Black Cherry Blues

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Black Cherry Blues

Dave Robicheaux [3]

James Lee Burke

Avon (1988)

Rating: ★★★★☆

Tags: Fiction, General, Political, Detective and mystery stories, Mystery Detective, Mystery, Private investigators, Hard-Boiled, Private Investigators - Louisiana - New Iberia, Robicheaux; Dave (Fictitious Character), Legal Stories, Bayous
Fictionttt Generalttt Politicalttt Detective and mystery storiesttt Mystery Detectivettt Mysteryttt Private investigatorsttt Hard-Boiledttt Private Investigators - Louisiana - New Iberiattt Robicheaux; Dave (Fictitious Character)ttt Legal Storiesttt Bayousttt

Amazon.com Review

In this winner of the 1990 Edgar Award for best mystery novel, Dave Robicheaux, a former New Orleans policeman, is pursued by a psychopath and flees his home on the Bayou Teche, in the heart of Louisiana, to find a new life in Montana. After settling near the Blackfoot River Canyon, Robicheaux finds himself smack dab in the middle of an illegal Mafia takeover of Indian lands. As he struggles to expose the truth, he must face some hard facts about himself, especially after the appearance of an old Cajun friend, Dixie Lee Pughe.

From Publishers Weekly

Burke pits a land-hungry oil company against a Blackfeet Indian reservation in a stunning novel that takes detective fiction into new imaginative realms. His Cajun sleuth, Dave Robicheaux, an ex-New Orleans cop featured in two previous novels, attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, has recurrent nightmares about his murdered wife, and cares for an adopted El Salvadoran refugee girl. When two American Indian activists disappear, Robicheaux's dogged investigation not only sets him on a collision course with Mafia thugs and oil interests, but also leads him into a romance with Darlene American Horse, his ex-partner's girlfriend. All the main characters in this darkly beautiful, lyric saga carry heavy emotional baggage, and Robicheaux's sleuthing is a simultaneous exorcism of demons of grief, loss, fear, rage, vengeance. Burke's fictional terrain--stretching from the Louisiana bayous to Montana's red cliffs and pine-dotted hills--is uniquely his own, yet also a microcosm of a multi-ethnic America. He writes from the heart and the gut. 35,000 first printing; major ad/promo.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amazon.com Review

In this winner of the 1990 Edgar Award for best mystery novel, Dave Robicheaux, a former New Orleans policeman, is pursued by a psychopath and flees his home on the Bayou Teche, in the heart of Louisiana, to find a new life in Montana. After settling near the Blackfoot River Canyon, Robicheaux finds himself smack dab in the middle of an illegal Mafia takeover of Indian lands. As he struggles to expose the truth, he must face some hard facts about himself, especially after the appearance of an old Cajun friend, Dixie Lee Pughe.

From Publishers Weekly

Burke pits a land-hungry oil company against a Blackfeet Indian reservation in a stunning novel that takes detective fiction into new imaginative realms. His Cajun sleuth, Dave Robicheaux, an ex-New Orleans cop featured in two previous novels, attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, has recurrent nightmares about his murdered wife, and cares for an adopted El Salvadoran refugee girl. When two American Indian activists disappear, Robicheaux’s dogged investigation not only sets him on a collision course with Mafia thugs and oil interests, but also leads him into a romance with Darlene American Horse, his ex-partner’s girlfriend. All the main characters in this darkly beautiful, lyric saga carry heavy emotional baggage, and Robicheaux’s sleuthing is a simultaneous exorcism of demons of grief, loss, fear, rage, vengeance. Burke’s fictional terrain—stretching from the Louisiana bayous to Montana’s red cliffs and pine-dotted hills—is uniquely his own, yet also a microcosm of a multi-ethnic America. He writes from the heart and the gut. 35,000 first printing; major ad/promo.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Black Cherry Blues

By

James Lee Burke

v1.0 Initial release

v1.1 Misc formatting, fixed misc ocr errors, fixed broken paragraphs, separated joined paragraphs

Synopsis:

    A first class detective adventure, tough and suspenseful … I’ve not read anything so good since Raymond Chandler set down Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles’ Walker Percy James Lee Burke, author of the highly-acclaimed
HEAVEN’S PRISONERS
and
THE NEON RAIN
, returns with his third Dave Robicheaux adventure which confirms his reputation as a brilliant storyteller and a crime novelist of compelling originality.

BLACK CHERRY BLUES
sweeps from the lush, misty Bayou country of Southern Louisiana to the rugged landscape of Montana, where Dave Robicheaux ex-New Orleans homicide detective confronts Indians, oil company roughnecks and ruthless criminals.

