One Last Lie

by Paul Doiron

  “A Cane Corso. Have you heard of them?”

  “They were the war dogs the Roman legions brought with them on campaigns.”

  Her imperfectly aligned teeth somehow only made her prettier. “I only know they come from Italy.”

  I estimated that the mastiff weighed somewhere around 120 pounds—20 odd pounds less than Shadow—but he was far more muscular than the wolf hybrid. In a fight to the death, I wasn’t sure which would prevail. The most likely outcome would be that the two canines would tear each other to bloody shreds.

  “Why were you speaking to him in German?”

  “Stan says it’s to avoid the dog hearing a word in English that he associates with commands.”

  “You must be Vaneese.”

  “Vaneese Delhomme.”

  A voice boomed from the direction of the house. “There he is! Maine’s second-most famous game warden.”

  Stan Kellam descended the porch stairs with arms extended.

  He was in his sixties, but he had a vitality about him you don’t often see in men his age. He had acquired a considerable belly, but his chest and shoulders were as burly as I remembered, and he had the narrow hips of a former athlete. He wore his sandy hair barbered in the same flattop he’d sported as a young warden. His jaw was square, resolute. His mouth was small and thin lipped.

  “How are you, Mike? I hope my monster here didn’t give you too bad a scare.”

  Kellam was dressed in a maroon Florida State T-shirt, cargo shorts, and leather sandals. I’m six two, and we were eye to eye when we shook hands. As a younger man, he must have stood even taller.

  “I’m fine, Lieutenant.”

  “Please don’t call me that. I’ve spent the past six years trying to forget my checkered career. I see you’ve met Vaneese. And Ferox, the bloodthirsty bastard.” He said these last words with affection while kneeling beside the dog and, to my dismay, removing the muzzle. The animal continued to glare at me with demonic auburn eyes.

  “You seem to have been expecting me,” I said.

  He responded with a merry twinkle. “Yes and no.”

  Again, I paused.

  “I’ll explain over lunch,” he said. “Vee and I were just sitting down when Ferox heard your vehicle. That’s a sweet-looking Scout, by the way. Let’s get out of this damned drizzle. It’s like God has been taking the world’s longest piss on us. When was the last time I saw you, Mike? Was it at my retirement party? I know it was a hell of a bash because I barely remember it!”

  He clapped me so hard between the shoulder blades that I almost lost my balance.

  24

  We sat down in a dining room with hardwood furniture and a view of the gray lake. A serving bowl filled with some sort of orange stew steamed between two place settings, perfuming the air with squash, onion, spices, and meat: the smell of the West Indies, as I imagined it.

  Kellam motioned for me to sit across from him while Vaneese disappeared into the kitchen. It gave me an opportunity to study his face up close. He looked decidedly older than the last time I’d seen him. His pink skin bore the divot scars of many dermatological surgeries.

  “You ever have Haitian food before, Mike? I’m guessing not. This is joumou. Pumpkin soup, basically. It usually has beef in it, but Vaneese makes it with moose meat. I shot a big bull last fall, half a ton, dressed. How’s that for fusion cuisine? Port-au-Prince meets Presque Isle.”

  The remark about the hunting trip made me realize that the décor of the former sporting camp was utterly devoid of taxidermy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ventured into one of these historic lodges and not confronted a dusty moose head staring down with glass eyeballs from over the fireplace. Instead, bright paintings of turquoise seas and multicolor shanty towns decorated the walls.

  The woman reappeared with a bottle of Corona and a glass for me. Kellam already had a beer in hand.

  Ferox, meanwhile, curled up on the floor beside his master. I couldn’t see the war dog from where I was seated—the table was between us—but I was very aware that he had an unobstructed line of attack should he choose to bite me in the crotch.

  “I can see from your expression that you don’t know which question to start with,” said Kellam, dishing me up a bowl of stew. “I’ll make it easy for you. It was Nick Francis who told me you were coming.”

  I came very close to spitting out my beer. “He did?”

