Black Cherry Blues

CHAPTER 11

It was Sunday morning. I took Alafair to nine o'clock mass, then we fixed cush-cush and ate breakfast with Dixie Lee. He had shaved, pressed his slacks, and put on a white shirt.

"Where are you going?" I said.

"Some Holy Rollers asked me to play piano at their church. I hope the plaster don't fall out of the ceiling when I walk in."

"That's good."

He looked down at his coffee cup, then played with the big synthetic diamond ring on his finger.

"I got something bothering me," he said.

"What is it?"

He looked at Alafair.

"Alafair, why don't you start on the dishes while Dixie helps me with something outside?" I said.

We went out to the truck, and I took the small whisk broom from behind the seat and began sweeping out the floor.

"I'm afraid I'm going to drink. I woke up scared about it this morning," he said.

"Just do it a day at a time. Do it five minutes at a time if you have to."

"Why the fuck am I scared, man?"

"Because it's fear that makes us drink."

"I don't understand. It don't make sense. I felt real good yesterday. Today I'm shaking inside. Look at my hands. I feel like I just got off a jag."

"Dixie, I'm not a psychologist, but you're going into a church today that's like the one you grew up in. Maybe you're dealing with some memories that bring back some bad moments. Who knows?

Just let it go, partner. You're sober this morning. That's all that counts."

"Maybe some people ain't supposed to make it."

"You're not one of them."

"You'd really throw me out if I went back on the juice?"

"Yep."

"Somehow that just made a cold wind blow through my soul."

"You work the steps, and I promise all that fear, all those weird mechanisms in your head, will go away."

"What mechanisms?"

"Strange thoughts and images, things that don't make any sense, stuff that you won't talk about with anybody. If you work the program, all those things will gradually disappear."

The morning was cool, and there was a breeze off the river, but there were drops of perspiration on his forehead and in his eyebrows.

"Dave, I just feel downright sick inside. I can't explain it."

"It's going to pass," I said.

"Just don't drink today."

But his eyes were forlorn, and I well understood the peculiar chemical misery he was experiencing at the moment; I also knew that my words would mean more to him later than they did now.

"While we're out here, let me tell you about something else," I said.

"I'm going to receive a phone call this afternoon. I don't want you to answer it."

"All right."

"It'll be from Sally Dee. I don't want him to know you're living here."

"You're putting me on?"

I continued sweeping the floor mat with the whisk broom.

"Dave, that ain't true?"

"It's complicated."

"So is shit. This is some kind of nightmare. What are you doing, man?"

"Just don't answer the phone."

"I wouldn't touch the sonofabitch at gunpoint."

An hour later the phone rang. But it was Tess Regan, not Sally Dio.

"Jason, the eighth-grader I told you about, the one who talked with the man in the yellow car, he just came over on his bicycle," she said.

"Last night he went to the Heidelhaus for dinner with some of his relatives. He saw the yellow car behind the restaurant. He's sure it's the same one. He remembered that the back window was cracked and there was a University of Wyoming sticker on it."

"What kind of car?"

"A Mercury."

"Did he get the license number?"

"No, I asked him. He said he didn't have a piece of paper or a pencil. Kids don't quite pull it all off sometimes, Dave."

"He did just fine," I said.

"It was at dinnertime, you say?"

"Yes. He said the Mercury was there when he went into the restaurant, and it was still there when he left. He tried to tell his uncle about it, but it was a birthday party and adults tend not to hear children sometimes."

"Thanks very much, Tess. Tell Jason I appreciate what he's done."

Alafair and I drove over to the Heidelhaus, a large Bavarian-style restaurant on the south side of town. The lunch crowd had started to come in, and the parking lot was half filled with cars, but none of them was a yellow Mercury. I drove behind the building and around the sides but had no luck there, either. I took Alafair for an ice cream cone, returned in a half hour, and still came up empty.

When we got home Dixie Lee was reading the newspaper on the front steps.

"It ain't rung. At least not while I was here," he said.

"How was church?"

"It went okay. They asked me to play again Wednesday night. They ain't a bad bunch for people that probably left their toast in the oven too long."

Alafair went inside just as the phone rang.

"Damn, there it is," Dixie Lee said.

"Go easy, boy. Let's stay on the sunny side for a while."

Alafair had picked up the receiver, but I eased it out of her hand before she could speak. I stepped into the bathroom and closed the door on the cord.

"You had time to think, Robicheaux?" Sally Dee said.

"I still believe you have things mixed up."

"I'm not interested in opinions. You want to do some business, or you want to keep fucking around?"

"You've got it backwards, Sal. You hired Charlie Dodds to take me out."

"That's past history. You come up to the lake uninvited, you provoked my father, you started that beef out on the road. I mark it off even. That's the way I see it."

"What's the offer?"

"What d'you mean, what's the offer? I spelled it out to you yesterday."

"No, you didn't. You said three or four grand a week. Are you going to pay that kind of money for house security?"

"We'll set you up with your own action. You manage a club in Vegas. All you got to do is count the receipts. You know what the skim is on a half-dozen lobby slots?"

"I'm about to go on trial."

"You're breaking my knob off."

"No, I think you're trying to do a number on me, Sal. You'll talk a lot of shit about the big score out in Vegas, let me think I got no worries about Harry Mapes, then a little time passes and I'm back in Louisiana in handcuffs."

"You think I'm playing games while that crazy fucker is shooting at me?"

"That's your problem. My big worry is prison. That and your shitheads coming around my house."

"I told you, there ain't anybody after you now. What is it I can't get through to you? This is a simple deal. You make money, I make money, Mapes gets whacked. You're home free. I guarantee it. People don't get out from under us. You were a cop. You know that."

"I don't think I want to do business with you, Sal."

"What?"

"I think you're about to take another fall."

"What is this? What the fuck are you up to, man?"

"Don't call here again. I'm out of your life. Don't even have thoughts about me."

"You shit-eating motherfucker, you're setting me up… It won't work, cocksucker… it's entrapment… you tell that to Nygurski… I've got lawyers that'll shove it up his ass."

I placed the receiver quietly in the cradle and went outside and sat down on the steps beside Dixie Lee, who was reading the comics in the newspaper. He turned the page and popped the paper straight between his hands.

"Don't start telling me about it. My system's puny as it is. I just as soon drink razor blades," he said.

