Purple Cane Road (6 page)

He wore shined oxblood cowboy boots, a white suit, a blue shirt, and a flowered necktie. He was too tall to speak comfortably into the microphone, and he removed it from the stand and held it in his huge hand.

His face was solemn, his voice unctuous.

“I know y’all heered a lot of stories about your governor,” he said. “I won’t try to fool you. They grieve me deeply. I’m talking heartfelt pain.”

He paused, taking a breath. Then his knees bent slightly, as though he were gathering a huge volume of air in his lower parts.

“But I’m here to tell y’all right now…That
anytime, anywhere,
anybody …” He shook his head from side to side for emphasis, his voice wadding in his throat as though he were about to strangle on his own emotions. “I mean
anybody
sets a trap for Belmont Pugh with whiskey and women…” His body was squatted now, his face breaking into a grin as wide as an ax blade. “Then by God they’ll catch him every time!” he shouted.

The audience went wild.

The price of domestic oil rose the same week and the economy bloomed. Belmont was reelected by a landslide..

LATE THE NEXT AFTERNOON I looked through the screen window of the bait shop and saw Belmont’s black Chrysler park by the boat ramp and Belmont walk down the dock toward the shop. His aides had started to follow him but he waved them off with his Stetson hat, then began slapping the hat against his thigh, as though pounding dust off his clothes. His brow was furrowed, his eyes deep in his face. He blew out his breath and punched and shaped the crown of his hat with his fist and fitted it back on his head just before entering the shop, his easy smile back in place.

Fifteen minutes later we were a mile down the bayou, the outboard pulled into a cove of cypress and willow trees. Belmont sat on the bow and flipped his lure toward the edge of the lily pads and retrieved it slowly through the dark water. He had a lean face and long teeth and pale eyes and graying hair that hung over his ears. His Stetson, which he wore virtually everywhere, was shapeless and stained with sweat and wrapped with a silver cord around the crown.

“You a student of Scripture, Dave?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“The Old Testament says Moses killed maybe two hundred people when he come down off Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments still smoking in his hands. God had just talked to him from the burning bush, but Moses saw fit to put them people to death.”

“I’m not following you, Belmont.”

“I’ve signed death warrants on a half dozen men. Every one of them was a vicious killer and to my mind deserved no mercy. But I’m sorely troubled by the case of this Labiche woman.”

I lay my rod across the gunnels of the boat. “Why?” I asked.

“Why?
She’s a woman, for God’s sakes.”

“That’s it?”

He fanned a mosquito out of his face.

“No, that’s not it. The minister at my church knows her and says her conversion’s the real thing. That maybe she’s one of them who’s been chosen to carry the light of God. I got enough on my conscience without going up to judgment with that woman’s death on me.”

“I know a way out.”

“How?”

“Refuse to execute anyone. Cut yourself loose from the whole business.”

He threw his rod and reel against the trunk of a cypress and watched it sink through a floating curtain of algae.

“Send me a bill for that, will you?” he said.

“You can bet on it,” I replied.

“Dave, I’m the governor of the damn state. I cain’t stand up in front of an auditorium full of police officers and tell them I won’t sign a death warrant ‘cause I’m afraid I’ll go to hell.”

“Is there another reason?”

He turned his face into the shadows for a moment. He rubbed the curls on the back of his neck.

“Some people say I might have a shot at vice president. It ain’t a time to be soft on criminals, particularly one who’s chopped up an ex-state trooper.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, trying to conceal the disappointment in my voice.

He beat at the air with both hands. “I’m gonna call the Mosquito Control down here and bomb this whole place,” he said. “Lord God Almighty, I thought liquor and women’s thighs were an addiction. Son, they don’t hold a candle to ambition.”

THE NEXT MORNING A young black woman walked through the front door of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and down the hall to my office and tapped on the glass with one ringed finger. She wore a lavender shirt and white blouse and lavender pumps, and carried a baby in diapers on her shoulder.

“Little Face?” I said when I opened the door.

“I’m moving back here. Out at my auntie’s place in the quarters at Loreauville. I got to tell you something,” she said, and walked past me and sat down before I could reply.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Zipper Clum is what’s up. He say he gonna do you and Fat Man both.”

“Clete Purcel is ‘Fat Man’?”

