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

you’ve been moving the furniture around about your mother’s death. He thinks you might just do a number on somebody.”
    “Who cares what he thinks?”
    “I think he’s right on. You’re going to coast along, not saying anything, stonewalling people, then when you think you’ve found out enough, you’re going to blow up their shit.”
    “Maybe you’re right.”
    “It’s not your style, noble mon. That’s why I’m going to be in town for a little while. I was out at Passion Labiche’s place early this morning.”
    “What for?”
    “Because I’m not sure the hit on Zipper Clum is related to your mother’s death. These political fucks in Baton Rouge want Letty Labiche executed, body in the ground, case closed, so they can get back full-time to the trough. You keep turning over rocks, starting with sticking a gun in Zipper Clum’s mouth up on that roof.”
    “Me?”
    “So I helped a little bit. That Passion Labiche is one hot-ass-looking broad, isn’t she? Is she involved with anybody?”
    “Why don’t you give some thought to the way you talk about women?”
    “It was a compliment. Anyway, you’re right, she’s hiding something. Which makes no sense. What do she and her sister have to lose at this point?”
    I shook my head.
    “I think we should start with the hitter, the cracker on the tape,” I said.
    “I got a question for you. Jack Abbott, this mainline con a writer got out of the Utah Pen some years back? Where’d he go after he knifed a waiter to death in New York?”
    “Morgan City.”
    “What can I say? Great minds think alike. I already put in a couple of calls,” Clete said, grinning while he wiped food off his mouth.
     
     
    BUT I DIDN’T have great faith in finding the killer of Zipper Clum in Morgan City, even though it was known as a place for a man on the run to disappear among the army of blue-collar laborers who worked out of there on fishing vessels and offshore drilling rigs. Clete had not heard the tape on which Zipper had said his killer had never done outside work and had skin like milk. I also believed Clete was more interested in monitoring me than the investigation into my mother’s death. He came to the sheriff’s department at quitting time, expecting to drive down together to Morgan City.
    “I can’t go today,” I said.
    “Why not?” he asked.
    “Commitments at home.”
    “Yeah?” He was standing in the middle of my office, his porkpie hat slanted down on his head, his stomach hanging over his belt, an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth. He tossed the cigarette end over end into the wastebasket. “I refuse to light one of these things ever again. Why are you giving me this bullshit, Streak?”
    “Come have dinner with us.”
    “No, I’m meeting this retired jigger an hour from now. You coming or not?”
    “A bank jigger?”
    “More serious. He was the lookout man for a couple of hit teams working out of Miami and New Orleans.”
    “Not interested.”
    “Where do you think we’re supposed to get information from, the library?”
    When I didn’t reply, he said, “Dave, if you want me out of town, just say so.”
    “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
    “You talk about it. I’m meeting the jigger. You don’t want to hear what I find out, no problem.”
    After he closed the door behind him, his heat and anger remained like a visible presence in the room’s silence.
     
    THAT EVENING ALAFAIR, Bootsie, and I were eating supper in the kitchen when we heard a heavy car on the gravel in the driveway. Alafair got up from the table and peered out the window. She was in high school now and seemed to have no memory anymore of the civil war in El Salvador that had brought her here as an illegal refugee, nor of the day I pulled her from the submerged wreckage of an airplane out on the salt. Her Indian-black hair was tied up on her head with a blue bandanna, and from the back, when she raised up on the balls of her feet to see better through the blinds, her