Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“I told you. Going into that fortune-telling and tattoo place in Lafayette.”

“What for?”

“Ask her.”

“You brought up the subject, Helen.”

“Yeah. And I dropped it. Two days ago,” she said.

I went back to the office and called Dana Magelli at NOPD.

“I’ve got a lead for you,” I said.

“I see. You’re doing general oversight on our cases now?” he replied.

“Hear me out, Dana. Johnny Remeta told me he was going to squeeze the people who killed my mother.”

“Are you kidding me? You’re in personal contact with an escaped felon who’s murdered two police officers?”

“Saturday night I was in Maggie Glick’s bar over in Algiers. I ran into Jim Gable’s ex-chauffeur, a guy named Micah something or another. He said he was going to come into some money by squeezing the man who was milking the cow.”

“What?”

“Those were his words. I think he was saying Remeta is shaking down Jim Gable.”

“You’re saying Jim Gable killed your mother?” he said.

“Remeta forced Don Ritter to give up the names of my mother’s killers before he executed him. At least that’s what he says.”

“What am I supposed to do with information like this? I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Magelli said.

“Put Micah under surveillance.”

“Shake loose three or four detectives and follow a guy around who has no last name? This sounds like something Purcel thought up, maybe to get even with the department.”

“I’m serious, Dana.”

“No, you’re obsessed. You’re a good guy. I love you. But you’re stone nuts. That’s not a joke. Stay out of town.”

The next day I drove to the City Library and found the collection of Civil War-era photographs that Johnny Remeta had been looking at just before he jumped out of the reading room window. I used the index, then flipped to the grainy black-and-white pictures taken at the Bloody Angle and Dunker Church.

The images in the pictures told me nothing new about Remeta. He was simply a necromancer with broken glass in his head trying to find a historical context for the rage and pain his mother had bequeathed him. But if that was true, why had the image of the book, its pages turning in the wind, disturbed me in my dream?

Because I hadn’t considered he was looking at something else in the collection, not just at the photos of Union and Confederate dead at Sharpsburg and Spotsylvania?

I flipped back two pages and was suddenly looking at a photograph of a two-story, narrow, columned house, surrounded by a piked iron fence. The picture had been taken in 1864, in uptown New Orleans, after the Union occupation of the city by General Butler.

According to the historical notes opposite the photograph, the house was owned by a young woman, believed to be a southern spy, who hid her lover, an escaped Confederate prisoner of war, from General Butler’s soldiers. The soldier was badly wounded, and when she discovered her own arrest was imminent, the two of them drank poison and died upstairs in a tester bed.

I went back to the department and called Dana Magelli at NOPD again.

“We haven’t found Remeta because he hides in plain sight,” I said.

“I knew it was going to be that kind of day.”

“Give it a rest, Dana. When he had a cop on his tail in the Quarter, he parked his truck and went inside the police station. How many perps have that kind of cool?”

“Give me a street address and we’ll swing by.”