Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“I’m glad you do. Good-bye.”

For the second time in ten minutes someone had hung up on me.

I took Alafair to the park to play, then we went back home and fixed supper. Clete had told me I could call him at the Eastgate Lounge at six o’clock. I wasn’t sure that I should. Whatever he had done with Charlie Dodds, it wasn’t good. But at that point my legal problems as well as the threat to Alafair’s and my safety were so involved and seemingly without solution that I wondered why I should be troubled over some marginal involvement with the fate of a depraved and psychotic character like Dodds, whom nobody cared about except perhaps Sally Dio because he had probably paid him half the hit money up front. It was five-thirty, and we were five minutes into our meal when I heard a car park in front and somebody walk up on the porch.

Even before I could make out his silhouette against the screen door, I saw Dixie Lee’s battered pink Cadillac convertible parked with two wheels on the edge of my grass. The top was up, but I could see that the backseat was loaded with suitcases, boxes of clothing and cowboy boots, hangered western suits racked on a wire.

His sudden change of fortune, his plans for himself, his rehearsed entreaty, were altogether too obvious and predictable. I didn’t open the door. I was even a bit ashamed at my lack of sympathy. But it had been a bad day, and I really didn’t need Dixie Lee in it. He was eloquent in his desperation, though. He had marshaled all the raw energies of a drunk who knew that he was operating on the last fuel in his tank.

“Things are coming apart up there at the lake,” he said. “You were right, Sal’s a shit. No, that ain’t right. He’s a crazy person. He wants your ass cooked in a pot. I couldn’t abide it. I had to get out.”

“Watch your language. My daughter’s here.”

“I’m sorry. But you don’t know what Sal’s like when lights start going off in his head. He’s got this twisted-up look on his face. Nobody can say anything around him unless you want your head snapped off. One of the broads is eating her dessert at the dinner table, and Sal keeps smoking his cigarette and looking at her like she crawled up out of a drain hole. Her eyes are blinking and she’s trying to smile and be pretty and cute and get off the hook, then he says, ‘You eat too much,’ and puts out his cigarette in her food.

“He hates you, Dave. You really got to him. You bend up the wheels inside a guy like Sally Dee, and smoke starts to come out of the box. I don’t want to be around it. That’s where it stands. You tell me to get out of your life, I can relate to it. But I picked myself into some thin cotton, son, and I got nowhere to turn. I’ll be straight with you on something else, too. I’m in to Sal for fifteen thou. That’s how much flake I put up my nose on the tab. So I got that old Caddy out there, thirty-seven dollars in my pocket, and a quarter tank of gas. I’m trying to keep it all in E major, but I blew out my amps on this one.”

“Save the rock ’n’ roll corn pone for somebody else,” I said. “I had Charlie Dodds in my house this morning.”

“Dodds? I thought he went back to Vegas last night. What was he doing here?”

“You don’t know?”

“You mean he’s a mechanic? I didn’t know. I swear in front of God I didn’t. I thought he was one of Sal’s mules. Is that how you got that purple knot on your head?”

“Something like that.”

“Man, I’m sorry. I didn’t have any idea. The guy didn’t say three words when he was around me. I thought he was retarded. All those mules got that meltdown look in their eyes. They swallow balloons full of skag, fly in and out of canyons, land on dirt roads at night. We’re talking about the dumbest white people you ever met.”

“I think he might have a backup man still after me. Is there some other new guy hanging around Sal’s place?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, I can’t help you, Dixie.”

He looked at me blankly through the screen. He swallowed, glanced up the street as though something of significance were waiting for him there, then started to speak again.

“I’ve got too many problems of my own. That’s about it, partner,” I said.

“No way, huh?”

“I’m afraid not.”

He blew his breath up into his face.

“I can’t blame you,” he said. “I just ain’t got many selections right now.”

“Start over.”

“Yeah, why not? It ain’t my first time washing dishes or living in a hallelujah mission. Hey, I want you to remember one thing, though, Dave. I ain’t all bad. I never set out to harm anybody. It just worked out that way.”

“Whatever you do, good luck with it, Dixie,” I said, and closed the inside door on him and went back to the kitchen table, where Alafair had already started in on her dessert.

I looked at my watch—it was a quarter to six now—and tried to finish supper. The food seemed tasteless, and I couldn’t concentrate on something Alafair was telling me about the neighbor’s cat chasing grasshoppers in the flower bed.