DR03 - Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke

  "You have an obligation to tell us that, I think."

  "This guy didn't have a Texas accent, did he?"

  "No. He didn't have an accent."

  "A couple of guys have a beef with me. Maybe he works for one of them. But their beef is with me. It's not going to affect anything at your school."

  "I see," she said, and her eyes went away into the sunlight on the yard.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound sharp," I said.

  "You weren't. I'm sorry you're having this trouble." She stood up to go.

  "I think you should consider calling the police. Your daughter is a beautiful little girl."

  "There's no law against a guy asking for somebody's address."

  "You probably understand these things better than I, then. Thank you for the tea."

  "Wait a minute. I appreciate your help. I really do. And Alafair thinks the world of you. But I could start explaining my situation to you now and we'd still be talking tomorrow morning. It's a mess, and it involves a bunch of bad people. I don't have any answers for it, either. Sometimes cops can't do you any good. That's why as I get older I believe more and more in prayer. At least I feel like I'm dealing with somebody who's got some real authority." I smiled again, and this time it took.

  "I'll bet you handle it all right," she said, and her eyes crinkled. She squeezed my hand and walked down the steps onto the sidewalk, out of the porch's shadow, into the sunshine, her calves clicking with light in the bright air.

  I went into the kitchen and fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts for lunch. While I ate I stared out the window at the neighbor's orange cat climbing up the roof of the garage out by the alley. Overhead, two doves sat on the telephone wires. Who had been the man on the telephone? I thought. Sally Dio's mechanic out of Vegas? Or maybe somebody who worked with Harry Mapes. Why not? It would be a safe way for Mapes to keep me agitated and off-balance. He was a mailer of hypodermic needles and threats against a child. A telephone call to the school would be consistent with his past behavior. At least that's what a police department psychologist would say.

  Except for the fact that I was the defendant in an upcoming murder trial and Mapes was the prosecution witness. The apparatus of the law was on his side; he was the friend of the court, the chain-whipped victim of an alcoholic, burnt-out cop. Mapes didn't need to shave the dice.

  Which brought me back to my original speculation and Dan Nygurski's warning, one I truly did not want to confront. A faceless button man whose only name was Charlie.

  Call the police, she had said. Suffering God, I thought, why is it that in problematic situations almost everyone resorts to axioms and societal remedies that in actuality nobody believes in? Tess Regan was a good girl, and obviously I was being too hard on her in my frustration, but ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker? In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?

  I drove to Bob Ward's Sporting Goods, a mountaineering and tackle-and-gun store I had heard about even in Louisiana, and used my MasterCard to buy a .38 revolver, a box of rounds and a cutaway holster for it, a secondhand twelve-gauge shotgun, and a box of double-aught buckshot. Back home I carried the tool chest from my truck into the kitchen, slipped the top shelf out of the cupboard, and tacked the .38 holster to its bottom. I replaced the shelf, loaded five rounds into the revolver, set the hammer on the empty chamber, slipped the revolver into the holster, and snapped the leather strap across the base of the hammer.

  Then I took a hacksaw from the tool chest, lay the shotgun on the back-porch step, placed my knee hard against the stock, and sawed through the ventilated rib sight and both barrels ten inches above the chambers. I broke open the breech, looked through the barrels at the clean, oily whorls of light, plopped two double-aughts in the chambers, snapped the breech shut, set the safety, and put the shotgun on the top shelf of the closet in the front hallway.

  With the .45 in the bedroom, there would now be no place in the house where I would not have almost immediate access to a weapon. It wasn't a panacea, but it was all I had. I could have spent time regretting that I had bounced Sally Dio's head off his van in front of his friends, but if he was involved with Harry Mapes or Star Drilling Company, and I believed he was, it would have been only a matter of time before I had trouble with the Dio family, anyway.

  I was still tired from yesterday's drive over the Divide. No, it went deeper than that. I was tired of pursuing a course that seemed to have no resolution, of walking about in what seemed to be a waking nightmare, of feeling that I deserved all this, that somehow I had asked for it, that it was inevitable that I ride in a wood cart like a condemned seventeenth-century criminal, creaking over the cobbled street through the mob toward the elevated platform where a hooded man waited with wheel and iron bar.

  I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a cutoff sweatshirt, and ran four miles along the river. It was a cloudless day, the sky hard and blue, and the pines high up on the mountains seemed to tremble with light. In the south the Bitterroots were as sharp and etched against the sky as if they had been cut out with a razor blade. The spring runoff of melted snow was starting to abate in the river, and great round boulders that had been covered by the current only two days ago were now exposed and hot-looking in the sun, the skeletal remains of hellgrammites welded to their sides. I ran all the way to the university district, thumped across the river on an abandoned railroad bridge, and looked down below at a fisherman horsing a rainbow out of the current onto the gravel. The riverbank was lined with cottonwoods and willows, and the wind blew out of Hellgate Canyon and flattened the new leaves so that the trees looked like they had changed, in a flick of the eye, to a pale green against the brown rush of water.

