Black Cherry Blues (14 page)

His girlfriend, whose full name was Darlene American Horse, was making sandwiches for us in the kitchen. Clete sat in a sway-backed canvas chair with a vodka Collins in his hand, one sandaled foot crossed on his knee, the other on a blond bearskin rug. Outside the sliding glass doors the lake was a deep blue, and the pines on an island of gray boulders were bending in the wind.

“The thing you won’t forget,” he said, “the guy who got whacked out back there in Louisiana all right, the guy I whacked out that psychotic sonofabitch Starkweather, I had to kill him. They said they’d give me ten grand, and I said that’s cool, but I was going to run him out of town, take their bread, and tell them to fuck off if they complained about it later. Except he was feeding his pigs out of a bucket with his back to me, telling me how he didn’t rattle, how he wouldn’t piss on a cop on the pad if he was on fire, then he put his hand down in his jeans and I saw something bright in the sun and heard a click, and when he turned around with it I put a big one in his forehead. It was his Zippo lighter, man. Can you dig that?”

Maybe the story was true, maybe not. I just wasn’t interested in his explanation or his obvious obsession, one that left his eyes searching for that next sentence, hanging unformed out there in the air, which would finally set the whole matter straight.

“Why do they call him ‘the Duck’?” I said.

“What?”

“Why do they call Sally Dio ‘the Duck’?”

“He wears duck tails He took a long drink out of his Collins. His mouth looked red and hard. He shrugged as though dismissing a private, troubling thought.

“There’s another story. About a card game and drawing a. deuce or something. The deuce is the duck, right? But it’s all guinea stuff. They like titles. Those stories are usually bullshit.”

“I tell you, Clete, I’d really appreciate it if you could just bring Dixie Lee down here. I really don’t need to meet the whole crowd.”

“You’re still the same guy, your meter always on overtime.” Then he smiled.

“Do you think I’m going to call up the man I work for and say, “Sorry, Sal, my old partner here doesn’t want to be caught dead in the home of a grease balT He laughed, chewing ice and candied cherries in his jaws.

“But it’s a thought, though, isn’t it? Dave, you’re something else.” He kept smiling at me, the ice cracking between his molars.

“You remember when we cooled out Julio Segura and his bodyguard? We really made the avocado salad fly.”

“Last season’s box score.”

    “Yeah, it is.” He looked idly out the sliding doors at the lake a moment, then slapped his knee and said, “Man, let’s eat.”

He walked up behind his girlfriend in the kitchen, picked her up around the ribs, and buried his face in her hair. He half walked and carried her back into the living room with his arms still locked around her waist. She turned her face back toward him to hide her embarrassment.

“This is my mainline mama, her reg’lar daddy’s sweet little papoose,” he said, and bit the back of her neck.

That’s really cool, Cletus, I thought.

She wore a denim skirt with black stockings and a sleeveless tan sweater. There were three moles by the edge of her mouth, and her eyes were turquoise green, like a Creole’s. Her hands were big, the backs nicked with gray scars, the nails cut back to the quick. The gold watch she wore on one wrist and the bracelet of tiny gold chains on the other looked like misplaced accidents above her work-worn hands.

“She’s the best thing in my life, that’s what she is,” he said, still pushing his mouth into her hair.

“I owe Dixie Lee for this one. She got his drunk butt off of a beer joint floor on the reservation and drove him all the way back to Flathead. If she hadn’t, a few bucks there would have scrubbed out the toilet with his head. Dixie’s got a special way about him. He can say good morning and sling the shit through the fan.”

She eased Clete’s arms from around her waist.

“Do you want to eat out on the porch?” she said.

“No, it’s still cool. Spring has a hard time catching on here,” he said.

“What’s it in New Orleans now? Ninety or so?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Hotter than hell. I don’t miss it,” he said.

His girlfriend set the table for us by the sliding doors, then went back in to the kitchen for the food. A wind was blowing across the lake, and each time it gusted, the dark blue surface rippled with light.

“I don’t know why she hooked up with me, but why question the fates?” he said.

“She looks like a nice girl.”

“You better believe she is. Her husband got killed falling trees over by Lincoln. A Caterpillar backed over him, ground him all over a rock. She spent five years opening oysters in a restaurant in Portland. Did you see her hands?”