I called Nygurski at his house a few minutes later. He wasn't home, so I put Alafair in the truck and we drove back to the Heidel-haus. This time the yellow Mercury with the cracked back window and the University of Wyoming sticker was parked in the shade of the building behind the dumpster.

I parked in the main lot, away from the Mercury, took Alafair inside and bought her a Coke by a stone fireplace that was now filled with a huge tropical aquarium.

I went up to the male cashier at the bar.

"I backed into a yellow Mercury by the side of the building," I said.

"I think it might belong to somebody who works here. I think I just scratched it, but I'd like to make it right."

"Next to the building? Right out there?" he asked, gesturing toward the side of the restaurant where the dumpster was located.

"Yeah, that's it."

"It sounds like Betty's. That's her down the bar."

She was around thirty, blond, thick across the stomach, overly rouged, too old for the Bavarian waitress costume that she wore.

"Is that your Mercury by the side of the building, the one with the Wyoming sticker?" I said.

"Sure." She stopped washing glasses and smiled at me. There were tiny lines in the corners of her eyes.

"I'm afraid I backed into it. I don't think I really hurt it, but you might take a look at it to be sure."

"You couldn't hurt that thing. It's twelve years old and has eighty-five thousand miles on it."

"Well, I just didn't want to drive off and not say anything."

"Just a minute." She took several glass steins out of the tin sink, set them top down on a folded dish towel, then said something to the cashier.

"I have to hurry. We're real busy right now."

I told Alafair I would be right back, and the waitress and I went outside to her car. I ran my hand over some scratches by the Mercury's taillight.

"That's about where I hit it," I said.

"I couldn't tell if that was old stuff or not. Maybe I just hit the bumper."

"Forget it. It's not worth worrying about. I'm getting rid of it, anyway."

"Aren't you a friend of Harry's?" I said.

"Which Harry?"

"Mapes."

"Sure. How'd you know that?"

"I guess I saw y'all together."

"How do you know Harry?"

"Through the oil business. I thought he was doing lease work east of the Divide."

"He is. He's just visiting right now."

"Well, I'm sorry to have taken you away from your work."

"It's all right. It's nice of you to be concerned. Not many people would bother."

She was a nice lady, and I didn't like to deceive her. I wondered how she had gotten involved with Harry Mapes. Maybe because it's a blue-collar, male-oriented town, I thought, where a woman's opportunities are limited. Regardless, I felt sorry for her.

I took Alafair back to the house, called the baby-sitter, then Tess Regan, but neither of them was at home.

"There's a dollar double feature at the Roxy. How about I take her to that?" Dixie Lee said.

Before I could hide it he saw the hesitation in my face.

"You think I'm gonna get drunk, I'm gonna run off and leave her alone?" he said.

"No."

"Or maybe I ain't worked up to the step where you can trust me as good as that old woman down at the church."

"I just didn't know what you had planned for today."

"You want me to look after her or not?"

"I'd appreciate your doing that, Dixie."

"Yeah, I can see that. But that's all right. I ain't sensitive. It all bounces off me."

"I probably won't be home until late this evening," I said.

"Can you fix her supper?"

"Show me a little trust, son. I'd be grateful for it."

I drove back across town and parked on a side street behind the Heidelhaus so I could see the yellow Mercury. It was a long wait, but at eight o'clock she came out of the restaurant, walked to her car with her purse on her arm, started the engine, and drove south into the Bitterroot Valley.

I followed her twenty-five miles along the river. The light was still good in the valley, and I could see her car well from several hundred yards away, even though other cars were between us; but then she turned onto a dirt road and headed across pasture-land toward the foot of the mountains. I pulled to the shoulder of the highway, got out with my field glasses, and watched the plume of white dust grow smaller in the distance, then disappear altogether.

I drove down the dirt road into the purple shadows that were spreading from the mountains' rim, crossed a wide creek that was lined with cottonwoods, passed a rotted and roofless log house with deer grazing nearby, then started to climb up on a plateau that fronted a deep canyon in the mountains. The dust from her Mercury still hung over the rock fence that bordered the property where she had turned in. The house was new, made of peeled and lacquered logs that had a yellow glaze to them, with a railed porch, a peaked shingle roof, and boxes of petunias and geraniums in the windows. But her car was the only one there.

I drove on past the house to the canyon, where there was a Forest Service parking area, and watched the house for a half hour through my field glasses. She fed a black Labrador on the back steps, she took some wash off the line, she carried a carton of mason jars out of the shed back into the house, but there was no sign of Harry Mapes.

I went back home and found Alafair asleep and Dixie Lee putting a new set of strings on his sunburst Martin.

I didn't have to call Dan Nygurski again. He called me at five minutes after eight the next morning.

"You beat me to it," I said.

"I tried to catch you at home yesterday."

"About Sally Dio."

"That's right."

"About your phone conversation with him."

"That's right. So he did use the pay phone down the road from his house?"

"Yeah, he sure did. In fact, he was using it several times a day. Calls to Vegas, Tahoe, LA, Galveston. Notice I'm using the past tense here."

I squinted my eyes closed and pressed my forefinger and thumb against my temples.

"I've sympathized with you, I've tried to help you," he said.

"I took you into my confidence. I just had a conference call with a couple of federal agents who are very angry right now. My explanations to them didn't seem to make them feel any better."

"Dan"

"No, you got to talk yesterday. It's my turn now. You blew a federal wiretap. You know how long it took us to set that up?"

"Listen to what you've got on that tape. Solicitation to commit murder. He stepped in his own shit."

"You remember when I told you that Sal is not Bugsy Siegel? I meant it. He did time for stolen credit cards. He's a midlevel guy. But he's connected with some big people in Nevada. They're smart, he's not. He makes mistakes they don't. When he falls, we want a whole busload to go up the road with him. Are you starting to get the big picture now?"

"All right, I screwed it up."

"That doesn't bother me as much as the fact that I think you knew better."

"He walked into it. I let it happen. I'm sorry it's causing you problems."

"No, you wanted to make sure he thought he was tapped. That way he wasn't about to try to whack you again."

"What would you do?"

"I would have stayed away from him to begin with."

"That's a dishonest answer. What would you do if a guy like io was trying to whack you out, maybe you and your daughter ath?"

I could hear the long-distance hum of the wires in the receiver.

