Black Cherry Blues Read online

  “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 into 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 Huntsville 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 wa
s 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 ducktails 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 Drno 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.”

  “You a wiseguy, 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 scrots, 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. E
nd 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.