Purple Cane Road (35 page)

29

T
HAT NIGHT I DREAMED of roses. I saw the sheriff trim-ming them in his garden and I saw them tattooed on Maggie Glick’s breasts. I saw them painted in miniature on the vase Johnny Remeta had given Alafair. I also saw the rose with green leaves that was tattooed on the neck of Letty Labiche.

But just as I woke and was momentarily between all the bright corridors of sleep and the grayness of the dawn, the flowers disappeared from the dream and I saw a collection of Civil War photographs on a library table, the pages flipping in the wind that blew through the open window.

I wanted to dismiss the dream and its confused images, but it lingered with me through the day. And maybe because the change of the season was at hand, I could almost hear a clock ticking for a sexually abused woman waiting to die in St. Gabriel Prison.

On Monday morning I was out at the firing range with Helen Soileau. I watched her empty her nine-millimeter at a paper target, her ear protectors clamped on her head. When the breech locked open, she pulled off her ear protectors and slipped a fresh magazine into the butt of her automatic and replaced it in her holster and began picking up her brass.

“You’re dead-on this morning,” I said.

“I’m glad somebody is.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re off-planet. I have to say everything twice to you before you hear me,” she said, chewing gum.

“Where’d you see Passion Labiche?”

“I told you. Going into that fortune-telling and tattoo place in Lafayette.”

“What for?”

“Ask her.”

“You brought up the subject, Helen.”

“Yeah. And I dropped it. Two days ago,” she said. I went back to the office and called Dana Magelli at NOPD.

“I’ve got a lead for you,” I said.

“I see. You’re doing general oversight on our cases now?” he replied.

“Hear me out, Dana. Johnny Remeta told me he was going to squeeze the people who killed my mother.”

“Are you kidding me? You’re in personal contact with I an escaped felon who’s murdered two police officers?”

“Saturday night I was in Maggie Glick’s bar over in Algiers. I ran into Jim Gable’s ex-chauffeur, a guy named Micah something or another. He said he was going to come into some money by squeezing the man who was milking the cow.”

“What?”

“Those were his words.  I think he was saying Remeta is shaking down Jim Gable.”

“You’re saying Jim Gable killed your mother?” he said.

“Remeta forced Don Ritter to give up the names of my mother’s killers before he executed him. At least that’s what he says.”

“What am I supposed to do with information like this? I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Magelli said.

“Put Micah under surveillance.”

“Shake loose three or four detectives and follow a guy around who has no last name? This sounds like something Purcel thought up, maybe to get even with the department.”

“I’m serious, Dana.”

“No, you’re obsessed. You’re a good guy. I love you. But you’re stone nuts. That’s not a joke. Stay out of town.”

THE NEXT DAY I drove to the City Library and found the collection of Civil War-era photographs that Johnny Remeta had been looking at just before he jumped out of the reading room window. I used the index, then flipped to the grainy black-and-white pictures taken at the Bloody Angle and Dunker Church.

The images in the pictures told me nothing new about Remeta. He was simply a necromancer with broken glass in his head trying to find a historical context for the rage and pain his mother had bequeathed him. But if that was true, why had the image of the book, its pages turning in the wind, disturbed me in my dream?

Because I hadn’t considered he was looking at something else in the collection, not just at the photos of Union and Confederate dead at Sharpsburg and Spotsylvania?

I flipped back two pages and was suddenly looking at a photograph of a two-story, narrow, columned house, surrounded by a piked iron fence. The picture had been taken in 1864, in uptown New Orleans, after the Union occupation of the city by General Butler.

According to the historical notes opposite the photograph, the house was owned by a young woman, believed to be a southern spy, who hid her lover, an escaped Confederate prisoner of war, from General Butler’s soldiers. The soldier was badly wounded, and when she discovered her own arrest was imminent, the two of them drank poison and died upstairs in a tester bed.

I went back to the department and called Dana Magelli at NOPD again.

“We haven’t found Remeta because he hides in plain sight,” I said.

“I knew it was going to be that kind of day.”

