Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

But with time he became everything that he despised. He took freebies from whores, borrowed money from shylocks, fought the shakes every morning with cigarettes, aspirin, and speed, and finally took ten thousand dollars to blow away a potential government witness in a hog lot.

Then he had cleaned out his and his wife’s bank account, roared the wrong way down a one-way street into the New Orleans airport, bounced over a concrete island, and abandoned his car with both doors open in front of the main entrance. He just made the flight to Guatemala.

A month later I received a card from him that had been postmarked in Honduras.

Dear Streak,

Greetings from Bongo-Bongo Land. I’d like to tell you I’m off the sauce and working for the Maryknolls. I’m not. Guess what skill is in big demand down here? A guy that can run through the manual of arms is an automatic captain. They’re all kids. Somebody with a case of Clearasil could take the whole country.

See you in the next incarnation,

C.

P.S. If you run into Lois, tell her I’m sorry for ripping her off. I left my toothbrush in the bathroom. I want her to have it.

I watched his taillights glimmer and fade in the rain. As far as I knew, there was still a warrant on him. What was Cletus doing back in the States? And in Lafayette?

But he was somebody else’s charge now, not mine. So good luck, partner, I thought. Whatever you’re operating on, I hope it’s as pure and clean as white gas and bears you aloft over the places where the carrion birds clatter.

I drove across the street and parked in front of the Star Drilling Company’s regional office. Confronting them probably seems a foolish thing to do, particularly in the capacity of a citizen rather than that of a law officer. But my experience as a policeman investigating white-collar criminals always led me to the same conclusion about them: they might envision a time when they’ll have to deal with the law, but in their minds the problem will be handled by attorneys, in a court proceeding that becomes almost a gentlemen’s abstraction. They tremble with both outrage and fear when a plainclothes cop, perhaps with an IQ of ninety-five, a .357 showing under his coat, a braided blackjack in his pocket, steps into the middle of their lives as unexpectedly as an iron door slamming shut and indicates that he thinks habeas corpus is a Latin term for a disease.

I put on my coat and ran through the rain and into the building. The outer offices of Star Drilling, which were separated by half-glass partitions, were occupied by draftsmen and men who looked like geologists or lease people. The indirect lighting glowed on the pine paneling, and the air-conditioning was turned so high that I felt my skin constrict inside my damp seersucker. The geologists, or whatever they were, walked from desk to desk, rattling topography maps between their outstretched hands, their faces totally absorbed in their own frame of reference or a finger moving back and forth on the numbers of a township and range.

The only person who looked at me was the receptionist. I told her I wanted to see the supervisor about a mineral lease in Montana.

His desk was big, made of oak, his chair covered with maroon leather, the pine walls hung with deer’s heads, a marlin,

two flintlock rifles. On a side table was a stuffed lynx, mounted on a platform, the teeth bared, the yellow glass eyes filled with anger.

His name was Hollister. He was a big man, his thick, graying hair cut military, his pale blue eyes unblinking. Like those of most managerial people in the Oil Center, his accent was Texas or Oklahoma and his dress eccentric. His gray Oshman coat hung on a rack, his cuff links were the size of quarters and embossed with oil derricks. His bolo tie was fastened with a brown and silver brooch.

He listened to me talk a moment, his square hands motionless on the desk, his face like that of a man staring into an ice storm.

“Wait a minute. You came to my office to question me about my employees? About a murder?”

I could see tiny stretched white lines in the skin around the corners of his eyes.

“It’s more than one, Mr. Hollister. The girl in the fire and maybe some people in Montana.”

“Tell me, who do you think you are?”

“I already did.”

“No, you didn’t. You lied to my receptionist to get in here.”

“You’ve got a problem with your leasemen. It won’t go away because I walk out the door.”

His pale eyes looked steadily at me. He lifted one finger off his desk and aimed it at me.

“You’re not here about Dixie Pugh,” he said. “You’ve got something else bugging you. I don’t know what it is, but you’re not a truthful man.”

I touched the ball of my thumb to the corner of my mouth, looked away from him a moment, and tapped my fingers on the leather arm of my chair.

“You evidently thought well enough of Dixie Lee to give him a job,” I said. “Do you think he made all this up and then set himself on fire?”

“I think you’re on your way out of here.”

“Let me tell you a couple of things about the law. Foreknowledge of a crime can make you a coconspirator. Knowledge after the fact can put you into an area known as aiding and abetting. These guys aren’t worth it, Mr. Hollister.”