  “Said you wanted to talk with me about the St. Ignace shit show. I was pretty damned surprised to hear from him. That Indian never made an effort to hide the fact he hated my guts. I admired his forthrightness in that regard. Backstabbers are the worst.”

  Stunned that Nick had given me away, I felt a need to play my cards even closer now. “I didn’t get that impression, that he hates you.”

  “There’s no need to sugarcoat things with me, Mike. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know—and I won’t even ask why you’re digging this up. All I ask is that you respect me enough to shoot straight in return.”

  “Deal.”

  He wiped beer foam from his faint lips. “How’s that joumou?”

  Vaneese had reappeared with her place setting. She arranged herself beside Kellam and sat down. Somewhere in her travels back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen, she had acquired a pair of glasses that made her look bookish but no less attractive.

  “It’s delicious,” I said to Vaneese. “What are the spices I’m tasting?”

  “Clove and allspice, mainly,” she said. “Joumou is our national dish. Before the revolution, the slave masters forbade us from eating it. I am speaking about my ancestors, you understand.”

  “I take it you’ve already talked with Charley about what happened in St. Ignace,” Kellam said, oblivious to our culinary conversation. “He was as much in the loop as anyone.”

  “You know details about the operation that he doesn’t.”

  “That’s true. How are Charley and Ora?”

  I had thought that Charley must have visited Kellam ahead of me, but from the sounds of things, it didn’t seem as if they had spoken in ages.

  “Good.”

  “Weren’t you engaged to one of their daughters?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Not quite.”

  “Show Mike your ring, Vaneese.”

  She extended an elegant arm across the table to show me the diamond.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “When’s the wedding?”

  “This fall,” said Kellam. “My belief is that when you find a good woman, marry her. Of course, this will be my third trip down the aisle. One of my sons has already threatened not to show, the ungrateful prick, which means three of my grandkids won’t be there either. Families!”

  “But you think he will relent, yes?” said Vaneese.

  “He damn well better if he wants to stay in my will,” Kellam said. “I can’t think of a sadder discovery than to learn a boy of yours has become a bigot.”

  “I don’t think that’s the reason, cher.”

  “It’s one reason. That and his being older than you. And you also being a world-class fox.”

  The stew was in fact delicious, and I looked up from my empty bowl. “How did you two meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  He leaned his heavy forearms on the table. The hair on them was so blond it reminded me of down on a baby’s head. “I’m sure there’s a rumor going around the Warden Service. Stan ‘the Man’ Kellam bought himself a mail-order Nubian princess. We actually met in college, Vaneese and I.”

  The war-painted Indian logo on his T-shirt suddenly made sense. “I’d heard that you’d gone back to school.”

  “You stop learning, you die. That’s my motto. After I retired, I decided to go get my Ph.D. I’ve always been interested in criminology—the hard science behind policing—and FSU has an excellent program. Plus, of course, I would be in Tallahassee and could spend my off-hours bass fishing. The university must have a quota requiring it to admit one ornery old redneck from M
aine each year. God love affirmative action.”

  “What does ornery mean?” Vaneese asked in her charming accent.

  “It means I’m a grouchy son of a bitch who thinks he knows more than he does. Mike will vouch for that as an apt description of me. Wouldn’t you, Mike?”

  “I don’t know you well enough, Stan.”

  “Ha!”

  “But based on what I’ve heard—”

  “Good! You’re shooting straight with me. Vaneese, would you mind fetching us another beer?”

  I tapped the bottle. “I’m still working on mine.”

  “Like hell you are. Get him another Corona, Vee.”

  She hadn’t made much progress with her own dinner but seemed not to mind being at Kellam’s beck and call.

  He watched her girlish hips with appreciation.

  “I don’t understand it either,” he said, lowering his voice. “A young girl like that, falling for a lunk like me. She was getting a master’s in agronomy. Had been admitted to the U.S. on a student visa before the government clamped down on those. When I told her that I was renovating a lodge in the North Woods—she couldn’t even imagine this place. I finally showed it to her on a map. That was a mistake! She saw that Fish River Checkpoint is located in Garfield Plantation. You should have seen the fear in her eyes. I had to explain that a Maine township doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the cane fields back in Haiti.”

