Purple Cane Road (15 page)

Then they were inside the cabin, the security guard naked now, mounted between her legs, rearing on his stiffened arms, buckling her body into the stained mattress, bouncing the iron bed frame against the planked wall. A freight train loaded with refined sugar from the mill roared past the window.

Just as the security guard reached orgasm, his lips twisting back on his teeth like a monkey’s, the door to the cabin drifted back on its hinges and Mack stepped inside and clicked on the light switch, his narrow, mustached face bright with purpose. He wore pointed boots and striped pants and a two-tone sports coat and cocked fedora like a horse trainer might. He slipped a small, nickel-plated revolver out of his belt and pointed it to the side, away from the startled couple in the center of the bed.

“You just waiting tables, you?” he said to my mother.

“Look, bud. This is cash and carry. Nothing personal,” the security guard said, rolling to one side now, pulling the sheet over his genitalia, removing himself from the line of fire.

“You ain’t seen that band on her finger? You didn’t know you was milking t’rew another man’s fence?” Mack said.

“Hey, don’t point that at me. Hey, there ain’t no problem here. I just got paid. It’s in my wallet. Take it.”

“I’ll t’ink about it, me. Get down on your knees.”

“Don’t do this, man.”

“I was in the bat’room. I splashed on my boots. Right there on the toe. I want that spot to shine…No, you use your tongue, you.”

Then Mack leaned over and pressed the barrel of the revolver into the sweat-soaked hair of the naked man while the man cleaned Mack’s boot and his bladder broke in a shower on the floor.

CONNIE DESHOTEL PUSHED the off button on the tape player.

“It looks like a variation of the Murphy scam gone bad,” she said. “The security guard came back with his friend and got even.”

“It’s bullshit,” I said.

“Why?” She set two bowls of her ice cream and brandy dessert on the table.

“Andropolis originally told me the killers were cops, not security guards. Andropolis worked for the Giacanos. Anything he knew had to come from them. We’re talking about dirty cops.”

“This is from another tape. The security guard
was
a Giacano, a distant cousin, but a Giacano. He was killed in a car accident about ten years ago. He worked for a security service in Algiers about the time your mother supposedly died.”

Far across the lake, the sun was just a red ember among the trees. “I tell you what, Ms. Deshotel,” I said, turning from the screen.

“Connie,”
she said, smiling with her eyes.

Then her mouth parted and her face drained when she heard my words.

I walked down the incline through the shadows and stepped into the outboard and cranked the engine. Clete climbed in, rocking the boat from side to side as I turned us around without waiting for him to sit down.

“What happened in there?” he asked.  

I reached into the ice chest and lifted out a can of Budweiser and tossed it to him, then opened up the throttle.

It was almost dark when we entered the canal that led to the boat landing. The air was heated, the sky crisscrossed with birds, dense with the distant smell that rain makes in a dry sugarcane field. I ran the boat up onto the ramp and cut the engine and tilted the propeller out of the water and flung our life vests up onto the bank and lifted the ice chest up by the handles and waded through the shallows.

“You gonna tell me?” Clete said.

“What?”

“How it went in there.” His face was round and softly focused, an alcoholic shine in his eyes.

“I told her if Don Ritter ever repeats those lies about my mother, I’m going to jam that tape up his ass with a chain saw.”

“Gee, I wonder if she got your meaning,” he said, then clasped his huge hand around the back of my neck, his breath welling into my face like a layer of malt. “We’re going to find out who hurt your mother, Streak. But you’re no executioner. When those guys go down, it’s not going to be on your conscience. My old podjo had better not try to go against me on this one,” he said, his fingers tightening into my neck.

THE NEXT MORNING I woke before dawn to the sounds of rain and a boat engine on the bayou. I fixed a cup of coffee and a bowl of Grape-Nuts and ate breakfast at the kitchen table, then put on my raincoat and hat and walked down to the bait shop in the grayness of the morning to help Batist open up.

“Dave, I seen a man wit’ a boat trailer by the ramp when I drove up,” Batist said. “I got out of my truck and he started to walk toward me, then he turned around and drove off. Later a boat gone on by the shop. I t’ink it was him.”

