Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“That’s good of you,” I said.

“What was the victim’s name again?”

“Mae Guillory was her maiden name. Her married name was Robicheaux.”

“Are you related?”

“She was my mother. So I’ll be hanging around on this one, Ms. Deshotel.”

The inquisitory beam came back in her eyes, as though the earlier judgment she had passed on me had suddenly been set in abeyance.

5

As a Little Boy Zipper Clum tap-danced for coins on the sidewalks in the French Quarter. The heavy, clip-on taps he wore on his shoes clicked and rattled on the cement and echoed off the old buildings as though he were in a sound chamber. He only knew two steps in the routine, but his clicking feet made him part of the scene, part of the music coming from the nightclubs and strip joints, not just a raggedy black street hustler whose mother turned tricks in Jane’s Alley.

Later on, Zipper Clum came to fancy himself a jazz drummer. He took his first fall in Lake Charles, a one-bit in the Calcasieu Parish Prison, before the civil rights era, when the Negroes were kept in a separate section, away from the crackers, who were up on the top floor. That was all right with Zipper, though. It was cooler downstairs, particularly when it rained and the wind blew across the lake. He didn’t like crackers, anyway, and at night he could hear the music from the juke joint on Ryan Street and groove on the crash of drums and the wail of horns and saxophones.

His fall partner was a junkie drummer who had sat in with the Platters and Smiley Lewis. Zipper was awed by the fact that a rag-nose loser with infected hype punctures on his arms could turn two drumsticks into a white blur on top of a set of traps.

In the jail the junkie created two makeshift drumsticks from the wood on a discarded window shade and showed Zipper everything he knew. There was only one problem: Zipper had desire but only marginal talent.

He feigned musical confidence with noise and aggressiveness. He sat in with bands on Airline Highway and crashed the cymbals and bass drum and slapped the traps with the wire brushes. But he was an imitator, a fraud, and the musicians around him knew it.

He envied and despised them for their gift. He was secretly pleased when crack hit New Orleans like a hurricane in 1981. Zipper was clean, living on his ladies, pumping iron and drinking liquid protein and running five miles a day while his pipehead musician friends were huffing rock and melting their brains.

But he still loved to pretend. On Saturday mornings he sat in the back of his cousin’s lawn-mower shop off Magazine and plugged in a cassette of Krupa or Jo Jones or Louie Bellson on his boom box, simultaneously recording himself on a blank tape while he flailed at his set of drums.

Witnesses later said the white man who parked a pickup truck out front wore Levi’s low on his hips, without a belt, a tight-fitting white T-shirt, cowboy boots, and combed his hair like a 1950s greaser. One witness sa

id he was a teenager; two others described him as a man in his thirties. But when they talked to the police artist, they all agreed he had white skin, a mouth like a girl’s, and that he looked harmless. He smiled and said hello to an elderly woman who was sitting under an awning, fanning herself.

The bell tinkled over the front door and Zipper turned down the boom box and shouted from the back, “My cousin’s next door.”

But some crackers just don’t listen.

“Hey, don’t come around that counter, man,” Zipper said. “Say, you not hearing me or something? The man who own this store ain’t here right now.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, just stay out there in front. Everything gonna be cool.”

“When’s he gonna be back?”

“Maybe two or three minutes, like the sign on the door say.”

“You play drums?”

There was a pause. “What you want in here, cracker?” Zipper asked.

“Your cousin’s got a big tab with Jimmy Fig. He’s got to pay the vig to the Fig.”

Zipper got up from the stool he was sitting on and walked to the service counter. The counter was lined with secondhand garden tools that had been wire-brushed on a machine, sharpened, oiled, and repainted.

“Jimmy Fig don’t lend money. He sells cooze,” Zipper said.

“If you say so. I just go where they tell me.”

“Don’t grin at me, man.”