Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  My mother was a plump, attractive woman who worked for thirty cents an hour in a laundry that employed mostly Negro women. She loved to dress up and wear her lavender pillbox hat, one with a stiff white net on it, and go to dance halls and crawfish boils and the fais-dodo in Breaux Bridge. While my father was in the parish prison, other men came to our house, and two of them offered my mother access to what she thought was a much better world than the one she shared with my father.

  Hank was a soldier stationed at Fort Polk, a tall, sun-browned man with a red, welted scar from Omaha Beach on his shoulder who told my mother he belonged to the stagehands union in Hollywood. In the morning he would go into the bathroom when my mother was already in there, and I would hear them laughing through the door. Then he would stay in there a long time by himself, filling the room with steam. When I went in to bathe before school, no warm water was left in the tank, and he would tell me to heat a pan on the stove and wash with a rag at the kitchen sink.

  “Mama wants me to take a whole bath,” I said one morning.

  “Suit yourself, kid. Scrub out the tub when you get finished. I don’t like sitting in somebody else’s dirt,” he replied.

  He smelled of testosterone and shaving cream and the cigarette he kept balanced on the lavatory while he combed Lucky Tiger into his hair in front of the mirror, a towel wrapped around his hips. He saw me watching him in the mirror and he turned and cocked his fists like a prizefighter’s.

  He and my mother boarded the Sunset Limited in 1946 and went out to Hollywood. On the platform she hugged me against her and kept patting me on the head and back as though her hands could convey meaning her words could not.

  “I’m gonna send for you. I promise, Davy. You gonna see movie stars and swim in the ocean and go on rollercoaster rides out over the water, you. It ain’t like here, no. It don’t never rain and people got all the money they want,” she said.

  When she returned to New Iberia on the bus, the ticket purchased with money my father had to wire a priest, she showed me postcards of Angel’s Flight and Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the beach at Malibu, as though these were magic places that had defined her experience in California rather than a garage apartment by a downtown freeway where Hank had left her one morning with the icebox empty and the rent unpaid.

  But it was a thin, small-boned bouree dealer named Mack who took her away from us permanently. He owned a car and wore a fedora and two-tone shoes and had a moustache that looked like it had been drawn above his lip with grease pencil. I hated Mack more than any of the others. He feared my father and was cruel in the way all cowards are. He knew how to inflict injury deep into the bone, and he always had an explanation to mask the nature of his real agenda, like a man who tickles a child incessantly and says he means no harm.

  My calico cat gave birth to her litter in the barn, but Mack found them before I did. He put them in a paper sack and weighted the sack with a rock and sank it in the coulee, pushing me away with his palm, then raising a cautionary finger at my face.

  “Don’t touch me again, no, ’cause I’m gonna hit you,” he said. “Them kittens gonna grow up and kill the chicks, just like their mama been doin’. You gonna buy more chickens, you? You gonna put food on the table, you?”

  He and my mother drove away one summer’s day in a rooster tail of dust to Morgan City, where Mack got her a job at a beer garden. I didn’t see her again until many years later, when I was in high school and I went to a roadhouse on the Breaux Bridge Highway with some other boys. It was a ramshackle gambling and pickup place, where the patrons fought over whores with bottles and knives in the parking lot. She was dancing with a drunk by the jukebox, her stomach pressed into his loins. Her face was tilted up into his, as though she were intrigued by his words. Then she saw me looking at her from the bar, saw my hand lift from my side to wave at her, and she smiled back at me briefly, her eyes shiny and indolent with alcohol, a vague recognition swimming into her face and disappearing as quickly as it came.

  I never saw her again.

