Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

I pulled into the grocery store and he got out without answering and went inside. The store was weathered gray, the nail holes leaking rust, the wide gallery sagging on cinder blocks. Next to it was an abandoned dance hall, the Montgomery Ward brick peeled away in strips, the old red and white Jax sign perforated with bird shot.

Behind the nightclub was a row of cabins that looked like ancient slave quarters. The wind was blowing harder now, flecked with rain, and dust lifted in clouds out of the fields.

Clete came out of the store with a half pint of bourbon in a paper bag and an open can of beer. He took a hit out of the bottle, finished the beer, and put the bottle under the front seat.

“I called Gable. He says to come on down,” Clete said. “Something wrong?”

“This place … It’s like I was here before.”

“That’s because it’s a shithole where whitey got rich while a lot of peons did the grunt work. Like where you grew up.”

When I ignored his cynicism, his eyes crinkled at the corners and he sprayed his mouth with breath freshener. “Wait till you meet Jim Gable. Then tell me he’s not a special kind of guy,” he said.

• • •

The light had faded from the sky and rain slanted across the flood lamps that were anchored high in the palm trees when we pulled through the iron gates into Jim Gable’s drive. He opened the side door onto the porte cochere, grinning with a gap-toothed smile, a man dressed in white slacks and a blue-striped sports coat. His head was too large for his narrow shoulders.

He shook my hand warmly.

“I’ve heard a great deal about you, Mr. Robicheaux. You had quite a war record, I understand,” he said.

“Clete did. I was over there before it got hot,” I replied.

“I was in the National Guard. We didn’t get called up. But I admire the people who served over there,” he said, holding the door open for us.

The inside of the house was softly lit, the windows hung with red velvet curtains; the rooms contained the most beautiful oak and cypress woodwork I had ever seen. We walked through a library and a hallway lined with bookshelves into a thickly carpeted living room with high French doors and a cathedral ceiling. Through a side door I saw a woman with a perfectly white, deathlike face lying in a tester bed. Her hair was yellow and it fanned out on the pillow from her head like seaweed floating from a stone. Gable pulled the door shut.

“My wife’s not well. Y’all care for a whiskey and soda?” he said from the bar, where he tonged cubes of ice into a highball glass. His hair was metallic gray, thick and shiny, and parted sharply on the side.

“Not for me,” I said. Clete shook his head.

“What can I help y’all with?” Gable asked.

“A pimp named Zipper Clum is throwing your name around,” I said.

“Really?”

“He says you and a vice cop in the First District have an interest in a prostitute named Little Face Dautrieve,” I said.

“An interest?”

“Zipper says she gets into the sack with you guys or she goes down on a possession charge,” I said.

Gable’s eyes were full of irony. “One of my men held Zipper’s face down on an electric hot plate. That was fifteen or twenty years ago. I fired the man who did it. Zipper forgets that,” Gable said. He drank from his glass and lit a thin cigar with a gold lighter. “You drove over from New Iberia to check on corruption in the New Orleans Police Department, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“I think the prostitute has information that might be helpful in the case of Letty Labiche,” I said.

He nodded, his eyes unfocused with half-formed thoughts.

“I hear Labiche is born again,” he said.

“That’s the word,” I said.

“It’s funny how that happens on death row. As far as I’m concerned, Letty Labiche doesn’t deserve to die by lethal injection. She killed a lawman. I think she should be put to death in the electric chair, and not all at once, either,” he said.

Clete looked at me, then at the door.

“A lot of people think different,” I said.