Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“What you’re doing is not only stupid, you’re starting to piss me off, Dixie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You want to be on these guys’ leash the rest of your life? What’s the matter with you?”

“Everything. My whole fucking life. You want to pour yourself some iced tea? I got to use the bedpan.”

“I think I’ve been jerked around here, partner.”

“Maybe you been jerking yourself around.”

“What?”

“Ask yourself how much you’re interested in me and how much you’re interested in the drilling company that killed your old man.”

I watched him work the stainless steel bedpan out from the rack under the mattress.

“I gu

ess you have dimensions I haven’t quite probed,” I said.

“I flunked out my freshman year, remember? You’re talking way above my league.”

“No, I don’t think so. We’ll see you around, Dixie.”

“I don’t blame you for walking out mad. But you don’t understand. You can’t, man. It was big back then. The Paramount Theater in Brooklyn with Allan Freed, on stage with guys like Berry and Eddie Cochran. I wasn’t no drunk, either. I had a wife and a kid, people thought I was decent. Look at me today. I’m a fucking ex-convict, the stink on shit. I killed a child, for God’s sake. You come in here talking an AA shuck about the beautiful weather outside when maybe I’m looking at a five-spot on Angola farm. Get real, son. It’s the dirty boogie out there, and all the cats are humping to it in three-four time.”

I stood up from my chair.

“I’ll speak with the sheriff about the deputy. He won’t leave you alone again. I’ll see you, Dixie,” I said.

I left him and walked outside into the sunlight. The breeze was cool and scented with flowers, and across the street in a grove of oak trees a Negro was selling rattlesnake watermelons off the back of a truck. He had lopped open one melon on the tailgate as an advertisement, and the meat was dark red in the shade. I looked back up at Dixie Lee’s room on the corner of the second floor and saw a nun close the venetian blinds on the sunlight.

CHAPTER

3

I had never liked the Lafayette Oil Center. My attitude was probably romantic and unreasonable. As chambers of commerce everywhere are fond of saying, it provided jobs and an expanded economy, it meant progress. It was also ugly. It was low and squat and sprawling, treeless, utilitarian, built with glazed brick and flat roofs, tinted and mirrored windows that gave onto parking lots that in summer radiated the heat like a stove.

And to accommodate the Oil Center traffic the city had widened Pinhook Road, which ran down to the Vermilion River and became the highway to New Iberia. The oak and pecan trees along the road had been cut down, the rural acreage subdivided and filled with businesses and fast-food restaurants, the banks around the Vermilion Bridge paved with asphalt parking lots and dotted with more oil-related businesses whose cinder-block architecture had all the aesthetic design of a sewage-treatment works.

But there was still one café on Pinhook left over from my college days at Southwestern in the 1950s. The parking lot was oystershell, the now-defunct speakers from the jukebox were still ensconced in the forks of the spreading oak trees, the pink and blue and green neon tubing around the windows still looked like a wet kiss in the rain.

The owner served fried chicken and dirty rice that could break your heart. I finished eating lunch and drinking coffee and looked out at the rain blowing through the oaks, at the sheen it made on the bamboo that grew by the edge of the parking lot. The owner propped open the front door with a board, and the mist and cool air and the smell of the trees blew inside. Then a Honda stopped in a rain puddle out front, the windshield wipers slapping, and an Indian girl with olive skin and thick black hair jumped out and ran inside. She wore designer jeans, which people had stopped wearing, a yellow shirt tied across her middle, and yellow tennis shoes. She touched the raindrops out of her eyes with her fingers and glanced around the restaurant until she saw the sign over the women’s room. She walked right past my table, her damp wrist almost brushing my shoulder, and I tried not to look at her back, her thighs, the way her hips creased and her posterior moved when she walked; but that kind of resolution and dignity seemed to be more and more wanting in my life.

I paid my check, put on my rain hat, draped my seersucker coat over my arm, and ran past the idling Honda to my truck. Just as I started the engine the girl ran from the restaurant and got into the Honda with a package of cigarettes in her hand. The driver backed around so that he was only ten feet from my cab and rolled his window down.

I felt my mouth drop open. I stared dumbfounded at the boiled pigskin face, the stitched scar that ran from the bridge of his nose up through one eyebrow, the sandy hair and intelligent green eyes, the big shoulders that made his shirt look as though it were about to rip.

Cletus Purcel.

He grinned and winked at me.

“What’s happening, Streak?” he said into the rain, then rolled up the window, and splashed out onto Pinhook Road.

My old homicide partner from the First District in the French Quarter. Bust ’em or smoke ’em, he used to say. Bury your fist in their stomachs, leave them puking on their knees, click off their light switch with a slapjack if they still want to play.

He had hated the pimps, the Nicaraguan and Colombian dealers, the outlaw bikers, the dirty-movie operators, the contract killers the mob brought in from Miami, and if left alone with him, they would gladly cut any deal they could get from the prosecutor’s office.