Black Cherry Blues (37 page)

“Some ARVN and white mice would march them out to the stake, tie them to it, and put a round behind the ear. At least that was what I was told. I never saw it.”

“I think you had some head damage over there. You’ve got thirty seconds to be past Betty’s property line, then we call the sheriff.”

“You’d better concentrate on my words, Harry. The executioner was probably a special kind of guy. He could kill people and go home and have lunch. He’s somebody you can understand. You’d recognize each other in a group. But you know I’m not like you, and that’s why you’re not afraid of me. I can come out here and talk about cooling you out, but you know I won’t do it. But how about Sally Dio?”

“Dio? You must truly be out of your mind. Get out of here, man.”

“He was talking about whacking you out. That’s not a shuck. He’sgot some new guys up at the lake. They’re the real article, genuine syndicate hit men. You can call Dan Nygurski at the DEA in Great Falls and ask him. Or, better yet, ask him to deny it. If that’s not enough for you, I can give you Sal’s unlisted number and you can talk with him about it. If I’m just jerking you around, you can clear the whole matter up in a few minutes.”

“What’s Dio care about me? I only met the guy twice.”

“Ask him. Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in his and Dixie Lee’s lease deals. He’s probably a borderline psychotic. I doubt if he thinks too straight.”

His eyes looked like they were focused on a thought ten inches in front of his face. Then they came back on me.

“Where’d you hear this?” he asked.

“Stay away from my daughter. Don’t come near that school. I don’t care if your lady friend’s son goes there or not,” I said, and I got back into the truck and drove out on the dirt road.

In the rearview mirror I saw him standing alone in the yard, staring after me, the woman holding the screen door wide behind him.

I went back home, walked down the street to a noon AA meeting, bought groceries for our supper that evening, then sat on the back steps in the shade and tried to put myself inside the mind of Harry Mapes. He was a smart man. He had killed a number of people over the years his first when he was seventeen and God only knew how many in Vietnam and he had never spent a day in jail for it. He wasn’t compulsive; he was calculating, and he used fear and violence to achieve an immediate, practical end. Like any sociopath’s, his emotions were simple ones and concerned entirely with desires, survival, and the destruction of his enemies. He remained passive, functional, and innocuous in appearance until he felt threatened. Then he rose to the occasion.

When he saw me east of the Divide, on the dirt road between the Indian beer joint and the home of Clayton Desmarteau’s mother, I scared him in some way. He went to the school ground to keep my mind on other things or, perhaps, to provoke me into attacking him again. Somehow he had also concluded that Darlene had sent me east of the Divide, had put me on that dirt road south of the Black-feet Reservation, and he feared that somewhere in that hardpan country I would discover what had happened to Clayton Desmar-teau and his cousin.

In the last two days I had managed to turn it around on both Dio and Mapes, to use some smoke and their own frame of reference against them, so that in all probability they wouldn’t come around me and Alafair again. But my legal situation remained the same as it had been when I left Louisiana. My victory had become the restoration of the status quo. I lay down on the living room couch in a funk, with my arm across my eyes, and fell asleep.

The image in my dream was brief, like needles of light in the afternoon haze. Darlene kneeling by water, white-tailed deer thudding across the wet ground between the cottonwoods.

I felt feathers brushing across my forearm and cheek. I opened one eye and looked at Alafair’s grinning face. The other day she had found an old feather duster in the house.

“How you doing, you cute little guy?” I said.

“How you doing, you cute little Dave?” she said. She wore jeans and her Baby Orca T-shirt.

I sat up on the couch.

“How’d you get home?” I said.

“Dixie Lee walked down and got me. You was asleep. Dave?”

“What?” I rubbed my face and tried to make the afternoon come into focus.

“We only got two more days of school. We going home then?”

“Maybe so, little guy.”

“We better call Batist and tell him.”

“Alafair, when we go back home, it might be for just a few days. I might have to sell a few things and raise some money so we can take another trip.”

“Trip?”

“To a different place for a while. Down by the ocean, maybe.”

“We’re not going to live at the house no more?”

“I don’t know, Alf.”

I looked at the confusion in her face.

“Let’s take things as they come,” I said.

“I just don’t want you to be disappointed later if we move somewhere else for a while.”

