"Black Cherry Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 10

That evening I called Dan Nygurski at his house in Great Falls.

"Where've you been? I called you three times today," he said.

"Over here, east of the Divide."

"Now? Where?"

"Right outside of Great Falls."

"What are you doing right now?"

"Nothing. Going to a motel. I don't feel like driving back tonight."

"We're fixing to cook out in the backyard in a few minutes. You want to come over?"

"My little girl's with me."

"Bring her. We've got three kids she can play with. I've got some heavy stuff on Mapes that you ought to know about."

"The DEA had a file on him?"

"FBI. He was part of a kidnap investigation. You better come over."

He gave me his address and directions, and Alafair and I drove in the twilight to a 1950s suburb of split-level ranch homes, maple-lined streets, sprinklers twirling on the lawns, flower beds full of blue clematis, yellow and red roses, with tree bark packed on the dirt to prevent the growth of weeds. We sat on the redwood deck built out back, behind sliding glass doors, while Alafair played on a small seesaw with two of his little girls. The coals in his hibachi had already turned gray and hot before we arrived, and his wife brought out a tossed salad and a pitcher of iced tea on a tray, then laid a row of venison and elk steaks on the grill. The grease hissed and steamed off the coals and the smell was wonderful.

His wife was attractive and polite and had the same accent as he.

She wore makeup and a dress, and her eyes were shy when you looked too closely at them. She went back into the kitchen and began slicing a loaf of French bread on a cutting board.

"You're wondering why a woman who looks like that married a guy who looks like me," he said.

"Not at all."

"Come on, Robicheaux."

"Women have kind hearts."

"Yeah, they do," he said, and got up from his chair and closed the sliding glass door.

"So let's walk around the side of the house so nobody else has to hear what I have to tell you. In fact, maybe we ought to wait until after you've eaten."

"Let's do it."

We walked into his side yard, which was planted with apple trees and climbing red roses on trellises set in small circular beds. There were small, hard green apples in the leaves of the trees. A picket fence separated his yard from his neighbor's swimming pool. It was dusk now, and the reflection of the neighbor's porch light looked like a yellow balloon under the pool's surface. He picked up two metal chairs that were leaned against the side of his house and shook them open. His mouth twitched when he started to speak, and I saw the web of vein and sinew flex and pulse in his throat.

"Where'd your lawyer get his information on Mapes?"

"He hired a PI."

"Tell him to get your money back. The PI blew it. I suspect he checked the sheriff's and city police's office in Mapes's hometown, came up with the assault arrest, the golf club deal, when Mapes was seventeen, then sent your lawyer a bill for two days' services, which is usually about six hundred dollars. In the meantime he didn't check anything else."

"What's the story?"

"Look, you were a cop a long time. You know that once in a while you run across a guy, a guy who everybody thinks is normal, maybe a guy with an education, a good job, service record, a guy who doesn't focus much attention on himself. At least he doesn't give cops reason to think about him. But there's something wrong with him. The conscience isn't there, or maybe the feelings aren't.

But he's out there, in suburbs just like this, and he's the one who commits the murders that we never solve. I think that's your man Harry Mapes.

"In 1965 an eighteen-year-old soldier on leave from Fort Polk picked up his girlfriend in Tyler, Texas, and took her to a drive-in movie. Then it looks like they went out on a back road and parked behind an old greenhouse where somebody used to grow roses. At least that's where the sheriff's department found the girl's dress and underwear. They found the car five miles away in a creek bed. Somebody had torn the gas line loose and set it on fire. Both those kids were in the trunk. The pathologist said they were alive when it burned."

I leaned forward on the folding metal chair and picked a leaf from a rosebush. My throat felt tight. I could hear the children playing on the seesaw in the backyard.

"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 shit bag 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. CD.

I drove up to Poison, found a florist's, 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's 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's 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.

"Don't worry about it."

"Are you kidding? He's got mental diseases they haven't named yet. I ain't puttirfg you on, son. He's got a hard-on for you you couldn't knock down with a hammer."

"Don't use that language in the house."

