Black Cherry Blues (30 page)

“Lord God, you liked to give me a heart attack,” he said.

“You can’t drink while you stay with us,” I said.

“If you do or if you come home with it on your breath, you’re eighty-sixed. No discussion, no second chance. I don’t want any profanity in front of my daughter, and you go outside if you want to smoke. You share the’ cooking and the cleaning, you go to bed when we do. The AA group down the street has a job service. If they find you some work, you take it, whatever it is, and you pay one third of the groceries and the rent. That’s the deal, Dixie. If there are any rules here you can’t live with, now’s the time to tell me.”

“Son, you say ‘Frog’ and I’ll say ‘How high?’ “

 He began unloading the backseat of his car. His face wore the expression of a man who might have been plucked unexpectedly from the roof of a burning building. As he piled his boxes and suitcases and clothes on the sidewalk, he talked without stop about the 1950s, Tommy Sands, Ruth Brown, the Big Bopper, the mob, cons in Huntsville, the actress wife who paid goons to beat him up behind Co&k’s Hoe Down in Houston. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to six.

He was still talking while I looked up the number of the Eastgate Lounge.

“-called him ‘the hippy-dippy from Mississippi, yes indeed, Mister Jimmy Reed,’ ” he said.

“When that cat went into ‘Big Boss Man,’ you knew he’d been on Parchman Farm, son. You don’t fake them kind of feelings. You don’t grow it in New York City, either. You don’t put no mojo in your sounds unless you picked cotton four cents a pound and ate a mess of them good ole butter beans. My daddy said he give up on me, that somebody snuck me into the crib, that I must have been a nigra turned inside out.”

Alafair sat delighted and amazed as she listened to Dixie Lee’s marathon storytelling. I dialed the Eastgate Lounge, then listened to the hum and clatter of noise in the background while a woman called Clete to the phone. I heard him scrape the receiver off a hard surface and place it to his ear.

“Streak?”

“Yep.”

“Did I surprise you? Did you think maybe your old partner had headed for Taco Greaso Land again?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“I don’t rattle, mon. At least not over the shit bags.”

“Maybe you should be careful what you tell me.”

“Do I sound like I’m sweating it? When are you going to stop pretending you still got your cherry?”

“You’re starting to get to me, Clete.”

“What else is new? All I did was save your life today.”

“Is there something you want to say?”

“Yeah. Get your butt over here. You know where the East-gate is?”

“Yeah, but I’m bringing Alafair with me. I’ll meet you in the park across the river from the shopping center. You walk across an old railway trestle that’s been made into a footbridge.”

“And you’ll be eating ice cream cones at a picnic table. Man, how do I get in on the good life?” he said, and hung up.

I told Dixie Lee there was a cold roast, bread, and mayonnaise in the icebox, and he could fix himself sandwiches if he hadn’t eaten yet. Then Alafair and I drove across town to the ice cream place on the north bank of the Clark Fork, bought cones, and walked across the river on the footbridge to the park on the opposite side. In the past, there had been a bad fire up the sides of Hellgate Canyon, and the pines that grew down from the crest had been scorched black and then the ash and the burnt needles had been washed away by rain and the spring snowmelt so that the steep gray-pink cliffs of the canyon were exposed high above the river. The wind was up, and the leaves of the cottonwoods along the river’s edge clicked and flickered in the soft light; because the spring runoff had ended and the water was dropping each day, more and more white, moss-scaled stones were exposed in the riverbed and the main channel was turning from copper-colored to a dark green. The white water had formed into long, narrow trout riffles that fanned out behind big rocks into deep pools.

The park was full of blue spruce and Russian olive trees, and kids from the university, which was only a block away, sailed Fris-bees overhead and played rag football. We sat on the mowed grass, high up on the riverbank, so we could look out over the tops of the willows and watch two men who were fishing with worms and spinning rods, throwing lead weights far out into the channel. I saw Clete walk across the bridge with a paper sack hefted in one arm. I got’Alafair started on one of the swing sets and then sat back down on the bank. His knees cracked, his stomach hung over his Budweiser shorts, and he grunted hard in his chest when he sat down beside me.

“You look undressed,” I said.

“Oh.” He touched his chest and smiled.

“I don’t work for Sal anymore. I don’t have to walk around with a piece all the time. Feels good, mon.”

