“Oh, I will.”
“What did the killer do to Pepper?”
“Probably several things. I’ll have to wait on the coroner’s report to know for sure. His penis and testicles were in the sink. You believe in an afterlife?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I suspect Bill Pepper found his hell right here on earth,” the sheriff said.
* * *
Clete had fallen asleep sitting on a bench in a holding can somewhere on the north end of Flathead Lake. In his dream, he was a little boy and had gone with his father and mother and sisters to Pontchartrain Park for July the Fourth. It was dusk in the dream, and the sky was printed with the fireworks exploding over the lake, and he could hear the popping of rifles in the shooting gallery and the music from the carousel. His father and mother were smiling at him, and his sisters were holding hands and skipping down the boardwalk, the wind smelling of salt and caramel popcorn and candied apples.
When he woke from the dream, he looked through the window and saw the pink glow in the sky and thought the neon-striped Kamikaze packed with screaming kids was teetering against the sunset, about to rip like a scythe through the air and plummet toward the ground, then rise again into the gloaming of the day. He closed and opened his eyes and looked at the peeling yellow paint on the walls, the names burned into the ceiling with cigarette lighters, the toilet where someone’s vomit had dried on the rim.
The sheriff of Missoula County pulled up a chair to the barred door and sat down. He placed a yellow legal pad on his knee and studied it. “Other people will be talking to you, Mr. Purcel. But since it was a member of my department who was killed, I want the first crack at you,” he said.
“Y’all towed my Caddy?”
“I think that’s the least of your worries.”
“Where’s it parked?”
“You want to explain what you were doing at Bill Pepper’s cottage?”
“I already did. To anyone who’d listen. I went there to talk with him. The back door was open. He was lying in the hallway. I didn’t touch anything other than the outside doorknob. I left the inside as I’d found it. I tried to call in the 911, but I didn’t have cell service. I got stopped at the roadblock five miles from Big Fork. Where’d you put my Caddy?”
“Why were you carrying burglar tools and ligatures and all those weapons in a duffel bag?”
“I’m sentimental about memorabilia.”
“That’s pretty amusing. You think cutting off a man’s penis and testicles is amusing?”
“The guy was a dirty cop, and somebody caught up with him. But it wasn’t me.”
“How do you know he was a dirty cop?”
“He was compromising the investigation into the death of Angel Deer Heart in order to earn favor with her grandfather.”
“So you went up to his cottage on Swan Lake to talk to him about that?”
“That and a couple of other things.”
“What might the ‘other things’ be?”
“He and another idiot in your department made sexual remarks about my daughter in front of her and others. This was right after your man kicked the shit out of Wyatt Dixon.”
“When were these remarks made?”
“Why don’t you ask your crime scene investigator? He was there.”
“You were just looking out for your daughter’s interests?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
The sheriff stared at his legal pad. “Detective Pepper left a note behind. Did you know that?” he said.
“No.”
“He said some people thought he had a relationship with the ‘Horowitz girl.’ Would that be your daughter?”
“Horowitz is my daughter’s last name. Your man didn’t have any ‘relationship’ with her.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“Yeah, I do. We don’t invite cockroaches into our environment.”
“In the note, Detective Pepper indicated that he did something to your daughter. What would he be referring to?”
“I guess the remarks he made.”
“You’re telling me a man who’s coming apart, who’s drunk out of his mind, who’s telling the world ‘fuck it,’ is doing all this because of some sexist remarks he made to a young woman?”
“You’d know the answer to that better than me. I never met the man.”
“How did you know where his cottage was?”
“I called up a PI I know in Missoula.”
The sheriff nodded, his face composed, the long white tips of his mustache hanging below his jawbone. “That’s right, you were here many years ago, weren’t you? You did security for Sally Dio and some other mobsters.”
“That’s correct.”
“That was right before his plane crashed into the side of a mountain, wasn’t it?”
Clete looked thoughtfully out the window. “Yeah, I think I was still around here when that happened. It was a big loss. I think a pizza parlor in Palermo shut down for fifteen minutes.”
“We pulled your sheet at the NCIC, Mr. Purcel. You have a longer record than most felons. You killed a federal informant and dropped a Teamster official from a hotel window into a dry swimming pool. You and your friend Detective Robicheaux left a bunch of people dead on the bank of a bayou in Louisiana not once but twice.”
“That’s why we’re here — to rest up.”
“There’s only one reason you’re not being arrested. There’s no trace of blood on you or your clothing or shoes or in your vehicle. That leaves me in a quandary. If you’re an innocent man, why are you lying?”
“I’m not. And the reason I’m not under arrest is so you can question me without giving me my rights.”
The sheriff’s face was tired, his eyes without heat or anger or any emotion that Clete could see. “This is all about your daughter, isn’t it? What is it you’re not telling me, Mr. Purcel? What did Bill Pepper do to your little girl?”