"Sorry, it's a speech defect or something. His head reminds me of a flowerpot somebody dropped on the concrete. It's full of cracks and the dirt's starting to leak out, but he don't know it yet. Dig this. Sal built an elevator platform for the piano at his club, one of these deals that rises up into the spotlight while the guy's playing. Except after the club closed this two-hundred-and-eighty-pound bouncer got on top of the piano with this topless dancer for some serious rumba boogie, and somehow the machinery got cranked up and the elevator went right up to the ceiling and mashed them both against a beam. It broke the guy's neck, and the broad was trapped up there with him all night. So Sal says it's a real big tragedy, and he holds the funeral on a Sunday afternoon at the club, with the casket covered with flowers out in the middle of the dance floor. But the undertaker messed up the job, and the guy's neck was bent and his head was out of round, like a car tire had run over it, and the dagos were slobbering and wailing all over the place while Sal's singing on the mike in a white suit like he's Tony Bennett. It was so disgusting the waiters went back to the union and threatened to quit. Later Sal says to me, "It was a class send-off, don't you think? Jo-Jo would have liked it." Except I found out he only rented the casket, and he had Jo-Jo planted in a cloth-covered box in a desert cemetery outside of town that lizards wouldn't crawl across."

"Good night, Dixie."

He shook his head and forked another piece of pie in his mouth.

"You worry about my bad language, and you're fixing to squeeze Sal in the peaches. You're a wonder to behold, son."

I set the alarm on my Seiko watch for two A.M. and went to sleep. It was raining lightly when I was awakened by the tiny dinging sound on my wrist. I dialed Sal's number, then hung up when a man with sleep in his voice answered. I waited fifteen minutes, then hung up again as soon as the same man said "Hello" irritably into the receiver. I drank a glass of milk and watched the rain fall in the yard and run down the window, then at two-thirty I called again. I put a pencil crossways in my teeth and covered the mouthpiece with my handkerchief.

"Who the fuck is this?" the same man said.

"Where's Sal?" I kept my voice in the back of my throat and let it come out in a measured rasp.

"Asleep. Who is this?"

"Go wake him up."

"Are you crazy? It's two-thirty in the morning. What's with you, man?"

"Listen, you get that dago welsher out of bed."

"I think you're loaded, man, and you'd better stop playing on the phone and forget you ever called here."

"You don't recognize my voice, huh? Maybe it's because a guy put a wrench across my windpipe, a guy that gutless kooze sent me to see. I didn't catch a plane back to Vegas, either. I'm one hour away. I better not find out you're hitting on my broad, either."

He was quiet a moment, then he said, "Charlie?"

I didn't answer.

"Charlie?" he said.

"Hey, man…"

"What?"

"I didn't know. Hey, man, I'm sorry. You should have told me. It's late, and I been asleep, and I didn't know it was you."

"Get him on the phone."

"Man, he's out. I mean, like him and Sandy must have smoked a whole shoe box of shit before they crashed. How about he calls you in the morning?"

"You got some kind of skin growth over your ears?"

"Look, man, I go in there, he'll tear my dick off. He's been crawling the walls all day, anyway. Look, I don't know what's going on between you guys, but I don't want to get caught in it. Okay? I'm not putting you on, man, he can't talk to you. He really smoked his brains tonight."

I waited five seconds and listened to him breathe.

"Tell him I'm coming," I said, and hung up.

I overslept the next morning and was awakened by the sound of Alafair fixing breakfast in the kitchen. She was too short to function well around the stove, and she clattered the pans loudly on the burners.

"I can walk myself today, Dave," she said.

"No, that's out. We do everything together, little guy. We're a team, right?"

She stood in front of the stove, her face quiet, her head even with the top of the stove, looking at the skillet full of French toast.

"It makes me feel funny in front of the other kids," she said.

"I'll drive you, then. It'll be like I'm dropping you off on the way to work. That'll be okay, won't it?"

"Clarise don't know how to take care of Tripod. She's always mad at him."

I turned off the stove, picked up the skillet with a dish towel, and set it in the sink to cool. The French toast was burned around the edges.

"We're just going to have to accept some things now. That's the way it is, Alf," I said.

She packed her lunch box silently, then ate only half of her French toast, and went outside and waited for me on the front step. The wind was blowing off the river, and the sunlight through the maple tree made shifting patterns of leaves on her face.