He twisted the cap off a bottle of Great Falls.

“Dixie Lee says he didn’t know Dodds was a hit man.”

“He probably didn’t. Where’d you see Dixie Lee?”

“He’s living at my house.”

“I’ll be damned. He cut the umbilical cord? I didn’t think he had the guts. Sal doesn’t handle rejection well.”

“Dodds may have had a partner, a backup guy. Does Dio have another guy in town?”

“If he does, I don’t know about it. I know a lot of them, too. At least the ones Sal hangs with. They’re New York transplants who think the essence of big time is playing bridge by the pool with a lot of gash lying around. Hey, dig this. Sal had a bunch of them staying at his motel, and the motel manager is this little Jewish guy who used to run a book for the mob out of a pizza joint in Fort Lauder-dale. Of course, the Jew can’t do enough for the dagos because they scare the shit out of him. But he’s got this kid who’s a wiseass college student at Berkeley, and the kid works for his old man as the poolside waiter during the summer. So four of the dagos are playing cards at one of the umbrella tables. And these are big, mean-looking cocksuckers, shades, wet black hair all over their stomachs, big floppers tucked in their bikinis, and they’re giving the kid a terrible time sending food back to the kitchen, complaining the drinks taste like there’s bathroom antiseptic in them, running the kid back and forth for cigarettes and candied cherries and sun cream for the gash and anything else they think of.

“Then one guy spills ice and vodka all over the table and tells the kid to mop it up and bring him another deck of cards. The kid says, “Hey, I’ve been studying Italian at school this year. What does Eatta my shitta mean?”

“The old man hears it and slaps his kid’s face in front of everybody. Then he starts swallowing and sweating and apologizing to the dagos while they stare at him from behind those black shades. Finally one of them stands up, hooks his finger in the old man’s mouth, and throws him down in an iron chair. He says, “He don’t have manners ‘cause you didn’t teach him none. So you shut up your face and don’t be talking to impress nobody. You clean this up, you bring everybody what they want, you sit over there and you don’t go nowhere till we say.”

“They made him sit out there in the sun like an organ-grinder’s monkey for four hours. Till the kid finally begged them to let the old man go back inside.

“It’s good to say Ciao, ciao, bambino to the grease balls The next time the United States drops an A-bomb on anyone, I think it should be Palermo.”

“Where’s Dodds?”

“You really want to know?”

“I want to know if he’s going to be back after me.”

“First you tell me why you didn’t drop the dime on me.” There was a half grin on his face as he raised the beer bottle to his mouth.

“No games, Clete.”

“Because a guy out on bond for murder doesn’t like to introduce cops to his blood-spattered kitchen. Because maybe he knows they might just take the easy route and haul his butt down to the bag. Sounds like your faith might be waning, Streak.”

“Is that guy going to be back?”

“That’s one you don’t have to worry about.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Get serious. You don’t need to know any more, Streak. Except the fact that our man didn’t like heights.”

“What?”

“Did you ever meet a psychopath yet that wasn’t scared of something? It’s what makes them cruel. Charlie didn’t like high places. At least not the one I showed him.”

I looked out silently at the river. A Frisbee sailed by overhead.

“Too grim for you?” Clete said.

“Did he kill Darlene?”

“No, I’m convinced that’s one he didn’t do.”

“Dio, then?”

“He didn’t know. Put it in the bank, too.”

I stood up and began brushing the grass off my pants.

“You’re going to turn to stone on me, huh?” he said.

“It’s a school night. Alafair has to get home.”

“Why is it you always make me feel like anthrax, Streak?”

“You’re right about one thing today. I didn’t call the heat because I didn’t want to be part of another criminal investigation. Particularly when I was left with the problem of explaining how somebody’s blood got smeared all over my walls and stove and floor. Right now I’m going to believe that Charlie Dodds is on a flight to new opportunities in Mexico City. Beyond that, I wouldn’t count on anything, Clete.”

“I’m going to get the guy that did her. You want to sit around and bite your nails, that’s cool with me.”

I walked off toward a group of children with whom Alafair was playing tag. Then Clete called after me, in a voice that made people turn and stare, “I love you anyway, motherfucker.”

