Purple Cane Road (7 page)

The bell tinkled over the front door and Zipper turned down the boom box and shouted from the back, “My cousin’s next door.”

But some crackers just don’t listen.

“Hey, don’t come around that counter, man,” Zipper said. “Say, you not hearing me or something? The man who own this store ain’t here right now.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, just stay out there in front. Everything gonna be cool.”

“When’s he gonna be back?”

“Maybe two or three minutes, like the sign on the door say.”

“You play drums?”

There was a pause. “What you want in here, cracker?” Zipper asked.

“Your cousin’s got a big tab with Jimmy Fig. He’s got to pay the vig to the Fig.”

Zipper got up from the stool he was sitting on and walked to the service counter. The counter was lined with secondhand garden tools that had been wire-brushed on a machine, sharpened, oiled, and repainted.

“Jimmy Fig don’t lend money. He sells cooze,” Zipper said.

“If you say so. I just go where they tell me.”

“Don’t grin at me, man.”

“No problem.”

“Hey, take your hand out where I can see it,” Zipper said.

“I delivered the message. I’m going now. Have a good day.”

“No, I want to show you something. This is a twenty-dollar gold piece. Bet you fifty dollars I can roll it across the top of my fingers three times without dropping it. I lose, I put in the gold piece, too. Damn, I just dropped it. You on, my man?”

“Fifty dollars? “Without touching it with the other hand?”

“You got it, bo.”

“You give me the gold piece, too?”

“My word’s solid, bo. Ask anybody about Zipper Clum.”

“All right, there’s my fifty bucks. This isn’t a hustle, is it?”

Zipper smiled to himself and began working the gold piece across the tops of his fingers, the edges of the coin tucking into the crevices of skin and flipping over like magic. At the same time his left hand moved under the counter, where his cousin had nailed a leather holster containing a .38 revolver. Zipper felt his palm curve around the checkered wood handles and the smooth taper of the steel.

“Oops, I dropped it again. I done made you rich, cracker,” he said, and slipped the .38 from the leather.

It was a good plan. It had always worked before, hadn’t it? What was wrong?

His mind could not assimilate what had just happened. The gold piece had dropped off the tops of his fingers and bounced on the counter and rolled dryly across the wood. But the cracker had not been watching the coin. He had just stood there with that stupid grin on his face, that same, arrogant, denigrating white grin Zipper had seen all his life, the one that told him he was a dancing monkey, the unwanted child of a Jane’s Alley whore.

He wanted to snap off a big one, right in the cracker’s mouth, and blow the back of his head out like an exploding muskmelon.

But something was wrong in a way he couldn’t focus on, like a dream that should illuminate all the dark corners of your consciousness but in daylight eludes your memory. His left hand wouldn’t function. The coldness of the steel, the checkering on the grips had separated themselves from his palm. One side of him was lighter than the other, and he was off balance, as though the floor had tilted under his feet. He closed his eyes and saw the scene take place again, watching it now through a red skein on the backs of his eyelids, the cracker lifting a machete off the counter, one his cousin had honed on an emery wheel, swinging it across Zipper’s forearm, chopping through tendon and bone like a butcher’s cleaver.

Zipper stared down at the .38 and his severed arm and the fingers that now seemed to be trying to gather up the gold twenty-dollar piece from the countertop. Zipper’s boom box was playing Louie Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” and he remembered a little boy on Bourbon Street stooping in mid-dance to catch the coins that bounced out of the cigar box by his feet and rolled across the sidewalk.

“It was supposed to be a clean hit. That’s the way I work. So it’s on you,” the cracker said, and came quickly behind the counter and shoved Zipper to the floor.

The cracker pulled back the slide on a .25 automatic and bent over and pulled the trigger, straddling Zipper, his cowboy boots stenciling the floor with Zipper’s blood. But the gun clicked and did not fire.

The cracker ejected the shell, then aimed the muzzle an inch from Zipper’s forehead and shielded his face with one hand to avoid the splatter.

“You the trail back to Robicheaux’s mama. You got a mouth like a girl. You got blue eyes. You got skin like milk. You never done no outside work. You six feet tall. Boy, you one badass motherfucker,” Zipper said.

