Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Yeah, I did. They burn a girl to death and you ask me a question like that? These guys got no bottom, if that’s what you mean. They’ll go down where it’s so dark the lizards don’t have eyes.”

I drove down Pinhook Road toward the Vermilion River and parked under a spreading oak tree by the motel, a rambling white stucco building with a blue tile roof. Rainwater dripped from the tree onto my truck cab, and the bamboo and palm trees planted along the walks bent in the wind off the river and the flagstones in the courtyard were wet and red in the sun’s last light. A white and blue neon sign in the shape of a flower glowed against the sky over the entrance of the motel, an electrical short in it buzzing as loud as the cicadas in the trees. I stared at the front of the motel a moment, clicking my keys on the steering wheel, then I opened the truck door and started inside.

Just as I did the glass door of a motel room slid open and two men and women in bathing suits with drinks in their hands walked out on the flagstones and sat at a table by the pool. Vidrine and Mapes were both laughing at something one of the women had said. I stepped back in the shadows and watched Mapes signal a Negro waiter. A moment later the waiter brought them big silver shrimp-cocktail bowls and a platter of fried crawfish. Mapes wore sandals and a bikini swimming suit, and his body was as lean and tan as a long-distance runner’s. But Vidrine wasn’t as confident of his physique; he wore a Hawaiian shirt with his trunks, the top button undone to show his chest hair, but he kept crossing and recrossing his legs as though he could reshape the protruding contour of his stomach. The two women looked like hookers. One had a braying laugh; the other wore her hair pulled back on her head like copper wire, and she squeezed Mapes’s thigh under the table whenever she leaned forward to say something.

I got back in the truck, took my World War II Japanese field glasses out of the glove box, and watched them out of the shadows for an hour. The underwater lights in the swimming pool were smoky green, and a thin slick of suntan oil floated on the surface. The waiter took away their dishes, brought them more rounds of tropical drinks, and their gaiety seemed unrelenting. They left the table periodically and went back through the sliding glass door into the motel room, and at first I thought they were simply using the bathroom, but then one of the women came back out touching one nostril with her knuckle, sniffing as though a grain of sand were caught in her breathing passage. At ten o’clock the waiter began dipping leaves out of the pool with a long-handled screen, and I saw Mapes signal for more drinks and the waiter look at his watch and shake his head negatively. They sat outside for another half hour, smoking cigarettes, laughing more quietly now, sucking on pieces of ice from the bottoms of their glasses, the women’s faces pleasant with a nocturnal lassitude.

Then a sudden rain shower rattled across the motel’s tile roof, clattered on the bamboo and palm fronds, and danced in the swimming pool’s underwater lights. Vidrine, Mapes, and the women ran laughing for the sliding door of the room. I waited until midnight, and they still had not come back out.

I put on my rain hat and went into the motel bar. It was almost deserted, and raindrops ran down the windows. Outside, I could see the white and blue neon flower against the dark sky. The bartender smiled at me. He wore black trousers, a white shirt that glowed almost purple in the bar light, and a black string tie sprinkled with sequins. He was a strange-looking man. His eyes were close-set and small as dimes, and he smoked a Pall Mall with three fingers along the barrel of the cigarette. I sat at the corner of the bar, where I could see the front door of Vidrine and Mapes’s rooms, and ordered a 7-Up.

“It’s pretty empty tonight,” I said.

“It sure is. You by yourself tonight?” he said.

“Right now I am. I was sort of looking for some company.” I smiled at him.

He nodded good-naturedly and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink. Finally he said, “You staying at the motel?”

“Yeah, for a couple of days. Boy, I tell you I got one.” I blew out my breath and touched my forehead with my fingertips. “I met this lady last night, a schoolteacher, would you believe it, and she came up to my room and we started hitting the JD pretty hard. But I’m not kidding you, before we got serious about anything she drank me under the table and I woke up at noon like a ball of fire.” I laughed. “And with another problem, too. You know what I mean?”

He ducked his head and grinned.

“Yeah, that can be a tough problem,” he said. “You want another 7-Up?”

“Sure.”

He went back to his work in the sink, his small eyes masked, and a moment later he dried his hands absently on a towel, turned on a radio that was set among the liquor bottles on the counter, and walked into a back hallway, where he picked up a house phone. He spoke into the receiver with his back turned toward me so that I could not hear him above the music on the radio. Outside the window, the trees were black against the sky and the blue tile of the motel roof glistened in the rain.

The girl came through the side door ten minutes later and sat one stool down from me. She wore spiked heels, Levi’s, a backless brown sweater, and hoop earrings. She shook her wet hair loose, lit a cigarette, ordered a drink, then had another, and didn’t pay for either of them. She talked as though she and I and the bartender were somehow old friends. In the neon glow she was pretty in a rough way. I wondered where she came from, what kind of trade-off was worth her present situation.

I wasn’t making it easy for her, either. I hadn’t offered to pay for either of her drinks, and I had made no overture toward her. I saw her look at her watch, then glance directly into the bartender’s eyes. He lit a cigarette and stepped out the door as though he were getting a breath of fresh air.

“I hate lounges, don’t you? They’re all dull,” she said.

“It’s a pretty slow place, all right.”

“I’d rather have drinks with a friend in my room.”

“What if I buy a bottle?”

“I think that would be just wonderful,” she said, and smiled as much to herself as to me. Then she bit down on her lip, leaned toward me, and touched my thigh. “I’ve got a little trouble with Don, though. Like a seventy-five-dollar bar tab. Could you lend it to me so they don’t eighty-six me out of this place?”

“It’s time to take off, kiddo.”

“What?”

I took my sheriff’s deputy badge out of my back pocket and opened it in front of her. It was just an honorary one, and I kept it only because it got me free parking at Evangeline Downs and the Fairgrounds in New Orleans, but she didn’t know that.

“Don’s in deep shit. Go home and watch television,” I said.

“You bastard.”

“I told you you’re not busted. You want to hang around and have some of his problems?”

Her eyes went from my face to the bartender, who was coming back through the side door. Her decision didn’t take long. She took her car keys out of her purse, threw her cigarettes inside, snapped it

shut, and walked quickly on her spiked heels out the opposite door into the rain. I held up the badge in front of the bartender’s small, close-set eyes.