"Did that Missoula detective get ahold of you?" he asked.

"He came out and left his card."

"I hope he'll be of some help to you if you have more trouble there."

"Look, Dan-"

"I have another call. We'll see you," he said.

I went into the kitchen to fix a bowl of Grape-Nuts and spilled the box all over the floor. I cleaned up the cereal with a wet paper towel and threw it in the trash.

"I'm heading out for work," Dixie Lee said.

"All right."

"Who was that?"

"Nobody."

"Yeah… well, what do you want to do after Wednesday?"

"What?"

"About Alafair. That job ain't but four hours a day. I can put them in any time I want."

"What are you talking about?"

"School's out for the summer, ain't it? I can help look after her. What's the best time for me to be home?"

"I don't know, Dixie. I can't think about it right now."

I felt him looking quietly at the side of my face, then he turned |and walked outside to his automobile. I looked at my watch. It was eight-thirty. I locked the house, put the.45 under the truck seat, land drove south once again into the Bitterroot Valley.

This time the black Jeepster was parked right next to the Mercury, and when I pulled into the yard and got out of the truck woodsmoke was blowing off the stone chimney. Through the front window I could see the woman named Betty drinking coffee with a man at a table in the living room.

The porch rails and the lacquered yellow logs of the house were wet with dew. I stepped up on the porch, knocked on the door, and when the woman opened it I saw Harry Mapes stare at me with his mouth parted over his coffee cup. Then he got up and walked out of my line of sight into a side room.

"Hi," she said, and smiled with recognition.

"You're"

"I didn't tell you my name yesterday. It's Dave Robicheaux. I'd like to talk to Harry."

"Sure. He's here. But how'd you know where I lived?"

"I'm sorry for disturbing you, but I'd appreciate it if you'd ask him to step out here."

"I don't understand this," she said, then turned and saw Mapes standing behind her.

"Harry, this is the guy I told you about."

"I figured it was you," he said to me.

He wore jeans and a flannel shirt, and a black automatic hung from his left hand. The chain scars on his face were almost totally gone now.

"Harry, what are you doing?" she said.

"This is the guy who attacked me in Louisiana," he said.

"Oh!" she said. Then she said it again, "Oh!"

"Come outside, Mapes," I said.

"You don't know when to leave it alone, do you?" he said.

"My lawyer told me you might try something like this. He also told me what to do about it "

"What's that?"

"You try to intimidate a witness, you just create more trouble for yourself. Figure it out."

"So you're holding all the cards. Look, I don't have a weapon. Why don't you step outside? Nobody's going to eat you."

His fingers were long on the sides of the automatic. I had seen only one or two like it since I had left Vietnam. It was a 7.62-millimeter Russian Tokarev, a side arm often carried by NVA officers.

I saw Mapes wet the triangular scar on his lip, his mouth tight, his eyes narrowed as though he were biting down softly on a piece of string. He wasn't a bad-looking man. He still had the build of a basketball player or a man who could do an easy five-mile morning run. You wouldn't pay particular attention to him in a supermarket line. Except for his eyes. He was the kind who was always taking your inventory, provided you represented or possessed something he was interested in; and sometimes when you studied the eyes in his kind you saw a hidden thought there that made you look away hurriedly.

"You're right," he said, and set the pistol on the arm of a couch by the door.

"Because you're all smoke. A guy who's always firing in the well. A big nuisance who couldn't mind his own business."

He opened the screen door and stepped out on the porch.

"You think it's going to come out different somehow at your trial?" he said.

"You think following me around Montana is going to make all that evidence go away?"

"You've got it wrong, Harry. I gave up on trying to nail you. You're too slick a guy. You've fooled people all your life. You burned two people to death when you were seventeen, you murdered the Indians, the waitress in Louisiana, your partner, and I think you raped and murdered Darlene. You got away with all of it."

I saw the blood drain out of the face of the woman behind the screen. Mapes's chest rose and fell with his breathing.

"Listen, you asshole" he said.

"But that's not why I'm here. You were at the school ground, in that Mercury there, looking at my daughter through field glasses, asking questions about her. Now, my message here is simple. If you come around her again, I'm going to kill you. Believe it. I've got nothing to lose at this point. I'm going to walk up to you, wherever you are, and blow your fucking head off."

I walked off the porch into the yard.

"Oh, no, you don't," he said.

"You, too, Betty. You stay out here and listen to this. My lawyer did some checking on this guy. He's a drunk, he's a mental case, he's got an obsession because he got his wife killed by some drug dealers. Then somebody threatened his daughter, and he accused me and my partner. The fact that he's an ex-cop with dozens of people who'd like to even a score with him doesn't seem to enter his head. Let me tell you something, Ro-bicheaux. Betty's son goes to a Catholic school in Missoula. She and her ex-husband have shared custody. Sometimes I pick him up or drop him off for her. If that's the same school your daughter goes to, it's coincidence, and that's all it is."

"You heard what I said. No warning light next time," I said.

I got inside my truck and closed the door.

"No, Harry, bring him back," the woman said.

"Who's Darlene? What's he talking about a rape? Harry?"

"He's leaving. Close the door," he said to her.

"Harry, I'll call the sheriff. He can't get away with saying that."

"He's leaving. He's not coming back."

Then he walked toward the truck window just as I started the engine.

"You're going to prison," he said.

"Nothing's going to change that. You can mess me up with my girl, you can say stuff about blowing me away if it makes you feel good, but in a few weeks you're going to be hoeing sweet potatoes in Angola."

I put the transmission in reverse and began backing around in a half circle. The wind blew his hair, and his skin looked grained and healthy in the sunlight. His eyes never left my face. My knuckles were ridged on top of the gearshift knob, and my thighs were shaking as I depressed the floor pedals.

It had all been for nothing.

But there was still time, the moment was still there. To pull the.45 from under the seat, to aim it suddenly at his face, knock him to his knees, screw the barrel hard into his neck and cock the hammer, let him experience the terror of his victims who clawed the inside of an automobile trunk while the metal heated and the flames spread to the gasoline tank. I could feel the.45 leap into my hand as though it had a life of its own.

I shut off the engine and stepped out of the truck. My face felt cool in the bright air. The yellow log house and the ponderosa and blue spruce on the hillsides seemed dazzling in the sun. His eyes dropped to my hands. I held my palms up.

