Purple Cane Road (36 page)

“Passion Labiche has confessed she participated in the murder of Vachel Carmouche?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Where is it?” she asked.

“Where’s what?”

“The statement, the tape, whatever.”

“I didn’t take a formal statement from her.”

“So what is it you want from us?” she asked.

“I’m apprising you of the situation.”

“It sounds like you’re getting your chain jerked.”

“The weed sickle she used is still under the house.”

“I think you should get out of law enforcement. Become a public defender. Then you can clean up after these people on a regular basis. Talk to the D.A. when he gets back. He’s going to tell you the right person is going to be injected three weeks from now. I suggest you learn to live with it,” she said.

It was still raining outside, and through the window I could see the old crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery and the rain dancing on top of the bricks and plaster. “Passion was telling the truth,” I said.

“Good. Make the case and we’ll indict for capital murder. Anything else you want?” she replied, and began sticking files in a cabinet, her back to me.

BUT BARBARA SHANAHAN surprised me. And so did Connie Deshotel, who rang my phone just before 5 P.M.

“Your ADA called me. She says you have new evidence in the Carmouche case,” she said.

“Both sisters killed him,” I said.

“You know this for a fact?”

“Yes.”

“Put something together. I’ll take it to the governor.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“Because I’m the attorney general of Louisiana. Because I don’t want to overlook mitigating circumstances in a capital conviction.”

“I want to offer Passion Labiche immunity,” I said.

“That’s between you and the prosecutor’s office.”

“Belmont thinks he’s going to be a vice-presidential candidate. He’s not going to be easy to move.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

After she hung up I put on my coat to leave the office. Through the window I could see rain and leaves blowing in the cemetery. Helen Soileau opened my office door and leaned inside.

“Give me a ride, boss man?”

“Sure. Why would Connie Deshotel want to help Letty Labiche?”

“Simple. She’s humanitarian and is always willing to risk her ass for a cop killer,” Helen said.

“Right,” I said.

IN THE MORNING I drove out to Passion Labiche’s house, but she wasn’t home. I drove up the road, along the bayou, to her nightclub outside St. Martinville and saw her pickup truck parked by the back door under a dripping tree. She was unloading groceries from the bed and carrying them, two sacks at a time, through a puddle of water into the small kitchen in back. She wore baggy strap overalls and a gray T-shirt and a red bandanna tied around her neck. Her feet were wet up to her ankles.

“Need a hand?” I asked.

“I got it. What you want, Dave?” she said.

I followed her through the screen door into the kitchen.

“I talked to the attorney general. She wants to take your statement about Carmouche’s death to the governor,” I said.

“What statement?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said what statement you talking about?”

She put a huge gumbo pot on the gas range and split open a bag of okra on the drainboard and began rinsing the okra under hot water and rubbing it smooth with a dish towel. Her hair looked oily and unwashed and I could smell a sour odor in her clothes.

“If you want immunity, we have to wait till the D.A. comes back from Washington,” I said.

“I got scleroderma. He can give immunity from that?”

“I’m telling you what’s available.”

“It don’t matter what I do. They gonna kill my sister. Your friends, the attorney general and Belmont Pugh? I wish it was them gonna be strapped down on that table. I wish they could know what it feels like to sit in a cage and wait for people to tape a needle on your arm and steal the breath out of your chest. You don’t die easy on that table, no. You strangle to death.” She raised one arm from her work, her back still to me, and wiped at the corner of her face. “It’s over, Dave. Don’t be bothering me and Letty again.”

WHEN I DROVE back to the office, the sugarcane in the fields waving against the grayness of the sky, I kept thinking of Passion’s words. Was it just a matter of her peculiar use of the second person, or had she described the execution as though she were speaking of her own fate, not Letty’s?

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I received a call from Dana Magelli in New Orleans.

“I’m patched in on Camp Street. We got a ‘911 shots-fired’ a half hour ago. The neighbors say a blond guy drove up in a Honda, went inside, then suddenly
pow, pow,
and the Honda drives back off We showed the neighbors Remeta’s picture. They say he looks like the guy who’s been living upstairs.”

