Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its generous assistance, and I also would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for its past support.

  About the Author

  James Lee Burke was born in Houston, Texas, in 1936 and grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. He is the author of thirty novels, including eighteen featuring the Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, and two collections of short fiction. Many of Burke’s book have been New York Times bestsellers and he has twice been awarded an Edgar for Best Crime Novel of the Year. In 2009 the Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master. He has also been the recipient of Bread Loaf and Guggenheim fellowships and an NEA grant. Three of his novels—Heaven’s Prisoners, Two for Texas, and In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead—have been made into motion pictures. Burke lives with his wife, Pearl, in Missoula, Montana.

  Look for the next Dave Robicheaux novel,

  A Morning for Flamingos

  Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

  We parked the car in front of the parish jail and listened to the rain beat on the roof. The sky was black, the windows fogged with humidity, and white veins of lightning pulsated in the bank of thunderheads out on the Gulf.

  “Tante Lemon’s going to be waiting for you,” Lester Benoit, the driver, said. He was, like me, a plainclothes detective with the sheriff’s department. He wore sideburns and a mustache, and had his hair curled and styled in Lafayette. Each year he arranged to take his vacation during the winter in Miami Beach so that he would have a year-round tan, and each year he bought whatever clothes people were wearing there. Even though he had spent his whole life in New Iberia, except for time in the service, he always looked as if he had just stepped off a plane from somewhere else.

  “You don’t want to see her, do you?” he said, and grinned.

  “Nope.”

  “We can go in the side door and bring them down the back elevator. She won’t even know we’ve been there.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “It’s not me that’s got the problem. If you don’t feel good about it, you should have asked off the assignment. What’s the big deal, anyway?”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Then blow her off. She’s an old nigger.”

  “She says Tee Beau didn’t do it. She says he was at her house, helping her shell crawfish, the night that guy got killed.”

  “Come on, Dave. You think she’s not going to lie to save her grandson?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You damn straight, maybe.” Then he looked off in the direction of the park on Bayou Teche. “It’s too bad the fireworks got rained on. My ex was taking the kids to it. Happens every year. I got to get out of this place.” His face looked wan in the glow of the streetlight through the rain-streaked window. His window was cracked at the top to let out his cigarette smoke.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  “Give it a minute. I don’t want to drive in wet clothes all the way up there.”

  “It’s not going to let up.”

  “I’ll finish my cigarette and we’ll see. I don’t like being wet. Hey, tell me on the square, Dave, is it delivering Tee Beau that bothers you, or do we have some other kind of concerns here?” The streetlight made shadows like rivulets of rain on his face.

  “Have you ever been to one?” I asked.

  “I never had to.”

  “Would you go?”

  “I figure the guy sitting in that chair knew the rules.”

  “Would you go?”

  “Yeah, I would.” He turned his head and looked boldly at my face.

  “It can be an expensive experience.”

  “But they all knew the rules. Right? You snuff somebody in the state of Louisiana, you get treated to some serious electroshock therapy.”

  “Tell me the name of one rich man the state’s burned. Or any state, for that matter.”

  “Sorry. I’m not broken up about these guys. You think Jimmie Lee Boggs should have gotten life? Would you like him back around here on parole after ten and a half?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t think so. I’ll tell you another thing. If that guy tries anything on me, I’ll park one in his mouth. Then I’ll find his mother and describe it to her on her deathbed. How’s that sound?”

  “I’m going in now. You want to come?”

  “She’s going to be waiting,” he said, and grinned again.

  She was. In a drenched print-cotton dress, sun-faded and colorless from repeated washings, that clung to her bony frame like wet tissue paper. Her mulatto hair looked like a tangle of gray-gold wire, her high-yellow skin as though it were spotted with brown dimes. She sat alone on a wood bench next to a holding cell, next to the elevator from which her grandson, Tee Beau Latiolais, whom she had raised by herself, would emerge in a few minutes with Jimmie Lee Boggs, both of them manacled in waist and leg chains. Her blue-green eyes were covered with cataracts, but they never left the side of my face.

  She had worked in one of Hattie Fontenot’s cribs on Railroad Avenue in the 1940s; then she’d spent a year in the women’s penitentiary for stabbing a white man through the shoulder after he beat her up. Later she worked in a laundry and did housework for twenty dollars a week, which was the standard full-time salary for any Negro in South Louisiana, wherever he or she worked, well into the 1960s. Tante Lemon’s daughter gave birth prematurely to a baby that was so small it fitted into the shoe box she hid it in before she put it in the bottom of a trash barrel. Tante Lemon heard the child’s cries when she went out to use the privy the next morning. She raised Tee Beau as her own, fed him cush-cush with a spoon to make him strong, and tied a dime around his neck with a string to keep illness from traveling down his throat. They lived in an unpainted shack whose gallery had totally collapsed, so that the steps looked as if they led into a gaping, broken mouth, in an area people called nigger town. Each spring my father, who was a commercial trapper and fisherman, hired her to shell crawfish for him, though he could scarcely afford her meager salary. Whenever he caught mullet or gar in his nets, he dressed it and dropped it by her house.

