Purple Cane Road

Who are all these people in the jails?

Meltdowns of every stripe, pipeheads and intravenous junkies who use public institutions to clean their systems out so they can re-addict, recidivists looking for the womb, armed robbers willing to risk ten years for a sixty-dollar score at a 7-Eleven.

Also the twenty-three-hour lockdown crowd: sadists, serial killers, necrophiliacs, sex predators, and people who defy classification, what we used to call the criminally insane, those whose deeds are so dark their specifics are only hinted at in news accounts.

I could have interviewed the jigger named Steve Andropolis on Friday, the same day that Don Ritter did. But what was the point? At best Ritter was a self-serving bumbler who would try to control the interview for his own purposes, probably buy into Andropolis' manipulations, and taint any possibility of obtaining legitimate information from him. Moreover, Ritter was investigating a homicide and had a legal reach that I did not.

So I waited over the weekend and drove to Morgan City on Monday.

Just in time to see Andropolis' body being wheeled out of the jail on a gurney by two paramedics.

'What happened?' I asked the jailer.

''What happened?' he asks,' the jailer replied, as though a third party were in the room. He was a huge, head-shaved, granite-jawed man whose oversized pale blue suit looked like it was tailored from cardboard.

'I got people hanging out the windows. I got escapees going through air ducts. I got prisoners walking out the door with 'time served,' when they're not the guys supposed to be walking out the door,' he said.

He took a breath and picked up his cigar from his ashtray, then set it back down and cracked his knuckles like walnuts.

'I locked Andropolis in with eleven other prisoners. The cell's supposed to hold five. There's three bikers in that cell the devil wouldn't let scrub his toilet. There's a kid who puts broken glass in pet bowls. One guy shoots up speedballs with malt liquor. Those are the normal ones. You ask what happened? Somebody broke his thorax. The rest of them watched while he suffocated. Got any other questions?'

He scratched a kitchen match across the wood surface of his desk and relit his cigar, staring through the flame at my face.

The truth was I didn't care how Andropolis had died or even if he was dead. He was evil. He had been a jigger on hit teams, a supplier of guns to assassins, a man who, like a pimp or an eel attached to the side of a shark, thrived parasitically on both the suffering and darkness of others.

The following day Connie Deshotel called me at my office.

'I'm at my camp on the lake. Would you like to meet me here?' she said.

'What for?'

'I have a tape. A copy of Don Ritter's interview with Andropolis.'

'Ritter and Andropolis are a waste of time.'

'It's about your mother. Andropolis was there when she died. Listen to the details on the tape. If he's lying you'll know… Would you rather not do this, Dave? Tell me now.'

12

THAT EVENING CLETE and I drove to a boat landing outside Loreauville and put my outboard in the water and headed down the long, treelined canal into Lake Fausse Pointe. A sun shower peppered the lake, then the wind dropped and the air became still and birds rose out of the cypress and willows and gum trees against a blood-red sky.

The alligators sleeping on the banks were slick with mud and looked like they were sculpted out of black and green stone. The back of my neck felt hot, as though it had been burned by the sun, and my mouth was dry for no reason that I could explain, the way it used to be when I woke up with a whiskey hangover. Clete cut the engine and let the outboard float on its wake through a stand of cypress toward a levee and a tin-roofed stilt house that was shadowed by live oaks that must have been over a hundred years old.

'I'd shit-can this broad now. She's jerking your chain, Streak,' he said.

'What's she got to gain?'

'She was with NOPD in the old days. She's tight with that greasebag Ritter. You don't let Victor Charles get inside your wire.'

'What am I supposed to do, refuse to hear her tape?'

'Maybe I ought to shut up on this one,' he replied, and speared the paddle down through the hyacinths, pushing us in a cloud of mud onto the bank.

I walked up the slope of the levee, under the mossy overhang of the live oaks, and climbed the steps to the stilt house's elevated gallery. She met me at the door, dressed in a pair of platform sandals and designer jeans and a yellow pullover that hung on the points of her breasts. She held a spoon and a round, open container of yellow ice cream in her hands.

She looked past me down the slope to the water.

'Where's Bootsie?' she said.

'I figured this was business, Ms. Deshotel.'

'Would you please call me 'Connie'?… Is that Clete Purcel down there?'

'Yep.'

'Has he been house-trained?' she said, raising up on her tiptoes to see him better.

'Beg your pardon?' I said.

'He's unzippering himself in my philodendron.'

I followed her into her house. It was cheerful inside, filled with potted plants and bright surfaces to catch the sparse light through the trees. In the kitchen she spooned ice cream into the blender and added pitted cherries and bitters and orange slices and a cup of brandy. She flipped on the switch, smiling at me.

'I can't stay long, Connie,' I said.

'You have to try this.'

'I don't drink.'

'It's a dessert.'

'I'd like to hear the tape, please.'

'Boy, you are a pill,' she replied. Then her face seemed to grow with concern, almost as though it were manufactured for the moment. 'What's on that tape probably won't be pleasant for you to hear. I thought I'd make it a little easier somehow.'

She took a battery-powered tape player out of a drawer and placed it on the kitchen table and snapped down the play button with her thumb, her eyes watching my face as the recorded voices of Don Ritter and the dead jigger Steve Andropolis came through the speaker.

I stood by the screen window and gazed out at the lake while Andropolis described my mother's last hours and the hooker and pimp scam that brought about her death.

I wanted to shut out the words, live inside the wind in the trees and the light ruffling the lake's surface, listen to the hollow thunking of a pirogue rocking against a wood piling, or just watch Clete's broad back and thick arms and boyish expression as he flipped a lure with his spinning rod out into the dusk and retrieved it back toward the bank.

But even though he had been a parasite, an adverb and never a noun, Andropolis had proved in death his evil was sufficient to wound from beyond the grave.

'The guys who whacked her weren't cops. They were off-duty security guards or something. She had this dude named Mack with her. He told everybody he was a bouree dealer but he was her pimp. Him and Robicheaux's mother, if that's what she was, just worked the wrong two guys,' Andropolis' voice said.

As through a sepia-tinted lens I saw wind gusting on a dirt road that lay like a trench inside a sea of sugarcane. Black clouds roiled in the sky; a red and white neon Jax sign swung on a metal pole in front of a dance hall. Behind the dance hall was a row of cabins that resembled ancient slave quarters, and each tiny gallery was lit with a blue bulb. In slow motion I saw my mother, her body obese with beer fat, lead a drunk man from the back