Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

At 11 P.M. they went out the back of the café and walked down the alley toward his car. Rain blew in a vortex from a streetlight out by the sidewalk, and the palm trees between the garages filled with wind and raked against the wood walls.

The man waiting in the shadows wore a wide hat and a black raincoat with the collar up. The piece of lumber he held in his hands was thick and square and probably three feet long. Leaves clung wetly to his shoulders and hat, so that he looked like an extension of the hedge when he stepped into the alley. He swung the piece of lumber with both hands, as he would a baseball bat, into Axel’s face.

Axel crashed backwards into a row of garbage cans, his forehead veined with blood and water. Then the man in the wide hat leaned over and drove the piece of lumber into Axel’s throat and the side of his head.

The man stood erect, water sluicing off his hat brim, his face a dark oval against the streetlight at the end of the alley.

“Haul freight, unless you want the same,” he said to the woman.

She turned and ran, twisting her face back toward the hatted man, her flats splashing through puddles that were iridescent with engine oil. The hatted man tossed the piece of lumber in the hedge, then picked up a whiskey bottle and broke it against the side of a garage.

He stooped over Axel’s body, the streetlight glinting on the jagged shell of the bottle, his extended arm probing downward into the darkness, soundlessly, like a man doing a deed he had conceived in private and now performed without heat or surprise.

“It’d take a real sonofabitch to do something like that, Dave,” Magelli said.

“It wasn’t Clete.”

“How do you know?”

“Check out Jim Gable’s chauffeur. He’s an ex-carnival man named Micah. His face is disfigured.”

“Why don’t you let Purcel cover his own ass for a change?”

“Jennings is a rogue cop. He brought this down on himself. Lay off of Clete,” I said.

“Tell it to Jennings. The doctor had the mirrors taken out of his hospital room.”

18

A week passed, and I didn’t hear anything more from Dana Magelli. The night Jennings had been attacked Clete was picking up a bail skip for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater in Baton Rouge, which didn’t mean he couldn’t have attacked Jennings after he dumped the skip in Willie and Nig’s office. But Clete Purcel had boundaries, even though they were a little arbitrary, and they didn’t include mutilating a half-conscious man who was already on the ground.

I wanted to empty my head and caseload and go to Key West with Bootsie and Alafair and fish for three weeks. I was tired of other people’s problems, of breaking up domestic arguments, of hosing vomit out of a cruiser, of washing spittle off my face, of cutting slack to junkies because they had the virus, only later to have one try to bite me when I cuffed him.

I was tired of seeing the despair in the faces of black parents when I told them their children had overdosed on meth or heroin or had been gunned down in a robbery. Or vainly trying to reassure a store owner of his self-worth after he had been forced at gunpoint to kneel and beg for his life. Nor did I ever again want to look into the faces of women who had been raped, sodomized, burned with cigarettes, and beaten with fists, every ounce of dignity and self-respect they once possessed systematically ripped out of their bodi

es.

If you meet longtime street cops who don’t drink or use, they’re usually either in twelve-step programs or brain-dead or they have criminal propensities themselves.

But each time I cleared my head and tried to concentrate on all the potential that every day could bring—the sun showers that blew in from the Gulf, Bootsie’s meeting me for lunch at Victor’s or in the park, the long summer evenings and the way the light climbed high into the sky at sunset, picking up Alafair at night at the City Library and going for ice cream with her high school creative writing group—my mind returned again and again to thoughts about my mother’s fate, the pleas for help she must have uttered, and the fact her killers were still out there.

But it was more than my mother’s death that obsessed me. Long ago I had accepted the loss of my natal family and my childhood and the innocence of the Cajun world I had been born into. You treat loss just like death. It visits everyone and you don’t let it prevail in your life.

What I felt now was not loss but theft and violation. My mother’s memory, the sad respect I had always felt for her, had been stolen from me. Now the tape-recorded lie left behind by a dead jigger in the Morgan City jail, that my mother was a whore and a thief, had become part of a file at the New Orleans Police Department and I had no way to change it.

“Something on your mind?” Helen Soileau said in my office.

“No, not really,” I replied.

She stood at the window and rubbed the back of her neck and looked out at the street.

“Connie Deshotel just kind of disappeared? Being photographed with a couple of procurers didn’t rattle her?” she said.

“Not that I could tell,” I said, tilting back in my chair.

“She was in her office. All her power was right there at her fingertips. Don’t let her fool you, Dave. That broad’s got you in her bombsights.”

But it was Friday afternoon and I didn’t want to think any more about Connie Deshotel. I signed out of the office, bought a loaf of French bread at the market, and drove down the dirt road toward my house, the sun flashing like pieces of hammered brass in the oak limbs overhead.