"He said Mapes and Vidrine killed a couple of guys and buried them back in a woods. Can you connect that to anything?"
His big face looked vague.
"No, not really," he said.
I saw his girl, Darlene, look directly into her plate, her head turned down, as though she wanted to hide her expression. But I noticed the color of her eyes darken in the corners.
"I'm sorry for the way I talk," I said.
"I think Clete and I were cops too long. Sometimes we don't think about what we say in front of other people." I tried to smile at her.
"I don't mind," she said.
"I appreciate you having me for lunch. It's very good."
"Thank you."
"I came out here fishing with a friend of mine years ago," I said.
" Montana 's a beautiful place to live, isn't it?"
"Some of it is. When you have a job. It's a hard place to find work in," she said.
"Everything's down here," Clete said.
"Oil, farming, cattle, mining. Even lumber. It's cheaper to grow trees down south. These dumb bastards voted for Reagan, then got their butts reamed."
"Then why is your buddy up here? And these lease people?"
His green eyes moved over my face, then he grinned.
"You never could resist mashing on a guy's oysters," he said.
"He's not my buddy. I work for him. I get along with him. It's a professional relationship."
"All right, what's he doing here?"
"It's a free country. Maybe he likes the trout."
"I met a DEA man who had some other theories."
"When it comes to Sal's business dealings, I turn into a potted plant. I'm also good at taking a smoke in the yard."
"Tell it to somebody else. You were the best investigative cop I ever knew."
"At one time," he said, and winked. Then he looked out at the lake and the inland sea gulls that were wheeling over the shoreline.
He pushed a piece of food out from behind his teeth with his tongue.
"You've read a lot more books than I have. You remember that guy Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind?" He's a blockade runner for the Confederates or something. He tells Scarlett that fortunes are made during a country's beginning and during its collapse. Pretty good line. I think Sal read that book in the Hunts-ville library. He wheels and deals, mon."
I didn't say anything. I finished the rest of my sandwich and glanced casually at my watch.
"All right, for God's sake," Clete said.
"I'll take you up there. But do me a favor. That's my meal ticket up there. Don't look at these people like they're zoo creatures. Particularly Sal's father. He's a bloated old degenerate, but he's also a vicious sonofabitch who never liked me to begin with. I mean it, Dave. Your face doesn't hide your feelings too well. It gets that glaze on it like an elephant broke wind in the room. Okay? We got a deal, right, partner?"
"Sure," I said.
"Oh boy."
Sally Dio had brought Galveston, Texas, with him. His glassed-in sun porch, which gave onto the lake, was filled with potted banana, umbrella, orange, and Hong Kong orchid trees, and in the center of the house was a heavily chlorinated, lime-green swimming pool with steam rising off the water. A half-dozen tanned people sat on the edge of the tiles or drifted about lazily on inflated rubber rafts. The living room was paneled with white pine, the carpet was a deep red, and the waxed black piano, with the top propped open, gleamed in the indirect lighting. Dixie Lee, dressed only in a pair of Hawaiian beach shorts and an open bathrobe, sat at the piano bench and ran his fingers back and forth over the keys, his shoulders hunched, then suddenly his arms outspread, his florid face confident with his own sound. He sang, "I was standing on the corner Corner of Beale and Main, When a big policeman said, "Big boy, you'll have to tell me your name."
I said, "You'll find my name On the tail of my shirt. I'm a Tennessee hustler And I don't have to work." Sally Dio sat behind a set of drums and cymbals in a pair of pleated gray slacks, bare-chested, his red suspenders hooked over his shoulders. He was a lean, hard-bodied man, his face filled with flat and sharp surfaces like a person whose bone is too close to the skin so that the eyes look overly large for the face. Under his right eye was a looped scar that made his stare even more pronounced, and when he turned his head toward Dixie Lee and fluttered the wire brushes across the snare drum, the ridge of his duck tails glistened against the refracted sunlight off the lake.
Out on the redwood veranda I could see the back of a wheelchair and a man sitting in it. Sally Dio and Dixie finished their song. No one asked me to sit down.
" Dixie says you used to be a police officer. In New Orleans," Sally Dio said. His voice was flat, his eyes casually interested in my face.
"That's right."
"What do you do now?"
"I'm a small-business man."
"Probably pays better, doesn't it?"
"Sometimes."
He made a circular pattern on the drumhead with the wire brushes.
"You like Louisiana?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Why are you up here, then?"
Clete walked to the wet bar by the pool's edge and started fixing a drink., "I have some things to take care of. I wanted a few words with Dixie," I said.
"He says you're in a lot of trouble down there. What's he got to do with your trouble?"
"A lot."
He looked me evenly in the eyes. Then he fluttered and ticked the brushes lightly on the drum skin.
" Dixie never hurt anybody. Not intentionally, anyway," he said.
"I mean him no harm, Mr. Dio."
"I'm glad of that."
A dripping blond girl in a silver swimsuit that was as tight as tin on her body, with a terry cloth robe over her shoulder, walked toward us, drying her hair with a towel.
"You want me to take Papa Frank in, Sal?" she said.
"Ask Papa Frank."
"He gets cold if he stays out there too long."
"Then go ask him, hon."
She walked to the glass doors, then stopped and hooked up the strap on her sandal, pausing motionlessly against the light as though she were caught in a photographer's lens. Sally Dio winked at her.
I looked at Dixie Lee. I had to talk to him alone, outside. He refused to see any meaning in my face. A moment later the blond girl pushed the man in the wheelchair into the living room.
He wore a checkered golf cap, a knitted sweater over his protruding stomach, a muffler that almost hid the purple goiter that was the size of an egg in his neck. His skin was gray, his eyes black and fierce, his face unevenly shaved. Even from several feet away his clothes smelled of cigar smoke and Vick's VapoRub. With his wasted legs and swollen stomach, he reminded me of a distended frog strapped to a chair.
But there was nothing comical about him. His name had been an infamous one back in the forties and fifties. He had run all the gambling on Galveston Island and all the prostitution and white slavery on Post Office and Church streets. And I remembered another story, too, about a snitch on Sugarland Farm who tried to cut a deal by dropping the dime on Frank Dio. Somebody caught him alone in the shower and poured a can of liquid Drano down his mouth.
He fixed one watery black eye on me.
"Who's he?" he said to his son.
"Somebody Clete used to know," Sally Dio said.
"What's he want?"
"He thinks Dixie Lee can get him out of some trouble," Sally Dio said.
"Yeah? What kind of trouble you in?" the father said to me.
"He's up on a murder charge, Pop. Mr. Robicheaux used to be a police officer," Sally Dio said. He smiled.
"Yeah?" His voice raised a level.
"Why you bring this to our house?"
"I didn't bring anything to your house," I said.
"I was invited here. By Clete over there. Because the man I wanted to talk with couldn't simply walk down the hill and spend five minutes with me."