Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“No, don’t do that,” he said finally. “I guess we’ve got a vested interest. This whole Indian thing started with Pugh, and Pugh’s had a longtime involvement with Sally Dee. Give me the directions again.”

I told him in detail once more. The shower had moved eastward across the fields, and rain was now clicking on the roof of the phone booth. An Indian boy on an old bicycle with fat tires rattled past me on the road, his face bent down against the rain.

“I’ll call the FBI and the Teton sheriff’s office,” Nygurski said. “Then I’ll be out myself. I want a promise from you, though.”

“What is it?”

“Other people take it from here on in. You’re out of it. Absolutely.”

“All right.”

“I want your word. You don’t go near Mapes.”

“You have it, but you’ve got to get him with the Tokarev.”

“I think you’ve made your point. But are you sure that’s what you saw in his hand? I wonder why he didn’t get rid of it.”

“They were prize souvenirs in Vietnam. Besides, he always sailed out of everything he ever did.”

“Where are you going to be?”

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“On the road where their truck went into the ditch. We can walk in from there, or find the access road that leads back to the garbage dump.”

“Did you hear anything more from Dio?”

“Nope. Except two of his goons broke Purcel’s hand. He says he took a couple of gold ashtrays out of Dio’s house.”

“Bad guy to steal from. Purcel must not have pressed charges, because we didn’t hear anything about it.”

“He said something strange when I went to see him in the hospital yesterday. He said, ‘Our man’s going to have a sandy fuck.’ Or maybe I misunderstood him. I think Dio has a girlfriend named Sandy. Anyway, it didn’t make any sense to me.”

“Where is he?”

“St. Pat’s in Missoula.”

“Maybe it’s time we have a talk with him. I’ll see you a little later this morning. In the meantime, congratulations. You’re a good cop, Robicheaux. Get your badge back.”

“You’ve been a good friend, too, Dan.”

“And, lastly, keep your name out of my paperwork for a while.”

I drove back up the road in the rain and parked by the stream where I had entered the woods at dawn. Then the clouds moved eastward and the rain drifted away over the land behind me, and in the distance the sheer red cliffs of the mountains rose into the tumbling plateaus of ponderosa. When I closed my eyes and laid my head back against the seat I heard robins singing in a lone cottonwood by the stream.

The next morning I drank almost two pots of coffee and waited for the phone to ring. I had spent nearly all of the previous day at the murder site, the Teton sheriff’s department, and the coroner’s office. I watched three deputies finish the exhumation and put the bodies gingerly in black bags, I gave a statement to the FBI and one to the sheriff’s office, I talked to the pathologist after he had opened up the brainpans of both Indians with an electric saw and had picked out the 7.62 slugs that had been fired at close range into the back of their skull. I had them contact the St. Martin Parish sheriff’s office about Dixie Lee’s deposition in which he claimed to have overheard Vidrine and Mapes talking about the murder of the Indians. I told them where to find Mapes in the Bitterroot Valley, where his girlfriend worked in Missoula, the kind of cars he drove; I talked incessantly, until people started to walk away from me and Nygurski winked at me and said he would buy me a hamburger so I could be on my way back to Missoula.

So I drank coffee on the back steps and waited for someone to call. Dixie Lee went to work and came back in the early afternoon, and still no one had phoned.

“Ease up, boy. Let them people handle it,” he said.

We were in the kitchen, and I was shining my shoes over some newspapers that I had spread on the floor.

“That’s what I’m doing,” I said.

“You put me in mind of a man who spent his last cent on Ex-Lax and forgot the pay toilet cost a dime.”

“Give me a break on the scatology.”