Haunted by a double tragedy the accidental death of his father and brutal murder of his wife -Robicheaux embarks on an investigation that leads to the Montana offices of the oil company that once employed his father. And in coming to the aid of an old friend, burnt-out rockabilly star Dixie Lee Pugh, he is sucked into a violent, terrifying world where shady federal agents and mafia henchmen obey nobody’s rules but their own…

“A stunning novel that takes detective fiction into new imaginative realms”

Publishers Weekly

Also by James Lee Burke

The Neon Rain

Heaven’s Prisoners

Black Cherry Blues

Century

ISBN: 0-313-7126-3643-9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent

Excerpt from
“Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standin’ on the Corner)”
by Jimmie Rogers is reprinted by permission of Peer International Corp. Copyright 1931 by Peer International Corp.

For John and Flavia McBride

I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its generous assistance, and I also would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for its past support.

Black Cherry Blues

CHAPTER 1

Her hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window. The night is hot and breathless, the clouds painted like horsetails against the sky; a peal of thunder rumbles out on the Gulf like an apple rolling around in the bottom of a wood barrel, and the first raindrops ping against the window fan. She sleeps on her side, and the sheet molds her thigh, the curve of her hip, her breast. In the flicker of the heat lightning the sun freckles on her bare shoulder look like brown flaws in sculpted marble.

Then a prizing bar splinters the front door out of the jamb, and two men burst inside the house in heavy shoes, their pump shotguns at port arms. One is a tall Haitian, the other a Latin whose hair hangs off his head in oiled ringlets. They stand at the foot of the double bed in which she sleeps alone, and do not speak. She awakes with her mouth open, her eyes wide and empty of meaning. Her face is still warm from a dream, and she cannot separate sleep from the two men who stare at her without speaking. Then she sees them looking at each other and aim their shotguns point-blank at her chest. Her eyes film and she calls out my name like a wet bubble bursting in her throat.

The sheet is twisted in her hands; she holds it against her breasts as though it could protect her from twelve-gauge deer slugs and double-aught buckshot.

They begin shooting, and the room seems to explode with smoke and flame from their shotgun barrels, with shell wadding, mattress stuffing, splinters gouged out of the bedstead, torn lampshades, flying glass. The two killers are methodical. They have taken out the sportsman’s plug in their shotguns so they can load five rounds in the magazine, and they keep firing and ejecting the smoking hulls on the floor until their firing pins snap empty. Then they reload with the calmness of men who might have just stood up in a blind and fired at a formation of ducks overhead.

The sheet is torn, drenched with her blood, embedded in her wounds. The men have gone now, and I sink to my knees by my wife and kiss her sightless eyes, run my hands over her hair and wan face, put her fingers in my mouth. A solitary drop of her blood runs down the shattered headboard and pools on my skin. A bolt of lightning explodes in an empty field behind the house. The inside of my head is filled with a wet, sulphurous smell, and again I hear my name rise like muffled, trapped air released from the sandy bottom of a pond.

It was four in the morning on a Saturday and raining hard when I awoke from the dream in a West Baton Rouge motel. I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear and tried to rub the dream out of my face, then I used the bathroom and came back and sat on the side of the bed again in the dark.

First light was still two hours away, but I knew I would not sleep again. I put on my raincoat and hat and drove in my pickup truck to an all-night cafe that occupied one side of a clapboard roadhouse. The rain clattered on my truck cab, and the wind was blowing strong out of the southwest, across the Atchafalaya swamp, whipping the palm and oak trees by the highway. West Baton Rouge, which begins at the Mississippi River, has always been a seedy area of truck stops, marginal gambling joints, Negro and blue-collar bars. To the east you can see the lighted girders of the Earl K. Long Bridge, plumes of smoke rising from the oil refineries, the state capitol building silhouetted in the rain. Baton Rouge is a green town full of oak trees, parks, and lakes, and the thousands of lights on the refineries and chemical plants are regarded as a testimony to financial security rather than a sign of industrial blight. But once you drive west across the metal grid of the bridge and thump down on the old cracked four-lane, you’re in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin Cajuns, red bones roustabouts, pipe lingers rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax.

The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the cafe parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman’s smile. Because if you’re forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you’ve simply chosen to live alone, you’re easily flattered by a young woman’s seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age.

I ordered a chicken-fried steak and a cup of coffee and listened to Jimmy Clanton’s recording of “Just a Dream” that came from the jukebox next door. Through the open doorway that gave onto the empty dance floor, I could see a half-dozen people at the bar against the far wall. I watched a man my age, with waved blond hair, drink his whiskey down to the ice, point to the glass for the bartender to refill it, then rise from his stool and walk across the dance floor into the cafe.

He wore gray slacks, a green sport shirt with blue flowers on it, shined loafers, white socks, a gold watch, and gold clip-on ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket. He wore his shirt outside his slacks to hide his paunch and love handles.

“Hey, hon, let me have a cheeseburger and bring it up to the bar, will you?” he said.