Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke Page A

on this at all, Ms. Deshotel.”
    She put down her pen and sat forward in her swivel chair. She looked into space.
    “I’ll call the authorities in Lafourche Parish. It sounds like a blind alley, though. Who’s the informant?”
    “A pimp in New Orleans.”
    “Why’s he coming forward now?”
    “A friend of mine was going to throw him off a roof.”
    “Ah, it’s becoming a little more clear now. Is this friend Clete Purcel?”
    “You know Clete?”
    “Oh, yes. You might say there’s a real groundswell for revocation of his P.I. license. In fact, I have his file right here.” She opened a desk drawer and removed a manila folder filled with police reports, a thickly folded printout from the National Crime Information Center, and what looked like letters of complaint from all over the state. “Let’s see, he shot and killed a government witness, stole a concrete mixer and filled a man’s convertible with cement, and destroyed a half-million-dollar home on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth grader. He also slim-jimmed Bobby Earl’s car at the Southern Yacht Club and urinated on the seats and dashboard. You say he’s been throwing people off of roofs recently?”
    “Maybe I misspoke on that,” I said.
    She glanced at her watch.
    “I’m sorry. I’m late for a luncheon. Give me your card and I’ll call you with any information I can find,” she said.
    “That’s good of you,” I said.
    “What was the victim’s name again?”
    “Mae Guillory was her maiden name. Her married name was Robicheaux.”
    “Are you related?”
    “She was my mother. So I’ll be hanging around on this one, Ms. Deshotel.”
    The inquisitory beam came back in her eyes, as though the earlier judgment she had passed on me had suddenly been set in abeyance.
     

5
    A S A LITTLE BOY Zipper Clum tap-danced for coins on the sidewalks in the French Quarter. The heavy, clip-on taps he wore on his shoes clicked and rattled on the cement and echoed off the old buildings as though he were in a sound chamber. He only knew two steps in the routine, but his clicking feet made him part of the scene, part of the music coming from the nightclubs and strip joints, not just a raggedy black street hustler whose mother turned tricks in Jane’s Alley.
    Later on, Zipper Clum came to fancy himself a jazz drummer. He took his first fall in Lake Charles, a one-bit in the Calcasieu Parish Prison, before the civil rights era, when the Negroes were kept in a separate section, away from the crackers, who were up on the top floor. That was all right with Zipper, though. It was cooler downstairs, particularly when it rained and the wind blew across the lake. He didn’t like crackers, anyway, and at night he could hear the music from the juke joint on Ryan Street and groove on the crash of drums and the wail of horns and saxophones.
    His fall partner was a junkie drummer who had sat in with the Platters and Smiley Lewis. Zipper was awed by the fact that a rag-nose loser with infected hype punctures on his arms could turn two drumsticks into a white blur on top of a set of traps.
    In the jail the junkie created two makeshift drumsticks from the wood on a discarded window shade and showed Zipper everything he knew. There was only one problem: Zipper had desire but only marginal talent.
    He feigned musical confidence with noise and aggressiveness. He sat in with bands on Airline Highway and crashed the cymbals and bass drum and slapped the traps with the wire brushes. But he was an imitator, a fraud, and the musicians around him knew it.
    He envied and despised them for their gift. He was secretly pleased when crack hit New Orleans like a hurricane in 1981. Zipper was clean, living on his ladies, pumping iron and drinking liquid protein and running five miles a day while his pipehead musician friends were huffing rock and melting their brains.
    But he still loved to pretend. On Saturday mornings he sat in the back of his cousin’s lawn-mower shop off Magazine and