Purple Cane Road

or on your TV show. Y'all can take my remarks any damn way you want, but by God I'm gonna do what my conscience tells me. If that don't sit right with somebody, they can chase a possum up a gum stump.'

An aide stepped close to Belmont and spoke into his ear. Belmont 's face had the flatness of a guilty man staring into a strobe light. It didn't take long for the viewer to realize that a rare moment had come and gone.

Belmont blinked and his mouth flexed uncertainly before he spoke again.

'I'm an elected official. I'm gonna do my duty to the people of Lou'sana. That means when the appeals is over, I got to uphold the law. I don't got personal choices… That's it. There's complimentary food and drink on a table in the back of the room.' He swallowed and looked into space, his face empty and bloodless, as though the words he had just spoken had been said by someone else.

The next morning I read the coroner's report on the death of Vachel Carmouche. It was signed by a retired pathologist named Ezra Cole, a wizened, part-time deacon in a fundamentalist congregation made up mostly of Texas oil people and North Louisiana transplants. He had worked for the parish only a short time eight or nine years ago. But I still remembered the pharmacy he had owned in the Lafayette Medical Center back in the 1960s. He would not allow people of color to even stand in line with whites, requiring them instead to wait in the concourse until no other customers were inside.

I found him at his neat gray and red bungalow out by Spanish Lake, sanding a boat that was inverted on saw-horses. His wife was working in the garden behind the picket fence, a sunbonnet on her head. Their lawn was emerald green from soak hoses and liquid nitrogen, their bamboo and banana trees bending in their backyard against the blueness of the lake. But in the midst of this bucolic tranquillity, Ezra Cole waged war against all fashion and what he saw as the erosion of moral tradition.

'You're asking me how blood got on the ceiling and the wall by the stove? The woman slung it all over the place,' he said.

He wore suspenders over a white dress shirt and rubber boots with the pants tucked inside. His face was narrow and choleric, his eyes busy with angry thoughts that seemed to have less to do with my questions than concerns he carried with him as a daily burden.

'The pattern was too thin. Also, I don't know how she could throw blood on the ceiling from a heavy tool like a mattock,' I said.

'Ask me how she knocked the eyeball out of his head. The answer is she probably has the strength of three men. Maybe she was full of dope.'

'The drug screen says she wasn't.'

'Then I don't know.'

'Was there a second weapon, Doctor?'

'It's all in the report. If you want to help that woman, pray for her soul, 'cause I don't buy death row conversions.

'I think the blood on the ceiling was thrown there by a knife or barber's razor or weed sickle,' I said.

His face darkened; his eyes glanced sideways at his wife. His hand pinched hard into my arm.

'Step over here with me,' he said, pushing and walking with me toward my truck.

'Excuse me, but take your hand off my person, Dr. Cole.'

'You hear my words, Mr. Robicheaux. I know Vachel Carmouche's relatives. They don't need to suffer any more than they have. There's nothing that requires a pathologist to exacerbate the pain of the survivors. Are you understanding me, sir?'

'You mean you lied on an autopsy?'

'Watch your tongue.'

'There was a second weapon? Which means there might have been a second killer.'

'He was sexually mutilated. While he was still alive. What difference does it make what kind of weapon she used? The woman's depraved. You're trying to get her off? Where's your common sense, man?'

At sunset that same day Batist phoned up from the dock.

'Dave, there's a man down here don't want to come up to the house,' he said.

'Why not?'

'Hang on.' I heard Batist put the receiver down on the counter, walk away from it, then scrape it up in his hand again. 'He's outside where he cain't hear me. I t'ink he's a sad fellow 'cause of his face.'

'Is his name Mike or Micah or something like that?'

'I'll go ax.'

'Never mind. I'll be right down.'

I walked down the slope toward the dock. A purple haze hung in the trees, and birds lifted on the wind that blew across the dead cypress in the swamp. The man who was the chauffeur for Cora Gable was leaning on the rail at the end of the dock, looking out at the bayou, his face turned into the shadows. His shirtsleeves were rolled and his biceps were tattooed with coiled green and red snakes whose fangs were arched into their own tails.

'You're Micah?' I said.

'That's right.'

'Can I help you?' I asked.

'Maybe you can Ms. Perez.'

'Jim Gable's wife?'

'I call her by her screen name. The man who marries her ought to take her name, not the other way around.'

His right eye glimmered, barely visible behind the nodulous growth that deformed the side of his face and exposed the teeth at the corner of his mouth. His hair was straw-colored and neatly barbered and combed, as though his personal grooming could negate the joke nature had played upon him.

'It's all about a racetrack. Outside of Luna Mescalero, New Mexico,' he said.

'Pardon?'

'Mr. Gable got her to buy a spread out there. He's building a racetrack. He's been trying to do it for years. That's where I'm from. I was a drunkard, a carnival man, what they call the geek act, before that woman come into my life.'

'She seems like a special person,' I said.

He turned his face into the glow of the electric lights and looked me directly in the eyes.

'I did nine months on a county road gang, Mr. Robicheaux. One day I sassed a hack and he pulled me behind the van and caned knots all over my head. When I tried to get up he spit on me and jabbed me in the ribs and whipped me till I cried. Ms. Perez seen it from her front porch. She called the governor of New Mexico and threatened to walk in his office with a reporter and slap his face unless I was released from jail. She give me a job and an air-conditioned brick cottage to live in when other people would hide their children from me.'

'I don't know what I can do, Micah. Not unless Jim Gable has committed a crime of some kind.'

He chewed the skin on the ball of his thumb.

'A man who doesn't respect one woman, won't respect another,' he said.

'Excuse me?'

He looked out into the shadows again, his head twisting back and forth on his neck, as though searching for words that would not injure.

'He speaks disrespectfully of Ms. Perez in front of other men. She's not the only one. Is your wife's first name Bootsie?'

'Yes,' I replied, the skin tightening around my temples.

'He said dirty things about her to a cop named Rit-ter. They laughed about her.'

'I think it's time for you to go.'

He splayed open his hand, like a fielder's glove, and stared at it and wiped dirt off the heel with the tips of his fingers.

'I've been told to get off better places. I come here on account of Ms. Perez. If you won't stand up for your wife, it's your own damn business,' he said, and brushed past me, his arm grazing against mine.

'You hold on,' I said, and lifted my finger at him. 'If you've got a beef to square with Jim Gable, you do it on