Purple Cane Road (22 page)

“I see. Anyway, I thought I’d ask. How you doin’?”

“Fine. Busy. All that sort of thing,” she said.

“By the way, the thief didn’t get the photo. I have it here. It shows you with Passion’s parents sometime around Christmas of 1967.”

“Could be. I don’t know much about her family. Maybe I met them at one time. Dave, when my political enemies want to do me damage with pictures, they put them on dartboards. Say hello to Bootsie.”

THE NEXT AFTERNOON Dana Magelli at NOPD returned a call I had placed earlier in the day.

“Can you pull the jacket of a cop named Axel Jennings?” I said.

“Why?”

“He and Don Ritter and another guy worked over Clete Purcel down by Cocodrie. I also think this Jennings character is a good guy to look at for the Burgoyne shooting.”

“Jennings shot his own partner on the Atchafalaya? You come up with some novel ideas, Dave.”

“Can you get his jacket?”

“I have it sitting in front of me. I was just going to call you about Purcel. Where is he?”

I had put my foot in it.

AXEL JENNINGS LIVED uptown in the small yellow bungalow on Baronne in which he had grown up. It had a neat green yard, a stone porch, and an alleyway with palm trees that grew between the garages. The neighborhood was like neighborhoods had been during World War II, places where people cut the grass on Saturday evening and listened to the ball game on radios that sat in open windows. At least that’s what his father had said.

Axel’s father had flown with General Curtis LeMay on incendiary raids against Japanese targets between the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay’s raids didn’t do any good. It took a second atom bomb to vaporize another city to bring the war to an end. Most civilians, particularly these peace types, didn’t know squat about what went on over there. That’s what Axel’s father had said.

Axel had three loves: firearms, model railroading, and the memory of his father, whose picture in uniform he kept on the mantel.

He was a member at a gun range in St. Charles Parish, and almost every weekend he packed up his boxes of hand-loaded ammunition and his three favorite weapons—his .45 auto, a scoped ‘03 Springfield, and the civilian equivalent of the M-14 rifle—and fired them from under a wood shed at paper targets clipped to wires in front of a dirt embankment.

His father used to say marksmanship was simply the coordination of angles with the beat of your heart and the rise and fall of your lungs. The bullet’s behavior was mathematically predictable and was governed by no rules other than physical principles. You simply had to make the weapon an extension of blood and sinew and thought so that the squeeze of your finger created a geometric certainty for your target.

It was all about control and order.

The same way with life, his father had said. People didn’t respect authority anymore. You had to find a leader, a man you could respect, and put your faith in him, just as he placed his faith in you. His father called it a reciprocity of personal honor.

Axel’s sunporch and guest room were covered with electric trains. The tracks ran across floors and tables and sections of plywood screwed down on sawhorses. The tracks wound through papier-mache mountains and tiny forests, past water towers and freight depots and miniature communities; there were toy brakemen and gandy walkers along the tracks and switches that diverted locomotives past each other at the last possible moment, and warning bells and flashing lights at the crossings.

When Axel cranked up all his trains at once, the smells of warm metal and oil and overheated electrical circuits reminded him of the clean acrid smell of gunpowder at the range.

Two kills with a department-issue M-16, a third kill shared with Burgoyne.

He thought he might feel bad about the first barricaded suspect he popped.

He didn’t. The guy had every opportunity to come out of the building. Instead, he turned on the gas jets and was going to take his child out with him. Just as the guy was about to light the match, Axel, in a prone position on a rooftop, sucked in his breath, exhaled slowly, and drilled a round through a glass pane and nailed him through both temples.

You believed in what you did. You trusted the man you took orders from. And you didn’t look back. That’s what his father had said.

It must have been grand to be around during World War II. Working people made good money and for fun went bowling and played shuffleboard in a tavern and didn’t snort lines off toilet tanks; you walked a girl home from a cafe without gang bangers yelling at her from a car; blacks lived in their own part of town. Kids collected old newspapers and coat hangers and automobile tires and hauled them on their wagons down to the fire-house for the war effort. The enemy was overseas. Not in the streets of your own city.

