Light of the World

  “There’s something you hid from me. I just ain’t figured out what it is,” he replied. His eyes rested on the ballpoint in her hand. “You like ham or a chunk of steak with your eggs?”

  WYATT DIXON HAD never been on the property of a wealthy man and had always assumed that the geographical passage from the world of those who ate potatoes and those whose bread was served on a gold plate would involve rumbling over a drawbridge and a moat, not simply driving up a maple-shaded road through an open gate and cutting his engine in front of a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion overlooking the Clark Fork of the Columbia River.

  The gardens were bursting with flowers, the lawn a blue-green mixture of fescue and clover and Bermuda grass. Three men who looked like gardeners were watering the flowers and weeding the beds, hummingbirds hanging in midair above them, the sun a yellow flame through trees that grew higher than the roof.

  One of the gardeners snipped a rose and set it in a bucket of water and walked toward Wyatt, sticking his cloth gloves in his back pocket, smiling behind a pair of Ray-Ban wraparounds. His hair was gold and braided in cornrows, his tanned scalp popping with perspiration. A red spider was tattooed on the back of one hand. “You the plumber?” he said.

  “I look like a plumber?” Wyatt replied.

  The gardener gazed up the driveway at the road and at the sunlight spangling in the canopy, his smile never leaving his mouth. His lips had no color and seemed glued on his face. “You’re lost and you need directions?”

  “I got a message for Mr. Love Younger. Is he home?”

  The gardener took a two-way phone from a pouch on his belt. “I can ask.”

  Wyatt glanced at an upstairs window from which an elderly man was looking back. “Is that him yonder?” he said.

  “What’s your name, buddy?” the gardener said.

  Wyatt pulled the walkie-talkie from the gardener’s hand and pushed the talk button. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Younger. This is Mr. Dixon. You got yourself a little-bitty teensy-weensy pissant down here deciding who talks to you and who don’t. I need to have a word with you about the death of your granddaughter. You want to come down here or not?”

  “You’re the rodeo man who sold her the bracelet?” a voice replied.

  “Yes, sir, that would be yours truly. I sold it to her in the biker joint she didn’t have no business in.”

  “Stay right there,” the voice said.

  A moment later, a man with a broad forehead and vascular arms and a glare emerged from the front door. When Wyatt extended his hand and stepped toward him, the man with the cornrows and another gardener grabbed his upper arms, struggling to get their fingers around the entirety of his triceps.

  “Let him go,” Younger said.

  “Thank you, kind sir. Breeding shows every time,” Wyatt said, straightening a crick out of his neck. “A journalist named Bertha Phelps come to see me this morning. I think maybe she’s working for you, but she says that ain’t true.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Younger said.

  “The cops are trying to put your granddaughter’s murder on me. The one who tried hardest was Bill Pepper. I bet you know who he is. Or rather, who he was.”

  “I do.”

  “You were paying him?”

  “Why have you come here, Mr. Dixon?”

  “To find out why y’all are trying to do me in.”

  “I have no interest in you at all, except for the fact that you were the last person to see my granddaughter alive.”

  “That’s a lie, Mr. Younger. Every biker in the Wigwam saw her. Except I’m the only man there what got pulled in.”

  Younger held his gaze on Wyatt’s face. “I understand you have quite a history. You ever kill anyone, Mr. Dixon?”

  “They say I busted a cap on a rapist.”

  “But you didn’t do it?”

  “I’m just telling you what they say. In prison you don’t ever ask a man what he done. You ask, ‘What do they say you did?’ ”

  “I think you’re a dangerous and violent man.”

  “Not no more, I ain’t. Not unless people fuck with me.”

  “You can’t use that language here,” Younger said. “State your purpose or leave.”

  Wyatt folded his arms on his chest and looked at the Tudor-style house and the beige walls and the purple rockwork around the windows and entranceways and the flowers blooming as big as cantaloupes in the beds. “I just wondered why a man who owned all this would hire a small-town flatfoot and general loser like Bill Pepper to give grief to a man what ain’t done him nothing. You must be pretty goddamn bored.”

