James Burke - Purple Cane Road

In the jail the junkie created two makeshift drumsticks from the wood on a discarded window shade and showed Zipper everything he knew. There was only one problem: Zipper had desire but only marginal talent.

He feigned musical confidence with noise and aggressiveness. He sat in with bands on Airline Highway and crashed the cymbals and bass drum and slapped the traps with the wire brushes. But he was an imitator, a fraud, and the musicians around him knew it.

He envied and despised them for their gift. He was secretly pleased when crack hit New Orleans like a hurricane in 1981. Zipper was clean, living on his ladies, pumping iron and drinking liquid protein and running five miles a day while his pipehead musician friends were huffing rock and melting their brains.

But he still loved to pretend. On Saturday mornings he sat in the back of his cousin's lawn-mower shop off Magazine and plugged in a cassette of Krupa or Jo Jones or Louie Bellson on his boom box, simultaneously recording himself on a blank tape while he flailed at his set of drums.

Witnesses later said the white man who parked a pickup truck out front wore Levi's low on his hips, without a belt, a tight-fitting white T-shirt, cowboy boots, and combed his hair like a 1950s greaser. One witness said he was a teenager; two others described him as a man in his thirties. But when they talked to the police artist, they all agreed he had white skin, a mouth like a girl's, and that he looked harmless. He smiled and said hello to an elderly woman who was sitting under an awning, fanning herself.

The bell tinkled over the front door and Zipper turned down the boom box and shouted from the back, "My cousin's next door."

But some crackers just don't listen.

"Hey, don't come around that counter, man," Zipper said. "Say, you not hearing me or something? The man who own this store ain't here right now."

"Sorry."

"Yeah, just stay out there in front. Everything gonna be cool."

"When's he gonna be back?"

"Maybe two or three minutes, like the sign on the door say."

"You play drums?"

There was a pause. "What you want in here, cracker?" Zipper asked.

"Your cousin's got a big tab with Jimmy Fig. He's got to pay the vig to the Fig."

Zipper got up from the stool he was sitting on and walked to the service counter. The counter was lined with secondhand garden tools that had been wire-brushed on a machine, sharpened, oiled, and repainted.

"Jimmy Fig don't lend money. He sells cooze," Zipper said.

"If you say so. I just go where they tell me."

"Don't grin at me, man."

"No problem."

"Hey, take your hand out where I can see it," Zipper said.

"I delivered the message. I'm going now. Have a good day."

"No, I want to show you something. This is a twenty-dollar gold piece. Bet you fifty dollars I can roll it across the top of my fingers three times without dropping it. I lose, I put in the gold piece, too. Damn, I just dropped it. You on, my man?"

"Fifty dollars? "Without touching it with the other hand?"

"You got it, bo."

"You give me the gold piece, too?"

"My word's solid, bo. Ask anybody about Zipper Clum."

"All right, there's my fifty bucks. This isn't a hustle, is it?"

Zipper smiled to himself and began working the gold piece across the tops of his fingers, the edges of the coin tucking into the crevices of skin and flipping over like magic. At the same time his left hand moved under the counter, where his cousin had nailed a leather holster containing a.38 revolver. Zipper felt his palm curve around the checkered wood handles and the smooth taper of the steel.

"Oops, I dropped it again. I done made you rich, cracker," he said, and slipped the.38 from the leather.

It was a good plan. It had always worked before, hadn't it? What was wrong?

His mind could not assimilate what had just happened. The gold piece had dropped off the tops of his fingers and bounced on the counter and rolled dryly across the wood. But the cracker had not been watching the coin. He had just stood there with that stupid grin on his face, that same, arrogant, denigrating white grin Zipper had seen all his life, the one that told him he was a dancing monkey, the unwanted child of a Jane's Alley whore.

He wanted to snap off a big one, right in the cracker's mouth, and blow the back of his head out like an exploding muskmelon.

But something was wrong in a way he couldn't focus on, like a dream that should illuminate all the dark corners of your consciousness but in daylight eludes your memory. His left hand wouldn't function. The coldness of the steel, the checkering on the grips had separated themselves from his palm. One side of him was lighter than the other, and he was off balance, as though the floor had tilted under his feet. He closed his eyes and saw the scene take place again, watching it now through a red skein on the backs of his eyelids, the cracker lifting a machete off the counter, one his cousin had honed on an emery wheel, swinging it across Zipper's forearm, chopping through tendon and bone like a butcher's cleaver.

Zipper stared down at the.38 and his severed arm and the fingers that now seemed to be trying to gather up the gold twenty-dollar piece from the countertop. Zipper's boom box was playing Louie Prima's "Sing, Sing, Sing," and he remembered a little boy on Bourbon Street stooping in mid-dance to catch the coins that bounced out of the cigar box by his feet and rolled across the sidewalk.

"It was supposed to be a clean hit. That's the way I work. So it's on you," the cracker said, and came quickly behind the counter and shoved Zipper to the floor.

The cracker pulled back the slide on a.25 automatic and bent over and pulled the trigger, straddling Zipper, his cowboy boots stenciling the floor with Zipper's blood. But the gun clicked and did not fire.

The cracker ejected the shell, then aimed the muzzle an inch from Zipper's forehead and shielded his face with one hand to avoid the splatter.

"You the trail back to Robicheaux's mama. You got a mouth like a girl. You got blue eyes. You got skin like milk. You never done no outside work. You six feet tall. Boy, you one badass motherfucker," Zipper said.

"You got that last part right," the cracker said.

It was funny how loud a.25 was. A couple of pops and you couldn't hear for an hour. The shooter recovered his empty brass and the ejected dud from the floor, pulled off his T-shirt, which was now splattered with blood, wiped off the machete's handle, and walked to his truck with his shirt wadded up in his hand.

Then something bothered him. What was it? He went back inside and kicked the boom box on the floor and smashed its guts out with his boot heel. Still, something wasn't right. Why had the pimp started taking his inventory? A mouth like a girl's? What was that stuff about somebody's mama? Maybe the pimp was a latent fudge packer. There was a lot of weirdness around these days. Well, that's the way the toilet flushed sometimes.

The old woman outside, who was deaf, waved to him as he twisted the steering wheel of his truck, a pocket comb in his teeth, and turned into the traffic.

MONDAY MORNING AN old-time NOPD homicide investigator named Dana Magelli sat down in my office and played the recording tape that had been recovered from the destroyed boom box at the murder scene off Magazine Street. Magelli had dark, close-clipped hair and dark skin and wore a neat mustache and still played an aggressive handball game three days a week at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Photos from the crime scene and a composite sketch of the shooter were spread on top of my desk.

"Why would Zipper call the hitter the trail back to your mother?" he asked.

"Zipper says 'Robicheaux' on the tape. He doesn't mention a first name. Why do you connect the tape to me?" I replied.