Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“Can I keep the photo?”

She popped the glued edges loose from the backing and handed it to me. Her consciousness of its content, or any importance it might have, seemed to be already lost by the time I had taken it from her hand.

“My sister’s got only one lawyer working on her case now. He’s twenty-five years old,” she said.

“I think you helped Letty kill Vachel Carmouche. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere until that fact is flopping around on the table,” I said.

She stared back at me with the transfixed expression of an animal caught in a truck’s headlights.

She literally ran from the building.

I hated my own words.

I grew up in the South Louisiana of the 1940s and ’50s. I remember the slot and racehorse machines, their chromium and electric glitter among the potted palms in the old Frederic Hotel on Main Street, and the cribs on each side of the train tracks that ran the length of Railroad Avenue. I collected for the newspaper on Saturday afternoons, and the prostitutes would be sitting on their galleries, smoking the new filter-tipped cigarettes and sometimes dipping draft beer out of a bucket a pimp would bring them from Broussard’s Bar. They were unattractive and physically dissolute women, and they wore no makeup and their hair was uncombed and looked dirty. Sometimes they laughed like deranged people, a high, cackling sound that climbed emptily, without meaning, into the brassy sky.

None of them had Cajun accents, and I wondered where they came from. I wondered if they had ever gone to church, or if they had parents anywhere, or perhaps children. I saw a pimp strike one of them on the gallery once, the first time I had ever seen a man hit a woman. Her nose bled on her hand. Her pimp had oiled black hair and wore purple slacks that fitted him as tightly as a matador’s pants.

“You got your money, kid?” he said to me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Better get on it, then,” he said.

I rode away on my bike. When I passed the crib again, she was sitting on a swing next to him, weeping into a red-spotted dish towel, while he consoled her with one arm around her shoulders.

I also remembered the gambling clubs in St. Martin and St. Landry parishes during the 1950s. Bartenders, bouncers, and blackjack dealers wore the badges of sheriff’s deputies. No kid was ever turned away from the bar or a table. The women were brought in by the Giacanos in New Orleans and a Syrian family in Lafayette and worked out of air-conditioned trailers behind the clubs. The head of the state police who tried to enforce the law and shut down gambling and prostitution in Louisiana became the most hated man in the state.

Most of those same clubs stayed in business into the 1960s. Passion was right. People of every stripe visited them. Would Connie Deshotel need to hire someone to steal an old photograph showing her in the company of people whom she may have known in only a casual way?

I decided to find out.

“I’m sorry to bother you with a minor situation here,” I said when I got her on the phone.

“I’m happy you called, Dave,” she replied.

“There was a B&E at Passion Labiche’s house. Somebody stole a box of photographs out of her closet.”

“Yes?”

“Passion says she’d told you about seeing you in an old photo she had. Is there any reason anybody would want to steal something like that? A political enemy, perhaps?”

“You got me.”

“I see. Anyway, I thought I’d ask. How you doin’?”

“Fine. Busy. All that sort of thing,” she said.

“By the way, the thief didn’t get the photo. I have it here. It shows you with Passion’s parents sometime around Christmas of 1967.”

“Could be. I don’t know much about her family. Maybe I met them at one time. Dave, when my political enemies want to do me damage with pictures, they put them on dartboards. Say hello to Bootsie.”

The next afternoon Dana Magelli at NOPD returned a call I had placed earlier in the day.

“Can you pull the jacket of a cop named Axel Jennings?” I said.

“Why?”

“He and Don Ritter and another guy worked over Clete Purcel down by Cocodrie. I also think this Jennings character is a good guy to look at for the Burgoyne shooting.”