Purple Cane Road

the Ten Commandments still smoking in his hands. God had just talked to him from the burning bush, but Moses saw fit to put them people to death.'

'I'm not following you, Belmont.'

'I've signed death warrants on a half dozen men. Every one of them was a vicious killer and to my mind deserved no mercy. But I'm sorely troubled by the case of this Labiche woman.'

I lay my rod across the gunnels of the boat. 'Why?' I asked.

'Why? She's a woman, for God's sakes.'

'That's it?'

He fanned a mosquito out of his face.

'No, that's not it. The minister at my church knows her and says her conversion's the real thing. That maybe she's one of them who's been chosen to carry the light of God. I got enough on my conscience without going up to judgment with that woman's death on me.'

'I know a way out.'

'How?'

'Refuse to execute anyone. Cut yourself loose from the whole business.'

He threw his rod and reel against the trunk of a cypress and watched it sink through a floating curtain of algae.

'Send me a bill for that, will you?' he said.

'You can bet on it,' I replied.

'Dave, I'm the governor of the damn state. I cain't stand up in front of an auditorium full of police officers and tell them I won't sign a death warrant 'cause I'm afraid I'll go to hell.'

'Is there another reason?'

He turned his face into the shadows for a moment. He rubbed the curls on the back of his neck.

'Some people say I might have a shot at vice president. It ain't a time to be soft on criminals, particularly one who's chopped up an ex-state trooper.'

'I don't know what to tell you,' I said, trying to conceal the disappointment in my voice.

He beat at the air with both hands. 'I'm gonna call the Mosquito Control down here and bomb this whole place,' he said. 'Lord God Almighty, I thought liquor and women's thighs were an addiction. Son, they don't hold a candle to ambition.'

The next morning a young black woman walked through the front door of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and down the hall to my office and tapped on the glass with one ringed finger. She wore a lavender shirt and white blouse and lavender pumps, and carried a baby in diapers on her shoulder.

'Little Face?' I said when I opened the door.

'I'm moving back here. Out at my auntie's place in the quarters at Loreauville. I got to tell you something,' she said, and walked past me and sat down before I could reply.

'What's up?' I said.

'Zipper Clum is what's up. He say he gonna do you and Fat Man both.'

'Clete Purcel is 'Fat Man'?'

'Fat Man shamed him, slapped his face up on that roof, throwed his pimp friends crashing down through a tree. I ax Zipper why he want to hurt you. He say you tole some people Zipper was snitching them off.'

'Which people?'

She rolled her eyes. 'Zipper's gonna tell me that? He's scared. Somebody done tole him he better clean up his own mess or Zipper ain't gonna be working his street corners no more. Anybody who can scare Zipper Clum is people I wouldn't want on my case.'

She shifted her baby to her other shoulder.

'You're an intelligent lady, Little Face.'

'That's why I'm on welfare and living with my auntie in the quarters.'

'The day Vachel Carmouche was killed a black girl of about twelve was turning an ice cream crank on his gallery. That was eight years ago. You're twenty, aren't you?'

'You been thinking too much. You ought to go jogging with Fat Man, hep him lose weight, find something useful for you to do so you don't tire out your brain all the time.'

'What happened inside Vachel Carmouche's house that night? Why won't you tell me?'

'He wanted to live real bad, that's what happened. But he didn't find no mercy 'cause he didn't deserve none. You ax me, a man like that don't find no mercy in the next world, either.'

'You saw him killed, didn't you?'

'Mine to know.'

'Did he molest you? Is that why Letty came to Carmouche's back door that night?'

Her small face seemed to cloud with thought.

'I got to come up wit' a name for you. Maybe an Indian one, something like 'Man Who's Always Axing Questions and Don't Listen.' That's probably too long, though, huh? I'll work on it.'

'That's real wit,' I said.

'It ain't your grief, Sad Man. Stay out of it before you do real damage to somebody. About Zipper? Some snakes rattle before they bite. Zipper don't. He's left-handed. So he's gonna be doing something wit' his right hand, waving it around in the air, taking things in and out of his pockets. You gonna be watching that hand while he's grinning and talking. Then his left hand gonna come at you just like a snake's head. Pow, pow, pow. I ain't lyin', Sad Man. '

'If Vachel Carmouche molested you, we'd have corroborating evidence that he molested Letty and Passion,' I said.

'I got to feed my baby now. Tell Fat Man what I said. It won't be no fun if he ain't around no more,' she said.

She rose from her chair and hefted her baby higher on her shoulder and walked back out the door, her face oblivious to the cops in the hall whose eyes cut sideways at her figure.

Connie Deshotel was the attorney general of Louisiana. Newspaper accounts about her career always mentioned her blue-collar background and the fact she had attended night school at the University of New Orleans while working days as a patrolwoman. She graduated in the upper five percent of her law class at LSU. She never married, and instead became one of those for whom civil service is an endless ladder into higher and higher levels of success.

I had met her only once, but when I called her office in Baton Rouge Wednesday afternoon she agreed to see me the next day. Like her boss, Belmont Pugh, Connie Deshotel was known as an egalitarian. Or at least that was the image she worked hard to convey.

Olive-skinned, with metallic-colored hair that had been burned blond on the ends by the sun, she was dressed in a gray suit with a silver angel pinned on her lapel. When I entered her office, her legs were crossed and her hand was poised with a pen above a document on her desk, like a figure in a painting who emanates a sense of control, repose, and activity at the same time.

But unlike Belmont Pugh, the sharecropper populist who was so untraveled and naive he believed the national party would put a bumbling peckerwood on its ticket, Connie Deshotel's eyes took your inventory, openly, with no apology for the invasion of your person and the fact you were being considered as a possible adversary.

'We met once, years ago, during Mardi Gras,' she said.

My gaze shifted off hers. 'Yeah, I was still with NOPD. You were in the city administration,' I said.

She touched a mole at the corner of her mouth with a fingertip.

'I was drunk. I was escorted out of a meeting you were chairing,' I said.

She smiled faintly, but her eyes hazed over, as though I were already disappearing as a serious event in her day.

'What can I do for you, Detective Robicheaux? That's your grade, detective, right?' she asked.

'Yeah. An informant told me two cops on a pad for the Giacanos killed a woman in Lafourche Parish in 1966 or '67. Her maiden name was Mae Guillory.'