Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

She watched his face over the top of the glass as she drank. Her skin was dusty, the tops of her breasts golden and filmed with perspiration in the dying light. She lifted her hair off her neck and pulled it on top of her head.

He touched the roundness of her upper arm with his fingertips.

“You’re a strong woman,” he said.

“Overweight.”

“Not to me,” he replied.

She kept brushing her hair back from the corner of her mouth, not speaking, letting her eyes meet his as though she knew his thoughts.

“I drink too much. I lost my badge in a bad shooting. I did security for Sally Dio in Reno,” he said.

“I don’t care.”

She tilted up her face and looked sideways with her eyes, the

wind blowing her hair back from her face.

“My ex said she could have done better at the Humane Society,” he said.

“What somebody else say got nothing to do wit’ me.”

“You smell like strawberries.”

“That’s ’cause we standing in them, Clete.”

She pushed the soft curve of her sandal across the hardness of his shoe.

They went upstairs to the third story of the house and made love in an oversized brass bed that was surrounded by three electric fans. She came before he did, then mounted him and came a second time, her hands caressing his face simultaneously. Later she lay close to him and traced his body with her fingertips, touching his sex as though it were a source of power, in a way that almost embarrassed him and made him look at her quizzically.

She wanted to hear stories about the Marine Corps and Vietnam, about his pouring a container of liquid soap down a hood’s mouth in the men’s room of the Greyhound bus depot, about growing up in the Irish Channel, how he smashed a woman’s greenhouse with rocks after he found out her invitation for ice cream had been an act of charity she extended at her back door to raggedy street children.

“I’m a professional screwup, Passion. That’s not humility, it’s fact. Dave’s the guy with the history,” he said.

She pulled him against her and kissed his chest.

He stayed away for two days, then returned to her house at sunrise, his heart beating with anticipation before she opened the door. She made love with him as though her need were insatiable, her thighs fastened hard around him, the small cry she made in his ear like a moment of exorcism.

Two weeks later he sat in her kitchen, a blue and white coffeepot by his empty plate, while Passion rinsed a steak tray under the faucet.

He ran his nails through his hair.

“I think you’re looking for an answer in a guy who doesn’t have any,” he said.

When she didn’t reply, he smiled wanly. “I’m lucky to have a P.I. license, Passion. New Orleans cops cross the street rather than talk to me. I’ve had the kind of jobs people do when they’re turned down by the foreign legion.”

She stood behind him, kneading his shoulders with her large hands, her breasts touching the back of his head.

“I have to go to the doctor in the morning. Then I want to visit my sister,” she said.

Clete drank out of his julep and stirred the ice in the bottom of the glass.

“She told me all the details about what Carmouche did to her and Letty. Somebody should dig that guy up and chain-drag the corpse through Baton Rouge,” he said. Then he seemed to look at a thought inside his head and his face went out of focus. “Passion would let him exhaust himself on her so he’d go easier on her sister.”

“Get this stuff out of your mind, Clete.”

“You think she’s playing me?”