Black Cherry Blues (15 page)

“You a wise guy huh?”

“You want me to fix you a drink, Mr. Frank?” Clete said.

The old man flipped his hand at Clete, his eyes still fixed on me, as though he were brushing away bad air.

“That’s my cousin you’re talking about,” he said.

I didn’t reply. I looked again at Dixie Lee, who sat hunched forward on the piano bench, his hands in his lap, his gaze averted from us.

“Tell him to get the fuck out of here,” the father said.

“Tell that other one he don’t bring smartass guys up to our house, either.” Again, he didn’t bother to look in Clete’s direction.

Then he motioned with his hand again, and the girl in the silver bathing suit wheeled him through a far door into a bedroom. The bed was piled with pink pillows that had purple ruffles around them. I watched the girl close the door.

“Got to do what Pop says. See you around, Mr. Robicheaux,” Sally Dio said. He tapped one wire brush across the drumhead.

“Dixie, I want you to walk down to my car with me,” I said.

“Conversation time’s over, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“The man can speak for himself, can’t he?” I said.

But before all my words were out, Sally Dio did a rat-a-tat-tat on the drum with the brushes.

“Are you coming, Dixie?”

Again he slapped the brushes rapidly on the drum, looking me steadily in the eyes with a grin at the corner of his mouth.

“A footnote about your relative in Angola,” I said.

“I not only helped put him away, I maced him in the face after he spit on a bailiff.”

“Clete, help our man find his car,” he said.

Clete took his drink away from his mouth. His face reddened. Behind him, the people in the pool were in various attitudes of embrace among the rubber cushions and wisps of steam.

“Sal, he’s a good guy. We got off to a bad start this morning,” he said.

“Mr. Robicheaux’s late for somewhere else, Clete.”

Clete looked as though he had swallowed a thumbtack.

“No problem. I’m on my way. Take it easy, Clete,” I said.

“Sal, no kidding, he’s a solid guy. Sometimes things just go wrong. It’s nobody’s fault,” Clete said.

“Hey, Robicheaux something to take with you,” Sally Dio said.

“You came in here on somebody’s shirttail. Then you talked rude to an old man. But you’re in my house and you get to leave on a free pass. You been treated generous. Don’t have any confusion about that.”

I walked outside into the sunlight, the wind riffling the lake, the hazy blue-green roll of the hills in the distance. The flagstone steps that led down the hill to Clete’s place and my truck were lined with rosebushes and purple clematis.

“Wait a minute, Dave,” I heard Clete say behind me.

He had on his crushed porkpie hat, and as he descended the flagstone steps in his Bermuda shorts his legs looked awkward, the scars on his knees stretched and whitened across the bone.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Forget it.”

“No, that was bad in there. I’m sorry about it.”

“You weren’t a part of it. Don’t worry about it.”

“Everybody was saying the wrong things, that’s all.”

“Maybe so.”

“I didn’t want it to go like that. You know that.”

“I believe you, Cletus.”

“But why do you have to scratch a match on their sc rots man?”

“I thought I was pretty well behaved.”

“Oh fuck yeah. Absolutely. Dave, a half dozen like you could have this whole state in flames.”

“What’s Dio’s gig here?”

He snuffed inside his nose.

“I take his money. I don’t care what he does. End of subject,” he said.

“See you around. Thanks again for the lunch. Say good-bye to Darlene for me.”

“Yeah, anytime. It’s always a kick. Like having a car drive through your house.”

I smiled and started toward my pickup.

“Stay in your truck a few minutes. Dixie’ll be down,” he said, walking up a gravel path toward his house.

“How do you know?”

“Because even though he acts like a drunk butthole, he wants to help. Also because I told him I’d beat the shit out of him if he didn’t.”

I sat in my pickup for ten minutes and was about to give it up when I saw Dixie Lee walk down from Sally Dio’s. He had put on a yellow windbreaker and a pair of brown slacks, and the wind blew strands of his blond hair on his forehead. He opened the door on the passenger’s side and got in.

“How about we go down to the restaurant on the water for a brew?” he said.

“I’m so dry right now I’m a fire hazard.”

