Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  "You know a guy named Wyatt Dixon?" I asked.

  "No. Who is he?"

  "An ex-con from Texas. He seems to be buds with this militia leader, Carl Hinkel."

  "If Hinkel had his way, the rest of us would be bars of soap."

  "You know this Earth First group?" I said.

  "The first line of defense against the dickheads- those are Los Angeles dickheads I'm talking about," he said, his voice rising again, his eyes resting on the tourists, "who want to drill for oil in wilderness areas and denude the national forest."

  "I see."

  "You're not convinced?" he said.

  "It's been good meeting you, Mr. Girard. I read a couple of your books. I admire your talent."

  He seemed to look at me with a different light in his eyes.

  He said, "Holly and I are having some people over tonight. It's a publication party. A collection of essays done by local writers on the Blackfoot. Bring Tobin Voss or whoever you like."

  "That's kind of you. Tell me, Mr. Girard, why would a fellow's film agent want to send a private detective after him?"

  "Man claims I set fire to his convertible outside the Polo Lounge. But don't put any credence in that. The poor guy's unbalanced. He's trying to set up 900 toll numbers for Charlie Manson and the Menendez brothers."

  "This is your agent?"

  "Not anymore," he said, his eyes smiling.

  "Come with us," Doc said to his daughter Maisey that evening.

  "Holly Girard looks like melted wax somebody put in the refrigerator," Maisey said.

  "I don't want you here alone," he said.

  "Steve is picking me up. We're going to the movies. If you don't trust me, then stay home."

  "What time are you coming back from the show?" Doc said.

  "Maybe you could put an electric monitor on me. The kind that criminals wear when they're sentenced to home arrest."

  "How about it with the histrionics?" Doc said.

  "How about it yourself, Dad? You're the selfish one. You give up nothing and want me to give up everything."

  Maisey's face had the bright shininess of a candied apple. The skin above her upper lip was moist with perspiration, like a little girl's.

  Ease up, Doc, I thought.

  He looked out the front window at the twilight in the hills and the black swirl of the river as it made a bend and flowed deeper into woods that had already gone dark with shadow.

  "We'll be back by eleven. Can you do the same?" he said.

  "I don't know. Kids in Missoula fill condoms with water and throw them at each other's cars. Can I give that up for my father's peace of mind? Gee, I'm not sure," she said. She fixed her hair in front of the mirror and looked at her father's reflection and raised her eyebrows innocuously.

  I went outside and waited for Doc by my truck. Through the front window I could see him and Maisey arguing bitterly. When he came outside he tried to be good-natured but he couldn't hide the strain in his face.

  "They say a father has a few rough moments when his daughter is between thirteen and seventeen. I think it's more like being rope-drug up and down a staircase on a daily basis," he said.

  "Who's the kid she's going out with?" I asked.

  "He lives up the road. He's a good boy. There's his car now," Doc said.

  "Then quit worrying," I said.

  We drove into Missoula through Hellgate Canyon and met Cleo Lonnigan at an ice cream parlor on the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. She was outside, at a table by the water, the cottonwoods blowing in the wind behind her. She wore a black dress and pearls and looked absolutely beautiful.

  "I called your house. I thought maybe I was late. Maisey said you'd already left," she said.

  A network of lines crisscrossed Doc's forehead.

  "How long ago did you call?" he asked.

  "Just a minute ago," Cleo answered.

  "Why is she still at home?" Doc said, then went to the pay phone inside the ice cream parlor before either Cleo or I could speak.

  "He's a little wired," I said.

  "I think Doc and his daughter should get a divorce," she said.

  I saw him replace the receiver on the hook, then walk down the steps toward us.

  "Nobody home. They probably took off," he said.

  "Sure," I said, glad the conversation was about to change.

  He glanced at his wristwatch, his eyes busy with thought. "I'll call from Girard's place," he said.

  Xavier Girard and his wife Holly lived in a big log house on a bluff above the Clark Fork. The sun was only a spark between two ridges in the western part of the valley now, but the afterglow rose high into the vault of blue sky overhead, and looking to the north you could see snowcapped mountains in the Rattlesnake Wilderness and, toward Missoula, the maple trees in residential neighborhoods riffling in the breeze and the lights of downtown reflecting on the river's surface.