  “I ain’t eating that, me,” he would say to me, as though he owed an explanation for being charitable.

  I could hear the elevator coming down. A uniformed jailer at a small desk was finishing the paperwork on the transfer of the prisoners from the parish jail to Angola.

  “Mr. Dave,” Tante Lemon said.

  “Tell them up there they already been fed,” the jailer said. “There ain’t anything wrong with them, either. The doctor checked out both of them.”

  “Mr. Dave,” she said again. Her voice was low, as though she were speaking in church.

  “I can’t help, Tante Lemon,” I said.

  “He was at my little house. He didn’t kill no redbone,” she said.

  “Somebody’s going to take her home,” the jailer said.

  “I told all them people, Mr. Dave. They ain’t listen to me. What for they gonna listen an old nigger woman worked Miz Hattie’s crib? That’s what they say. Old nigger putain lyin’ for Tee Beau.”

  “His lawyer’s going to appeal. There are a lot of things that can be done yet,” I said. I kept waiting for the elevator doors to open.

  “They gonna electrocute that boy,” she said.

  “Tante Lemon, I can’t do anything about it,” I said.

  Her eyes wouldn’t leave my face. They were small and wet and unblinking, like a bird’s.

  I saw Lester smiling to himself.

  “A car’s going to take you home,” the jailer said to her.

  “What for I goin’ home, me? Be home by myself in my little house?” she answered.

  “You fix something hot, you get out of them wet clothes,” the jailer said. “Then tomorrow you talk to Tee Beau’s lawyer, like Mr. Dave says.”

  “Mr. Dave know better,” she said. “The
y gonna burn that little boy, and he ain’t done nothing wrong. That redbone pick on him, make fun of him in front of people, work him so hard he couldn’t eat when he got home. I fix chicken and rice, everything nice, just the way he like it. He sit down all dirty at the table and stare at it, put it in his mouth like it ain’t nothing but a bunch of dry bean. I tell him go wash his face and arm, then he gonna eat. But he say, ‘I tired, Gran’maman. I cain’t eat when I tired.’ I say, ‘Tomorrow Sunday, you gonna sleep tomorrow, you, then you gonna eat.’ He say, ‘He comin’ for me in the morning. We got them field to cut.’

  “Where everybody when that little boy need he’p?” she said. “When that redbone roll up a newspaper and swat him like he’s a cat? Where them po-lice, them lawyer then?”

  “I’ll come over to your house tomorrow, Tante Lemon,” I promised.

  Lester lit a cigarette and smiled up into the smoke. I heard the elevator motor stop; then the door slid open and two uniformed sheriff’s deputies walked Tee Beau Latiolais and Jimmie Lee Boggs out in chains. They were dressed in street clothes for the trip up to Angola. Tee Beau wore a shiny sports coat the color of tin, baggy purple pants, and a black shirt with the collar flattened out on the coat. He was twenty-five, but he looked like a child in adult clothes, like you could pick him up around the waist as you would a pillow slip full of sticks. Unlike his grandmother’s, his skin was black, his eyes brown, too big for his small face, so that he looked frightened even when he wasn’t. Someone in the jail had cut his hair but had not shaved the neck, leaving a black wiry line low on the back of his neck that looked like dirt.

  But Jimmie Lee Boggs was the man who caught your eye. His hair was silver, long and thin, and it hung straight back off his head like thread that had been sewn to the scalp. He had jailhouse pallor, and his eyes were elongated and spearmint green. His lips looked unnaturally red, as though they had been rouged. The curve of his neck, the profile of his head, the pink-white scalp that showed through his threadlike hair, reminded me of a mannequin’s. He wore a freshly laundered T-shirt, jeans, and ankle-high black tennis shoes without socks. A package of Lucky Strikes stuck up snugly from one of his pockets. Even though his hands were manacled to the waist chain and he had to shuffle because of the short length of chain between his ankles, you could see the lean tubes of muscle move in his stomach, roll in his arms, pulse over his collarbones when he twisted his neck to look at everyone in the room. The peculiar light in his eyes was not one you wanted to get lost in.

  The jailer opened a file cabinet drawer and took out two large grocery bags that were folded and stapled neatly across the top. The name “Boggs” was written on one, “Latiolais” on the other.

  “Here’s their stuff,” he said, and handed the bags to me. “If y’all want to stay up there tonight, you can get a per diem.”

  “Lookit what you send up there, you,” Tante Lemon said. “Ain’t you shamed? You put that little boy in chains, you pretend he like that other one, ’cause you conscience be bothering y’all at night.”

  “I had that boy in my jail eight months, Tante Lemon, long before he got in this trouble,” the jailer said. “So don’t be letting on like Tee Beau never done anything wrong.”

  “For taking from Mr. Dore junkyard. For giving his gran’maman an old window fan ain’t nobody want. That’s why y’all had him in y’all’s jail.”

  “He stole Mr. Dore’s car,” the jailer said.

  “That’s what he say,” Tante Lemon said.

