Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“You feel bad, don’t you?” she said.

“No.”

“You think what you’ve done is wrong, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Clete’s impotent, Dave,” she said.

“What?”

“He goes to a doctor, but it doesn’t do any good.”

“When did he become impotent?”

“I don’t know. Before I met him. He says a fever did it to him in Guatemala. He says he’ll be all right eventually. He pretends it’s not a problem.”

I raised up on my elbow and looked into her face.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You moved in with an impotent man?”

“He can’t help what he is. He’s good to me in other ways. He’s generous, and he respects me. He takes me places where Indians don’t go. Why do you have that look on your face?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to,” I said.

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing. I just don’t quite understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Your relationship. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe it isn’t your business.”

“He was my partner, I’m in bed with his girl. You don’t think I have some involvement here?”

“I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”

I knew that anything else that I said would be wrong. I sat on the edge of the bed with my back toward her. The wind fluttered the shade in the window, casting a brilliant crack of sunlight across the room. Finally I looked over my shoulder at her. She had pulled the sheet up over her breasts.

“I try not to be judgmental about other people. I apologize,” I said. “But he and I used to be good friends. You said he was impotent. You were suggesting I didn’t have anything to feel bad about. There’s something wrong in the equation here. Don’t pretend there isn’t.”

“Look the other way, please,” she said, gathered the sheet around her, picked up her clothes from the chair, and walked into the bathroom. A few minutes later she came back out in her yellow dress, pushing the top back on her lipstick, pressing her lips together.

“I like you just the same,” I said.

“You don’t know anything,” she said.

And she left me there, with a wet spot in the center of my bed and a big question mark as to whether I had acquired any degree of caution or wisdom in the fiftieth year of my life.

CHAPTER

7

I needed to go back east of the Divide and talk to more people about the disappearance of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin. But I had gotten too late a start that day, and instead I drove up to Flathead Lake and spent two hours searching through property records in the county clerk’s office. I was still convinced that there was some tie between Sally Dio, Dixie Lee, Harry Mapes, and Star Drilling Company. I didn’t buy the story that Sally Dio kept Dixie Lee around to effect innocuous real estate deals or because he simply liked over-the-hill rockabilly musicians. I had known too many like him in New Orleans. They liked women but didn’t consider them important; they liked power but would share it out of necessity; they were cruel or violent upon occasion but usually in a pragmatic way. However, they loved money. It was the ultimate measure of success in their lives, the only subject of interest in their conversations. They paid with cash in restaurants, not with credit cards, and their elaborate tipping was as much a part of their predictable grandiosity as their lavender Cadillacs and eight-hundred-dollar tropical suits.