Purple Cane Road

a free glass of domestic wine with the special; young white couples without geographical origins or means of support who lived in walk-ups with no air-conditioning and strolled the sidewalks with no apparent destination; and the men whose thoughts made them wake each morning with a longing that seldom found satiation.

I walked down the alley and entered Maggie Glick's through the back door. It was crowded and dark and unbearably frigid inside. She was behind the bar, fixing a drink in a Collins glass, talking to a white man in a business suit. She had woven glass Mardi Gras beads into her hair and she wore a white knit blouse that exposed the roses tattooed on the tops of her breasts. The man did not sit but stood and grinned while she talked, his back stiff, his eyes drifting down the bar to a mulatto girl who could not have been older than eighteen.

His eyes met mine and he fiddled with a college or fraternity ring of some kind on his finger and turned his face away, as though he had heard a sudden noise outside, and walked down to the far end of the bar, then glanced back at me again and went out the door.

'My competition send you 'round?' Maggie asked.

'Johnny Remeta says he was never in here. He says you were lying,' I said.

'You a sober, thinking man now. Let me ax you a question. Why would I lie and tell you a man like that was a customer? 'Cause it gonna be good for my bid-ness?'

'That's why I believe you.'

'Do say?'

'Where can I find him?' I asked.

'He used to come in here. He don't now. Man shop for the trade in here got to be functional, know what I mean.”

“No.'

'That boy get off with a gun. And it ain't in his pants. Here, drink a free soda. I'll bag it to go.'

'Jim Gable sprung you from St. Gabriel, Maggie?'

'I got sprung 'cause I was innocent. Have a good night, darlin',' she said, and turned her back to me, lighting a cigarette. Her hair was jet black, her skin as golden as a coin in the flare of light.

I walked toward the front of the building and was about to push open the door onto the street when I saw a muscular blond man in a pale blue suit with white piping on the lapels at the corner of the bar. His hair was clipped and combed neatly on the side of his head, one eye like a small marble inside the nodulous skin growth on the right side of his face.

'I thought maybe you'd gone back to New Mexico, Micah,' I said.

He had a long-neck bottle of beer and a shot glass in front of him, and he sipped from the shot, then drank a small amount of beer afterward, like a man who loves a vice so dearly he fears his appetite for it will one day force him to give it up.

'The heavyweight champion of the Shrimp Festival,' he said.

I sat down next to him and took a peanut out of a plastic bowl on the bar and cracked the shell and put the nut in my mouth.

'You ever see a guy by the name of Johnny Remeta in here?' I asked.

'What would you give to find out?'

'Not much.'

He lifted the shot glass again and tipped it into his mouth.

'I might buy half of a carnival. What do you think of that?' he said.

'Maybe you can give me a job. I got bumped from the department after I punched out Jim Gable.'

He watched an overweight, topless girl in heels and a sequined G-string walk out on a tiny stage behind the bar.

'Miss Cora give you a severance package?' I said.

'The smart man squeezes the man who milks the cow. That don't mean anything to you. But maybe one day it will,' he said.

'Really?' I said.

'You're an ignorant man.'

'You're probably right,' I said, and slapped him on the back and caused him to spill his drink on his wrist.

I went outside and walked down to the old docks and pilings on the waterfront. It was dark now, and rain was falling on the river and I could see the nightglow of New Orleans on the far bank and, to the south, green trees flattening in the wind and the brown swirl of the current as it flowed around a wide bend toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Somewhere down on that southern horizon my father's rig had blown out and he had hooked his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and bailed off the top of the derrick into the darkness. His bones and hard hat and steel- toed boots were still out there, shifting in the tidal currents, and I truly believed that in one way or another his brave spirit was out there as well.

The cops who had murdered my mother had rolled her body into a bayou, as contemptuous of her in death as they were of her in life. But eventually her body must have drifted southward into the salt water, and now I wanted to believe she and Big Al were together under the long, green roll of the Gulf, all their inadequacies washed away, their souls just beginning the journey they could not take together on earth.

The rain was blowing hard in the streets when I walked back to my truck, and the neon above the bars looked like blue and red smoke in the mist. I heard men fighting in a poolroom and I thought of Big Aldous Robicheaux and Mae Guillory and the innocence of a world in which inarticulate people could not tell one another adequately of either their pain or the yearnings of their hearts.

29

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of roses. I saw the sheriff trimming them in his garden and I saw them tattooed on Maggie Glick's breasts. I saw them painted in miniature on the vase Johnny Remeta had given Alafair. I also saw the rose with green leaves that was tattooed on the neck of Letty Labiche.

But just as I woke and was momentarily between all the bright corridors of sleep and the grayness of the dawn, the flowers disappeared from the dream and I saw a collection of Civil War photographs on a library table, the pages flipping in the wind that blew through the open window.

I wanted to dismiss the dream and its confused images, but it lingered with me through the day. And maybe because the change of the season was at hand, I could almost hear a clock ticking for a sexually abused woman waiting to die in St. Gabriel Prison.

On Monday morning I was out at the firing range with Helen Soileau. I watched her empty her nine-millimeter at a paper target, her ear protectors clamped on her head. When the breech locked open, she pulled off her ear protectors and slipped a fresh magazine into the butt of her automatic and replaced it in her holster and began picking up her brass.

'You're dead-on this morning,' I said.

'I'm glad somebody is.'

'Excuse me?'

'You're off-planet. I have to say everything twice to you before you hear me,' she said, chewing gum.

'Where'd you see Passion Labiche?'

'I told you. Going into that fortune-telling and tattoo place in Lafayette.'

'What for?'

'Ask her.'

'You brought up the subject, Helen.'

'Yeah. And I dropped it. Two days ago,' she said. I went back to the office and called Dana Magelli at NOPD.

'I've got a lead for you,' I said.

'I see. You're doing general oversight on our cases now?' he replied.

'Hear me out, Dana. Johnny Remeta told me he was going to squeeze the people who killed my mother.'

'Are you kidding me? You're in personal contact with I an escaped felon who's murdered two police