"Did you ever go to the stake in Saigon?" I said.

"What?"

"Some ARVN and white mice would march them out to the stake, tie them to it, and put a round behind the ear. At least that was what I was told. I never saw it."

"I think you had some head damage over there. You've got thirty seconds to be past Betty's property line, then we call the sheriff."

"You'd better concentrate on my words, Harry. The executioner was probably a special kind of guy. He could kill people and go home and have lunch. He's somebody you can understand. You'd recognize each other in a group. But you know I'm not like you, and that's why you're not afraid of me. I can come out here and talk about cooling you out, but you know I won't do it. But how about Sally Dio?"

"Dio? You must truly be out of your mind. Get out of here, man."

"He was talking about whacking you out. That's not a shuck. He'sgot some new guys up at the lake. They're the real article, genuine syndicate hit men. You can call Dan Nygurski at the DEA in Great Falls and ask him. Or, better yet, ask him to deny it. If that's not enough for you, I can give you Sal's unlisted number and you can talk with him about it. If I'm just jerking you around, you can clear the whole matter up in a few minutes."

"What's Dio care about me? I only met the guy twice."

"Ask him. Maybe you shouldn't have gotten mixed up in his and Dixie Lee's lease deals. He's probably a borderline psychotic. I doubt if he thinks too straight."

His eyes looked like they were focused on a thought ten inches in front of his face. Then they came back on me.

"Where'd you hear this?" he asked.

"Stay away from my daughter. Don't come near that school. I don't care if your lady friend's son goes there or not," I said, and I got back into the truck and drove out on the dirt road.

In the rearview mirror I saw him standing alone in the yard, staring after me, the woman holding the screen door wide behind him.

I went back home, walked down the street to a noon AA meeting, bought groceries for our supper that evening, then sat on the back steps in the shade and tried to put myself inside the mind of Harry Mapes. He was a smart man. He had killed a number of people over the years his first when he was seventeen and God only knew how many in Vietnam and he had never spent a day in jail for it. He wasn't compulsive; he was calculating, and he used fear and violence to achieve an immediate, practical end. Like any sociopath's, his emotions were simple ones and concerned entirely with desires, survival, and the destruction of his enemies. He remained passive, functional, and innocuous in appearance until he felt threatened. Then he rose to the occasion.

When he saw me east of the Divide, on the dirt road between the Indian beer joint and the home of Clayton Desmarteau's mother, I scared him in some way. He went to the school ground to keep my mind on other things or, perhaps, to provoke me into attacking him again. Somehow he had also concluded that Darlene had sent me east of the Divide, had put me on that dirt road south of the Black-feet Reservation, and he feared that somewhere in that hardpan country I would discover what had happened to Clayton Desmar-teau and his cousin.

In the last two days I had managed to turn it around on both Dio and Mapes, to use some smoke and their own frame of reference against them, so that in all probability they wouldn't come around me and Alafair again. But my legal situation remained the same as it had been when I left Louisiana. My victory had become the restoration of the status quo. I lay down on the living room couch in a funk, with my arm across my eyes, and fell asleep.

The image in my dream was brief, like needles of light in the afternoon haze. Darlene kneeling by water, white-tailed deer thudding across the wet ground between the cottonwoods.

I felt feathers brushing across my forearm and cheek. I opened one eye and looked at Alafair's grinning face. The other day she had found an old feather duster in the house.

"How you doing, you cute little guy?" I said.

"How you doing, you cute little Dave?" she said. She wore jeans and her Baby Orca T-shirt.

I sat up on the couch.

"How'd you get home?" I said.

"Dixie Lee walked down and got me. You was asleep. Dave?"

"What?" I rubbed my face and tried to make the afternoon come into focus.

"We only got two more days of school. We going home then?"

"Maybe so, little guy."

"We better call Batist and tell him."

"Alafair, when we go back home, it might be for just a few days. I might have to sell a few things and raise some money so we can take another trip."

"Trip?"

"To a different place for a while. Down by the ocean, maybe."

"We're not going to live at the house no more?"

"I don't know, Alf."

I looked at the confusion in her face.

"Let's take things as they come," I said.

"I just don't want you to be disappointed later if we move somewhere else for a while."

I heard the phone ring in the hallway. Alafair picked up her lunch box from the coffee table and started toward the kitchen.

"Miss Regan asked if we eat redfish," she said.

"Why she ask that? What's she care about redfish? I got pushed down on the school ground. I threw a dirt clod at the boy that did it."

I let her go and didn't say anything more.

"Dave, you better take this," Dixie Lee said in the doorway, the telephone receiver in his hand.

"What is it?"

"St. Pat's Hospital. They got Clete in there."

We drove to the hospital on Broadway, left Alafair in the second-floor waiting room with a comic book, and walked down the corridor to Clete's room. A plainclothes cop, with his badge on his belt, was just coming out the door. He had a blond mustache and wore a white shirt and knit tie. He was putting a small notebook in his shirt pocket.

"What happened?" I said."

"Who are you?" he said.

"A friend of Cletus Purcel."

"What's your name?"

"Dave Robicheaux."

He nodded slowly, and I saw the name meant nothing to him.

"Your friend got worked over," he said.

"He says he didn't know the two guys who did it. But the bartender who phoned us said the two guys called him by name. Tell your friend it's dumb to protect people who'll slam a man's hand in a car door."

He brushed past me and walked to the elevator. Dixie Lee and I went inside the room, which Clete shared with an elderly man who had an IV connected to his wasted arm. Clete's bed was on the far side of the partition, one end elevated so he could look up at the television set that was turned on without sound. One eye was swollen into a purple egg, and his head was shaved in three places where the scalp had been stitched. His right hand was in plaster; the ends of his fingers were discolored as though they were gangrenous.

"I heard you with the detective," he said.

"He doesn't seem to believe your story," I said.

"He's probably got marital trouble. It makes a cynic out of you. What's happening, Dixie?"

"Oh man, who did this to you?" Dixie Lee said.

"A couple of Sal's meatballs."

"Who?" Dixie Lee said.

"Carl and Foo-Foo. I got Foo-Foo one shot in the rocks, though. He's not going to be unlimbering his equipment for a while."

"What happened?" I said.

