James Burke: Purple Cane Road

"A political fuck named Jim Gable. He's an insider at City Hall. He was in uniform at NOPD before we came along."

"A City Hall insider is extorting sexual favors from a street hooker?"

"This guy's had his Johnson out for thirty years. You want to brace him?"

"You up for it?" I asked.

Clete thought about it. "He's on vacation, over at his home in Lafourche Parish." Clete pressed his palms together and twisted them back and forth, the calluses scraping audibly. "Yeah, I'm up for it," he said.

We drove out of the city, south, to Bayou Lafourche, then followed the state highway almost to Timbalier Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. We turned down a dirt road through farmland and clusters of paintless cabins and clearings in the sugarcane that were filled with tin-roofed sheds and farm equipment. It was late afternoon now, and the wind had kicked up and the cane was blowing in the fields. Clouds moved across the sun and I could smell rain and salt in the air and the odor of dead animals in the ditches. Off in the distance, silhouetted against the dull shimmer of the bay, was a three-story coffee-colored, purple-tiled house surrounded by palm trees.

"How's a cop own a house like that?" I asked.

"It's easy if you marry an alcoholic with heart disease in her family," Clete said. "Stop up at that grocery. I'm going to have a beer and shot. This guy turns my stomach."

"How about easing up, Clete?"

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.

"Fortunately it's not my obligation to argue with them," Gable replied. "On another subject, would you care to look at my collection of ordnance?" He was grinning again now, his callousness or meanness of spirit or whatever moral vacuity that seemed to define him once more hidden in the smiling mask that he wore like ceramic.

"Another time," I said.

But he wasn't listening. He pushed open two oak doors with big brass handles on them. The inside of the room was filled with glass gun cases, the walls hung with both historical and modern weapons. One mahogany rack alone contained eight AK-47 rifles. On a table under it was a huge glass jar, the kind used in old-time drugstores, filled with a yellow fluid. Gable tapped on the lid with his fingernail so the object inside vibrated slightly and moved against the glass.

I felt a spasm constrict the lining of my stomach.

"That's a V.C. head. My cousin brought it back. He was in the Phoenix Program," Gable said.

"We've got all we need here," Clete said to me.

"Have I offended you?" Gable asked.

"Not us. I wish you'd made it over there, Jim. It was your kind of place," Clete said.

Clete and I both turned to go and almost collided into Gable's wife. She wore a white silk robe and silver slippers and supported herself on a cane with a rubber-stoppered tripod on it. Her rouged cheeks and lipstick made me think of cosmetics applied in a desperate fashion to a papier-mache doll. Her yellow hair was like wisps of corn silk. When she smoothed it back, lifting it coyly into place, her temples pulsed with tiny blue veins.

"Have you invited the gentlemen for a late supper?" she asked her husband.

"They're just here on business, Cora. They're leaving now," Gable replied.

"I apologize for not coming out to welcome you. I didn't realize you were here," she said.

"That's quite all right," I said.

"You mustn't pay attention to Jim's war souvenirs. They were given to him or he purchased them. He's a gentle man by nature," she said.

"Yes, ma'am,", I said.

She placed her hand in mine. It had no more weight or density than a bird's wing.

"We'd love to see you again, sir," she said. Her fingers tightened on mine, her eyes more than earnest.

The sky was dark and streaked with rain when Clete and I went back outside. The air smelled of ozone and schooled-up fish out in the bay. Lightning leaped from the horizon to the top of the sky, and I looked out at the pale green color of the sugarcane blowing in the wind and at the crossroads in the distance where we had stopped at the general store next to the abandoned nightclub with the cabins in back, and I remembered when I had been there before.