DR17 - Swan Peak

  Troyce studied the side of Candace Sweeney’s face for a long time. “Why are you telling me this?”

  She glanced at him, disconcerted. They were headed up the Fourth of July Pass now, the forests on either side of them carving out of the darkness in the headlights. “I wasn’t telling you anything. I was saying, you know, that—” Her words seized up in her throat. The muscles in one side of his face had been impaired by an incision of some kind, perhaps by a knife wound, and his expression looked disjointed, split in half, as though two different people shared his skin.

  “You were saying what?” he asked.

  “That whoever smacked around the bone-smoker back there probably hasn’t figured out why he does stuff like that. Like he’s a sick fuck. Like maybe I was, too. That’s just the way the world is. People don’t necessarily get to choose what or who they are.” She turned her eyes boldly on Troyce’s face.

  “You’re pretty smart,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m a cook for CEO titty babies who get their dorks mixed up with their deer guns.”

  Up ahead, the road was empty. Troyce twisted in the seat and looked through the back window. A car’s taillights were disappearing in the opposite direction. “Pull in to that rest stop,” he said.

  “That’s not a very good place.”

  “Why not?”

  “They don’t clean it. It smells like a bear took a dump in it six months ago and forgot to flush the toilet.”

  “That’s all right. Pull in.”

  She parked the SUV by the public restroom, where an apron of electric light fell on the gravel and the roof of the vehicle and the giant log that separated the parking area from the sidewalk, all the things that should have looked normal and comforting but were now removed from the asphalt highway connecting Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney to the rest of the world.

  “You didn’t cut the engine,” he said.

  “I was gonna listen to the radio,” she said.

  He turned off the ignition for her, then rolled down his window on the electric motor. The air was sweet with the smell of the woods, and water was ticking out of the trees. “Say that last part again. That part about the woman hating the little girl still living inside her,” he said.

  “I’m not into Jerry Springer. If you want to fuck me, I’ll give it some thought. But I was talking about myself, nobody else.”

  “I want you to change my bandages. I’m leaking.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Who cares? Tell me about that woman again, the one who was going to drown her kid.”

  When she went into the back to retrieve the medical kit from under the seat, she saw a holstered, strapped-down nine-millimeter and a stitched leather-covered blackjack, the kind shaped like a large squash, the leaded end mounted on a spring and wood handle, one that could break bone and teeth and crush a person’s face into pulp. The points of fir trees extended into the sky all around her. Directly overhead, the constellations were colder and brighter than she had ever seen them. She opened the passenger door and looked blankly into Troyce Nix’s face.

  “Do I end here?” she said.

  “Little darlin’, the Lord broke the mold when He made you. Ain’t nothing gonna happen to you, at least not while I’m around.”

  “Take off your shirt,” she said.

  CHAPTER 8

  ON MONDAY MORNING Joe Bim Higgins asked me to come to his office at the Missoula County Courthouse. When I tapped on his partially opened door, he was standing at the window, gazing out on the lawn and the maple trees that shaded the benches by the sidewalk.

  “Thanks for coming by, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said, extending his hand. “Early yesterday morning somebody broke into the house in Bonner where Seymour Bell was living. Bell’s roommates were gone for the weekend. Whoever broke in tore the place up pretty bad.”

  “You don’t think it was just vandalism?”

  “No, the drawers were all pulled out, mattresses peeled back, closets emptied. Somebody was looking for something.”

  “Was anything missing?”

  “Bell’s roommate says a cheap camera is gone, one of those little throwaway jobs. He said he was sure it was on top of Bell’s bookcase when he left the house on Friday afternoon.” Higgins paused, watching my expression. “What’s your take on it?”

  “If the camera was the object of interest and in full view, the intruder wouldn’t have torn up the whole house. He was after something else as well, something more important.”

  “I talked with your boss in New Iberia this morning. She said you were a good cop.”

  I knew what was coming. “No,” I said. “I came out here to fish. I got involved in your investigation because the homicide took place behind Albert’s house. Clete thought the killer might have been sending Albert a message.”

