Purple Cane Road (21 page)

“I’m not sure
who
they were. Waste of time, anyway,” he replied, and tipped his ashes into his cupped palm.

“Why?”

He moved his neck slightly, so that the skin brushed like sandpaper against the stiff edges of his collar.

“I got a sheet,” he said.

“People with records sue the system all the time. It’s a way of life around here.”

“New Orleans cops have murdered their own snitches. They’ve committed robberies and murdered the witnesses to the robberies. Go work your joint somewhere else,” he said, and leaned over the railing and raked the ashes off his palm.

“You afraid of Gable?” I asked.

He brushed at the ashes that had blown back on his black clothes. Sweat leaked out of his hair; the right side of his face glistened like a broken strawberry cake.

I went back inside just as Bootsie was emerging from the ladies’ room. We walked through the tables in the main dining area to the banquet room in back where Jim Gable stood at the head of the table, pouring white wine into his wife’s glass.

“Jim says y’all know each other,” the sheriff said to me.

“We sure do,” I said.

“Bootsie’s an old acquaintance, too. From when she lived in New Orleans,” Gable said, the corners of his eyes threading with lines.

“You look overheated, Dave. Take off your coat. We’re not formal here,” the mayor said. She was an attractive and gentle and intelligent woman, and her manners were sincere and not political. But the way she smiled pleasantly at Jim Gable while he poured wine into her glass made me wonder in awe at the willingness of good people to suspend all their self-protective instincts and accept the worst members of the human race into their midst.

There was something obscene about his manner that I couldn’t translate into words. His mouth constricted to a slight pucker when he lifted the neck of the wine bottle from the mayor’s glass. He removed a rose that was floating in a silver center bowl and shook the water from it and placed it by her plate, his feigned boyishness an insult to a mature woman’s intelligence. During the luncheon conversation his tongue often lolled on his teeth, as though he were about to speak; then his eyes would smile with an unspoken, mischievous thought and he would remain silent while his listener tried to guess at what had been left unsaid.

With regularity his eyes came back to Bootsie, examining her profile, her clothes, a morsel of food she was about to place on her lips.

When he realized I was looking at him, his face became suffused with an avuncular warmth, like an old friend of the family sharing a mutual affection.

“Y’all are fine people, Dave,” he said.

Just before coffee was served, he tinked his glass with a spoon.

“Ms. Mayor and Sheriff, let me state the business side of our visit real quickly,” he said. “Our people are looking into that mess on the Atchafalaya. Obviously some procedures weren’t followed. That’s our fault and not y’all’s. We just want y’all to know we’re doing everything possible to get to the bottom of what happened…Dave, you want to say something?”

“No,” I said.

“Sure?” he said.

“I don’t have anything to say, Gable.”

“Friends don’t call each other by their last names,” he said.

“I apologize,” I said.

He smiled and turned his attention away from the rest of the table. “You lift, don’t you? I’ve always wanted to get into that,” he said to me.

“I haven’t had much time. I’m still tied up with that Little Face Dautrieve investigation. Remember Little Face? A black hooker who worked for Zipper Clum?” I said.

“No bells are going off,” he said.

“We hope to have all of you to a lawn party as soon as the weather cools,” Cora Gable said. “It’s been frightfully hot this summer, hasn’t it?”

But Gable wasn’t listening to his wife. His arm rested on top of the tablecloth and his eyes were fixed indolently on mine. His nails were clipped and pink on his small fingers.

“I understand Clete Purcel had trouble with some off-duty cops. Is that what’s bothering you, Dave?” he said.

I looked at my watch and didn’t answer. Gable lit a thin black cigar with a gold lighter and put the lighter in his shirt pocket.

“What a character,” he said, without identifying his reference. “You and Purcel must have made quite a pair.”

“Please don’t smoke at the table,” Bootsie said.

Gable looked straight ahead in the silence, a smile frozen on his mouth. He rotated the burning tip of his cigar in the ashtray until it was out, and picked up his wineglass and drank from it, his hand not quite hiding the flush of color in his neck.

