James Burke: Black Cherry Blues

"I'm closing up for the day and we're about to go to a crawfish boil in the park," I said.

"This won't take long. I talked with the sheriff in New Iberia and he said you could probably help me out. You used to be a deputy in his department, didn't you?"

"For a little while."

His face was seamed and coarse, the eyes slightly red around the rims. He flexed his mouth in a peculiar way when he talked, and it caused the muscles to jump in his neck, as though they were attached to a string. ' "Before that you were on the force in New Orleans a long time? A lieutenant in homicide?"

"That's right."

"I'll be," he said, and looked at the red sun through the cypress trees and the empty boats tied to the dock.

My experience with federal agents of any kind has always been the same. They take a long time to get to it.

"Could I rent a boat from you? Or maybe could you go with me and show me some of these canals that lead into Vermilion Bay?" he asked. His thinning dark hair was cut GI, and he brushed his fingers back through it and widened his eyes and looked around again.

"I'll rent you a boat in the morning. But you'll have to go out by yourself. What is it exactly I can help you with, Mr. Nygurski?"

"I'm just messing around, really." He flexed his mouth again.

"I heard some guys were off-loading some bales down around Vermilion Bay. I just like to check out the geography sometimes."

"Are you out of New Orleans?"

"No, no, this is my first trip down here. It's nice country. I've got to try some of this crawfish while I'm here."

"Wait a minute. I'm not following you. You're interested in some dope smugglers operating around Vermilion Bay but you're from somewhere else?"

"It's just an idle interest. I think they might be the same guys I was after a few years ago in Florida. They were unloading a cigarette boat at night outside of Fort Myers, and some neckers out in the dunes stumbled right into the middle of the operation. These guys killed all four of them. The girls were both nineteen. It's not my case anymore, though."

The twang, the high-pitched voice, just would not go with the subject matter nor the short, thick-bodied dark man who I now noticed was slew-footed and walked a bit sideways like a crab.

"So you're out of Florida?" I said.

"No, no, you got me all wrong. I'm out of Great Falls, Montana, now, and I wanted to talk with you about"

I shook my head.

"Dixie Lee Pugh," I said.

We walked up the dock, across the dirt road and through the shadows of the pecan trees in my front yard. When I asked him how he had connected me with Dixie Lee, he said that one of his people had written down my tag number the morning I had met Dixie in the cafe outside Baton Rouge. But I also guessed that the DEA had a tap on his motel phone. I went inside the house, brought out two cold cans of Dr. Pepper, and we sat on the porch steps. Through the trunks of the pecan trees I could see the shadows lengthening on the bayou.

"I don't mean any disrespect toward your investigation, Mr. Nygurski, but I don't think he's a major drug dealer. I think y'all are firing in the well."

"Why?"

"I believe he has a conscience. He might be a user, but that doesn't mean he's dealing."

"You want to tell me why he came out to see you?"

"He's in some trouble. But it doesn't have anything to do with drugs, and he'll have to be the one to tell you about it."

"Did he tell you he celled with Sal the Duck in Huntsville?"

"With who?"

"Sal the Duck. Also known as Sally Dio or Sally Dee. You think that's funny?"

"I'm sorry," I said. I wiped my mouth with my hand.

"But am I supposed to be impressed?"

"A lot of people would be. His family used to run Galveston. Slots, whores, every floating crap game, dope, you name it. Then they moved out to Vegas and Tahoe and about two years ago they showed up in Montana. Sal came back to visit his cousins in Galveston and got nailed with some hot credit cards. I hear he didn't like Huntsville at all."

"I bet he didn't. It's worse than Angola."

"But he still managed to turn a dollar or two. He was the connection for the whole joint, and I think he was piecing off part of his action to Pugh."

"Well, you have your opinion. But I think Dixie 's basically an alcoholic and a sick man."

Nygurski took a newspaper clipping out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

"Read this," he said.

"I guess the reporters thought this was funny."

The headline read " CURIOSITY KILLED THE BEAR." The dateline was Poison, Montana, and the lead paragraph described how a duffel bag containing forty packages of cocaine had been dropped by parachute into a heavily wooded area east of Flathead Lake and was then found by a black bear who strung powder and wrappers all over a hillside before he OD'd.

"That parachute came down on national forestland. But guess who has a hunting lease right next door?"

"I don't know."

"Sally Dio and his old man. Guess who acted as their leasing agent?"

" Dixie Lee."

"But maybe he's just a sick guy."

I looked away at the softness of the light on the bayou. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the knuckles on his hand as he clenched the soda can.

"Come on, what do you think?" he said.

"I think you're in overdrive."

"You're right. I don't like these cocksuckers"

"Nobody does. But I'm out of the business. You're tilting with the wrong windmill."

"I don't think killing bears is funny, either. I don't like to see these guys bring their dirt and greed into a beautiful country. Your friend Pugh is standing up to his bottom lip in a lake of shit and the motorboat is just about to pass."

"Then tell him that," I said, and looked at my watch. The breeze dented the leaves in the pecan trees.

"Believe me, I will. But right now I'm frig mo here."

"What?"

"It means "Fuck it, I got my orders." In three days I go back to Great Falls." He drained his soda can, crushed it in his palm, and set it gently on the porch step. He stood up and handed me his card.

"My motel number in Lafayette is on the back. Or later you can call me collect in Montana if you ever want to share any of your thoughts."

"I've got nothing worth sharing."

"It sounds depressing." His mouth made that peculiar jerking motion again.

"Tell me, do you find something strange about my face?"

"No, I wouldn't say that."

"Come on, I'm not sensitive."

"I meant you no offense," I said.

"Boy, you're a careful one. A woman once told me my face looked like soil erosion. I think it was my wife. Watch out for Dixie Pugh, Robicheaux. He'll sell you a bowl of rat turds and call it chocolate chip."

"I changed my mind. I'll share one thought with you, Mr. Nygurski. You didn't come all the way down here to follow a guy like Dixie Lee around. No matter how you cut it, he's not a long-ball hitter."

"Maybe he is, maybe he isn't."

"What's really going on up there?"

"Everything that's going on in the rest of the country, except accelerated. It's a real zoo story. All the big players are there, nosing up to the trough. Keep fooling around with that rock 'n' roller and you'll meet some of them."

He walked off through the trees, his feet loud on the dead leaves and dried pecan husks. si The moon was down that night, the sky black, and trees of lightning trembled on the southern horizon. At four in the morning I was awakened by the rumble of dry thunder and the flickering patterns of light on the wall. A tuning fork was vibrating in my chest, but I couldn't explain why, and my skin was hot and dry to the touch even though the breeze was cool through the window. I heard sounds that were not there: a car engine dying on the road, the footsteps of two men coming through the trees, a board squeaking on the porch, the scrape of a prizing bar being inserted between the front door and the jamb. They were the sounds of ghosts, because one man had been electrocuted in his bathtub with his radio in his lap and the other had died in an attic off St. Charles when five hollow-point rounds from my.45 had exploded up through the floor into the middle of his life.