Later, Dixie and I went to an early AA meeting. Afterward, one of the members who worked in the job-placement service told Dixie that he had found him a part-time job operating a forklift at the pulp mill out on the river. We walked home, and it was obvious that Dixie was not happy at the news. He sulked around the house, then took his sunburst guitar out on the back steps and began playing with a thumb pick and singing a song that I had heard only once before, | many years ago. The words went to the tune of "Just a Closer Walk With Thee."

"Now, bread and gravy is all right, And a turnip sandwich is a delight, But my kids always scream For more of them good ole butter beans.

Well, just a little piece of country ham, Just pass the butter and the jam, Just pass the biscuits if you please, And some more of them good ole butter beans.

Just see that woman over there, The one with both her hands in the air. She's not pregnant as she seems. She's just full of good ole butter beans."

I opened the screen and sat down on the steps beside him. It was warm, and the clover in the grass was alive with bees.

"You're supposed to report to the plant at noon, aren't you?" I said.

"That's what he said."

"You going out there in slacks and a Hawaiian shirt?"

"Look, that job ain't exactly what I had in mind."

"Oh?"

"Ain't that place a toilet paper factory or something? Besides, I don't have experience running heavy equipment."

"A forklift isn't heavy equipment. And I thought you told me you operated one in Huntsville."

"For about two days, till I dropped the prongs on a guy's foot."

"We had a deal, podna. We don't renegotiate the terms."

He made a sliding blues chord high up on the guitar's neck, then ran it all the way down to the nut.

"I learned that from Sam Hopkins," he said.

"I went out to his house in the Fifth Ward in Houston. People said them nigras'll leave you bleeding in the street for the garbageman to find. They treated me like royalty, man."

"I spent some time Wednesday in some courthouses east of the Divide."

His face went blank.

"I found some of the deals you made over there."

He continued to look out at the lawn and the bees lifting off the clover.

"I'm not an expert on the oil business, but I saw some peculiar stuff in those lease files," I said.

"They're public records. A person can look all they want to." He began fishing in his shirt pocket for a cigarette.

"Every time you leased up a big block of land for Star Drilling, there was a hole or two left in it."

" He lit his cigarette and smoked it with his elbow propped on the belly of his guitar.

"Those holes were leased or bought up by one of Sal's businesses in Vegas," I said.

"The same company name is on some of the deals you made for him around Flathead Lake."

"I'm not proud of it."

"So he does want into the oil and gas business."

"He wants to cover his action every way he can. He's shooting for the big score in gambling and lake property development, he wants in on the gas domes on the East Front. In the drilling business, it don't matter if they tap in on top of your property or not. As long as you're in the pool, part of the dome, you're going to get royalties. That ain't all he's got on his mind, either. They make a big strike over there, it could be like that pipeline deal up in Alaska. All them sonsofbitches are horny, and they got plenty of money for dope, too. Them conservation people are hollering because the gas is full of hydrogen sulfide, it stinks like rotten eggs, but they ought to hear what Sal's got planned for the place."

"So you took Star over the hurdles?"

"That's about it."

"And you helped Sal start out in a brand-new enterprise."

"You want me on the cross? I told you I done it. I ain't lied about it."

"But that's not all of it."

"What?"

"Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes had to know what you were doing."

"At first they didn't, but Vidrine heard about it from another guy who was working the same township and range as me. He told Mapes, and they stuck it to me at the motel one night. I thought they were going to drop the dime on me with the home office, but they just wanted me to piece off the action. Sal said no problem. It cost him a little coke. Everybody was happy."

"You've got to give me something I can use against Mapes."

"I got nothing to offer. I told you all of it. They're like piranha in a goldfish bowl. You stick your finger in it, you take back a polished bone."

I left him thumbing the bass string on his guitar and staring out at the lawn, as though the blue and green shades in the grass held a secret for him. A few minutes later he came into the house and changed into an old shirt and a pair of ripped and faded pink slacks and drove off toward the smoking stacks of the pulp mill west of town.

After he was gone, I sat alone in the silence of the house with the realization that there was nothing I could do today to help my case. I knew of nothing I could do tomorrow or the next day either. I had run out of options. The time has come, I thought, to think not in terms of what to do but instead of where to go. Any jail or prison is a bad place. The person who thinks otherwise has never been in one. Angola is worse than most. The man who would willingly submit to do time unjustly in a place like that would take pleasure in his own crucifixion, I thought. It was a big country, and there were lots of places to get lost in it.