  Monday morning the sheriff called me into his office. He wore a striped, black suit with a purple-and-white-striped snap-button shirt and a hand-tooled belt and half-topped boots. The windowsill behind his head was lined with potted plants that glowed in the thinly slatted light through the blinds. He had run a dry-cleaning business before he was elected sheriff and was probably more Rotarian than lawman; but he had been in the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir and no one questioned his level of integrity or courage or the dues he had paid and never spoke about (except, to my knowledge, on one occasion, when he’d had a coronary and thought he was dying and he told me of pink airbursts high above the snow on the hills and Chinese bugles blowing in the darkness and winds that could swell fingers into purple balloons).

  His stomach hung over his belt and his cheeks were often flushed from hypertension, but his erect posture, either sitting or standing, always gave him the appearance of a much greater level of health than he actually possessed.

  “I just got off the phone with the East Baton Rouge sheriff’s office,” he said, looking down at a yellow legal pad by his elbow. “They say a couple of black lowlifes were thrown off a roof east of town last night.”

  “Oh?”

  “One of them has a broken arm, the other a concussion. The only reason they’re alive is they crashed through the top of an oak tree.”

  I nodded, as though unsure of his larger meaning.

  “The two lowlifes say Clete Purcel is the guy who made them airborne. You know anything about this?” the sheriff said.

  “Clete’s methods are direct sometimes.”

  “What’s most interesting is one of them took down the license number of your truck.” The sheriff’s eyes dropped to his legal pad. “Let’s see, I jotted down a quote from the East Baton Rouge sheriff. ‘Who told your homicide investigator he could come into my parish with an animal like Clete Purcel and do business with a baseball bat?’ I didn’t quite have an answer for him.”

  “You remember my mother?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he replied, his eyes shifting off mine, going empty now.

  “A pimp named Zipper Clum was on that roof. He told me he saw my mother killed. Back in 1966 or ’67. He wasn’t sure of the year. It wasn’t an important moment in his career.”

  The sheriff leaned back in his chair and lowered his eyes and rubbed the cleft in his chin with two fingers.

  “I’d like to believe you trusted me enough to tell me that up front,” he said.

  “People like Zipper Clum lie a lot. He claims two cops drowned her in a mud puddle. They shot somebody and put a throw-down on the corpse. My mother saw it. At least that’s what Clum says.”

  He tore the top page off his legal pad and crumpled it up slowly and dropped it in the wastebasket.

  “You want some help on this?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life,” the sheriff said.

  “He also said he never took his own advice.”

  The sheriff rose from his swivel chair and began watering his plants with a hand-painted teakettle. I closed the door softly behind me.

  I took a vacation day Friday and drove back to New Orleans and parked my truck on the edge of the Quarter and walked through Jackson Square and Pirates Alley, past the deep green, shaded garden behind St. Louis Cathedral, and down St. Ann to Clete Purcel’s office.

  The building was tan stucco and contained an arched foyer and flagstone courtyard planted with banana trees. An “Out to Lunch” sign hung in the downstairs window. I went through the foyer and up the stairs to the second floor, where Clete lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a balcony that gave onto the street. The ironwork on the balcony was overgrown with bougainvillea, and in the evening Clete put on a pair of blue, baggy, knee-length boxing trunks and pumped barbells out there under a potted palm like a friendly elephant.

  “You re
ally want to ‘front this vice cop over Little Face Dautrieve?” he asked. He had unwrapped two fried-oyster po’ boy sandwiches, and he set them on the table with two cardboard containers of dirty rice.

  “No, I want to find out why she has this personal involvement with Letty Labiche.”

  He sat down at the table and hung a napkin like a bib from his shirt collar. He studied my face.

  “Will you stop looking at me like that?” I said.

  “I can hear your wheels turning, big mon. When you can’t get it to go your way, you find the worst guy on the block and put your finger in his eye.”

  “I’m the one who does that?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.” He chewed a mouthful of oysters and bread and sliced tomatoes and lettuce, a suppressed smile at the corner of his mouth.

  I started to speak, but Clete put down his sandwich and wiped his mouth and his eyes went flat. “Dave, this vice cop is a real prick. Besides, a lot of guys at NOPD still think we’re the shit that wouldn’t flush.”

