttering, sprinkling the water's surface.

"I think you're a great lady, Boots. I don't think any man deserves you. I know I don't," I said.

The light had washed out of the sky; the wind blowing across my neighbor's cane field was touched with rain and smelled of damp earth and the wildflowers that grew along the coulee. Bootsie sat down on the step behind me, then I felt her fingertips on the back of my neck and in my hair.

"You want to go inside?" she asked.

Later that night the weather turned unseasonably cool and it started to rain, hard, sheets of it marching across marshlands, cane fields, tin roofs, bayous, and oak-lined communities up the Teche. In the little town of Loreauville, a man parked his pickup truck outside a clapboard bar and walked through the rain to the entrance. He wore jeans low on his hips, exposing his midriff, and pointed boots and black-rimmed glasses and a straw cowboy hat.

When he sat at the bar, which was deserted because of the bad weather, he removed his hat and set it crown-down on the stool next to him. He wiped his glasses with a paper napkin, then forgot they were dry and picked them up and wiped them again, his expression seemingly troubled by a concern or problem he couldn't resolve. Later the bartender described the man as "handsome, with kind of a ducktail haircut… Likable, I guess, but I wouldn't make him for no dishware man."

The man ordered a diet soda and opened a vinyl folder wrapped with rubber bands and filled with invoices of some kind.

"You know a family named Grayson back in the quarters?" he said.

"Cain't say I do," the bartender replied.

The man looked down at his invoice folder, widening his eyes, as though bemused. "They live next door to the Dautrieve family," he said.

"Oh, yeah. Go back up the road till you see some shotgun cabins. The Dautrieves are on the second row," the bartender said.

"They won a bunch of dishware."

"Who?"

"The Graysons." The man held up a brochure with pictures of dishes and cups on it to make his point.

The bartender nodded vaguely. The man with the invoice folder stared into space, as though he saw meaning in the air, in the lightning that trembled in the trees along the bayou. He paid for his diet drink and thanked the bartender and drove up the road, in the opposite direction from the quarters.

It was still raining the next night when Little Face Dautrieves aunt left for her janitorial job at the hospital in New Iberia and Little Face changed her baby's diapers, put a pacifier in his mouth, and lay him down in his crib. The cabin had been built in the last century, but it stayed warm and dry and snug in bad weather. When it rained Little Face liked to open the bedroom window partway and let the breeze blow across the baby's crib and her bed.

In the middle of the night she thought she heard a truck engine outside and tires crunching on clamshells, then the sound disappeared in the thunder and she fell asleep again.

When she awoke he was standing over her, his form-fitting T-shirt molded wetly against his torso. His body had a fecund odor, like water in the bottom of a coulee; a nickel-plated revolver, the handles wrapped with electrician's tape, hung from his gloved right hand.

"I came in out of the rain," he said.

"Yeah, you done that. There ain't no rain in the house," she replied, raising herself up on her hands, a wishbone breaking in her throat.

"You mind if I stay here? I mean, stay out of the rain?" he asked.

"You here, ain't you?"

His palm opened and closed on the grips of the pistol, the edges of the tape sticking, popping on his skin. His face was pale, his mouth soft and red in the flashes of lightning outside. He wet his lips and cut his eyes at the window, where mist was drifting across the sill and dampening the baby's mattress.

The man pushed the window tight and gazed down at the baby, who slept with his rump in the air. A pillow was stuffed into an empty space where one of the wood runners was missing. For some reason, perhaps because of the noise the window made, the baby woke and started to cry. The man pried the pillow loose and kneaded it in his left hand and turned toward Little Face.

"Why'd you get mixed up with a bunch of geeks? Why'd you run your mouth?" the man said. His black hair was combed back neatly on both sides, his skin glistening with water, his navel rising and falling above his jeans.

"Write out a list of the people ain't geeks. I'll start hanging 'round wit' them," she replied.

"Make that baby be quiet."

"You done woke him up. Babies gonna cry when they get woke up."

"Just shut him up. I can't think. Why don't you have a man to take care of you?"

"I can have all the men I want. Trouble is, I ain't met none I want, including present company."

He looked at the baby again, then closed and opened his eyes. He took a breath of air through his mouth, holding it, as though he were about to speak. But no sound came out. He folded the pillow around the pistol and held both ends together with his left hand. The rims of his nostrils whitened, as though the temperature had dropped precipitously in the room.

"You make me mad. You're too dumb to understand what's happening. Get that look off your face," he said.

"It's my house. I ain't axed you in it. Go back in the rain you don't like it," she said quietly.

Then she saw into his eyes and her throat went dry and became constricted like a piece of crimped pipe and she remembered the word "abyss" from a sermon at a church somewhere and she knew now what the word meant. She tried to hold her gaze evenly on his face and stop the sound that thundered in her ears, that made her own words distorted and unintelligible to her.

