by Paul Moomaw
“What were you really thinking about?”
Arceneaux laughed, and propped his head with his hands. “Hot tubs,” he said. “And dead bodies.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “See if I ever fuck you again.” She rolled out of bed. “You talking about the Holy Roller lady and her boy friend up at the Double Pine?”
Arceneaux nodded. “Yeah,” he said. He tracked Anne’s tall body with his eyes as she moved about the room, picking up clothes that had fallen more or less at random when they began the afternoon’s love making. “Did I ever mention that you have the sexiest butt in western Montana, if not in the entire western world?”
“Flattery won’t help you now. My mother warned me about men like you, but she forgot to mention the necrophilia.”
Arceneaux slid from the bed and began collecting his own clothes. He pulled on underpants, Levis and his shirt, then walked toward the bedroom door. “Coffee?”
“You bet,” Anne said.
He was grinding beans at the kitchen counter when her arms wrapped him gently from behind. “The flash of light suddenly strikes,” she said, and kissed the back of his neck. “Your interest is strictly professional, yes?”
“My interest in what?”
“In that murder.”
Arceneaux poured the ground beans into the filter, added water, and pushed the button on the Krups coffee maker. It was one of his small luxuries. “You’re very perceptive for a lawyer,” he said. He walked quickly back to the bedroom, picked up shoes and socks, and returned to the kitchen.
“The suspect’s brother hired me to investigate. He says the man didn’t do it.” He sat down and started pulling on his socks.
“Is he paying you, or do you get your reward in heaven?”
Arceneaux slapped his rear pocket. “I got my reward right here. He gave he a thousand dollar advance, and the check cleared.”
“So now you have to do something to earn it.”
“Right.” He finished tying his shoes. “The dead guy’s name sounds familiar, but I don’t know why. Corey Wallace. Ring a bell?
“Big and loud,” Anne said. “I oscillate between being glad the bastard’s dead and feeling cheated. We’ve wanted to take him down for years.”
“Sounds almost personal.”
Anne nodded. “Kind of.” She poured two cups of coffee and carried them to the table. “He was one of us. An attorney. Got popped for stealing from three elderly clients. Disbarred and did some time. When he got out he came back to Missoula, and everybody was sure he was running a drug operation, but he was always too slick to catch. Officially, he became a small business man. Best bet was he was using the business to launder drug money. I think someone was beginning to dig into that, but now it won’t matter.”
“What kind of business?” Arceneaux asked.
“He had a chain of laundromats.”
The laugh caught Arceneaux in mid swallow, and the coffee went up his nose and out again. It hurt, and he could not suppress a yell of agony. Some of the liquid sprayed onto Anne. She grabbed a wad of paper napkins and wiped herself off.
“Sorry, Arceneaux said.
“Better my blouse than my nose. That had to hurt.” She tossed the napkins onto the table. “I understand Larry French is defending,” she said.
“In a manner of speaking. He’s convinced his client, my client too, now I think of it, is guilty as hell. He’s made up his mind that the only way to go is to cop a plea. I’m worried that if he really has to go to trial, he’ll just go through the motions.”
“I’m surprised,” Anne said. “In law school, he talked like he wanted to be another Melvin Belli.”
Arceneaux smiled ruefully. The three had gone through the University of Montana together, although Arceneaux, who had made a detour through Iraq during the Gulf War, was a few years older.
“Students have their dreams, don’t they?” he said. “Larry wanted to be a hot shot defense attorney. I was going to do good deeds for the tribe. And you were going to save the environment, as I recall. Now Larry’s got a half-assed practice in Hamilton, and you’re prosecuting two-bit dope dealers for the County of Missoula.” Arceneaux took a sip of coffee. His smile had vanished. “At least you and Larry still practice some kind of law,” he said.
“One more year, and you can go back,” she said.
“I don’t know if I will.” He reached across the table and stroked her cheek. “Maybe I’ll become Missoula’s sexiest private heat.”