Axel’s occasional girlfriend, a barmaid named Cherry Butera, said he’d been depressed since Jimmy Burgoyne was killed in that shooting on the Atchafalaya. He’d taken a couple of vacation days, and he and the girlfriend had driven down to Grand Isle. A storm was tearing up the Gulf and the sky had turned green and the surf was wild and yellow with churning sand.

“There’s a Nazi sub out there. The Coast Guard sunk it with planes in ‘42,” he said. “I wish I’d been alive back then.”

“What for?” she asked.

“I would have been there. I would have been part of all that,” he replied.

They drove back to New Orleans in the rain and drank beer in a small pizza joint two blocks from his house. Banana trees thrashed against the side of the building, and the shadows from the neon signs in the windows cascaded like water down Axel’s face.

“Somebody’s following me,” he said.

“You’re blaming yourself because you weren’t there when Jimmy was killed,” his girlfriend said.

He looked at her a moment, then his eyes disconnected from hers and looked at nothing. He peeled the gold and green label off his beer bottle and rolled it into tiny balls.

“I saw somebody outside my window. He was behind us on the road tonight,” he said.

“The road was empty, hon. The bad guys are afraid of you. Everybody knows that.”

“I wish Jimmy was here. I wish he wasn’t dead,” he said.

At 11 P.M. they went out the back of the cafe and walked down the alley toward his car. Rain blew in a vortex from a streetlight out by the sidewalk, and the palm trees between the garages filled with wind and raked against the wood walls.

The man waiting in the shadows wore a wide hat and a black raincoat with the collar up. The piece of lumber he held in his hands was thick and square and probably three feet long. Leaves clung wetly to his shoulders and hat, so that he looked like an extension of the hedge when he stepped into the alley. He swung the piece of lumber with both hands, as he would a baseball bat, into Axel’s face.

Axel crashed backwards into a row of garbage cans, his forehead veined with blood and water. Then the man in the wide hat leaned over and drove the piece of lumber into Axel’s throat and the side of his head.

The man stood erect, water sluicing off his hat brim, his face a dark oval against the streetlight at the end of the alley.

“Haul freight, unless you want the same,” he said to the woman.

She turned and ran, twisting her face back toward the hatted man, her flats splashing through puddles that were iridescent with engine oil. The hatted man tossed the piece of lumber in the hedge, then picked up a whiskey bottle and broke it against the side of a garage.

He stooped over Axel’s body, the streetlight glinting on the jagged shell of the bottle, his extended arm probing downward into the darkness, soundlessly, like a man doing a deed he had conceived in private and now performed without heat or surprise.

“IT’D TAKE A REAL sonofabitch to do something like that, Dave,” Magelli said. “It wasn’t Clete.”

“How do you know?”

“Check out Jim Gable’s chauffeur. He’s an ex-carnival man named Micah. His face is disfigured.”

“Why don’t you let Purcel cover his own ass for a change?”

“Jennings is a rogue cop. He brought this down on himself. Lay off of Clete,” I said.

“Tell it to Jennings. The doctor had the mirrors taken out of his hospital room.”  

18

A
WEEK PASSED, and I didn’t hear anything more from Dana Magelli. The night Jennings had been attacked Clete was picking up a bail skip for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater in Baton Rouge, which didn’t mean he couldn’t have attacked Jennings after he dumped the skip in Willie and Nig’s office. But Clete Purcel had boundaries, even though they were a little arbitrary, and they didn’t include mutilating a half-conscious man who was already on the ground.

I wanted to empty my head and caseload and go to Key West with Bootsie and Alafair and fish for three weeks. I was tired of other people’s problems, of breaking up domestic arguments, of hosing vomit out of a cruiser, of washing spittle off my face, of cutting slack to junkies because they had the virus, only later to have one try to bite me when I cuffed him.