I nodded.

“Then she was waiting tables in that Indian beer joint. You ought to check out a reservation bar. Those guys would make great pilots in the Japanese air force.”

“They’re going to send me up the road unless I nail Mapes.”

He pushed at the thick scar on his eyebrow with his finger.

“You’re really sweating this, aren’t you?” he said.

“What do you think?”

“I can’t blame you. An ex-cop doing time. Bad scene, mon. But I got off the hook, zipped right out of it, and if anybody should have gone up the road, it was me. Tell your lawyer to get a couple of continuances. Witnesses go off somewhere, people forget what they saw, the prosecutor loses interest. There’s always a way out, Streak.”

His girl brought out a tray filled with ham sandwiches, glasses of iced tea, a beet and onion salad, and a fresh apple pie. She sat down with us and ate without talking. The three moles by the corner of her mouth were the size of BBs.

“You actually think Dixie can help you?” Clete said.

“He has to.”

“Good luck. He told me once his life’s goal is to live to a hundred and get lynched for rape. He’s an all-right guy, but I think he has a wet cork for a brain.”

“He said Mapes and Vidrine killed a couple of guys and buried them back in a woods. Can you connect that to anything?”

His big face looked vague.

“No, not really,” he said.

I saw his girl, Darlene, look directly into her plate, her head turned down, as though she wanted to hide her expression. But I noticed the color of her eyes darken in the corners.

“I’m sorry for the way I talk,” I said.

“I think Clete and I were cops too long. Sometimes we don’t think about what we say in front of other people.” I tried to smile at her.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“I appreciate you having me for lunch. It’s very good.”

“Thank you.”

“I came out here fishing with a friend of mine years ago,” I said.

“Montana’s a beautiful place to live, isn’t it?”

“Some of it is. When you have a job. It’s a hard place to find work in,” she said.

“Everything’s down here,” Clete said.

“Oil, farming, cattle, mining. Even lumber. It’s cheaper to grow trees down south. These dumb bastards voted for Reagan, then got their butts reamed.”

“Then why is your buddy up here? And these lease people?”

His green eyes moved over my face, then he grinned.

“You never could resist mashing on a guy’s oysters,” he said.

“He’s not my buddy. I work for him. I get along with him. It’s a professional relationship.”

“All right, what’s he doing here?”

“It’s a free country. Maybe he likes the trout.”

“I met a DEA man who had some other theories.”

“When it comes to Sal’s business dealings, I turn into a potted plant. I’m also good at taking a smoke in the yard.”

“Tell it to somebody else. You were the best investigative cop I ever knew.”

“At one time,” he said, and winked. Then he looked out at the lake and the inland sea gulls that were wheeling over the shoreline.

He pushed a piece of food out from behind his teeth with his tongue.

“You’ve read a lot more books than I have. You remember that guy Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind?” He’s a blockade runner for the Confederates or something. He tells Scarlett that fortunes are made during a country’s beginning and during its collapse. Pretty good line. I think Sal read that book in the Hunts-ville library. He wheels and deals, mon.”

I didn’t say anything. I finished the rest of my sandwich and glanced casually at my watch.

“All right, for God’s sake,” Clete said.

“I’ll take you up there. But do me a favor. That’s my meal ticket up there. Don’t look at these people like they’re zoo creatures. Particularly Sal’s father. He’s a bloated old degenerate, but he’s also a vicious sonofabitch who never liked me to begin with. I mean it, Dave. Your face doesn’t hide your feelings too well. It gets that glaze on it like an elephant broke wind in the room. Okay? We got a deal, right, partner?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Oh boy.”

Sally Dio had brought Galveston, Texas, with him. His glassed-in sun porch, which gave onto the lake, was filled with potted banana, umbrella, orange, and Hong Kong orchid trees, and in the center of the house was a heavily chlorinated, lime-green swimming pool with steam rising off the water. A half-dozen tanned people sat on the edge of the tiles or drifted about lazily on inflated rubber rafts. The living room was paneled with white pine, the carpet was a deep red, and the waxed black piano, with the top propped open, gleamed in the indirect lighting. Dixie Lee, dressed only in a pair of Hawaiian beach shorts and an open bathrobe, sat at the piano bench and ran his fingers back and forth over the keys, his shoulders hunched, then suddenly his arms outspread, his florid face confident with his own sound. He sang, “I was standing on the corner Corner of Beale and Main, When a big policeman said, “Big boy, you’ll have to tell me your name.”

