Purple Cane Road (10 page)

“Did you eat yet?” she said.

“I had that potato salad in the icebox.”

“You might have to do an extra mile on your run,” she replied.

I leaned forward on my forearms and folded my hands between my knees. The ducks were turning in circles on the pond, their wings fluttering, sprinkling the water’s surface.

“I think you’re a great lady, Boots. I don’t think any man deserves you. I know I don’t,” I said.

The light had washed out of the sky; the wind blowing across my neighbor’s cane field was touched with rain and smelled of damp earth and the wildflowers that grew along the coulee. Bootsie sat down on the step behind me, then I felt her fingertips on the back of my neck and in my hair.

“You want to go inside?” she asked.

LATER THAT NIGHT the weather turned unseasonably cool and it started to rain, hard, sheets of it marching across marshlands, cane fields, tin roofs, bayous, and oak-lined communities up the Teche. In the little town of Loreauville, a man parked his pickup truck outside a clapboard bar and walked through the rain to the entrance. He wore jeans low on his hips, exposing his midriff, and pointed boots and black-rimmed glasses and a straw cowboy hat.

When he sat at the bar, which was deserted because of the bad weather, he removed his hat and set it crown-down on the stool next to him. He wiped his glasses with a paper napkin, then forgot they were dry and picked them up and wiped them again, his expression seemingly troubled by a concern or problem he couldn’t resolve. Later the bartender described the man as “handsome, with kind of a ducktail haircut… Likable, I guess, but I wouldn’t make him for no dishware man.”

The man ordered a diet soda and opened a vinyl folder wrapped with rubber bands and filled with invoices of some kind.

“You know a family named Grayson back in the quarters?” he said.

“Cain’t say I do,” the bartender replied.

The man looked down at his invoice folder, widening his eyes, as though bemused. “They live next door to the Dautrieve family,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. Go back up the road till you see some shotgun cabins. The Dautrieves are on the second row,” the bartender said.

“They won a bunch of dishware.”

“Who?”

“The Graysons.” The man held up a brochure with pictures of dishes and cups on it to make his point.

The bartender nodded vaguely. The man with the invoice folder stared into space, as though he saw meaning in the air, in the lightning that trembled in the trees along the bayou. He paid for his diet drink and thanked the bartender and drove up the road, in the opposite direction from the quarters.

IT WAS STILL RAINING the next night when Little Face Dautrieves aunt left for her janitorial job at the hospital in New Iberia and Little Face changed her baby’s diapers, put a pacifier in his mouth, and lay him down in his crib. The cabin had been built in the last century, but it stayed warm and dry and snug in bad weather. When it rained Little Face liked to open the bedroom window partway and let the breeze blow across the baby’s crib and her bed.

In the middle of the night she thought she heard a truck engine outside and tires crunching on clamshells, then the sound disappeared in the thunder and she fell asleep again.

When she awoke he was standing over her, his form-fitting T-shirt molded wetly against his torso. His body had a fecund odor, like water in the bottom of a coulee; a nickel-plated revolver, the handles wrapped with electrician’s tape, hung from his gloved right hand.

“I came in out of the rain,” he said.

“Yeah, you done that. There ain’t no rain in the house,” she replied, raising herself up on her hands, a wishbone breaking in her throat.

“You mind if I stay here? I mean, stay out of the rain?” he asked.

“You here, ain’t you?”

His palm opened and closed on the grips of the pistol, the edges of the tape sticking, popping on his skin. His face was pale, his mouth soft and red in the flashes of lightning outside. He wet his lips and cut his eyes at the window, where mist was drifting across the sill and dampening the baby’s mattress.

The man pushed the window tight and gazed down at the baby, who slept with his rump in the air. A pillow was stuffed into an empty space where one of the wood runners was missing. For some reason, perhaps because of the noise the window made, the baby woke and started to cry. The man pried the pillow loose and kneaded it in his left hand and turned toward Little Face.

“Why’d you get mixed up with a bunch of geeks? Why’d you run your mouth?” the man said. His black hair was combed back neatly on both sides, his skin glistening with water, his navel rising and falling above his jeans.