“You got that last part right,” the cracker said.

It was funny how loud a .25 was. A couple of pops and you couldn’t hear for an hour. The shooter recovered his empty brass and the ejected dud from the floor, pulled off his T-shirt, which was now splattered with blood, wiped off the machete’s handle, and walked to his truck with his shirt wadded up in his hand.

Then something bothered him. What was it? He went back inside and kicked the boom box on the floor and smashed its guts out with his boot heel. Still, something wasn’t right. Why had the pimp started taking his inventory? A mouth like a girl’s? What was that stuff about somebody’s mama? Maybe the pimp was a latent fudge packer. There was a lot of weirdness around these days. Well, that’s the way the toilet flushed sometimes.

The old woman outside, who was deaf, waved to him as he twisted the steering wheel of his truck, a pocket comb in his teeth, and turned into the traffic. 

6

M
ONDAY MORNING AN old-time NOPD homicide investigator named Dana Magelli sat down in my office and played the recording tape that had been recovered from the destroyed boom box at the murder scene off Magazine Street. Magelli had dark, close-clipped hair and dark skin and wore a neat mustache and still played an aggressive handball game three days a week at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Photos from the crime scene and a composite sketch of the shooter were spread on top of my desk.

“Why would Zipper call the hitter the trail back to your mother?” he asked.

“Zipper says ‘Robicheaux’ on the tape. He doesn’t mention a first name. Why do you connect the tape to me?” I replied.

“You and Clete Purcel were at First District asking questions about him.”

“He told me he saw two cops kill my mother back in the sixties.”

“I see,” Magelli said, his eyes going flat. “Which leads you to conclude what?”

“That maybe the guys who did it put the hitter on Zipper Clum.”

“Who might these guys be?”

“Search me,” I said, my eyes not quite meeting his.

He wore a beige sports jacket and tan slacks. He leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on my desk.

“You’re a good cop, Dave. You always were. You got a rotten deal. A lot of guys would like to see you reinstated in the department,” he said.

“How about Purcel?”

“Purcel was a wrong cop.”

“The whole department was wrong,” I said.

“It’s not that way now. Maybe a few guys are still dirty, but the new chief has either suspended or put most of the real slimebags in jail.”

“What’s your point, Dana?”

“You’d better not be squaring a personal beef on your own in Orleans Parish.”

“I guess you never know how it’s going to shake out,” I said.

“Bad answer from a guy with your mileage,” he said.

“Find my old jacket and put a letter in it,” I said.

But he wasn’t listening now. “We’ve run the shooter through the computer system every way we could,” he said. “Nothing. He’s got the look of a genuine sociopath, but if there’s paperwork on him anywhere, we can’t find it.”

“I think he’s a new guy, just starting out, making his bones with somebody,” I said. “He was personally upset he couldn’t make a clean hit. But he was still doing everything right until he went back to smash the boom box. He knew he was leaving something behind, but his head was on the full-tilt boogie and he couldn’t think his way through the problem. So he tore up the boom box but he left us the tape. He’s an ambitious, new player on the block who doesn’t quite have ice water in his veins yet.”

Magelli rubbed his chin with two fingers.

“I had a Tulane linguist listen to the tape,” Magelli said. “He says the accent is Upper South, Tennessee or Kentucky, reasonably educated, at least for the kind of dirt bags we usually pull in. You think he’s mobbed-up?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because he talks about paying ‘the vig to the Fig.’ Everybody in the life knows Jimmy Figorelli is a pimp, not a shylock.”

Magelli smiled.

“Come back to work for us,” he said.

“Take Purcel, too. You get two for one.”

“You wouldn’t come if we did, would you?”

I took my eyes off his to change the subject. “There’s another possibility in this case,” I said. “It was Zipper Clum’s perception the hitter was sent by the people who killed my mother. That doesn’t make it so. A lot of people would enjoy breaking champagne botdes on Zipper’s headstone.”

“Zipper was a ruthless bucket of shit. But he was the smartest pimp I ever met. He knew who paid his killer. You know it, too,” Magelli said. He cocked his finger at me like a pistol as he went out the door.