“Give it a rest, Dana. When he had a cop on his tail in the Quarter, he parked his truck and went inside the police station. How many perps have that kind of cool?”

“Give me a street address and we’ll swing by.”

“He’s imbued with this notion he’s a Confederate hero of some kind and my daughter is his girlfriend. He was reading an account in our library about two lovers who committed suicide during the Civil War in a home on Camp Street.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s living in New Orleans.”

“You have something better to offer?”

“Every cop in the city has a mug shot of this guy. What else can we do?”

“Pull Jim Gable’s personnel records for me.”

“Forget it.”

“Why?”

“We’ll handle our own people. Am I communicating here? Gable is none of your business.”

That’s what you think, I thought as I lowered the receiver into the phone cradle.

I WORKED LATE that evening, then drove home along the bayou road in the dusk. I could smell chrysanthemums and a smell like gas on the wind and see fireflies lighting in the gloom of the swamp. The house had already fallen into shadow when I turned into the drive and the television set was on in the living room, the sounds of canned laughter rising and falling in the air like an insult to the listener’s credulity. I tried not to think about the evening that awaited Bootsie and me as soon as I entered the house, hours of unrelieved tension, formality that hid our mutual anger, physical aversion, and periods of silence that were louder than a scream.

I saw Batist chopping up hog meat on a butcher table he had set up by the coulee. He had taken off his shirt and put on a gray apron, and I could see the veins cord in his shoulder each time he raised the cleaver in the air. Behind him, the sky was still blue and the evening star was out and the moon rising, and his head was framed against the light like a glistening cannonball.

“Sold thirty-five lunches today. We run out of poke chops,” he said.

A cardboard box by his foot contained the hog’s head and loops of blue entrails.

“You doin’ all right?” I asked.

“Weather’s funny. The wind’s hard out of the west. I seen t’ings glowing in the swamp last night. My wife use to say that was the
loupgarou.”

“It’s swamp gas igniting or ball lightning, podna. You know that. Forget about werewolves.”

“I run my trot line this morning. Had a big yellow mudcat on it. When I slit it open there was a snake in its stomach.”

“I’ll see you later,” I said.

“When the
loupgarou
come, somebody gonna die. Old folks use to burn blood to run it back in the trees.”

“Thanks for putting up the meat, Batist,” I said, and went inside the house.

Bootsie sat at the kitchen table reading from two sheets of lined paper. She wore blue jeans and loafers and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut away at the shoulders; wisps of her hair had fallen loose from her barrette and hung on the back of her neck. Her fingers were pressed to her temples while she read.

“Is that from Remeta?” I said.

“No. I went to an Al-Anon meeting today. Judy Theriot, my sponsor, was there. She said I had a problem with anger.”

“She did?” I said, my voice neutral.

“She made me do a Fourth Step and write out an inventory. Now that I’ve read it again I’d like to wad it up and throw it away.”

I went to the icebox and took out a pitcher of iced tea and poured a glass at the sink. I raised the glass to my mouth, then lowered it and set it back on the drain-board.

“Would you care for one?” I asked.

“You want to know what’s in my inventory?” Bootsie asked.

“I’m a little bit afraid of what’s coming.”

“My first statement has to do with absolute rage.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Hold your water, Streak, before I get charged up again. Judy made me write out a list of all the things you did that angered me. It’s quite long.”

I looked out the window at Batist chopping meat on the wood table by the coulee. He had started a trash fire of leaves, and the smoke was blowing into my neighbor’s cane field. I could feel my scalp tightening as I waited for Bootsie to recite her written complaint, and I wanted to be outside, in the wind, in the autumnal smell of smoldering leaves, away from the words that would force me to look again at the ongoing insanity of my behavior.

Then, rather than wait for her to speak again and quietly accept criticism, I took the easier, softer way and tried to preempt it. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s the violence. Nobody should have to live around it. I drag it home with me like an animal on a chain,” I said.

