Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“When it comes to Sal’s business dealings, I turn into a potted plant. I’m also good at taking a smoke in the yard.”

“Tell it to somebody else. You were the best investigative cop I ever knew.”

“At one time,” he said, and winked. Then he looked out at the lake and the inland sea gulls that were wheeling over the shoreline. He pushed a piece of food out from behind his teeth with his tongue. “You’ve read a lot more books than I have. You remember that guy Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind?” He’s a blockade runner for the Confederates or something. He tells Scarlett that fortunes are made during a country’s beginning and during its collapse. Pretty good line. I think Sal read that book in the Huntsville library. He wheels and deals, mon.”

I didn’t say anything. I finished the rest of my sandwich and glanced casually at my watch.

“All right, for God’s sake,” Clete said. “I’ll take you up there. But do me a favor. That’s my meal ticket up there. Don’t look at these people like they’re zoo creatures. Particularly Sal’s father. He’s a bloated old degenerate, but he’s also a vicious sonofabitch who never liked me to begin with. I mean it, Dave. Your face doesn’t hide your feelings too well. It gets that glaze on it like an elephant broke wind in the room. Okay? We got a deal, right, partner?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Oh boy.”

Sally Dio had brought Galveston, Texas, with him. His glassed-in sun porch, which gave onto the lake, was filled with potted banana, umbrella, orange, and Hong Kong orchid trees, and in the center of the house was a heavily chlorinated, lime-green swimming pool with steam rising off the water. A half-dozen tanned people sat on the edge of the tiles or drifted about lazily on inflated rubber rafts. The living room was paneled with white pine, the carpet was a deep red, and the waxed black piano, with the top propped open, gleamed in the indirect lighting. Dixie Lee, dressed only in a pair of Hawaiian beach shorts and an open bathrobe, sat at the piano bench and ran his fingers back and forth over the keys, his shoulders hunched, then suddenly his arms outspread, his florid face confident with his own sound. He sang,

“I was standing on the corner

Corner of Beale and Main,

When a big policeman said,

‘Big boy, you’ll have to tell me your name.’

I said, ‘You’ll find my name

On the tail of my shirt.

I’m a Tennessee hustler

And I don’t have to work.’”

Sally Dio sat behind a set of drums and cymbals in a pair of pleated gray slacks, bare-chested, his red suspenders hooked over his shoulders. He was a lean, hard-bodied man, his face filled with flat and sharp surfaces like a person whose bone is too close to the skin so that the eyes look overly large for the face. Under his right eye wa

s a looped scar that made his stare even more pronounced, and when he turned his head toward Dixie Lee and fluttered the wire brushes across the snare drum, the ridge of his ducktails glistened against the refracted sunlight off the lake.

Out on the redwood veranda I could see the back of a wheelchair and a man sitting in it. Sally Dio and Dixie finished their song. No one asked me to sit down.

“Dixie says you used to be a police officer. In New Orleans,” Sally Dio said. His voice was flat, his eyes casually interested in my face.

“That’s right.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m a small-business man.”

“Probably pays better, doesn’t it?”

“Sometimes.”

He made a circular pattern on the drumhead with the wire brushes.

“You like Louisiana?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why are you up here, then?”

Clete walked to the wet bar by the pool’s edge and started fixing a drink.