JUST AS I WAS going into Victor’s on Main Street for lunch, Clete Purcel’s maroon Cadillac pulled to the curb, his salt-water fishing rods sticking out of the back windows. He’d bought the Cadillac, the only type of car he ever drove, for eight hundred dollars from a mortician who had bought it off the family of a mobbed-up suicide victim. The steel-jacketed .357 round had exited through the Cadillac’s roof, and Clete had filed down the jagged metal and filled the hole with body solder and sanded it smooth and sprayed it with gray primer so the roof looked like it had been powdered from the explosion of a large firecracker.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I had to get out of New Orleans for a while. This homicide guy Magelli was bugging me yesterday about Zipper Clum getting popped. Like I have knowledge about every crime committed in Orleans and Jefferson parishes,” Clete said. “

You usually do.”

“Thanks. Let’s get something to go and eat in the park. I want to have a talk with you, big mon.”

“About what?”

“I’ll tell you in the park.”

We ordered two Styrofoam containers of fried catfish and coleslaw and dirty rice and drove across the drawbridge that spanned Bayou Teche at Burke Street. The bayou was dented with rain rings. Clete parked the Cadillac by one of the picnic shelters under the oaks in City Park, and we sat under the tin roof in the rain and warm breeze and ate lunch. Inside all of Clete’s outrageous behavior was the secular priest, always determined to bail his friend out of trouble, no matter how unwanted his help was. I waited for the sermon to begin.

“Will you either say it or stop looking at me like that?” I said finally.

“This homicide hotshot, Magelli? He’s heard you’ve been moving the furniture around about your mother’s death. He thinks you might just do a number on somebody.”

“Who cares what he thinks?”

“I think he’s right on. You’re going to coast along, not saying anything, stonewalling people, then when you think you’ve found out enough, you’re going to blow up their shit.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“It’s not your style, noble mon. That’s why I’m going to be in town for a little while. I was out at Passion Labiche’s place early this morning.”

“What for?”

“Because I’m not sure the hit on Zipper Clum is related to your mother’s death. These political fucks in Baton Rouge want Letty Labiche executed, body in the ground, case closed, so they can get back full-time to the trough. You keep turning over rocks, starting with sticking a gun in Zipper Clum’s mouth up on that roof.”

“Me?”

“So I helped a little bit. That Passion Labiche is one hot-ass-looking broad, isn’t she? Is she involved with anybody?”

“Why don’t you give some thought to the way you talk about women?”

“It was a compliment. Anyway, you’re right, she’s hiding something. Which makes no sense. What do she and her sister have to lose at this point?”

I shook my head.

“I think we should start with the hitter, the cracker on the tape,” I said.

“I got a question for you. Jack Abbott, this mainline con a writer got out of the Utah Pen some years back? Where’d he go after he knifed a waiter to death in New York?”

“Morgan City.”

“What can I say? Great minds think alike. I already put in a couple of calls,” Clete said, grinning while he wiped food off his mouth.

BUT I DIDN’T have great faith in finding the killer of Zipper Clum in Morgan City, even though it was known as a place for a man on the run to disappear among the army of blue-collar laborers who worked out of there on fishing vessels and offshore drilling rigs. Clete had not heard the tape on which Zipper had said his killer had never done outside work and had skin like milk. I also believed Clete was more interested in monitoring me than the investigation into my mother’s death. He came to the sheriff’s department at quitting time, expecting to drive down together to Morgan City.

“I can’t go today,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Commitments at home.”

“Yeah?” He was standing in the middle of my office, his porkpie hat slanted down on his head, his stomach hanging over his belt, an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth. He tossed the cigarette end over end into the wastebasket. “I refuse to light one of these things ever again. Why are you giving me this bullshit, Streak?”

“Come have dinner with us.”

“No, I’m meeting this retired jigger an hour from now. You coming or not?”

“A bank jigger?”

“More serious. He was the lookout man for a couple of hit teams working out of Miami and New Orleans.”

“Not interested.”

“Where do you think we’re supposed to get information from, the library?”