Light of the World dr-20

by James Lee Burke

  Louie did not go out in a blaze of glory. He died in a lawn chair while watching a shuffleboard game at the retirement center where he lived. At his funeral, a woman in the viewing line leaned over the coffin and spat in his face. Many thought she was the widow of a victim. As it turned out, she was his landlady, and Louie had stiffed her on a winning lottery ticket they had purchased together. In death, Louie was no more dignified or intriguing than he had been in life, and all his lessons were no more than the self-serving rationale of a psychopath. The problem was that Gretchen hadn’t gotten into the life for money. What she learned from Louie was a means to another end — namely, to get even for the burns that had been inflicted on an infant and for the day a man named Golightly had forever robbed her of her innocence.

  Don’t let your feelings get involved in it? What a laugh, she thought.

  She put her dark glasses back on and dipped her hand in her tote bag and felt the can of Mace and the foamed butt of the telescopic baton she carried. She waited until a car passed, then crossed the street and stepped up on Bill Pepper’s darkened porch. The bulb above the door made a loud squeak when she unscrewed it. Beyond the house, she could see the moon shining on a church steeple and hear the river humming through the willows and rocks along the riverbank.

  Go home. There’s still time. He’s a cop. Don’t throw everything away over an insult, a voice said.

  Another voice replied, Don’t let anyone get over on you ever again.

  She tapped on the door with her left hand, her breath coming hard in her chest as she stared through the glass at the detective’s face approaching hers.

  When he opened the door, she could smell the whiskey and cigarettes through the screen. He worked the light switch up and down, his expression puzzled. “Must have burned out a bulb,” he said. “Who’s that?”

  Her scarf was tied down tightly on her head, the lenses in her glasses as dark as a welder’s goggles. She tightened her hand around the can of Mace. On the living room wall was a framed photograph of the detective holding a little girl in a pinafore on his hip, both of them smiling. Another photograph showed him with a little boy. “You the lady from the church?” he said.

  “Pardon?” she said.

  “The one who called about Sarah going to Bible camp? Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

  “I’m Gretchen Horowitz, and I need to talk to you about a comment you made.”

  His eyes went away from her. Then he smiled with recognition. “Oh yeah, I got it. Come in,” he said, pushing open the screen. “I need to explain some things.”

  Don’t do it, the voice said.

  “I heard what you and your deputy said.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I’m expecting a phone call,” he said, stepping back, motioning her in. “My granddaughter is gonna be visiting in June. I’m supposed to enroll her in Bible camp. That’s why I thought—” The phone rang on a hallway table. He made a face and picked it up, leaving her in the doorway, gesturing at her to come in while he talked.

  She could hear only part of the conversation, but it was obvious he was agitated and conflicted, trying to suppress his irritation and at the same time please the party on the other end of the line. “No, sir, Dixon may be a partner in the crime, but not necessarily,” he said. “We have the arrow somebody shot at the Robicheaux girl. I found a salesman at Bob Ward’s sporting goods who remembers a guy buying a bow and arrows of the same kind three days ago. He remembers the guy wearing a bracelet woven from metal wire… No, sir, the guy paid cash, so all we have on him is the salesman’s description. Trust me on this, sir. I’m gonna nail the man who did this to your granddaughter.”

  She was standing inside the doorway when he hung up. He seemed to look at her without seeing her.

  “Was that the grandfather of the Indian girl who was killed?” she asked.

  “I was just doing a little outreach,” he said. “Where were we? My treatment of Wyatt Dixon this morning? He’s got people around here fooled, but I knew him when he was a member of a white-power group down in the Bitterroot Valley, the same bunch at Hayden Lake over in Idaho. I saw what somebody did to that Indian girl, and this morning I went a little crazy. I lost it. I wish I hadn’t.”

  She had taken off her glasses and placed them in her tote bag. She continued to stare at him, not speaking.

  “You want a drink?” he said.

