James Burke: Purple Cane Road

"This is Dave Robicheaux. He's a homicide detective in Iberia Parish," Clete said. "He's a friend of Letty Labiche."

She tilted up her profile and pursed her lips and brushed back her hair with her fingers. She had on heels, and her rump and the backs of her thighs were taut against her shorts.

"How about flexing your brain instead of your stuff for a change?" Clete said.

"What he want wit' me?" she said.

"Why would you keep all those newspaper clippings about Letty?" I asked.

"They for Zipper," she replied.

"You know how Zipper got his name? He carved all over a girl's face with a razor blade," Clete said to her.

"We still love you, Fat Man. Everybody down here do," she said.

"I hate this job," Clete said.

I placed my hands lightly on the tops of Little Face's arms. For a moment the cocaine glaze went out of her eyes.

"Letty Labiche is probably going to be executed. A lot of people think that shouldn't happen. Do you know something that can help her?" I said.

Her mouth was small and red, and she puckered her lips uncertainly, her eyes starting to water now. She pulled out of my grasp and turned away.

"I got an allergy. It makes me sneeze all the time," she said.

The mantel over the small fireplace was decorated with blue and red glass candle containers. I stooped down and picked up a burned newspaper photo of Letty from the hearth. Her image looked like it was trapped inside a charcoal-stained transparency. A puff of wind blew through the door, and the newspaper broke into ash that rose in the chimney like gray moths.

"You been working some juju, Little Face?" I asked.

'"Cause I sell out of my pants don't mean I'm stupid and superstitious." Then she said to Clete, "You better go, Fat Man. Take your friend wit' you, too. You ain't funny no more."

Sunday morning I went to Mass with my wife, Bootsie, and my adopted daughter, Alafair, then I drove out to the Labiche home on the bayou.

Passion Labiche was raking pecan leaves in the backyard and burning them in a rusty barrel. She wore men's shoes and work pants and a rumpled cotton shirt tied under her breasts. She heard my footsteps behind her and grinned at me over her shoulder. Her olive skin was freckled, her back muscular from years of field work. In looking at the brightness of her face, you would not think she grieved daily on the plight of her sister. But grieve she did, and I believed few people knew to what degree.

She dropped a rake-load of wet leaves and pecan husks on the fire, and the smoke curled out of the barrel in thick curds like damp sulfur burning. She fanned her face with a magazine.

"I found a twenty-year-old hooker in New Orleans who seems to have a big emotional investment in your sister's case. Her name's Little Face Dautrieve. She's originally from New Iberia," I said.

"I don't guess I know her," she said.

"How about a pimp named Zipper Clum?"

"Oh, yes. You forget Zipper about as easy as face warts," she said, and made a clicking sound and started raking again.

"Where do you know him from?" I said.

"My parents were in the life. Zipper Clum's been at it a long time." Then her eyes seemed to go empty as though she were looking at a thought in the center of her mind. "What'd you find out from this black girl?"

"Nothing."

She nodded, her eyes still translucent, empty of anything I could read. Then she said, "The lawyers say we still got a chance with the Supreme Court. I wake up in the morning and think maybe it's all gonna be okay. We'll get a new trial, a new jury, the kind you see on television, full of people who turn abused women loose. Then I fix coffee and the day's full of spiders."

I stared at her back while she raked. She stopped and turned around.

"Something wrong?" she said.

"I didn't mention Little Face Dautrieve was black," I said.

She removed a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth. Her skin looked dry and cool inside the smoke from the fire, her hands resting on the rake, her shoulders erect.

"What are the odds she work for Zipper and she white?" she said.

When I didn't reply her eyes wandered out into the yard.

"I'll stay in touch," I said finally.

"You bet, good-looking man, you."

I operated A BOAT-rental and bait business on the bayou down toward Avery Island, south of New Iberia. The house my father had built of cypress sat up on a slope above the dirt road, its wide gallery and rusted corrugated roof shaded by live-oak and pecan trees. The beds were planted with roses, impatiens, hydrangeas, and hibiscus, and we had a horse lot for Alafair's Ap-paloosa and a rabbit hutch and a duck pond at the foot of the backyard. From the gallery we could look down through the tree trunks in the yard to the dock and concrete boat ramp and the bait shop and the swamp on the far side. At sunset I pulled back the awning on the guy wires that ran above the dock and turned on the string of overhead lights and you could see the bream feeding on the insects around the pilings and the water hyacinths that grew in islands among the cypress knees. Every night the sky over the Gulf danced with heat lightning, white sheets of it that rippled silently through hundreds of miles of thunderheads in the wink of an eye.

I loved the place where I lived and the house my father had built and notched and grooved and pegged with his hands, and I loved the people I lived with in the house.

Sunday night Bootsie and I ate supper on the picnic table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. The wind was balmy and smelled of salt and fish spawning, and the moon was up and I could see the young sugarcane blowing in my neighbor's field.

Bootsie set out a tray of deviled eggs and sliced ham and onions and tomatoes on the table and poured two glasses full of crushed ice and sun tea and put sprigs of mint in them. Her hair was the color of honey and she had cut it so it was short and thick on the back of her neck. She had the most lovely complexion of any woman I had ever known. It had the pinkness of a rose petal when the rose first opens into light, and a faint flush came into her cheeks and throat when she made love or when she was angry.

"You saw Passion Labiche today?" she asked.

"Yeah. It bothered me a little bit, too," I said.

"Why?"

"A hooker in New Orleans, a bail skip Clete ran down, had saved all these clippings about Letty. I asked Passion if she knew her. She said she didn't, but then she slipped and referred to the girl as being black. Why would she want to lie?"

"Maybe she was just making an assumption."

"People of color usually make derogatory assumptions about their own race?" I said.

"All right, smart," she said.

"Sorry."

She hit the top of my hand with her spoon. Just then the phone rang in the kitchen.

I went inside and picked it up.

"I got the word on Zipper Clum. He's going to be in a fuck pad in Baton Rouge about two hours from now. Out towards where Highland Road runs into the highway… You there?" Clete said.

"Yeah. I'm just a little tired."

"I thought you wanted the gen on those news clippings."

"Can we nail this guy another time?"

"The Zip's a moving target," he said.

I PUT my army-issue.45 that I had brought home from Vietnam on the seat of my truck and took the four-lane to Lafayette, then caught I-10 across the Atchafalaya Basin. The wind came up and it started to rain, dimpling the bays on each side of the causeway. The islands of willows and flooded cypress were in early leaf, whipping in the wind, and there was a hard chop in the bays that broke against the pilings of abandoned oil platforms. I crossed the Atchafalaya River, which had swollen over its banks into the woods, then the wetlands began to fall behind me and I was driving through pasture and farmland again and up ahead I could see the bridge across the Mississippi and the night glow of Baton Rouge against the sky.