James Burke - Black Cherry Blues

"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."