But the idea of being a permanent fugitive from the law was so strange and removed from any concept I had ever had about my fate in this world that thinking about it left me numb and staring at phantasms in the air.

Annie, I thought.

But she came to me only in the darkness, and her visits had become less frequent and her voice had grown weaker across the water and in the din of the rain. I had only myself to depend on now, and my Higher Power and the AA program that I followed. Maybe, as I had told Dixie Lee in the hospital, it was time to look at the things that I had rather than at the problems that seemed to beset me without a solution. I was sober, even though I had set myself up for a fall by not attending meetings. When I had wanted to join Annie in that watery place more than anything in the world, I had gone into therapy rather than let that morning arrive when I would awaken in the blue-gray light, sit quietly on the side of my bed in my underwear, and fit the iron sight of my.45 against the roof of my mouth. And, last, I had Alafair, who was given to me inside a green bubble of air from below the Gulf's surface.

Maybe it's like the seventh-inning stretch, I thought, when they've shelled your fastball past your ears and blown your hanging curve through the boards. Afternoon shadows are growing on the field, your arm aches, the movement and sound of the fans are like an indistinct hum in the stands. Then a breeze springs up and dries the sweat on your face and neck, you wipe your eyes clear on your sleeve, scrub the ball against your thigh, fork your fingers tightly into the stitches, and realize that the score is irrelevant now, that your failure is complete, that it wasn't so bad after all because now you're free and alone in a peculiar way that has put you beyond the obligations of victory and defeat. The batter expects you to float another balloon past his letters, and instead you take a full windup, your face dry and cool in the breeze, your arm now weightless, and you swing your leg and whole butt into the delivery, your arm snaps like a snake, and the ball whizzes past him in a white blur. And that's the way you pitch the rest of the game, in the lengthening shadows, in the dust blowing off the base paths, in the sound of a flag popping on a metal pole against the blue sky; you do it without numbers in your head, right into the third out in the bottom of the ninth.

And I wasn't going to let Tess Regan have the final statement, either. You don't walk out of a room on someone, with tears in your eyes, as though he's an ogre, unless you want to inflict a certain amount of damage. I ate lunch, then told her that over the phone. Then I asked her to have dinner with me and Alafair at a restaurant that evening. ' "I don't know what to say. I don't want to be unkind to you. I just don't understand you," she said.

"Stop hiding behind that elementary-school-teacher stuff."

"You stop talking to me like that."

"Don't treat me like I fell through a hole in the dimension, either."

"You're an incredible person. You can't say everything that's on your mind to somebody, then ask them out to dinner."

"I've been straight with you, Tess. I'm indebted to you for the care you've given Alafair. I respect and like you. I don't want you to be unaware of that fact. That's all I had to say. We'll leave it at that."

She paused a moment, then, away from the receiver, cleared her throat.

"I have aPTA buffet at five-thirty," she said.

"We could go out for dessert later, if you'd like to."

That evening I shined my loafers, put on a pair of seersucker slacks, a long-sleeved blue shirt with a red-and-black-striped tie, and Alafair and I picked her up in the truck at seven-thirty. She lived on the bottom floor of an old orange-brick apartment building, with a wood porch and thick wood columns and an enormous white-trunked birch tree in the front yard. She wore beige sandals and a print dress covered with small blue and pink flowers. We went to an outdoor cafe by the river and had ice cream and Black Forest chocolate cake, and I paid for it with my MasterCard, hoping that it hadn't been canceled yet. It rained briefly; now the sky looked like an ink wash above the mountains and I could see lightning striking hard on a distant ridge.

Alafair was overjoyed at the thought of Tess Regan and me being together. But it wasn't a romantic overture on my part. Or at least that was what I told myself, although she was surely good to look at. I think she reminded me of one of those girls whom Catholic boys were always told, when I was growing up, that they should marry. I doubt that a girl of that kind ever existed, but we believed she did, anyway. Before I met Darlene, I was involved seriously with only three women in my adult life. My first wife was from Martinique, a descendant of French Huguenots, or probably iconoclasts who liked to smash statues in cathedrals. She tired quickly of living with a drunk, for which I couldn't blame her, but she also tired of living on a policeman's salary and became fond of wealth and clubhouse society. She married a Houston geologist, and the last I heard they lived in River Oaks and raced quarter horses at Rio Dosa.

