Black Cherry Blues (36 page)

“Is that your Mercury by the side of the building, the one with the Wyoming sticker?” I said.

“Sure.” She stopped washing glasses and smiled at me. There were tiny lines in the corners of her eyes.

“I’m afraid I backed into it. I don’t think I really hurt it, but you might take a look at it to be sure.”

“You couldn’t hurt that thing. It’s twelve years old and has eighty-five thousand miles on it.”

“Well, I just didn’t want to drive off and not say anything.”

“Just a minute.” She took several glass steins out of the tin sink, set them top down on a folded dish towel, then said something to the cashier.

“I have to hurry. We’re real busy right now.”

I told Alafair I would be right back, and the waitress and I went outside to her car. I ran my hand over some scratches by the Mercury’s taillight.

“That’s about where I hit it,” I said.

“I couldn’t tell if that was old stuff or not. Maybe I just hit the bumper.”

“Forget it. It’s not worth worrying about. I’m getting rid of it, anyway.”

“Aren’t you a friend of Harry’s?” I said.

“Which Harry?”

“Mapes.”

“Sure. How’d you know that?”

“I guess I saw y’all together.”

“How do you know Harry?”

“Through the oil business. I thought he was doing lease work east of the Divide.”

“He is. He’s just visiting right now.”

“Well, I’m sorry to have taken you away from your work.”

“It’s all right. It’s nice of you to be concerned. Not many people would bother.”

She was a nice lady, and I didn’t like to deceive her. I wondered how she had gotten involved with Harry Mapes. Maybe because it’s a blue-collar, male-oriented town, I thought, where a woman’s opportunities are limited. Regardless, I felt sorry for her.

I took Alafair back to the house, called the baby-sitter, then Tess Regan, but neither of them was at home.

“There’s a dollar double feature at the Roxy. How about I take her to that?” Dixie Lee said.

Before I could hide it he saw the hesitation in my face.

“You think I’m gonna get drunk, I’m gonna run off and leave her alone?” he said.

“No.”

“Or maybe I ain’t worked up to the step where you can trust me as good as that old woman down at the church.”

“I just didn’t know what you had planned for today.”

“You want me to look after her or not?”

“I’d appreciate your doing that, Dixie.”

“Yeah, I can see that. But that’s all right. I ain’t sensitive. It all bounces off me.”

“I probably won’t be home until late this evening,” I said.

“Can you fix her supper?”

“Show me a little trust, son. I’d be grateful for it.”

I drove back across town and parked on a side street behind the Heidelhaus so I could see the yellow Mercury. It was a long wait, but at eight o’clock she came out of the restaurant, walked to her car with her purse on her arm, started the engine, and drove south into the Bitterroot Valley.

I followed her twenty-five miles along the river. The light was still good in the valley, and I could see her car well from several hundred yards away, even though other cars were between us; but then she turned onto a dirt road and headed across pasture-land toward the foot of the mountains. I pulled to the shoulder of the highway, got out with my field glasses, and watched the plume of white dust grow smaller in the distance, then disappear altogether.

I drove down the dirt road into the purple shadows that were spreading from the mountains’ rim, crossed a wide creek that was lined with cottonwoods, passed a rotted and roofless log house with deer grazing nearby, then started to climb up on a plateau that fronted a deep canyon in the mountains. The dust from her Mercury still hung over the rock fence that bordered the property where she had turned in. The house was new, made of peeled and lacquered logs that had a yellow glaze to them, with a railed porch, a peaked shingle roof, and boxes of petunias and geraniums in the windows. But her car was the only one there.

I drove on past the house to the canyon, where there was a Forest Service parking area, and watched the house for a half hour through my field glasses. She fed a black Labrador on the back steps, she took some wash off the line, she carried a carton of mason jars out of the shed back into the house, but there was no sign of Harry Mapes.

I went back home and found Alafair asleep and Dixie Lee putting a new set of strings on his sunburst Martin.

I didn’t have to call Dan Nygurski again. He called me at five minutes after eight the next morning.

“You beat me to it,” I said.

“I tried to catch you at home yesterday.”

“About Sally Dio.”

