Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Then you’ll need to make an appointment with Sister Louise, and maybe she’ll ask the parents to bring Jason in. But I doubt it. Not unless you want to tell us what this is about and also call the police. Because that’s what we’re going to do.”

“That’s good. But you need to listen to me now and not be afraid of what I’m going to tell you. This guy is not a child molester. He wants to get at me through Alafair. He may work for the mob out of Vegas or Reno. I had one like that in my house this morning. That’s why it’s been an unusual day. Or he may be somebody connected with an oil company, a guy named Mapes or somebody who works for him. Either way, the local cops don’t have much experience with this kind of guy.”

“The mob?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“You mean like in The Godfather? The honest-to-God Mafia?”

“The real article.”

“And you didn’t tell me this before?”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything. Except maybe to alarm you.”

“I think I’m very angry right now.”

“Look, I don’t want to be the guy to mess up your day. You asked for the truth, I gave it to you. There’s no big revelation in what I told you, either. There’s some Reno transplants right up there at Flathead Lake. The mob’s anyplace there’s money to be made in gambling or dope or any kind of vice.”

She didn’t answer.

“Listen,” I said, “if that guy comes back, you try to get his license number, then you call the heat, then you call me. Okay?”

“What do you plan to do?” she said. Her voice was dry, the way heat is when it lifts off a metal surface.

“I’m going to seriously impair his interest in children on school yards.”

“I’ll give your words some thought. In the meantime you might reflect a bit on the need for a little more candor in your relationships with other people. Maybe they don’t like to feel that they’re not to be trusted with this great body of private information that you have.”

The line went dead in my hand.

I couldn’t blame her. How would any ordinary person deal with the knowledge that an emissary of the mob could stroll into a world as innocent and predictable as a children’s playground? But was the man indeed one of Dio’s people, a partner of or a backup for Charlie Dodds? Why would Dodds need a backup? It was a simple hit, probably a five-thou whack that a guy like Dodds considered a cakewalk. Unless Dio’s outraged pride was so great that he wanted a child’s death as well as my own.

It didn’t compute, though. If Dodds had been paid to hurt Alafair also, he would have waited until after three o’clock, when we were both home, or he would have come on the weekend.

So that left Harry Mapes. He had been driving a black Jeepster when I had seen him just south of the Blackfeet Reservation, but maybe the man in the yellow car with the binoculars worked with Mapes or had been hired by him. Why would he want to turn the screws on me now? Did he think I was close to finding something or turning it around on him? If he did, he had a lot more confidence in me than I did in myself.

I called Sister Louise, the principal, at the school and caught her just before she left the office. She had already talked with Tess Regan, and she was no more happy with me than Tess Regan had been. She sounded like some of the nuns I had known as a child, the ones who wore black habits that were probably like portable stoves and who whacked your knuckles with tricorner rulers and who could hit you on the run with their fifteen-decade rosaries. She told me that she had just made a police report, that I should do the same, and that a patrol car would be parked by the school tomorrow morning.

“I’d still like to talk with the little boy, what’s his name, Jason,” I said.

“He’s told me everything he knows. He’s a shy boy. He’s not one to stu

dy detail in adults.”

“Does he remember if the man had an accent?”

“He’s fourteen years old. He’s not a linguist.”

“Sister, it’s good that you’ll have a patrol car out there tomorrow. But our man won’t be back while the cops are around.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“But he may well be when they’re gone. That’s when we can nail him.”

“There’s no ‘we’ involved in this, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“I see.”