Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

He set his guitar in the swing and placed his hat crown-down next to it and pulled the bottle neck and steel picks off his fingers and dropped them tinkling inside the hat.

“The old woman and me is going to eat some lima bean soup. You can stay if you want. But we’re done talking on this particular subject,” he said.

“Those cops are still out there, aren’t they?” I said.

“Good-bye, sir. Before you judge me, you might be thankful you got what you got,” he said, and went inside the darkness of the cabin and let the screen slam behind him.

Members in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous maintain that alcohol is but the symptom of the disease. It sounds self-serving. It’s not.

That night I sat at the counter in the bait shop and watched Clete Purcel use only one thumb to unscrew the cap from a pint bottle of whiskey, then pour two inches into a glass mug and crack open a Dixie for a chaser. He was talking about fishing, or a vacation in Hawaii, or his time in the corps, I don’t remember. The beer bottle was dark green, running with moisture, the whiskey in the mug brownish gold, like autumn light trapped inside a hardwood forest.

The air outside was humid and thick with winged insects, and strings of smoke rose from the flood lamps. I opened a can of Dr Pepper but didn’t drink it. My hand was crimped tightly around the can, my head buzzing with a sound like a downed wire in a rain puddle.

Clete tilted the glass mug to his mouth and drank the whiskey out of the bottom, then chased it with the beer and wiped his mouth on his palm. His eyes settled on mine, then went away from me and came back.

“Your head’s back in that story the black hooker told you,” he said.

“My mother said her name was Mae Robicheaux,” I said.

“What?”

“Before she died, she said her name was Robicheaux. She took back her

married name.”

“I’m going to use your own argument against you, Dave. The sonsofbitches who killed your mother are pure evil. Don’t let them keep hurting you.”

“I’m going to find out who they are and hunt them down and kill them.”

He screwed the cap back on his whiskey bottle and wrapped the bottle in a paper bag, then drank from his beer and rose from the counter stool and worked the whiskey bottle into his side pocket.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Going back to the motel. Leaving you with your family. Taking my booze out of here.”

“That’s not the problem.”

“It’s not the main one, but you’d like it to be. See you tomorrow, Streak,” he said.

He put on his porkpie hat and went out the door, then I heard his Cadillac start up and roll heavily down the dirt road.

I chained up the rental boats for the night and was turning off the lights when Clete’s Cadillac came back down the road and parked at the cement boat ramp. He met me at the end of the dock with a tinfoil container of microwave popcorn in his hand.

“I hate watching TV in a motel room by myself,” he said, and laid his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me up the slope to the house.

Early the next morning I put all the crime scene photos from the Vachel Carmouche homicide in an envelope and drove out to his deserted house on Bayou Teche. I pushed open the back door and once more entered the heated smell of the house. Purple martins, probably from the chimney, were flying blindly against the walls and windows, splattering their droppings on the floors and counters. I swatted them away from my face with a newspaper and closed off the kitchen to isolate the birds in the rest of the house.

Why was I even there? I asked myself. I had no idea what I was looking for.

I squatted down and touched a brownish flake of blood on the linoleum with my ballpoint pen. It crumbled into tiny particles, and I wiped my pen with a piece of Kleenex, then put my pen away and blotted the perspiration off my forehead with my sleeve.

All I wanted to do was get back outside in the wind, under the shade of a tree, out of the smell that Vachel Carmouche seemed to have bled into the woodwork when he died. Maybe I had to stop thinking of Passion and Letty Labiche as victims. I tried to tell myself that sometimes it took more courage to step away from the grief of another than to participate in it.

I felt a puff of cool air rise from the floor and I looked down through a crack in the linoleum, through a rotted plank, at a pool of water under the house with purple martins fluttering their wings in it. Then I realized the birds inside the house had not come from the chimney. But it wasn’t the birds that caught my attention. One of the cinder-block pilings was orange with rust that had leaked from a crossbeam onto the stone.

I went back outside and lay flat on my stomach and crawled under the house. Three feet beyond the rear wall, wedged between the crossbeam and the cinderblock piling, was a one-handed weed sickle. I pried it loose and crawled back into the sunlight. The short wood handle was intact, but the half-moon blade had rusted into lace.

I slipped the sickle handle-first into a Ziploc bag and knocked on Passion’s door.