  “So who cares if we rumple their threads?” I said.

  He blew out his breath and slipped his seersucker coat over his shoulder holster and put on his porkpie hat and waited for me by the door.

  We went down to First District Headquarters on North Rampart, not far from the Iberville Welfare Project, but the detective we were looking for, a man named Ritter, had gone to Mississippi to pick up a prisoner. Clete’s face was dark, his neck red, when we came back outside.

  “I thought you’d be relieved,” I said.

  He bit a hangnail off his thumb.

  “You see the way those guys were looking at me in there? I don’t get used to that,” he replied.

  “Blow ’em off.”

  “They were down on you because you were honest. They were down on me because they thought I was dirty. What a bunch.”

  We got in my truck. A drop of perspiration ran out of the lining of his hat into his eye. His skin looked hot and flushed, and I could smell his odor from inside his coat.

  “You said Little Face was supposed to come across for both Ritter and a liaison guy. Who’s the liaison guy?” I said.

  “A political fuck named Jim Gable. He’s an insider at City Hall. He was in uniform at NOPD before we came along.”

  “A City Hall insider is extorting sexual favors from a street hooker?”

  “This guy’s had his Johnson out for thirty years. You want to brace him?”

  “You up for it?” I asked.

  Clete thought about it. “He’s on vacation, over at his home in Lafourche Parish.” Clete pressed his palms together and twisted them back and forth, the calluses scraping audibly. “Yeah, I’m up for it,” he said.

  We drove out of the city, south, to Bayou Lafourche, then followed the state highway almost to Timbalier Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. We turned down a dirt road through farmland and clusters of paintless cabins and clearings in the sugarcane that were filled with tin-roofed sheds and farm equipment. It was late afternoon now, and the wind had kicked up and the cane was blowing in the fields. Clouds moved across the sun and I could smell rain and salt in the air and the odor of dead animals in the ditches. Off in the distance, silhouetted against the dull shimmer of the bay, was a three-story coffee-colored, purple-tiled house surrounded by palm trees.

  “How’s a cop own a house like that?” I asked.

  “It’s easy if you marry an alcoholic with heart disease in her family,” Clete said. “Stop up at that grocery. I’m going to have a beer and shot. This guy turns my stomach.”

  “How about easing up, Clete?”

  I pulled into the grocery store and he got out without answering and went inside. The store was weathered gray, the nail holes leaking rust, the wide gallery sagging on cinder blocks. Next to it was an abandoned dance hall, the Montgomery Ward brick peeled away in strips, the old red and white Jax sign perforated with bird shot.

  Behind the nightclub was a row of cabins that looked like ancient slave quarters. The wind was blowing harder now, flecked with rain, and dust lifted in clouds out of the fields.

  Clete came out of the store with a half pint of bourbon in a paper bag and an open can of beer. He took a hit out of the bottle, finished the beer, and put the bottle under the front seat.

  “I called Gable. He says to come on down,” Clete said. “Something wrong?”

  “This place … It’s like I was here before.”

  “That’s because it’s a shithole where whitey got rich while a lot of peons did the grunt work. Like where you grew up.”

  When I ignored his cynicism, his eyes crinkled at the corners and he sprayed his mouth with breath freshener. “Wait till you meet Jim Gable. Then tell me he’s not a special kind of guy,” he said.

  • • •

  The light had faded from the sky and rain slanted across the flood lamps that were anchored high in the palm trees when we pulled through the iron gates into Jim Gable’s drive. He opened the side door onto the porte cochere, grinning with a gap-toothed smile, a man dressed in white slacks and a blue-striped sports coat. His head was too large for his narrow shoulders.

  He shook my hand warmly.

  “I’ve heard a great deal about you, Mr. Robicheaux. You had quite a war record, I understand,” he said.

  “Clete did. I was over there before it got hot,” I replied.

  “I was in the National Guard. We didn’t get called up. But I admire the people who served over there,” he said, holding the door open for us.

