Purple Cane Road (20 page)

“The lady at the cafe across from the French Market said you used to go to her church when you were a little girl,” I said.

Maggie Glick’s eyes cut sideways at me, her lips parting slightly.

“You’re not a killer, Maggie. But somebody used you to set up a hit. I think the person who used you may have been involved in the murder of my mother,” I said.

Her eyes stayed fixed on mine, clouding, her brow wrinkling for the first time.

“Your mother?” she said.

“Two cops killed her. Zipper Clum was going to dime them. You’re a smart lady. Put the rest of it together,” I said.

Her eyes shifted off mine and looked straight ahead into the gloom, the red glow of the neon tubing on the wall clock reflecting on the tops of her breasts. She tried to keep her face empty of expression, but I saw her throat swallow slightly, as though a piece of dry popcorn -were caught in it. Her chest rose briefly against her blouse, then the moment passed and her face turned to stone and the slashes of color died in her cheeks. She raised her cup again, balancing it between the fingers of both hands, so that it partially concealed her mouth and made her next statement an unintelligible whisper.

“What?” I said.

“Get out of here. Don’t you be talking about the church I went to, either. What you know about how other people grew up? You used to come in here drunk, but you don’t remember it. Now you think you got the right to wipe your feet on my life?” she said.

She wheeled the top of her barstool around and walked toward the fire exit in back, her long legs wobbling slightly on her heels.

Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought I saw a flash of wetness in the side of her eye.

THAT NIGHT BOOTSIE and I went to a movie in New Iberia, then bought ice cream on the way home and ate it on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in back. Clouds tumbled across the moon and my neighbor’s cane field was green and channeled with wind.

“You look tired,” she said.

“I can’t see through this stuff,” I said.

“About your mother?”

“All the roads lead back to prostitution of some kind: Zipper Clum, Little Face Dautrieve, this woman Maggie Glick, the story the jigger told about my mother working a scam with Mack—”

“It’s the world they live in, Dave—prostitution, drugs, stealing, it’s all part of the same web.” She looked at my expression and squeezed the top of my hand. “I don’t mean your mother.”

“No, it’s not coincidence. Jim Gable—” I hesitated when I used his name, then looked her evenly in the eyes and went ahead. “Gable and this vice cop Ritter are mixed up with hookers. Passion and Letty Labiche’s parents were procurers. Connie Deshotel wet her pants when she thought Passion recognized her. Somehow it’s all tied in together. I just don’t know how.”

“Your mother wasn’t a prostitute. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that.”

“You’re my buddy, Boots.”

She picked up the dishes to take them inside, then stopped and set them down again and stood behind me. Her fingers touched my hair and neck, then she bent over me and slipped her hands down my chest and pressed her body against me, her stomach and thighs flattening into my back, her mouth on my ear.

Later, in bed, she lay against me. Her fingertips traced the shrapnel scars that were like a spray of raised arrowheads on my hip. She turned her head and looked at the limbs of the oaks and pecan trees moving against the sky and the shadows the moon made in the yard.

“We have a wonderful family,” she said.

“We do,” I replied. That’s when the phone rang. I went into the kitchen to answer it.

It was an intern at Iberia General. “An ambulance brought in a man named Clete Purcel. A gun fell out of his clothes,” he said.

“He’s a P.I. He has a license to carry it. What happened to him?”

“Maybe you’d better come down.”

CLETE HAD MANY ENEMIES. Outside of the Mob, which bore him a special grudge, the worst were his ex-colleagues inside the New Orleans Police Department.

He had gone down to Cocodrie for the weekend, on Terrebonne Bay, where he still kept a rented cabin and a small boat. On Saturday morning he went south into the Gulf until the coast was only a low, green line on the horizon, then he floated with the tide and fished in the swells for white trout, baking shirtless under the sun all day, consuming one can of beer after another, his whole body glistening like an oiled ham.

At sunset, when he headed for shore, the crushed ice in his cooler was layered with trout, his empty beer cans floated in the bilge, and the flying fish leaping out of the crests of waves and the raindrops that dented the swells were the perfect end to a fine day.