“Somebody hit Remeta?”

“I’m not sure,” Magelli said.

“You haven’t gone into the house?”

“It’s burning. There’s another problem, too. Gunfire’s coming from the upstairs window. Whoever’s in there is going down with the ship.”

HELEN AND I CHECKED out a cruiser, hit the flasher, and took the four-lane through Morgan City into New Orleans. We made it in less than two hours. We came off 1-10 onto St. Charles Avenue, passed Lee Circle, and headed uptown toward the Garden District. When we turned onto Camp, the street was sealed off with emergency vehicles and plumes of black smoke were still rising from the scorched brick shell and cratered roof of the building I had seen in the historical photograph.

Magelli stood behind an NOPD cruiser, looking at the destroyed building, his face flinching slightly when a live round popped inside the heat.

“You nail him?” Helen said.

“We never saw him,” Magelli said.

“You couldn’t get anybody into the first floor?” I asked.

“We kept within our perimeter. We’ve got nobody down. Is that all right with you?” he said.

“You bet,” I replied.

The defensiveness went out of his face.

“We’ve heard ammunition popping for two hours. How many were in a weapon is anybody’s guess. At least two rounds hit a fire truck. Another one went through a neighbor’s window,” he said.

The wind changed, and he turned his head and cleared his throat slightly and spit in the gutter.

“Well, you know what’s inside. You want to take a look?” he said.

“I guess we won’t have ribs for lunch today,” Helen said.

Magelli, two cops in uniform, and Helen and I went through the piked gate and started up the stairs to the second story, our weapons drawn. But the top of the stairs was partially blocked by a pile of burned laths and plaster. A raincoated fireman pushed his way past us and cleared a walkway, then kicked the door loose from the jamb.

The smell inside did not fit in time and place; instead, I thought of a village across the seas and I heard ducks quacking in terror and the grinding sounds of steel tracks on an armored vehicle.

The fire had probably started on or near the gas stove, and the entirety of the kitchen looked like a room carved out of soft coal. The canned goods in the pantry had superheated, and exploded glass from preserve or jelly jars had embedded like teeth in the walls. Portions of the roof had collapsed into the living room, half covering a desk by a front window. On the floor, among hundreds of brass shell casings and shards of broken window glass and a network of incinerated rug fibers, were the remains of two bolt-action rifles, their magazines filled with melted lead, and a .45 and a nine-millimeter pistol, the slides blown back and jammed open.

We neared the front windows, and a fireman gagged behind his face shield. I pressed my handkerchief to my mouth and nose and thought of water buffalo and grass huts and rice in wicker baskets and penned hogs and the kerosene-like smell of a flame arching into a ville from a vehicle we called zippo tracks and another smell that was like the sweet, sickening stench a rendering plant makes. The fireman used the point of his ax to drag a pile of drenched debris off a desk, and the stench rose from the desk well as palpably and thick as a cloud of insects.

“Sorry for the remark outside,” Helen said, her eyes deliberately unfocused as she looked down at the shape curled inside the well.

“Is that Remeta?” Magelli asked.

There was little left of the dead man’s features. The head was hairless, the skin burned black. His forearms were pressed against his ears, as though the flames had contained a sound he did not want to hear. The tissue around his right eye looked like a scorched and shriveled biscuit.

“He was a geek. I was wrong about him,” I said.

Magelli raised his eyes to mine, not understanding.

“It’s Micah, Jim Gable’s chauffeur. He used to be a carnival geek. He told me people paid to see the deformity on his face so they wouldn’t have to look at the ugliness inside themselves.”

“So?” Magelli said.

“He was a carnie man. He knew better than to shake down a man like Remeta. He was sent here to kill him,” I said.

“You’re saying Gable hired him?” Magelli said.

“A cop who had a whole family capped? Not a chance. I can’t believe I was a meter maid here,” Helen said.  

31

T
HE NEXT MORNING I called Clete’s motel but no one answered. I tried again later and a woman picked up the phone.

“Passion?” I said.

“What you want?”

“Where’s Clete?”