Annie was not only the best woman I ever knew; she was also the best human being. I called her my Mennonite girl, sewn together from cornflowers and bluebonnets. Her faults were those of excess in love, forgiveness, worry over others, faith that goodness would always prevail over evil. She was seldom if ever critical of others, and when their views didn't coincide with her eccentric Kansas vision of the world, she saw them as victims of what she called weirdness, a condition that she saw virtually everywhere.

I became involved with Robin Gaddis after Annie's death. She was a stripper and sometime-hooker on Bourbon Street, but she was brave in her way and kind and gave much more than she received. What some will not understand is that it takes courage to grow up in a place like the welfare project by the old St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans. Ask a tourist who has visited that cemetery in anything less than a large group, even in broad daylight. Or if one is suicidal and would like to have a truly existential experience, he might try walking through Louis Armstrong Park, right next to the welfare project, at night. Robin's body was outraged in many ways long before she began taking off her clothes for men simply for money. I don't know where she is today. I wish I did. I have two Purple Hearts. I believe they belong much more to Annie, Robin, and Darlene than they do to me.

The wind began to blow, and in the fading twilight I could see the smoke from the pulp mill flatten in the valley west of town and smell its odor like a tinge of sewage in the wet air. We drove Tess Regan back to her apartment house, and I walked her to her door. The porch light was on, and there was a sheen in her auburn hair, and her shoulders looked pale against her pink-and-blue-flowered dress.

"Thank you for this evening," she said, and she touched me lightly on the arm with her fingers and let them rest there for perhaps three seconds. Her green eyes were warm and genuine, and I wondered if she had been rehearsing for a long time to be that Catholic girl the nuns and the brothers had told us about.

We drove under the dark shadows of the trees toward our house, and the glow from the street lamps looked like long slicks of yellow light ironed into the street's wet surface. I turned the corner onto our block while Alafair kept looking out the passenger window at a pair of headlights behind us.

"That same car stopped down from Miss Regan's," she said.

"What?"

"That car stopped behind us while you were talking to Miss Regan on the porch."

I parked in front of our house. The street was dark, and the strings of lights on the sawmill across the river shone on the water's surface.

"Don't get out of the truck," I said, and I reached under the seat for my.45. The vehicle behind me pulled to the curb, and the driver cut the headlights just as I stepped out of the cab with the automatic held behind my leg.

Clete stuck his head out of the window of his Toyota jeep, his mouth grinning, a white billed cap cocked over his eye.

"Hey, can you tell me where I can catch the St. Charles streetcar?" he said.

"What have you got hidden behind you, noble mon? Are we into heavy shit here?"

"What are you doing following me?"

"I was on my way over and just happened to see you on the other street. Slow your pulse down, Streak." He got out of the Toyota and stretched and yawned. He wore a purple and gold LSU football jersey with a big tiger's head on the front. His love handles stuck out from the sides of his blue jeans. He reached back through the car window and took out a pint of whiskey in a paper bag, unscrewed the cap, and took a neat drink.

"Who was the broad?" he said.

I didn't answer him. I walked Alafair into the house, turned on all the lights, looked in each of the rooms, and came back outside. He sat on the steps, smoking a cigarette, the pint bottle by his knee.

"Who's the new broad?" he said.

"Wrong word."

"All right, who's the lady?"

"Just a friend, one of the teachers at the school. She looks after Alafair sometimes."

"I wonder why she isn't homely. Probably just a coincidence."

"What are you up to, Clete?"

"Nothing. Maybe I just want to talk a minute. You got a minute, don't you?"

I sat down next to him on the steps. Against the lights on the sawmill, I could see the outline of suitcases and a couple of rolled sleeping bags in the back of his jeep. He took his billfold out of his back pocket and began counting through a thick sheaf of twenties in the bill holder.

"How you doing on money?" he said.

"Not bad."

"I bet."

"I've still got my credit cards."