“Write out a list of the people ain’t geeks. I’ll start hanging ‘round wit’ them,” she replied.

“Make that baby be quiet.”

“You done woke him up. Babies gonna cry when they get woke up.”

“Just shut him up. I can’t think. Why don’t you have a man to take care of you?”

“I can have all the men I want. Trouble is, I ain’t met none I want, including present company.”

He looked at the baby again, then closed and opened his eyes. He took a breath of air through his mouth, holding it, as though he were about to speak. But no sound came out. He folded the pillow around the pistol and held both ends together with his left hand. The rims of his nostrils whitened, as though the temperature had dropped precipitously in the room.

“You make me mad. You’re too dumb to understand what’s happening. Get that look off your face,” he said.

“It’s my house. I ain’t axed you in it. Go back in the rain you don’t like it,” she said quietly.

Then she saw into his eyes and her throat went dry and became constricted like a piece of crimped pipe and she remembered the word “abyss” from a sermon at a church somewhere and she knew now what the word meant. She tried to hold her gaze evenly on his face and stop the sound that thundered in her ears, that made her own words distorted and unintelligible to her.

Her hands knotted the sheet on top of her stomach.

“My baby ain’t part of this, is he?” she said.

The man drew an enormous breath of air through his nose, as though he were hyperventilating. “No, what do you think I am?” He held up the pillow as though he had just discovered its presence. “Don’t put something like this in a crib. That’s how babies suffocate,” he said, and flung the pillow across the room.

He shoved the revolver in his blue-jeans pocket, the butt protruding just above the edge of the cloth, his booted feet wide-spread, as though he were confronting an adversary that no one else saw.

“You gonna just stand there, Rain Man?” she asked, because she had to say something or the sound roaring in her ears would consume her and the shaking in her mouth would become such that her jawbones would rattle.

He waited a long time to answer her. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. But you shouldn’t be messing with my head, lady. You really shouldn’t be doing that at all,” he said.

Then he went out the screen door into the storm and drove his truck in reverse down the clamshells to the two-lane state road, the rain blowing like shattered crystal in his backup lights.

I SPENT THE NEXT morning, along with my partner, Helen Soileau, interviewing Little Face and anyone else in Loreauville who might have seen the intruder into Little Face’s home. Helen had started her career as a meter maid at NOPD, then had put in seven years as a patrolwoman in the Garden District and the neighborhood around the Desire Welfare Project, an area so dangerous and violent that black city councilmen tried to persuade President Bush to clean it out with federal troops. Finally she returned to New Iberia, where she had grown up, and was hired as a plainclothes investigator by the sheriff’s department.

Helen wore slacks and khakis and jeans to work, was thick-bodied and muscular, and looked boldly into the world’s face, her arms pumped, her waved, lacquered blond hair her only visible concession to femininity. As a rule, she had trouble with difficult people only once. She had shot and killed three perpetrators on the job.

We stood in the parking lot of the bar the intruder had visited the night before he had wedged a screwdriver blade into the lock on Little Face’s cabin door. The sun was out, the air cool and rain-washed, the sky blue above the trees.

“You think he’s the same guy who did Zipper Clum, huh?” Helen said.

“That’s my read on it,” I said.

“He tells the bartender he’s delivering dishware to a family named Grayson, who don’t exist, then casually mentions the Graysons live next to the Dautrieves, and that’s how he finds Little Face. We’re dealing with a shit-bag who has a brain?”

She didn’t wait for me to answer her question. She looked back at the bar, tapping her palm on the top of the cruiser.

“How do you figure this guy? He must have known his contract was on a woman, but then he walks out on the job,” she said.

“She had the baby in the room with her. It sounds like he wasn’t up to it.”

“All we need is another piece of shit from New Orleans floating up the bayou. What do you want to do now, boss man?”

“Good question.”

Just as we started to get in the cruiser, the bartender opened the screen door and leaned outside. He held up a brightly colored brochure of some kind in his hand.