* * *
Wyatt Dixon was unloading three tons of sixty-pound hay bales off a flatbed at his place on the Blackfoot River when he saw the two cruisers coming up the dirt road, their tires splashing through the puddles. He was shirtless and wearing a straw hat and Wranglers tucked inside his boots, a bandana knotted around his neck. He fitted his fingers under the twine on a bale and lifted it out in front of him, his chest and arms blooming with green veins. He walked to the edge of the bed and dropped the bale into space, his gaze never leaving the cruisers. His shoulders were pink with fresh sunburn, and his back was crosshatched with scar tissue that looked like it had been laid there with a whip. A scar as thick as an earthworm ran from under his armpit and disappeared inside his leather belt. The deputies parked in the shade of the cottonwoods and approached him as a group of four, studying his half-crushed house, his barn, the trees, the bluebirds, the Appaloosas in the corral, the riffle in the middle of the stream, anything that kept them from having to look directly at Wyatt Dixon.
Wyatt removed his hat and unknotted his bandana and wiped his face and gazed at the Indian paintbrush and wild roses that grew in the grass along the riverbank. The river was deep and wide from the runoff and contained a coppery green light where the sun shone directly upon it. Wyatt put his hat back on and fingered the long red welt that ran down his side. For just a second he thought about the bull that had impaled him at the Calgary Stampede, shaking him on its horns like a piñata and goring him again on the ground, the crowd rising, the women holding their hands to their mouths.
“Howdy-doody, boys,” he said.
The lead deputy had to squint into the sun to look up at Wyatt. “Know why we’re here?”
“To pester people?”
“Somebody killed Bill Pepper up at Swan Lake.”
“I’m totally broke up,” Wyatt said.
“We’d like to have you come down to the department.”
“I already been there. I didn’t enjoy it too much.”
“The sheriff probably wants to exclude you.”
“I’ll save
y’all the time. Just consider me excluded.”
“It’s important, Wyatt.”
“Not to me it ain’t.”
“We’re just doing our job. How about hooking yourself up? It’s not personal.”
“Speaking of job performance, I’d rate y’all’s somewhere between mediocre to piss-poor.”
“Is it true you can speak dead languages?”
Wyatt blew his breath up into his face and looked at the sunlight wobbling inside the riffle on the river, then jumped down from the flatbed into the middle of the deputies. All of them stepped backward before they could check themselves. He began picking pieces of hay off his arms and chest, dropping each one into the wind. “How’d Pepper go out?” he asked.
“Hard,” the lead deputy said.
“How hard?”
“Hard as it gets.”
“It happened this morning?”
The deputy shook his head noncommittally. Wyatt lifted his T-shirt off the outside mirror on the driver’s side of the flatbed truck. He studied his reflection in the mirror, touching at a razor nick on his jaw, then worked his shirt over his arms and head and neck. The T-shirt fitted him so tightly, it looked like latex on his skin. His eyes were empty when he looked at the deputy. “Did Pepper go out with a bag over his head?”
“I don’t know all the details,” the deputy said. “I can’t discuss them with you, anyway.”
“Did you know Angel Deer Heart?”
“Afraid not,” the deputy said.
“Did you ever wonder why rich people would adopt a raggedy-ass little girl from the rez?”
“Put on the cuffs, Wyatt.”
“Half of them come out of the womb with alcohol on the brain. The other half are crack babies.”
“You could ask the lead investigator about all this, except he’s dead.”
“You ever hear Southerners talk about the ‘dumbest white person’ they ever met?”
“Nope.”
“Most people think that’s an insult to people of color. What that really means is the dumbest person on earth is a stupid white man. You can teach a horse, a dog, or even a tree frog to tap-dance before you can teach toilet training to a white man who is willfully ignorant. All colored people know that.”
The deputy cupped his hand around Wyatt’s upper arm. “You’re a puzzle, buddy.”
“Did you know y’all are living in the middle of biblical events?”
“Biblical?”
“That’s what I said.”
The deputy walked with him to the cruiser. “I love your accent, Wyatt. Watch your head getting in,” he said.
* * *
At one-thirty P.M. on Saturday, the sheriff called me again. “You want to come down here and talk to this crazy bastard?” he said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Most of the DIs I knew in the service were from the South. I always thought someone had pissed inside their brains when they were infants. Now I’m sure of it. I just spent twenty minutes listening to Wyatt Dixon talk about the history of the earth and the coming of the Antichrist. Did you know the world is sixty-four hundred years old?”
“He’s probably psychotic. Why pay any attention to anything he says?”
“Because he had motivation to kill Detective Pepper. He’s also one of the last people to see Angel Deer Heart alive.”
I didn’t want to remind the sheriff that he had spoken favorably of Dixon after Alafair and I had trouble with him. “Does he have an alibi for last night?”
“His neighbors across the river say there was a light on in his barn and they thought they saw him shoeing horses until after midnight.”
“So he’s not your guy?”
“Probably not. But he has information about the Deer Heart girl that he’s not sharing.”
“What kind of information?”
“He thinks she was adopted for reasons other than humanitarian ones.”
“What reasons?”
“He’s a little vague on that.”
“Why’d you call me?” I asked.
“Because I don’t know what the hell I’m dealing with. What makes it worse is that Wyatt Dixon has almost convinced me.”
