Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“I have some things to take care of. I wanted a few words with Dixie,” I said.

“He says you’re in a lot of trouble down there. What’s he got to do with your trouble?”

“A lot.”

He looked me evenly in the eyes. Then he fluttered and ticked the brushes lightly on the drum skin.

“Dixie never hurt anybody. Not intentionally, anyway,” he said.

“I mean him no harm, Mr. Dio.”

“I’m glad of that.”

A dripping blond girl in a silver swimsuit that was as tight as tin on her body, with a terry cloth robe over her shoulder, walked toward us, drying her hair with a towel.

“You want me to take Papa Frank in, Sal?” she said.

“Ask Papa Frank.”

“He gets cold if he stays out there too long.”

“Then go ask him, hon.”

She walked to the glass doors, then stopped and hooked up the strap on her sandal, pausing motionlessly against the light as though she were caught in a photographer’s lens. Sally Dio winked at her.

I looked at Dixie Lee. I had to talk to him alone, outside. He refused to see any meaning in my face. A moment later the blond girl pushed the man in the wheelchair into the living room.

He wore a checkered golf cap, a knitted sweater over his protruding stomach, a muffler that almost hid the purple goiter that was the size of an egg in his neck. His skin was gray, his eyes black and fierce, his face unevenly shaved. Even from several feet away his clothes smelled of cigar smoke and Vick’s VapoRub. With his wasted legs and swollen stomach, he reminded me of a distended frog strapped to a chair.

But there was nothing comical about him. His name had been an infamous one back in the forties and fifties. He had run all the gambling on Galveston Island and all the prostitution and white slavery on Post Office and Church streets. And I remembered another story, too, about a snitch on Sugarland Farm who tried to cut a deal by dropping the dime on Frank Dio. Somebody caught him alone in the shower and poured a can of liquid Drno down his mouth.

He fixed one watery black eye on me.

“Who’s he?” he said to his son.

“Somebody Clete used to know,” Sally Dio said.

“What’s he want?”

“He thinks Dixie Lee can get him out of some trouble,” Sally Dio said.

“Yeah? What kind of trouble you in?” the father said to me.

“He’s up on a murder charge, Pop. Mr. Robicheaux used to be a police officer,” Sally Dio said. He smiled.

“Yeah?” His voice raised a level. “Why you bring this to our house?”

“I didn’t bring anything to your house,” I said. “I was invited here. By Clete over there. Because the man I wanted to talk with couldn’t simply walk down the hill and spend five minutes with me.”

“I invite. Sal invites. You don’t get invited by somebody that works for me,” the father said. “Where you used to be a cop?”

“New Orleans.”

“You know——?” He used the name of an old-time Mafia don in Jefferson Parish.

“Yes, I helped give him a six-year jolt in Angola. I heard he complained a lot about the room service.”

“You a wiseguy, huh?”