Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke

don’t know anything else about it.”
    “But you’re sure she was a whore? That’s what you called her, right?” I said.
    “You got some trouble with that word?” he asked.
    “No, not really,” I said, and took my eyes off his and scratched a place on my forehead.
    He raised a finger to the counterman to order a beer for himself, then said, “I got to take a drain.”
    Clete leaned forward in the booth.
    “Quit baiting the guy,” he said.
    “He knows more,” I said.
    “He’s a gumball. You get what you see. Be thankful. We got the name of the shooter.”
    “Excuse me,” I said, and followed Steve Andropolis into the men’s room and shot the dead bolt behind me. The room was small, the air fetid and warm, with a wood enclosure around the toilet. I reached under my seersucker coat and slipped my .45 from its clip-on holster. I pulled back the slide and released it, chambering the top round on the magazine.
    I stood back from the door on the toilet enclosure and kicked it open. Andropolis had been tucking his shirt into his trousers when the door hit him in the back and knocked him off balance against the wall. He tried to push the door back into my face, but I stomped it again, harder this time, ripping the top hinge and screws loose, pinning him in a half-crumpled position against the toilet bowl. I held on to the side of the stall with my left hand and drove my shoe through the door, again and again, splintering plywood into his face.
    Then I flung the door off him and pointed the .45 at his mouth. A twelve-inch strip of desiccated wood was affixed to his cheek with three rusty nails.
    “I wanted to apologize to you, Steve. I lied out there. I was bothered by the word ‘whore.’ When a subhuman sack of shit calls my dead mother a whore, that bothers me. Does that make sense to you, Steve?”
    He closed his eyes painfully and pulled loose the splintered board that was nailed to his cheek.
    “I’ve heard about you, you crazy sonofabitch. What do I know about your mother? I’m a spotter. I never capped anybody in my life.”
    “You tell me who killed her, Steve, or your brainpan is going to be emptied into that toilet bowl in ten seconds.”
    He began getting to his feet, blood draining in a long streak from his cheek.
    “Fuck you, Zeke,” he said, and drove his fist into my scrotum.
    My knees buckled, and a wave of pain rose like a gray, red-veined balloon out of my loins, took all the air from my lungs, and spread into my hands. I fell against the wall, the backs of my legs quivering, the .45 on the floor by my foot, the hammer on full cock.
    Andropolis kicked the screen out of the window, placed one foot on the jamb, and leaped outside.
    He stared back at me, the clouds etched with purple fire behind his head.
    “When your mother died? I hope it didn’t go like I think it probably did. I hope they hurt her,” he said.
    He ran through the shallow water across the mudflat toward a distant clump of willow trees. The water splashing from under the impact of his feet had the same amber brilliance in the sunlight as whiskey splashed in a thick beer glass. I sighted the .45 on the middle of his back and felt my finger begin to tighten inside the trigger guard.
    Clete Purcel exploded the dead bolt off the men’s room door frame with one thrust of his massive shoulder.
    “What are you doing, Dave?” he said incredulously.
    I lay my forehead down on my arms and closed my eyes, my heart thundering in my ears, a vinegar-like odor rising from my armpits.
     
    THE NEXT AFTERNOON I drove out to the Labiche house on the bayou and was told by a black kid watering down the azaleas in front that Passion was at the cafe and nightclub she owned outside St. Martinville. I drove to the club, a flat-roofed, green building with rusty screens and a fan-ventilated, hardwood dance floor. The sun’s glare ofFthe shale parking lot was blinding. I went in the side door and walked across the dance floor to the bar, where