  When I turned into my block my body was running with sweat, and I could feel the sun's heat deep in my skin. I did fifty push-ups off the back steps, fifty stomach crunches, one hundred leg lifts, and twenty-five chin-ups on the iron stanchion that supported the clothesline, while my neighbor's orange cat watched me from the garage roof. Then I sat quietly in the grass, my forearms on my knees, breathing the sweet smell of the clover, my heartbeat as regular and strong and temporarily as confident as it had been twenty years before.

  The moon was down that night, somewhere beyond the black outline of the Bitterroots, and dry lightning leapt whitely between the clouds over the mountains. I could smell electricity and impending rain through the screen door, and the trees along the street were dark and shaking in the wind. At nine o'clock the phone rang.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Can you come up here, Dave?" The line was heavy with static.

  "Clete?"

  "I need you up here, man. Real bad."

  "What is it?"

  "Darlene .. . Fuck, man. She's dead."

  CHAPTER 8

  The regular baby-sitter wasn't home. I found Tess Regan's number in the telephone book, called her, then took Alafair over to her house.

  An hour and a half later I drove up the dirt lane to Clete's small redwood house on Flathead Lake. All the lights were on. It was raining, and the lake was black in the background, and I could see the rain blowing in the light from the windows. Farther up the dirt lane, past the electronic gate, the Dio house was dark. I knocked on Clete's front door; when no one answered, I went inside.

  I heard a toilet flush somewhere in back, then he walked out of the bedroom with a wet towel held to his mouth. His face looked bloodless, the skin as tight as a lampshade. His tie was pulled loose, and his white shirt was wet down the front. He sat down at the table by the sliding glass doors and drank noisily out of a coffee cup, his whole hand wrapped around the cup to keep it from shaking. On the table were a carton of milk and a fifth of Cutty Sark. He drew in deeply on a Camel and held the smoke down as though he were taking a hit off a reefer. His breath jerked
in his chest when he let the smoke out. Out on the lake a lighted, anchored sailboat pitched in the troughs.

  He rubbed the towel on his mouth again, then on the back of his thick neck.

  "I can't keep anything down. I think I got a peptic ulcer," he said.

  "Where is she?"

  "In the main bathroom." He looked up at me with his poached face and swallowed.

  "Get yourself together."

  "I came back from Missoula, she was like that. I can't take this shit."

  But I wasn't listening to him. I walked down the hall to the bathroom. When I looked inside I had to clasp one hand on the door-jamb. The safety razor lay on the tile floor, glued thickly to the surface with her blood. She was nude and had slipped down in the tub on her side so that only half her face floated above the soapy red water. There was a deep incision across the inside of both forearms.

  Oh Lord God, I thought, and had to take a deep breath and look away.

  She had bled until she was almost white. I sat on the edge of the tub and touched her soft, wet hair with my fingertips. It felt like wet feathers.

  Written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror were the words:

  C,

  Checking out, Bye-bye, love,

  I ran my hand through my hair and stared numbly at her. Then I saw the tiny scratches and the red discolorations, like pale strawberry bruises, like love bites, on her neck and shoulder. I took a sheet out of the bedroom and draped it over her, then went back into the living room.

  Clete was pouring another scotch and milk at the table. The smoke from his Camel curled up over the nicotine stains on his fingers. The skin around his eyes flexed abruptly when he saw my expression.

  "Hey, you get that look out of your face, man," he said.

  "What were you doing in Missoula?" I said.

  "I pick up cigars for Sal's old man. There's only one store in Missoula that carries his brand."

  "Why tonight?"

  "He told me to."

  "Why haven't you called the locals?"

  "They're going to bust me for it."

  "For a suicide?" I watched his face carefully.

  "It's no suicide. You know it's not."

  "Clete, if you did this"

  "Are you crazy? I was going to ask her to marry me. I'm seeing a therapist now because I'm fucked up, but when I was straightened out I was going to see about taking us back to New Orleans, living a regular life, opening up a bar maybe, getting away from the grease balls."

  I looked steadily into his eyes. They stared back at me, hard as green marbles, as though they had no lids. The stitched scar that ran from the bridge of his nose through one eyebrow looked as red as a bicycle patch. Then his eyes broke, and he took a hit of the scotch and milk.

  "I don't care what you believe," he said.

  "If you think I got jealous over you and her, you're right. But I didn't blame her for it. I got a condition I can't do anything about right now. The therapist says it's because of all that stuff back in New Orleans and because I'm working for grease balls and pretending I like it when actually I wouldn't spit on these guys. But I didn't blame her. You got that?"

  "She told you?"

  "What's to tell? There's ways a guy knows. Butt out of my personal affairs, Streak."

  "I put a sheet over her. Don't go back in there till the cops get here." I picked up the telephone. The moon had broken through a crack in the clouds over the mountains on the far side of the lake, and I could see the froth on the waves blowing in the wind.

  "You saw the bruises?" Clete said.

