Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“He’s not full of booze,” Clete said.

“What do you need, Cletus?”

“I screwed up a lot of things back there in New Orleans. Blew my marriage, took juice, knocked a girl up, got into the shylocks. Then I cooled out that shitbag in the hog lot. But I paid for it. In spades. I’d like to change it but I can’t. I guess that’s what remorse is about. But the big one that’s been eating my lunch all this time is that I could have brought that guy in and gotten you off the hook. For ten grand I helped them turn you into toilet paper.”

“The lowlifes all took a fall one way or another.”

“Yeah, your fourteen years with the department went down the hole, too.”

“It was my choice, Clete,”

“You want to act like a stand-up guy about it, that’s copacetic. But I don’t buy it. I fucked you over. It’s the worst thing I did in my life. I’m telling you I’m sorry. I’m not asking you to say anything. I’m telling you how I feel. I’m not bringing it up again. You were my best friend. I stuck it to you.”

“It’s all right. Maybe you were doing the best you could at the time.”

His one open eye stared up at me. It looked like a piece of green glass in his battered face.

“It’s time to write it off, partner,” I said.

“That’s straight?”

“Who cares about last year’s box score?”

He swallowed. His eye was watery along the bottom rim.

“Fuck, man,” he said.

“I have to go. Alafair is in the waiting room.”

“I’ve got to tell you something,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve got to whisper it. Come here.”

“What is it, Clete?”

“No, closer.”

I leaned over him, then his good hand came up, clamped around the back of my neck like a vise, and pulled my face down on his. He kissed me hard on the mouth, and I could smell the cigarettes on his breath, the salve and Mercurochrome painted on his stitches and shaved scalp.

We drove out west of town to the bar where Clete had been beaten up by Sally Dee’s goons and found his Toyota jeep in the parking lot. Dixie Lee drove it back to the house, parked it in back, and locked it. A few minutes later Tess Regan called.

“Can you come over?” she said.

“When?”

“Tonight. For redfish. Didn’t Alafair say anything?”

“It came out a little confused.”

“I called you earlier, but nobody was home. It’s nothing special, really. We could make it another night.”

“Tonight’s fine,” I said.

And it was. The evening was cool and smelled of flowers and sprinkled yards, and she blackened the redfish on a grill in the backyard and served it in her small dining room, which glowed with the sun’s reflection through the tall turn-of-the-century windows. She wore tight blue jeans and low heels, a short-sleeved blouse with tiny pink roses on it, and gold hoop earrings, but her apartment gave her away. The wood floors and mahogany trim on the doors gleamed; the kitchen was spotless; the hung pictures and those on the marble mantel were all of relatives. The wallpaper was new, but the design and color did nothing to remove the apartment from an earlier era. A Catholic religious calendar, with an ad for a mortuary on it, was affixed to the icebox door with small magnets. She had crossed two palm strands in an X behind the crucifix on the dining room wall.

After supper we did the dishes together while Alafair watched television. When her leg bumped against me, she smiled awkwardly as though we had been jostled against one another on a bus, then her eyes looked at my face with both expectation and perhaps a moment’s fear. I suspected she was one of those whose heart could be easily hurt, one to whom a casual expression of affection would probably be interpreted as a large personal commitment. The moon was up now. The window was open and I could smell the wet mint against the brick wall and the thick, cool odor of lawn grass that had been flooded by a soak hose. It was the kind of soft moment that you could slip into as easily as you could believe you were indeed able to regain the innocence of your youth.