  “That’s one reason I want you working for me. Albert is just like me. He’s old and wants his own way. When he doesn’t get it, he starts throwing horse turds in the punch bowl.”

  “Albert is going to have to take care of himself.”

  “You don’t get it, Mr. Robicheaux. The West isn’t the same place or culture I grew up in. People like Albert Hollister used to be the rule, not the exception. Albert believes in his country and his fellow man, and he’ll let people kill him before he’ll accept the fact that most of his fellow citizens care more about the price of gasoline than a volunteer soldier getting killed in Afghanistan. I want to deputize you right here, with a gentleman’s understanding that this is a temporary situation confined to the investigation of these recent homicides. I’ve got good people working for me, there’s just not enough of them. What do you say, partner?”

  “What about Clete Purcel?”

  “Forget it.” He took a badge in a leather holder out of his desk drawer and dropped it on his blotter. “Tell me you don’t want it and we’re done.”

  ONE MILE AWAY, Clete had just parked his Caddy under a cluster of maple trees behind the university library when he saw a familiar green Honda pass on the street. He had seen the Honda twice that morning, in traffic, once outside the Express Lube Friday morning, and once later, at the mall.

  Clete watched the Honda disappear around a curve at the base of the mountain behind the university. He walked across a knoll, through a grove of trees, and sat on the steps of a classroom building with a view of his Caddy. He sat there for ten minutes, sipping from a silver flask, each hit of Scotch and milk going down like the old friend it used to be, the wind blowing cool through the trees, the damp smell of the steps reminiscent of the Quarter in the early-morning hours. But the green Honda did not reappear, and Clete walked to the library, where he began to research both the life of the woman he had slept with and the life of the husband he had cuckolded.

  As he did these things, he felt wrapped in a web of deceit and desire that he could not scrub off his skin.

  The reference librarian helped him find articles about the young Jamie Sue Stapleton on the Internet and in music magazines and biographical books dealing with country-and-western personalities. Most of it was fluff, written by hacks who created caricatures of blue-collar people who rose from humble origins to a world stage where their brocaded and sequined western costumes told their audiences that fame and wealth could be theirs, too, if only they believed. The manufactured accents, the nativism and cynical use of religion, the meretricious nature of the enterprise, the cheapness of the disguise were all forgivable sins. It was the poor whites’ answer to the minstrel show. Starshine allowed them to delight in the parody of themselves and to turn the poverty and rejection that characterized their lives into badges of honor.

  Unfortunately for the hacks who wrote about her, Jamie Sue’s life and career did not lend themselves to predictability.

  She had been born to a blind woman and an oil-field roustabout in Yoakum, Texas, the inception point of the old Chisholm Trail. She left high school at age sixteen and worked as a waitress at a truck stop in San Antonio an
d as a dancer at a topless club in Houston. According to one interview, she earned an associate of arts degree from a community college when she was nineteen. She also married her English professor and divorced him one year later, after charging him with assault and battery and spousal rape.

  With the money from her divorce settlement, she formed her first band.

  At a time when Nashville music was transforming itself into a middle-class and popular medium, Jamie Sue used Kitty Wells and Skeeter Davis as her models, and a mandolin and a banjo as her lead instruments, and a Dobro instead of an electric bass. A song that always brought down the house was one written by Larry Redmond titled “Garth Ain’t Playing Here Tonight.”

  She hooked up with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, a rodeo drifter some people said had the best voice to hit the Texas hill country since Jimmie Rodgers had lived there. Others said a hymnal duet by Jamie Sue and Jimmy Dale could make the devil join the Baptist Church. But two weeks before they were scheduled to cut their first album in an Austin recording studio, Jimmy Dale put a knife into the nephew of the meanest county judge in Southwest Texas.

