by Mike Markel
I walked up to the entrance gate.
Just inside, off to the left, was a guard booth maybe four by six, made of aluminum, black panels on the bottom half, glass on the top half, flood lights on the four corners of the roof.
When I approached the booth, out stepped the guard in a gray and black phony military uniform. But the AK-47 slung over his shoulder was real. He didn’t say anything. Neither did I, as I turned and walked back toward my car.
I drove back out the gravel road, onto the beat-up asphalt road toward 53. I remembered seeing a blistered-paint motel about a mile before I turned off, so I headed back that way. The weathered Vacancy sign suspended from the neon sign that read Mountain Inn looked permanent. I pulled in and parked under the stucco overhead marked Office. The girl at the desk looked up from her magazine, as curious as a cow staring at a new gate. Not even an official smile. She was about twenty five, with an interesting combination of blond eyebrows and roots but Joan Jett black hair, parted severely down the middle. A little badge reading Maureen was pinned on her low-cut sweater, which displayed a good third of her truly remarkable boobs, one of which came with a nickel-sized purple and red flower tat. Unfortunately, the sweater also did nothing to hide a pretty significant belly roll.
Sitting in the tiny office that smelled equal parts Lysol and cigarettes, thumbing through Us magazine, she dressed like she was okay with being all about her tits. Like she’d enjoyed being Big Tits Maureen in high school, and she couldn’t do anything about becoming Fat Maureen at forty, so she might as well be Check Out the Tits on Desk Clerk Maureen for a while. Like she didn’t have any choices, out here in Lake Hollow.
I gave her thirty-nine bucks in cash and she handed me an old metal key attached to a big plastic oval that had the number 6 written in Sharpie on a piece of masking tape. I walked past the small pool with candy wrappers, leaves, and crushed paper cups floating in the brown water on the blue tarp that had covered it all winter. A gold 6 was screwed into the red plywood door last painted during the Reagan administration. The Lysol smell hit me as I entered the tiny, dark room. I felt for a light switch inside the door and turned on the 60-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture.
Right inside the door was a double-hung window, no screen, so if you left the window open or unlocked, a guy could reach in from outside and open the door. The double bed, covered with a tattered, stained floral spread, took up most of the room. On each side of the bed was a pine end table with a cheap lamp with pictures of fish on the paper shade. A reasonably clean ashtray sat on each of the end tables, with No Smoking signs on the wall above them. The message was a weary shrug of resignation about how the world works: we’re asking you not to smoke, but you’re going to do what you’re going to do, and we’re not going to do anything about it, and it’s probably better you use the ashtray than put burn marks in the end table, so we’re good, right?
I went to use the bathroom.
The towel rack had two mismatched towels. One of them read Crown Motel, Los Angeles, Calif. As I closed the door, I noticed that the knob had cracked the drywall because there was no doorstop or anything. I looked down in the corner and saw a few stray pubes floating around on the floor from the draft when the door closed. I didn’t really need to pee. I could hold it till I got to the bottom of the ravine.
Not wanting to get any gross shit on my clothes from the disgusting bedspread, in case I ever made it back home alive, I put my big bag on the tiny Formica table that served as a writing desk and sat on the kid-size desk chair. When I was in school, a couple of teachers had informed me that failing to plan was planning to fail, which struck me as extremely dorky to say to a kid. They were right, naturally, but I’d never taken it to heart. So here I found myself up in Lake Hollow. I’d scoped out the Montana Patriot Front compound—from outside the entrance, anyway—but I had no idea what to do next.
I knew I needed to get away from Rawlings, where the investigation was dead in the water and Nick Corelli was feeding me and Ryan a line of horseshit about what he was up to—and perhaps who the fuck he was. The best I had was what I’d suggested to the chief: talk to Christopher Barry, the head Nazi, tell him we’re investigating a crime in Rawlings that might be linked to one of his people, just see what happens. Maybe he’d get in touch with Willson Fredericks at the university and something might break free. Fredericks might start telling us who this BC guy was from the emails. The only thing different about my foolproof plan now was that I was on my own. Ryan wouldn’t have been willing to violate a direct order from a boss—that’s more my style.