  “I’ve done you no harm. Don’t you dare say I have.”

  “What do you call tasing a man?”

  “I don’t even know what the term means.”

  “You have a reason for staring into my face like that?” Wyatt said.

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  “Northeast Texas, just south of the Red.”

  “You have unusual eyes.”

  “What’s my place of birth have to do with my eyes?”

  “Nothing. I have a feeling you want trouble. I don’t think you’ll be happy until you get it.”

  Wyatt peeled the paper off a lollipop and stuck the lollipop in his jaw. “There is one other thing you can tell me, because it’s perplexed me for years. It’s got to do with the unpleasant subject of incest and such. I heard this tale about a mountain boy in Kentucky who married a girl from the next hollow and learned on their wedding night she was a virgin. In the morning he sent her back to her folks. When his daddy asked him how come he kicked her out, the boy said she was a virgin. His pap said, ‘You done the right thing, son. If she ain’t good enough for her own family, she ain’t good enough for ours, either.’ Is that story true?”

  “Get him out of here,” Younger said.

  THE NEXT DAY the sheriff called Albert’s house. By chance I answered the phone. I wished I hadn’t. “Where is the Horowitz woman?” he asked.

  “I think she went to the airport early this morning,” I said.

  “She did what?”

  “She’s making a documentary,” I said. “Can I help with something?”

  “The abandoned truck that woman shot up is registered to an old man in a remote place in West Kansas. The locals found him in his barn yesterday. The coroner said he’d been dead for months. Where did Horowitz go?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want her for?”

  “Last night we pulled a floater out of the Clark Fork. He was peppered with rounds from a nine-millimeter.”

  “The guy Gretchen shot?”

  “How would I know? One in the head, one in the throat, one in the chest. Is that the way she does it? Let me share my feelings with you, Mr. Robicheaux. You guys are starting to be a real nuisance.”

  “Why us?”

  “We didn’t have this mess on our hands until you and your friends arrived.”

  “Run your bullshit on somebody else, Sheriff.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Bill Pepper was a dirty cop and on a pad for Love Younger, and you didn’t do anything about it. You turned over the investigation of a young girl’s death to a bum. In the meantime, somebody put an electronic bug in Clete Purcel’s cabin.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Probably a few days ago. What’s the deal on the floater?”

  “His name was Emile Schmitt. He was a private investigator in Fort Lauderdale and Atlantic City. He got his license yanked when he was charged with battery involving the apprehension of a female bail skip.”

  “How did the owner of the pickup die?”

  “The decomposition was too great. The coroner couldn’t be sure. There was a strand of looped fence wire close by.”

  “Do you believe we’re dealing with Asa Surrette?” I asked.

  “Why would a Kansas sex pervert and serial killer be mixed up with a PI from the East Coast?”

  “Maybe they have a shared
agenda.”

  “Like what?” the sheriff said.

  “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. What do you want me to tell Gretchen Horowitz, Sheriff?”

  I could hear him breathing against the receiver. “I want her to ID the body. I want her to look at the man she killed.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Maybe it’s time she becomes accountable for some of her deeds.”

  How about accountability from the society that produced her? I thought. “Clete and I will come with her to your office,” I said, and hung up.

  I hoped I was through with Elvis Bisbee, at least for the day. I wasn’t. Five minutes later, he called back. “I didn’t tell you something. There was a stink in the abandoned truck,” he said. “It wasn’t motor oil or dried blood or decayed food or a creel of fish somebody left under the seat. The stink didn’t come from anything we could find.”

  “I’m not tracking you, Sheriff.”

  “It smelled like excrement. Like somebody had rubbed it into the upholstery. Except the lab tech couldn’t find any. This guy Asa Surrette has a hard-on about your daughter, so maybe you and your family are part of the problem. Frankly, I wish you and your daughter had stayed in Louisiana.”