  Why had she married an older man, one terribly mutilated by fire? Was it simply money? Clete found only a few news articles on Leslie Wellstone: He had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a double major in anthropology and comparative literature, but he had disappeared into the post-psychedelic culture of Haight-Ashbury. He had made underground films and a documentary on migrant farmworkers. He had joined a New Age commune high up in the mountains above Santa Fe. He had also enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and gotten his Spam fried in the Sudan.

  Clete had the feeling Leslie Wellstone was a man who had dealt himself almost all the cards in the box and had liked none of them.

  Clete left the library and headed toward his Caddy. In a parking lot by the Student Union, he saw the green Honda again. A man was sitting behind the steering wheel, his face obscured by the sun visor. Out on the lawn, in the shade of maples not far from the Caddy, a college-age boy and girl were eating sandwiches on a blanket, the door of their parked vehicle yawning open behind them, their car radio playing softly. Clete looked again at the green Honda. Show-time on the campus, he thought.

  He walked over to the college boy and his girl. The air in the shade was cool and smelled of clover. The two young people looked up at Clete uncertainly. He squatted down on his haunches, eye level with them, and opened his badge holder on his knee.

  “My name is Clete Purcel. I’m a private investigator from New Orleans,” he said. “See that guy parked in the green shitbox over there?”

  They nodded but kept their eyes on his face and did not look directly at the parking lot.

  “That dude has been following me, and I want to turn it around on him,” Clete said. “The problem is, he’s made my maroon Caddy over there. In the next couple of minutes, I’m going to flush him out of the parking lot. I’ve got about thirty-seven bucks in my wallet. It’s yours if you’ll follow him in your car and let me sit in the backseat.”

  “He’ll know who we are,” the boy said.

  “No, he can’t see your car from where he is. He’s not interested in y’all. He’ll be looking for me and my Caddy.”

  “What’s he done besides follow you?” the girl asked.

  “He’s a child molester,” Clete replied.

  “What do you plan to do to him?” the boy asked.

  Take a chance, Clete thought. “Maybe nothing. Maybe break all his wheels,” he said. “Anytime you want me out of the car, I’ll get out.”

  The boy and girl looked at each other and shrugged.

  Clete walked across the grass to Lyle Hobbs’s vehicle and propped one arm on the roof above the driver’s window. Hobbs had a box of Wheat Thins open on his lap and was feeding them one at a time into his mouth, chewing them on his back teeth. His recessed right eye, the one looped with stitch marks, glittered wetly, as though it had been irritated by the wind. Clete suppressed a yawn, his gaze wandering up the slope of the mountain behind the university. Then he watched a U.S. Forest Service plane, one filled with fire retardant, flying low across the sky, its engines laboring with its massive load. “Nice day, isn’t it?” he said.

  Lyle Hobbs turned on his radio and tuned the station to a baseball game in progress. “You gonna let it get personal, Mr. Purcel?”

  A nest of small blue veins was pulsing in Clete’s temple. “When I was with NOPD, I’d do just that, Lyle. Get personal, I mean. Know why that was? Because my pay was the same whether I was eating doughnuts or mopping up the sidewalk with a degenerate. Now I’m a PI. When it becomes personal, I get in trouble and lose my source of income.”

  “I noticed that about you when you were working for Sally Dee. A real pro. I was impressed. You always seemed to fit right in,” Hobbs replied, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  “Does it ever get personal for you, Lyle? Ever know a guy with a short-eyes jacket who wasn’t afraid — I mean, deep down inside, scared shitless? It’s what makes them cruel, isn’t it? That’s why they always choose their victims carefully. You ever get a real bone-on and go apeshit on somebody, Lyle?”

  “You’re a real philosopher, Mr. Purcel,” Hobbs said, suddenly looking up at Clete, just like the lead-weighted eyelids of a doll clicking open. He dropped his empty Wheat Thins box out the window. It bounced off the pavement, powdering Clete’s shoes with crumbs.

  Clete went into the alcove of the classroom building across from the library and waited. He unscrewed the cap on his flask and took a hit of Scotch and milk, then another one. After five minutes, he heard Lyle Hobbs start his car. He waited until he could see Hobbs’s car heading toward the road that separated the campus from the mountain behind it. Then he walked quickly down the steps to the young couple sitting under the trees. “Let’s rock,” he said.

