The Wild Inside

by Christine Carbo

  We headed back to headquarters, picked up a couple of to-go sandwiches from Carol at the café in West Glacier on the way, and ate while we waited for Walsh to do his digging around. Finally, when he called back, we got the names of four possible users who might know of Stimpy or hang out with him. We found them easily since three of them were roommates living in a prefab structure with a corrugated tin roof near the South Fork Flathead River, close to Hungry Horse. All three were high. All it took was threatening to take them in for some drug testing for them to tell us that Stimpy would be hanging with a mutual buddy of theirs named Trevor Fields. Coincidentally, Fields turned out to be the fourth guy on our printout, so we left without needing to get his address.

  • • •

  “Ma-fucking-lissa,” Stimpy said, shaking his head after we introduced ourselves, as if he knew she was the one who directed us to his buddy’s place. “Ma-fucking-lissa.” I could tell by his enlarged pupils and his quick and random fidgety body movements that he was jacked on some form of amphetamine.

  “Actually no,” I said. “She wouldn’t give us any names at all. Said you knew nothing about Victor Lance’s death.”

  “Then you should listen to her, ’cause I don’t. Ain’t that right?” He turned to his buddy, Trevor, who wore a black skullcap and was watching some reality TV show, his jaw slack and his mouth hanging open. He stared at us blankly, didn’t answer, then turned back to the screen, the right side of his mouth suddenly jumping toward his right eye. I resisted the urge to ask him if he’d caught any flies yet.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “How should I know?” Stimpy sat in an ugly green armchair in the dim house, one leg resting across on old coffee table with beer cans scattered across it, the other bouncing fiercely up and down.

  “Maybe if you think about it, you might remember.” Monty stood next to me, his arms stiff by his sides. I casually folded my arms in front of me and tilted my head and gave him my best I’m-serious-and-I’ve-got-time gaze.

  “I knew him, that’s all,” Stimpy offered.

  “And the last time you saw him?”

  “In Melissa’s bar. Last week sometime.”

  “You have any words with him?”

  He shrugged and laughed—that crazy meth laugh, and I felt a twinge shoot up my spine. “I guess I did.” He took the other leg down from the table and began bouncing it too so that both legs bobbed frantically like he was some vibrating puppet. “I shot the shit with everyone in the place. Don’t ask me the fuck what we talked about.” He laughed again.

  “Fair enough.” I knew he wouldn’t remember—was too doped up for any clear recall, so there was no point in asking. “What I need to know then is what you were doing this last Friday.”

  “I was at a barbecue all day at a friend’s house in Columbia Falls, near the river.”

  “All day and evening?”

  Stimpy nodded, his eyes large and bulging, a strange, almost goofy grin on his face, the corners of his mouth tucking downward. I looked away, at the filthy walls, at an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the dirt-caked windowsill and at scraps of wallpaper that had been pulled off in the hallway past the living room and left on the floor. “What time did you go there?”

  He sucked in his cheeks from both sides for a moment and wrinkled his brow, then let the flesh pop out with a suction sound. “Don’t know. Don’t remember.”

  “How long were you there?”

  He grabbed a beer can, tipped it, and when he found it empty, threw it with some force across the coffee table so that it hit the others and made a loud clanking sound. I was surprised because I don’t think Monty moved a muscle, but I wasn’t sure that I didn’t ever-so-slightly flinch. “Don’t know. Don’t remember.” He turned his gaze to the TV.

  “Look.” I stepped toward him. I towered above him and interrupted his view of the TV. He looked up at me, agitation in his eyes. “You gonna go to that place where you’re too cool to help us out?” I asked. “Because, I mean, we could leave here together, you, him”—I pointed to Monty with a chin lift—“and me till we get some kind of alibi on you. Until we go huntin’ down people at the party and try to figure out when you got there and when you left. You interested in that?”

  He sneered at me.

  “Huh, what do you say? You got other plans for the next few days? And while we’re at it, I might as well talk to the county boys ’bout taking on yet another project on meth dealing up the Line. Apparently, that last one didn’t quite get the job done now, did it?”

  Stimpy hopped up, anger filling his eyes. He was a good five inches shorter than me, but he had girth and adrenaline already on board. He glared at me with one side of his lip turned up in disgust, his eyes bulging, and the veins in his neck popping. I was taking a chance by getting him riled up, but I wanted some answers. “You don’t know shit about me.”

  “That’s right, I don’t. So fill me in.”

  “I was at that party all day.”

  “What time did you go?”

  “I don’t know, we went before noon and stayed until late.”

  “What’s late?”

  “Past two a.m.”

  “You got names of some of the people at the party?”

  Stimpy nodded, his lip still curled in disgust. Then, as if he suddenly recalled something, he got that goofy wide grin back. He reminded me of a ventriloquist’s doll. Then he started laughing crazily, a high-pitched maniacal laugh that prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. Trevor joined in, his facial twitch erupting into a full-on laugh. “Man, don’t you guys do your homework?” Stimpy asked.

  I felt something inside me wither.

