DR17 - Swan Peak

  I could see the fear growing in his eyes as he looked at my expression and heard my words and realized that all the rules of constraint and procedure and protocol that had always kept him safe had just been vacuumed out of his life. He backed against the stove, the spout of the teakettle touching his spine, sending a tremor through his body. He wiped the blood from his nose with the flat of his hand, then tried to wipe it off with the other palm, smearing it on both hands. The texture of his face looked coarse, ingrained with dirt somehow, as though the personae he had presented to the world were melting off his skin like makeup under a heat lamp.

  “I need to turn off the burner,” he said.

  “No, you need to tell me why those two kids died. What did they have on the Wellstones?”

  “I don’t know about those things. I’m a preacher. If you’re saying I’m tempted by the flesh, then I’m guilty. But I didn’t kill or hurt anybody.”

  I cannot offer an adequate explanation for what happened next. Maybe it was Click’s disingenuousness; maybe it was the fact that he used the teachings of Jesus to deceive and betray the young people who trusted him; or maybe it was just the bloodlust that had lived inside me for most of my adult life.

  The manifestation was always the same. It was like an alcoholic blackout, except the kind of blackout I’m describing occurred most often when I was not drinking. A red-black balloon would fill the inside of my head, and I would hear sounds like trains passing or high winds blowing among cresting waves, and I would experience a coppery taste in the back of my throat like pennies or the acidic taste in your saliva when your gums are bleeding. My age, my service overseas, my attempts to repudiate violence in my life, my membership in Alcoholics Anonymous, and my participation in my church community would have no influence on the events that would follow.

  Clete had saved me from myself in many instances. But this time he was not around.

  I drove my fist into Sonny Click’s face and felt his upper lip split against his teeth. Then I hit him in the stomach, doubling him over. I’m not sure of the exact order of the things I did to him next. I could hear the teakettle screaming and feel its steam boiling my cheek and neck as I pulled open the oven door and shoved his head and shoulders inside. I turned on the gas and smelled its raw odor gush from the unlit jets below the grill. When he struggled, I kicked him in the back of the thigh, collapsing his purchase on the floor, and held him down tighter against the grill.

  “Why did those kids die?” I asked.

  “The burner’s on,” he said, the side of his face wedged into the steel wires, his nostrils flecked with blood around the rims. “The room will explode.”

  “Answer my question. Why did they die?”

  “Things happen inside the Wellstone house that nobody knows about. The girl, Cindy, tried to tell me something. I didn’t want to hear it. I was afraid. I hope she’ll forgive me.”

  I tightened my hold on his neck and shoved his head harder into the grill. I could feel an even more dangerous level of anger rising inside me. “Don’t pretend you’re a repentant man. You molested that girl who was here, didn’t you?”

  “She’s of legal age.”

  I raised his head slightly and smashed it again into the grill.

  “Yes, I slept with her,” he said. “I’m sorry for what I did. The gas is going to ignite and we’re going to die. Don’t do this. I’ll make it right. I’ll go away and you’ll never see me again. Whatever you want, just tell me and I’ll do it.”

  I pulled him from the oven and turned off the gas feed to both the oven and the burner under the teakettle. Click was crying, his face trembling, tears coursing down his cheeks. A dark stain had spread through the crotch of his slacks.

  “Get up,” I said.

  When he didn’t move, I lifted him by the front of his shirt and threw him in a chair. “Who burglarized Seymour Bell’s house in Bonner?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  There was a long silence. Outside, I could see the wind blowing in the trees that grew on a slope across the river. Sonny Click’s eyes followed my hand as I placed it behind my back. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Cops call this kind of gun a ‘drop.’ The numbers are acid-burned. It has no prints on it. It can’t be traced back to me. What did the intruder take from Seymour Bell’s house?”

  He looked at me blankly, his mouth a round O. I forced the barrel of the thirty-two over his teeth and pulled back the hammer. His eyes bulged from their sockets as he stared up into my face. Then he began to tremble all over, his teeth clicking on the steel.

  I said, “If you make me jerk the trigger, the round will punch a hole through the base of your skull.”

  But by now he was shaking so badly he had to grip the sides of the chair to keep his upper torso stationary. He tried to speak and gagged on his words.

  “Say it again,” I said, removing the pistol from his mouth.

  “Nobody told me about a burglary. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and shoot me,” he said. “What kind of man are you? What kind of man would do this?”

  “Somebody who’s too old and tired to care. Sayonara, Mr. Click. If you see me coming, cross the street.”

  I walked back outside and let the door slam behind me. I could smell smoke from a forest fire in the wind and dust blowing out of a rain squall farther down the Clark Fork gorge. Had Click lied? Did he know more than he had told me? I doubted it. But it was his question to me that I couldn’t let go of. What kind of man was I? he had asked. My answer to him had been both facile and cynical. The fact was, in moments like these, I had no idea who actually lived inside my skin.