“All right, but I want you to understand something first, Dixie. I don’t want you to talk to me because of something Clete said to you.”

“Clete didn’t say anything.”

“He didn’t?”

“Well, he’s a little emotional sometimes. I don’t pay him any mind. He don’t like to see you in trouble.”

“But this is what’s going to happen if I don’t hear what I need from you. I’m going to take down Mapes one way or another. If that means getting you locked up as a material witness, that’s what’s going to happen. I can’t promise I’ll pull it off, but I’ll use all the juice I can to turn the key on you, Dixie.”

“Oh man, don’t tell me stuff like that. Not this morning, anyway. My nerve endings are fried as it is.”

“That’s another item. I don’t want to hear any more about your drinking problems, your theological concerns, or any of the other bullshit you spoon out to people when you’re in a corner. Are we clear on this?”

“You come down with both feet, son.”

“You dealt me into this mess. You’d better be aware of that, partner.”

“All right. Are we going for a brew or are you going to sit here and saw me apart?”

I started the truck and drove up the dirt lane through the pines to the main road, which was bordered on the far side by a short span of cherry orchards and then the steep rock face of the mountain. We drove along the lake toward the restaurant that was built on pilings out over the water. Dixie Lee had his face turned into the breeze and was looking wistfully at the sandy beaches, the dense stands of pine, the sailboats that tacked against the deep blue brilliance of the lake.

“Why don’t you let me get you some real estate here?” he said.

“To tell you the truth, Dixie, I mortgaged my house and business to make bail.”

“Oh.”

“Why is the Dio family buying up land around here?”

“The state is recessed. Property values are way down. The Dios are going to make a lot of money later on.”

I pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. A narrow dock protruded out from behind the building, and skiffs and sailboats were moored to it. There was a glaze of gasoline and oil on the water, and sea gulls dipped and turned over an open bait well in one of the boats. I turned off the ignition.

“I don’t think you’ve been hearing me very well, Dixie,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m really tired of you trying to pull strings on me. We’re operating on the outer edges of my patience here.”

“What’d I say?”

“The mob doesn’t make money out of real estate speculation. You stop lying to me.”

“You hurt me, man. Maybe I’m a lush, but that don’t mean I’m a liar.”

“Then tell me why they’re buying up property.”

“Dave, if you go to prison, and, Lord, I hope you don’t, you’ll learn two things in there. You stay out of the boss man’s eye, and you never try to find out the other side of a cat like Sal. You go along and you get along. When you were a cop, did you want to know everything that was going on in your department? How many guys were on a pad? How many of them copped some skag or flake at a bust and sold it off later? Look, in another three or four weeks I’m going to start playing a gig at one of Sal’s places in Tahoe. It’s not a big deal a piano bar, a stand-up bass, maybe a guitar. But it’s Tahoe, man. It’s rhythm and blues and back in the lights. I just got to ease up on the fluids, get it under control.”

“Why not get it the hell out of your Me?”

“Everybody don’t chop cotton the same way. I’m going inside for a brew. You want to come?”

I watched him walk across a board ramp into the bar side of the restaurant. I had wasted most of the morning, part of the afternoon, had accomplished nothing, and I felt a great weariness both with Dixie Lee and my situation. I followed him inside. He sat at the far end of the bar, by the windows, silhouetted against the sunlight on the lake. The walls of the bar were decorated with life preservers and nautical ropes and fish nets Dixie was drinking from a bottle of Great Falls with a shot of whiskey on the side.

The bartender walked toward me, but I motioned him away.

“You don’t want anything?” Dixie said.

“Who would Mapes and Vidrine have reason to kill?” I said.

“Not Vidrine. Mapes.”

“All right.”

He looked out the window.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It was somebody who was in his way, somebody who would cost him money.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So who would cause Mapes trouble?”

“Maybe the crazoids. The tree spikers. Star Drilling wants to get into a wilderness area on the eastern slope. The tree spikers want everybody out.”

“But they don’t represent anybody. You said they were cultists or something.”

“I don’t know what they are. They’re fucking wild men.”

“What could they do to keep Star out of a wilderness area?”