He winched his boat onto his trailer and put on his tropical shirt, but his skin was stiff with sunburn and dried salt, and he was sure the only remedy for his discomfort was a foot-long chili dog and a six-pack of Dixie to go.

The 911 Club was built out of cinder blocks and plywood on a sandy flat by the side of the road. It was owned by an ex-Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff who supposedly welcomed everyone at his bar, but most of his clientele, particularly on weekends, was made up of police officers, male and female, or those who wished to imitate them.

A gathering of sports trappers was taking place at the bar and in the parking lot when Clete came down the road. The trappers wore olive-green T-shirts, dog tags, camouflage pants they tucked inside combat boots, goatees that bristled on the chin. They automatically crushed their aluminum cans in their hands after draining them, lit their cigarettes with Bic lighters, sucking in on the flame with the satisfaction of dragons breathing smoke, touching their genitalia when they laughed.

But Clete didn’t care about the trappers. He saw at least four men and two women, white and black, he knew from the Second and Third districts in New Orleans. They crossed the parking lot and went inside the double screen doors. They were carrying open cans of beer and laughing, the way people would at a private party.

Just go on up the road, Clete thought.

He did. For a hundred yards. But if he didn’t buy beer and something to eat at the 911 Club, he would have to drive two miles farther up the road.

There was a difference between caution and driving two extra miles because you were afraid of the people you used to work with.

He made a U-turn and pulled his Cadillac and boat trailer onto the oyster shells of the 911 parking lot and went in the side door.

Don Ritter was at the bar, peeling a hard-boiled egg while he told a story to the men around him.

“The Kit Carsons were V.C. who’d gone over to our side,” he said. “This one little sawed-off dude, we called him ‘Bottles’ because of his glasses, he kept saying, ‘Boss, you leave me behind, VC. gonna make it real hard.’

“So I told him, ‘I’d like to help you, little buddy, but you haven’t showed us a lot. Let’s face it. Your ville’s V.C. Those are your relatives, right? A lot of people might question your loyalties.’

“He goes, ‘Time running out, boss. Americans going home. Bottles gonna be in the shitter.’ I go, ‘Wish I could help. But you know how it is. You got to bring us something we can use.’”

Both of Ritter’s elbows were propped on the bar while he picked tiny pieces of eggshell off his egg, grinning at the backs of his fingers.

“So what’d he bring you?” another man said.

“Can you believe this? He and his brother-in-law stole a slick from the ARVN and loaded it with these fifty-gallon drums of gasoline. They taped frags to the tops of the drums and flew over their own ville and burned it to the ground. He comes to me and says, ‘Ville gone, boss. That good enough?’”

Ritter started laughing. He laughed so hard tears coursed down his cheeks and a violent cough hacked in his chest. He held a paper napkin to his mouth, then began laughing and coughing again.

The cops and trappers standing around Ritter waited.

“What happened to Bottles?” another man asked.

“You got me. I was on the Freedom Bird the next week…Oh, he probably did all right,” Ritter said, wiping his eyes, lifting his glass to his mouth.

Clete ordered a chili dog and a draft and went to the men’s room. Ritter’s eyes followed him, then the eyes of the other men turned and followed him, too.

When Clete came back out, the jukebox was playing and someone was racking pool balls. At first he wasn’t sure about the references he was now hearing in the story Ritter was telling his friends.

“His wife was a muff-diver. That’s not exaggeration. My wife knew her. She dumped him for another dyke and went off to a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. Can you dig it? The guy comes home and thinks he’s finally nailed her in the sack with the milkman and she’s getting it on with another broad?” Ritter said.

They’re shitheads. Walk away from it, Clete thought.

But the bartender had just set Clete’s foot-long chili dog, smothered with melted cheese and chopped onions, in front of him and was now drawing a schooner of beer for him. So Clete hunched over his plate and ate with a spoon, his porkpie hat tilted over his forehead, and tried to ignore Ritter and his friends, whose conversation had already moved on to another subject.