“Asleep. Leave him alone.”

“How about a little show of manners?” I said.

“I’ll tell him you called. Right now he needs his rest,” she said, and hung up.

That evening I drove to the motel. It had been hot all day, and the sky was purple and red in the west and it had just started to rain. When Clete opened the door his clothes looked like they had been slept in and I could smell alcohol deep down in his lungs.

“What’s up, Streak?” he said.

“Did Passion tell you I called?”

“She must have forgot.”

He closed the door behind me. The room was dark and in disarray. A red bandanna, like the one I had seen Passion wear around her neck, was on the nightstand.

He took an open can of beer out of the icebox and drank the can empty and dropped it in a trash basket.

“Jim Gable’s chauffeur tried to hit Remeta. Remeta put one in him and then set his own apartment on fire,” I said. I looked at the side of his face, his gaze that was focused on nothing. “Clete?”

“Remeta wanted everybody to think the chauffeur was him?”

“Or to buy time till he could find Gable and cook his hash.”

“Gable set up the hit, huh?”

“That’s my guess.”

He turned on the tap in the sink and washed his face with his hands. “I’m out of hooch. I’ve got to get a drink,” he said.

“I thought you were breaking it off with Passion.”

“She’s all alone. Her sister’s going to be executed. She’s got an incurable disease. What am I supposed to say? You were a good punch but hit the road?”

Then he started opening and closing cabinets, rooting in his suitcase, reopening the icebox, even though he already knew there was no more booze in the cottage.

“Passion wants me to go with her to Letty’s execution. She got Letty to put my name on the list,” he said. “You ever see the Stake in Saigon? I’m not up to this bullshit.”

He waved one meaty hand in the air, as though warning away an imaginary adversary. I sat down on the side of his bed and waited for his anger to pass. Then my gaze alighted on one of the pillows by the headboard.

“Who was bleeding?” I asked.

“Go home, Dave. Let me alone for a while. I’ll be all right. I promise,” he said, and leaned heavily on the sink, his back swelling with breath like a beached whale’s.

THE NEXT DAY I got another call from Connie Deshotel.

“I wasn’t able to make any headway with Belmont,” she said.

“I see.”

“He’s caught between his own inclinations and what his constituency wants. It’s not easy for him,” she said.

“His inclinations? I’ll float that by Letty Labiche if I get a chance.”

“I tried to help. I don’t know what else you want.”

“Where’s Belmont now?”

“I wouldn’t know. Try his office. But I’m out of this. You understand? Frankly, I just don’t want any more of your rudeness,” she said.

“What’s your relationship with Jim Gable, Connie?” I said.

But the connection had already gone dead.

CONNIE DESHOTEL HAD SAID she didn’t know Belmont Pugh’s whereabouts. But today was Wednesday, and I knew where to find him. When Belmont had been a traveling preacher and broom salesman, he had made a regular midweek stop at a slat-board fundamentalist church outside the little settlement of Lottie, in the middle of the Atchafalaya Basin. The congregation had paid thirty-five dollars for every sermon Belmont gave, and today, either out of gratitude or the aura of humility his continued presence at the church brought him, Belmont was still a regular at Wednesday night meetings.

That evening I drove up through Opelousas and took Highway 190 toward Baton Rouge, then turned down a shale road and crossed a railroad track and went deeper into the Basin, past a community of small houses with rusted screens, to a church building with a blue neon cross on the roof.

The congregation had laid out dinner on plank tables by a grove of cedar trees. Among the cluster of pickup trucks and 1970s gas-guzzlers I saw Belmont’s black Chrysler, a patina of gray mud on the fenders.

The windows were down in the Chrysler, and when I walked past it I could see a bored state trooper behind the wheel and a woman in back who was smoking a cigarette. She looked like she had been reconstructed in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, with silicone implants, a face tuck, chemically dyed skin, and industrial-strength perfume. She blew her nose on a Kleenex and dropped it out the window on the grass.

Belmont’s mouth was full of food, his Stetson pushed back on his head so that the ends of his hair were mashed against his forehead like a little boy’s.