Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Mapes was involved?” I said.

“That’s the big question. The fingerprints of another kid from Marshall were on the victims’ car, but not Mapes’s. But that would figure, if Mapes drove one car and the other kid drove the victims’ car to the place where they burned it. Both of them were seen together earlier that night, and it took two people to pull it off, unless the kid they had dead-bang was on foot, which is improbable, since he owned a car and was driving around in it with Mapes earlier.”

“The other kid didn’t implicate Mapes?”

“He denied everything. Evidently he had a reputation around Marshall as a lunatic. Acid, speed, all that bullshit. In his cell he wrapped himself in toilet paper, soaked it in lighter fluid, and set himself on fire. It looked like good theater. But later on he showed everybody he was sincere. He unwrapped some wire from a broom and hanged himself.

“In the meantime, Mapes’s old man, who owned a sawmill there, hired a law firm, and they got a Mexican prostitute to swear Mapes and another friend of his were trying out their magic twangers that night. The other kid backed her up. But later on it looks like he might have had problems with his conscience.”

“And he was the one Mapes worked over with the golf club.”

“You got it, brother. Case closed. On top of it, that other kid got zapped in Vietnam two years later.”

I rubbed my hands up and down on my trousers.

“I’ve got to nail him, Dan. I’m all out of leads, and I keep coming up with a handful of air.”

“Let’s eat some dinner.”

“I don’t think I’m up to it. I’m sorry. I’ve got less than one and a half weeks to trial. I’m being straight with you. I’m just not going to do time.”

“You’re a good man, and you’re going to be all right,” he said, and put his big hand on the corner of my shoulder. It felt hard and cupped, like a starfish that had dried on hot sand.

It was time to turn things around on Sally Dee, to plant some dark thoughts in his head about his own vulnerability, so I could concentrate on Harry Mapes. I knew that Charlie Dodds had probably become bear food at the bottom of a canyon, but Sally Dee didn’t. However, he was well aware of Charlie Dodds’s potential, and I doubted if he would enjoy being in an adversarial relationship with him. Snapping dogs don’t like having their collars chained together.

After Alafair and I got back to Missoula, I rented an hour’s typewriter time at the University of Montana library and composed the following letter. I worked hard on it. Chaucer and Dickens created wonderful rogues. I wondered what they would have thought of my attempt. But the more I read over my final draft, the more I was certain that they just might have winked at me with approval.

Dear Sal,

The flowers that go with this you can stick up your butt. When you called Vegas, you said it was a simple yard job. You didn’t say anything about pictures and this before and after bullshit. That little stunt almost got me killed. In fact, maybe I think you set me up. You go around telling everybody you’re a made guy but made guys don’t get their nose bent out of joint by some ex-cop that nobody cares about. I think you’re not only a dago shitbag and a welsher but a yellow cunt, too. I heard about you from some guys that were in Huntsville. They say your punk had the whole joint laughing at you behind your back. The only reason you got straight is because you were more afraid of your old man than you were of your punk. But you’re not getting out of this one. You owe me the rest of the money, and you know where to deliver it. I don’t get it, and I mean right away, I’m coming after you. Nobody back in Vegas is going to make a beef about it, either. They all think you’re a prick that should have been clipped a long time ago.

C.D.

I drove up to Polson, found a florist, then called them from a pay phone across the street and got the price of a small floral delivery to Sally Dio’s house. Then I found the state employment office, parked by the curb, and watched the men who went in and out of the entrance or who sat against the wall in the shade and smoked cigarettes and passed a bottle back and forth in a paper sack. Finally a middle-aged man in work clothes with uncut dull blond hair came out the door and sat down on the curb with his friends.

I got out of my truck and walked up to him.

“Say, I’ll pay you five bucks to go into a florist and put in an order for me,” I said. “I’m playing a joke on a guy, and I don’t want him to know where the flowers came from. How about it?”

He took a hand-rolled cigarette out of his mouth and looked at me quizzically. He shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t give a shit,” he said.

I drove him back over to the street where the florist was located, parked three stores down, and gave him the money for the order and a sealed envelope with the letter inside. I didn’t know Dio’s address, but I had printed his name on the envelope and drawn the approximate location of his house on Flathead Lake.

“Don’t tell them you’re doing this for anybody else,” I said. “Just give them the money and the order and the envelope. Okay?”

“Can you make it ten? If I don’t buy them other guys a can of beer or something, they might cut me out of a job they get.”

He went into the store and was back out in five minutes. I drove him back to the state employment office.

“You didn’t tell them anything, did you?” I asked.

“What’s to talk about in a flower place? I give them the money, I give them the envelope. You got any more jobs like this one you want done?”

That night Dixie Lee and I took Alafair to a movie. Before I went to bed I got Dixie to give me Sally Dee’s unlisted telephone number.

“What for? You don’t want no more truck with that man,” he said. He sat in his undershirt, candy-striped undershorts, and black shoes at the kitchen table, eating a piece of pie.