Purple Cane Road Read Online Free PDF

into her face and disappearing as quickly as it came.
    I never saw her again.
     
    MONDAY MORNING THE SHERIFF called me into his office. He wore a striped, black suit with a purple-and-white-striped snap-button shirt and a hand-tooled belt and half-topped boots. The windowsill behind his head was lined with potted plants that glowed in the thinly slatted light through the blinds. He had run a dry-cleaning business before he was elected sheriff and was probably more Rotarian than lawman; but he had been in the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir and no one questioned his level of integrity or courage or the dues he had paid and never spoke about (except, to my knowledge, on one occasion, when he’d had a coronary and thought he was dying and he told me of pink air-bursts high above the snow on the hills and Chinese bugles blowing in the darkness and winds that could swell fingers into purple balloons).
    His stomach hung over his belt and his cheeks were often flushed from hypertension, but his erect posture, either sitting or standing, always gave him the appearance of a much greater level of health than he actually possessed.
    “I just got off the phone with the East Baton Rouge sheriff’s office,” he said, looking down at a yellow legal pad by his elbow. “They say a couple of black lowlifes were thrown off a roof east of town last night.”
    “Oh?”
    “One of them has a broken arm, the other a concussion. The only reason they’re alive is they crashed through the top of an oak tree.”
    I nodded, as though unsure of his larger meaning.
    “The two lowlifes say Clete Purcel is the guy who made them airborne. You know anything about this?” the sheriff said.
    “Clete’s methods are direct sometimes.”
    “What’s most interesting is one of them took down the license number of your truck.” The sheriff’s eyes dropped to his legal pad. “Let’s see, I jotted down a quote from the East Baton Rouge sheriff. ‘Who told your homicide investigator he could come into my parish with an animal like Clete Purcel and do business with a baseball bat?’ I didn’t quite have an answer for him.”
    “You remember my mother?” I asked.
    “Sure,” he replied, his eyes shifting off mine, going empty now.
    “A pimp named Zipper Clum was on that roof. He told me he saw my mother killed. Back in 1966 or ‘67. He wasn’t sure of the year. It wasn’t an important moment in his career.”
    The sheriff leaned back in his chair and lowered his eyes and rubbed the cleft in his chin with two fingers.
    “I’d like to believe you trusted me enough to tell me that up front,” he said.
    “People like Zipper Clum lie a lot. He claims two cops drowned her in a mud puddle. They shot somebody and put a throw-down on the corpse. My mother saw it. At least that’s what Clum says.”
    He tore the top page off his legal pad and crumpled it up slowly and dropped it in the wastebasket.
    “You want some help on this?” he asked.
    “I’m not sure.”
    “Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life,” the sheriff said.
    “He also said he never took his own advice.”
    The sheriff rose from his swivel chair and began watering his plants with a hand-painted teakettle. I closed the door softly behind me.
     
    I TOOK A VACATION day Friday and drove back to New Orleans and parked my truck on the edge of the Quarter and walked through Jackson Square and Pirates Alley, past the deep green, shaded garden behind St. Louis Cathedral, and down St. Ann to Clete Purcel’s office.
    The building was tan stucco and contained an arched foyer and flagstone courtyard planted with banana trees. An “Out to Lunch” sign hung in the downstairs window. I went through the foyer and up the stairs to the second floor, where Clete lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a balcony that gave onto the street. The ironwork on the balcony was overgrown with bougainvillea, and in the evening Clete put on a pair of blue, baggy,