  When she didn’t answer, he sat down on a couch with a cheap flower-print cover. He pulled the cork from a whiskey bottle and poured into a teacup. “Let me catch my breath. Sit down, will you, please? Okay, this is what it is: I went up there on the logging road, and the deputy made a wiseacre sexist remark, and I thought I’d say something smart back. I shot off my mouth. I’m sorry I did that. Look, this doesn’t excuse my behavior, but I’ve got a couple of problems myself, one with my prostate, the other with my daughter, who can’t get her life on track.”

  He looked down at his teacup, then picked it up and drank it empty. “I got the Big C. I might beat it, I might not. If I had my way, I’d be down in Muscle Shoals, crabbing with my grandchildren. Except I need the income for my daughter and her kids, and I can’t retire. Maybe you can help me with something here.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Your friend the Robicheaux girl? She’s sure she didn’t see who shot that arrow at her?”

  “Ask her.”

  “Like I was saying on the phone, we got the arrow from her, but the only prints on it were hers. That means the guy who shot it wiped it down. Which means he was operating in a premeditated fashion to commit a homicide. Wyatt Dixon had no reason to target the Robicheaux girl.”

  “Then who was it?”

  He rubbed his palms up and down on his thighs, a spark of static electricity jumping off the heel of his hand. “I got a theory. Close the door and sit down. You want a glass of wine or a Pepsi? My guess is you’d rather have a Pepsi.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you’re all business, lady. You don’t mess around. I doubt you ever take guff off a man, either.”

  He went to the small kitchen just off the living room and opened the refrigerator and placed the ice tray and a tall glass on the counter and ripped the tab on a soda can and filled the glass, all the while talking about his grandchildren with his back to her. She was standing in the same spot when he came back into the living room. “Mind if I close this? I think it’s fixing to rain again,” he said, pushing the front door shut. “Dixon may not have shot at your friend, but that doesn’t mean he’s an innocent man. He stays viable through deception. He loved what I did to him this morning because he was center stage. I’ve known his kind all my life, ignorant peckerwoods always spouting from the Bible. They say they’re born-again, but they’ll cut your throat for a quarter and lick the cut clean for an extra dime.”

  “You seem to really hate him.”

  “What I hate is deceit. I’ll tell you something I don’t tell many people. My father was a brakeman on the old L and N line. He took pity on a black vagabond and fed him and let him sleep in a boxcar parked on a siding. When the guy woke up, he killed my father with a pocketknife and took his billfold and left his body on the tracks. We moved to a place on an alley in Macon, and I grew up shining shoes, and my mother and little sister did housecleaning. You learn a lot about the world looking up from a shoeshine box. How do you think that Indian girl got killed? Somebody deceived her. We know she knew Dixon because she bought a bracelet from him. Maybe her killer was Dixon’s friend, maybe a partner of some kind.”

  She sat down in a chair across from him. “Run that by me again.”

  He went into a circuitous history about Dixon’s background, the crimes of which he was suspected but never charged, the fact that Dixon had been a member of a separatist group in Texas and on the edge of the same circles as Timothy McVeigh. She sipped from her glass, the fatigue of the day starting to catch up with her, her concentration starting to stray. She noticed the tidy drabnes
s of the room, the frayed carpets, the nicked furniture, like a re-creation of an impoverished working-class home from many years ago. He seemed to become frustrated with her inattention, his hands moving more rapidly, his chest swelling. He loosened his collar. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To talk.”

  “Then why don’t you talk? Maybe you came here for something else.”

  “I think we’ve straightened it out.”

  “What were you going to do if that didn’t happen?”

  Her mouth was dry, the muscles in her chest not working right.

  “Why don’t you answer the question?” he said.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I was talking about deception. Haven’t you been listening? You look a little woozy.”