  “I hope I don’t have to pay rent here tonight,” Lester said, and brushed cigarette ashes off his slacks by flipping his nails against the cloth.

  Then Tante Lemon started to cry. Her eyes closed, and tears squeezed out of the lids as though she were sightless; her mouth trembled and jerked without shame.

  “Good God,” said Lester.

  “Gran’maman, I be writing,” Tee Beau said. “I be sending letters like I right down the street.”

  “I got to go to the bathroom,” said Jimmie Lee Boggs.

  “Shut up,” the jailer told him.

  “That boy innocent, Mr. Dave,” she said. “You know what they gonna do. T’connais, you. He goin’ to the Red Hat.”

  “Y’all get out of here. I’ll see she’s all right,” the jailer said.

  “Fuck, yes,” Lester said.

  We went out into the dark, into the rain and the lightning that leapt across the southern sky, and locked Jimmie Lee Boggs and Tee Beau into the back of the car behind the wire-mesh screen. Then I unlocked the trunk and threw the two paper bags containing their belongings inside. At the back of the trunk, fastened to the floor with elastic rope, were a .30-06 scoped rifle in a zippered case and a twelve-gauge pump shotgun with a pistol stock. I got in the passenger’s side, and we drove out of town on the back road that led through St. Martinville to Interstate 10, Baton Rouge, and Angola Pen.

  The spreading oaks along the two-lane road were black and dripping with water. The rain had slackened, and when I rolled my window partly down I could smell the sugarcane and the wet earth in the fields. The ditches on both sides of the road were high with rainwater.

  “I got to use the can,” Jimmie Lee Boggs said.

  Neither Lester nor I answered.

  “I ain’t kidding you, I gotta go,” he repeated.

  “You should have gone back there,” I said.

  “I asked. He told me to shut up.”

  “You’ll have to hold it,” I said.

  “What’d you come back to this stuff for?” Lester said.

  “I’m into some serious debt,” I said.

  “How bad?”

  “Enough to lose my house and boat business.”

  “I’m going to get out one of these days. Buy me a place in Key Largo. Then somebody else can haul the freight. Hey, Boggs, didn’t the mob have enough work for you in Florida?”

  “What?” Boggs said. He was leaning forward on the seat, looking out the side window.

  “You didn’t like Florida? You had to come all the way over here to kill somebody?” Lester said. When he smiled, the edge of his mouth looked like putty.

  “What do you care?” Boggs asked him.

  “I was just curious.”

  Boggs was silent. His face looked strained, and he shifted his buttocks back and forth on the seat.

  “How much did they pay you to do that bar owner?” Lester said.

  “Nothing,” Boggs said.

  “Just doing somebody a favor?” Lester continued.

  “I said ‘nothing’ because I didn’t kill that guy. Look, I don’t want to be rude, we got a long trip together, but I’m feeling a lot of discomfort back here.”

  “We’ll get you some Pepto Bismol or something up on the Interstate,” Lester said.

  “I’d appreciate that, man,” Boggs said.

  We went around a curve through open pasture. Tee Beau was sleeping with his head on his chest. I could hear frogs croaking in the ditches.

  “What a July Fourth,” Lester said.

  I stared out the window at the soaked fields. I didn’t want to listen to any more of Lester’s negative comments, nor tell him what was really on my mind, namely, that he was the most depressing person I had ever worked with.

  “I tell you, Dave, I never thought I’d have an assignment with a cop who’d been up on a murder beef himself,” he said, yawning and widening his eyes.

  “Oh?”

  “You don’t like to talk about it?”

  “I don’t care one way or the other.”

  “If it’s a sore spot, I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “It’s not a sore spot.”

  “You’re kind of a touchy guy sometimes.”

  The rain struck my face, and I rolled the window up again. I could see cows clumped together among the trees, a solitary, dark farmhouse set back in a sugarcane field, and up ahead an old filling station that had been there since the 1930s. The outside bay was lighted, and the rain was blowing off the eaves into the lig
ht.

  “I got something bad happening inside me,” Boggs said. “Like glass turning around.”

  He was leaned forward on the seat in his chains, biting his lip, breathing rapidly through his nose. Lester looked at him, behind the mesh screen, in the rearview mirror. “We’ll get you the Pepto. You’ll feel a lot better.”

  “I can’t wait. I’m going to mess my pants.”

  Lester looked over at me.

  “I mean it, I can’t hold it, you guys. It ain’t my fault,” Boggs said.

  Lester craned his head around, and his foot went off the gas. Then he looked over at me again. I shook my head negatively.

  “I don’t want the guy smelling like shit all the way up to Angola,” Lester said.

  “When you transport a prisoner, you transport the prisoner,” I said.

  “They told me you were a hard-nose.”

  “Lester—”

  “We’re stopping,” he said. “I’m not cleaning up some guy’s diarrhea. That don’t sit right with you, I’m sorry.”

  He pulled into the bay of the filling station. Inside the office a kid was reading a comic book behind an old desk. He put down the comic and walked outside. Lester got out of the car and opened his badge on him.

  “We’re with the sheriff’s office,” he said. “A prisoner needs to use your rest room.”