Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

I dried my face and went back into the kitchen.

“You want me to boogie?” Clete said.

“Get the skillet out of the cabinet, then call Nig and Wee Willie and tell them you’ll need a bond,” I said as I took a carton of eggs and a slab of bacon from the icebox.

After we ate breakfast, Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to Mass. When we got back, Clete was down at the dock, sitting at a spool table under an umbrella, reading the newspaper. From a distance he looked like a relaxed and content man enjoying the fine day, but I knew better. Clete had no doubt about the gravity of his actions. Once again his recklessness had empowered his enemies and he now hung by a spider’s thread over the maw of the system.

Television programs treat the legal process as an intelligent and orderly series of events that eventually punishes the guilty and exonerates the innocent. The reality is otherwise. The day you get involved with the law is the day you lose all control over your life. What is dismissed by the uninitiated as “a night in jail” means sitting for an indeterminable amount of time in a holding cell, with a drain hole in the floor, looking at hand-soiled walls scrawled with pictures of genitalia, listening to other inmates yell incoherently down the corridors while cops yell back and clang their batons on the bars.

You ask permission to use a toilet. When you run out of cigarettes or matches, you beg them off a screw through the bars. Your persona, your identity, and all the social courtesy you take for granted are remo

ved from your existence like the skin being pulled off a banana. When you look through a window onto the street, you realize you do not register on the periphery of what are called free people. Your best hope of getting back outside lies with a bondsman who secretes Vitalis through his pores or a twenty-four-hour Yellow Pages lawyer who wears zircon rings on his fingers and keeps a breath mint on his tongue. We’re only talking about day one.

That afternoon I finally got Dana Magelli on the phone.

“Clete says the entry wounds look like they came from a .22 or .25,” I said.

“Thank him for his feedback on that.”

“He didn’t do it, Dana. It was a professional hit. I think we’re talking about Johnny Remeta.”

“Except Purcel has a way of stringing elephant shit behind him everywhere he goes.”

“You want me to bring him in?”

“Take a guess.”

“We’ll be there in three hours.”

There was a long silence and I knew Magelli’s basic decency was having its way with him.

“IAD has been looking at Ritter for a month. Tell Purcel to come in and give a statement. Then get him out of town,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Janet Gish confirms his story. We don’t need zoo creatures muddying up the water right now. You hearing me?”

“You’re looking at some other cops?”

He ignored my question. “I mean it about Purcel. He’s not just a pain in the ass. In my view he’s one cut above the clientele in Angola. He mixes in our business again, I’ll turn the key on him myself,” Magelli said.

I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle on top of the counter in the bait shop. Through the screen window I could see Clete at a spool table, watching an outboard pass on the bayou, his face divided by sunlight and shadow. I walked outside the bait shop and looked down at him.

“That was Dana Magelli. You’re going to skate,” I said.

He beamed at me, and I realized all the lessons he should have learned had just blown away in the breeze.

The next day NOPD matched the .25-caliber rounds taken from Don Ritter’s body to the .25-caliber round that was fired into Zipper Clum’s forehead.

That night Alafair went with friends to the McDonald’s on East Main. She came home later than we expected her and gave no explanation. I followed her into her bedroom. Tripod was outside the screen on the windowsill, but she had made no effort to let him in. The light was off in the room and Alafair’s face was covered with shadow.

“What happened tonight?” I asked.

“Whenever I tell you the truth about something, it makes you mad.”

“I’ve shown bad judgment, Alafair. I’m just not a good learner sometimes.”

“I saw Johnny. I took a ride with him.”