"I stopped at this bar off Ninety. They must have seen the jeep in the parking lot. They caught me with a baton when I came out the side door. When I thought they were through, they dragged me to a car and slammed my hand in the door. If the bartender hadn't come out, they'd have done my other hand."

"Tell the cops," Dixie Lee said.

"Why do you want to protect Carl and Foo-Foo?"

"What goes round, comes round," Clete said.

"I ain't sweating it, mon."

"You used to say "Bust 'em or smoke 'em." Let the cops bust them," I said.

"Maybe they've got a surprise coming out of the jack-in-the-box," Clete said. He looked at my face.

"All your radio tubes are lit up, Streak. What are you thinking about?"

"Why'd they do it?"

"Sal's running scared. He's got nobody but his old man and his hired dagos. Even the corn holers cut out on him."

"That's not it," I said.

"How do I know what goes on in his head?"

"Come on, Clete," I said.

"When I left, he owed me fifteen hundred in back salary. Plus I'd already paid my rent to him in advance. So I went in his house and took a couple of gold ashtrays."

"You crazy bastard," Dixie Lee said.

"He didn't kill Darlene, then, did he?"

"I don't know," Clete said.

"Yes, you do. Somebody shot at him. He thinks it was Charlie Dodds. If he had killed Darlene, you'd be the first person he would fear. Those two guys wouldn't have just broken your hand, either. They would have passed you on the road and taken you out with a shotgun."

"Maybe," he said.

"No maybe about it, Cletus," I said.

"It was Mapes. He thought she sent me over by the reservation where he killed the two Indians. He found her alone, and he raped and killed her. You've got a beef with the wrong guy, and you know it."

"I got a beef with Sal for all kinds of reasons," he said.

"But that's all right. Our man's going to have a sandy fuck."

"What?" I said.

"A fifties joke. Sand in the Vaseline," he said.

"Forget it. Hey, do me a favor. My jeep's still out at that bar. It's a log place, right where Broadway runs into Ninety. Take it to your house, will you? The keys are on the table. I don't want some local punks to clean it out."

"All right."

"Where's Mapes?" he said.

"You'll have to find him on your own, partner."

"You know where he is, then."

"Do you want us to bring you anything?"

"Come on, you think I'm going to get out of bed and scramble Mapes's eggs? You give me too much credit."

"You'd find a way, Clete."

He wet his mouth and smiled.

"Dixie, can you give me and Streak a minute?" he said.

"Sure."

"It's just something from our First District days," Clete said.

"I don't mind," Dixie Lee said.

"Then come on back later," Clete said.

"Don't be talking down to me. It hurts my feelings," Dixie Lee said.

"I'll come see you tomorrow."

He walked out of the room.

"He's not full of booze," Clete said.

"What do you need, Cletus?"

"I screwed up a lot of things back there in New Orleans. Blew my marriage, took juice, knocked a girl up, got into the shylocks. Then I cooled out that shit bag in the hog lot. But I paid for it. In spades. I'd like to change it but I can't. I guess that's what remorse is about. But the big one that's been eating my lunch all this time is that I could have brought that guy in and gotten you off the hook. For ten grand I helped them turn you into toilet paper."

"The lowlifes all took a fall one way or another."

"Yeah, your fourteen years with the department went down the hole, too."

"It was my choice, Clete,"

"You want to act like a stand-up guy about it, that's copacetic. But I don't buy it. I fucked you over. It's the worst thing I did in my life. I'm telling you I'm sorry. I'm not asking you to say anything. I'm telling you how I feel. I'm not bringing it up again. You were my best friend. I stuck it to you."

"It's all right. Maybe you were doing the best you could at the time."

His one open eye stared up at me. It looked like a piece of green glass in his battered face.

"It's time to write it off, partner," I said.

"That's straight?"

"Who cares about last year's box score?"

He swallowed. His eye was watery along the bottom rim.

"Fuck, man," he said.

"I have to go. Alafair is in the waiting room."

"I've got to tell you something," he said.

"What?"

"I've got to whisper it. Come here."

"What is it, Clete?"

"No, closer."

I leaned lover him, then his good hand came up, clamped around the back of my neck like a vise, and pulled my face down on his. He kissed me hard on the mouth, and I could smell the cigarettes on his breath, the salve and Mercurochrome painted on his stitches and shaved scalp.

We drove out west of town to the bar where Clete had been beaten up by Sally Dee's goons and found his Toyota jeep in the parking lot. Dixie Lee drove it back to the house, parked it in back, and locked it. A few minutes later Tess Regan called.

"Can you come over?" she said.

"When?"

"Tonight. For redfish. Didn't Alafair say anything?"

"It came out a little confused."

"I called you earlier, but nobody was home. It's nothing special, really. We could make it another night."

"Tonight's fine," I said.

And it was. The evening was cool and smelled of flowers and sprinkled yards, and she blackened the redfish on a grill in the backyard and served it in her small dining room, which glowed with the sun's reflection through the tall turn-of-the-century windows. She wore tight blue jeans and low heels, a short-sleeved blouse with tiny pink roses on it, and gold hoop earrings, but her apartment gave her away. The wood floors and mahogany trim on the doors gleamed; the kitchen was spotless; the hung pictures and those on the marble mantel were all of relatives. The wallpaper was new, but the design and color did nothing to remove the apartment from an earlier era. A Catholic religious calendar, with an ad for a mortuary on it, was affixed to the icebox door with small magnets. She had crossed two palm strands in an X behind the crucifix on the dining room wall.

After supper we did the dishes together while Alafair watched television. When her leg bumped against me, she smiled awkwardly as though we had been jostled against one another on a bus, then her eyes looked at my face with both expectation and perhaps a moment's fear. I suspected she was one of those whose heart could be easily hurt, one to whom a casual expression of affection would probably be interpreted as a large personal commitment. The moon was up now. The window was open and I could smell the wet mint against the brick wall and the thick, cool odor of lawn grass that had been flooded by a soak hose. It was the kind of soft moment that you could slip into as easily as you could believe you were indeed able to regain the innocence of your youth.

So I squeezed her hand and said good night, and I saw the flick of disappointment in her eyes before she smiled again and walked with me back into the living room. But she was one with whom you dealt in the morning's light, unless you were willing to trust the nocturnal whirrings of your own heart.