Anne squeezed his arm. “You already are, sweetie.” She sat back, drained her coffee cup, and gazed at him worriedly. “You can joke, but I remember the things you used to say about helping your people. I liked that in you. I liked it a whole lot.”
Arceneaux shrugged. “I’m not sure I know who my people are, any more. My dad’s family is kind enough, and polite, but I think they sort of shake their heads about me when I’m not there to see it. And my mom’s family,” he fell silent for a moment, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the room. “When she left my dad, she moved in with her folks at first, and I used to go visit on weekends. Dad didn’t feel welcome at their farm, so he would drop me off at the mailbox, and I’d walk up to the house. When my mother took off for Idaho with her new boyfriend, I didn’t even know. I still remember that last Saturday. Dad dropped me at the mail box, I walked up to the house and rang the bell, and my grandmother came to the door. She told me my mom had gone away, and she wasn’t coming back, and I didn’t need to come back again either. Not ever. I had to walk all the way home. It took me three hours.”
Anne rubbed his back, gently, and lowered her head to his shoulder. “That stinks,” she said.
Arceneaux closed his eyes. There in front of him stood his grandmother, staring down at him, her blue eyes icy and hateful. He opened his eyes wide again and shook his head violently to drive the image away. “You know what she told me?” he said. “My grandmother? She said, ‘You were a mistake, but it was your mother’s mistake, and we’re not going to keep paying for it.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his temples and rubbed hard, then let them drop again. “I didn’t tell my dad about it until the next weekend, when I had to. He didn’t say anything. Not a word. He just held me for a while, then took me for a walk. And we never did talk about it. It was as if she had never existed for him. I don’t think I ever understood that, but I guess he just wasn’t real good at showing his feelings. But that meant I never got to deal with it either. He stuffed it, so I stuffed it.”
Arceneaux got up and filled his cup. “Anyway, I don’t know what I am. Indian. White man. Lawyer. Private investigator.” He shrugged. “I do hear that I’m not too bad in bed.”
Anne rose and put her arms around him. “I hear that, too,” she said. “And as far as I’m concerned, you’re just fine being who you are, even if you don’t know who that is.”
Arceneaux looked at her questioningly.
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“I wonder sometimes if we would be sitting here like this if I looked more like a real Indian.”
Anne’s eyes widened. She tilted her head to one side, as if she wanted to see him from a different angle.
“That bothers you?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“I’d be sitting right here if you looked like Chief Sitting Bull.”
Arceneaux gave her a crooked grin. “Yeah, but he was a chief.”
Anne pressed her fingertips against his lips. “Do you believe me?” she asked.
“Sure,” Arceneaux said, but he did not know if that was true or not. Or, he thought, would I be sitting here if you weren’t white, and then he was hearing his ex-wife, Teresa, when things had turned too ugly for the marriage to hold together, screaming at him that now he could go find a white woman to go with his goddam white man job.
Chapter 6
The pathologist’s name was Edwin Munsey. Once he had earned major money reading X-rays, CAT scans and the like. Then
he read one wrong, and was a little too obviously drunk at the time. Now he was mostly retired, except for digging around in the occasional body for Ravalli County, which could not afford a full time pathologist. He sat at his desk and leafed through a two-month-old copy of Fly Fisherman while Arceneaux, seated across from him, mumbled his way through the reports on Samantha Marks and Corey Wallace.
“Where’s the middle meningeal artery?” Arceneaux asked.
Munsey put the magazine down. “In your skull. It runs up a groove in the side of the skull, in your temple. It supplies blood to the skull and the dura.”
“What’s the dura?”
“The bag that holds your brain in place.”
Arceneaux returned to the report, shaking his head as he read. Then he tossed it on the table.
“I’ll let you translate. But I gather whoever killed this guy really beat the crap out of him,” he said.
“You don’t think Arden Marks did it?”
“I’m getting paid to prove he didn’t. What do you think?”
