Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

Stetson, which he wore virtually everywhere, was shapeless and stained with sweat and wrapped with a silver cord around the crown.
    “You a student of Scripture, Dave?” he asked.
    “Not really.”
    “The Old Testament says Moses killed maybe two hundred people when he come down off Mount Sinai with 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