She came to me in a dream that night, a dream as clear in its detail as though you had suddenly focused all the broken purple and tan glass in a kaleidoscope into one perfect image. Darlene's hair was braided on her shoulders, and she wore the doeskin dress she had been buried in, the purple glass bird on her breast. I saw her look first at me from the overhang of the cliff, then squat on her moccasins by a spring that leaked out of rocks into a tea-colored stream. She put her hands into the trailing moss, into the silt and wet humus and mud, and began to smear it on her face. She looked at me again, quietly, her mouth cold and red, her cheeks streaked with mud; then she was gone, and I saw a huge golden deer crash through the underbrush and cottonwoods.

I sat straight up in bed, my breath coming hard, my hands shaking. I looked at my watch. It was two in the morning. I shook Dixie Lee awake on the couch.

"I've got to go east of the Divide. You have to take care of Alafair until I get back," I said.

"What?"

"You heard me. Can you do that? Fix breakfast for her, walk her to school, pick her up in the afternoon?"

"What's going on?" His face was puffy and full of sleep.

"I have to depend on you, Dixie. I'll be back by tomorrow evening. But you've got to take good care of her. Call in sick at work if you have to."

"All right," he said irritably.

"But what are you doing?"

"I think I'm going to nail Mapes. I think I'm going to do it."

He sat up on the edge of the couch in his underwear, his arms draped between his thighs. He widened his eyes and rubbed his face.

"I hate to tell you, son, you still act like a drunk man," he said.

Fifteen minutes later I stopped at an all-night diner on the edge of town, bought a thermos of black coffee, then I was roaring up the highway along the Blackfoot River, the tree-covered crests of the mountains silhouetted blackly against the starlight, the river and the cottonwoods and willows along the banks aglow with the rising moon.

It was dawn when I drove down the dirt road where Clayton Des-marteau had gone into the ditch. The hardpan fields were wet with dew, and the long rays of the sun struck against the thick green timber high up in the saddles of the mountains that formed the Divide. I took an army entrenching tool out of the back of my truck, jumped across the stream on the north side of the road, and walked up the incline into the lodgepole pine. It was cool and the wind was blowing, but I was sweating inside my shirt and my hand was tight on the wood shaft of the E-tool. Low pools of mist hung around the trees, and I saw a doe and her fawn eating in the bear grass. Then I intersected the thin trace of a road that had been used as an access to a garbage dump, and walked on farther across the pine needles until I hit the stream that flowed under a heavy canopy of trees at the foot of a rock-faced hill, and followed it across the soft moldy remains of a log cabin, a rusted-out wood stove half buried in the wet soil, and carpets of mushrooms whose stems cracked under my shoes. Finally I saw the spring that flowed out of the hillside, glistened on the dark rocks and moss, and spread into a fan of blackened leaves and rivulets of silt at the edge of the stream.

Annie and my father had tried to tell me in the dream, but I hadn't understood. It was winter when Vidrine and Mapes had murdered Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin. It was winter, and the ground must have been frozen so hard that a pest hole digger could only chip it. My heart was beating as I unscrewed the metal ring under the blade of the E-tool, folded the blade into a hoe, and tightened the ring. I scraped away the layers of leaves and raked back long divots of silt and fine gravel, creating half a wagon wheel that spread out from the stream's edge back to the spring's source. My pants were wet up to my knees, my shoes sloshing with water. Then I reset the blade and began digging out a level pit in five-inch scoops and setting the mud carefully in a pile on the bank. I worked a half hour, until my shirt was sweated through and my arms and face were streaked with mud. I had begun to think that maybe Dixie Lee was right; I was simply behaving as though I were on a dry drunk.

Then my shovel hit the toe of a work boot, and I worked the sand and mud off the edges, the congealed laces, back along the gray shank of shinbone that protruded from the rotted sock. I uncovered the other leg, then the folded knees and the collapsed, flattened thigh that was much too small now for the cloth that lay in strips around it. The second man was buried right next to the first, curled in an embryonic position, the small, sightless, tight gray ball of his face twisted up through the soil.

I stepped back from the pit into the middle of the stream, cleaned the shovel blade in the gravel, then knelt on the opposite bank and washed my arms and face in the water. But I was trembling all over and I couldn't stop sweating. I sat on the bank, with my knees pulled up in front of me, and tried to stop hyperventilating, to think in an orderly fashion about the rest of the morning. I hadn't hit the perfecta in the ninth race, but it was close, if I just didn't do anything wrong. Then, as I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with my thumb and looked across the stream at the glistening mound of mud and silt that I had dug from the bodies, at the nests of white worms trial I had lifted into the light, I saw a corroded green cartridge that had been ejected from an automatic. It had the same bottleneck shape as the 7.62-millimeter round fired by a Russian Tokarev.

I had to drive three miles down the dirt road before I found a pay phone outside of a closed filling station. It had started to rain over the mountains, but the sky in the east was still pink and blue, and the air smelled of pine and sage. When I got Dan Nygurski on the phone at' his office, I told him all of it, or I thought all of it, but my words came out in a rush, and my heart was still beating fast, and I felt as if I were standing at the finish line at the track, my fingers pinched tight on that perfecta ticket, trying in the last thunderous seconds of the race to will the right combination under the wire.

"Let your motor idle a little bit," he said.

"How'd you find them?"

"They were run off the road between the beer joint and Clayton Desmarteau's house. I think Mapes and Vidrine took them out of the truck at gunpoint and drove them into the woods. An old road leads off the main one and runs back to a garbage dump. They got out there and walked back to the stream. But the ground was probably covered with snow and frozen solid. I bet you could bust a pick on it in wintertime. Then they walked across a warm-water spring, where the ground stayed soft and wet year-round, and that's where they shot Desmarteau and his cousin."

"Tell me about the shell again."

"It came up in a shovelful of mud. I didn't even see it until I had stopped digging. It's bottlenecked, like a 7.62 round. Mapes has got a Tokarev. He had it in his hand at his girl's house down in the Bitterroot. I think he had it in Lafayette, too. He was trying to get to his open suitcase when I hit him with the chain. Look, it's enough for a search warrant. But it's got to be done right. You can bring the FBI in on it, let them coordinate it."

"Oh?"

"They can use kidnapping and interstate flight, or depriving a minority of his civil rights by taking his life. The locals might blow it. If Mapes gets a sniff of what's going on before they serve the warrant, he'll lose the Tokarev."

