Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“What are the odds she work for Zipper and she white?” she said.

When I didn’t reply her eyes wandered out into the yard.

“I’ll stay in touch,” I said finally.

“You bet, good-looking man, you.”

I operated a boat-rental and bait business on the bayou down toward Avery Island, south of New Iberia. The house my father had built of cypress sat up on a slope above the dirt road, its wide gallery and rusted corrugated roof shaded by live-oak and pecan trees. The beds were planted with roses, impatiens, hydrangeas, and hibiscus, and we had a horse lot for Alafair’s Appaloosa and a rabbit hutch and a duck pond at the foot of the backyard. From the gallery we could look down through the tree trunks in the yard to the dock and concrete boat ramp and the bait shop and the swamp on the far side. At sunset I pulled back the awning on the guy wires that ran above the dock and turned on the string of overhead lights and you could see the bream feeding on the insects around the pilings and the water hyacinths that grew in islands among the cypress knees. Every night the sky over the Gulf danced with heat lightning, white sheets of it that rippled silently through hundreds of miles of thunderheads in the wink of an eye.

I loved the place where I lived and the house my father had built and notched and grooved and pegged with his hands, and I loved the people I lived with in the house.

Sunday night Bootsie and I ate supper on the picnic table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. The wind was balmy and smelled of salt and fish spawning, and the moon was up and I could see the young sugarcane blowing in my neighbor’s field.

Bootsie set out a tray of deviled eggs and sliced ham and onions and tomatoes on the table and poured two glasses full of crushed ice and sun tea and put sprigs of mint in them. Her hair was the color of honey and she had cut it so it was short and thick on the back of her neck. She had the most lovely complexion of any woman I had ever known. It had the pinkness of a rose petal when the rose first opens into light, and a faint flush came into her cheeks and throat when she made love or when she was angry.

“You saw Passion Labiche today?” she asked.

“Yeah. It bothered me a little bit, too,” I said.

“Why?”

“A hooker in New Orleans, a bail skip Clete ran down, had saved all these clippings about Letty. I asked Passion if she knew her. She said she didn’t, but then she slipped and referred to the girl as being black. Why would she want to lie?”

“Maybe she was just making an assumption.”

“People of color usually make derogatory assumptions about their own race?” I said.

“All right, smart,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She hit the top of my hand with her spoon. Just then the phone rang in the kitchen.

I went inside and picked it up.

“I got the word on Zipper Clum. He’s going to be in a fuck pad in Baton Rouge about two hours from now. Out towards where Highland Road runs into the highway … You there?” Clete said.

“Yeah. I’m just a little tired.”

“I thought you wanted the gen on those news clippings.”

“Can we nail this guy another time?”

“The Zip’s a moving target,” he said.

I put my army-issue .45 that I had brought home from Vietnam on the seat of my truck and took the four-lane to Lafayette, then caught I-10 across the Atchafalaya Basin. The wind came up and it started to rain, dimpling the bays on each side of the causeway. The islands of willows and flooded cypress were in early leaf, whipping in the wind, and there was a hard chop in the bays that broke against the pilings of abandoned oil platforms. I crossed the Atchafalaya River, which had swollen over its banks into the woods, then the wetlands began to fall behind me and I was driving through pasture and farmland again and up ahead I could see the bridge across the Mississippi and the night glow of Baton Rouge against the sky.

I drove through the city, then east on Highland, out into the country again, and turned on a shell road that led back into a grove of trees. I saw Clete’s maroon Cadillac parked by a white cinder-block apartment building whose windows were nailed over with plywood. A second car, a new Buick with tinted windows, was parked next to a cluster of untrimmed banana trees. A light burned behind the plywood on the second floor of the building, and another light was turned on inside a shed that had been built over the stairwell on the roof.

I clipped my holster on my belt and got out of the truck and walked toward the front entrance. It had stopped raining now, and the wind puffed the trees over my head. The dark blue paint of the Buick was luminous with the rainwater that had beaded into drops as big as quarters on the wax.

I heard feet scraping on the roof, then a man’s voice yell out and a sound like a heavy weight crashing through tree limbs.

I slipped the .45 out of its holster and went to the side of the building and looked up toward the roof. I saw Clete Purcel lean over the half-wall that bordered the roof, stare at something down below, then disappear.

I went in the front door and climbed the stairs to a hallway that was littered with garbage and broken plaster. Only one room was lighted. The door was open and a video camera on a tripod was propped up by a bed with a red satin sheet on it.

I went up another stairwell to the roof. I stepped out on the gravel and tar surface and saw Clete grab a black man by his belt and the back of his collar and run him toward the wall, then fling him, arms churning, into a treetop down below.