  The inside of the house was softly lit, the windows hung with red velvet curtains; the rooms contained the most beautiful oak and cypress woodwork I had ever seen. We walked through a library and a hallway lined with bookshelves into a thickly carpeted living room with high French doors and a cathedral ceiling. Through a side door I saw a woman with a perfectly white, deathlike face lying in a tester bed. Her hair was yellow and it fanned out on the pillow from her head like seaweed floating from a stone. Gable pulled the door shut.

  “My wife’s not well. Y’all care for a whiskey and soda?” he said from the bar, where he tonged cubes of ice into a highball glass. His hair was metallic gray, thick and shiny, and parted sharply on the side.

  “Not for me,” I said. Clete shook his head.

  “What can I help y’all with?” Gable asked.

  “A pimp named Zipper Clum is throwing your name around,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “He says you and a vice cop in the First District have an interest in a prostitute named Little Face Dautrieve,” I said.

  “An interest?”

  “Zipper says she gets into the sack with you guys or she goes down on a possession charge,” I said.

  Gable’s eyes were full of irony. “One of my men held Zipper’s face down on an electric hot plate. That was fifteen or twenty years ago. I fired the man who did it. Zipper forgets that,” Gable said. He drank from his glass and lit a thin cigar with a gold lighter. “You drove over from New Iberia to check on corruption in the New Orleans Police Department, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “I think the prostitute has information that might be helpful in the case of Letty Labiche,” I said.

  He nodded, his eyes unfocused with half-formed thoughts.

  “I hear Labiche is born again,” he said.

  “That’s the word,” I said.

  “It’s funny how that happens on death row. As far as I’m concerned, Letty Labiche doesn’t deserve to die by lethal injection. She killed a lawman. I think she should be put to death in the electric chair, and not all at once, either,” he said.

  Clete looked at me, then at the door.

  “A lot of people think different,” I said.

  “Fortunately it’s not my obligation to argue with them,” Gable replied. “On another subject, would you care to look at my collection of ordnance?” He was grinning again now, his callousness or meanness of spirit or whatever moral vacuity that seemed to define him once more hidden in the smiling
mask that he wore like ceramic.

  “Another time,” I said.

  But he wasn’t listening. He pushed open two oak doors with big brass handles on them. The inside of the room was filled with glass gun cases, the walls hung with both historical and modern weapons. One mahogany rack alone contained eight AK-47 rifles. On a table under it was a huge glass jar, the kind used in old-time drugstores, filled with a yellow fluid. Gable tapped on the lid with his fingernail so the object inside vibrated slightly and moved against the glass.

  I felt a spasm constrict the lining of my stomach.

  “That’s a V.C. head. My cousin brought it back. He was in the Phoenix Program,” Gable said.

  “We’ve got all we need here,” Clete said to me.

  “Have I offended you?” Gable asked.

  “Not us. I wish you’d made it over there, Jim. It was your kind of place,” Clete said.

  Clete and I both turned to go and almost collided into Gable’s wife. She wore a white silk robe and silver slippers and supported herself on a cane with a rubber-stoppered tripod on it. Her rouged cheeks and lipstick made me think of cosmetics applied in a desperate fashion to a papier-mâché doll. Her yellow hair was like wisps of corn silk. When she smoothed it back, lifting it coyly into place, her temples pulsed with tiny blue veins.

  “Have you invited the gentlemen for a late supper?” she asked her husband.

  “They’re just here on business, Cora. They’re leaving now,” Gable replied.

  “I apologize for not coming out to welcome you. I didn’t realize you were here,” she said.

  “That’s quite all right,” I said.

  “You mustn’t pay attention to Jim’s war souvenirs. They were given to him or he purchased them. He’s a gentle man by nature,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She placed her hand in mine. It had no more weight or density than a bird’s wing.

  “We’d love to see you again, sir,” she said. Her fingers tightened on mine, her eyes more than earnest.