I’d left my suitcase in the car. I decided not to bring it into the room. The thought of having it stolen from my car was less depressing than the thought of actually sleeping in this room. I’d already paid for the night, so Maureen wouldn’t care if she never saw me again. I grabbed my bag, got in the car, and headed back to Nazi City. This time I parked right up near the entrance gate. I thought I’d try acting like of course they’d let me in. I walked up to the gate.
The guard stood there in the middle of my path, the Kalash across his chest, his right index finger resting on the trigger guard. He looked like a Doberman Pinscher, his brown eyes following every movement I made. He didn’t say anything.
“Hi,” I said. He looked into my eyes silently. “I’d like to see the Reverend Christopher Barry. Know if he’s in?”
He waited a while. “Who are you?”
“My name is Karen Seagate. I’m a detective with the Rawlings Police Department. Couple hours east of here.”
“ID?”
I reached in my bag and pulled out my wallet and my badge on its leather holder with the chain. I opened up the wallet and showed him my ID, then put my badge around my neck.
“Stay there,” he said, which I was certainly planning to do. He walked back into his booth and began speaking into a radio unit. It took about half a minute. He came back out. “Weapons?”
I reached into my belt holster and pulled out my Colt, handing it to him butt first.
He motioned me over to his guard booth. I put my palms onto the glass and spread my legs. He patted me down: both legs, down to my socks, inside my jacket. Then he turned me around to face him and pointed to my bag, which I handed to him. He rummaged through it, slowly. He said nothing and showed nothing. “Stay there,” he said again. He walked back into the booth, picked up the radio, and talked into it again. He came out and motioned me in with the muzzle of his rifle.
He pointed toward the two buildings on the other side of the compound. “The one on the right.”
I started walking toward the Reverend Christopher Barry’s place. I looked back toward the guard booth, where I saw the concise Nazi standing next to his booth, his AK-47 back on his shoulder.
The day was bright and pleasant, maybe forty-five degrees, with big, lazy clouds drifting across the sky. A slight breeze carried the sweet smell of the pines that stood outside the chain-link fence. My feet crunched on the pine needles and twigs. All in all, very nice out here in Lake Hollow.
Chapter 16
The church was off to the left: a log cabin, steel roof, one story, three steps leading up to a double-width door. Thirty yards off to the right sat the Reverend Christopher Barry’s house. It looked vintage 1950, a three-bedroom, one-bath starter home for a returning vet. White asphalt shingles with green shutters, a brick fireplace in the middle, a woodstove chimney pipe at one end. Hugging one side was a twelve-foot satellite dish and a five-hundred-gallon propane tank. Except that there was no lawn or shrubs or anything, his house could be seen on any street in Rawlings.
I climbed the three concrete steps, which looked original to the house because they were cracked and patched. Concrete is no match for Montana winters. There was a cheap metal handrail, which had been added recently—both the Rev and his wife were getting up in years. I opened the aluminum storm door and knocked on the wooden front door. I heard slow, heavy footsteps on a squeaky floor. A moment later, the door opened. The
kitchen had a linoleum floor, flowered wallpaper, painted cabinets, and a fifties chrome and Formica dining-room set that now sells for thousands in antique stores. The smell of bread cooking started me salivating.
Alice Barry was a wide, doughy grandma, with white hair permed into tight curls. Behind her round glasses with silver frames, she had tiny gray eyes, close set. She wore no makeup and no expression. She was drying her hands on a dishtowel tucked into a belt on her printed housedress, which looked like the ones my own Grammy used to make all the time on her sewing machine from tissue-paper patterns. “May I help you?”
I wanted to ask if she’d made any cookies. “Good afternoon, ma’am. Detective Seagate from the Rawlings Police Department. I was hoping to have a few words with the Reverend Barry.”