  “Coppy, coppy, coppy.” Stimpy rocked from foot to foot with stick-straight legs like an excited child who needs to pee.

  I stared at him, my eyes narrowed.

  “The C’ Falls cops came to our party Friday night because, ohhh”—he made a mocking circle out of his mouth and put a hand to it—“I guess we were being a little too loud. You can check with the guy that came. He knows me; they all do.” He began laughing again, this time more a snicker than that maniacal cackle. “Surprised you guys didn’t already know that.”

  • • •

  That night I drank. I went to the closest liquor store I could find in Hungry Horse and bought some Jim Beam whiskey. I also brought home several of the files to mull over to try to get a feel for what my gut was telling me.

  After leaving Stimpy, we checked with the Columbia Falls police station and verified that Andy Stimpson was at the party they visited. With no search warrants on hand, they didn’t search for drugs, just for underage drinkers, which, lucky for the hostess, weren’t there. This didn’t account for whether he had left earlier in the day or for what time he showed up at the party, but it did verify that he was there around seven p.m., a time Wilson said was possible for the bullet to have entered Lance.

  My rationalization about the whiskey was that it would cut through whatever static was clouding my brain and leave only my intuition to point me in the right direction like a compass finding true north. Instead, I found myself going deeper into my neurosis, rolling the Vermont quarter incessantly over and over, and feeling sorry for myself and guilty for not having phoned my mother or sister since I’d gotten to Glacier.

  That’s when there was a knock. I shoved the coin back in my pocket and opened the door to find Monty with a yellow bag of potato chips. “Didn’t have time to bake that pie.” He held out the bag.

  I moved to the side and gestured for him to come in. “I’ll live.”

  “Oh, but I make a good one.”

  “I’m sure you do and probably balance your checkbook just as well. The question is, can you operate a chain saw?”

  “Sure can.” He smiled.

  “And can you drink whiskey and fill up on those greasy chips
”—I motioned to the bag with my chin—“and still be worth a damn in the morning?”

  “We’ll find out,” Monty said.

  I laughed in spite of my earlier disappointment in him. If this geeky guy was actually going to attempt to drink liquor with me instead of Shirley Temples, I’d have to give him some credit. I thought of the two old men in Melissa’s bar, tossing back a couple tumblers of whiskey in the middle of the afternoon. I grabbed Monty a glass from the old oak cabinets, threw a few ice cubes in, and splashed the amber liquid over them, its dark color rich in the hue cast through the old 1950s-looking, rippled-glass light casings of the cabin. “So what brings you here?”

  “Thought we could go over the case.”

  I nodded. “Workaholic, are ya?”

  “I suppose. And you’re not?” He looked at the papers spread across the rectangular table in front of the old couch.

  “Actually, I’m not. I just don’t have anything better to do in this place.”

  “This place? You say it with such disdain?”

  “Nah.” I shrugged. “Didn’t mean to.” But I did.

  “I thought you were from here? Don’t you have family in the area?”

  “I am and I do.” I took a sip of whiskey and winced out of habit even though I was probably already beyond the grimacing phase. “Now don’t start making me feel guilty about that.”

  “You haven’t seen ’em?”

  “Actually, haven’t even called ’em.”

  Monty peered at me through his glasses, his eyes seeming wider than usual, almost magnified, and I couldn’t tell whether it was the booze or the eyeglasses he was wearing.

  “What? You been noticing a lot of extra leisure time in the past two days?”

  “True.” Monty looked at the coffee table again. “Are there always this many leads?”

  “There’s always a lot of busywork, tracking things down, verifying details, but this one has a bunch of divergent avenues to go down.” I sat in the chair I’d been sitting in for the first two nights and gestured for Monty to sit as well.

  He did, set his glass on the coffee table, and ripped open the bag of chips.

  “Let’s see,” I said, holding up my index finger, “we’ve got the meth connection.” I added a finger and continued to do so with each lead. “We’ve got the animal torture thing, we’ve got a weird situation with a family member’s truck seen closest to the crime, and I don’t need to tell you, the family or the significant other’s always the first place we look because nine times out of ten, there’s trouble there. Which leads us to the girlfriend.” I had four fingers in the air and was gesturing with them. “Who—Christ Almighty—happens to be Smith’s daughter. And let’s not forget that she’s got a new boyfriend”—I opened my thumb—“who just might have a temper himself and just might have wanted to teach this guy a lesson or two.” I put my hand down.

  “Obviously,” I said, “Smith’s daughter doesn’t know how to pick ’em. And now”—I looked Monty in the eye—“your boss tells me that Victor’s uncle is trying to get a life-estate agreement out of him because the grandchildren are all feuding over how to deal with the Lake McDonald cabin, which is probably worth, what, a few million now?”

  “Hard to say what the land is worth at this point. It’s not like the Park Service is dripping with money these days, but usually they do buy anything they can get in the Lake McDonald area. And for Lou Shelton’s lot, anything in that price range is a lot of money. Somehow they always scrape the funds together, whether they use TPL.” He raised his brow to see if I knew what he meant.

  “Yeah, Trust for Public Lands.”