“That’s right.”

“About your phone conversation with him.”

“That’s right. So he did use the pay phone down the road from his house?”

“Yeah, he sure did. In fact, he was using it several times a day. Calls to Vegas, Tahoe, LA, Galveston. Notice I’m using the past tense here.”

I squinted my eyes closed and pressed my forefinger and thumb against my temples.

“I’ve sympathized with you, I’ve tried to help you,” he said.

“I took you into my confidence. I just had a conference call with a couple of federal agents who are very angry right now. My explanations to them didn’t seem to make them feel any better.”

“Dan”

“No, you got to talk yesterday. It’s my turn now. You blew a federal wiretap. You know how long it took us to set that up?”

“Listen to what you’ve got on that tape. Solicitation to commit murder. He stepped in his own shit.”

“You remember when I told you that Sal is not Bugsy Siegel? I meant it. He did time for stolen credit cards. He’s a midlevel guy. But he’s connected with some big people in Nevada. They’re smart, he’s not. He makes mistakes they don’t. When he falls, we want a whole busload to go up the road with him. Are you starting to get the big picture now?”

“All right, I screwed it up.”

“That doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that I think you knew better.”

“He walked into it. I let it happen. I’m sorry it’s causing you problems.”

“No, you wanted to make sure he thought he was tapped. That way he wasn’t about to try to whack you again.”

“What would you do?”

“I would have stayed away from him to begin with.”

“That’s a dishonest answer. What would you do if a guy like io was trying to whack you out, maybe you and your daughter ath?”

I could hear the long-distance hum of the wires in the receiver.

“Did that Missoula detective get ahold of you?” he asked.

“He came out and left his card.”

“I hope he’ll be of some help to you if you have more trouble there.”

“Look, Dan-”

“I have another call. We’ll see you,” he said.

I went into the kitchen to fix a bowl of Grape-Nuts and spilled the box all over the floor. I cleaned up the cereal with a wet paper towel and threw it in the trash.

“I’m heading out for work,” Dixie Lee said.

“All right.”

“Who was that?”

“Nobody.”

“Yeah… well, what do you want to do after Wednesday?”

“What?”

“About Alafair. That job ain’t but four hours a day. I can put them in any time I want.”

“What are you talking about?”

“School’s out for the summer, ain’t it? I can help look after her. What’s the best time for me to be home?”

“I don’t know, Dixie. I can’t think about it right now.”

I felt him looking quietly at the side of my face, then he turned |and walked outside to his automobile. I looked at my watch. It was eight-thirty. I locked the house, put the .45 under the truck seat, land drove south once again into the Bitterroot Valley.

This time the black Jeepster was parked right next to the Mercury, and when I pulled into the yard and got out of the truck woodsmoke was blowing off the stone chimney. Through the front window I could see the woman named Betty drinking coffee with a man at a table in the living room.

The porch rails and the lacquered yellow logs of the house were wet with dew. I stepped up on the porch, knocked on the door, and when the woman opened it I saw Harry Mapes stare at me with his mouth parted over his coffee cup. Then he got up and walked out of my line of sight into a side room.

“Hi,” she said, and smiled with recognition.

“You’re”

“I didn’t tell you my name yesterday. It’s Dave Robicheaux. I’d like to talk to Harry.”

“Sure. He’s here. But how’d you know where I lived?”

“I’m sorry for disturbing you, but I’d appreciate it if you’d ask him to step out here.”

“I don’t understand this,” she said, then turned and saw Mapes standing behind her.

“Harry, this is the guy I told you about.”

“I figured it was you,” he said to me.

He wore jeans and a flannel shirt, and a black automatic hung from his left hand. The chain scars on his face were almost totally gone now.

“Harry, what are you doing?” she said.

“This is the guy who attacked me in Louisiana,” he said.

“Oh!” she said. Then she said it again, “Oh!”

“Come outside, Mapes,” I said.

“You don’t know when to leave it alone, do you?” he said.

“My lawyer told me you might try something like this. He also told me what to do about it “

“What’s that?”

“You try to intimidate a witness, you just create more trouble for yourself. Figure it out.”

