Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

I cupped my hand on the back of his neck. The baked scales on his skin were as stiff as blistered paint.

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” I said.

“So why did you want to talk in private?”

“We think the Zipper Clum shooter is a Kentucky product by way of Michigan. His real name is Johnny O’Roarke but he goes by Remeta. He did a two-bit in Raiford. He also got to be an expert in jailhouse romance.”

“Same guy who was going to do Little Face?”

“That’s the way I see it.”

“The jigger said Remeta didn’t have a sheet.”

“You ever know a gumball yet who had the whole story right?”

“So Remeta blew off the hit and now he’s in the shit-house with whoever gave him the contract. Is that what you were going to tell me?”

“That’s about it.”

He grinned and drank out of his beer. “And you think we should make life as messed up as possible for all bad guys involved?”

“Who’s the best source for cold pieces around New Orleans?” I asked.

“It used to be Tommy Carrol, till somebody flushed his grits for him. Right now?” He scratched his hairline and thought. “You ever hear of the Eighteenth Street gang in Los Angeles? They’re here, kind of like sewer growth metastasizing across the country. I never thought I’d miss the greaseballs.”

I drove down East Main at sunrise the next day, under the arched canopy of live oaks that lined the street, and picked Clete up at the apartment he had rented downtown. The moon was still up, the air heavy with the smell of night-blooming flowers and wet trees and bamboo and water that has seeped deep into the soil and settled permanently around stone and brickwork.

But three hours later Clete and I were in a rural area north of New Orleans that in terms of toxicity probably has no environmental equivalent in the country. The petrochemical plants on the edge of the wetlands bleed their wastes into the drainages and woods, systemically killing all life in them, layering the soil with a viscous, congealed substance that resembles putty veined with every color in the rainbow.

The man we were looking for, Garfield Jefferson, lived at the end of a row of tin-roofed shotgun shacks left over from the days of corporate plantations. The rain ditch in front was blown with Styrofoam litter, the yard heaped with upholstered furniture.

“This guy’s a gun dealer?” I said.

“He creates free-fire zones for other people to live in and keeps a low profile in Shitsville. Don’t be deceived by his smile, either. He’s a mainline grad of Pelican Bay,” Clete said.

Garfield Jefferson’s skin was so black it gave off a purple sheen, at least inside the colorless gloom of his tiny living room, where he sat on a stuffed couch, legs spread, and grinned at us. The grin never left his face, as though his mouth were hitched on the corners by fishhooks.

“I’m not following y’all. You say you a cop from New Iberia and some dude give you my name?” he said.

“Johnny Remeta says you sold him the piece he did Zipper Clum with. That puts you deep down in the bowl, Garfield,” I said.

“This is all new to me, man. How come the guy is telling you this, anyway? He just running around loose, popping people, calling in information from the phone booth?” Jefferson said.

“Because he fucked up a hit for the wrong people and he knows his ass is hanging over the fire. So he wants to cut a deal, and that means he gives up a few nickel-and-dimepus heads like yourself as an act of good faith,” Clete said.

Jefferson looked out the window, grinning at nothing, or perhaps at the outline of a chemical plant that loomed over a woods filled with leafless trees. His hair was shaved close to the scalp, his wide shoulders knobby with muscle under his T-shirt. He fitted a baseball cap backwards on his head and adjusted it, his eyes glowing with self-satisfaction.

“A turned-around cap in Louisiana mean a guy don’t do drugs. You white folks ain’t caught on to that. You see a nigger with his hat on backwards, you think ‘Mean-ass motherfucker, gonna ’jack my car, get in my daughter’s bread.’ I ain’t dealt no guns, man. Tell this cracker he be dropping my name, I be finding his crib. I got too much in my jacket to sit still for this shit,” he said. He grinned innocuously at us.

Clete stood up from his chair and remained standing on the corner of Jefferson’s vision. He picked up a ceramic lamp, the only bright object in the room, and examined the motel logo on the bottom of it.

“You got a heavy jacket, huh?” I said.

“Eighteen Streeters always get Pelican Bay. Twenty-three-hour lockdown. But I’m through with all that. I come back here to be with the home folks,” Jefferson said.

Clete smashed the lamp across the side of Jefferson’s head. Pieces of ceramic showered on the couch and in Jefferson’s lap. For a moment his face was dazed, his eyes out of focus, then the corners of his mouth stretched upward on wires again.

“See, when people got a weight problem, they go around pissed off all the time, big hard-on ’cause they fat and ugly and don’t want no full-length mirrors in their bathrooms,” Jefferson said.