Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

The truth was I didn’t care how Andropolis had died or even if he was dead. He was evil. He had been a jigger on hit teams, a supplier of guns to assassins, a man who, like a pimp or an eel attached to the side of a shark, thrived parasitically on both the suffering and darkness of others.

The following day Connie Deshotel called me at my office.

“I’m at my camp on the lake. Would you like to meet me here?” she said.

“What for?”

“I have a tape. A copy of Don Ritter’s interview with Andropolis.”

“Ritter and Andropolis are a waste of time.”

“It’s about your mother. Andropolis was there when she died. Listen to the details on the tape. If he’s lying you’ll know … Would you rather not do this, Dave? Tell me now.”

12

That evening Clete and I drove to a boat landing outside Loreauville and put my outboard in the water and headed down the long, treelined canal into Lake Fausse Pointe. A sun shower peppered the lake, then the wind dropped and the air became still and birds rose out of the cypress and willows and gum trees against a bloodred sky.

The alligators sleeping on the banks were slick with mud and looked like they were sculpted out of black and green stone. The back of my neck felt hot, as though it had been burned by the sun, and my mouth was dry for no reason that I could explain, the way it used to be when I woke up with a whiskey hangover. Clete cut the engine and let the outboard float on its wake through a stand of cypress toward a levee and a tin-roofed stilt house that was shadowed by live oaks that must have been over a hundred years old.

“I’d shit-can this broad now. She’s jerking your chain, Streak,” he said.

“What’s she got to gain?”

“She was with NOPD in the old days. She’s tight with that greasebag Ritter. You don’t let Victor Charles get inside your wire.”

“What am I supposed to do, refuse to hear her tape?”

“Maybe I ought to shut up on this one,” he replied, and speared the paddle down through the hyacinths, pushing us in a cloud of mud onto the bank.

I walked up the slope of the levee, under the mossy overhang of the live oaks, and climbed the steps to the stilt house’s elevated gallery. She met me at the door, dressed in a pair of platform sandals and designer jeans and a yellow pullover that hung on the points of her breasts. She held a spoon and a round, open container of yellow ice cream in her hands.

She looked past me down the slope to the water.

“Where’s Bootsie?” she said.

“I figured this was business, Ms. Deshotel.”

“Would you please call me ‘Connie’? … Is that Clete Purcel down there?”

“Yep.”

“Has he been house-trained?” she said, raising up on her tiptoes to see him better.

“Beg your pardon?” I said.

“He’s unzippering himself in my philodendron.”

I followed her into her house. It was cheerful inside, filled with potted plants and bright surfaces to catch the sparse light through the trees. In the kitchen she spooned ice cream into the blender and added pitted cherries and bitters and orange slices and a cup of brandy. She flipped on the switch, smiling at me.

“I can’t stay long, Connie,” I said.

“You have to try this.”

“I don’t drink.”

“It’s a dessert.”

“I’d like to hear the tape, please.”