  I FOUND AN A.A. meeting that afternoon in Missoula, but I did not introduce myself when the woman leading the meeting asked out-of-town visitors to do so. Nor did I speak during the meeting or afterward. I got caught in a traffic detour downtown and passed Stockman’s bar and a place called the Oxford and another bar called Charlie B’s and one called the Silver Dollar by the railroad tracks. Two Indians were sitting on a curb in front of the Silver Dollar, drinking from a flat-sided bottle wrapped tightly in a paper sack. They were half in shadow and half in sunlight, squinting up into the brightness of the afternoon, the reddish-amber tint of the liquor glinting like the flash of a stained diamond whenever they tilted the bottle to their lips.

  I cleared my throat and swallowed and took a candy bar from the glove box and bit into it. Then I drove into the university district and parked in front of the church where Molly and I attended Mass when we were in Missoula. The priest was my age and had grown up in the smelter town of Anaconda. His ancestors had worked in the mines and had been members of the Molly Maguires and the IWW in an era when Irish working people had paid back in kind, sometimes with dynamite dropped in the bottom of the hole. We went into his office, one that looked out upon maple trees and shady lawns and big stone houses with huge blue spruces in the yards. I told him what I had done to the Reverend Sonny Click, sparing nothing, including the systematic degradation I had put Click through.

  The priest was a tall, raw-boned man with an aquiline profile and a taciturn manner that belied his strong feelings, particularly about social justice. I thought I might get a free ride.

  Wrong.

  “I think you’re leaving something out,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You’ve described what you did, but you haven’t talked about why you did it, Dave.”

  “Click is a charlatan. He preys on young girls. He lied about knowing those two kids who were killed. He belongs to the bunch that Jesus recommended millstones for.”

  Good try.

  “Is that the only reason?” the priest asked.

  I scratched my arm and looked out the window. “I wanted to tear him apart. Maybe I wanted to kill him. I don’t know what else to say, Father. I’ve done these kinds of things before. It’s an old problem.”

  “What do you think the cause is?”

  I did not w
ant to answer the question. He waited a long time, then gave it up. “Well, neither of us is a psychiatrist.” He started to give me his absolution.

  “I did it because I want to drink,” I said. “The desire is always there — in my sleep, in the middle of a fine day, in the middle of a rainstorm. It doesn’t matter, it’s always there.”

  He nodded, his face empty, his eyes directed away from mine. The silence was such that my ears were ringing.

  BUT MY EXPERIENCE with the Reverend Sonny Click wasn’t over. I had turned my cell phone off at the A.A. meeting and had left it off until I drove away from the church. When I turned it back on, I had a voice mail from Sheriff Joe Bim Higgins: “Call me when you get this message. This isn’t a request, either.” The message had been left only ten minutes earlier.

  I punched in his callback number. “This is Dave Robicheaux,” I said.

  “Where are you?” Higgins said.

  “In my truck. By Christ the King Church.”

  “I’m on my way to Rock Creek. I’ll meet you at Sonny Click’s house.”

  “What for?”

  “You’d better be there in twenty minutes, or you’ll be under arrest.”

  I took him at his word. When I turned in to the Rock Creek drainage, I could see two Missoula County Sheriff’s Department cruisers parked in front of Click’s house. I also saw an ambulance parked on the yellow grass in the side yard.

  Joe Bim Higgins walked toward me, his trousers stuffed inside his cowboy boots, his suit flecked with chaff blowing out of the field. The burned side of his face made me think of plaster that has dried unevenly on a wall. “What time were you out here?” he asked.

  “Who says I was?”

  “You want to be a smart-ass?”

  “Midday.”

  “What time, exactly?” he asked.

  “Somewhere around one-thirty. I’m not sure.”

  “The mailman says a guy answering your description left here at about a quarter to two. Would you say that’s correct?”

  “I just told you.”

  “Did you come back later in the afternoon?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “What’d you do to him?”

  “Ask Click.”

  “You want a lawyer? I think you and your friend Purcel should have a team of them to follow you around.”

  “I lost control. If you want the details, get them from the good reverend. While you’re at it, ask him why he lied during a murder investigation.”

  “I thought I had seen the whole cast of characters, but you and your fat friend take the cake.”

  “I’m getting a little tired of this, Sheriff.”

  “You are? I bet Click is, too.”

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

  “We’re still waiting on the coroner. Come inside and tell me what you think.” He handed me a pad and a pencil. “Jot down every place you’ve been this afternoon, Mr. Robicheaux, and the names of people who saw you there. How about your friend Purcel? Know where he’s been? Seems like when one of you tracks pig flop on the rug, the other one is right behind. You don’t have mad cow disease in Louisiana, do you? That’s what we’re afraid of in Montana. At least until you guys arrived. I’ve never been to Louisiana. Me and the old woman got to visit there someday.”

  I followed him inside the house. Two plainclothes cops were in the bedroom. They wore polyethylene gloves and were taking everything out of Click’s dresser drawers. A straw-bottom chair lay on its side in front of an open closet.

  “The wind knocked down a tree on the power line. A lineman looked through the side window and saw Click. He was still warm when we got here. That’s the only reason you’re not in handcuffs.”

  Click had been suspended from horse reins that were looped over a rafter at the top of the closet. They had been wrapped around his throat and were knotted tightly under the carotid artery. His loafers had fallen from his feet. The purple discoloration had not left his face, and he wore the strange, lidded, downcast expression of a man who has accepted that he has gone permanently into deep shade. His neck did not look broken, and I suspected he had strangled to death.