“Fat Man shamed him, slapped his face up on that roof, throwed his pimp friends crashing down through a tree. I ax Zipper why he want to hurt you. He say you tole some people Zipper was snitching them off.”

“Which people?”

She rolled her eyes. “Zipper’s gonna tell me that? He’s scared. Somebody done tole him he better clean up his own mess or Zipper ain’t gonna be working his street corners no more. Anybody who can scare Zipper Clum is people I wouldn’t want on my case.”

She shifted her baby to her other shoulder.

“You’re an intelligent lady, Little Face.”

“That’s why I’m on welfare and living with my auntie in the quarters.”

“The day Vachel Carmouche was killed a black girl of about twelve was turning an ice cream crank on his gallery. That was eight years ago. You’re twenty, aren’t you?”

“You been thinking too much. You ought to go jogging with Fat Man, hep him lose weight, find something useful for you to do so you don’t tire out your brain all the time.”

“What happened inside Vachel Carmouche’s house that night? Why won’t you tell me?”

“He wanted to live real bad, that’s what happened. But he didn’t find no mercy ‘cause he didn’t deserve none. You ax me, a man like that don’t find no mercy in the next world, either.”

“You saw him killed, didn’t you?”

“Mine to know.”

“Did he molest you? Is that why Letty came to Carmouche’s back door that night?”

Her small face seemed to cloud with thought.

“I got to come up wit’ a name for you. Maybe an Indian one, something like ‘Man Who’s Always Axing Questions and Don’t Listen.’ That’s probably too long, though, huh? I’ll work on it.”

“That’s real wit,” I said.

“It ain’t your grief, Sad Man. Stay out of it before you do real damage to somebody. About Zipper? Some snakes rattle before they bite. Zipper don’t. He’s left-handed. So he’s gonna be doing something wit’ his right hand, waving it around in the air, taking things in and out of his pockets. You gonna be watching that hand while he’s grinning and talking. Then his left hand gonna come at you just like a snake’s head. Pow, pow, pow. I ain’t lyin’, Sad Man.”

“If Vachel Carmouche molested you, we’d have corroborating evidence that he molested Letty and Passion,” I said.

“I got to feed my baby now. Tell Fat Man what I said. It won’t be no fun if he ain’t around no more,” she said.

She rose from her chair and hefted her baby higher on her shoulder and walked back out the door, her face oblivious to the cops in the hall whose eyes cut sideways at her figure.

CONNIE DESHOTEL WAS the attorney general of Louisiana. Newspaper accounts about her career always mentioned her blue-collar background and the fact she had attended night school at the University of New Orleans while working days as a patrolwoman. She graduated in the upper five percent of her law class at LSU. She never married, and instead became one of those for whom civil service is an endless ladder into higher and higher levels of success.

I had met her only once, but when I called her office in Baton Rouge Wednesday afternoon she agreed to see me the next day. Like her boss, Belmont Pugh, Connie Deshotel was known as an egalitarian. Or at least that was the image she worked hard to convey.

Olive-skinned, with metallic-colored hair that had been burned blond on the ends by the sun, she was dressed in a gray suit with a silver angel pinned on her lapel. When I entered her office, her legs were crossed and her hand was poised with a pen above a document on her desk, like a figure in a painting who emanates a sense of control, repose, and activity at the same time.

But unlike Belmont Pugh, the sharecropper populist who was so untraveled and naive he believed the national party would put a bumbling peckerwood on its ticket,  Connie Deshotel’s eyes took your inventory, openly, with no apology for the invasion of your person and the fact you were being considered as a possible adversary.

“We met once, years ago, during Mardi Gras,” she said.

My gaze shifted off hers. “Yeah, I was still with NOPD. You were in the city administration,” I said.

She touched a mole at the corner of her mouth with a fingertip.

“I was drunk. I was escorted out of a meeting you were chairing,” I said.

She smiled faintly, but her eyes hazed over, as though I were already disappearing as a serious event in her day.

“What can I do for you, Detective Robicheaux? That’s your grade,
detective,
right?” she asked.

“Yeah. An informant told me two cops on a pad for the Giacanos killed a woman in Lafourche Parish in 1966 or ‘67. Her maiden name was Mae Guillory.”

“Which department were they with?”