“So you’re holding all the cards. Look, I don’t have a weapon. Why don’t you step outside? Nobody’s going to eat you.”

His fingers were long on the sides of the automatic. I had seen only one or two like it since I had left Vietnam. It was a 7.62-millimeter Russian Tokarev, a side arm often carried by NVA officers.

I saw Mapes wet the triangular scar on his lip, his mouth tight, his eyes narrowed as though he were biting down softly on a piece of string. He wasn’t a bad-looking man. He still had the build of a basketball player or a man who could do an easy five-mile morning run. You wouldn’t pay particular attention to him in a supermarket line. Except for his eyes. He was the kind who was always taking your inventory, provided you represented or possessed something he was interested in; and sometimes when you studied the eyes in his kind you saw a hidden thought there that made you look away hurriedly.

“You’re right,” he said, and set the pistol on the arm of a couch by the door.

“Because you’re all smoke. A guy who’s always firing in the well. A big nuisance who couldn’t mind his own business.”

He opened the screen door and stepped out on the porch.

“You think it’s going to come out different somehow at your trial?” he said.

“You think following me around Montana is going to make all that evidence go away?”

“You’ve got it wrong, Harry. I gave up on trying to nail you. You’re too slick a guy. You’ve fooled people all your life. You burned two people to death when you were seventeen, you murdered the Indians, the waitress in Louisiana, your partner, and I think you raped and murdered Darlene. You got away with all of it.”

I saw the blood drain out of the face of the woman behind the screen. Mapes’s chest rose and fell with his breathing.

“Listen, you asshole” he said.

“But that’s not why I’m here. You were at the school ground, in that Mercury there, looking at my daughter through field glasses, asking questions about her. Now, my message here is simple. If you come around her again, I’m going to kill you. Believe it. I’ve got nothing to lose at this point. I’m going to walk up to you, wherever you are, and blow your fucking head off.”

I walked off the porch into the yard.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said.

“You, too, Betty. You stay out here and listen to this. My lawyer did some checking on this guy. He’s a drunk, he’s a mental case, he’s got an obsession because he got his wife killed by some drug dealers. Then somebody threatened his daughter, and he accused me and my partner. The fact that he’s an ex-cop with dozens of people who’d like to even a score with him doesn’t seem to enter his head. Let me tell you something, Ro-bicheaux. Betty’s son goes to a Catholic school in Missoula. She and her ex-husband have shared custody. Sometimes I pick him up or drop him off for her. If that’s the same school your daughter goes to, it’s coincidence, and that’s all it is.”

“You heard what I said. No warning light next time,” I said.

I got inside my truck and closed the door.

“No, Harry, bring him back,” the woman said.

“Who’s Darlene? What’s he talking about a rape? Harry?”

“He’s leaving. Close the door,” he said to her.

“Harry, I’ll call the sheriff. He can’t get away with saying that.”

“He’s leaving. He’s not coming back.”

Then he walked toward the truck window just as I started the engine.

“You’re going to prison,” he said.

“Nothing’s going to change that. You can mess me up with my girl, you can say stuff about blowing me away if it makes you feel good, but in a few weeks you’re going to be hoeing sweet potatoes in Angola.”

I put the transmission in reverse and began backing around in a half circle. The wind blew his hair, and his skin looked grained and healthy in the sunlight. His eyes never left my face. My knuckles were ridged on top of the gearshift knob, and my thighs were shaking as I depressed the floor pedals.

It had all been for nothing.

But there was still time, the moment was still there. To pull the .45 from under the seat, to aim it suddenly at his face, knock him to his knees, screw the barrel hard into his neck and cock the hammer, let him experience the terror of his victims who clawed the inside of an automobile trunk while the metal heated and the flames spread to the gasoline tank. I could feel the .45 leap into my hand as though it had a life of its own.

I shut off the engine and stepped out of the truck. My face felt cool in the bright air. The yellow log house and the ponderosa and blue spruce on the hillsides seemed dazzling in the sun. His eyes dropped to my hands. I held my palms up.

“Did you ever go to the stake in Saigon?” I said.

“What?”