"You remember that time I dropped a deuce at Jefferson Downs? You lent it to me so Lois wouldn't find out."

"You paid it back. When we took that charter fishing trip out of Gulfport."

"Not quite. I didn't pay the guy."

I looked at him.

"He was a lousy guy. He ran us up on the sandbar, he didn't bring enough bait, his mate was a smartass. You think I'm going to give a guy like that four hundred dollars?" he said.

"Thanks, Clete. I don't need it right now."

He folded a stack of bills between his fingers and shoved them into my shirt pocket.

"Take it and stop irritating me."

"It looks like you're packed up."

"You can't ever tell."

"What are you doing, partner?"

"I think my greatest potential lies in population control and travel. Who'd you tell about Charlie Dodds?"

"The DEA."

"I knew it."

"The agent said he was going to the locals with it, too."

"Big deal. But I knew you'd do it, Streak. You'll always be a straight cop."

"There's worse things."

"What's that mean?"

"Nothing. I'm just talking about myself. I've got to go inside now. You want to come in?"

"No, thanks. I think I'll just take a drive somewhere, maybe eat a steak."

"You've been lucky so far, Clete. Walk away from it."

"You ought to come up to the Nine Mile House at Alberton with me. They've got steaks you can cut with a spoon. Watch out for that schoolteacher. Those kind will marry you."

I watched him drive away in the darkness. I went into the kitchen and put the folded sheaf of bills from my pocket on the table. Then I looked at the bills again and counted them. Some of the bills were fifties, not twenties. He had given me over six hundred dollars.

Later that night, Dixie came home with a black-and-white television set that he had bought for ten dollars, and was watching the late show on the couch in his underwear when the phone rang. I sat up sleepily on the edge of the bed and looked out at him in the lighted hallway as he answered the phone. His hairy stomach protruded over the elastic of his candy-striped shorts. He put his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver.

"It's that DEA Polack in Great Falls," he said.

"You want me to tell him you're bombed out?"

"That's all right," I said, took the phone from him, went into the bathroom, and closed the door.

"What's up, Dan?" I said.

"I'm just glad to find you home."

"I'm glad to be home, too. My watch says it's one in the morning."

"An hour ago, somebody took a shot at Sally Dee. They damn near got him, too. The sheriff over there is going to have you high up on his list."

"Give him a call in the morning, will you, and tell him what time you got ahold of me. I don't want any more dealings with that guy."

"Sure. Hey, the deputy who called me said Sal's real shook up. The shooter got up on the knoll above the house and parked a big one right through the kitchen window while Sal was drinking a glass of milk and eating cookies at the table. It blew glass and parts of a flowerpot all over him. Guess who wants police protection now?"

"What do they have so far?"

"Not much. They know about where the shot came from. That's about it."

"No witnesses?"

"Not so far. You got some ideas?"

"Put it this way. How many people wouldn't like to see him cooled out?"

"No, no, let's be a little more candid here."

"My speculations aren't of much value these days."

"We're talking about Purcel."

"He was here earlier tonight."

"How much earlier?"

"Three hours."

"That'd give him time to get up there, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, it would."

"You think he did it, don't you?"

"Maybe."

"Well, ole Sal's on the other end of the stick now. I wonder how he's going to handle it."

"He'll bring in some more of his hired shitheads. I'm real tired, Dan, Is there anything else?"

"Stay clear of Purcel."

"You better tell that to the Dio family. I wouldn't want Clete I hunting me."

"I don't think these guys want advice from the DEA. It's not a federal situation, anyway. Sometimes you get to sit back and watch the show."

I went back to bed and slept until the sun came up bright in my eyes and I heard the Saturday morning sound of children roller-skating out on the sidewalk.

For one morning I didn't want to think about my troubles, so when the lady next door gave me a venison roast, Alafair and I packed my rucksack for a picnic, took Dixie Lee with us, and drove down into the Bitterroot Valley to Kootenai Creek Canyon. The sky was cloudless, a hard ceramic blue from the Sapphire Mountains all the way across the valley to the jagged, snow-tipped ridges of the Bitterroots. We walked two miles up a U.S. Forest Service trail by the stream-bed, the water white and boiling over the rocks, the floor of the canyon thick with cottonwoods and ponderosa pine, the layered rock walls rising straight up into saddles of more pine and peaks that were as sharp as ragged tin. The air was cool and so heavy with the smell of mist from the rocks, wet fern, pine needles, layers of dead cottonwood leaves, logs that had rotted into humus, that it was almost like breathing opium.