“Who was he?” I asked.

“I ain’t seen him befo’. It was like he t’ought I was somebody else. Maybe he was looking for you, huh?”

“Why’s this guy so important, Batist?”

“My eyes ain’t that good no more. But there was somet’ing shiny on his dashboard. Like chrome. Like a pistol, maybe.”

I turned on the string of lights over the dock and looked out the screen window at the rain denting the bayou and the mist blowing out of the cypress and willow trees in the swamp. Then I saw one of my rental boats that had broken loose from its chain floating sideways past the window.

“I’ll go for it,” Batist said behind me.

“I’m already wet,” I said.

I unlocked an outboard by the concrete ramp and headed downstream. When I went around the bend, I saw the loose boat tangled in an island of hyacinths close-in to a stand of flooded cypress. But I wasn’t alone.

An outboard roared to life behind me, and the green-painted aluminum bow came out of a cut in the swamp and turned into my wake.

The man in the stern was tall, dark-haired, his skin pale, his jeans and T-shirt soaked. He wore a straw hat, with a black ribbon tied around the crown, and his face was beaded with water. He cut his engine and floated up onto the pad of hyacinths, his bow inches from the side of my boat.

He placed both of his palms on his thighs and looked at me and waited, his features flat, as though expecting a response to a question.

“That’s an interesting shotgun you have on the seat,” I said.

“A Remington twelve. It’s modified a little bit,” he replied.

“When you saw them off at the pump, they’re illegal,” I said, and grinned at him. I caught the painter on the boat that had broken loose and began tying it to the stern of my outboard.

“You know who I am?” he asked. His eyes were a dark blue, the color of ink. He took a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped his face with it, then glanced upward at the grayness in the sky and the water dripping out of the canopy.

“We don’t hear a Kentucky accent around here very often,” I said.

“Somebody shot at me yesterday. Outside New Orleans.”

“Why tell me?”

“You made them think I was gonna turn them in. That’s a rotten thing to do, sir.”

“I hear you killed people for the wise guys out on the coast. You had problems a long time before you came to Louisiana, Johnny.”

His eyes narrowed at my use of his name. His mouth was effeminate and did not seem to go with his wide shoulders and heavy upper arms. He picked at his fingernails and looked at nothing, his lips pursing before he spoke again.

“This is a pretty place. I’d like to live somewhere like this. This guy who got killed in Santa Barbara? He raped a fourteen-year-old girl at an amusement park in Tennessee. She almost bled to death. The judge gave him two years probation. What would you do if you were her father?”

“You were just helping out the family?”

“I’ve tried to treat you with respect, Mr. Robicheaux. I heard you’re not a bad guy for a roach.”

“You came here with a sawed-off shotgun.”

“It’s not for you.”

“Who were the other people you did?” The rain had slackened, then it stopped altogether and the water dripping out of trees was loud on the bayou’s surface. He removed his straw hat and stared reflectively into the cypress and willows and air vines, his eyes full of light that seemed to have no origin.

“A greaseball’s wife found out her husband was gonna have her popped. By a degenerate who specialized in women. So the wife brought in an out-of-state guy to blow up her husband’s shit. The degenerate could have walked away, but some guys just got to try. Nobody in Pacific Palisades is losing sleep.”

“Who paid you to do Zipper Clum and Little Face Dautrieve?”

“The money was at a drop. All I know is they tried to pop me yesterday. So maybe that puts me and you on the same team.”

“Wrong.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His eyes seemed to go out of focus, as though he were refusing to recognize the insult that hung in the air. He pulled at his T-shirt, lifting the wetness of the cloth off his skin.

“You gonna try to take me down?” he asked.

“You’re the man with the gun,” I replied, grinning again.

“It’s not loaded.”

“I’m not going to find out,” I said.

He lifted the cut-down shotgun off the seat and lay it across his thighs, then worked his boat alongside my engine. He ripped out the gas line and tossed it like a severed snake into the cattails.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” I said.

 “I don’t lie, sir. Not like some I’ve met.” He pumped open the shotgun and inserted his thumb in the empty chamber. Then he removed a Ziploc bag with three shells in it from his back pocket and began fitting them into the magazine. “I dropped my gun in the water and got my other shells wet. That’s why it was empty.”