I was tired of seeing the despair in the faces of black parents when I told them their children had overdosed on meth or heroin or had been gunned down in a robbery. Or vainly trying to reassure a store owner of his self-worth after he had been forced at gunpoint to kneel and beg for his life. Nor did I ever again want to look into the faces of women who had been raped, sodomized, burned with cigarettes, and beaten with fists, every ounce of dignity and self-respect they once possessed systematically ripped out of their bodies.

If you meet longtime street cops who don’t drink or use, they’re usually either in twelve-step programs or brain-dead or they have criminal propensities themselves.

But each time I cleared my head and tried to concentrate on all the potential that every day could bring—the sun showers that blew in from the Gulf, Bootsie’s meeting me for lunch at Victor’s or in the park, the long summer evenings and the way the light climbed high into the sky at sunset, picking up Alafair at night at the City Library and going for ice cream with her high school creative writing group—my mind returned again and again to thoughts about my mother’s fate, the pleas for help she must have uttered, and the fact her killers were still out there.

But it was more than my mother’s death that obsessed me. Long ago I had accepted the loss of my natal family and my childhood and the innocence of the Cajun world I had been born into. You treat loss just like death. It visits everyone and you don’t let it prevail in your life.

What I felt now was not loss but theft and violation. My mother’s memory, the sad respect I had always felt for her, had been stolen from me. Now the tape-recorded lie left behind by a dead jigger in the Morgan City jail, that my mother was a whore and a thief, had become part of a file at the New Orleans Police Department and I had no way to change it.

“Something on your mind?” Helen Soileau said in my office.

“No, not really,” I replied.

She stood at the window and rubbed the back of her neck and looked »ut at the street.

“Connie Deshotel just kind of disappeared? Being photographed with a couple of procurers didn’t rattle her?” she said.

“Not that I could tell,” I said, tilting back in my chair.

“She was in her office. All her power was right there at her fingertips. Don’t let her fool you, Dave. That broad’s got you in her bombsights.”

But it was Friday afternoon and I didn’t want to think any more about Connie Deshotel. I signed out of the office, bought a loaf of French bread at the market, and drove down the dirt road toward my house, the sun flashing like pieces of hammered brass in the oak limbs overhead.

ALAFAIR AND BOOTSIE and I ate dinner at the kitchen table. Outside the window, the evening sky was piled high with rain clouds, and columns of sunlight shone through the clouds on my neighbor’s sugarcane. Alafair ate with her book bag by her foot. In it she kept her short stories and notebooks and felt pens and a handbook on script writing. By her elbow was a thick trade paperback with a black-and-white photo of a log cabin on the cover.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“Night Comes to the Cumberland.
It’s by a lawyer named Harry Caudill. It’s a history of the southern mountains,” she said.

“For your creative writing group?” I asked.

“No, a boy at the library said I should read it. It’s the best book ever written about the people of Appalachia,” she replied.

“You’re going to read your new story tonight?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “By the way, I might get a ride home tonight.”

“With whom?” Bootsie said.

“This boy.”

“Which boy?” I asked.

“The one who told me about Night Comes to the Cumberland.”

“That nails it down,” I said.

“Dave, I
am
sixteen now…Why are you making that face?”

“No reason. Sorry,” I said.

“I mean, lighten up,” she said.

“You bet,” I said, looking straight ahead.

A few minutes later Alafair got into the car with Bootsie to ride into town. Under the trees the sunlight was red on the ground, and I could smell humus and the wet, dense warm odor of the swamp and schooled-up fish on the wind.

“No riding home with boys we don’t know, Alafair. We got a deal?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“Alf?” I said.

“You have to stop talking to me like I’m a child. Until you do, I’m just not going to say anything.”

Behind Alafair’s angle of vision Bootsie shook her head at me, then she said, “I’ll be back in a little while, Dave,” and I watched them drive down the road toward New Iberia.

I don’t know how good a father I was, but I had learned that when your daughter is between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, you will never win an argument with her, and if you fall back on anger and recrimination and coercion to prevail over her, you will come to loathe your triumph and the weakness it disguises and you will not easily find forgiveness for it in either her or yourself.