I needed some help. I had accomplished virtually nothing on my own; I had been locked up for punching out Sally Dio, had persuaded nobody of my theories, and instead had managed to convince a couple of local cops that I was a gun-wielding paranoid. That night I called Dan Nygurski at his home in Great Falls. A baby-sitter answered and said that he was at a movie with his wife, that she would take down my name and number. He returned my call just after ten, when I was drifting off to sleep with a damp towel folded across the lump on my forehead. I took the phone into the kitchen and closed the hallway door so as not to wake Alafair or Dixie Lee, who was sleeping on the living room couch.

I told him about Charlie Dodds in my house. About the slapjack across the head, the handcuffs, the Instamatic camera, the survival knife that he had started to shove into my heart. Then I told him about Clete, the working over that Dodds had taken, the rolled rug, and the trip in the jeep probably up a log road in either the Bitterroot Valley or the Blackfoot Canyon.

“You realize what you’re telling me?” Nygurski said.

“I don’t give a damn about Dodds. That’s not why I called.”

“You didn’t tell the cops any of this?”

“I’m telling you. Do with it what you want. I’ll bet nobody ever finds Dodds, though. Clete’s done this kind of thing before and gotten away with it.”

“You should have called the cops.”

“Bullshit. I’d be trying to arrange bond right now.”

“I’ll have to report this to them.”

“Go ahead. I think their interest level on a scale of one to ten will be minus eight. Look, Nygurski, there’s somebody else after me or my daughter. He was hanging around her school this morning. Maybe it’s Mapes, maybe it’s another one of Dio’s people. I need some help.”

“I think it takes a hell of a lot of nerve to ask a federal agent for help after you run around two states with a baseball bat.”

“We both want the same thing Sally Dee doing some serious time.”

“No, you’ve got it wrong. I want to do my job. You want to write your own rules on a day-to-day basis.”

“Then you give me a solution. You pledge the safety of my daughter, you assure me that I won’t be headed for Angola Farm in about three weeks, and I won’t be a problem to you.”

“What kind of help do you want?”

“Can you find out if Dio might have another hit man in town?”

“If he does, we don’t know about it. Maybe he put out the contract and let Dodds hire a backup guy. I tell you, though, if this new guy is working with Dodds, he’s not going to try for any ‘before and after’ stuff, not after Dodds blew it. He’ll go for a clean hit, one that you’ll never see coming. I don’t want to be graphic, but you know how they usually do it one behind the head, one in the ear, and three under the chin.”

“Run Mapes for me.”

“What do you expect to find?”

“I don’t know. My lawyer says he was in trouble only once, for beating up a kid with a golf club when he was seventeen. But I’ve seen this guy in action, and I can’t believe he hasn’t bumped into the furniture more than once.”

“Where’s he from?”

“He beat up the kid in Marshall, Texas.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“There’s one other thing. Dixie Lee moved out of Dio’s place. He says he’s through with him. You might talk to him.”

“About what?”

“That’s your province. How about grand jury testimony? It took guts to walk out on Dio, particularly when he owes him fifteen thou.”

“When did you decide to start sharing Pugh’s secrets?”

“He’s probably going to need federal protection sometime. He might be a drunk, but his head sops up information and people’s conversations like a blotter.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s staying with me.”

“What did you do for kicks as a kid? Swallow thumbtacks?”

“The guy’s up against the wall,” I said.

“No, I take that crack back. You’re a slick operator, Robicheaux. Pugh becomes a federal witness, Pugh lives at your house, your house and the people in it go under our umbrella. Right?”

“Not really.”

“I hope not. Because we choose the accommodations.”

“Clever people don’t end up in the mess I’m in, Nygurski.”

“I think maybe there’s solid truth in that statement. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime you watch your butt.”

“When can I hear from you about Mapes?”

“I’m going the extra mile for you. Ease up on the batter, okay? Have a little trust. If you ever get out of this, get your badge back. I think everybody would rather have you inside the tent pissing out the flap rather than the other way around. I’m sure of it.”

Dixie Lee was up early the next morning and had breakfast with me and Alafair at the kitchen table. He was one of those drunks whose eyes clear and whose skin becomes pink and unlined with only a twenty-four-hour respite from alcohol. This morning his face was shaved and bright, and he wore a pair of pleated, white summer shorts and a white sport shirt with green parrots on it. I walked Alafair to school, then made him go to an AA meeting with me down the street and put his name in with the job-placement service. His mood was not as cheerful on the way back home as it had been earlier.