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The tape was picked up by the BBC, then aired in the United States. Vachel Carmouche lost his job. His sin lay not in his deeds but in his visibility.
He boarded up his house and disappeared for many years, where to, we never knew. Then he returned one spring evening eight years ago, pried the plywood off his windows, and hacked the weeds out of his yard with a sickle while the radio played on his gallery and a pork roast smoked on his barbecue pit. A black girl of about twelve sat on the edge of the gallery, her bare feet in the dust, idly turning the crank on an ice cream maker.
After sunset he went inside and ate dinner at his kitchen table, a bottle of refrigerated wine uncapped by his plate. A hand tapped on the back door, and he rose from his chair and pushed open the screen.
A moment later he was crawling across the linoleum while a mattock tore into his spine and rib cage, his neck and scalp, exposing vertebrae, piercing kidneys and lungs, blinding him in one eye.
Letty Labiche was arrested naked in her backyard, where she was burning a robe and work shoes in a trash barrel and washing Vachel Carmouche’s blood off her body and out of her hair with a garden hose.
For the next eight years she would use every means possible to avoid the day she would be moved to the Death House at Angola Penitentiary and be strapped down on a table where a medical technician, perhaps even a physician, would inject her with drugs that sealed her eyes and congealed the muscles in her face and shut down her respiratory system, causing her to die inside her own skin with no sign of discomfort being transmitted to the spectators.
I had witnessed two electrocutions at Angola. They sickened and repelled me, even though I was involved in the arrest and prosecution of both men. But neither affected me the way Letty Labiche’s fate would.
2
Clete Purcel still had his private investigator’s office in the Quarter, down on St. Ann, and ate breakfast every morning in the Café du Monde across from Jackson Square. That’s where I found him, the third Saturday in April, at a shady outdoor table, a cup of coffee and hot milk and pile of powdered beignets on a plate in front of him.
He wore a blue silk shirt with huge red flowers on it, a porkpie hat, and Roman sandals and beige slacks. His coat was folded over an empty chair, the handkerchief pocket torn loose from the stitching. He had sandy hair that he combed straight back and a round Irish face and green eyes that always had a beam in them. His arms had the girth and hardness of fire plugs, the skin dry and scaling from the sunburn that never quite turned into a tan.
At one time he was probably the best homicide investigator NOPD ever had. Now he ran down bail skips in the projects for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.
“So I’m hooking up Little Face Dautrieve when her pimp comes out of the closet with a shank and almost cuts my nipple off,” he said. “I paid three hundred bucks for that suit two weeks ago.”
“Where’s the pimp?” I asked.
“I’ll let you know when I find him.”
“Tell me again about Little Face.”
“What’s to tell? She’s got clippings about Letty Labiche all over her living room. I ask her if she’s morbid and she goes, ‘No, I’m from New Iberia.’ So I go, ‘Being on death row makes people celebrities in New Iberia?’ She says, ‘Brush your teeth more often, Fat Man, and change your deodorant while you’re at it.’ ”
He put a beignet in his mouth and looked at me while he chewed.
“What’s she down on?” I asked.
“Prostitution and possession. She says the vice cop who busted her got her to lay him first, then he planted some rock in her purse. He says he’ll make the possession charge go away if she’ll provide regular boomboom for him and a department liaison guy.”
“I thought the department had been cleaned up.”
“Right,” Clete said. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and picked up his coat. “Come on, I’ll drop this at the tailor’s and take you out to the project.”
“You said you hooked her up.”
“I called Nig and got her some slack … Don’t get the wrong idea, mon. Her pimp is Zipper Clum. Little Face stays on the street, he’ll be back around.”
We parked under a tree at the welfare project and walked across a dirt playground toward the two-story brick apartment building with green window trim and small green wood porches where Little Face Dautrieve lived. We passed a screen window and Clete fanned the air in front of his face. He stared through the screen, then banged on the frame with his fist.
“Lose the pipe and open the front door,” he said.
“Anything for you, Fat Man. But don’t get on my bat’room scale again. You done broke all the springs,” a voice said from inside.
“My next job is going to be at the zoo. I can’t take this anymore,” Clete said when we were on the front porch.
Little Face pushed open the door and held it while we walked inside. She wore cut-off blue jeans and a white T-shirt and had very dark skin and lustrous, thick hair that she wore on her shoulders. Her eyes were no bigger than dimes.
“This is Dave Robicheaux. He’s a homicide detective in Iberia Parish,” Clete said. “He’s a friend of Letty Labiche.”
She tilted up her profile and pursed her lips and brushed back her hair with her fingers. She had on heels, and her rump and the backs of her thighs were taut against her shorts.
