Purple Cane Road

Axel's occasional girlfriend, a barmaid named Cherry Butera, said he'd been depressed since Jimmy Burgoyne was killed in that shooting on the Atchafalaya. He'd taken a couple of vacation days, and he and the girlfriend had driven down to Grand Isle. A storm was tearing up the Gulf and the sky had turned green and the surf was wild and yellow with churning sand.

"There's a Nazi sub out there. The Coast Guard sunk it with planes in '42," he said. "I wish I'd been alive back then."

"What for?" she asked.

"I would have been there. I would have been part of all that," he replied.

They drove back to New Orleans in the rain and drank beer in a small pizza joint two blocks from his house. Banana trees thrashed against the side of the building, and the shadows from the neon signs in the windows cascaded like water down Axel's face.

"Somebody's following me," he said.

"You're blaming yourself because you weren't there when Jimmy was killed," his girlfriend said.

He looked at her a moment, then his eyes disco

"I saw somebody outside my window. He was behind us on the road tonight," he said.

"The road was empty, hon. The bad guys are afraid of you. Everybody knows that."

"I wish Jimmy was here. I wish he wasn't dead," he said.

At 11 p.m. they went out the back of the cafe and walked down the alley toward his car. Rain blew in a vortex from a streetlight out by the sidewalk, and the palm trees between the garages filled with wind and raked against the wood walls.

The man waiting in the shadows wore a wide hat and a black raincoat with the collar up. The piece of lumber he held in his hands was thick and square and probably three feet long. Leaves clung wetly to his shoulders and hat, so that he looked like an extension of the hedge when he stepped into the alley. He swung the piece of lumber with both hands, as he would a baseball bat, into Axel's face.

Axel crashed backwards into a row of garbage cans, his forehead veined with blood and water. Then the man in the wide hat leaned over and drove the piece of lumber into Axel's throat and the side of his head.

The man stood erect, water sluicing off his hat brim, his face a dark oval against the streetlight at the end of the alley.

"Haul freight, unless you want the same," he said to the woman.

She turned and ran, twisting her face back toward the hatted man, her flats splashing through puddles that were iridescent with engine oil. The hatted man tossed the piece of lumber in the hedge, then picked up a whiskey bottle and broke it against the side of a garage.

He stooped over Axel's body, the streetlight glinting on the jagged shell of the bottle, his extended arm probing downward into the darkness, soundlessly, like a man doing a deed he had conceived in private and now performed without heat or surprise.

"It'D take a real sonofabitch to do something like that, Dave," Magelli said. "It wasn't Clete."

"How do you know?"

"Check out Jim Gable's chauffeur. He's an ex-carnival man named Micah. His face is disfigured."

"Why don't you let Purcel cover his own ass for a change?"

" Je

"Tell it to Je

18

A WEEK PASSED, and I didn't hear anything more from Dana Magelli. The night Je

I wanted to empty my head and caseload and go to Key West with Bootsie and Alafair and fish for three weeks. I was tired of other people's problems, of breaking up domestic arguments, of hosing vomit out of a cruiser, of washing spittle off my face, of cutting slack to junkies because they had the virus, only later to have one try to bite me when I cuffed him.

I was tired of seeing the despair in the faces of black parents when I told them their children had overdosed on meth or heroin or had been gu

If you meet longtime street cops who don't drink or use, they're usually either in twelve-step programs or brain-dead or they have criminal propensities themselves.

But each time I cleared my head and tried to concentrate on all the potential that every day could bring-the sun showers that blew in from the Gulf, Bootsie's meeting me for lunch at Victor's or in the park, the long summer evenings and the way the light climbed high into the sky at sunset, picking up Alafair at night at the City Library and going for ice cream with her high school creative writing group-my mind returned again and again to thoughts about my mother's fate, the pleas for help she must have uttered, and the fact her killers were still out there.

But it was more than my mother's death that obsessed me. Long ago I had accepted the loss of my natal family and my childhood and the i

What I felt now was not loss but theft and violation. My mother's memory, the sad respect I had always felt for her, had been stolen from me. Now the tape-recorded lie left behind by a dead jigger in the Morgan City jail, that my mother was a whore and a thief, had become part of a file at the New Orleans Police Department and I had no way to change it.

"Something on your mind?" Helen Soileau said in my office.

"No, not really," I replied.

She stood at the window and rubbed the back of her neck and looked»ut at the street.

"Co

"Not that I could tell," I said, tilting back in my chair.

"She was in her office. All her power was right there at her fingertips. Don't let her fool you, Dave. That broad's got you in her bombsights."

But it was Friday afternoon and I didn't want to think any more about Co

Alafair and Bootsie and I ate di

"What are you reading?" I asked.

"Night Comes to the Cumberland. It's by a lawyer named Harry Caudill. It's a history of the southern mountains," she said.

"For your creative writing group?" I asked.

"No, a boy at the library said I should read it. It's the best book ever written about the people of Appalachia," she replied.