  It hadn’t passed my notice that, having begun our lunch with a proclamation that he would answer my questions about St. Ignace, he hadn’t once returned to the topic.

  But as I learned from Joe Fixico—had it only been two days since my visit to the Everglades?—when someone gets talking, the best thing to do is keep quiet and let them tell their stories. People often reveal themselves in their digressions.

  “What about her brother, Edouard?”

  Kellam gave me a wink. “Don’t report me to ICE, OK?”

  “He’s in the country illegally?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s basically confined to the property through no fault of his own. He can’t risk being spotted by some nosy parker. Don’t get me wrong. He’s not my indentured servant. I pay him well, and he has a good life. Does a lot of fishing on the lake.”

  Ferox noisily repositioned himself under the table, as sleeping dogs will do.

  Kellam continued, “Sometimes I consider bringing Edouard to Presque Isle for a Big Mac, but it would be a stupid risk. When was the last time you visited the County? You must have noticed that our roads are crawling with Border Patrol trucks.”

  “I noticed.”

  “When I was first assigned here—this was before 9/11—you could cross back and forth to Canada three or four times a day. The customs agents in the booth would just wave you across. These days, it’s like climbing the fucking Berlin Wall. But the new laws keep us safe, the politicians claim. Safe from old French ladies in Edmundston who want to get their hair done in Madawaska.”

  “I never would have guessed that Edouard and Vaneese were sister and brother.”

  He leaned across the table, his breath grainy with beer. “You ever hear of the Tonton Macoute? The Duvaliers kept the people in line with their own personal death and rape squads. Edouard’s father—”

  The door between the kitchen and the dining room swung open. Vaneese appeared with two more bottles. If she’d heard Kellam discussing the violent circumstances surrounding her brother’s conception, she didn’t show it.

  “I was telling Mike about your field of study, Vee,” he said.

  She showed off her marvelous, imperfect teeth again. “Potatoes.”

  “I told her that Aroostook County was the best place to learn about potato farming—that she could write her master’s thesis on it here. I’d introduce her to a dozen spud experts, I promised.”

  “I didn’t believe him about Maine,” she said. “To me, it seemed as foreign as Haiti must seem to you.”

  Kellam slurped the foaming head off his beer. “You ever been to the Caribbean, Mike?”

  “No, but I did get to Florida recently.”

  Vaneese flashed that lovely smile of hers again. “Were you in Gainesville?”

  “I never made it north of Fort Lauderdale.” I turned back to Kellam. “I was doing a background check on someone who’d applied for a job with the Warden Service.”

  “I heard. You shot him down, so to speak.”

  Kellam had been so convincing about having detached himself from the politics of the bureau, the announcement made me sit up.

  “Pat Shorey told me,” he explained. “We still talk, Pat and I. He comes up here every fall to hunt. He was my sub-permittee when I shot that moose we just ate. He’s no fan of yours, but I expect you know that.”

  Kellam missed his calling as a politician; the man had a rare gift for filibustering.

  “About St. Ignace,” I began.

  “How’d you like to go fishing, Mike? We could talk about it on the water.”

  “You want to go fishing?”

  “Vaneese will appreciate having us out of her hair. You have reading to do, don’t you, Vee?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Kellam stood up. “We’ve got a good Hex hatch on this pond. The bottom is nice and silty. They won’t be rising until dusk—although on dark days, you never know. I’ve had good luck fishing Maple Syrups on sinking lines. If you didn’t pack a rod, I have about three dozen for you to choose from.”

  I was having trouble viewing the high-spirited chatterbox across the table as the “man of patience and guile” my friend had warned me against. But that might be a testament to Kellam’s cunning. Should I go out alone with him on a boat on a remote lake, though?

  But you only live once. And I had never been afraid of taking risks. Then again, neither had Scott Pellerin.

