Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“I see,” Magelli said, his eyes going flat. “Which leads you to conclude what?”

“That maybe the guys who did it put the hitter on Zipper Clum.”

“Who might these guys be?”

“Search me,” I said, my eyes not quite meeting his.

He wore a beige sports jacket and tan slacks. He leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on my desk.

“You’re a good cop, Dave. You always were. You got a rotten deal. A lot of guys would like to see you reinstated in the department,” he said.

“How about Purcel?”

“Purcel was a wrong cop.”

“The whole department was wrong,” I said.

“It’s not that way now. Maybe a few guys are still dirty, but the new chief has either suspended or put most of the real slimebags in jail.”

“What’s your point, Dana?”

“You’d better not be squaring a personal beef on your own in Orleans Parish.”

“I guess you never know how it’s going to shake out,” I said.

“Bad answer from a guy with your mileage,” he said.

“Find my old jacket and put a letter in it,” I

said.

But he wasn’t listening now. “We’ve run the shooter through the computer system every way we could,” he said. “Nothing. He’s got the look of a genuine sociopath, but if there’s paperwork on him anywhere, we can’t find it.”

“I think he’s a new guy, just starting out, making his bones with somebody,” I said. “He was personally upset he couldn’t make a clean hit. But he was still doing everything right until he went back to smash the boom box. He knew he was leaving something behind, but his head was on the full-tilt boogie and he couldn’t think his way through the problem. So he tore up the boom box but he left us the tape. He’s an ambitious, new player on the block who doesn’t quite have ice water in his veins yet.”

Magelli rubbed his chin with two fingers.

“I had a Tulane linguist listen to the tape,” Magelli said. “He says the accent is Upper South, Tennessee or Kentucky, reasonably educated, at least for the kind of dirt bags we usually pull in. You think he’s mobbed-up?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because he talks about paying ‘the vig to the Fig.’ Everybody in the life knows Jimmy Figorelli is a pimp, not a shylock.”

Magelli smiled.

“Come back to work for us,” he said.

“Take Purcel, too. You get two for one.”

“You wouldn’t come if we did, would you?”

I took my eyes off his to change the subject. “There’s another possibility in this case,” I said. “It was Zipper Clum’s perception the hitter was sent by the people who killed my mother. That doesn’t make it so. A lot of people would enjoy breaking champagne bottles on Zipper’s headstone.”

“Zipper was a ruthless bucket of shit. But he was the smartest pimp I ever met. He knew who paid his killer. You know it, too,” Magelli said. He cocked his finger at me like a pistol as he went out the door.

Just as I was going into Victor’s on Main Street for lunch, Clete Purcel’s maroon Cadillac pulled to the curb, his salt-water fishing rods sticking out of the back windows. He’d bought the Cadillac, the only type of car he ever drove, for eight hundred dollars from a mortician who had bought it off the family of a mobbed-up suicide victim. The steel-jacketed .357 round had exited through the Cadillac’s roof, and Clete had filed down the jagged metal and filled the hole with body solder and sanded it smooth and sprayed it with gray primer so the roof looked like it had been powdered from the explosion of a large firecracker.