"I had to take a lot of heat because of that phone tap."

"I'm sorry."

"It hasn't quieted down yet."

"I was up against the wall. I don't know what else to tell you. You want me to hang up and call the sheriff's office?"

He waited a moment.

"No, don't do that," he said finally.

"I guess we've got a vested interest. This whole Indian thing started with Pugh, and Pugh's had a longtime involvement with Sally Dee. Give me the directions again."

I told him in detail once more. The shower had moved eastward across the fields, and rain was now clicking on the roof of the phone booth. An Indian boy on an old bicycle with fat tires rattled past me on the road, his face bent down against the rain.

"I'll call the FBI and the Teton sheriff's office," Nygurski said.

"Then I'll be out myself. I want a promise from you, though."

"What is it?"

"Other people take it from here on in. You're out of it. Absolutely."

"All right."

"I want your word. You don't go near Mapes."

"You have it, but you've got to get him with the Tokarev."

"I think you've made your point. But are you sure that's what you saw in his hand? I wonder why he didn't get rid of it."

"They were prize souvenirs in Vietnam. Besides, he always sailed out of everything he ever did."

"Where are you going to be?"

"On the road where their truck went into the ditch. We can walk in from there, or find the access road that leads back to the garbage dump."

"Did you hear anything more from Dio?"

"Nope. Except two of his goons broke Parcel's hand. He says he took a couple of gold ashtrays out of Dio's house."

"Bad guy to steal from. Purcel must not have pressed charges, because we didn't hear anything about it."

"He said something strange when I went to see him in the hospital yesterday. He said, "Our man's going to have a sandy fuck." Or maybe I misunderstood him. I think Dio has a girlfriend named Sandy. Anyway, it didn't make any sense to me."

"Where is he?"

"St. Pat's in Missoula."

"Maybe it's time we have a talk with him. I'll see you a little later this morning. In the meantime, congratulations. You're a good cop, Robicheaux. Get your badge back."

"You've been a good friend, too, Dan."

"And, lastly, keep your name out of my paperwork for a while."

I drove back up the road in the rain and parked by the stream where I had entered the woods at dawn. Then the clouds moved eastward and the rain drifted away over the land behind me, and in the distance the sheer red cliffs of the mountains rose into the tumbling plateaus of ponderosa. When I closed my eyes and laid my head back against the seat I heard robins singing in a lone cotton-wood by the stream.

The next morning I drank almost two pots of coffee and waited for the phone to ring. I had spent nearly all of the previous day at the murder site, the Teton sheriff's department, and the coroner's office. I watched three deputies finish the exhumation and put the bodies gingerly in black bags, I gave a statement to the FBI and one to the sheriff's office, I talked to the pathologist after he had opened up the brain pans of both Indians with an electric saw and had picked out the 7.62 slugs that had been fired at close range into the back of their skull. I had them contact the St. Martin Parish sheriff's office about Dixie Lee's deposition in which he claimed to have overheard Vidrine and Mapes talking about the murder of the Indians I told them where to find Mapes in the Bitterroot Valley, where his girlfriend worked in Missoula, the kind of cars he drove; I talked incessantly, until people started to walk away from me and Nygurski winked at me and said he would buy me a hamburger so I could be on my way back to Missoula.

So I drank coffee on the back steps and waited for someone to call. Dixie Lee went to work and came back in the early afternoon, and still no one had phoned.

"Ease up, boy. Let them people handle it," he said.

We were in the kitchen, and I was shining my shoes over some newspapers that I had spread on the floor.

"That's what I'm doing," I said.

"You put me in mind of a man who spent his last cent on Ex-Lax and forgot the pay toilet cost a dime."

"Give me a break on the scatology."

"The what?"

"It's not a time for humor, Dixie."

"Go to a meet. Get your mind off it. They got his butt dead-bang. You're out of it, boy."

"You have them dead-bang when you weld the door on them."

Finally I called Nygurski's office. He wasn't in, he had left no message for me, and when I called the Teton sheriff's office a deputy there refused to talk with me. I had become a spectator.

I sat down at the kitchen table and started buffing my loafers again.

"While you were gone yesterday I put all Clete's stuff in the basement," Dixie Lee said.

"Was that all right?"

"Sure."

"He'll probably get out in a couple more days. He's got one rib that's broke bad, though. The doc says he's got ulcers, too."

"Maybe he'll go back to New Orleans and get started over again."

"There was something funny in his jeep."

"What's that?" But I really wasn't listening.

"A pillowcase. With sand in it."

"Huh."

"Why would he put sand in a pillowcase?"

"I don't know."

"He must have had a reason. Clete never does anything without a reason."

"Like I say, I don't know."

"But it's funny to do something like that. What d'you think?"

"I don't care, for God's sakes. Dixie, cut me some slack, will you?"

"Sorry." ' "It's all right."

"I just thought I'd get your mind off of things."

"Okay."

"I want to see you loosen up, smile a little bit, start thinking about Louisiana, let them people handle it."

"I'll do all those things. I promise," I said, and I went into the bathroom, washed my face, then waited out on the front porch until it was time for Alafair to get out of school.

But he was right. I was wired, and I was thinking and acting foolishly. In finding the bodies of the Indians I had been far more successful than I had ever thought I would be. Even if the FBI or the locals didn't find the Tokarev, Mapes would still remain the prime suspect in the murder because of motive and Dixie Lee's testimony, and he could be discredited as a prosecution witness against me in Louisiana. No matter how it came out, it was time to pack our bags for New Iberia.

And that's what I started doing. Just as the phone rang.

"Mr. Robicheaux?" a woman said.

"Yes."

"This is the secretary at the DEA in Great Falls. Special Agent Nygurski called a message in from his car and asked me to relay it to you."

"Yes?"

"He said, "They found the weapon. Mapes is in custody. Call in a couple of days if you want ballistic results. But he's not going to fly on this one. Enjoy your trip back to Louisiana." Did you get that, sir?"

"Yes."

"Did you want to leave a message?"

"Tell him Playgirl magazine wants him on a centerfold."

She laughed out loud.

"I beg your pardon?" she said.

"Tell him I said thank you."

Five minutes later Alafair came through the front door with her lunch box.