“Judy made me look at something I didn’t want to see. I was often angry when you were protective of someone else. You beat up Gable because you thought he was treating me disrespectfully in public. Then I lectured you about your violent feelings toward Remeta.”

“You weren’t wrong,” I said.

“What?”

“I set Remeta up the other night. I was going to dust him and take him out of Alafair’s life.”

She was quiet a long time, staring into space, her cheeks spotted with color. Her mouth was parted slightly and I kept waiting for her to speak.

“Boots?” I said.

“You were actually going to kill him?”

“Yes.”

I could see the anger climbing into her face. “In front of our home, just blow him away?” she said.

“I couldn’t do it. So he’ll be back. We can count on it.”

I could hear the wall clock in the silence. Her face was covered with shadow and I couldn’t  see her expression. I waited a moment longer, then rinsed out my glass and dried it and put it in the cupboard and went out on the front gallery. The screen opened behind me.

“He’s coming back?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“I wish you had killed him. That’s what I really feel. I wish Johnny Remeta was dead. If he comes around Alafair again, I’ll do it myself. Get either in or out of the game, Streak,” she said.

“Your sponsor would call that rigorous honesty,” I said.

She tried to hold the anger in her face, then mashed her foot on top of mine.

THE BEDROOM WAS FILLED with shadows and the curtains twisted and popped in the wind when Bootsie sat on my thighs and lowered her hand, then raised herself and placed me inside her. A few minutes later her mouth opened silently and her eyes became unfocused, her hair hanging in her face, and she began to say something that broke and dissolved in her throat; then I felt myself joining her, my hands slipping off her breasts onto her back, and in my mind’s eye I saw a waterfall cascading over pink rocks and a marbled boulder tearing loose from its moorings, rolling heavily, faster and faster in the current, its weight pressing deeply into the soft pebbly bottom of the stream.

She kissed me and cupped her hand on my forehead as though she were checking to see if I had a fever, then pushed my hair up on my head.

“Alafair will be home soon. Let’s take her to dinner at the Patio. We can afford an extra night out, can’t we?” she said.

“Sure.”

I watched her as she put on her panties and bra; her back was firm with muscle, her skin as free of wrinkles as a young woman’s. She was reaching for her shirt on the chair when an odor like scorched hair and burning garbage struck her face.

“Good Lord, what is that?” she said.

I put on my khakis and the two of us went into the kitchen and looked through the window into the backyard. The sun had dropped below the horizon, but the light had not gone out of the sky, and the full moon hung like a sliver of partially melted ice above my neighbor’s cane. Batist flung a bucket filled with hog’s blood onto the trash fire, and a cloud of black smoke with fire inside it billowed up into the wind and drifted back against the house.

“What’s Batist doing? Has he lost his mind?” Bootsie said.

I rubbed the small of her back, my fingers touching the line of elastic across the top of her panties.

“It’s a primitive form of sacrifice. He believes he saw the
loupgarou
in the swamp,” I said.

“Sacrifice?”

“It keeps the monster back in the trees.”

“You thinking about Letty Labiche?”

“About all of us, I guess,” I said.  

30

T
HE NEXT DAY was Wednesday. I don’t know why, but I woke with a sense of loss and emptiness I hadn’t experienced in many years. It was like the feelings I had as a child that I could never explain to priests or nuns or any other adults who tried to help me. But when that strange chemical presence would have its way with my heart, like weevil worms that had invaded my blood, I was convinced the world had become a gray, desolate place without purpose, with no source of heat other than a perpetual winter sun.

I walked down through the mist in the trees to the road and took the newspaper out of the metal cylinder and opened it on the kitchen table.

The lead story had a three-column headline that read: “Governor Sets Execution for Labiche.”

Unless Belmont Pugh commuted her sentence, Letty had exactly three weeks to live.

I drove to the department in the rain and talked to the sheriff, then went to the prosecutor’s office.

The district attorney was out of town and would be gone for a week, and the ADA I caught was Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and was a good prosecutor, and I had always wanted to like her. But she seldom smiled and she went about her job with the abrasiveness of a carpenter building coffins with a nail gun.