Black Cherry Blues

  “From what I’ve been told, these are all people you’ve had trouble with at one time or another. You think you’re being entirely objective here?”

  “The Dios are animals. So is Mapes. Purcel killed a guy for some paramilitary crazies in New Orleans. I wouldn’t underestimate the potential of any of them.”

  “Why would Purcel kill her?”

  He looked at me with interest for the first time. I dropped my eyes to my shoes. Then I looked back at him.

  “I was involved with Darlene,” I said. “He knew about it.”

  The sheriff nodded and didn’t reply. He opened his desk drawer and took out a clipboard on which were attached Xeroxed copies of the kinds of forms that county medical examiners use in autopsies.

  “You were right about the bruises,” he said. “She had them on her neck and her shoulders.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “She also had a bump on the back of her head,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “But it’s going down as a suicide.”

  “What?”

  “You got it the first time.”

  “What’s the matter with you? You’re discounting your own autopsy report?”

  “Listen, Robicheaux, I don’t have any evidence that she didn’t kill herself. On the other hand, I have every indication that she did. She could have hit her head on the tub. She could have gotten the bruises anywhere. Maybe you don’t like to hear this, but Indians around here get into trouble. They get drunk, they fight in bars, families beat the shit out of each other. I’m not knocking them. I’ve got nothing against them. I think they get a lousy break. But that’s the way it is. Look, if I suspected anybody, it’d have to be Purcel. But I don’t believe he did it. The guy’s really strung out on this.”

  “What about Sally Dee?”

  “You give me the motive, you put him in the house, I’ll cut the warrant.”

  “You’re making a big mistake, Sheriff.”

  “Tell me how. Fill me in on that, please.”

  “You’re taking the easy choice, you’re letting them slide. The Dios sense weakness in you, they’ll eat you alive.”

  He opened a deep drawer in the bottom of his desk and took out a baton. The layers of black paint were chipped, and the grip had been grooved in a lathe and drilled to hold a leather wrist loop. He dropped it loudly on the desktop.

  “The guy I replaced gave me this the day I took office,” he said. “He told me, ‘Everybody doesn’t have to go to jail.’ And there’s days when maybe I got that kind of temptation. I see Dio in the supermarket and I shudder. This is good country. He doesn’t belong here. But I don’t bust heads, I don’t let my deputies do it, either. If that don’t sit right with somebody, that’s their problem.” He mashed out his cigarette without looking at me.

  “I guess I’ll be on my way,” I said, and stood up. Then, as an afterthought, I said, “Did the autopsy show anything else unusual?”

  “Not to me or the medical examiner.”

  “What else?”

  “I think we’ve ended this discussion.”

  “Come on, Sheriff, I’m almost out of your day.”

  He glanced again at his clipboard.

  “What she had for supper, traces of semen in the vagina.”

  I took a breath and looked out the window at the electric blueness of the lake in the sunlight and the low green hills and pine trees in the distance. Then I pinched my eyes and the bridge of my nose with my fingers and put on my sunglasses.

  “You were on the money about Cletus,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He didn’t do it. He’s impotent. She was raped before she was murdered.”

  He sucked his teeth, smiled to himself, shook his head slightly, and opened his newspaper to the sports page.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “It’s the only chance I get to read it.”

  I found out from the medical examiner’s office that Darlene’s family had picked up the body that morning and that the funeral was the next afternoon on the Blackfeet Reservation. The next day was Saturday, so Alafair drove across the mountains with me to Dupuyer, on the south end of the reservation. I found out from the local newspaper that the service was to be held at a Baptist church up on the Marias River at two o’clock. We had lunch in a clapboard café that was built onto the side of a grease-stained, cinder-block filling station. I had little appetite and couldn’t finish my plate, and I stared out the window at the dusty street while Alafair ate her hamburger. The bars were doing a good business. Rusted pickup trucks and oversized jalopy gas burners were parked at an angle to the curb, and sometimes whole families sat listlessly in them while the old man was inside the juke joint. People who looked both devastated and broke from the night before sat on the curb, their attention fixed on nothing, their mouths open like those of silent, newly hatched birds.