“Of what?”
“That there’s an evil presence in our midst. That the cave behind Albert Hollister’s house is the source of something that I hate to even think about.”
“Don’t let this guy get to you,” I said.
“Come down here and tell me that after you look at Bill Pepper’s face in the crime scene photos. One of his eyes looked like an eight ball. The coroner says he was alive when he was castrated. Where’s the Horowitz girl?”
I looked out the window. Gretchen’s pickup was parked by the guest cabin. “She didn’t do this,” I said.
“We talked to a homicide investigator at Miami-Dade. She was known in the trade as Caruso. You want to vouch for Caruso, Mr. Robicheaux?”
* * *
After Clete was released from the holding jail in Big Fork, he did not ask Gretchen if she’d had anything to do with the death of Bill Pepper. At the cabin, she kept waiting for him to stop talking and look directly in her face and ask the question, but he didn’t. She fixed bacon and scrambled eggs and set his plate on the table and sat down across from him and waited some more. He started eating, buttering a biscuit, drinking his coffee, spearing his fork through the eggs, but he didn’t ask the question.
“I went looking for you,” she said.
“I figured you would,” he replied.
“You didn’t find Pepper, did you?”
“Not alive, I didn’t.”
“You think I did him?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“If he’d drawn down on you or tried to attack you again, you would have blown him out of his socks. Maybe you would have broken a couple of his spokes. But you didn’t have anything to do with what happened inside that cottage. Neither did I. Anyone who thinks different doesn’t know anything about either of us.”
“I told you what I wanted to do to him. I told you how I wanted him to suffer.”
“You’re like most brave people, Gretchen: too brave to know you’re supposed to be afraid, and too good to understand you’re incapable of doing bad.”
She thought she was going to cry.
He stopped eating. “Dave and I did a lot of stuff at NOPD that we don’t like to remember. We called it operating under a black flag. That’s when the Contras and the Colombians were filling our cities with cocaine. But we never did anything beyond what we had to. That’s the only rule there is. You do what you have to, and you never hurt people unnecessarily.” He started eating again.
She got up from the table and went into the bathroom and washed her face and dried it. When she came back out, he was looking at the FedEx mailer she had left on the coffee table. “What’s that?” he said.
“Some Sierra Club guys got ahold of a core sample from an exploratory well drilled on the Canadian side of the frontier. I sent it to a geological lab in Austin. This stuff has the same kind of sulfurous content that’s coming out of the shale-oil operation up in Alberta. Supposedly, it heats up the planet a lot faster than ordinary crude.”
“Pepper left a note. Evidently, some guys scared the hell out of him. They thought maybe you were his girlfriend and you had some information that was harmful to their interests.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I thought the sheriff had his ass on upside down. You think this has something to do with the documentary you’re making?”
“I just got out of film school. Why should anyone be afraid of me?”
“I can’t imagine,” he replied.
* * *
That afternoon she took her nine-millimeter Beretta and her Airweight .38 up to the gun range behind Albert’s house. The sun had already gone behind the ridge, and the trees were full of shadows and clattering with robins. Up the arroyo by the a
bandoned log road, she saw a flock of wild turkeys that had been down to the creek to drink before going to bed. She set up a row of coffee cans on a wood plank suspended between two rocks and clamped on her ear protectors and, from twenty yards away, aimed the Beretta with both arms extended and let off all fourteen rounds in the magazine, blowing the cans into the air and hitting them again as they rolled down the hillside, birds rising from the trees all around her.
She saw the man on horseback out of the corner of her eye but showed no recognition of his presence. She set down the Beretta on Albert’s shooting table and removed the ear protectors and shook out her hair. She picked up the five-shot Airweight and flipped out the cylinder from the frame and picked the rounds one at a time from the ammunition box and plopped them into the chambers, then closed the cylinder, never glancing at the man on horseback. “What do you think you’re doing here?” she said, as though speaking to herself.
“I rent pasture on the other side of the ridge. You shot the doo-doo out of them cans.”
She began picking up the cans and replacing them on the plank. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. You already done it,” he said. He stood up in the stirrups and grabbed the limb of a ponderosa and lifted himself free of the horse, his biceps swelling to the size of softballs. He was wearing a maniacal grin when he dropped to the ground, his shoulders hunched like an ape’s. He caught the reins of the Appaloosa and flipped them around the lower branch of a fir tree. “You’ve got a fourteen-round pre-assault-weapons-ban magazine in that Beretta. That’s right impressive.”
“I think you’re probably a pretty good guy, cowboy. But you’re off your turf,” she said.
“You got a mouth on you. Ain’t many that speaks their mind like that.”
“Does Mr. Hollister mind you riding up here?”
“He never mentioned it.”
“You know who he is?”
He seemed to think about the question. “A famous writer.”
“Have you tried any of his books?”
He looked into space. “I don’t recall. My brain ain’t always in the best of shape,” he said. He was wearing a candy-striped shirt with a rolled white collar. His shirt was pressed and his needle-nosed boots spit-shined, as bright as mirrors even in the shade. “You like rodeos?”
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