James Burke - Black Cherry Blues

"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."