Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“What were you doing the night Carmouche got it?”

“Read the trial report. I’m not interested in covering that same old territory again. Tell me something. You got a problem with your friend seeing me ’cause I’m Creole?”

“You’ll have to find another pincushion, Passion. See you around,” I said, and walked across the yard under the shade trees toward my truck.

“Yeah, you, too, big stuff,” she said.

When I drove back up the road, she was carrying a loaded trash can in each hand to the roadside, her chest and heavy arms swollen with her physical power. I waved, but my truck seemed to slide past her gaze without her ever seeing it.

That afternoon Governor Belmont Pugh held a news conference, supposedly to talk about casinos, slot machines at the state’s racetracks, and the percentage of the gambling revenue that should go into a pay raise for schoolteachers.

But Belmont did not look comfortable. His tie was askew, the point of one collar bent upward, his eyes scorched, his face the color and texture of a boiled ham. He kept gulping water, as though he were dehydrated or forcing down the regurgitated taste of last night’s whiskey.

Then one reporter stood up and asked Belmont the question he feared: “What are you going to do about Letty Labiche, Governor?”

Belmont rubbed his mouth with the flat of his hand, and the microphone picked up the sound of his calluses scraping across whiskers.

“Excuse me, I got a sore throat today and cain’t talk right. I’m granting an indefinite stay of execution. Long as she’s got her appeals up there in the courts. That’s what the law requires,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘indefinite,’ Governor?”

“I got corn fritters in my mouth? It means what I said.”

“Are you saying even after her Supreme Court appeal, you’re going to continue the stay, or do you plan to see her executed? It’s not a complicated question, sir,” another reporter, a man in a bow tie, said, smiling to make the insult acceptable.

Then, for just a moment, Belmont rose to a level of candor and integrity I hadn’t thought him capable of.

“Y’all need to understand something. That’s a human life we’re talking about. Not just a story in your papers or on your TV show. Y’all can take my remarks any damn way you want, but by God I’m gonna do what my conscience tells me. If that don’t sit right with somebody, they can chase a possum up a gum stump.”

An aide stepped close to Belmont and spoke into his ear. Belmont’s face had the flatness of a guilty man staring into a strobe light. It didn’t take long for the viewer to realize that a rare moment had come and gone.

Belmont blinked and his mouth flexed uncertainly before he spoke again.

“I’m an elected official. I’m gonna do my duty to the people of Lou’sana. That means when the appeals is over, I got to uphold the law. I don’t got personal choices … That’s it. There’s complimentary food and drink on a table in the back of the room.” He swallowed and looked into space, his face empty and bloodless, as though the words he had just spoken had been said by someone else.

The next morning I read the coroner’s report on the death of Vachel Carmouche. It was signed by a retired pathologist named Ezra Cole, a wizened, part-time deacon in a fundamentalist congregation made up mostly of Texas oil people and North Louisiana transplants. He had worked for the parish only a short time eight or nine years ago. But I still remembered the pharmacy he had owned in the Lafayette Medical Center back in the 1960s. He would not allow people of color to even stand in line with whites, requiring them instead to wait in the concourse until no other customers were inside.

I found him at his neat gray and red bungalow out by Spanish Lake, sanding a boat that was inverted on sawhorses. His wife was working in the garden behind the picket fence, a sunbonnet on her head. Their lawn was emerald green from soak hoses and liquid nitrogen, their bamboo and banana trees bending in their backyard against the blueness of the lake. But in the midst of this bucolic tranquillity, Ezra Cole waged war against all fashion and what he saw as the erosion of moral tradition.

“You’re asking me how blood got on the ceiling and the wall by the stove? The woman slung it all over the place,” he said.

He wore suspenders over a white dress shirt and rubber boots with the pants tucked inside. His face was narrow and choleric, his eyes busy with angry thoughts that seemed to have less to do with my questions than concerns he carried with him as a daily burden.

“The pattern was too thin. Also, I don’t know how she could throw blood on the ceiling from a heavy tool like a mattock,” I said.

“Ask me how she knocked the eyeball out of his head. The answer is she probably has the strength of three men. Maybe she was full of dope.”

“The drug screen says she wasn’t.”

“Then I don’t know.”

“Was there a second weapon, Doctor?”

“It’s all in the report. If you want to help that woman, pray for her soul, ’cause I don’t buy death row conversions.”

“I think the blood on the ceiling was thrown there by a knife or barber’s razor or weed sickle,” I said.

His face darkened; his eyes glanced sideways at his wife. His hand pinched hard into my arm.