Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke

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.”
    “Which department were they with?”
    “He didn’t know.”
    “Did you find a record of the crime?”
    “None.”
    “How about the body?”
    “To my knowledge, none was ever found.”
    “Missing person reports?”
    “There’s no paperwork