Purple Cane Road

According to Johnny, a couple of pedophiles would use him while the old man got drunk on their tab. Family values hadn't made a big splash in the Detroit area yet.'

'So he's hung up over his father?'

'You got it all wrong, Mr. Robicheaux. He doesn't blame the father for what happened to him. He thinks the mother betrayed him. He's never gotten over what he perceives as her failure.'

'He's making overtures to my daughter.'

There was no response.

'Are you there?' I asked.

'You're asking me to tell you his future? My bet is Johnny will do himself in one day. But he'll probably take others with him,' the psychologist said.

The next morning I drove to Baton Rouge and went to Connie Deshotel's office. The secretary told me Connie used her lunch hour on Thursdays to play racquet-ball at a nearby club.

The club was dazzling white, surrounded with palm trees that were planted in white gravel; the swimming pool in back was an electric blue under the noon sun. Inside the building, I looked down through a viewing glass onto the hardwood floor of a racquetball court and watched Connie take apart her male opponent. She wore tennis shoes with green tubes of compressed air molded into the rubber soles, a pleated tennis skirt, and a sleeveless yellow jersey that was ringed under the neck and arms with sweat. Her tanned calves hardened with muscle when she bent to make a kill shot.

Her opponent, a tall, graying, athletic man, gave it up, shook hands good-naturedly, and left. She bounced the rubber ball once, served the ball to herself off the wall, then fired it into a low ricochet that sent it arching over her head, as though she were involved in a private celebration of her victory. Her eyes followed the ball's trajectory until they met mine. Then her face tightened, and she pushed her hair out of her eyes and left the court through a door in the back wall, slamming it behind her. I went down the stairs and intercepted her in the lounge area.

'I have some information about my mother's death,'

I said.

'Not here.'

'You're not going to put me off, Connie.'

'What is it?'

I gestured at a table.

'I'm leaving here in two minutes. But I'll make you a promise. You follow me anywhere again and I'll have you arrested,' she said.

'I have a witness.'

'To what?'

'My mother's murder. Two cops in uniform did it. In front of a cabin a few miles off Purple Cane Road in Lafourche Parish. One of them called her an ignorant bitch before he knocked her down.'

Her eyes stared into mine, unblinking, her lashes like black wire. Then they broke and she looked at nothing and pulled the dampness of her jersey off the tops of her breasts.

'Bring your witness forward,' she said.

'Nope.'

'Why not?'

'I think the individual would end up dead,' I said.

'You don't want to indicate the person's gender to me? I'm the attorney general of the state. What's the matter with you?'

'You trust Don Ritter. I don't. I think he tried to have both me and Johnny Remeta killed.'

She motioned at a black waiter in a white jacket. He nodded and began pouring a club soda into a glass of ice for her. She touched the sweat off her eyes with a towel and hung the towel around her neck.

'I'll say it again. My office is at your disposal. But a lot of this sounds like paranoia and conspiratorial obsession,' she said.

'The cops were NOPD.' 'How do you know this?'

'They killed a Lafourche Parish nightclub owner named Ladrine Theriot and made a local constable take the weight. They weren't backwoods coon-asses, either. They were enforcers and bagmen for the Giacanos. So if they weren't New Orleans cops, where did they come from?'

She took the club soda from the waiter's hand and drank it half-empty. The heat seemed to go out of her face but not her eyes.

'You have a larger agenda, Dave. I think it has something to do with me,' she said.

'Not me. By the way, you play a mean game of racquetball for a woman who smokes.'

'How kind.'

'The other day I noticed your gold and leather cigarette lighter. Did Jim Gable give you that? Y'all must be pretty tight.'

She got up from the table with her club soda in her hand.

'My apologies to Bootsie for saying this, but you're the most annoying person I've ever met,' she said, and walked toward the dressing room, her pleated skirt swishing across the tops of her thighs.

'You READ my MAIL?' Alafair said. It was evening, the sun deep down in the trees now, and she was grooming Tex, her Appaloosa, in the railed lot by his shed. She stared at me across his back.

'The letter was lying on your bed. Bootsie saw Johnny's name on it. It was inadvertent,' I replied.

'You didn't have the right to read it.' 'Maybe not. Maybe you know what you're doing. But I believe he's a dangerous man.'

'Not the Johnny O'Roarke I know.'

'You always stood up for your friends, Alafair. But this guy is not a friend. The prison psychologist said he's a sick man who will probably die by his own hand and take other people with him.'

'Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.'

'How about it on the language?'

'You admit he saved our lives, but you run him down and take his head apart, a person you don't know anything about, then you tell me to watch my language. I just don't expect crap like that from my father.'

'Has he tried to see you?'

'I'm not going to tell you. It's none of your business.'

'Remeta's a meltdown, Alf.'

'Don't call me that stupid name! God!' she said, and threw down the brush she had been using on Tex and stormed inside the house.

That night I DREAMED about a sugar harvest in the late fall and mule-drawn wagons loaded with cane moving through the fog toward the mill. The dirt road was frozen hard and littered with stalks of sugarcane, and the fog rolled out of the unharvested cane on each side of the road like colorless cotton candy and coated the mules' and drivers' backs with moisture. Up ahead the tin outline of the mill loomed against the grayness of the sky, and inside I could hear the sounds of boilers overheating and iron machines that pulverized the cane into pulp. Immediately behind the mill a stubble fire burned in a field, creeping in serpentine red lines through the mist.

The dream filled me with a fear I could not explain. But I knew, with a terrible sense of urgency, I could not allow myself to go farther down the road, into the mill and the grinding sounds of its machinery and the fire and curds of yellow smoke that rose from the field beyond.

The scene changed, and I was on board my cabin cruiser at dawn, on West Cote Blanche Bay, and the fogbank was heavy and cold on the skin, sliding with the tide into the coastline. To the north I could see Avery Island, like two green humps in the mist, as smooth and firm-looking as a woman's breasts. The waves burst in strings of foam against the white sleekness of the bow, and I could smell the salt spray inside my head and bait fish in a bucket and the speckled trout that arched out of the waves and left circles like rain rings in the stillness of the swells.

When I woke I went into the kitchen and sat in the dark, my loins aching and my palms tingling on my thighs. I