  Then I saw Alafair watching them, her eyes squinting, as though a camera lens were opening momentarily in her mind.

  “What do you see, little guy?” I said.

  “Are those Indians?”

  “Sure.”

  “They’re like me?”

  “Well, not exactly, but maybe you’re part Indian. An Indian Cajun from Bayou Teche,” I said.

  “What language they talk, Dave?”

  “English, just like you and me.”

  “They don’t know no Spanish words?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  I saw a question mark, then a troubled look slip into her face.

  “What’s on your mind, little guy?” I asked.

  “The people in my village. They sat in front of the clinic. Like those people there.” Her eyes were looking at an elderly man and woman on the curb. The woman was fat and wore army shoes and dirty athletic socks, and her knees were splayed open so that you could see up her dress. “Dave, they ain’t got soldiers here, have they?”

  “You get those thoughts out of your head,” I said. “This is a good country, a safe place. You have to believe what I tell you, Alf. What happened in your village doesn’t happen here.”

  She put her hamburger on her plate and lowered her eyes. The corners of her mouth were turned downward. Her bangs hung in a straight line across her tan forehead.

  “It did to Annie,” she said.

  I looked away from her face and felt myself swallow. The sky had clouded, the wind had come up and was blowing the dust in the street, and the sun looked like a thin yellow wafer in the south.

  The funeral was in a wood-frame church whose white paint had blistered and peeled into scales. All the people inside the church were Indians, people with braided hair, work-seamed faces, hands that handled lumber without gloves in zero weather, except for Clete and Dixie Lee, who sat in a front pew to the side of the casket. It was made of black metal, lined and cushioned with white silk, fitted with gleaming brass handles. Her hair was black against the silk, her face rouged, her mouth red as though she had just had a drink of cold water. She had been dressed in a doeskin shirt, and a beaded necklace with a purple glass bird on it, wings outstretched in flight, rested on her breast. Only the top portion of the casket was opened, so that her forearms were not visible.

  The skin of Clete’s face was shiny and stretched tight on the bone. He looked like a boiled ham inside his blue suit. I could see his cigarettes tight against his shirt pocket; his big wrists stuck out of his coat sleeves; his collar had popped loose under the knot of his tie; the strap of his nylon shoulder holster made a hard line across his back. His eyes had the glare of a man staring at a match flame.

  I didn’t hear, or rather listen to, much of what the preacher said. He was a gaunt and nervous man who read from the Old Testament and made consoling remarks in the best fashion he was probably capable of, but the rain that began clicking against the roof and windows, sweeping in a lighted sheet across the hardpan fields and river basin, was a more accurate statement of the feelings that were insi
de me.

  I made a peculiar prayer. It’s a prayer that sometimes I say, one that is perhaps self-serving, but because I believe that God is not limited by time and space as we are, I believe perhaps that He can influence the past even though it has already happened. So sometimes when I’m alone, especially at night, in the dark, and I begin to dwell on the unbearable suffering that people probably experienced before their deaths, I ask God to retroactively relieve their pain, to be with them in mind and body, to numb their senses, to cool whatever flame licked at their eyes in their final moments. I said that prayer now for Darlene. Then I said it again for my wife, Annie.

  The cemetery, a windswept and weed-grown square of land enclosed by wire strung between concrete posts, was located a short distance from the edge of the river bottoms. The Marias basin was strange country; the bluffs and the gradated channelings of the river looked as if they had been formed with a putty knife, the clay and silt layered and smoothed in ascending plateaus. Even the colors were strange. The eroded bluffs on the far side of the basin were gray and yellow and streaked with a burnt orange that looked like rust. The water in the main channel was high and brown, and leafless cottonwood limbs floated in it. The sky was sealed with gray clouds from horizon to horizon; in the thin rain the countryside looked as if it were poisoned by the infusion of toxic waste. This was the place Darlene had told me about, the site of what was called the Baker massacre of 1870. On this afternoon, except for a solitary purple dogwood blooming by the cemetery fence, it looked as though the spring had never touched the land here, as though this place had been predestined as moonscape, a geographical monument to what was worst in us.

