Black Cherry Blues

  “Get the waiter,” he said to the man who was standing.

  “What are you having, Mr. Robicheaux?” the man said.

  “Nothing.”

  He motioned the waiter to the door anyway.

  “Bring a bottle of something nice for Mr. Dio’s guest,” he said. “Bring Mr. Dio another Manhattan, too. You want anything else, Sal?”

  Sal shook his head again, then motioned the two men out of the room. I sat down across the table from him. A half-dozen cigarette butts were in the ashtray, and ashes were smeared on the linen tablecloth. I could smell the heavy odor of nicotine on his breath. The looped scar under his right eye was tight against his skin.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With Charlie Dodds.”

  “I don’t know anything about him.”

  “Cut the shit. He tried to clip me last night.”

  “What has that got to do with me?”

  He breathed through his nose and wet his lips.

  “I want to know what’s going on,” he said.

  “You got me, Sal. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You and Dodds cut some kind of deal.”

  “I think maybe you’ve burned out some cells in your brain.”

  “Listen, you stop trying to fuck with my head. You and him got something going. You paid him or something, you turned him around. I don’t know what kind of deal you’re working, but believe me, man, it ain’t worth it.”

  “This is why you wanted to meet? Big waste of time.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I mean it, you quit jerking me around. We’re talking business. We straighten all this out right now. We don’t, my old man will. You understand that? You and Charlie Dodds aren’t going to fuck up millions of dollars in deals people got around here.”

  “You’re hitting on the wrong guy, Sal.”

  The waiter brought in a Manhattan and a green bottle of wine in a silver ice bucket. He uncorked the wine and started to pour it into a glass for me to taste.

  “Get out of here,” Sal said.

  After the waiter was gone, Sal lit a fresh cigarette and drew the smoke deep into his lungs.

  “Listen,” he said, “there’s nothing between us.”

  “Then you shouldn’t send bad guys around my house.”

  “It was a personal beef. It’s over. Nobody got hurt. It ends now. There’s a lot of money going to be made here. You can have in on it.”

  I looked at my watch.

  “I have to be somewhere else,” I said.

  “What the fuck is with you? I’m talking a score you couldn’t dream about. I’m talking three, four large a week. Broads, a condo in Tahoe, any fucking thing you want. You going to turn that down because you got a personal beef to square?”

  “I’ll see you, Sal. Don’t send anybody else around my house. It won’t help your troubles with Charlie Dodds.”

  I started to get up. He put his hand on my forearm.

  “I know something you want, you need, man. And I’m the cat can give it to you,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That guy Mapes. Dixie said he can send you up the road. How’d you like it Mapes wasn’t around to worry you anymore?” He took a drink from his Manhattan. His eyes were level and intent over the glass.

  “I don’t even know where he is,” I said.

  “You say the word, you end this bullshit between you and me, you deliver up that cocksucker Charlie Dodds, Mapes is dead meat. You’ll get Polaroids, then you burn them. You don’t have any connection with it. Nobody’ll ever see the guy again. It’ll be like he never existed.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’ll think about it?”

  “That’s what I said, Sal. Call me tomorrow afternoon.”

  I walked out of the restaurant into the coolness of the night. The streets were full of college kids, and I could smell pine woodsmoke from people’s chimneys and the heavy, cold smell of the river in the air.

  When I got home Dixie showed me the business card a Missoula city detective had left in the mailbox. The detective had penciled a note on the back to the effect that he wanted me to call him, since he had missed me twice at the house. I suspected this had to do with Dan Nygurski’s calling the local police about Charlie Dodds’s visit to my house. I dropped the card on top of the icebox, put Alafair to bed, and watched a late show with Dixie Lee.

  I slept through until morning without dreaming or once getting up in the night. When I woke and stepped out on the porch with a cup of coffee, the river was green and running fast in the shadows of the bridge, riffling over the boulders in the deepest part of the current, and the sunlight through the maples in the yard looked like spun glass.

  CHAPTER

  11

  It was Sunday morning. I took Alafair to nine o’clock mass, then we fixed cush-cush and ate breakfast with Dixie Lee. He had shaved, pressed his slacks, and put on a white shirt.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “Some Holy Rollers asked me to play piano at their church. I hope the plaster don’t fall out of the ceiling when I walk in.”

  “That’s good.”

  He looked down at his coffee cup, then played with the big synthetic diamond ring on his finger.

  “I got something bothering me,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  He looked at Alafair.

  “Alafair, why don’t you start on the dishes while Dixie helps me with something outside?” I said.

  We went out to the truck, and I took the small whisk broom from behind the seat and began sweeping out the floor.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to drink. I woke up scared about it this morning,” he said.

  “Just do it a day at a time. Do it five minutes at a time if you have to.”

  “Why the fuck am I scared, man?”

  “Because it’s fear that makes us drink.”

  “I don’t understand. It don’t make sense. I felt real good yesterday. Today I’m shaking inside. Look at my hands. I feel like I just got off a jag.”

  “Dixie, I’m not a psychologist, but you’re going into a church today that’s like the one you grew up in. Maybe you’re dealing with some memories that bring back some bad moments. Who knows? Just let it go, partner. You’re sober this morning. That’s all that counts.”

  “Maybe some people ain’t supposed to make it.”

  “You’re not one of them.”

  “You’d really throw me out if I went back on the juice?”

  “Yep.”

  “Somehow that just made a cold wind blow through my soul.”

  “You work the steps, and I promise all that fear, all those weird mechanisms in your head, will go away.”

  “What mechanisms?”

  “Strange thoughts and images, things that don’t make any sense, stuff that you won’t talk about with anybody. If you work the program, all those things will gradually disappear.”