“This way,” she said.
I followed her across the kitchen toward the living room.
She stopped and turned back to me. “You said your name is Detective Seagate from Rawlings? And you’re here on official business?”
“That’s right, ma’am. Detective Seagate, from Rawlings,” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t lie and say I was on official business. Maybe because Grammy could always tell if I was lying.
An ancient hound walked over slowly, wagging its tail in a broad, lazy arc. It had droopy jowls trailing spit tinsel. Sniffing at my knee, it transferred some slobber onto my jeans.
“Don’t worry about Jasper,” the Reverend Barry said, walking toward me deliberately, listing back and forth with each careful step. He bent slightly to touch the dog’s head affectionately. “You’re not going to hurt this gal, are you, old boy?”
Jasper perked up at his master’s attention.
The Reverend Christopher Barry led me into the living room, no more than ten feet by fifteen. In the corner, on an old cloth easy chair, sat a hulking blond boy watching a small black-and-white television sitting on a pine parson’s table. He looked maybe eighteen or twenty, with wispy blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had the beginnings of a beard, but it was so thin and patchy you could miss it. The baby fat in his cheeks made his blue eyes recede. Slumped in the chair, he was a shapeless mound of white skin.
The Reverend Barry pointed to the boy and said, “This is Ricky. He helps me out with things around here.” I started to walk over to Ricky to shake his hand, but he just turned his head slightly toward me and half nodded, then turned back to the television set. I pegged him as coming from a slightly lower branch on the evolutionary tree than Jasper.
The Reverend Christopher Barry motioned for me to sit on the tired orange velour couch covered with Jasper fur ranging in color from bone and tan all the way to brown and black. On each side of the couch was a pine end table with a built-in lamp shaped like a miniature tree truck. The Reverend sank into a recliner, brown vinyl with duct-tape accents. Jasper walked over to an oval braided rug next to Barry’s chair and slowly eased his bones down, his eyes closing almost immediately.
Christopher Barry had thick white hair, cut short. His face was lined with dozens of tiny creases, his eyes ringed by liver spots. The eyebrows were long, wild wires of gray and white. “Sorry about the clutter, Detective,” he said, referring to the hundreds of patriot magazines and pamphlets on the coffee table, the end tables, and the several bookshelves crammed into the living room. Like I’d come to do a shoot for Better Homes and Gardens but someone would have to straighten up first. “As you might imagine, I get quite a bit of mail.” He smiled with satisfaction at his own importance.
“Yes, I can see that,” I said. I was having a little trouble getting a read on this guy. He couldn’t believe I’d think he was an important guy, sitting in this crappy, dark old house filled with illiterate newsletters written by today’s most fervent Neo-Nazi nutjobs. He called me detective, so he knew I was a cop. Did he think I stopped by to give him a good-citizenship plaque?
“How do you think the Wildcats will do this year?”
I assumed he was referring to the Central Montana State football team. Okay, he knew I was from Rawlings. That’s a start. “Tell you the truth, Reverend, I don’t really follow college football all that close.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” He picked up a pack of cigarettes and a butane lighter from an aluminum TV tray next to his chair. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”
I did, but what was I going to say? It was his house.
“You’ve got a running back, a boy named McDaniels—he’s going to be a good one.” He lit the cigarette and pulled on it long and hard. A moment later, the blue-gray smoke came shooting out of his nostrils like he was a cartoon dragon.
I expected to hear a real phlegmstorm gurgling in his lungs—a guy this old, sucking that hard on a cancer stick. Actually, I expected him to be dead already or working on Stage 3 or 4 lung cancer or emphysema or something, but he sounded fine. “Yeah,” I said, nodding my head. “That’s what I hear. McDaniels.”
“You know, the coach is changing the whole offense around to take advantage of him.”