  I watched the pallbearers lower Darlene’s casket into the freshly dug hole in the cemetery. The piled orange-and-gray dirt next to the grave was slick with rainwater. The graves around hers were littered with jelly glasses and dime-store vases filled with dead wildflowers. A small American flag lay sideways on a soldier’s grave, spotted with mud. A picture of a little girl, not more than five or six, was wrapped in plastic and tied to a small stone marker with baling wire. On the incline to one side of the cemetery a long length of black plastic pipe ran from a house trailer down to the lip of the river basin. The pipe had cracked at a joint, and a stream of yellow-black effluent had leaked its way in rivulets into one side of the cemetery.

  I walked over to the pickup truck, where Alafair slept on the seat with the door open; I stared out over the wet land. In the distance I could see rain falling heavily on some low gray-green hills dotted with a few pine trees. After a while I heard cars and pickups driving away over the dirt road, rocks knocking up under their fenders; then it became quiet again, except for the sound of the two gravediggers spading the mound of dirt on Darlene’s casket. Then a strange thing happened: the wind began to blow across the fields, flattening the grass, wrinkling the pools of rainwater in the road. It blew stronger and stronger, so unexpectedly hard, in fact, that I opened my mouth to clear my ears and looked at the sky for the presence of new storm clouds or even a funnel. A cloud shifted temporarily away from the sun and a curtain of light moved suddenly across the bluffs and the gradated layers of the river basin. As it did, the wind stripped away the purple flowers of the dogwood blooming by the cemetery fence and blew them in a pocket of air out over the river’s surface like a fragmented bird.

  Then it was all over. The sky was gray again, the wind dropped, the weeds stood up stiffly in the fields.

  I heard someone standing behind me.

  “It looks like the end of the earth, don’t it?” Dixie Lee said. He wore a gray western suit with a maroon shirt that had pearl snap buttons on it. “Or what the earth’ll look like the day Jesus ends it.”

  I saw Clete behind the wheel of Dixie’s pink Cadillac convertible, waiting for him.

  “Who paid for the casket?” I said.

  “Clete.”

  “Who did it, Dixie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sally Dio?”

  “I can’t believe something like that.”

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “Fuck, I don’t know.” He looked at Alafair, who was sleeping with her rump in the air. “I’m sorry… but I don’t know. I ain’t sure about anything anymore.”

  I continued to look out over the river flats, the swirl of dark current in the middle of the river, and the orange-streaked bluffs beyond.

  “It ain’t any good to stand out here studying on things,” he said. “Convoy on back with us and we’ll stop in Lincoln for something to eat.”

  “I’ll be along after a while.”

  I heard him light a cigarette, click his lighter shut and put it in his pocket. I could smell his cigarette smoke drifting from behind me.

  “Walk over here with me. I don’t want to wake up that little girl,” he said.

  “What is it, Dixie?” I said irritably.

  “Some people say life’s a bitch and you die. I don’t know if that’s right or not. But it’s what you’re starting to think right now, and it ain’t your way. You get yourself a lot of distance between you and them kind of thoughts, son. Look, you got involved with her. Everything ain’t lost on me. I know what you’re feeling.”

  “You’re sober.”

  “So I eased up a couple of days. I got my own program. You guys stay sober a day at a time. I get drunk a day at a time. Convoy on back with us. Give me a break from Clete. Sonofabitch is driving me crazy. It’s like being next to a balloon that’s fixing to float down on a hot cigarette. I tell you, he catches the guy that did this, it ain’t ever getting to the jailhouse.”

