Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

I didn’t answer him.

“Do you want absolution?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. For my inadequacies. My failures. For any grief or injury I’ve brought an innocent person. That’s the best I can say. I can’t describe it.”

His forearms were folded on his thighs. He looked down at his boots, but I could see a sad light in his eyes. He took a deep breath.

“I wish I could be of more help to you,” he said. “We’re not always up to the situation. Our experience is limited.”

“You’ve been more than kind.”

“Give it time, Mr. Robicheaux.” Then he smiled and said, “Not everybody gets to see a blinding light on the way to Damascus.”

When I left that sunny, green enclosure between the buildings, he was kneeling down in a flower bed, troweling out a hole for the pink-and-gray-striped caladium, his eyes already intent with his work, his day obviously ordered and serene and predictable in a way that I could not remember mine being since I walked off the plane into a diesel-laced layer of heat at Tan Son Nhut air base in 1964.

I wanted to go into yesterday. And I don’t think that’s always bad. Sometimes you simply have to walk through a door in your mind and lose thirty or forty years in order to remember who you are. Maybe it’s a self-deception, a mental opiate that I use to escape my problems, but I don’t care. We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been, and I sincerely believe that in many ways the world in which I grew up was better than the one in which we live today. I stuck a paperback copy of Ernest Gaines’s Of Love and Dust in my pocket, and walked down to Bonner Park and sat on a bench under a maple tree and read. The fountain and concrete wading pool looked dry and white in the sun, and in the distance the mountains were a sharp blue against the clouds. The wind was cool blowing out of the shade, but I was already inside the novel, back on a hot sugarcane and sweet potato plantation in South Louisiana in the 1940s. No, that’s not really true. I was back in New Iberia the summer after my second year in college, when my brother, Jimmie, and I worked on an offshore seismograph rig and bought a ’forty-six Ford convertible that we put dual Hollywood mufflers on, lowering blocks and fender skirts, painted canary yellow and lacquered and waxed until the metal seemed to have the soft, deep gleam of butter. It was the best summer of my life. I fell in love seriously for the first time, with a girl who lived on Spanish Lake, outside of town, and as is always the case with your first love, I remembered every detail of the season, as though I had never experienced summer before, sometimes with a poignancy that would almost break my heart. She was a Cajun like myself, and her hair was brown and bleached in streaks by the sun so that it looked like dark honey when the wind blew it. We danced at Voorhies Roof Garden in Lafayette and Slick’s in St. Martinville, drank twenty-cent long-necked Jax beer under the oaks at Deer’s Drive-In in New Iberia; we fished for white trout out on the salt, went to crab boils and fish fries at Cypremort Point and drove home in the lilac evening, down that long two-lane blacktop parish road between the cypress and the oaks, with the wind warm off the Gulf, the new cane green in the fields, the western sky streaked with fire, the cicadas deafening in the trees.

She was one of those girls who love everything about the man they choose to be theirs. She never argued or contended, she was happy in any place or situation where we were together, and I only had to touch her cheek with my fingers to make her come close to me, to press herself against me, to kiss my throat and put her hand inside my shirt. It rained every afternoon, and sometimes after it cleared and the clouds were pink and maroon on the horizon, we’d drive down the levee to the dock where my father kept his boat, the cypress dripping into the dead water, and in the soft light her face would have the color and loveliness of a newly opened flower.

Jimmy Clanton’s “Just a Dream” was on every jukebox in southern Louisiana that summer, and car radios at the drive-in were always tuned to “Randy’s Record Shop” in Memphis at midnight, when Randy kicked it off with “Sewannee River Boogie.” Each morning was one of expectation, of smoky light in the pecan trees outside my bedroom window, of innocent desire and the confidence that within a few hours I would be with her again, and that absolutely nothing would ever come between us. But it ended over an unreasonable and youthful concern. I hurt her without meaning to, in a way that I could not explain to myself, much less to her, and my silence caused her an even greater injury that these many years later still troubles me on occasion.

I’ll never forget that summer, though. It’s the cathedral I sometimes visit when everything else fails, when the heart seems poisoned, the earth stricken, and dead leaves blow across the soul’s windows like bits of dried parchment.

My experience has been that grief an

d loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead. The next morning I was back in the Lake County courthouse.

The sheriff looked as hard and round as a wooden barrel. His dark blue suit was spotted with cigarette ash that he had tried to clean off with a wet paper towel; he wore his gray hair in a crew cut, his white shirt lapels ironed flat so that his chest hair stuck out like a tangle of wire. He was one of those elected law officers who have probably been diesel mechanics or log-truck drivers before someone had talked them into running for office. He sat at the corner of his desk when he talked, rather than behind it, and smoked a cigarette and looked out the window at the lake with such private concentration that I had the feeling that he already knew the outcome of our conversation, and that he was talking to me now only because of a public relations obligation that the office imposed upon him.

“You were a homicide detective in New Orleans?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Then a detective in the sheriff’s department in… what’s the name of that place?”

“New Iberia. Where they make Tabasco sauce.” I smiled at him, but his eyes were looking through his cigarette smoke at the blue wink off the lake.

“You know a DEA agent named Dan Nygurski?”

“Yep.”

“He was here yesterday. He said I could count on you coming to see me.”

“I see.”

“He said I should tell you to go back to Louisiana. What do you think about that?”

“Advice is cheap.”

“You’re wondering about the coroner’s report?”

I let out my breath. “Yes, sir, I am,” I said.

“Because you think she was murdered?”