From behind the caked makeup on her face, Cora Gable watched her husband’s discomfort the way a hawk on a telephone wire might watch a rabbit snared in a fence.

AFTER LUNCH, AS OUR group moved through the dining room and out onto the gallery and front walk, the sheriff hung back and gripped my arm.

“What the hell was going on in there?” he whispered.

“I guess I never told you about my relationship with Jim Gable,” I said.

“You treated him like something cleaned out of a drainpipe,” he said.

“Go on?” I said.

But Jim Gable was not the kind of man who simply went away after being publicly corrected and humiliated. While Micah was helping Cora Gable into the back of the limo, Gable stopped me and Bootsie as we were about to walk back to our car.

“It was really good to see y’all,” he said.

“You’ll see more of me, Jim. I guarantee it,” I said, and once again started toward our car.

“You look wonderful, Boots,” he said, and took her hand in his. When he released it, he let his fingers touch her wrist and trail like water down the inside of her palm. To make sure there was no mistaking the insult, he rubbed his thumb across her knuckles.

Suddenly I was standing inches from his face. The sheriff was out in the street and had just opened the driver’s door of his cruiser and was now staring across the roof at us.

“Is there something wrong, Dave?” Gable asked.

“Would you like to have a chat over in the alley?” I said.

“You’re a lot of fun,” he said, and touched my arm good-naturedly. “Twenty-five years on the job and you spend your time chasing down pimps and whores and talking about it in front of your new mayor.” He shook the humor out of his face and lit another cigar and clicked his lighter shut. “It’s all right to smoke out here, isn’t it?”

I WENT BACK to the office and spent most of the afternoon doing paperwork. But I kept thinking about Jim Gable. In A.A. we talk about putting principles before personalities. I kept repeating the admonition over and over to myself. Each time I did I saw Gable’s fingers sliding across my wife’s palm.

When the phone rang I hoped it was he.

“I thought I’d check in,” the voice of Johnny Remeta said.

“You have a thinking disorder. You don’t check in with me. You have no connection with my life.”

“You know a New Orleans cop named Axel?”

“No.”

“When I was chained up in that car, that cop Bur-goyne, the one who got smoked? He kept telling that other cop not to worry, that Axel was gonna be on time. He said, ‘No fuss, no muss. Axel’s an artist.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I found out Burgoyne partnered with a guy named Axel. He’s a sharpshooter, the guy they use for, what do they call it, a barricaded suspect. He’s got two or three kills.”

“Maggie Glick says you used to come to her bar.”

“I never heard of her. I don’t even drink. Does everybody down here lie?”

“Don’t call here again unless you want to surrender yourself. Do you understand that? Repeat my words back to me.”

“You saved my life. I owe you. It’s a matter of honor, Mr. Robicheaux. You got a cell phone in case I can’t reach you at home?”

AFTER I’D HUNG UP on him I punched in Clete’s apartment number.

“You know anybody named Axel?” I asked.

“Yeah, Axel Jennings. He’s Don Ritter’s buddy, the one who hit me in the back of the head with a set of brass knuckles.”

“Johnny Remeta just called me again. Maybe Jennings is the shooter who did Burgoyne by mistake.”

“I’ve got some plans about this guy Jennings. Worry about Remeta. He’s got you mixed up with his father or something.”

“What do you mean you’ve got plans for Jennings?” I asked.

“How about I take y’all to dinner tonight? Dave, Remeta’s a head case. Ritter and Axel Jennings are windups. Don’t lose the distinction.”  

17

A
STORM HAD MOVED into the Gulf and the morning broke gray and cool and shrouded with mist, then it begin to rain. I glanced out my office window and saw Passion Labiche get out of a car and step over the flooded curb and run up the front walk of the courthouse. Her hair and skin were shiny with water when she knocked on my office glass. Under her right arm she carried a scrapbook or photo album wrapped in a cellophane bag.

“You want to dry off?” I asked.

“I’m sorry for the way I talked to you at my house. I have days I don’t feel too good,” she said.

“It’s all right. How about some coffee?”