  I followed them back toward the Divide, across the greening plains and into the mountains, up the glistening black highway into thick stands of ponderosa pine, blue shadow in the canyons, white water breaking over the boulders in the streambeds far below, long strips of cloud hanging wetly in the trees. It was misting heavily in the town of Lincoln; the air was cool and purple in the twilight and smelled of cut logs and woodsmoke and food cooking and the diesel exhaust from the eighteen-wheel log trucks idling in café parking lots. I saw Clete and Dixie pull off the road next to a café and look back at me. I shifted into second, accelerated through the traffic light, and kept going through town. Alafair looked at me in the light from the dashboard. Her window was half down, and there were drops of water in her hair and on her tan face.

  “We ain’t going to stop?” she said.

  “How about I buy you a buffalo burger on the other side of the mountain?”

  “They wanted you to stop with them, didn’t they?”

  “Those guys want lots of things. But like somebody once told me, I just don’t want to be there when they find it.”

  “Sometimes you don’t make no sense, Dave.”

  “I’ve got to have a talk with your teacher,” I said.

  On Monday morning I started to call my lawyer, then decided I didn’t need higher phone bills or more depressing news. If he had gotten a continuance, he would have called me, and anything else he might have to say would be largely irrelevant. I walked Alafair to school, then ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts at the kitchen table and tried to think, as I had all day Sunday, of a reasonable plan to push Harry Mapes and Sally Dio to the wall. But I was quickly running out of options. I would never be able to find the bodies of the dead Indians, much less prove that they were killed by Harry Mapes and Dalton Vidrine. I wondered how I had ever thought I could solve my legal problems by myself, anyway. I wasn’t a cop; I had no authority, access to police information, power of warrant, arrest, or interrogation. Most motion pictures portray private investigators as chivalric outsiders who solve crimes that mystify the bumbling flatfeet of officialdom. The reality is that most PIs are former jocks, barroom bouncers, and fired or resigned cops who would cut off their fingers to still have their civil service ratings. Their licenses gave them about as much legal authority as a postman.

  I could go back on the eastern slope of the Divide and start checking
oil leases in county courthouses. Maybe somehow I would tie Dio into Harry Mapes and Star Drilling Company and the Indians, but even if the connection existed, how would that help my defense on the murder charge in Louisiana? And who had killed Darlene and why? My thoughts became like dogs snapping at each other.

  I was distracted by the sound of somebody walking between my house and the neighbor’s. I got up from the table and looked through the bedroom door and out the screen window. In the leafy shade I saw a thick-bodied blond man in a yellow hard hat and a denim shirt with cutoff sleeves disappear through some bushes into the backyard. A tool belt clinked on his side. I walked quickly to the back door and saw him standing in the sunlight, in the middle of the lawn, staring up at the telephone pole with his hands on his hips. His biceps were big and red with sunburn.

  “Could I help you?” I said.

  “Telephone company. There’s trouble on the line.”

  I nodded and didn’t reply. He continued to stare up at the pole, then he glanced back at me again.

  “Did you use your phone this morning?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Did it ring and just stop?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s no big thing. I got to get up on your pole, and then maybe I’ll have to use your phone in a little bit. We’ll get it fixed, though.” He grinned at me, then walked out into the alley and behind the garage where I couldn’t see him.

  I went into the hallway, picked up the telephone, and listened to the dial tone. Then I dialed the operator. When she answered, I hung up. I looked out the back door again and couldn’t see the repairman. I sat back down at the kitchen table and continued eating from my cereal bowl.

  Something bothered me about the man, but I couldn’t think what it was. Maybe I’m just wired, I thought. Or maybe I wanted the dragons to come finally into my own yard. No, that wasn’t it. There was something wrong in the picture, something that was missing or that didn’t fit. I went to the front of the house and stepped out on the porch. There was no telephone truck parked on the street. Four houses down a short man in a cloth cap with two canvas sacks cross-strung on his chest was putting handbills with rubber bands on people’s doors. The bags were full and heavy, and there were sweat marks on his T-shirt.