03 Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke; J. Ferrer Aleu

Author:James Lee Burke; J. Ferrer Aleu
Language: es
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780380712045
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1989-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

The regular babysitter wasn’t home. I found Tess Regan’s number in the telephone book, called her, then took Alafair over to her house.

An hour and a half later I drove up the dirt lane to Clete’s small redwood house on Flathead Lake. All the lights were on. It was raining, and the lake was black in the background, and I could see the rain blowing in the light from the windows. Farther up the dirt lane, past the electronic gate, the Dio house was dark. I knocked on Clete’s front door; when no one answered, I went inside.

I heard a toilet flush somewhere in back, then he walked out of the bedroom with a wet towel held to his mouth. His face looked bloodless, the skin as tight as a lampshade. His tie was pulled loose, and his white shirt was wet down the front. He sat down at the table by the sliding glass doors and drank noisily out of a coffee cup, his whole hand wrapped around the cup to keep it from shaking. On the table were a carton of milk and a fifth of Cutty Sark. He drew in deeply on a Camel and held the smoke down as though he were taking a hit off a reefer. His breath jerked in his chest when he let the smoke out. Out on the lake a lighted, anchored sailboat pitched in the troughs.

He rubbed the towel on his mouth again, then on the back of his thick neck.

“I can’t keep anything down. I think I got a peptic ulcer,” he said.

“Where is she?”

“In the main bathroom.” He looked up at me with his poached face and swallowed.

“Get yourself together.”

“I came back from Missoula, she was like that. I can’t take this shit.”

But I wasn’t listening to him. I walked down the hall to the bathroom. When I looked inside I had to clasp one hand on the door-jamb. The safety razor lay on the tile floor, glued thickly to the surface with her blood. She was nude and had slipped down in the tub on her side so that only half her face floated above the soapy red water. There was a deep incision across the inside of both forearms.

Oh Lord God, I thought, and had to take a deep breath and look away.

She had bled until she was almost white. I sat on the edge of the tub and touched her soft, wet hair with my fingertips. It felt like wet feathers.

Written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror were the words:

C,

Checking out, Bye-bye, love,

I ran my hand through my hair and stared numbly at her. Then I saw the tiny scratches and the red discolorations, like pale strawberry bruises, like love bites, on her neck and shoulder. I took a sheet out of the bedroom and draped it over her, then went back into the living room.

Clete was pouring another scotch and milk at the table. The smoke from his Camel curled up over the nicotine stains on his fingers.

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