We climbed down the incline of the streambed and started a fire in a circle of rocks. The stream flattened out here, and the current flowed smoothly over some large boulders and spread into a quiet pool by the bank, where we set out cans of pop in the gravel to cool. I had brought along an old refrigerator grill, and I set it on the rocks over the fire, cut the venison into strips, put them on the grill with potatoes wrapped in tinfoil, then sliced up a loaf of French bread. The grease from the venison dripped into the fire, hissed and smoked in the wind, and because the meat was so lean it curled and browned quickly in the heat and I had to push it to the edge of the grill.

After we ate, Dixie Lee and Alafair found a pile of rocks that was full of chipmunks, and while they threw bread crumbs down into the crevices I walked farther down the stream and sat by a pool whose surface was covered by a white, swirling eddy of froth and leaves and spangled sunlight. Through the cottonwoods on the other side of the stream I could see the steep, moss-streaked cliff walls rise up straight into the sky.

Then a strange thing happened, because she had never appeared to me during the waking day. But I saw her face in the water, saw the sunlight spinning in her hair.

Don't give up, sailor, she said.

What?

You've had it worse. You always got out of it before.

When?

How about Vietnam?

I had the U.S. Army on my side.

Listen to the voices in the water and you'll be all right. I promise. Bye-bye, baby love.

Can't you stay a little longer?

But the wind blew the cottonwoods and the light went out of the water, and the pool turned to shadow and an empty pebble-and-sand bottom.

"Don't be down here talking to yourself, son," Dixie Lee said behind me.

"You'll give me cause to worry."

I didn't have to wait long to learn how Sally Dio would try to handle his new situation. He called me that evening at the house.

"I want a meet," he said.

"What for?"

"We talk some stuff out."

"I don't have anything to say to you."

"Look, man, this is going to get straightened out. One way or another. Right now."

"What have I got that you're interested in?"

"I ain't interested in anything you got. What's the matter with you? You got impacted shit in your head or something?"

"I'm busy tonight. Plus, I don't think I want to see you again, Sal."

I could almost hear his exasperation and anger in the silence.

"Look, I'm making an effort," he said.

"I'm going the extra mile. I don't have to do that. I can handle it other ways. But I'm treating you like a reasonable man."

I deliberately waited a good five seconds.

"Where?" I said.

"There's a bar and restaurant in Missoula, the Pink Zebra, right off Higgins by the river. It's in an alley, but it's a class place. Nine o'clock."

"I'll think it over."

"Listen, man" I hung up on him.

Later, I put the.45 back under the seat of the truck, dropped Alafair off at the baby-sitter's, then drove to the Pink Zebra downtown. It was located in a brick-paved alley that had been refurbished into a pedestrian walkway of small cafes and shops and bars that offered philodendron and brass elegance more than alcohol.

I went inside and walked past the espresso machines and a row of booths that had copper champagne buckets affixed to the outside. The brick walls and the ceiling were hung wich gleaming kettles and pots of ivy and fern, and in the back was a small private dining room, where I saw Sally Dio at a table with two men whom I hadn't seen before. But they came out of the same cookie cutter as some I had known in New Orleans. They were both around thirty, heavier than they should have been for their age, their tropical shirts worn outside their gray slacks, their necks hung with gold chains and religious medals, their pointed black shoes shined to the gloss of patent leather, their eyes as dead and level and devoid of emotion as someone staring into an empty closet.

I stopped at the door, and one of them stood up and approached me.

"If you'll step inside, Mr. Robicheaux, I need to make sure you're not carrying nothing that nobody wants here," he said.

"I don't think we'll do that," I said.

"It's a courtesy we ask of people. It's not meant to insult nobody," he said.

"Not tonight, podna."

"Because everybody's supposed to feel comfortable," he said.

"That way you have your drink, you talk, you're a guest, there ain't any tensions."

"What's it going to be, Sal?" I said.

He shook his head negatively at the man next to me, and the man stepped back as though his body were attached to a string.