I heard the phone ring in the hallway. Alafair picked up her lunch box from the coffee table and started toward the kitchen.

“Miss Regan asked if we eat redfish,” she said.

“Why she ask that? What’s she care about redfish? I got pushed down on the school ground. I threw a dirt clod at the boy that did it.”

I let her go and didn’t say anything more.

“Dave, you better take this,” Dixie Lee said in the doorway, the telephone receiver in his hand.

“What is it?”

“St. Pat’s Hospital. They got Clete in there.”

We drove to the hospital on Broadway, left Alafair in the second-floor waiting room with a comic book, and walked down the corridor to Clete’s room. A plainclothes cop, with his badge on his belt, was just coming out the door. He had a blond mustache and wore a white shirt and knit tie. He was putting a small notebook in his shirt pocket.

“What happened?” I said.”

“Who are you?” he said.

“A friend of Cletus Purcel.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dave Robicheaux.”

He nodded slowly, and I saw the name meant nothing to him.

“Your friend got worked over,” he said.

“He says he didn’t know the two guys who did it. But the bartender who phoned us said the two guys called him by name. Tell your friend it’s dumb to protect people who’ll slam a man’s hand in a car door.”

He brushed past me and walked to the elevator. Dixie Lee and I went inside the room, which Clete shared with an elderly man who had an IV connected to his wasted arm. Clete’s bed was on the far side of the partition, one end elevated so he could look up at the television set that was turned on without sound. One eye was swollen into a purple egg, and his head was shaved in three places where the scalp had been stitched. His right hand was in plaster; the ends of his fingers were discolored as though they were gangrenous.

“I heard you with the detective,” he said.

“He doesn’t seem to believe your story,” I said.

“He’s probably got marital trouble. It makes a cynic out of you. What’s happening, Dixie?”

“Oh man, who did this to you?” Dixie Lee said.

“A couple of Sal’s meatballs.”

“Who?” Dixie Lee said.

“Carl and Foo-Foo. I got Foo-Foo one shot in the rocks, though. He’s not going to be unlimbering his equipment for a while.”

“What happened?” I said.

“I stopped at this bar off Ninety. They must have seen the jeep in the parking lot. They caught me with a baton when I came out the side door. When I thought they were through, they dragged me to a car and slammed my hand in the door. If the bartender hadn’t come out, they’d have done my other hand.”

“Tell the cops,” Dixie Lee said.

“Why do you want to protect Carl and Foo-Foo?”

“What goes round, comes round,” Clete said.

“I ain’t sweating it, mon.”

“You used to say “Bust ‘em or smoke ‘em.” Let the cops bust them,” I said.

“Maybe they’ve got a surprise coming out of the jack-in-the-box,” Clete said. He looked at my face.

“All your radio tubes are lit up, Streak. What are you thinking about?”

“Why’d they do it?”

“Sal’s running scared. He’s got nobody but his old man and his hired dagos. Even the corn holers cut out on him.”

“That’s not it,” I said.

“How do I know what goes on in his head?”

“Come on, Clete,” I said.

“When I left, he owed me fifteen hundred in back salary. Plus I’d already paid my rent to him in advance. So I went in his house and took a couple of gold ashtrays.”

“You crazy bastard,” Dixie Lee said.

“He didn’t kill Darlene, then, did he?”

“I don’t know,” Clete said.

“Yes, you do. Somebody shot at him. He thinks it was Charlie Dodds. If he had killed Darlene, you’d be the first person he would fear. Those two guys wouldn’t have just broken your hand, either. They would have passed you on the road and taken you out with a shotgun.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“No maybe about it, Cletus,” I said.

“It was Mapes. He thought she sent me over by the reservation where he killed the two Indians. He found her alone, and he raped and killed her. You’ve got a beef with the wrong guy, and you know it.”

“I got a beef with Sal for all kinds of reasons,” he said.

“But that’s all right. Our man’s going to have a sandy fuck.”

“What?” I said.

“A fifties joke. Sand in the Vaseline,” he said.

“Forget it. Hey, do me a favor. My jeep’s still out at that bar. It’s a log place, right where Broadway runs into Ninety. Take it to your house, will you? The keys are on the table. I don’t want some local punks to clean it out.”