  The morning was cool, and there was a breeze off the river, but there were drops of perspiration on his forehead and in his eyebrows.

  “Dave, I just feel downright sick inside. I can’t explain it.”

  “It’s going to pass,” I said. “Just don’t drink today.”

  But his eyes were forlorn, and I well understood the peculiar chemical misery he was experiencing at the moment; I also knew that my words would mean more to him later than they did now.

  “While we’re out here, let me tell you about something else,” I said. “I’m going to receive a phone call this afternoon. I don’t want you to answer it.”

  “All right.”

  “It’ll be from Sally Dee. I don’t want him to know you’re living here.”

  “You’re putting me on?”

  I continued sweeping the floor mat with the whisk broom.

  “Dave, that ain’t true?”


  “It’s complicated.”

  “So is shit. This is some kind of nightmare. What are you doing, man?”

  “Just don’t answer the phone.”

  “I wouldn’t touch the sonofabitch at gunpoint.”

  An hour later the phone rang. But it was Tess Regan, not Sally Dio.

  “Jason, the eighth-grader I told you about, the one who talked with the man in the yellow car, he just came over on his bicycle,” she said. “Last night he went to the Heidelhaus for dinner with some of his relatives. He saw the yellow car behind the restaurant. He’s sure it’s the same one. He remembered that the back window was cracked and there was a University of Wyoming sticker on it.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “A Mercury.”

  “Did he get the license number?”

  “No, I asked him. He said he didn’t have a piece of paper or a pencil. Kids don’t quite pull it all off sometimes, Dave.”

  “He did just fine,” I said. “It was at dinnertime, you say?”

  “Yes. He said the Mercury was there when he went into the restaurant, and it was still there when he left. He tried to tell his uncle about it, but it was a birthday party and adults tend not to hear children sometimes.”

  “Thanks very much, Tess. Tell Jason I appreciate what he’s done.”

  Alafair and I drove over to the Heidelhaus, a large Bavarian-style restaurant on the south side of town. The lunch crowd had started to come in, and the parking lot was half filled with cars, but none of them was a yellow Mercury. I drove behind the building and around the sides but had no luck there, either. I took Alafair for an ice cream cone, returned in a half hour, and still came up empty.

  When we got home Dixie Lee was reading the newspaper on the front steps.

  “It ain’t rung. At least not while I was here,” he said.

  “How was church?”

  “It went okay. They asked me to play again Wednesday night. They ain’t a bad bunch for people that probably left their toast in the oven too long.”

  Alafair went inside just as the phone rang.

  “Damn, there it is,” Dixie Lee said. “Go easy, boy. Let’s stay on the sunny side for a while.”

  Alafair had picked up the receiver, but I eased it out of her hand before she could speak. I stepped into the bathroom and closed the door on the cord.

  “You had time to think, Robicheaux?” Sally Dee said.

  “I still believe you have things mixed up.”

  “I’m not interested in opinions. You want to do some business, or you want to keep fucking around?”

  “You’ve got it backwards, Sal. You hired Charlie Dodds to take me out.”

  “That’s past history. You come up to the lake uninvited, you provoked my father, you started that beef out on the road. I mark it off even. That’s the way I see it.”

  “What’s the offer?”

  “What d’you mean, what’s the offer? I spelled it out to you yesterday.”

  “No, you didn’t. You said three or four grand a week. Are you going to pay that kind of money for house security?”

  “We’ll set you up with your own action. You manage a club in Vegas. All you got to do is count the receipts. You know what the skim is on a half-dozen lobby slots?”

  “I’m about to go on trial.”

  “You’re breaking my knob off.”

  “No, I think you’re trying to do a number on me, Sal. You’ll talk a lot of shit about the big score out in Vegas, let me think I got no worries about Harry Mapes, then a little time passes and I’m back in Louisiana in handcuffs.”

  “You think I’m playing games while that crazy fucker is shooting at me?”

  “That’s your problem. My big worry is prison. That and your shitheads coming around my house.”

  “I told you, there ain’t anybody after you now. What is it I can’t get through to you? This is a simple deal. You make money, I make money, Mapes gets whacked. You’re home free. I guarantee it. People don’t get out from under us. You were a cop. You know that.”

  “I don’t think I want to do business with you, Sal.”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re about to take another fall.”

  “What is this? What the fuck are you up to, man?”

  “Don’t call here again. I’m out of your life. Don’t even have thoughts about me.”

  “You shit-eating motherfucker, you’re setting me up… It won’t work, cocksucker… it’s entrapment… you tell that to Nygurski… I’ve got lawyers that’ll shove it up his ass.”

  I placed the receiver quietly in the cradle and went outside and sat down on the steps beside Dixie Lee, who was reading the comics in the newspaper. He turned the page and popped the paper straight between his hands.

  “Don’t start telling me about it. My system’s puny as it is. I just as soon drink razor blades,” he said.

  I called Nygurski at his house a few minutes later. He wasn’t home, so I put Alafair in the truck and we drove back to the Heidelhaus. This time the yellow Mercury with the cracked back window and the University of Wyoming sticker was parked in the shade of the building behind the dumpster.

  I parked in the main lot, away from the Mercury, took Alafair inside and bought her a Coke by a stone fireplace that was now filled with a huge tropical aquarium.

  I went up to the male cashier at the bar.

  “I backed into a yellow Mercury by the side of the building,” I said. “I think it might belong to somebody who works here. I think I just scratched it, but I’d like to make it right.”

  “Next to the building? Right out there?” he asked, gesturing toward the side of the restaurant where the dumpster was located.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “It sounds like Betty’s. That’s her down the bar.”

  She was around thirty, blond, thick across the stomach, overly rouged, too old for the Bavarian waitress costume that she wore.

  “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 pastureland 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.