  When the coroner arrived, he and a deputy cut Click down with a pocketknife. I walked outside and stood in the wind. Afternoon fishermen were headed up Rock Creek Road and soon would be casting flies on sunlit riffles. I could see mountain goats high up on one side of the canyon, and down below, penned horses inside the afternoon shadows and a man splitting wood and stacking it inside a pole shed. I saw all these normal and beautiful things while I waited for Joe Bim Higgins to come out of the house.

  “The coroner thinks Click bailed off the chair. He also says somebody put some serious hurt on him,” Higgins said. “You got any problem of conscience about that?”

  “Guys like Click don’t kill themselves because of guys like me,” I said.

  “You’re saying this is a homicide?”

  “I think he was unconscious when he was dropped from the rafter.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “His hands were free. He was an able-bodied man. He could have pulled himself up.”

  “Yeah, if he wanted to. But suicide victims don’t want to save themselves. That’s why they commit suicide.”

  “You want me to come down to the department and make a statement?” I asked.

  “No, what I would really like is for you and your friend to get off the planet,” he replied.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE BEST RESTAURANT in Missoula was called the Pearl Café. The walls were salmon-colored and hung with pastel paintings inside gnarled wood frames. The tablecloths and silver and crystal settings glowed with clarity and light; the waitstaff was dressed as formally as waiters and waitresses and bartenders in fine New York restaurants, and they had the same degree of manners and professionalism. Alicia Rosecrans had selected the Pearl, not Clete Purcel, who normally ate in saloons or working-class cafés where the food was deep-fried in grease that could lubricate locomotive wheels. Clete’s objection was not the ambience but his belief that Alicia Rosecrans’s career would be compromised by her being seen in public with him.

  Nonetheless, he had consented to go there with her and had put on a new powder-blue sport coat and gray slacks, shined loafers, and a soft gray fedora that he had recently purchased at a fashion store in Spokane. He had ordered iced tea rather than wine with his dinner, and hadn’t broached the subject of what they might do or where they might go later in the evening or, for that matter, tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that. The truth was, Clete didn’t even know where Alicia lived. When she was in Missoula, she stayed in a motel. That day she had been in both Billings and Great Falls, and she was vague about where she would be the following day.

  “You’re pretty tired?” he said.

  “I think in the next two months I might be transferred to San Diego,” she replied.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “You’ve been there?”

  “When I was at Pendleton. It’s a nice city, the ocean and all.”

  The waitress set a loaf of hot sourdough bread wrapped in a napkin on the table and went away. Alicia removed her glasses and put them in a case and snapped the case shut. For some reason, the indentations where the glasses fitted on the bridge of her nose made her look disarmed and vulnerable, as if she had chosen to look that way.

  “You like West Coast living? Starbucks and jogging on the beach and surf fishing with old guys, that kind of stuff?” she said.

  “Yeah, I can dig that. Any place where it’s warm and there’s water and a few palm trees. I spend most of my time now in New Iberia, where Dave lives.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Because New Orleans isn’t New Orleans anymore.”

  “It’s being rebuilt, isn’t it?”

  “They won’t rebuild the place I grew up in. They don’t know how to. They weren’t there. Back then every day was a party. I don’t mean horns blo
wing and people getting drunk on their balconies. It was the way you woke up in the morning. Everything was green and gold, and the oaks were full of birds. Every afternoon it rained at three o’clock, and the whole sky would turn pink and purple and you could smell the salt in the wind. No matter where you went, you’d hear music — from radios and cafés and dance orchestras on the rooftops downtown. You could have all of it for the price of the ride on the St. Charles streetcar.”

  “You’re going back there, aren’t you?”

  “No, I like the idea of the West Coast,” he said. “See, I remember the way New Orleans used to be. If I didn’t remember the way it used to be, I could go back and live there. Sometimes good memories mess you up. What I mean is I dig the coast. A guy like me can always adjust.”

  She looked at him a long time, as though staring at a man through a pane of thick glass she would never be able to penetrate. When their food was served, she barely spoke. If prescience was a gift, it did not show as such on her face.

  Later that night, after he left her motel room, he thought he smelled flowers and the smell of salt spray on the wind. Then he realized it was her perfume and the smell of her skin and not a night-blooming garden in the neighborhood where he had grown up, or waves crashing on a beach in a place where he might live in the future, and he felt more alone and lost than he had ever felt in his life.

  TWO HOURS LATER, while Clete was trying to go to sleep, his cell phone vibrated under his pillow. The caller ID was blocked. “Clete?” a woman’s voice said.

  It was not a voice he wanted to hear. “What’s the haps, Jamie Sue?” he said.

  “We’ve got to get a message to this man Troyce Nix,” she said.

  We?

  He sat up in bed and adjusted the cell phone to his ear, wondering at the lack of judgment that seemed to characterize everything he did. “Why don’t you call Nix up? I’ll give you the name of his motel,” Clete said.

  “I don’t have credibility with him. Neither does Jimmy Dale.”