Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“You know this for a fact?”

“Yes.”

“Put something together. I’ll take it to the governor.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“Because I’m the attorney general of Louisiana. Because I don’t want to overlook mitigating circumstances in a capital conviction.”

“I want to offer Passion Labiche immunity,” I said.

“That’s between you and the prosecutor’s office.”

“Belmont thinks he’s going to be a vice-presidential candidate. He’s not going to be easy to move.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

After she hung up I put on my coat to leave the office. Through the window I could see rain and leaves blowing in the cemetery. Helen Soileau opened my office door and leaned inside.

“Give me a ride, boss man?”

“Sure. Why would Connie Deshotel want to help Letty Labiche?”

“Simple. She’s humanitarian and is always willing to risk her ass for a cop killer,” Helen said.

“Right,” I said.

In the morning I drove out to Passion Labiche’s house, but she wasn’t home. I drove up the road, along the bayou, to her nightclub outside St. Martinville and saw her pickup truck parked by the back door under a dripping tree. She was unloading groceries from the bed and carrying them, two sacks at a time, through a puddle of water into the small kitchen in back. She wore baggy strap overalls and a gray T-shirt and a red bandanna tied around her neck. Her feet were wet up to her ankles.

“Need a hand?” I asked.

“I got it. What you want, Dave?” she said.

I followed her through the screen door into the kitchen.

“I talked to the attorney general. She wants to take your statement about Carmouche’s death to the governor,” I said.

“What statement?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said what statement you talking about?”

She put a huge gumbo pot on the gas range and split open a bag of okra on the drainboard and began rinsing the okra under hot water and rubbing it smooth with a dish towel. Her hair looked oily and unwashed and I could smell a sour odor in her clothes.

“If you want immunity, we have to wait till the D.A. comes back from Washington,” I said.

“I got scleroderma. He can give immunity from that?”

“I’m telling you what’s available.”

“It don’t matter what I do. They gonna kill my sister. Your friends, the attorney general and Belmont Pugh? I wish it was them gonna be strapped down on that table. I wish they could know what it feels like to sit in a cage and wait for people to tape a needle on your arm and steal the breath out of your chest. You don’t die easy on that table, no. You strangle to death.” She raised one arm from her work, her back still to me, and wiped at the corner of her face. “It’s over, Dave. Don’t be bothering me and Letty again.”

When I drove back to the office, the sugarcane in the fields waving against the grayness of the sky, I kept thinking of Passion’s words. Was it just a matter of her peculiar use of the second person, or had she described the execution as though she were speaking of her own fate, not Letty’s?

The following Monday I received a call from Dana Magelli in New Orleans.

“I’m patched in on Camp Street. We got a ’911 shots-fired’ a half hour ago. The neighbors say a blond guy drove up in a Honda, went inside, then suddenly pow, pow, and the Honda drives back off. We showed the neighbors Remeta’s picture. They say he looks like the guy who’s been living upstairs.”