Her hands knotted the sheet on top of her stomach.

"My baby ain't part of this, is he?" she said.

The man drew an enormous breath of air through his nose, as though he were hyperventilating. "No, what do you think I am?" He held up the pillow as though he had just discovered its presence. "Don't put something like this in a crib. That's how babies suffocate," he said, and flung the pillow across the room.

He shoved the revolver in his blue-jeans pocket, the butt protruding just above the edge of the cloth, his booted feet wide-spread, as though he were confronting an adversary that no one else saw.

"You gonna just stand there, Rain Man?" she asked, because she had to say something or the sound roaring in her ears would consume her and the shaking in her mouth would become such that her jawbones would rattle.

He waited a long time to answer her. "I don't know what I'm gonna do. But you shouldn't be messing with my head, lady. You really shouldn't be doing that at all," he said.

Then he went out the screen door into the storm and drove his truck in reverse down the clamshells to the two-lane state road, the rain blowing like shattered crystal in his backup lights.

I SPENT THE next morning, along with my partner, Helen Soileau, interviewing Little Face and anyone else in Loreauville who might have seen the intruder into Little Face's home. Helen had started her career as a meter maid at NOPD, then had put in seven years as a patrolwoman in the Garden District and the neighborhood around the Desire Welfare Project, an area so dangerous and violent that black city councilmen tried to persuade President Bush to clean it out with federal troops. Finally she returned to New Iberia, where she had grown up, and was hired as a plainclothes investigator by the sheriff's department.

Helen wore slacks and khakis and jeans to work, was thick-bodied and muscular, and looked boldly into the world's face, her arms pumped, her waved, lacquered blond hair her only visible concession to femininity. As a rule, she had trouble with difficult people only once. She had shot and killed three perpetrators on the job.

We stood in the parking lot of the bar the intruder had visited the night before he had wedged a screwdriver blade into the lock on Little Face's cabin door. The sun was out, the air cool and rain-washed, the sky blue above the trees.

"You think he's the same guy who did Zipper Clum, huh?" Helen said.

"That's my read on it," I said.

"He tells the bartender he's delivering dishware to a family named Grayson, who don't exist, then casually mentions the Graysons live next to the Dautrieves, and that's how he finds Little Face. We're dealing with a shit-bag who has a brain?"

She didn't wait for me to answer her question. She looked back at the bar, tapping her palm on the top of the cruiser.

"How do you figure this guy? He must have known his contract was on a woman, but then he walks out on the job," she said.

"She had the baby in the room with her. It sounds like he wasn't up to it."

"All we need is another piece of shit from New Orleans floating up the bayou. What do you want to do now, boss man?"

"Good question."

Just as we started to get in the cruiser, the bartender opened the screen door and leaned outside. He held up a brightly colored brochure of some kind in his hand.

"Is this any hep to y'all?" he asked.

"What you got there?" I said.

"The man you was axing about? He left it on the counter. I saved it in case he come back," the bartender said.

Helen's usual martial expression stretched into a big smile. "Sir, don't handle that any more than you need to. There you go. Just let me get a Ziploc bag and you can slip it right inside… That's it, plop it right in. Lovely day, isn't it? Drop by the department for free doughnuts any time. Thank you very much," she said.

It's called the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS. It's a miracle of technology. A latent fingerprint can be faxed to a computer at a regional pod and within two hours be matched with a print that is already on file.

If the fingerprint has a priority.

Priorities are usually given to homicide cases or instances when people are in custody and there is a dramatic need to know who they are.

The man who had prized open Little Face Dautrieve's cabin door was de facto guilty of little more than breaking and entering. The possibility that he was the same man who killed Zipper Clum was based only on my speculation. Also, the Clum homicide was not in our j ur isdiction.

No priority for the latent print we took off the dish-ware brochure the bartender had saved. Get a number and wait. The line in Louisiana is a long one.

I called the office of Connie Deshotel, the attorney general, in Baton Rouge.

"She's out right now. Can she call you back?" the secretary said.

"Sure," I replied, and gave her my office number.

I waited until quitting time. No call. The next day was Saturday.

I tried again Monday morning.

"She's out," the secretary said.

"Did she get the message I left Friday?" I asked.

"I think she did."

"When will she be back?"

"Anytime now."

"Can you have her call me, please?"

"She's just been very busy, sir."

"So are we. We're trying to catch a murderer."

Then I felt stupid and vituperative for taking out my anger on a secretary who was not to blame for the problem.

Regardless, I received no return call. Tuesday morning I went into Helen's office. Her desk was covered with paperwork.

"You want to take a ride to Baton Rouge?" I asked.

Connie Deshotel's office was on the twenty-second floor of the state capitol building, high above the green parks of the downtown area and the wide sweep of the Mississippi River and the aluminum factories and petroleum refineries along its shores. But Connie Deshotel was not in her office. We were told by the secretary she was in the cafeteria downstairs.

