Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

I drove my pickup truck to Morgan City, then down deep into Terrebonne Parish, toward the Gulf, almost to Point au Fer. The sky was gray and roiling with clouds and I could smell salt spray on the wind. I went down a dirt road full of sinkholes, between thickly canopied woods that were hung with air vines, dotted with palmettos, and drifting with gray leaves. The road ended at a sunless, tin-roofed cypress cabin that was streaked black with rainwater. A man sat in a chair on the front porch, his stomach popping out of his shirt like a crushed white cake, a guitar laid flat on his lap.

When I got out of the truck, the man leaned forward and picked up a straw hat from the porch swing and fitted it low on his head. In the shade his skin had the bloodless discoloration that an albino’s might if he bathed in blue ink. He wore steel picks on the fingers of his right hand and the sawed-off, machine-buffed neck of a glass bottle on the index finger of his left. He slid the bottle neck up and down the strings of the guitar and sang, “I’m going where the water tastes like cherry wine, ’cause the Georgia water tastes like turpentine.”

A mulatto or Indian woman who was shaped like a duck, with Hottentot buttocks and elephantine legs, was hanging wash in back. She turned and looked at me with the flat stare of a frying pan, then spit in the weeds and walked heavily to the privy and went inside and closed the door behind her by fitting a hand through a hole in a board.

“She ain’t rude. She’s just blind. Preacher tole me once everybody’s got somebody,” the man on the porch said. He picked up a burning cigarette from the porch railing and raised it to his mouth. His hand was withered, the fingers crimped together like the dried paw of an animal.

“You Bobby Cale?” I asked.

He pushed his hat up on his forehead and lifted his face, turning it at a slight angle, as though to feel the breeze.

“I look like I might be somebody else?” he said.

“No, sir.”

“I was in Carville fifteen years. That was back in the days when people like me was walled off from the rest of y’all. I run off and lived in Nevada. Wandered in the desert and ate grasshoppers and didn’t take my meds and convinced myself I was John the Baptizer come back in modern times. I scared the hell out of people who turned up the wrong dirt road.”

I started to open my badge.

“I know who you are. I know why you’re here, too. It won’t do you no good,” he said.

“You didn’t shoot Ladrine Theriot,” I said.

“The paperwork says otherwise.”

“The two other cops there had on uniforms. They wore black slickers. They made you take their heat because they were from another parish and out of their jurisdiction.”

He threw his cigarette out into the yard and looked into space. His nose was eaten away, the skin of his face drawn back on the bone, the cheeks creased with lines like whiskers on a cat.

“You know a whole lot for a man wasn’t there,” he said.

“There was a witness. She used the name Mae Guillory,” I said.

“Everybody’s got at least one night in his life that he wants to carry on a shovel to a deep hole in a woods and bury under a ton of dirt. Then for good measure burn the woods down on top of it. I wish I was a drunkard and could just get up and say I probably dreamed it all. I don’t remember no witness.”

“The two other cops killed her. Except a hooker saw them do it.”

His eyes held on me for a long time. They were green, uncomplicated, and still seemed to belong inside the round, redneck face of an overweight constable from thirty years ago.

“You got an honest-to-God witness can hold them over the fire?” he said, his eyes lingering on mine.

“She never knew their names. She didn’t see their faces well, either.”

The moment went out of his eyes. “This world’s briers and brambles, ain’t it?” he said.

“You a churchgoin’ man, Mr. Cale?”

“Not no more.”

“Why not get square and start over? People won’t be hard on you.”

“They killed Mae Guillory? I always thought she just run off,” he said, an unexpected note of sadness in his voice.

I didn’t reply. His eyes were hooded, his down-turned nose like the ragged beak of a bird. He pressed the bottle neck down on the frets of the guitar and drew his steel picks across the strings. But his concentration was elsewhere, and his picks made a discordant sound like a fist striking piano keys.

“I had a wife and a little boy once. Owned a house and a truck and had money left over at the end of the month. That’s all gone now,” he said.

“Mae Guillory was my mother, Mr. Cale. Neither she nor I will rest until the bill’s paid.”