Munsey shrugged. “Tell the truth, I don’t think he did because, in fact, Wallace didn’t have the crap beat out of him, not the way you think of it ordinarily.”
“Seems pretty busted up to me.”
Munsey nodded. “Busted up, not beaten up. You ever see anybody really trashed?”
“I grew up in Mission,” Arceneaux said.
Munsey grinned. “Blood and bruises all over, right?”
Arceneaux nodded.
“This guy,” Munsey said, tapping the report with his fingers, “got hit exactly four times. First, in the nose, hard enough to crush it practically flat. It must have splattered blood all over. Then, just above the left eyebrow, hard enough to fracture the wall of the frontal sinus, and drive the bone fragments through the rear wall of the sinus cavity and into the brain. There was a third blow to the right temple, with such force that it cracked the bone and severed the middle meningeal artery neat as scissors. And finally, through the third and fourth ribs on the right side—all the way through, so the shattered ends of the ribs gashed the lung wide open. That made the lung collapse, and that upset the balance of pressure inside the chest cavity. When that happens, the heart shifts real hard to one side, which leads to a spasm of the heart muscle, which equals cardiac arrest.”
“So he died of a heart attack, so to speak?”
Munsey shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Any one of those blows could have killed him. What I know for sure is, first, he didn’t drown, and second, I couldn’t have done what the killer did to him. I know the anatomy, but I don’t have the skill.”
“Not Arden Marks?”
“Not in a million years. He’s too dumb, and too clumsy.” Munsey shook his head and sat back in his chair. “Wallace probably died faster and cleaner than Samantha, though. I didn’t see her clothes myself, but the sheriff said they found them in a corner of the bedroom, torn all to hell, and bloody. She was wearing a sweatshirt, and it was ripped right down the middle. Sheriff couldn’t get over it. Said he didn’t know if he could tear one like that, and he’s no wimp. She fought, too. Bruises on her knuckles, fingernails on one hand busted all to hell. Got a nice sample of somebody’s skin from under the nails on the other hand. That arm was hanging outside the hot tub. I would guess she left some major gouges in somebody. Hope so, at least.”
“I’m told the crime lab matched that flesh to her husband,” Arceneaux said. “It’s one of the strikes against him.”
Munsey riffled through the report briefly. “What actually caused her death, in my opinion, was a pretty fierce blow to the base of the neck. She got hit there with something round and hard, a steel rod, something like that. It crushed the vertebra and pretty well destroyed the spinal cord. She wouldn’t have lived long after that.”
“Maybe a baseball bat?”
“Could be, but I would think something narrower,” Munsey said. He shook his head and sighed. “Whoever did it, that girl really wanted to live. She was a mess. I tried to pretty her up a little before her parents came to identify her, but there wasn’t a lot I could do. The mom took it really hard, and she had to do it all by herself. Her asshole husband brought her, but he wouldn’t go into the room, just sat in here and waited for his wife to do the dirty work, then got up and walked out without saying a word. He didn’t even hold the door open for her. Walked out and let it slam in her face.” He opened a desk drawer and retrieved a half-filled bottle of Glenlivet. “Join me?” he asked.
“Why not?”
Two aluminum tumblers followed the bottle out of the drawer. “The remains of my old travel kit,” Munsey said, and grimaced. “My ex keeps asking me how I can still drink after whiskey, as she puts it, ruined my life. Fact is, my old job gave me ulcers. Scotch never did. Wives don’t understand things like that.” He filled each glass half way and pushed one across the desk to Arceneaux.
“One thing I thought was kind of interesting about these deaths,” and he waved his glass toward the report, “is that the girl and the man didn’t die together. I couldn’t get a decent estimate on time of death on either one. They were in that hot water too long, and the people at the Double Pine couldn’t tell me how hot it actually was. The sheriff says they think sometime after two in the morning, but who knows?”
“Somebody saw Arden Marks, or at least his truck, near the cabins about then,” Arceneaux said. He tested the Scotch, decided he liked brandy better.
