Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

Connie Deshotel was the attorney general of Louisiana. Newspaper accounts about her career always mentioned her blue-collar background and the fact she had attended night school at the University of New Orleans while working days as a patrolwoman. She graduated in the upper five percent of her law class at LSU. She never married, and instead became one of those for whom civil service is an endless ladder into higher and higher levels of success.

I had met her only once, but when I called her office in Baton Rouge Wednesday afternoon she agreed to see me the next day. Like her boss, Belmont Pugh, Connie Deshotel was known as an egalitarian. Or at least that was the image she worked hard to convey.

Olive-skinned, with metallic-colored hair that had been burned blond on the ends by the sun, she was dressed in a gray suit with a silver angel pinned on her lapel. When I entered her office, her legs were crossed and her hand was poised with a pen above a document on her desk, like a figure in a painting who emanates a sense of control, repose, and activity at the same time.

But unlike Belmont Pugh, the sharecropper populist who was so untraveled and naive he believed the national party would put a bumbling peckerwood on its ticket, Connie Deshotel’s eyes took your inventory, openly, with no apology for the invasion of your person and the fact you were being considered as a possible adversary.

“We met once, years ago, during Mardi Gras,” she said.

My gaze shifted off hers. “Yeah, I was still with NOPD. You were in the city administration,” I said.

She touched a mole at the corner of her mouth with a fingertip.

“I was drunk. I was escorted out of a meeting you were chairing,” I said.

She smiled faintly, but her eyes hazed over, as though I were already disappearing as a serious event in her day.

“What can I do for you, Detective Robicheaux? That’s your grade, detective, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. An informant told me two cops on a pad for the Giacanos killed a woman in Lafourche Parish in 1966 or ’67. Her maiden name was Mae Guillory.”

“Which department were they with?”

“He didn’t know.”

“Did you find a record of the crime?”

“None.”

“How about the body?”

“To my knowledge, none was ever found.”

“Missing person reports?”

“There’s no paperwork on this at all, Ms. Deshotel.”

She put down her pen and sat forward in her swivel chair. She looked into space.

“I’ll call the authorities in Lafourche Parish. It sounds like a blind alley, though. Who’s the informant?”

“A pimp in New Orleans.”

“Why’s he coming forward now?”

“A friend of mine was going to throw him off a roof.”

“Ah, it’s becoming a little more clear now. Is this friend Clete Purcel?”

“You know Clete?”

“Oh, yes. You might say there’s a real groundswell for revocation of his P.I. license. In fact, I have his file right here.” She opened a desk drawer and removed a manila folder filled with police reports, a thickly folded printout from the National Crime Information Center, and what looked like letters of complaint from all over the state. “Let’s see, he shot and killed a government witness, stole a concrete mixer and filled a man’s convertible with cement, and destroyed a half-million-dollar home on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth grader. He also slim-jimmed Bobby Earl’s car at the Southern Yacht Club and urinated on the seats and dashboard. You say he’s been throwing people off of roofs recently?”

“Maybe I misspoke on that,” I said.

She glanced at her watch.

“I’m sorry. I’m late for a luncheon. Give me your card and I’ll call you with any information I can find,” she said.