“You said ‘not like some.’ You calling me a liar?” I said.

“You spread rumors I was a snitch. I was in the Flat Top at Raiford. I never gave anybody up.”

“Listen, Johnny, you backed out on the Little Face Dautrieve contract. You’re still on this side of the line.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand. Look at me.”

“I don’t like people talking to me like that, Mr. Robicheaux. Let go of my boat.”

I looked hard into his face. His eyes were dark, his cheeks pooled with shadow, like a death mask, his mouth compressed into a small flower. I shoved his boat out into the current.

“You got it, kid,” I said.

He cranked the engine and roared down the bayou, glancing back at me once, the bow of his boat swerving wildly to avoid hitting a nutria that was swimming toward the bank.  

13

L
ATER THAT MORNING I called the prison psychologist at Raiford in Florida, a social worker in Letcher County, Kentucky, and a high school counselor in Detroit. By quitting time I had received at least three dozen fax sheets concerning Johnny Remeta.

That afternoon Clete Purcel sat next to me on a wood bench at the end of the dock and read through the file I had put together on Remeta.

“He’s got a 160 I.Q. and he’s a button man?” Clete said.

“No early indications of violence, either. Not until he got out of Raiford.”

“You’re saying he got spread-eagled in the shower a few times and decided to get even?”

“I’m just saying he’s probably not a sociopath.”

Clete closed the manila folder and handed it back to me. The wind ruffled and popped the canvas awning over our heads.

“Who cares what he is? He was on your turf. I’d put one through his kneecap if he comes back again,” Clete said.

I didn’t reply. I felt Clete’s eyes on the side of my face. “The guy’s of no value to you. He doesn’t know who hired him,” Clete said. “Splash this psychological stuff in the bowl.”

“The social worker told me the kid’s father was a drunk. She thinks the old man sold the kid a couple of times for booze.”

Clete was already shaking his head with exasperation before I finished the sentence.

“He looked Zipper Clum in the eyes while he drilled a round through his forehead. This is the kind of guy the air force trains to launch nuclear weapons,” he said.

He stood up and gripped his hands on the dock railing. The back of his neck was red, his big arms swollen with energy.

“I’m pissed off at myself. I shouldn’t have helped you fire this guy up,” he said.

“How’s Passion?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Waiting for me to pick her up.” He let out his breath. “I’ve got baling wire wrapped around my head. I can’t think straight.”

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“I’m going to drive her to the women’s prison tomorrow to visit her sister.”

“You feel like you’re involving yourself with the other side?”

“Something like that. I always figured most people on death row had it coming. You watch Larry King last night? He had some shock-jock on there laughing about executing a woman in Texas. The same guy who made fun of Clinton at a banquet. These are America’s heroes.”

He went inside the bait shop and came back out with a sixteen-ounce can of beer wrapped in a paper towel. He took two long drinks out of the can, tilting his head back, swallowing until the can was almost empty. He blew out his breath and the heat and tension went out of his face.

“Dave, I dreamed about the Death House at Angola. Except it wasn’t Letty Labiche being taken there. It was Passion. Why would I have a dream like that?” he said, squeezing his thumb and forefinger on his temples.

BUT I WAS to hear Letty Labiche’s name more than once that day.

Cora Gable had volunteered her chauffeur, Micah, to deliver a thousand-name petition on behalf of Letty to the governor’s mansion. After he had picked up several friends of Cora’s in New Orleans, driven them to the capitol at Baton Rouge, and dropped them off again in New Orleans, he ate dinner by himself in a cafe by the river, on the other side of the Huey Long Bridge, then headed down a dusky two-lane road into Lafourche Parish.

He passed through a small settlement, then entered a long stretch of empty road surrounded by sugarcane fields. A white car closed behind him; a man in the passenger’s seat glanced back over his shoulder and clapped a battery-powered flashing red light on the roof.

The cops looked like off-duty narcs or perhaps SWAT members. They were thick-bodied and vascular, young, unshaved, clad in jeans and sneakers and dark-colored T-shirts, their arms ridged with hair, handcuffs looped through the backs of their belts.