Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

The box was packed with tissue paper and contained a six-inch-high ceramic vase that was painted with miniature climbing roses and a Confederate soldier and a woman in a hoop dress holding each other’s hands in an arbor of live oaks. The detail and the contrast of gray and red and green were beautiful inside the glazed finish.

The letter, handwritten on expensive stationery and folded in a neat square, read:

Dear Alafair,

I hope you don’t think too badly of me by this time. Your father cares for you and wants to protect you, so I don’t hold his feelings toward me against him. This is the vase I was working on. I tried to make the girl l

ook like you. What do you think? You can’t see the face of the Confederate soldier. I’ll let you imagine who he is.

I wish I could have lived in a time like the soldier and the girl on the vase did. People back then were decent and had honor and looked after each other.

You’re one of the best people I ever met. If you ever need me, I promise I will be there for you. Nobody will ever make me break that promise.

Your devoted friend from the library,

Johnny

“Where is she?” I asked.

“At the swimming pool.” Bootsie watched my face. “What are you thinking?”

“That boy is definitely not a listener.”

I went back to the office and placed another call to the psychologist at the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford. It wasn’t long before I knew I was talking to one of those condescending, incompetent bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to hold on to their jobs and hide their paucity of credentials.

“You’re asking me if he has obsessions?” the psychologist said.

“In a word, yeah.”

“We don’t have an adequate vocabulary to describe what some of these people have.”

“You don’t have to convince me of that,” I said.

“He was a suspect in a killing here. A gasoline bomb thrown inside another inmate’s cell. Your man was probably raped. You were faxed everything we have. I don’t know what else to tell you about him.”

“Wait a minute. You didn’t know him?”

“No. I thought you all understood that. Dr. Louvas worked with O’Roarke, or Remeta, as you call him. Dr. Louvas is at Marion now.”

“Excuse me for seeming impatient, but why didn’t you tell me that?”

“You didn’t ask. Is there anything else?”

I called the federal lockup at Marion, Illinois, and got Dr. Louvas on the phone. His was a different cut from his colleague in Florida.

“Yeah, I remember Johnny well. Actually I liked him. I wouldn’t suggest having him over for dinner, though,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“He has two or three personalities. Oh, I don’t mean he suffers dissociation, or any of that Three Faces of Eve stuff. He has an abiding sense of anger that he refuses to deal with. If he’d gotten help earlier, he might have turned out to be a writer or artist instead of a candidate for a lobotomy.”

“Because he was raped in prison?”

“His father would take him to a blind pig on skid row. That’s what they call after-hours places in Detroit. According to Johnny, a couple of pedophiles would use him while the old man got drunk on their tab. Family values hadn’t made a big splash in the Detroit area yet.”

“So he’s hung up over his father?”

“You got it all wrong, Mr. Robicheaux. He doesn’t blame the father for what happened to him. He thinks the mother betrayed him. He’s never gotten over what he perceives as her failure.”