"How'd you like to head home day after tomorrow?" I said. Her grin was enormous.

We cooked out in the backyard that evening and had Tess Regan over, then Alafair and I climbed the switchback trail to the concrete M on the mountain behind the university. The whole valley was covered with a soft red glow. The wind was cold at that altitude, even though we were sweating inside our clothes, and rain and dust were blowing up through the Bitterroot Valley. Then the wind began to blow harder through the Hellgate, flattening the lupine and whipping grains of dirt against our skin. Overhead a U.S. Forest Service flre-retardant bomber came in low over the mountains and turned toward the smoke jumpers' school west of town, its four propellers spinning with silver light in the sun's afterglow.

The thought that had kept bothering me all afternoon, that I had tried to push into a closed compartment in the back of my mind, came back like a grinning jester who was determined to extend the ball game into extra innings.

When we got home I unlocked Clete's jeep and picked up the soiled pillowcase that was on the floorboard. I turned it inside out and felt the residue of dry sand along the seams. Then I called Sally Dio's number at the lake. It was disconnected. I had reserved the next day for packing, shutting off the utilities, greasing the truck, making sandwiches for our trip home, and having a talk with Tess Regan about geographic alternatives. But Sally Dee was to have one more turn in my life.

"What time are you going in to work?" I said to Dixie Lee at breakfast the next morning.

"I ain't. The boss man said he don't need me today. That's something I want to talk with you about, Dave. With you cutting out, I don't know what kind of future I got here. Part-time fork lifting ain't what you'd call a big career move."

"Will you watch Alafair while I go up to the lake?"

"Why you going up there?"

"I need to talk with Dio. If he's not there, I'll leave him a note. Then I'll be back."

"You're going to do what?" He set his coffee cup down on the table and stared at me.

I drove to Poison, then headed up the east side of the lake through the cherry orchards. I could have called Dan Nygurski or the sheriff's office, but that would have forced me to turn in Cletus, and I thought that a man with ulcers, a broken rib, a crushed hand, and stitches in his head had paid enough dues.

It was cold and bright on the lake. The wind was puckering the electric-blue surface, and the waves were hitting hard against the rocks along the shore. I parked in front of the Dies' redwood house on the cliff, took off my windbreaker and left it in the truck so they could see I wasn't carrying a weapon, and used the brass knocker on the door. There was no answer. I walked around the side of the house, past the glassed-in porch that was filled with tropical plants, and saw the elder Dio in his wheelchair on the veranda, his body and head wrapped in a hooded, striped robe. In his hand was a splayed cigar, and inside the hood I could see the goiter in his throat, his purple lips, the liquid and venomous expression in his eyes. He said something to me, but it was lost in the wind, because I was looking down the tiers of redwood steps that led to the rocks below and the short dock where Sally Dee and his two hoods had just carried armloads of suitcases and cardboard boxes. Even Sal's set of drums was stacked on the dock.

The three of them watched me silently as I walked down the steps toward them. Then Sal knelt by a big cardboard box and began reinforcing a corner of it with adhesive tape as though I were not there. He wore a yellow jumpsuit, with the collar flipped up on his neck, and the wind had blown his long copper-colored hair in his face.

"What d'you want us to do, Sal?" one of his men said.

Sally Dee stood erect, picked up a glass of iced coffee from the dock railing, drank out of it, and looked at me with an almost amused expression.

"Nothing," he said.

"He's just one of those guys who get on the bottom of your shoe like chewing gum."

"I'll just take a minute of your time, Sal," I said.

"I think somebody fucked your airplane."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"My airplane?"

"That's right."

"How'd they fuck my airplane?"

"I think maybe somebody put sand in your gas tank."

"Who's this somebody you're telling me about?"

"That's all yoji get. You can make use of it or forget I was here."

"Yeah? No shit? Fuck with my airplane."

"If I were you, I'd check it out."

"You see my airplane around here?"

"Well, I told you what I had to say, Sal. I'll be going now."

"Why you doing me these favors?" he said, and grinned at the two men, who were leaning against the dock rail.

"Because I don't want a guy like you on my conscience."

He winked at the two men, both of whom wore shades.

"Keep looking at that spot between those two islands," he said to me, and pointed.

"That's it, right over there. Keep watching. You hear that sound? It's an airplane. You know whose plane that is? You see it now, coming past those pine trees? It sounds like there's sand in the gas tank? It looks like it's going to crash?"

The milk-white amphibian came in low between the islands and touched down into the dark-blue surface of the water, the backwash of the propellers blowing clouds of spray in the air.

"Number one, I got locks on those gas tanks," Sal said.

"Number two, I got a pilot who's also a mechanic, and he checks out everything before we go anywhere." Then he looked at the other two men again and laughed.

"Hey, man, let me ask you an honest question. I look like I just got off the boat with a bone in my nose and a spear in my hand? Come on, I ain't mad. Nothing's going to happen to you. Give me an honest answer."

I turned to go.

"Hey, hey, man, don't run off yet. You're too fucking much." His mouth wAs grinning widely.

"Tell me for real. You think we're all that dumb? That we weren't going to catch on to all these games? I mean, I look that dumb to you?"

"What are you trying to say?"

"It was a good scam. But you ought to quit when you're ahead. Foo-Foo promised the florist a hundred bucks if he should see the guy who sent the flowers and the note. So he came out yesterday and told us he seen the guy. So we found the guy, and the guy told us all about it. Charlie Dodds hasn't been anywhere around here."

"It looks like you're on top of every thing. I'm sorry I wasted your time."

He tried to hold his grin, but I saw it fading, and I also saw the hard brown glint in his eyes, like a click of light you see in broken beer glass.

"I'll tell you what's going to happen a little ways down the road," he said.

"I'm going to be playing cards with some guys in Nevada. Not Carl or Foo-Foo here. Guys you never heard of or saw before. I'll just mention your name and the name of that shithole you come from. I'll mention Purcel's name, too. And I might throw Dixie's in as a. Lucky Strike extra. That's all. I won't say nothing else. Then one day a guy'll come to your door. Or he'll be standing by your truck when you come out of a barbershop. Or maybe he'll want to rent a boat from you. It's going to be a big day in your life. When it happens, I want you to remember me."

His two men grinned from behind their shades. The sunlight was brilliant and cold on the lake, the wind as unrelenting as a headache.