  “Yeah, and maybe you’re in the wrong line of work,” I said. This time I pulled the phone out of the jack.

  AT FIVE-FIFTEEN A.M., Gretchen climbed inside the two-engine plane volunteered by a Sierra Club member and took off two minutes later from the Missoula airport, rising out of the predawn darkness into a breathtaking view of the mountaintops that surrounded the city, the streets below streaked with night-damp and car lights, the Clark Fork wending its way into the mystery and vastness of the American West. As the plane gained altitude and banked east toward the Grand Divide, she wondered if the pilot, a nice boy by the name of Percy Wolcott, had any idea who his passenger actually was, even though she had known him for several months. She wondered what his comfort level would be if he were privy to the thoughts and memories she could never free herself of. Would he be repelled? Would he be afraid?

  He was good-looking, about twenty-five, with thick dark brown hair he had let grow long without affectation. He was a good pilot and soft-spoken and considerate. When they first met at a Sierra Club function in West Hollywood, she thought he was gay. When she decided he was heterosexual, she wondered why he didn’t try to put moves on her, since most men did. Then she decided he was like two or three boys she had known in Miami who were shy and private and respectful toward women and nothing like their peers, most of whom were visceral and loud and, when they got her in the backseat, had a way of moving her hand down to their nether regions.

  What a drag, she thought, realizing she had been guilty of falling into the national obsession of classifying human beings in terms of their sexual behavior. Do Europeans and Brits do that? Nice to meet you, gay guy. Thank you, but I’m trans. How about you? You look like you might be hetero. Actually, I’m more of an across-the-board premature ejaculator, thank you very much.

  At five thousand feet, they hit turbulence that shook the plane and caused Percy to look at her in a protective and reassuring way, and in that moment, in the gentleness of his expression, she knew that her great concern was not about bigotry and obsession and the limited thinking of others; it was her fear that her friend Percy would be horrified if he knew the history of Gretchen Horowitz, that his kind validation of her would be withdrawn.

  In junior college she had read an autobiographical account written by a white man who was kidnapped as a child from a sod house in Oklahoma and raised among Comanche Indians. He grew up in the shadow of Quanah Parker and participated in atrocities that were the worst she had ever seen described on a printed page. The lines she remembered in particular were the elderly frontiersman’s depiction of himself as a white teenage boy, smeared with war paint and sweat and the dust of battle, a boy who, in the old man’s words, “thirsted to kill” and did things that were depraved and cruel beyond comprehension. When she read the descriptions, she realized she had found a kindred spirit, one who lived with thoughts and desires that might forever separate her from the rest of the human family.

  Bill Pepper had robbed her in every way possible. He had lied to her and turned her charity into a sword he drove into her breast. He had drugged her and bound her and systematically degraded her and mocked her while he did it. Then he escaped into the Great Shade at the hands of another and now lay safe in a stainless steel drawer inside a refrigerated room that smelled of formaldehyde. Where do you put your bloodlust now? she asked herself.

  Why did people give so much importance to drug and alcohol addiction? The day you gave up dope and booze was the day you got better. The day you gave up bloodlust was the day you allowed a succubus to devour the remnants of your self-respect.

  “There’s coffee in a thermos and an egg sandwich in the canvas bag behind your seat,” Percy said.

  “I’m fine,” she replied.

  “I can get us into Canada today if you want,” he said.

  “I’ve got too much footage on the shale operation. In some ways, it’s not effective.”

  He glanced sideways at her, not understanding.

  “The areas that are most damaged up there are already totally destroyed,” she said. “People don’t see what the area used to look like. They only see it after it’s been turned into a gravel pit. They’re also depressed by the fact they can’t do anything about it, so they don’t want to look at it or think about it anymore.”

  “I bet you’re going to be famous one day,” he said.

  “Why would I be famous?”

  “Because you’re the real thing.”

  “What’s the real thing?”