  "Yes."

  "Most of the locals aren't real bright. But when the coroner does the autopsy, they're going to pick me up."

  "Maybe. What's the point?"

  He drank out of the cup again, then drew in on the cigarette. His breath was ragged coming out.

  "You're not big on sympathy tonight, are you?" he said.

  "To be honest, I don't know what I feel toward you, Clete."

  "It's Sal. It's gotta be. I'm going to be on ice, he's going to be playing rock 'n' roll with Dixie Lee and the Tahoe corn holers I'm going to nail that fucker, man. I'm going to blow up his shit. I'm going to do it in pieces, too."

  "What's his motive?" I set the receiver back down.

  "He doesn't need one. He's psychotic."

  "I don't buy that."

  "She was on to something. It's got to do with oil, with Dixie Lee, maybe with dope. I don't know. She believed in spirits. She thought they told her things. Then yesterday she saw Sal chopping up lines for Dixie Lee and a couple of the Tahoe broads, and she told him he was a fucking cancer, that one day his kind were going to be driven into holes in the earth. Can you dig that? Holes in the earth."

  "Where are the Dios now?"

  "They said they were going to a play up in Bigfork."

  "Have you heard Sally Dio say anything about a guy named Charlie?"

  "Charlie? No. Who is he?"

  "A hit man out of Vegas."

  "Wait a minute, they picked up a guy at the airport in Missoula last night. I thought he was just another one of Sal's butt wipes I offered to drive in and get him, but Sal said I needed a night off."

  "What did he look like?"

  "I don't know, I didn't see him."

  The clouds over the lake were silver where the moon had broken through, and the water below was black and glazed with light.

  "I'm going to call the cops now, then I'm taking off," I said.

  "I don't want my name in it, all right?"

  "Whatever you say." Then he said, "You're pretty cool. A cool operator. You always were. Nobody shakes ole Streak's cookie bag. They could strike matches on your soul and not make you flinch."

  I didn't answer him. I walked out into the misting rain and the broken moonlight and drove my pickup truck back down the lake-front road toward Poison. The cherry trees in the orchards were dripping with rainwater in my headlights. The wooded hills were dark, and down on the beach I could see a white line of foam sliding up on the sand. With the windows up I was sweating inside the cab. I passed a neon-lit bar, a boat dock strung with light bulbs, a wind-sheltered cove where the pines grew right down to the water's edge, a clapboard cottage where people were having a party and somebody was still barbecuing in the darkness of the porch. Then I turned east of Poison, at the foot of the lake, and headed for the Jocko Valley, and I knew that I would be all right. But suddenly the clouds closed over the moon again, the sky became as black as scorched metal, and a hard wind blew out of the ice-capped Missions. A curtain of driving rain swept across meadow, irrigation canal, slough, poplar windbreak, and willow-lined stream. Lightning leapt from the crest of the Missions to the black vault of sky overhead, thunder rolled out of the canyons, and hailstones the size of dimes clattered on my truck like tack hammers.

  I pulled to the side of the road, sweat boiling off my face, my windows thick with steam. The truck shook violently in the wind. My knuckles were round and white on the steering wheel. I felt my teeth grinding, felt the truck's metal joints creak and strain, the tailgate tremble and reverberate against the hooked chain; then a shudder went through me that made my mouth drop open, as though someone had clapped me on both ears with the flats of his hands. When I closed my eyes I thought I saw a copper-colored stream beaten with raindrops, and in it a brown trout with a torn mouth and blood roaring in clouds from its gills.

  The next morning I walked down to the old brick church next to Alafair's school. The sun was brilliant in the bowl of blue sky above the valley. High up on one of the mountains above Hellgate Canyon, I could see horses grazing in the new grass and lupine below the timber, and the trees along the river were dark green from the rain. The current looked deep and cold between the sunbaked boulders that protruded from the water's surface. Someone had planted a garden by the side door of the church, and yellow roses and spearmint bloomed against the red-brick wall. I went inside, crossed myself at the holy water fount, and knelt in a pew close to the altar.
Like almost all Catholic churches, this one smelled like stone and water, incense, and burning wax. I think that fact is no accident inside a Catholic church. I think perhaps the catacombs, where the early Christians celebrated mass, smelled the same way.

  I prayed for Darlene, for Alafair, my father and brother, and finally for myself. A muscular, blond-headed priest in black trousers, scuffed cowboy boots, and a T-shirt came out of the sacristy and began removing the flower vases from the altar. I walked to the communion rail, introduced myself, and asked if he would hear my confession.

  "Let's go out into the garden," he said.

  Between the church and the rectory was a sunny enclosure of lawn and flower beds, stone benches, bird feeders, and a small greenhouse. The priest and I sat next to one another on a bench, and I told him about my relationship with Darlene and finally about her death. While I talked he flipped small pieces of dirt at the leaves of a potted caladium. When I finished he was silent a moment; then he said, "I'm not quite sure what you're confessing to. Do you feel that you used this woman?"