Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you kidding? He’s got mental diseases they haven’t named yet. I ain’t putting you on, son. He’s got a hard-on for you you couldn’t knock down with a hammer.”

“Don’t use that language in the house.”

“Sorry, it’s a speech defect or something. His head reminds me of a flowerpot somebody dropped on the concrete. It’s full of cracks and the dirt’s starting to leak out, but he don’t know it yet. Dig this. Sal built an elevator platform for the piano at his club, one of these deals that rises up into the spotlight while the guy’s playing. Except after the club closed this two-hundred-and-eighty-pound bouncer got on top of the piano with this topless dancer for some serious rumba boogie, and somehow the machinery got cranked up and the elevator went right up to the ceiling and mashed them both against a beam. It broke the guy’s neck, and the broad was trapped up there with him all night. So Sal says it’s a real big tragedy, and he holds the funeral on a Sunday afternoon at the club, with the casket covered with flowers out in the middle of the dance floor. But the undertaker messed up the job, and the guy’s neck was bent and his head was out of round, like a car tire had run over it, and the dagos were slobbering and wailing all over the place while Sal’s singing on the mike in a white suit like he’s Tony Bennett. It was so disgusting the waiters went back to the union and threatened to quit. Later Sal says to me, ‘It was a class send-off, don’t you think? Jo-Jo would have liked it.’ Except I found out he only rented the casket, and he had Jo-Jo planted in a cloth-covered box in a desert cemetery outside of town that lizards wouldn’t crawl across.”

“Good night, Dixie.”

He shook his head and forked another piece of pie in his mouth.

“You worry about my bad language, and you’re fixing to squeeze Sal in the peaches. You’re a wonder to behold, son.”

I set the alarm on my Seiko watch for two A.M. and went to sleep. It was raining lightly when I was awakened by the tiny dinging sound on my wrist. I dialed Sal’s number, then hung up when a man with sleep in his voice answered. I waited fifteen minutes, then hung up again as soon as the same man said “Hello” irritably into the receiver. I drank a glass of milk and watched the rain fall in the yard and run down the window, then at two-thirty I called again. I put a pencil crossways in my teeth and covered the mouthpiece with my handkerchief.

“Who the fuck is this?” the same man said.

“Where’s Sal?” I kept my voice in the back of my throat and let it come out in a measured rasp.

“Asleep. Who is this?”

“Go wake him up.”

“Are you crazy? It’s two-thirty in the morning. What’s with you, man?”

“Listen, you get that dago welsher out of bed.”

“I think you’re loaded, man, and you’d better stop playing on the phone and forget you ever called here.”

“You don’t recognize my voice, huh? Maybe it’s because a guy put a wrench across my windpipe, a guy that gutless kooze sent me to see. I didn’t catch a plane back to Vegas, either. I’m one hour away. I better not find out you’re hitting on my broad, either.”

He was quiet a moment, then he said, “Charlie?”

I didn’t answer.

“Charlie?” he said. “Hey, man…”

“What?”

/> “I didn’t know. Hey, man, I’m sorry. You should have told me. It’s late, and I been asleep, and I didn’t know it was you.”

“Get him on the phone.”

“Man, he’s out. I mean, like him and Sandy must have smoked a whole shoe box of shit before they crashed. How about he calls you in the morning?”

“You got some kind of skin growth over your ears?”

“Look, man, I go in there, he’ll tear my dick off. He’s been crawling the walls all day, anyway. Look, I don’t know what’s going on between you guys, but I don’t want to get caught in it. Okay? I’m not putting you on, man, he can’t talk to you. He really smoked his brains tonight.”

I waited five seconds and listened to him breathe.

“Tell him I’m coming,” I said, and hung up.

I overslept the next morning and was awakened by the sound of Alafair fixing breakfast in the kitchen. She was too short to function well around the stove, and she clattered the pans loudly on the burners.

“I can walk myself today, Dave,” she said.

“No, that’s out. We do everything together, little guy. We’re a team, right?”