I said, “You’ll find my name On the tail of my shirt. I’m a Tennessee hustler And I don’t have to work.” Sally Dio sat behind a set of drums and cymbals in a pair of pleated gray slacks, bare-chested, his red suspenders hooked over his shoulders. He was a lean, hard-bodied man, his face filled with flat and sharp surfaces like a person whose bone is too close to the skin so that the eyes look overly large for the face. Under his right eye was a looped scar that made his stare even more pronounced, and when he turned his head toward Dixie Lee and fluttered the wire brushes across the snare drum, the ridge of his duck tails glistened against the refracted sunlight off the lake.

Out on the redwood veranda I could see the back of a wheelchair and a man sitting in it. Sally Dio and Dixie finished their song. No one asked me to sit down.

“Dixie says you used to be a police officer. In New Orleans,” Sally Dio said. His voice was flat, his eyes casually interested in my face.

“That’s right.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m a small-business man.”

“Probably pays better, doesn’t it?”

“Sometimes.”

He made a circular pattern on the drumhead with the wire brushes.

“You like Louisiana?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why are you up here, then?”

Clete walked to the wet bar by the pool’s edge and started fixing a drink. , “I have some things to take care of. I wanted a few words with Dixie,” I said.

“He says you’re in a lot of trouble down there. What’s he got to do with your trouble?”

“A lot.”

He looked me evenly in the eyes. Then he fluttered and ticked the brushes lightly on the drum skin.

“Dixie never hurt anybody. Not intentionally, anyway,” he said.

“I mean him no harm, Mr. Dio.”

“I’m glad of that.”

A dripping blond girl in a silver swimsuit that was as tight as tin on her body, with a terry cloth robe over her shoulder, walked toward us, drying her hair with a towel.

“You want me to take Papa Frank in, Sal?” she said.

“Ask Papa Frank.”

“He gets cold if he stays out there too long.”

“Then go ask him, hon.”

She walked to the glass doors, then stopped and hooked up the strap on her sandal, pausing motionlessly against the light as though she were caught in a photographer’s lens. Sally Dio winked at her.

I looked at Dixie Lee. I had to talk to him alone, outside. He refused to see any meaning in my face. A moment later the blond girl pushed the man in the wheelchair into the living room.

He wore a checkered golf cap, a knitted sweater over his protruding stomach, a muffler that almost hid the purple goiter that was the size of an egg in his neck. His skin was gray, his eyes black and fierce, his face unevenly shaved. Even from several feet away his clothes smelled of cigar smoke and Vick’s VapoRub. With his wasted legs and swollen stomach, he reminded me of a distended frog strapped to a chair.

But there was nothing comical about him. His name had been an infamous one back in the forties and fifties. He had run all the gambling on Galveston Island and all the prostitution and white slavery on Post Office and Church streets. And I remembered another story, too, about a snitch on Sugarland Farm who tried to cut a deal by dropping the dime on Frank Dio. Somebody caught him alone in the shower and poured a can of liquid Drano down his mouth.

He fixed one watery black eye on me.

“Who’s he?” he said to his son.

“Somebody Clete used to know,” Sally Dio said.

“What’s he want?”

“He thinks Dixie Lee can get him out of some trouble,” Sally Dio said.

“Yeah? What kind of trouble you in?” the father said to me.

“He’s up on a murder charge, Pop. Mr. Robicheaux used to be a police officer,” Sally Dio said. He smiled.

“Yeah?” His voice raised a level.

“Why you bring this to our house?”

“I didn’t bring anything to your house,” I said.

“I was invited here. By Clete over there. Because the man I wanted to talk with couldn’t simply walk down the hill and spend five minutes with me.”

“I invite. Sal invites. You don’t get invited by somebody that works for me,” the father said.

“Where you used to be a cop?”

“New Orleans.”

“You know—?” He used the name of an old-time Mafia don in Jefferson Parish.

 “Yes, I helped give him a six-year jolt in Angola. I heard he complained a lot about the room service.”