"Look, I don't want to be the guy to mess up your day. You asked for the truth, I gave it to you. There's no big revelation in what I told you, either. There's some Reno transplants right up there at Flat-head Lake. The mob's anyplace there's money to be made in gambling or dope or any kind of vice."
She didn't answer.
"Listen," I said, "if that guy comes back, you try to get his license number, then you call the heat, then you call me. Okay?"
"What do you plan to do?" she said. Her voice was dry, the way heat is when it lifts off a metal surface.
"I'm going to seriously impair his interest in children on school yards."
"I'll give your words some thought. In the meantime you might reflect a bit on the need for a little more candor in your relationships with other people. Maybe they don't like to feel that they're not to be trusted with this great body of private information that you have."
The line went dead in my hand.
I couldn't blame her. How would any ordinary person deal with the knowledge that an emissary of the mob could stroll into a world as innocent and predictable as a children's playground? But was the man indeed one of Dio's people, a partner of or a backup for Charlie Dodds? Why would Dodds need a backup? It was a simple hit, probably a five-thou whack that a guy like Dodds considered a cakewalk. Unless Dio's outraged pride was so great that he wanted a child's death as well as my own.
It didn't compute, though. If Dodds had been paid to hurt Alafair also, he would have waited until after three o'clock, when we were both home, or he would have come on the weekend.
So that left Harry Mapes. He had been driving a black Jeepster when I had seen him just south of the Blackfeet Reservation, but maybe the man in the yellow car with the binoculars worked with Mapes or had been hired by him. Why would he want to turn the screws on me now? Did he think I was close to finding something or turning it around on him? If he did, he had a lot more confidence in me than I did in myself.
I called Sister Louise, the principal, at the school and caught her just before she left the office. She had already talked with Tess Regan, and she was no more happy with me than Tess Regan had been. She sounded like some of the nuns I had known as a child, the ones who wore black habits that were probably like portable stoves and who whacked your knuckles with tri corner rulers and who could hit you on the run with their fifteen-decade rosaries. She told me that she had just made a police report, that I should do the same, and that a patrol car would be parked by the school tomorrow morning.
"I'd still like to talk with the little boy, what's his name, Jason," I said.
"He's told me everything he knows. He's a shy boy. He's not one to study detail in adults."
"Does he remember if the man had an accent?"
"He's fourteen years old. He's not a linguist."
"Sister, it's good that you'll have a patrol car out there tomorrow. But our man won't be back while the cops are around."
"That's the point, isn't it?"
"But he may well be when they're gone. That's when we can nail him."
"There's no 'we' involved in this, Mr. Robicheaux."
"I see."
"I'm glad you do. Good-bye."
For the second time in ten minutes someone had hung up on me.
I took Alafair to the park to play, then we went back home and fixed supper. Clete had told me I could call him at the Eastgate Lounge at six o'clock. I wasn't sure that I should. Whatever he had done with Charlie Dodds, it wasn't good. But at that point my legal problems as well as the threat to Alafair's and my safety were so involved and seemingly without solution that I wondered why I should be troubled over some marginal involvement with the fate of a depraved and psychotic character like Dodds, whom nobody cared about except perhaps Sally Dio because he had probably paid him half the hit money up front. It was five-thirty, and we were five minutes into our meal when I heard a car park in front and somebody walk up on the porch.
Even before I could make out his silhouette against the screen door, I saw Dixie Lee's battered pink Cadillac convertible parked with two wheels on the edge of my grass. The top was up, but I could see that the backseat was loaded with suitcases, boxes of clothing and cowboy boots, hangered western suits racked on a wire.
His sudden change of fortune, his plans for himself, his rehearsed entreaty, were altogether too obvious and predictable. I didn't open the door. I was even a bit ashamed at my lack of sympathy. But it had been a bad day, and I really didn't need Dixie Lee in it. He was eloquent in his desperation, though. He had marshaled all the raw energies of a drunk who knew that he was operating on the last fuel in his tank.
"Things are coming apart up there at the lake," he said.
"You were right, Sal's a shit. No, that ain't right. He's a crazy person. He wants your ass cooked in a pot. I couldn't abide it. I had to get out."
"Watch your language. My daughter's here."
"I'm sorry. But you don't know what Sal's like when lights start going off in his head. He's got this twisted-up look on his face. Nobody can say anything around him unless you want your head snapped off. One of the broads is eating her dessert at the dinner table, and Sal keeps smoking his cigarette and looking at her like she crawled up out of a drain hole. Her eyes are blinking and she's trying to smile and be pretty and cute and get off the hook, then he says, "You eat too much," and puts out his cigarette in her food.