She shook her head. “I found that picture of Ms. Deshotel. The one I told her about when she came to my club. It was in the attic. My parents kept all the pictures of the places they lived and visited.”

She sat down in front of my desk and took a handkerchief from her purse and touched at her face.

“Why’d you decide to bring it in?” I asked.

” ‘Cause you axed about it. ‘Cause you been good to us.”

Passion turned the stiff pages of the album to a large black-and-white photo taken in a nightclub. The bar mirror was hung with Santa sleighs and reindeer and Styrofoam snowballs, and a group of five people, including Passion’s parents, sat on stools looking back at the camera, their drinks balanced on their knees, their faces glowing with the occasion.

Someone had inked “Christmas, 1967” in the corner of the photo, but there was no mistaking Connie Deshotel. She was one of those women whose facial features change little with time and are defined by their natural loveliness rather than by age or youth. She wore a black, sequined evening dress with straps and a corsage, and her champagne glass was empty and tilted at an angle in her hand. She was smiling, but, unlike the others, at someone outside the picture.

“Why should this picture be important to anybody?” Passion asked.

“Your folks were in the life. Connie Deshotel is attorney general.”

“They owned three or four dance halls. All kinds of people came in there. The governor, Earl K. Long, used to go in there.”

“Can I keep the photo?”

She popped the glued edges loose from the backing and handed it to me. Her consciousness of its content, or any importance it might have, seemed to be already lost by the time I had taken it from her hand.

“My sister’s got only one lawyer working on her case now. He’s twenty-five years old,” she said.

“I think you helped Letty kill Vachel Carmouche. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere until that fact is flopping around on the table,” I said.

She stared back at me with the transfixed expression of an animal caught in a truck’s headlights.

She literally ran from the building.

I hated my own words.

I GREW UP in the South Louisiana of the 1940s and ’50s. I remember the slot and racehorse machines, their chromium and electric glitter among the potted palms in the old Frederic Hotel on Main Street, and the cribs on each side of the train tracks that ran the length of Railroad Avenue. I collected for the newspaper on Saturday afternoons, and the prostitutes would be sitting on their galleries, smoking the new filter-tipped cigarettes and sometimes clipping draft beer out of a bucket a pimp would bring them from Broussard’s Bar. They were unattractive and physically dissolute women, and they wore no makeup and their hair was uncombed and looked dirty. Sometimes they laughed like deranged people, a high, cackling sound that climbed emptily, without meaning, into the brassy sky.

None of them had Cajun accents, and I wondered where they came from. I wondered if they had ever gone to church, or if they had parents anywhere, or perhaps children. I saw a pimp strike one of them on the gallery once, the first time I had ever seen a man hit a woman. Her nose bled on her hand. Her pimp had oiled black hair and wore purple slacks that fitted him as tightly as a matador’s pants.

“You got your money, kid?” he said to me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Better get on it, then,” he said.

I rode away on my bike. When I passed the crib again, she was sitting on a swing next to him, weeping into a red-spotted dish towel, while he consoled her with one arm around her shoulders.

I also remembered the gambling clubs in St. Martin and St. Landry parishes during the 1950s. Bartenders, bouncers, and blackjack dealers wore the badges of sheriff’s deputies. No kid was ever turned away from the bar or a table. The women were brought in by the Giacanos in New Orleans and a Syrian family in Lafayette and worked out of air-conditioned trailers behind the clubs. The head of the state police who tried to enforce the law and shut down gambling and prostitution in Louisiana became the most hated man in the state.

Most of those same clubs stayed in business into the 1960s. Passion was right. People of every stripe visited them. “Would Connie Deshotel need to hire someone to steal an old photograph showing her in the company of people whom she may have known in only a casual way?

I decided to find out.

“I’m sorry to bother you with a minor situation here,” I said when I got her on the phone.

“I’m happy you called, Dave,” she replied.

“There was a B&E at Passion Labiche’s house. Somebody stole a box of photographs out of her closet.”

“Yes?”

“Passion says she’d told you about seeing you in an old photo she had. Is there any reason anybody would want to steal something like that? A political enemy, perhaps?”

“You got me.”