  She set her glass on the coffee table and looked at it. She had drunk half the glass, and the ice had melted and seemed as thin as frost-coated dimes floating on top of the Pepsi. Her skin felt rubbery and dead to the touch, and her tongue was thick and her words slurred when she tried to speak.

  “It’s kind of like being in a slow-motion film, isn’t it?” he said. “I got you, girlie.”

  Rohypnol, she thought.

  He picked up her tote bag from the floor and pulled it open against the drawstring and lifted out the can of Mace and the expandable baton known as an ASP. “I checked you out today. Miami-Dade PD says you may have been a female badass for the Mob. This is Montana, girl. You don’t do a beatdown on a Missoula County sheriff’s detective. You seriously fucked yourself tonight.” He got up from the couch and turned off the light in the kitchen and the table lamps in the living room. “My van is in back. But just so you know there’re no hard feelings—”

  He leaned down, the heat and the smell in his clothes almost suffocating her. She could taste the tobacco on his tongue when he put it in her mouth.

  * * *

  The accident on the state highway happened a short distance before the turnoff onto the dirt road that led to Albert Hollister’s ranch. A tractor-trailer rig carrying a three-story-high piece of oil field equipment bound for Canada had blown two tires and skidded off the shoulder, toppling the load into a stand of cottonwoods by the creek. The few cars coming off the crest of Lolo Pass had come to a stop, as well as the traffic from the town. Clete and I got out of my pickup truck and started walking toward the accident. There was a trace of purple at the bottom of the sky, the evening star twinkling just above the mountains. A helicopter was hovering directly overhead. I thought it carried a news team from a local television station. I was wrong. The chopper landed on the highway, not in a field but on the highway, and one of the wealthiest men in the United States stepped out of it.

  I had seen him once before, in Lafayette, right after an offshore blowout had killed eleven men on the derrick and strung miles of fecal-colored oil all over the Gulf Coast. If I ever saw a Jacksonian man, it was Love Younger. He was as rough-hewn as carved oak, with the broad forehead and wide-set eyes we associate with the Anglo-Scotch minutemen who fired the first shots at Lexington and Concord. He had grown up in a place in eastern Kentucky I visited once, a wretched community of shacks, some with dirt floors, where the residents drew their water from the same creek their privies were on. Paradoxically, he had not come to Lafayette to talk about the oil well blowout but to establish a scholarship fund based on merit and need at the University of Louisiana.

  I saw Alafair standing by the side of her Honda, looking down at the massive load of machinery that had toppled off the trailer into the edge of the creek, snapping all the boomer chains like string. The stand of cottonwoods it had fallen on had been crushed into the mud. “Was he speeding?” I said, looking up toward Lolo Pass.

  “I heard the driver say his tires blew,” she replied.

  Evidently, that explanation did not work for Love Younger. He was arguing with a highway patrolman, jabbing his finger in the air, motioning at a hilltop on the far side of the highway. The patrolman kept nodding, his mouth a tight seam, raising his eyes only to nod again.

  “That guy’s name is Love?” Clete said.

  “He claims to be a descendant of Cole Younger.”

  Clete wasn’t impressed. “He also smeared a guy with the Silver Star and a Purple Heart.”

  “Have y’all heard from Gretchen?” Alafair said.

  “What about her?” Clete said.

  “We were going to have a drink in Missoula. She doesn’t answer her cell phone.”

  “When’s the last time you talked with her?” Clete said.

  “Six.”

  He checked his cell phone for missed calls. “Did she say where she was going?”

  “She said she had to take care of some personal business.”

  Clete looked at her. “What kind of personal business?”

  “The personal kind,” she said. “She wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

  “Did it have anything to do with those cops who were up on the ridge this morning?” I asked.

  “Maybe. I didn’t think about it at the time. I gave the arrow to a plainclothes detective named Pepper. He made me kind of queasy.”

  “How?” I said.

  “His eyes. They look at you, but there’s no light behind them.”

