Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“I think you ought to have an early change of life.”

“Yeah, you were always big on advice, Dave. You see this .38 I have on? I have a permit to carry it in three states. That’s because I work for Sally Dee. But I can’t work as a cop anywhere. So the same people who won’t let me work as a crossing guard license me to carry a piece for Sal. Does that tell you something? Anyway, I’m using the shortened version of your AA serenity prayer these days—‘Fuck it.’”

“Do I get through the gate?”

He blew cigarette smoke out into the wind. His green eyes were squinted, as though the sun hurt them, as though a rusted piece of wire were buried deeply in the soft tissue of his brain.

“Yeah, come on up to the house. I have to call up to Sal’s,” he said. “Meet Darlene. Eat lunch with us if you like. Believe it or not, I’m glad to see you.”

I didn’t want to have lunch with them, and I surely didn’t want to meet Sally Dio. I only wanted for Dixie Lee to walk down to Clete’s and talk with me, and then I would be on my way. But it wasn’t going to work out that way.

“They’re just getting up. Sal said to bring you up in about an hour,” Clete said, hanging up the phone in his living room. “They had a big gig last night. Have you ever met the Tahoe crowd? For some reason they make me think of people cornholing each other.”

His girlfriend, whose full name was Darlene American Horse, was making sandwiches for us in the kitchen. Clete sat in a swaybacked canvas chair with a vodka Collins in his hand, one sandaled foot crossed on his knee, the other on a blond bearskin rug. Outside the sliding glass doors the lake was a deep blue, and the pines on an island of gray boulders were bending in the wind.

“The thing you won’t forget,” he said, “the g

uy who got whacked out back there in Louisiana—all right, the guy I whacked out—that psychotic sonofabitch Starkweather, I had to kill him. They said they’d give me ten grand, and I said that’s cool, but I was going to run him out of town, take their bread, and tell them to fuck off if they complained about it later. Except he was feeding his pigs out of a bucket with his back to me, telling me how he didn’t rattle, how he wouldn’t piss on a cop on the pad if he was on fire, then he put his hand down in his jeans and I saw something bright in the sun and heard a click, and when he turned around with it I put a big one in his forehead. It was his Zippo lighter, man. Can you dig that?”

Maybe the story was true, maybe not. I just wasn’t interested in his explanation or his obvious obsession, one that left his eyes searching for that next sentence, hanging unformed out there in the air, which would finally set the whole matter straight.

“Why do they call him ‘the Duck’?” I said.

“What?”

“Why do they call Sally Dio ‘the Duck’?”

“He wears ducktails.” He took a long drink out of his Collins. His mouth looked red and hard. He shrugged as though dismissing a private, troubling thought. “There’s another story. About a card game and drawing a deuce or something. The deuce is the duck, right? But it’s all guinea stuff. They like titles. Those stories are usually bullshit.”

“I tell you, Clete, I’d really appreciate it if you could just bring Dixie Lee down here. I really don’t need to meet the whole crowd.”

“You’re still the same guy, your meter always on overtime.” Then he smiled. “Do you think I’m going to call up the man I work for and say, ‘Sorry, Sal, my old partner here doesn’t want to be caught dead in the home of a greaseball’?” He laughed, chewing ice and candied cherries in his jaws. “But it’s a thought, though, isn’t it? Dave, you’re something else.” He kept smiling at me, the ice cracking between his molars. “You remember when we cooled out Julio Segura and his bodyguard? We really made the avocado salad fly.”

“Last season’s box score.”

“Yeah, it is.” He looked idly out the sliding doors at the lake a moment, then slapped his knee and said, “Man, let’s eat.”

He walked up behind his girlfriend in the kitchen, picked her up around the ribs, and buried his face in her hair. He half walked and carried her back into the living room with his arms still locked around her waist. She turned her face back toward him to hide her embarrassment.

“This is my mainline mama, her reg’lar daddy’s sweet little papoose,” he said, and bit the back of her neck.

That’s really cool, Cletus, I thought.

She wore a denim skirt with black stockings and a sleeveless tan sweater. There were three moles by the edge of her mouth, and her eyes were turquoise green, like a Creole’s. Her hands were big, the backs nicked with gray scars, the nails cut back to the quick. The gold watch she wore on one wrist and the bracelet of tiny gold chains on the other looked like misplaced accidents above her work-worn hands.

“She’s the best thing in my life, that’s what she is,” he said, still pushing his mouth into her hair. “I owe Dixie Lee for this one. She got his drunk butt off of a beer joint floor on the reservation and drove him all the way back to Flathead. If she hadn’t, a few bucks there would have scrubbed out the toilet with his head. Dixie’s got a special way about him. He can say good morning and sling the shit through the fan.”

She eased Clete’s arms from around her waist.

“Do you want to eat out on the porch?” she said.

“No, it’s still cool. Spring has a hard time catching on here,” he said. “What’s it in New Orleans now? Ninety or so?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Hotter than hell. I don’t miss it,” he said.

His girlfriend set the table for us by the sliding doors, then went back into the kitchen for the food. A wind was blowing across the lake, and each time it gusted, the dark blue surface rippled with light.