“He didn’t know.”

“Did you find a record of the crime?”

“None.”

“How about the body?”

“To my knowledge, none was ever found.”

“Missing person reports?”

“There’s no paperwork on this at all, Ms. Deshotel.”

She put down her pen and sat forward in her swivel chair. She looked into space.

“I’ll call the authorities in Lafourche Parish. It sounds like a blind alley, though. Who’s the informant?”

“A pimp in New Orleans.”

“Why’s he coming forward now?”

“A friend of mine was going to throw him off a roof.”

“Ah, it’s becoming a little more clear now. Is this friend Clete Purcel?”

“You know Clete?”

“Oh, yes. You might say there’s a real groundswell for revocation of his P.I. license. In fact, I have his file right here.” She opened a desk drawer and removed a manila folder filled with police reports, a thickly folded printout from the National Crime Information Center, and what looked like letters of complaint from all over the state. “Let’s see, he shot and killed a government witness, stole a concrete mixer and filled a man’s convertible with cement, and destroyed a half-million-dollar home on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth grader. He also slim-jimmed Bobby Earl’s car at the Southern Yacht Club and urinated on the seats and dashboard. You say he’s been throwing people off of roofs recently?”

“Maybe I misspoke on that,” I said.

She glanced at her watch.

“I’m sorry. I’m late for a luncheon. Give me your card and I’ll call you with any information I can find,” she said.

“That’s good of you,” I said.

“What was the victim’s name again?”

“Mae Guillory was her maiden name. Her married name was Robicheaux.”

“Are you related?”

“She was my mother. So I’ll be hanging around on this one, Ms. Deshotel.”

The inquisitory beam came back in her eyes, as though the earlier judgment she had passed on me had suddenly been set in abeyance.

5

A
S A LITTLE BOY Zipper Clum tap-danced for coins on the sidewalks in the French Quarter. The heavy, clip-on taps he wore on his shoes clicked and rattled on the cement and echoed off the old buildings as though he were in a sound chamber. He only knew two steps in the routine, but his clicking feet made him part of the scene, part of the music coming from the nightclubs and strip joints, not just a raggedy black street hustler whose mother turned tricks in Jane’s Alley.

Later on, Zipper Clum came to fancy himself a jazz drummer. He took his first fall in Lake Charles, a one-bit in the Calcasieu Parish Prison, before the civil rights era, when the Negroes were kept in a separate section, away from the crackers, who were up on the top floor. That was all right with Zipper, though. It was cooler downstairs, particularly when it rained and the wind blew across the lake. He didn’t like crackers, anyway, and at night he could hear the music from the juke joint on Ryan Street and groove on the crash of drums and the wail of horns and saxophones.

His fall partner was a junkie drummer who had sat in with the Platters and Smiley Lewis. Zipper was awed by the fact that a rag-nose loser with infected hype punctures on his arms could turn two drumsticks into a white blur on top of a set of traps.

In the jail the junkie created two makeshift drumsticks from the wood on a discarded window shade and showed Zipper everything he knew. There was only one problem: Zipper had desire but only marginal talent.

He feigned musical confidence with noise and aggressiveness. He sat in with bands on Airline Highway and crashed the cymbals and bass drum and slapped the traps with the wire brushes. But he was an imitator, a fraud, and the musicians around him knew it.

He envied and despised them for their gift. He was secretly pleased when crack hit New Orleans like a hurricane in 1981. Zipper was clean, living on his ladies, pumping iron and drinking liquid protein and running five miles a day while his pipehead musician friends were huffing rock and melting their brains.

But he still loved to pretend. On Saturday mornings he sat in the back of his cousin’s lawn-mower shop off Magazine and plugged in a cassette of Krupa or Jo Jones or Louie Bellson on his boom box, simultaneously recording himself on a blank tape while he flailed at his set of drums.

Witnesses later said the white man who parked a pickup truck out front wore Levi’s low on his hips, without a belt, a tight-fitting white T-shirt, cowboy boots, and combed his hair like a 1950s greaser. One witness said he was a teenager; two others described him as a man in his thirties. But when they talked to the police artist, they all agreed he had white skin, a mouth like a girl’s, and that he looked harmless. He smiled and said hello to an elderly woman who was sitting under an awning, fanning herself.