I put my arms out, palms up, and shook my head to signal that I had no idea what he was talking about. Two back-and-forth’s about college football ought to be sufficient for this occasion, especially since I’d made clear it’s way high on my lengthy don’t-know-don’t-give-a-shit list.
“Well, Detective, you didn’t drive all the way out here to talk about college ball, I imagine.”
“No, Reverend,” I said, glad he’d finally got my message. “No, I didn’t.”
“Tell me what’s on your mind.” He put on a serious face and leaned in toward me, like we went way back, so whatever it is that was bothering me, he’d help. We’d discuss it, work it out. It was important to him.
“I want to let you know we’ve got a case in Rawlings, I just want to fill you in on it a little bit.”
“Well, I do appreciate that, Detective,” he said, nodding his head, as if detectives make courtesy calls all the time.
“Three days ago. Dolores Weston, state senator. Somebody bashed her skull in, raped her.” No reason not to tell him it was Weston. Willson Fredericks had figured it out immediately. Christopher Barry surely would know about it. I hadn’t planned to mention the rape, but after the words came out of my mouth, it felt right. Maybe he was old school and thought rape was over the line. At least, it was a way to make the point that the Rawlings Police Department took this case seriously. I wasn’t certain that was true, of course, but I wanted him to think it was.
“Yes, terrible. She wasn’t exactly my cup of tea—as a senator, I mean—but that was a terrible thing. Just terrible.” He took a long pull on his cigarette, blowing the dragon smoke up toward the low ceiling. The windows were closed, and the smoke just hung there, the air motionless in the room. “That took place in Rawlings, if I remember correctly?” He reached down and scratched his dog behind an ear. The dog’s eyes stayed closed, but the tail gave a little swoosh.
Okay. I was worried he was a little senile, but he knew exactly what was going on. He looked up in time for me to answer his question. “The body was discovered in Rawlings. Yes, that’s right.”
“Interesting,” he said. “You’re thinking the murder happened … happened someplace else? Then the body was moved to Rawlings?”
“I’m sorry, Reverend, there’s a couple details—forensics and some other things—I can’t go into at this time.”
“Hmm,” he said. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray, breaking off a long ash. “I understand completely. Forensics and some other things.” He nodded, as if giving serious thought to my phrase. “You have to be very careful. Public finds out the details of the case, makes it a lot harder for you to sift through any new leads that come in.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Do you have any suspects?”
“We’re watching some people, but it’s early.”
“Well, Detective,” he said, lifting himself to his feet, “I’d sure like to be able to help, and if there’s anything I can do,
you just get in touch.” I stood up, too. “I do appreciate you stopping by for a chat. All of us in the Montana Patriot Front support local law enforcement—even if, as in this case—it’s not that local to us here in Powell County.” He took one last pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out. “Are you heading out to do some camping, some fishing?”
At least it wasn’t football. “No, Reverend. Just came here to visit with you today.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. It’s beautiful out here, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “No place like it.”
“You can’t stay even one night in God’s country?”
“Wish I could. Got to be heading back this afternoon.”
“Ricky,” he said to the mound of pasty white white-power flesh sitting off to the side watching the TV, “you want to show the detective out?”
Ricky stood, silently. He was a few inches over six feet, with a large chest and a larger stomach. He had a crude, handmade swastika tat on his forearm. It looked like prison ink. He had the perfect demographics for going inside and joining a white-power gang, but he didn’t look old enough to have been in and out. He walked over to me and put out his arm in a gesture that was more sweeping than escorting me out of the room and back toward the kitchen and the front door.
Alice Barry was back at the sink and didn’t look up as Ricky opened the door, then the screen door. As I walked out onto the top concrete step, he turned to go back inside to his television.
“Say, Ricky?” I said. “That Reverend Barry, he’s quite a man, isn’t he?” See if the kid could talk.
Ricky paused a moment. I thought he might be processing a cop asking him about his boss. “I love the Reverend Barry,” he said, mouthing each word like a three-year old slogging through Pat the Bunny.