Read Online Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page B

of ninety-five, a .357 showing under his coat, a braided blackjack in his pocket, steps into the middle of their lives as unexpectedly as an iron door slamming shut and indicates that he thinks habeas corpus is a Latin term for a disease.

    I put on my coat and ran through the rain and into the building. The outer offices of Star Drilling, which were separated by half-glass partitions, were occupied by draftsmen and men who looked like geologists or lease people. The indirect lighting glowed on the pine paneling, and the air-conditioning was turned so high that I felt my skin constrict inside my damp seersucker. The geologists, or whatever they were, walked from desk to desk, rattling topography maps between their outstretched hands, their faces totally absorbed in their own frame of reference or a finger moving back and forth on the numbers of a township and range.

    The only person who looked at me was the receptionist. I told her I wanted to see the supervisor about a mineral lease in Montana.

    His desk was big, made of oak, his chair covered with maroon leather, the pine walls hung with deer’s heads, a marlin, two flintlock rifles. On a side table was a stuffed lynx, mounted on a platform, the teeth bared, the yellow glass eyes filled with anger.

    His name was Hollister. He was a big man, his thick, graying hair cut military, his pale blue eyes unblinking. Like those of most managerial people in the Oil Center, his accent was Texas or Oklahoma and his dress eccentric. His gray Oshman coat hung on a rack, his cuff links were the size of quarters and embossed with oil derricks. His bolo tie was fastened with a brown and silver brooch.

    He listened to me talk a moment, his square hands motionless on the desk, his face like that of a man staring into an ice storm.

    “Wait a minute. You came to my office to question me about my employees? About a murder?” ( I could see tiny stretched white lines in the skin around the corners of his eyes.”

    “It’s more than one, Mr. Hollister. The girl in the fire and maybe some people in Montana.”

    “Tell me, who do you think you are?”

    “I already did.”

    “No, you didn’t. You lied to my receptionist to get in here.”

    “You’ve got a problem with your lea semen It won’t go away because I walk out the door.”

    His pale eyes looked steadily at me. He lifted one finger off his desk and aimed it at me.

    “You’re not here about Dixie Pugh,” he said.

    “You’ve got something else bugging you. I don’t know what it is, but you’re not a truthful man.”

    I touched the ball of my thumb to the corner of my mouth, looked away from him a moment, and tapped my fingers on the leather arm of my chair.

    “You evidently thought well enough of Dixie Lee to give him a job,” I said.

    “Do you think he made all this up and then set himself on fire?”

    “I think you’re on your way out of here.”

    “Let me tell you a couple of things about the law. Foreknowledge of a crime can make you a coconspirator. Knowledge after the fact can put you into an area known as aiding and abetting. These guys aren’t worth it, Mr. Hollister.”

    “This discussion is over. There’s the door.”

    “It looks like your company has made stonewalling an art form.”

    “What?”

    “Does the name Aldous Robicheaux mean anything to you?”

    “No. Who is he?”

    “He was my father. He was killed on one of your rigs.”

    “When?”

    “Twenty-two years ago. They didn’t have a blowout preventer on. Your company tried to deny it, since almost everybody on the rig went down with it. A shrimper pulled a floor man out of the water two days later. He cost you guys a lot of money.”

    “So you got a grudge that’s twenty-two years old? I don’t know what to tell you, Robicheaux, except I wasn’t with the company then and I probably feel sorry for you.”

    I took my rain hat off my knee and stood up.

    “Tell Mapes and Vidrine to stay away from Dixie Lee,” I