Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

That afternoon I got a call from Wally, our departmental comedian.

“Enjoying your days off?” he asked.

“I’m cleaning the grease trap right now. Come on over.”

“I got a little problem. I’d like to finish my shift without being taken out of here in a box. My systolic is 190. I don’t need race riots. I don’t need black people shouting into the phone at me. I don’t need no white lesbian crazy woman firing up a mob over on Hopkins.”

“You’re talking about Helen Soileau?”

“I knew you could think it out. Way to go, Dave.”

I drove into town, then over to the west side to Hopkins Street, which, along with Railroad, used to comprise New Iberia’s red-light district. Helen Soileau had just handcuffed two black kids, about age fifteen, through the cap chain on a fire hydrant.

I parked the pickup in front of a liquor store and walked through the crowd that had formed on the sidewalk and the lawn of two houses. Helen was bent over at the waist, her hands on her hips, ven

ting her spleen at the two kids sitting on the cement. A city cop in a uniform was looking nervously up and down the street.

Helen raised up and stared at me, her face still heated. Her slacks were torn at the thigh and mud was smeared on her white shirt. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“I just happened by. What’d these guys do?”

“Not much. One shot a BB into a passing car and hit a six-week-old baby. This other little fuck put an M-80 under an old woman’s bedroom floor.”

“I think we need to turn the butane down.”

“They’re going to tell me where that BB gun is or stay here till they have to eat the paint on that hydrant. You hear that, you little pukes?”

“Walk over here with me, Helen,” I said.

“You got no business telling me what to do,” she replied.

“I can’t argue with that. But we’re on city turf. Let them handle it.”

She lifted her face into mine. Her eyes were blazing, her thick arms pumped.

“I’d like to punch you out, Dave. All the skipper needs is an apology and you’re back on the clock,” she said.

“So let the city guy do his job and take the kids down.”

“Yeah, I give a shit,” she said, and bent over and unlocked the handcuffs on the boys’ wrists, then cuffed them again and walked them to the city cruiser and shoved them inside and slammed the door behind them. Then she walked back to me and said, “Buy me coffee, Pops.”

I expected one of Helen’s harangues, but I was wrong. We went to the McDonald’s on East Main and sat by the window. The sky had turned green and the wind was blowing the oaks on the street, and leaves were rising out of the crown of the trees high in the air.

“I was in Lafayette this morning. You know that tattoo and fortune-telling place right off the four-lane?” she said.

“An old cypress cabin with beads and colored lights hanging all over the gallery?”

“I saw Passion Labiche go in there. That girl bothers me.”

“How?”

“Vachel Carmouche was a shithead and everybody knew it. That whole trial sucked. I get pissed off every time somebody tells me Carmouche was a lawman … Why the face?”

“I found evidence she didn’t do it by herself.”

“You’re telling me Passion helped her?”

“Yeah, I am.”