  “You think the work you do is more important than you are,” he said. “Hang on. There’s some weather up ahead. Once we’re over Rogers Pass, we’ll be in the clear.”

  She drifted off to sleep as the plane bounced under her, the rain spidering and flattening on the glass. When she awoke, they had just popped out of the clouds, and she saw the sharp gray peaks of mountains directly below her. They made her think of sharks clustered inside a giant saltwater pool with no bottom. “Who was that guy this morning?” Percy said.

  “Which guy?”

  “The one who dropped you at the airport.”

  “There wasn’t any guy. I drove myself. My pickup is parked in the lot.”

  “There was an older man in the waiting room. I thought maybe he was your father, the way he was looking at you.”

  “No,” she said. “My father is probably still asleep at Albert Hollister’s ranch. What did he look like?”

  “Long face, high forehead. I don’t remember. Can you get the thermos for me?”

  “Think hard, Percy.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember. Just a guy, about fifty-five or so. Older guys never look at you?”

  “I scare them away.”

  “You? That’s a laugh.”

  “You said I was the real thing. That’s kind of you, but you’re assigning me a virtue I don’t have. I love movies. I’ve loved them all my life. I never knew why until I read an interview with Dennis Hopper. He grew up poor in a little place outside Dodge City, Kansas. All he remembered of Dodge City was the heat and the smell of the feeder lots. Every Saturday he went to town with his grandmother and sold eggs. She gave him part of the egg money to go to a cowboy movie. Hopper said the movie theater became the real world and Dodge City became the imaginary one. When he was in his teens, he went out to Hollywood. His first role was in Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean. His second movie was Giant, with James Dean again. Not bad, huh?”

  “People like you.”

  “What?”

  “The Sierra Club people like you.” Percy leaned forward, seeming to stare at a point beyond the starboard wing. “Check out the Cessna at three o’clock.”

  “What about it?”

  “He’s been with us awhile
. Is anybody following you around?” His eyes crinkled.

  “Maybe I upset a few people in Florida and Louisiana.”

  “You’ll never make the cut as a villain, Gretchen. Here comes the Cessna. I didn’t tell you I used to drop fire retardant for the United States Forest Service. Let’s go down on the deck and see if he wants to stay with us.”

  They had just flown through clouds above a mountain peak into sunlight and wide vistas of patchwork wheat and cattle land. Percy took the twin-engine down the mountain’s slope like a solitary leaf gliding on the wind, the plane’s shadow racing across the tips of the trees. Gretchen felt as though she were dropping through an elevator shaft. Percy leveled out at the base of the mountain and began to gain altitude again, the engines straining, a barn and a white ranch house couched inside poplar trees miniaturizing as Gretchen looked out the window. “Where’d that red Cessna go?” Percy said.

  “I don’t know. Just don’t do that again,” she said.

  “Everything’s cool,” he replied. He touched a religious medal that hung from a chain on his instrument panel. “What can go wrong when you have Saint Christopher with you?”

  “I don’t find your attitude reassuring,” she said.

  They flew along the edges of the Grand Divide and Glacier National Park, where the flat plains seemed to collide with the mountains. On the western end of the Blackfoot Reservation, Gretchen saw several test wells, one close to the border of the park. The plane climbed higher into the mountains and made a wide turn over Marias Pass. She could see snow packed inside the trees on the crests and the slopes, and deep down in the canyon, an emerald river that wound through boulders that were as big as houses.

  She pulled open her window. “Get down as close as you can,” she said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Filming. That’s why we’re here.”

  “You want to fly through that canyon?”

  “You’ve got to do something for kicks.”

  He blew out his breath. “I underestimated you,” he said.

  You can say that again, she thought.

  He made another turn and headed straight at Marias Pass, dropping lower and lower, the trees standing out individually on the peaks, snow melting on rocks, a train trestle glinting above a gorge, Gretchen hanging out the window with her camera, her hair whipping in the wind.