"Is there a line to kiss her ring?" Helen asked.

"Excuse me?" the secretary said.

"Take it easy, Helen," I said in the elevator.

"Connie Deshotel was born with a hairbrush up her ass. Somebody should have straightened her out a long time ago," she replied.

"You mind if I do the talking?" I asked.

We stood at the entrance to the cafeteria, looking out over the tables, most of which were occupied. Connie Deshotel was at a table against the back wall. She wore a white suit and was sitting across from a man in a blue sports coat and tan slacks whose thinning hair looked almost braided with grease.

"You make the gel head?" Helen said.

"No."

"Don Ritter, NOPD Vice. He's from some rat hole up in Jersey. I think he's still in the First District."

"That's the guy who busted Little Face Dautrieve and planted rock on her. He tried to make her come across for him and Jim Gable."

"Sounds right. He used to shake down fudge packers in the Quarter. What's he doing with the attorney general of Louisiana?"

"Go easy, Helen. Don't make him cut and run," I said.

"It's your show," she said, walking ahead of me between the tables before I could reply.

As we approached Connie Deshotel, her eyes moved from her conversation onto my face. But they showed no sense of surprise. Instead, she smiled good-naturedly.

"You want some help with access to AFIS?" she said.

"How'd you know?" I asked.

"I called your office this morning. But you'd already left. The sheriff told me about your problem. I had him fax the latents to the pod. The ID should be on your desk when you get back to New Iberia," she said.

The confrontation I had been expecting was suddenly gone. I looked at her in dismay.

"You did it," I said.

"I'm glad my office could help. I'm only sorry I couldn't get back to you earlier. Would you like to join us? This is Don Ritter. He's at the First District in New Orleans," she said.

Ritter put out his hand and I took it, in the way you do when you suppress your feelings and know that later you'll wish you hadn't.

"I already know Helen. You used to be a meter maid at NOPD," he said.

"Yeah, you were tight with Jim Gable," she said, smiling.

I turned and looked directly into Helen's face. But she didn't allow herself to see my expression.

"Jim's working liaison with the mayor's office," Ritter said.

"How about that Zipper Clum getting wasted? Remember him? You and Jim used to leave him hooked up in the cage," Helen said.

"A tragic event. Everybody laughed for five minutes at roll call the other day," Ritter said.

"We have to go. Thanks for your help, Ms. Deshotel," I said.

"Anytime, Mr. Robicheaux," she replied. She looked lovely in her white suit, her olive skin dark with tan, the tips of her hair burned by the sun. The silver angel pinned on her lapel swam with light. "Come see us again."

I waited until we were in the parking lot before I turned my anger on Helen.

"That was inexcusable," I said.

"You've got to make them wince sometimes," she said.

"That's not your call, Helen."

"I'm your partner, not your driver. We're working the same case, Dave."

The air rising from the cement was hot and dense with humidity and hard to breathe. Helen squeezed my upper arm.

"In your mind you're working your mother's case and you think nobody's going to help you. It's not true, bwana. We're a team. You and I are going to make them religious on this one," she said.

If indeed the man who had broken into Little Face's cabin was the same man who murdered Zipper Clum, the jigger named Steve Andropolis had been halfway right about his identity. The National Crime Information Center said the print we had sent through AFIS belonged to one Johnny O'Roarke, who had graduated from a Detroit high school but had grown up in Letcher County, Kentucky. His mother's maiden name was Remeta. At age twenty he had been sentenced to two years in the Florida State Penitentiary at Raiford for robbery and possession of burglar tools and stolen property.

While in prison he was the suspect in the murder of a six-and-one-half-foot, 280-pound recidivist named Jeremiah Boone, who systematically raped every fish, or new inmate, in his unit.

Helen sat with one haunch on the corner of my desk, reading from the sheets that had been faxed to us by the Florida Department of Corrections in Tallahassee.

"The rapist, this guy Boone? He was Molotoved in his cell. The prison psychologist says O'Roarke, or Remeta, was the regular punch for eight or nine guys till somebody turned Boone into a candle. Remeta must have made his bones by torching Boone," she said, then waited. "You listening?"

"Yeah, sure," I replied. But I wasn't. "Connie Deshotel seemed to be on the square. Why's she hanging around with a wrong cop, the gel head, what's his name, Ritter?"

"Maybe they just ran into each other. She started her career at NOPD."

"She stonewalled us, then fell over backwards to look right," I said.

"She got us the ID. Forget it. What do you want to do about Remeta, or O'Roarke, or whatever he calls himself?" Helen said.

"He probably got front money on the Little Face hit. Somebody besides us isn't happy with him right now. Maybe it's a good time to start jacking up the other side."

"How?" she said.

I glanced out the window just as Clete Purcel's maroon Cadillac pulled to the curb, with Passion Labiche in the passenger's seat.