Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

I felt Alafair’s hand close tightly in mine. The other detective took the matchstick out of his mouth.

“Put your hands on the porch rail, spread your feet,” he said, and took Alafair by her other hand and began to pull her away from me.

I pointed my finger at him.

“You’re mishandling this. Back off,” I said.

Then I felt the other man shove me hard in the back, pushing me off-balance through the hydrangeas into the steps. I heard his pistol come out of his leather holster, felt his hand clamp down on my neck as he stuck the barrel of the revolver behind my ear.

“You’re under arrest for murder. You think being an ex-cop lets you write the rules?” he said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alafair staring at us with the stunned, empty expression of a person wakened from a nightmare.

They booked me into the parish jail on top of the old courthouse in the middle of Lafayette’s original town square. The jail was an ancient one, the iron doors and bars and walls painted battleship gray. The words “Negro Male” were still faintly visible on the door of one of the tanks. During the ride from New Iberia I had sat handcuffed in the back of the car, asking the detectives who it was I had killed. They responded with the silence and indifference with which almost all cops treat a suspect after he’s in custody. Finally I gave up and sat back against the seat cushion, the cuffs biting into my wrists, and stared at the oak trees flicking past the window.

Now I had been fin

gerprinted and photographed, had turned over my wallet, pocket change, keys, belt, even my scapular chain, to a deputy who put them in a large manila envelope, realizing even then that something important was missing, something that would have a terrible bearing on my situation, yes, my Puma knife; and now the jailer and the detective who chewed on matchsticks were about to lock me in a six-cell area that was reserved for the violent and the insane. The jailer turned the key on the large, flat iron door that contained one narrow viewing slit, pulled it open wide, and pushed lightly on my back with his fingers.

“Who the hell was it?” I said to the detective.

“You must be a special kind of guy, Robicheaux,” he said. “You cut a guy from his scrot to sternum and don’t bother to get his name. Dalton Vidrine.”

The jailer clanged the door behind me, turned the key, shot the steel lock bar, and I walked into my new home.

It was little different from any other jail that I had seen or even been locked in during my drinking years. The toilets stank, the air smelled of stale sweat and cigarette smoke and mattresses that had turned black with body grease. The walls were scratched with names, peace signs, and drawings of male and female genitalia. More enterprising people had climbed on top of the cells and burned their names across the ceiling with cigarette lighters. On the floor area around the main door was a “deadline,” a white line painted in a rectangle, inside of which no one had better be standing when the door swung open or while the trusties were serving out of the food cart.

But the people in that six-cell area were not the ordinary residents of a city or parish prison. One was an enormous demented Negro by the name of Jerome who had smothered his infant child. He told me later that a cop had worked him over with a baton; although he had been in jail two weeks, there were still purple gashes on his lips and lumps the size of birds’ eggs on his nappy head. I would come to know the others, too: a biker from New Orleans who had nailed a girl’s hands to a tree; a serial rapist and sodomist who was wanted in Alabama; a Vietnamese thug who, with another man, had garroted his business partner with jump cables for a car battery; and a four-time loser, a fat, grinning, absolutely vacant-eyed man who had murdered a whole family after escaping from Sugarland Farm in Texas.

I was given one phone call and I telephoned the best firm in Lafayette. Like all people who get into serious trouble with the law, I became immediately aware of the incredible financial burden that had been dropped upon me. The lawyer’s retainer was $2,000, his ongoing fee $125 an hour. I felt as though my head were full of spiders as I tried to think in terms of raising that kind of money, particularly in view of the fact that my bail hadn’t been set and I had no idea how high it would be.

I found out at my arraignment the next morning: $150,000. I felt the blood drain out of my face. The lawyer asked for bail reduction and argued that I was a local businessman, an ex–police officer, a property owner, a war veteran, and the judge propped his chin on one knuckle and looked back at him as impassively as a man waiting for an old filmstrip to run itself out.

We all rose, the judge left the bench, and I sat dazed and light-headed in a chair next to the lawyer while a deputy prepared to cuff me for the trip back to the jail. The lawyer motioned to the deputy with two fingers.

“Give us a minute, please,” he said. He was an older, heavyset man, with thinning cropped red hair, who wore seersucker suits and clip-on bow ties.

The deputy nodded and stepped back by the side door to the courtroom.

“It’s the pictures,” he said. “Vidrine’s entrails are hanging out in the bathtub. It’s mean stuff to look at, Mr. Robicheaux. And they’ve got your knife with your prints on it.”

“It must have fallen out of my pocket. Both of those guys were all over me.”

“That’s not what Mapes says. The bartender had some pretty bad things to say, too. What’d you do to him?”

“Told him he was going to be busted for procuring.”

“Well, I can discredit him on the stand. But Mapes—” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “There’s the fellow we have to break down. A man with chain burns all over his face and back can make a hell of a witness. Tell me, what in God’s name did you have in mind when you went through that door?”

My palms were damp. I swallowed and wiped them on my trousers.

“Mapes knew Vidrine was a weak sister,” I said. “After I was gone, he picked up my knife and took him out. That’s what happened, Mr. Gautreaux.”

He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, made a pocket of air in his jaw, cleared his throat and started to speak, then was silent. Finally, he stood up, patted me on the shoulder, and walked out the side door of the courtroom into the sunlight, into the wind ruffling the leaves of the oak trees, the noise of black kids roaring by on skateboards. The deputy lifted my arm and crimped one cuff around my wrist.

Batist and his wife kept Alafair with them the day I was arrested, but the next day I arranged for her to stay with my cousin, a retired schoolteacher in New Iberia. She was taken care of temporarily, Batist was running the dock, and my main worry had become money. Besides needing a huge unknown sum for the lawyer, I had to raise $15,000 for the bondsman’s fee in order to make bail. I had $8,000 in savings.

My half brother, Jimmie, who owned all or part of several restaurants in New Orleans, would have written a check for the whole amount, but he had gone to Europe for three months, and the last his partners heard from him he was traveling through France with a group of Basque jai alai players. I then discovered that bankers whom I had known for years were not anxious to lend money to a man who was charged with first-degree murder and whose current address was the parish jail. I had been locked up nine days, and Batist was still visiting banks and delivering loan papers to me.