“What I do know,” Munsey said, “is that Wallace died first, and judging from the relative state of decomposition, the girl died an hour or more later.”
Arceneaux tapped his head rhythmically with his fingers. “Could she have been floating unconscious in the hot tub, and then slipped off the seat and drowned accidentally?”
“Not unless she climbed back out afterwards. And, anyway, she didn’t drown. No water in the lungs. She was already dead when she went into the tub, I would guess. Whoever killed her propped her body up on one of the seats. Her head wasn’t in the water when they found her.”
“So unless Marks came back, he’s clean,” Arceneaux said.
Munsey poured more whisky into the glasses. “See how good Scotch facilitates the cognitive processes?”
“Son of a bitch,” Arceneaux said, half to himself. “Have you talked to Larry French about this?”
Munsey shook his head. “But it’s all right there.” He pointed to the report again.
“I don’t think he read it that carefully. He’s convinced he’s defending a killer.”
“It does seem like everybody’s already picked the winner on this one.”
He lifted his glass. “The girl was pregnant, you know? It was going to be a boy. I kept a tissue sample of the fetus, too, just in case somebody wants an analysis. They probably won’t, though. The baby was only about six weeks along. If you ask me, the way the world’s headed, the little bugger is lucky he won’t see the light of day.”
“Actually, the fetus gets to be part of the action,” Arceneaux said. “They’re charging Arden Marks with second degree murder because of that.”
Munsey sighed. “That seems to be the popular thing these days. You can tell Larry French that the fetus was not viable.” He lifted the glass to his lips and swallowed, then licked his lips with a satisfied look. “I was involved in a case kind of like that this summer. Young, pregnant housewife coming down Highway 12 off of Lolo Pass tried to get around a semi truck on a blind curve. Trouble was, another semi was coming up from the other way. She hit it head on. Nearly died, and the baby miscarried. She spent almost six months in the hospital recovering from her own injuries, and then they dragged her off to jail and charged her with negligent homicide because of the baby. I testified that the fetus was too undeveloped to have survived anyway, and that got her off.” Munsey smiled and took a swallow of Scotch. “I was fudging, to tell the truth. The fetus was mature enough that it probably would have had at least a fighting chance, but I figured the mom had suffered enough. Yo
u think I was wrong?”
“I think you were right on,” Arceneaux said. He stood up and drained the last of the Scotch. “Thanks.”
“Any time,” Munsey said. “I hate to drink alone. They say only alcoholics do that.”
That night the dream came back and woke Arceneaux up with the same feeling of dread it always caused. He lay on his back in the dark, willing his breathing to relax and his heart to slow. It was the same every time. He was in Iraq, riding in a Humvee, and it flipped and trapped him, and an Iraqi soldier walked up to the wreckage, and Arceneaux tried to be completely still, tried to make himself invisible, but the soldier saw him, he always saw him, and put the muzzle of his rifle against Arceneaux’s forehead, and pulled the trigger, and Arceneaux awoke feeling the muzzle blast.
He had not had the dream for a couple of years, and had thought he was done with it. He wondered if dealing with the descriptions of death in Munsey’s report had brought it back. The dream had no resemblance to reality, and that had always puzzled him. He had not been in an accident, and had not been shot, never even been shot at. He had done the shooting. He had taken two lives in fact, and refused to dwell on that. It had happened, and it was over. End of story. Teresa, his ex-wife, had accused him of having post-traumatic stress disorder. She had always wanted him to go see a shrink, but women did not understand those things. You did what you had to do, and then you got on with your life. Maybe the war had left a few scars, but life did that.
Arceneaux stared into the darkness for a while. Maybe I’m just scars all over, he thought. If I am, tough shit. He tried to will himself to sleep, and after close to an hour he succeeded.
Chapter 7
Larry French shook his head and gazed at Arceneaux with amusement.
“I admire your optimism,” he said. “But Marks is going down on this one. The only choice he has is whether he goes easy or hard.”