When he had finished eating and had drained the last of his beer, he started to get up from the stool and leave. But he paused, like a man who can’t make up his mind to get on the bus, then sat back down, his skin crawling with dried salt under his shirt. What was it he had to set straight? The lie that still hung in the air about his ex-wife? That was part of it. But the real problem was that Ritter could ridicule and sneer with impunity because he knew Clete was chained by denial to his past and would always be an object of contempt in the eyes of other cops.

“My ex left me because I was a drunk and I took juice and I popped a bucket of shit in Witness Protection,” Clete said. “She wasn’t a dyke, either. She just had the poor judgment to hang with your wife. The one who gave head to a couple of rookies at that party behind Mambo Joe’s.”

They caught him in the parking lot, as he was opening his car door, Ritter and one of the trappers and an unshaved man who wore canvas pants and rubber boots and firehouse suspenders on his bare torso.

The man in suspenders hit Clete in the back of the head with brass knuckles, then hooked him above the eye. As Clete bounced off the side of the Cadillac and crashed onto the shells, he saw the man in suspenders step away and Ritter take a long cylindrical object from him and pull a leather loop around his wrist.

“You think you’re still a cop because you throw pimps off a roof? In Camden guys who look like you drive Frito trucks. Here’s payback for that crack about my wife. How you like it, skell?” Ritter said.  

16

”
H
E USED A BATON on you?” I said.

“Mostly on the shins,” Clete said. He lay propped up in the hospital bed. There was a neat row of black stitches above his right eye and another one inside a shaved place in the back of his head.

“How’d you get out of it?”

“Some other cops stopped it.” He took a sip from a glass of ice water. His green eyes roved around the room and avoided mine and showed no emotion. He pulled one knee up under the sheet and his face flinched.

“This happened on Saturday. Where have you been since then?” I said.

“Laid up. A lot of Valium, too much booze. I ran off the road tonight. The state trooper let me slide.”

“You weren’t laid up. You were hunting those guys, weren’t you?”

“The one in canvas pants and suspenders, the dude who gave Ritter the baton? He was buds with that plainclothes, Burgoyne. I bet they were the two guys who beat the shit out of Cora Gable’s chauffeur. By the way, I called the chauffeur and shared my thoughts.”

“Don’t do this, Clete.”

“It’s only rock ‘n’ roll.”

“They’re going to put you in a box one day.”

“Ritter called me a skell.”

Tuesday morning the sheriff came into my office.

“I need you to help me with some PR.,” he said.

“On what?”

“It’s a favor to the mayor. We can’t have an ongoing war with the city of New Orleans. She and I are having lunch with some people to try and establish a little goodwill. You want to meet us at Lerosier?”

“Bootsie’s meeting me in the park.”

“Bring her along.”

“Who are these people we’re having lunch with?”

“P.R. types, who else? Come on, Dave, give me a hand here.”

BOOTSIE PICKED ME UP at noon and we drove down East Main and parked up from the Shadows and crossed the street and walked under the canopy of oaks toward the restaurant, which had been created out of a rambling nineteenth-century home with a wide gallery and ventilated green shutters.

I saw the sheriff’s cruiser parked in front of the restaurant, and, farther down, a white limousine with charcoal-tinted windows. I put my hand on Bootsie’s arm.

“That’s Cora Gable’s limo,” I said.

She slowed her walk for just a moment, glancing at the flowers in the beds along the edge of the cement.

“I just wish I could get my hydrangeas to bloom like that,” she said.

We walked up the steps and into a foyer that served as a waiting area. I could see our newly elected woman mayor and the sheriff and three men in business suits and Cora Gable at a table in a banquet room. At the head of the table, his face obscured by the angle of the door, sat a man in a blue blazer, with French cuffs and a heavy gold watch on his wrist.

“I have to go into the ladies’ room a minute,” Bootsie said.

A moment later I looked through the glass in the front door and saw Micah, the chauffeur, come up the walk and sit in a wicker chair at the far end of the gallery and light a cigarette.

I went back outside and stood by the arm of his chair. He smoked with his face averted and showed no recognition of my presence. Even though his forehead was freckled with perspiration, he did not remove his black coat or loosen his tie or unbutton his starched collar.

“Miss Cora said you won’t press charges against the two NOPD cops who worked you over,” I said.