"He hates you, Dave. You really got to him. You bend up the wheels inside a guy like Sally Dee, and smoke starts to come out of the box. I don't want to be around it. That's where it stands. You tell me to get out of your life, I can relate to it. But I picked myself into some thin cotton, son, and I got nowhere to turn. I'll be straight with you on something else, too. I'm in to Sal for fifteen thou. That's how much flake I put up my nose on the tab. So I got that old Caddy out there, thirty-seven dollars in my pocket, and a quarter tank of gas. I'm'trying to keep it all in E major, but I blew out my amps on this one."
"Save the rock 'n' roll corn pone for somebody else," I said.
"I had Charlie Dodds in my house this morning."
"Dodds? I thought he went back to Vegas last night. What was he doing here?"
"You don't know?"
"You mean he's a mechanic? I didn't know. I swear in front of God I didn't. I thought he was one of Sal's mules. Is that how you got that purple knot on your head?"
"Something like that."
"Man, I'm sorry. I didn't have any idea. The guy didn't say three words when he was around me. I thought he was retarded. All those mules got that meltdown look in their eyes. They swallow balloons full of skag, fly in and out of canyons, land on dirt roads at night. We're talking about the dumbest white people you ever met."
"I think he might have a backup man still after me. Is there some other new guy hanging around Sal's place?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"Yeah."
"Anyway, I can't help you, Dixie."
He looked at me blankly through the screen. He swallowed, glanced up the street as though something of significance were waiting for him there, then started to speak again.
"I've got too many problems of my own. That's about it, partner," I said.
"No way, huh?"
"I'm afraid not."
He blew his breath up into his face.
"I can't blame you," he said.
"I just ain't got many selections right now."
"Start over."
"Yeah, why not? It ain't my first time washing dishes or living in a hallelujah mission. Hey, I want you to remember one thing, though, Dave. I ain't all bad. I never set out to harm anybody. It just worked out that way."
"Whatever you do, good luck with it, Dixie," I said, and closed the inside door on him and went back to the kitchen table, where Alafair had already started in on her dessert.
I looked at my watch it was a quarter to six now and tried to finish supper. The food seemed tasteless, and I couldn't concentrate on something Alafair was telling
me about the neighbor's cat chasing grasshoppers in the flower bed.
"What's wrong?" she said.
"Nothing. It's just a little headache. It'll pass."
"That man made you mad or something?"
"No, he's just one of those guys who'll always have his elevator stuck between floors."
"What?"
"Nothing, little guy. Don't worry about it."
I chewed my food and looked silently out the window at the shadows and the cool gold light on the backyard. I heard Alafair wash her dishes in the sink, then walk toward the front of the house. A moment later she was back in the kitchen.
"That man's still out there. Just sitting in his car. What's he doing, Dave?" she said.
"Probably figuring out ways to sell the Rocky Mountains to Arab strip miners."
"What?"
"Just ignore him."
But I couldn't. Or at least I couldn't ignore the twelfth-step AA principle that requires us to help those who are afflicted in the same way we are. Or maybe I knew that I had asked for all my own troubles, and it wasn't right any longer to blame it on Dixie Lee. I set my knife and fork down on my plate and walked outside to his car. He was deep in thought, a cigarette burned almost down to his fingers, which rested on top of the steering wheel. His face jerked around with surprise when he heard me behind him.
"Lord God, you liked to give me a heart attack," he said.
"You can't drink while you stay with us," I said.
"If you do or if you come home with it on your breath, you're eighty-sixed. No discussion, no second chance. I don't want any profanity in front of my daughter, and you go outside if you want to smoke. You share the' cooking and the cleaning, you go to bed when we do. The AA group down the street has a job service. If they find you some work, you take it, whatever it is, and you pay one third of the groceries and the rent. That's the deal, Dixie. If there are any rules here you can't live with, now's the time to tell me."
"Son, you say 'Frog' and I'll say 'How high?' "
He began unloading the backseat of his car. His face wore the expression of a man who might have been plucked unexpectedly from the roof of a burning building. As he piled his boxes and suitcases and clothes on the sidewalk, he talked without stop about the 1950s, Tommy Sands, Ruth Brown, the Big Bopper, the mob, cons in Huntsville, the actress wife who paid goons to beat him up behind Co&k's Hoe Down in Houston. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to six.
He was still talking while I looked up the number of the Eastgate Lounge.
"-called him 'the hippy-dippy from Mississippi, yes indeed, Mister Jimmy Reed,' " he said.
"When that cat went into 'Big Boss Man,' you knew he'd been on Parchman Farm, son. You don't fake them kind of feelings. You don't grow it in New York City, either. You don't put no mojo in your sounds unless you picked cotton four cents a pound and ate a mess of them good ole butter beans. My daddy said he give up on me, that somebody snuck me into the crib, that I must have been a nigra turned inside out."
Alafair sat delighted and amazed as she listened to Dixie Lee's marathon storytelling. I dialed the Eastgate Lounge, then listened to the hum and clatter of noise in the background while a woman called Clete to the phone. I heard him scrape the receiver off a hard surface and place it to his ear.
