Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Let’s take things as they come,” I said. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed later if we move somewhere else for a while.”

I heard the phone ring in the hallway. Alafair picked up her lunch box from the coffee table and started toward the kitchen.

“Miss Regan asked if we eat redfish,” she said. “Why she ask that? What’s she care about redfish? I got pushed down on the school ground. I threw a dirt clod at the boy that did it.”

I let her go and didn’t say anything more.

“Dave, you better take this,” Dixie Lee said in the doorway, the telephone receiver in his hand.

“What is it?”

“St. Pat’s Hospital. They got Clete in ther

e.”

We drove to the hospital on Broadway, left Alafair in the second-floor waiting room with a comic book, and walked down the corridor to Clete’s room. A plainclothes cop, with his badge on his belt, was just coming out the door. He had a blond mustache and wore a white shirt and knit tie. He was putting a small notebook in his shirt pocket.

“What happened?” I said.

“Who are you?” he said.

“A friend of Cletus Purcel.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dave Robicheaux.”

He nodded slowly, and I saw the name meant nothing to him.

“Your friend got worked over,” he said. “He says he didn’t know the two guys who did it. But the bartender who phoned us said the two guys called him by name. Tell your friend it’s dumb to protect people who’ll slam a man’s hand in a car door.”

He brushed past me and walked to the elevator. Dixie Lee and I went inside the room, which Clete shared with an elderly man who had an IV connected to his wasted arm. Clete’s bed was on the far side of the partition, one end elevated so he could look up at the television set that was turned on without sound. One eye was swollen into a purple egg, and his head was shaved in three places where the scalp had been stitched. His right hand was in plaster; the ends of his fingers were discolored as though they were gangrenous.

“I heard you with the detective,” he said.

“He doesn’t seem to believe your story,” I said.

“He’s probably got marital trouble. It makes a cynic out of you. What’s happening, Dixie?”

“Oh man, who did this to you?” Dixie Lee said.

“A couple of Sal’s meatballs.”

“Who?” Dixie Lee said.

“Carl and Foo-Foo. I got Foo-Foo one shot in the rocks, though. He’s not going to be unlimbering his equipment for a while.”

“What happened?” I said.

“I stopped at this bar off Ninety. They must have seen the jeep in the parking lot. They caught me with a baton when I came out the side door. When I thought they were through, they dragged me to a car and slammed my hand in the door. If the bartender hadn’t come out, they’d have done my other hand.”

“Tell the cops,” Dixie Lee said. “Why do you want to protect Carl and Foo-Foo?”

“What goes round, comes round,” Clete said. “I ain’t sweating it, mon.”

“You used to say ‘Bust ’em or smoke ’em.’ Let the cops bust them,” I said.

“Maybe they’ve got a surprise coming out of the jack-in-the-box,” Clete said. He looked at my face. “All your radio tubes are lit up, Streak. What are you thinking about?”