  “How about it?” Kellam said. “You want to pick out a rod from my collection? I’ve got everything from vintage bamboo to the latest graphite.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said. “What kind of warden would I be if I didn’t pack a fly rod?”

  25

  In addition to his extensive fly rod collection, Kellam owned a bunch of boats of all shapes and sizes. The one he chose for us was a Crestliner 1756 Bass Hawk. It had a V-shaped aluminum hull, casting decks in the bow and stern, an overpowered Mercury V-8 outboard, and, in my opinion, didn’t belong on a hundred-acre trout pond. This was a boat built for Bassmaster competitions on Lake Okeechobee, where the contestants dressed like NASCAR drivers, in coveralls festooned with the logos of their corporate sponsors.

  The drizzle had picked up while we were eating, and we both put on waterproof jackets and pants for our excursion. Kellam’s rainwear didn’t have any patches from Abu Garcia or Rapala, but the fabric was redder than a fire engine. Soon his face was red, too, from the rain.

  Edouard helped us load and launch the boat. He didn’t have on a hat or a jacket. The water just streamed off his bald head and made dark stains on his shoulders and along the tops of his thighs.

  How does Vaneese feel about him acting as Stan’s houseboy?

  The retired warden took a seat at the wheel. He turned the key, and the outboard growled like a big cat that had been asleep and didn’t appreciate having been awakened. The next thing I knew, we had exploded forward from the dock. The g-force pushed the hood off my head, causing it to flap along my neck.

  “I’m sure you’re wondering where I got my money!” Kellam shouted above the engine.

  I wished I’d paused long enough to grab my earplugs. Most of the old wardens and guides I knew suffered from hearing loss to the point of near deafness. It was the inevitable outcome of a life running outboards, riding snowmobiles, and firing long guns inches from your unprotected ears.

  “My second wife believed I was going to get killed on the job, and she saw it as her road to riches. The year before we split, she took out life insurance on me. Ten million bucks! And I said, ‘What about you? What do I get if y
ou croak, babe?’ She thought that was hilarious, but we changed the policy. Six months later, she was run off the road by a logging truck. The insurance company wouldn’t pay at first. An adjuster actually investigated me! He thought I’d set it up somehow. But the truck driver was a Québécois from Daaquam, a good Catholic kid. He thought he was going to hell for accidentally killing my wife, so he took the blame. I wanted to kiss that fucking frog.”

  By the time he’d shouted out his story, we’d sped across the pond to a cove that looked promising for trout. Kellam cut the engine, but the Bass Hawk continued its forward momentum until he pushed the button that released the anchor. The weight caught in the muddy bottom, and the boat stopped with a jerk.

  My ears were still ringing from the engine noise. My head was wreathed with gasoline fumes. I felt a persistent vibration in the walls of my heart.

  “I want you to use one my flies,” Kellam said, still speaking loudly. “I want the credit when you catch a monster.”

  I stood in the bow, and he stood in the stern. I could tell it needled him that I could cast all ninety feet of my fly line and into the backing. He kept trying to muscle his line out farther and farther, which is the surest way to sabotage your casts.

  He’d brought a six-pack of beer, as well as a ziplock bag of moose jerky Edouard had made. I passed on both the Coronas and the dried meat.

  “Edouard uses Haitian spices. I guarantee you haven’t had anything like it before.”

  “I’m still full from lunch.”

  He drained half his bottle in one gulp, then let loose with a belch. “I know you’ve been waiting for me to get around to telling you what happened with Scott Pellerin. Truth is, I don’t like to go back to St. Ignace. Neither mentally nor physically. I haven’t set foot in that town since Charley and I agreed we were never going to find Scott. What did he tell you about the disaster?”

  “I’d prefer to hear your version.”

  “Spoken like a true investigator. I blame myself, obviously. Chasse had told me how hot the situation was, and still I sent in Pellerin, undercover.”

  “Chasse Lamontaine?” I remembered Kathy having mentioned the warden’s name.