Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “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 cornholers 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 shitbag 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 over 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.

  So I squeezed her hand and said good night, and I saw the flick of disappointment in her eyes before she smiled again and walked with me back into the living room. But she was one with whom you dealt in the morning’s light, unless you were willing to trust the nocturnal whirrings of your own heart.

  She came to me in a dream that night, a dream as clear in its detail as though you had suddenly focused all the broken purple and tan glass in a kaleidoscope into one perfect image. Darlene’s hair was braided on her shoulders, and she wore the doeskin dress she had been buried in, the purple glass bird on her breast. I saw her look first at me from the overhang of the cliff, then squat on her moccasins by a spring that leaked out of rocks into a tea-colored stream. She put her hands into the trailing moss, into the silt and wet humus and mud, and began to smear it on her face. She looked at me again, quietly, her mouth cold and red, her cheeks streaked with mud; then she was gone, and I saw a huge golden deer crash through the underbrush and cottonwoods.

  I s
at straight up in bed, my breath coming hard, my hands shaking. I looked at my watch. It was two in the morning. I shook Dixie Lee awake on the couch.

  “I’ve got to go east of the Divide. You have to take care of Alafair until I get back,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Can you do that? Fix breakfast for her, walk her to school, pick her up in the afternoon?”

  “What’s going on?” His face was puffy and full of sleep.

  “I have to depend on you, Dixie. I’ll be back by tomorrow evening. But you’ve got to take good care of her. Call in sick at work if you have to.”

  “All right,” he said irritably. “But what are you doing?”

  “I think I’m going to nail Mapes. I think I’m going to do it.”

  He sat up on the edge of the couch in his underwear, his arms draped between his thighs. He widened his eyes and rubbed his face.

  “I hate to tell you, son, you still act like a drunk man,” he said.

  Fifteen minutes later I stopped at an all-night diner on the edge of town, bought a thermos of black coffee, then I was roaring up the highway along the Blackfoot River, the tree-covered crests of the mountains silhouetted blackly against the starlight, the river and the cottonwoods and willows along the banks aglow with the rising moon.

  It was dawn when I drove down the dirt road where Clayton Desmarteau had gone into the ditch. The hardpan fields were wet with dew, and the long rays of the sun struck against the thick green timber high up in the saddles of the mountains that formed the Divide. I took an army entrenching tool out of the back of my truck, jumped across the stream on the north side of the road, and walked up the incline into the lodgepole pine. It was cool and the wind was blowing, but I was sweating inside my shirt and my hand was tight on the wood shaft of the E-tool. Low pools of mist hung around the trees, and I saw a doe and her fawn eating in the bear grass. Then I intersected the thin trace of a road that had been used as an access to a garbage dump, and walked on farther across the pine needles until I hit the stream that flowed under a heavy canopy of trees at the foot of a rock-faced hill, and followed it across the soft moldy remains of a log cabin, a rusted-out wood stove half buried in the wet soil, and carpets of mushrooms whose stems cracked under my shoes. Finally I saw the spring that flowed out of the hillside, glistened on the dark rocks and moss, and spread into a fan of blackened leaves and rivulets of silt at the edge of the stream.

  Annie and my father had tried to tell me in the dream, but I hadn’t understood. It was winter when Vidrine and Mapes had murdered Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin. It was winter, and the ground must have been frozen so hard that a posthole digger could only chip it. My heart was beating as I unscrewed the metal ring under the blade of the E-tool, folded the blade into a hoe, and tightened the ring. I scraped away the layers of leaves and raked back long divots of silt and fine gravel, creating half a wagon wheel that spread out from the stream’s edge back to the spring’s source. My pants were wet up to my knees, my shoes sloshing with water. Then I reset the blade and began digging out a level pit in five-inch scoops and setting the mud carefully in a pile on the bank. I worked a half hour, until my shirt was sweated through and my arms and face were streaked with mud. I had begun to think that maybe Dixie Lee was right; I was simply behaving as though I were on a dry drunk.

  Then my shovel hit the toe of a work boot, and I worked the sand and mud off the edges, the congealed laces, back along the gray shank of shinbone that protruded from the rotted sock. I uncovered the other leg, then the folded knees and the collapsed, flattened thigh that was much too small now for the cloth that lay in strips around it. The second man was buried right next to the first, curled in an embryonic position, the small, sightless, tight gray ball of his face twisted up through the soil.

  I stepped back from the pit into the middle of the stream, cleaned the shovel blade in the gravel, then knelt on the opposite bank and washed my arms and face in the water. But I was trembling all over and I couldn’t stop sweating. I sat on the bank, with my knees pulled up in front of me, and tried to stop hyperventilating, to think in an orderly fashion about the rest of the morning. I hadn’t hit the perfecta in the ninth race, but it was close, if I just didn’t do anything wrong. Then, as I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with my thumb and looked across the stream at the glistening mound of mud and silt that I had dug from the bodies, at the nests of white worms that I had lifted into the light, I saw a corroded green cartridge that had been ejected from an automatic. It had the same bottleneck shape as the 7.62-millimeter round fired by a Russian Tokarev.