“Is this any hep to y’all?” he asked.

“What you got there?” I said.

“The man you was axing about? He left it on the counter. I saved it in case he come back,” the bartender said.

Helen’s usual martial expression stretched into a big smile. “Sir, don’t handle that any more than you need to. There you go. Just let me get a Ziploc bag and you can slip it right inside…That’s it, plop it right in. Lovely day, isn’t it? Drop by the department for free doughnuts any time. Thank you very much,” she said.

IT’S CALLED THE Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS. It’s a miracle of technology. A latent fingerprint can be faxed to a computer at a regional pod and within two hours be matched with a print that is already on file.

If the fingerprint has a priority.

Priorities are usually given to homicide cases or instances when people are in custody and there is a dramatic need to know who they are.

The man who had prized open Little Face Dautrieve’s cabin door was de facto guilty of little more than breaking and entering. The possibility that he was the same man who killed Zipper Clum was based only on my speculation. Also, the Clum homicide was not in our j ur isdiction.

No priority for the latent print we took off the dish-ware brochure the bartender had saved. Get a number and wait. The line in Louisiana is a long one.

I called the office of Connie Deshotel, the attorney general, in Baton Rouge.

“She’s out right now. Can she call you back?” the secretary said.

“Sure,” I replied, and gave her my office number.

I waited until quitting time. No call. The next day was Saturday.

I tried again Monday morning.

“She’s out,” the secretary said.

“Did she get the message I left Friday?” I asked.

“I think she did.”

“When will she be back?”

“Anytime now.”

“Can you have her call me, please?”

“She’s just been very busy, sir.”

“So are we. We’re trying to catch a murderer.”

Then I felt stupid and vituperative for taking out my anger on a secretary who was not to blame for the problem.

Regardless, I received no return call. Tuesday morning I went into Helen’s office. Her desk was covered with paperwork.

“You want to take a ride to Baton Rouge?” I asked.

CONNIE DESHOTEL’S OFFICE was on the twenty-second floor of the state capitol building, high above the green parks of the downtown area and the wide sweep of the Mississippi River and the aluminum factories and petroleum refineries along its shores. But Connie Deshotel was not in her office. We were told by the secretary she was in the cafeteria downstairs.

“Is there a line to kiss her ring?” Helen asked.

“Excuse me?” the secretary said.

“Take it easy, Helen,” I said in the elevator.

“Connie Deshotel was born with a hairbrush up her ass. Somebody should have straightened her out a long time ago,” she replied.

“You mind if I do the talking?” I asked.

We stood at the entrance to the cafeteria, looking out over the tables, most of which were occupied. Connie Deshotel was at a table against the back wall. She wore a white suit and was sitting across from a man in a blue sports coat and tan slacks whose thinning hair looked almost braided with grease.

“You make the gel head?” Helen said.

“No.”

“Don Ritter, NOPD Vice. He’s from some rat hole up in Jersey. I think he’s still in the First District.”

“That’s the guy who busted Little Face Dautrieve and planted rock on her. He tried to make her come across for him and Jim Gable.”

“Sounds right. He used to shake down fudge packers in the Quarter. What’s he doing with the attorney general of Louisiana?”

“Go easy, Helen. Don’t make him cut and run,” I said.

“It’s your show,” she said, walking ahead of me between the tables before I could reply.

As we approached Connie Deshotel, her eyes moved from her conversation onto my face. But they showed no sense of surprise. Instead, she smiled good-naturedly.

“You want some help with access to AFIS?” she said.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“I called your office this morning. But you’d already left. The sheriff told me about your problem. I had him fax the latents to the pod. The ID should be on your desk when you get back to New Iberia,” she said.

The confrontation I had been expecting was suddenly gone. I looked at her in dismay.

“You did it,” I said.

“I’m glad my office could help. I’m only sorry I couldn’t get back to you earlier. Would you like to join us? This is Don Ritter. He’s at the First District in New Orleans,” she said.

Ritter put out his hand and I took it, in the way you do when you suppress your feelings and know that later you’ll wish you hadn’t.