“Nothing, really. People up here don’t like them. Them gyppo loggers will rip their ass if they get the chance.”

“Who’s that leave?”

He sipped off his whiskey, chased it with beer, and looked out at the lake. His face was composed and his green eyes were distant with either thought or perhaps no thought at all.

“Come on, partner, who could really mess up Mapes’s plans?”

“The Indians,” he said finally.

“Star wants to drill on the Black-feet Reservation. It shouldn’t be a problem, because in 1896 the Indians sold all their mineral rights to the government. But there’re some young guys, AIM guys, that are smart, that are talking about a suit.”

“The American Indian Movement?”

“Yeah, that’s them. They can tie everything up in court, say the treaty was a rip-off or the reservation is a religious area or some other bullshit. It can cost everybody a lot of money.”

“You know some of these guys?”

“No, I always stayed away from them. Some of them been in federal pens. You ever know a con with a political message up his butt? I celled with a black guy like that. Sonofabitch couldn’t read and was always talking about Karl Marx.”

“Give me one name, Dixie.”

“I don’t know any. I’m telling you the truth. They don’t like white people, at least white oil people. Who needs the grief?”

I left him at the bar and drove back toward Missoula. In the Jocko Valley I watched a rain shower move out from between two tall white peaks in the Mission Mountains, then spread across the sky, darken the sun, and march across the meadows, the clumped herds of Angus, the red barns and log ranch houses and clapboard cottages, the poplar windbreaks, the willow-lined river itself, and finally the smooth green hills that rose into another mountain range on the opposite side of the valley. Splinters of lightning danced on the ridges, and the sky above the timberline roiled with torn black clouds. Then I drove over the tip of the valley and out of the rain and into the sunshine on the Clark Fork as though I had slipped from one piece of geographical climate into another.

I picked up Alafair at the baby-sitter’s, next door to the rectory, then took her to an ice cream parlor by the river for a cone. There was a big white M on the mountain behind the university, and we could see figures climbing up to it on a zigzag trail. The side of the mountain was green with new grass, and above the M ponderosa pine grew through the saddle on the mountain and over the crest into the next valley. Alafair looked small at the marble-topped table, licking her cone, her feet not touching the floor. Her red tennis shoes and the knees of her jeans were spotted with grass stains.

“Were they nice to you at school?” I said.

“Sure.” Then she thought for a moment.

“Dave?”

“Yes.”

“The teacher says I talk like a Cajun. How come she say that?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said.

We drove back to the house, and I used my new phone to call Dan Nygurski at the DEA in Great Falls. At first he didn’t know where I was calling from, then I heard his interest sharpen when I told him I was in Montana.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” he said.

“I’m in some trouble.”

“I know about your trouble. I don’t think you’re going to make it any better by messing around up here in Montana.”

“What do you mean, you know about it?” , “I got feedback from our office in Lafayette. Vidrine and Mapes worked with Dixie Pugh, and Pugh lives with Sally Dio. It’s like keeping track of a daisy chain of moral imbeciles. You shouldn’t have gotten involved, Robicheaux.”

I couldn’t resist it.

“I was at Sally Dio’s today,” I said.

“I think that’s dumb, if you’re asking my opinion.”

“You know who Cletus Purcel is?”

“Yeah, he was your old homicide partner. I heard he blew away a witness. It looks like he found his own level.”

“He told me Dio is called the Duck because he wears duck tails but I think he left something out of the story.”

“I bet he did. Dio was playing poker with one of the Mexico City crowd on a yacht out in the Gulf. They were playing deuces wild, and the grease ball had taken six or seven grand off our friend. Except Dio caught him with a deuce hidden under his thigh. Sal’s old man used to be known as Frankie “Pliers.” I won’t tell you why. But I guess Sal wanted to keep up the tradition. He had another guy hold the grease ball down on the deck and he cut off most of his ear with a pair of tin snips. Then he told him, Tell everybody a duck ate your ear.” That’s the guy you were visiting today. That’s the guy who takes care of your buddy Dixie Lee.”

“Why does he care about Dixie Lee?”

“He gets something out of it. Sal doesn’t do anything unless there’s a blow job in it for him somewhere.”