  I had to drive three miles down the dirt road before I found a pay phone outside of a closed filling station. It had started to rain over the mountains, but the sky in the east was still pink and blue, and the air smelled of pine and sage. When I got Dan Nygurski on the phone at his office, I told him all of it, or I thought all of it, but my words came out in a rush, and my heart was still beating fast, and I felt as if I were standing at the finish line at the track, my fingers pinched tight on that perfecta ticket, trying in the last thunderous seconds of the race to will the right combination under the wire.

  “Let your motor idle a little bit,” he said. “How’d you find them?”

  “They were run off the road between the beer joint and Clayton Desmarteau’s house. I think Mapes and Vidrine took them out of the truck at gunpoint and drove them into the woods. An old road leads off the main one and runs back to a garbage dump. They got out there and walked back to the stream. But the ground was probably covered with snow and frozen solid. I bet you could bust a pick on it in wintertime. Then they walked across a warm-water spring, where the ground stayed soft and wet year-round, and that’s where they shot Desmarteau and his cousin.”

  “Tell me about the shell again.”

  “It came up in a shovelful of mud. I didn’t even see it until I had stopped digging. It’s bottlenecked, like a 7.62 round. Mapes has got a Tokarev. He had it in his hand at his girl’s house down in the Bitterroot. I think he had it in Lafayette, too. He was trying to get to his open suitcase when I hit him with the chain. Look, it’s enough for a search warrant. But it’s got to be done right. You can bring the FBI in on it, let them coordinate it.”

  “Oh?”

  “They can use kidnapping and interstate flight, or depriving a minority of his civil rights by taking his life. The locals might blow it. If Mapes gets a sniff of what’s going on before they serve the warrant, he’ll lose the Tokarev.”

  “I had to take a lot of heat because of that phone tap.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It hasn’t quieted down yet.”

  “I was up against the wall. I don’t know what else to tell you. You want me to hang up and call the sheriff’s office?”

  He waited a moment.

  “No, don’t do that,” he said finally. “I guess we’ve got a vested interest. This whole Indian thing started with Pugh, and Pugh’s had a longtime involvement with Sally Dee. Give me the directions again.”

  I told him in detail once more. The shower had moved eastward across the fields, and rain was now clicking on the roof of the phone booth. An Indian boy on an old bicycle with fat tires rattled past me on the road, his face bent down against the rain.

  “I’ll call the FBI and the Teton sheriff’s office,” Nygurski said. “Then I’ll be out myself. I want a promise from you, though.”

  “What is it?”

  “Other people take it from here on in. You’re out of it. Absolutely.”

  “All right.”

  “I want your word. You don’t go near Mapes.”

  “You have it, but you’ve got to get him with the Tokarev.”

  “I think you’ve made your point. But are you sure that’s what you saw in his hand? I wonder why he didn’t get rid of it.”

  “They were prize souvenirs in Vietnam. Besides, he always sailed out of everything he ever did.”

  “Where are you going to be?” />
  “On the road where their truck went into the ditch. We can walk in from there, or find the access road that leads back to the garbage dump.”

  “Did you hear anything more from Dio?”

  “Nope. Except two of his goons broke Purcel’s hand. He says he took a couple of gold ashtrays out of Dio’s house.”

  “Bad guy to steal from. Purcel must not have pressed charges, because we didn’t hear anything about it.”

  “He said something strange when I went to see him in the hospital yesterday. He said, ‘Our man’s going to have a sandy fuck.’ Or maybe I misunderstood him. I think Dio has a girlfriend named Sandy. Anyway, it didn’t make any sense to me.”

  “Where is he?”

  “St. Pat’s in Missoula.”

  “Maybe it’s time we have a talk with him. I’ll see you a little later this morning. In the meantime, congratulations. You’re a good cop, Robicheaux. Get your badge back.”

  “You’ve been a good friend, too, Dan.”

  “And, lastly, keep your name out of my paperwork for a while.”

  I drove back up the road in the rain and parked by the stream where I had entered the woods at dawn. Then the clouds moved eastward and the rain drifted away over the land behind me, and in the distance the sheer red cliffs of the mountains rose into the tumbling plateaus of ponderosa. When I closed my eyes and laid my head back against the seat I heard robins singing in a lone cottonwood by the stream.

  The next morning I drank almost two pots of coffee and waited for the phone to ring. I had spent nearly all of the previous day at the murder site, the Teton sheriff’s department, and the coroner’s office. I watched three deputies finish the exhumation and put the bodies gingerly in black bags, I gave a statement to the FBI and one to the sheriff’s office, I talked to the pathologist after he had opened up the brainpans of both Indians with an electric saw and had picked out the 7.62 slugs that had been fired at close range into the back of their skull. I had them contact the St. Martin Parish sheriff’s office about Dixie Lee’s deposition in which he claimed to have overheard Vidrine and Mapes talking about the murder of the Indians. I told them where to find Mapes in the Bitterroot Valley, where his girlfriend worked in Missoula, the kind of cars he drove; I talked incessantly, until people started to walk away from me and Nygurski winked at me and said he would buy me a hamburger so I could be on my way back to Missoula.