  Clete began punching a number into his cell phone with his thumb. “Direct to voice mail,” he said. “What’s the name of that plainclothes again?”

  “Bill Pepper,” I said. “Let me see how long this is going to take.” I walked up to within four feet of the highway patrolman and Love Younger and two of his aides who were standing close by. None of them took any notice of me.

  “My driver says he’s almost sure he heard the crack of a rifle,” Younger said to the patrolman.

  “That’s not what I heard him say, sir,” the officer said.

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “No, sir. Your driver said he heard two popping sounds. That could have been his tires.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Younger said. “We’re two miles from the ranch of Albert Hollister. He’s well known as an environmental fanatic and rabble-rouser. He and the Sierra Club have done everything in their power to stop the transportation of my equipment.”

  I opened my badge holder. “Would you mind if we pull out on the shoulder and work our way on up to the next turnoff?”

  “Yes, sir, go right ahead,” the patrolman said.

  “Mr. Younger, could I have a word with you?” I said.

  “Concerning what?”

  “Your granddaughter.”

  In the illumination of emergency flares and headlights, I saw Love Younger’s eyes sharpen and fix on mine. There were tiny blue and red veins in his cheeks, a bit of stubble on his throat above his collar, and a look of heated intensity in the face that usually hides either great tragedy or great anger.

  “Up on that ridge just west of us, somebody shot a hunter’s arrow at my daughter. It cut her ear,” I said. “A half inch closer, she probably would have been killed. We think the guy who did it could be connected to the death of your granddaughter.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dave Robicheaux. I’m a sheriff’s detective in New Iberia, Louisiana.”

  “Get his information,” Younger said to one of his aides.

  “No, sir, I’ll talk to you, or we’ll not talk at all.”

  He turned toward me, his expression neutral, and seemed to take my measure a second time. He pulled a notepad from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Write down your contact number. I’ll call you as soon as I clean up this mess. What’s your name again?”

  I told him.

  “You were involved in a shooting in Louisiana. I was there when it happened. You killed a man named Alexis Dupree,” he said. “I knew him.”

  “I didn’t do it, but a friend of mine did. I was there and watched it and thought my friend did the right thing. I think the world is a
better place for it. I’ll look forward to your call, Mr. Younger. My condolences for your loss.” I walked back down the line of cars and rejoined Alafair and Clete.

  “What’s the haps?” Clete said.

  “Jacksonian democracy is highly overrated,” I replied. “Did you hear from Gretchen?”

  “No, something’s wrong. She always lets me know where she is, even out in California. Does a day come when you don’t have to worry about your kid?”

  “Never,” I said.

  * * *

  As she lay helpless in the back of the van, her wrists fastened behind her with plastic ligatures, she could see the black shapes of the mountains through the rear windows and the rain slapping against the roof and sweeping in sheets across the highway. Her muscles felt like butter, her neck so weak it could barely support the weight of her head. She estimated that the van had been on the four-lane only about ten minutes before it made a turn, and she guessed they were now on the two-lane state road that led through the old company mill town of Bonner and on up the Blackfoot River. Pepper had been silent the whole time, filling the inside of the van with the smoke from his unfiltered cigarettes.

  She heard the hollow rumbling of a bridge under the van. Abruptly, the van swung off the asphalt onto a dirt surface, gravel pinging the undercarriage. Minutes later, the van climbed a steep hill and came down the other side, then turned left onto a rocky track pocked with holes and probably strewn with desiccated tree branches and twigs that snapped and splintered up into the frame.

  Bill Pepper hit the brakes, tossing her against the back of his seat. When he cut the engine, she could hear the rain pattering on the roof and see the wind flattening the drops of water on the back windows. She could not remember a time in her life when the smallest of details about the natural world had seemed so important to her. Pepper continued to smoke his cigarette, leaning forward to get a better look at the heavens, like a sailor or a fisherman trying to anticipate a squall. “I like it out here,” he said, staring straight ahead.