  The three of them followed Hobbs across town to a park in the middle of the residential district. All of the adjoining streets were lined with maple trees, the park spangled with sunshine, children playing on a baseball diamond and in a wading pool with a fountain geysering out of the center. In the midst of it all, Lyle Hobbs stood under a tree, watching a group of young teenage girls practicing somersaults in the grass.

  Clete took all the bills out of his wallet and handed them to the driver. “Thanks for the lift. You guys take care of yourself,” he said.

  “That guy’s really a molester?” the boy said.

  “From the jump,” Clete said.

  “Keep the money,” the boy said. He was burr-headed and wore a T-shirt and a ball cap pulled down on his brow. “You might actually bust that guy up?”

  “I exaggerate sometimes.”

  “You have booze on your breath,” the girl said, trying to smile. “We don’t want to see you get in trouble. You seem like a nice man.” She patted Clete on the wrist.

  After the college kids drove away, Clete walked into the park. Then his eyes focused on a picnic bench on the far side of the recreation building. Jamie Sue was sitting next to her brother-in-law, Ridley Wellstone. She was also sitting next to a stroller, watching a diapered little boy play in the grass. She set the boy on her lap and combed his hair with her fingernails.

  Clete tried to assimilate what he was looking at. The Scotch he had drunk wasn’t helping his thought processes. The light seemed to splinter into needles inside the trees; he opened his mouth to clear a popping sound in his ears. Then he realized both Wellstone and Jamie Sue were staring at him as though he were an aberration rather than the other way around.

  “What are you doing here?” Wellstone said. His aluminum crutches were propped beside him.

  “Following the asshole you put on my tail,” Clete said. He looked at Jamie Sue and the little boy. “You have a kid?”

  “Yes, I do. Why do you ask?”

  “Why do I ask?”

  “You don’t look well,” she said. “Do you want to sit down?”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Ridley
Wellstone said.

  The popping sound in Clete’s ears seemed to be gaining in intensity, like the thropping of helicopter blades. How dumb can one guy be? he asked himself.

  “We made restitution for your fishing gear. Now get out of here,” Wellstone said.

  People at the other picnic tables were staring, and Clete’s face felt tight and small in the wind. Again he thought he heard mechanical sounds from a distant war and smelled an odor like moldy clothes on his body and diesel fuel and mosquito repellent and mud that stank of stagnant water. For just a second he thought he felt the squish of trench foot inside his boot and saw the flicker of conical straw hats moving through elephant grass.

  He walked away from Jamie Sue’s picnic table, slightly off balance, his mouth dry, his forehead breaking a sweat. He passed Lyle Hobbs, who was still watching the teenage girls turning somersaults in the shade. Clete went into the restroom and washed his face for a long time. He dried his skin with a paper towel and looked in the metal reflector that served as a mirror. His face made him think of a pumpkin beaded with drops of water. Outside, he heard the music from an ice-cream truck. He thought of children playing in Audubon Park when he was a child in New Orleans. For a moment his heart was a kettle drum.

  Lyle Hobbs walked into the restroom and relieved himself in a urinal. He was wearing shades, breathing through his mouth as he urinated, shaking himself off with one hand. He zipped his fly, then wet his comb under the lavatory faucet and began combing his hair. He never glanced at Clete.

  “I catch you tailing me again, it’s going to play out a whole lot different,” Clete said.

  Hobbs flicked the water off his comb and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Mr. Wellstone came to town for his therapy. Nobody is tailing you, nobody is interested in you, Mr. Purcel. I cain’t abide a self-righteous man, particularly one that didn’t have a problem of conscience with putting his dick in another man’s wife. You’d better count your blessings you’re dealing with me and not Quince. Quince is mightily attached to the Wellstone family. Believe me when I say Quince is not a man you want mad at you.”