Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

I took a cold can of beer from the ice chest and touched the back of his arm with it. He took it from my hand without turning around. I opened a Dr Pepper and drank it and watched the breeze blow through the cypress, ruffling the leaves like green lace.

“Why don’t you say what’s on your mind?” Clete said.

“I went through the transcript of Letty Labiche’s trial. Both Letty and Passion testified that Passion was auditioning at a Lake Charles nightclub for a record company scout the night Vachel Carmouche got it.”

“ ’Cause that’s where she was,” Clete said.

“They always performed together. Why would she audition by herself?”

Clete retrieved his lure and idly shook the water off it, rattling the two treble hooks against the tip of the rod.

“What are you trying to do, Streak? Drag Passion into it? What’s to be gained?”

“I think both sisters are lying about what happened that night. What’s that suggest to you? Letty is already on death row. She has nothing to lose.”

“The state’s executioner got chopped into sausage links and somebody’s going to pay for it. You remember the Ricky Ray Rector case up in Arkansas? The guy had been lobotomized. He looked like black mush poured inside a prison jumpsuit. But he’d killed a cop. Clinton refused to commute the sentence. Rector told the warden he wanted to save out his pecan pie on his last meal so he could eat it after he was executed. Clinton’s president, Rector’s fertilizer. I bet nobody in Little Rock gave up their regular hump the night he got it, either.”

Clete lit a Lucky Strike and set his Zippo on the top of his tackle box and blew smoke out across his cupped hand.

“I thought you quit those,” I said.

“I did. For some reason I just started again. Dave, it’s grim shit. Passion says her sister’s scared of the dark, scared of being alone, scared of her own dreams. I came out here to get away from listening about it. So how about lightening up?”

He lay his rod across his thighs and stuck his hand behind him into the crushed ice for another beer, his face painted with the sun’s dying red light, his eyes avoiding mine.

According to his obituary, Robert Mitchum, when released from jail after serving time for marijuana possession, was asked what it was like inside the slams.

He replied, “Not bad. Kind of like Palm Springs without the riffraff.”

It’s gone downhill since.

Unless you’re a black kid hustling rock and unlucky enough to get nailed under the Three Strikes and You’re Out law, your chances of doing serious time are remote.

Who are all these people in the jails?

Meltdowns of every stripe, pipeheads and intravenous junkies who use public institutions to clean their systems out so they can re-addict, recidivists looking for the womb, armed robbers willing to risk ten years for a sixty-dollar score at a 7-Eleven.

Also the twenty-three-hour lockdown crowd: sadists, serial killers, necrophiliacs, sex predators, and people who defy classification, what we used to call the criminally insane, those whose deeds are so dark their specifics are only hinted at in news accounts.

I could have interviewed the jigger named Steve Andropolis on Friday, the same day that Don Ritter did. But what was the point? At best Ritter was a self-serving bumbler who would try to control the interview for his own purposes, probably buy into Andropolis’ manipulations, and taint any possibility of obtaining legitimate information from him. Moreover, Ritter was investigating a homicide and had a legal reach that I did not.

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So I waited over the weekend and drove to Morgan City on Monday.

Just in time to see Andropolis’ body being wheeled out of the jail on a gurney by two paramedics.

“What happened?” I asked the jailer.

“ ‘What happened?’ he asks,” the jailer replied, as though a third party were in the room. He was a huge, head-shaved, granite-jawed man whose oversized pale blue suit looked like it was tailored from cardboard.

“I got people hanging out the windows. I got escapees going through air ducts. I got prisoners walking out the door with ‘time served,’ when they’re not the guys supposed to be walking out the door,” he said.

He took a breath and picked up his cigar from his ashtray, then set it back down and cracked his knuckles like walnuts.

“I locked Andropolis in with eleven other prisoners. The cell’s supposed to hold five. There’s three bikers in that cell the devil wouldn’t let scrub his toilet. There’s a kid who puts broken glass in pet bowls. One guy shoots up speedballs with malt liquor. Those are the normal ones. You ask what happened? Somebody broke his thorax. The rest of them watched while he suffocated. Got any other questions?”

He scratched a kitchen match across the wood surface of his desk and relit his cigar, staring through the flame at my face.