  “That’s right. Often we use them for bridge funding or we sometimes use LWCF, you know, the Land and Water Conservation Fund.”

  “You work a lot with this stuff?”

  “I do.”

  “That what you do for Ford?”

  “Partly.”

  I studied Monty sitting on the old forest-green couch that sunk with anyone’s weight, even his small frame. I had somehow come to trust him in a very short span of time, but I wasn’t exactly sure why. Probably most significant to me was that he seemed to lack the prevalent overinflated ego and the cockiness that often accompanied law enforcement. Plus he stayed quiet in all the right places. But after today, with Ford, it was clear whom his loyalty resided with, so I wasn’t sure I’d been wise. Of course, it’s not like it was a bad thing that he was loyal to his boss. It just bugged me that his boss was Ford. “You like working for that guy?”

  “That guy? There’s that disdain again. You really don’t like him?”

  “Don’t know him enough to know.”

  “Well, it’s an absolute joy.” Monty made an overexaggerated smile, all teeth. “By the way, he’s not my boss. Smith is.”

  “He’s the super and you’ve been assigned to him. Same difference.”

  Monty shrugged. “You think that life-estate deal might have something to do with this?”

  I looked at the paperwork on my desk and picked up Shelton’s file. He had no criminal record, and his financial records were decent except for a Chapter 11 financial reorganization that he filed for in the early nineties. “Probably not. It’s a far-reaching and highly unlikely scenario, especially with all the trouble our victim was capable of getting into all on his own. But let’s just say, for example, that since he was such a live wire, that a cousin wanted him out of the possible inheritance pool? Again, it’s far-reaching, but maybe Victor was threatening Lou or one of the other cousins with something. Maybe Victor knew that Lou was talking to Ford about giving the place up and knew that he’d never see a dime of it. And being the druggie that he was, he might have been counting on living in the place once Lou was gone. All those homesteads are long since paid off.”

  Monty shrugged. “Sounds like a bad movie.”

  “It does.” I chuckled. “Must be the whiskey. Speaking of which, your ice is melting.” I lifted my chin to point at his glass. I felt like an older college student trying to corrupt his younger roommate. To my surprise, Monty grabbed his glass and finished the entire amount in one swig. He cringed, then he grabbed a handful of chips and threw the bag across the table toward me.

  “I like to stay away from the far-fetched.” I grabbed a few. “Another?”

  “Why not?”

  I brushed the salt off my palm on my jeans and went to the kitchen to grab the bottle and felt how noodlelike my legs were. Honestly, this was the best I’d felt in the last sixty-some hours. I refilled Monty’s drink and went back with the bottle. “How come you didn’t tell me about Lou Shelton before we went to see him?” I asked.

  “Tell you what?”

  “That you knew Ford was attempting to get a life estate out of him?”

  “Didn’t know about it. Never even heard the Shelton name before.”

  I eyed Monty, tried to read if he was being straight with me. “And you don’t think that’s strange?”

  “What? You mean in terms of Ford or Shelton or me?”

  “All three.”

  “I didn’t work on the west-side projects. I’ve been working mostly on the mining claim inholdings east of the Continental Divide, which were part of the Ceded Strip.”

  “The Ceded Strip?”

  “Yeah, you know. George Grinnell bought the strip in about 1895 from the Blackfeet and sold it to the government for conservation purposes, although, of course, at the time, before Taft even signed the bill to make the park in 1910, the government was mainly interested in mining, laying roads for that, and trapping into places like Quartz Lake or even Cracker.”

  “So, what work do you have with that now?”

  “You’d be surprised. By Cracker Lake in the St. Mary region, there are mining claims in court because the Park Service still doesn’t own that strip of land even though it’s in the designated bo
rder of the park. It’s still part of the Ceded Strip. The Blackfeet are still fighting for it because the government didn’t uphold its end of the bargain, you know, we’ll give you X amount for this land and we’ll also do Y and Z. Then the government doesn’t do Y and Z.”

  “Sounds like a familiar story.”

  “Yeah, but the court cases are a waste of time. They’ll never get that land back from the government. Then there are other claims, like from the Cattle Queen’s lineage. You’ve heard of her.”

  “I suppose.” I had a vague notion that I’d heard of her in some Montana history book in college.

  “She ran a cattle ranch near the town of Choteau in the late 1800s and had a mining claim on a creek that ran through the park, Cattle Queen Creek.”

  I hadn’t heard Monty talk this much since he’d joined me and I wondered if the historical element of the park is what drew him to working with the superintendent. “And what about this side?” I asked.

  “Even the west side has a few old mining claims, but mostly, it’s the homesteads and some ranches up past Polebridge where they used to have cattle that have the inholdings.”

  “And what’s the main deal with the inholdings around West Glacier?”

  “Just that the people who own private lands that are locked inside the park usually have lineage that goes way back. That’s the reason they have the land. For years, the Park Service has been trying to buy most of the inholders out with not a whole lot of success. People underestimate the value of family heritage. And for these people, their land and what they decide to do with it often is very different from what the Park Service wants to do with it.”