“All right.”

“Where’s Mapes?” he said.

“You’ll have to find him on your own, partner.”

“You know where he is, then.”

“Do you want us to bring you anything?”

“Come on, you think I’m going to get out of bed and scramble Mapes’s eggs? You give me too much credit.”

“You’d find a way, Clete.”

He wet his mouth and smiled.

“Dixie, can you give me and Streak a minute?” he said.

“Sure.”

“It’s just something from our First District days,” Clete said.

“I don’t mind,” Dixie Lee said.

“Then come on back later,” Clete said.

“Don’t be talking down to me. It hurts my feelings,” Dixie Lee said.

“I’ll come see you tomorrow.”

He walked out of the room.

“He’s not full of booze,” Clete said.

“What do you need, Cletus?”

“I screwed up a lot of things back there in New Orleans. Blew my marriage, took juice, knocked a girl up, got into the shylocks. Then I cooled out that shit bag in the hog lot. But I paid for it. In spades. I’d like to change it but I can’t. I guess that’s what remorse is about. But the big one that’s been eating my lunch all this time is that I could have brought that guy in and gotten you off the hook. For ten grand I helped them turn you into toilet paper.”

“The lowlifes all took a fall one way or another.”

“Yeah, your fourteen years with the department went down the hole, too.”

“It was my choice, Clete,”

“You want to act like a stand-up guy about it, that’s copacetic. But I don’t buy it. I fucked you over. It’s the worst thing I did in my life. I’m telling you I’m sorry. I’m not asking you to say anything. I’m telling you how I feel. I’m not bringing it up again. You were my best friend. I stuck it to you.”

“It’s all right. Maybe you were doing the best you could at the time.”

His one open eye stared up at me. It looked like a piece of green glass in his battered face.

“It’s time to write it off, partner,” I said.

“That’s straight?”

“Who cares about last year’s box score?”

He swallowed. His eye was watery along the bottom rim.

“Fuck, man,” he said.

“I have to go. Alafair is in the waiting room.”

“I’ve got to tell you something,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve got to whisper it. Come here.”

“What is it, Clete?”

“No, closer.”

I leaned lover him, then his good hand came up, clamped around the back of my neck like a vise, and pulled my face down on his. He kissed me hard on the mouth, and I could smell the cigarettes on his breath, the salve and Mercurochrome painted on his stitches and shaved scalp.

We drove out west of town to the bar where Clete had been beaten up by Sally Dee’s goons and found his Toyota jeep in the parking lot. Dixie Lee drove it back to the house, parked it in back, and locked it. A few minutes later Tess Regan called.

“Can you come over?” she said.

“When?”

“Tonight. For redfish. Didn’t Alafair say anything?”

“It came out a little confused.”

“I called you earlier, but nobody was home. It’s nothing special, really. We could make it another night.”

“Tonight’s fine,” I said.

And it was. The evening was cool and smelled of flowers and sprinkled yards, and she blackened the redfish on a grill in the backyard and served it in her small dining room, which glowed with the sun’s reflection through the tall turn-of-the-century windows. She wore tight blue jeans and low heels, a short-sleeved blouse with tiny pink roses on it, and gold hoop earrings, but her apartment gave her away. The wood floors and mahogany trim on the doors gleamed; the kitchen was spotless; the hung pictures and those on the marble mantel were all of relatives. The wallpaper was new, but the design and color did nothing to remove the apartment from an earlier era. A Catholic religious calendar, with an ad for a mortuary on it, was affixed to the icebox door with small magnets. She had crossed two palm strands in an X behind the crucifix on the dining room wall.

After supper we did the dishes together while Alafair watched television. When her leg bumped against me, she smiled awkwardly as though we had been jostled against one another on a bus, then her eyes looked at my face with both expectation and perhaps a moment’s fear. I suspected she was one of those whose heart could be easily hurt, one to whom a casual expression of affection would probably be interpreted as a large personal commitment. The moon was up now. The window was open and I could smell the wet mint against the brick wall and the thick, cool odor of lawn grass that had been flooded by a soak hose. It was the kind of soft moment that you could slip into as easily as you could believe you were indeed able to regain the innocence of your youth.