"Streak?"
"Yep."
"Did I surprise you? Did you think maybe your old partner had headed for Taco Greaso Land again?"
"I wasn't sure."
"I don't rattle, mon. At least not over the shit bags."
"Maybe you should be careful what you tell me."
"Do I sound like I'm sweating it? When are you going to stop pretending you still got your cherry?"
"You're starting to get to me, Clete."
"What else is new? All I did was save your life today."
"Is there something you want to say?"
"Yeah. Get your butt over here. You know where the East-gate is?"
"Yeah, but I'm bringing Alafair with me. I'll meet you in the park across the river from the shopping center. You walk across an old railway trestle that's been made into a footbridge."
"And you'll be eating ice cream cones at a picnic table. Man, how do I get in on the good life?" he said, and hung up.
I told Dixie Lee there was a cold roast, bread, and mayonnaise in the icebox, and he could fix himself sandwiches if he hadn't eaten yet. Then Alafair and I drove across town to the ice cream place on the north bank of the Clark Fork, bought cones, and walked across the river on the footbridge to the park on the opposite side. In the past, there had been a bad fire up the sides of Hellgate Canyon, and the pines that grew down from the crest had been scorched black and then the ash and the burnt needles had been washed away by rain and the spring snowmelt so that the steep gray-pink cliffs of the canyon were exposed high above the river. The wind was up, and the leaves of the cottonwoods along the river's edge clicked and flickered in the soft light; because the spring runoff had ended and the water was dropping each day, more and more white, moss-scaled stones were exposed in the riverbed and the main channel was turning from copper-colored to a dark green. The white water had formed into long, narrow trout riffles that fanned out behind big rocks into deep pools.
The park was full of blue spruce and Russian olive trees, and kids from the university, which was only a block away, sailed Fris-bees overhead and played rag football. We sat on the mowed grass, high up on the riverbank, so we could look out over the tops of the willows and watch two men who were fishing with worms and spinning rods, throwing lead weights far out into the channel. I saw Clete walk across the bridge with a paper sack hefted in one arm. I got'Alafair started on one of the swing sets and then sat back down on the bank. His knees cracked, his stomach hung over his Budweiser shorts, and he grunted hard in his chest when he sat down beside me.
"You look undressed," I said.
"Oh." He touched his chest and smiled.
"I don't work for Sal anymore. I don't have to walk around with a piece all the time. Feels good, mon."
He twisted the cap off a bottle of Great Falls.
"Dixie Lee says he didn't know Dodds was a hit man."
"He probably didn't. Where'd you see Dixie Lee?"
"He's living at my house."
"I'll be damned. He cut the umbilical cord? I didn't think he had the guts. Sal doesn't handle rejection well."
"Dodds may have had a partner, a backup guy. Does Dio have another guy in town?"
"If he does, I don't know about it. I know a lot of them, too. At least the ones Sal hangs with. They're New York transplants who think the essence of big time is playing bridge by the pool with a lot of gash lying around. Hey, dig this. Sal had a bunch of them staying at his motel, and the motel manager is this little Jewish guy who used to run a book for the mob out of a pizza joint in Fort Lauder-dale. Of course, the Jew can't do enough for the dagos because they scare the shit out of him. But he's got this kid who's a wiseass college student at Berkeley, and the kid works for his old man as the poolside waiter during the summer. So four of the dagos are playing cards at one of the umbrella tables. And these are big, mean-looking cocksuckers, shades, wet black hair all over their stomachs, big floppers tucked in their bikinis, and they're giving the kid a terrible time sending food back to the kitchen, complaining the drinks taste like there's bathroom antiseptic in them, running the kid back and forth for cigarettes and candied cherries and sun cream for the gash and anything else they think of.
"Then one guy spills ice and vodka all over the table and tells the kid to mop it up and bring him another deck of cards. The kid says, "Hey, I've been studying Italian at school this year. What does Eatta my shitta mean?"
"The old man hears it and slaps his kid's face in front of everybody. Then he starts swallowing and sweating and apologizing to the dagos while they stare at him from behind those black shades. Finally one of them stands up, hooks his finger in the old man's mouth, and throws him down in an iron chair. He says, "He don'
t have manners 'cause you didn't teach him none. So you shut up your face and don't be talking to impress nobody. You clean this up, you bring everybody what they want, you sit over there and you don't go nowhere till we say."
"They made him sit out there in the sun like an organ-grinder's monkey for four hours. Till the kid finally begged them to let the old man go back inside.
"It's good to say Ciao, ciao, bambino to the grease balls The next time the United States drops an A-bomb on anyone, I think it should be Palermo."
"Where's Dodds?"
"You really want to know?"
"I want to know if he's going to be back after me."
"First you tell me why you didn't drop the dime on me." There was a half grin on his face as he raised the beer bottle to his mouth.