Sal wore a cream-colored suit, black suspenders, and an open-necked purple sport shirt with white polka dots. His duck tails were combed back on the nape of his neck, and he smoked a cigarette without taking his hand from his mouth. He looked at me steadily out of his blade-face, his stare so intense that the bottom rim of his right eye twitched.

"Get the waiter," he said to the man who was standing.

"What are you having, Mr. Robicheaux?" the man said.

"Nothing."

He motioned the waiter to the door anyway.

"Bring a bottle of something nice for Mr. Dio's guest," he said.

"Bring Mr. Dio another Manhattan, too. You want anything else, Sal?"

Sal shook his head again, then motioned the two men out of the room. I sat down across the table from him. A half-dozen cigarette butts were in the ashtray, and ashes were smeared on the linen tablecloth. I could smell the heavy odor of nicotine on his breath. The looped scar under his right eye was tight against his skin.

"What the fuck's going on?" he said.

"What do you mean?"

"With Charlie Dodds."

"I don't know anything about him."

"Cut the shit. He tried to clip me last night."

"What has that got to do with me?"

He breathed through his nose and wet his lips.

"I want to know what's going on," he said.

"You got me, Sal. I don't know what you're talking about."

"You and Dodds cut some kind of deal."

"I think maybe you've burned out some cells in your brain."

"Listen, you stop trying to fuck with my head. You and him got something going. You paid him or something, you turned him around. I don't know what kind of deal you're working, but believe me, man, it ain't worth it."

"This is why you wanted to meet? Big waste of time."

"What do you want?"

"Nothing."

"I mean it, you quit jerking me around. We're talking business. We straighten all this out right now. We don't, my old man will. You understand that? You and Charlie Dodds aren't going to fuck up millions of dollars in deals people got around here."

"You're hitting on the wrong guy, Sal."

The waiter brought in a Manhattan and a green bottle of wine in a silver ice bucket. He uncorked the wine and started to pour it into a glass for me to taste.

"Get out of here," Sal said.

After the waiter was gone, Sal lit a fresh cigarette and drew the smoke deep into his lungs.

"Listen," he said, "there's nothing between us."

"Then you shouldn't send bad guys around my house."

"It was a personal beef. It's over. Nobody got hurt. It ends now. There's a lot of money going to be made here. You can have in on it."

I looked at my watch.

"I have to be somewhere else," I said.

"What the fuck is with you? I'm talking a score you couldn't dream about. I'm talking three, four large a week. Broads, a condo in Tahoe, any fucking thing you want. You going to turn that down because you got a personal beef to square?"

"I'll see you, Sal. Don't send anybody else around my house. It won't help your troubles with Charlie Dodds."

I started to get up. He put his hand on my forearm.

"I know something you want, you need, man. And I'm the cat can give it to you," he said.

"What's that?"

"That guy Mapes. Dixie said he can send you up the road. How'd you like it Mapes wasn't around to worry you anymore?" He took a drink from his Manhattan. His eyes were level and intent over the glass.

"I don't even know where he is," I said.

"You say the word, you end this bullshit between you and me, you deliver up that cocksucker Charlie Dodds, Mapes is dead meat. You'll get Polaroids, then you burn them. You don't have any connection with it. Nobody'll ever see the guy again. It'll be like he never existed."

"I'll think about it."

"You'll think about it?"

"That's what I said, Sal. Call me tomorrow afternoon."

I walked out of the restaurant into the coolness of the night. The streets were full of college kids, and I could smell pine woodsmoke from people's chimneys and the heavy, cold smell of the river in the air.

When I got home Dixie showed me the business card a Missoula city detective had left in the mailbox. The detective had penciled a note on the back to the effect that he wanted me to call him, since he had missed me twice at the house. I suspected this had to do with Dan Nygurski's calling the local police about Charlie Dodds's visit to my house. I dropped the card on top of the icebox, put Alafair to bed, and watched the late show with Dixie Lee.

I slept through until morning without dreaming or once getting up in the night. When I woke and stepped out on the porch with a cup of coffee, the river was green and running fast in the shadows of the bridge, riffling over the boulders in the deepest part of the current, and the sunlight through the maples in the yard looked like spun glass.