Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“I’m going to retire soon. I’m glad you told me what you did.”

“Sir?”

“I’d like you to be my successor,” he said.

“Come again?”

“What are you going to do with Passion’s confession?” he asked, ignoring my incredulity.

“It’ll be dismissed as an eleventh-hour attempt to stop Letty’s execution,” I said.

“Maybe that’s just what it is. You think of that? Where’s Remeta now?”

“He inasmuch told me my mother’s killers are the same people who tried to have him killed on the Atchafalaya. He says he’s going to extort them, then hire a button man to take them out.”

“You actually had that guy locked down in your sights? Then didn’t say anything about it till today?”

“That’s it, more or less.”

He locked the clasp on his clippers and dropped them in his pants pocket and looked at his grandchildren playing.

“Remeta is going to take you to your mother’s killers, isn’t he?” he said.

“That wasn’t the reason, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, scratching inside his shirt. “Yeah—” But he didn’t bother to continue, as though he were weary of contending with the self-serving machinations of others.

I ate an early dinner with Bootsie, then drove to New Orleans through Morgan City. The evening light still reached high into the dome of sky overhead when I parked my pickup truck down the block from Maggie Glick’s bar across the river in Algiers. The street was busy with the type of people whose Saturday nights were spent in a facsimile of the places their fellow countrymen enjoyed: elderly pensioners who ate in decrepit diners that served a free glass of domestic wine with the special; young white couples without geographical origins or means of support who lived in walk-ups with no air-conditioning and strolled the sidewalks with no apparent destination; and the men whose thoughts made them wake each morning with a longing that seldom found satiation.

I walked down the alley and entered Maggie Glick’s through the back door. It was crowded and dark and unbearably frigid inside. She was behind the bar, fixing a drink in a Collins glass, talking to a white man in a business suit. She had woven glass Mardi Gras beads into her hair and she wore a white knit blouse that exposed the roses tattooed on the tops of her breasts. The man did not sit but stood and grinned while she talked, his back stiff, his eyes drifting down the bar to a mulatto girl who could not have been older than eighteen.

His eyes met mine and he fiddled with a college or fraternity ring of some kind on his finger and turned his face away, as though he had heard a sudden noise outside, and walked down to the far end of the bar, then glanced back at me again and went out the door.

“My competition send you ‘round?” Maggie asked.

“Johnny Remeta says he was never in here. He says you were lying,” I said.

“You a sober, thinking man now. Let me ax you a question. Why would I lie and tell you a man like that was a customer? ’Cause it gonna be good for my bidness?”

“That’s why I believe you.”

“Do say?”

“Where can I find him?” I asked.

“He used to come in here. He don’t now. Man shop for the trade in here got to be functional, know what I mean?”

“No.”

“That boy get off with a gun. And it ain’t in his pants. Here, drink a free soda. I’ll bag it to go.”

“Jim Gable sprung you from St. Gabriel, Maggie?”

“I got sprung ’Cause I was innocent. Have a good night, darlin’,” she said, and turned her back to me, lighting a cigarette. Her hair was jet black, her skin as golden as a coin in the flare of light.

I walked toward the front of the building and was about to push open the door onto the street when I saw a muscular blond man in a pale blue suit with white piping on the lapels at the corner of the bar. His hair was clipped and combed neatly on the side of his head, one eye like a small marble inside the nodulous skin growth on the right side of his face.

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