  "Whose money bought this place?" I said as we walked up the drive toward the sundeck of the Girards' house.

  "Not Xavier's. He has the reverse King Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to garbage. He went back to Louisiana and built a million-dollar home on the bayou, you know, boy from Shitsville makes good, except he built it in a sinkhole and the foundation caved in and the whole thing slid into the bayou," Doc said.

  The guests on the deck and in the living room were writers and university people, artists, biologists and conservationists, photographers, liberal arts students from the East, an editor from Doubleday, a journalist from Time, a movie producer from A amp;E, smoke jumpers, and Xavier Girard's entourage of barroom fans.

  An actor from north-central Texas, who wore a suit with no tie, his dress shirt open at the collar, was holding forth at a glass-topped table, his mouth downturned at the corners like a drill instructor's.

  He was talking about a casting lunch of years ago.

  "See, Dennis is a right good boy and all, but he don't have no understanding of Southerners whatsoever. We was waiting on the food to come out and he started lecturing at me and using profane language and carrying on and getting in my face like he growed up in a vacant lot. So I reached across the table and grabbed him by the necktie and dragged him through the Caesar salad and cut off his tie with a steak knife and slammed him back down in the chair and told him to start acting like a white person for a change. I didn't have no trouble with him after that, but damned if the part didn't go to…"

  Down below the deck we could hear Xavier Girard, stripped to the waist, pounding a speed bag with his bare fists while his barroom pals looked on admiringly.

  It was Girard's wife who was the surprise. I expected her to possess at least some of her husband's eccentricities. Instead, she was either an extraordinary actress or she must have been blind-drunk the night she married him. She seemed to gaze into your eyes with total interest, regardless of the subject of conversation. Her skin was pale, her mouth irregularly shaped, as though her expression and smile were unpracticed, perhaps a bit vulnerable. She wore her dark blond hair in tresses and stood close to the person she was talking to, either man or woman, in a way that seemed sexually intimate yet defenseless.

  "You were an Assistant United States Attorney?" she said.

  "For a while. In Phoenix," I replied.

  "Why'd you quit?" she said.

  "I probably wasn't that good at it."

  Her eyes probed mine, as though my sentence contained meaning that the two of us should examine together. Then she fitted her thumb and forefinger around my wrist and said, "Will you let me share something with you?"

  We walked to the edge of the deck, into the shadows and a layer of cold air that rose from the river. The pines farther up the hill were black against the stars. She wore a purple evening dress and there was a shine on the tops of her breasts. Through the sliding glass doors I could see Doc punching in numbers repeatedly on a telephone while Cleo stood behind him, an exasperated expression on her face.

  "I'm concerned for Doc. He's obsessed about t
his gold mine up the Blackfoot," Holly Girard said.

  "Seems like he has a lot of company," I said.

  "But people listen to him. He was a war hero. He's got this Byzantine aura of spirituality about him. He could read the phone book and sound like John Donne."

  "You think somebody's going to hurt him?"

  "How would you feel toward Doc if you had no work and no food in the house and a poet was telling you a trout stream was more important than feeding your family?" she said.

  Through the glass door I saw Doc bang the phone receiver down in the cradle.

  "Excuse me," I said, and went inside. Doc widened his eyes at me, his hand still on the phone receiver, feigning a smile.

  "I called the theater they were going to. I know the manager. He didn't see her," Doc said.

  "Like the theater manager doesn't have anything else on his mind," Cleo said.

  "Y'all want to go?" I asked. "I should have brought my car," Doc said.

  "It's all right," I said.

  "It's been quite an evening. I just don't know if I can stand any more like it," Cleo said.

  I told them I'd see them outside and I went down a hallway to the bathroom. Three women and two men were standing by an abstract oil painting, not far from the bathroom door. Their eyes were bright, their conversation gilded with laughter.

  "Is this the line for the bathroom?" I asked.

  They stopped talking and looked at me peculiarly, as though I had spoken in another language. Then a woman said, "Holly's inside."

  The door was ajar, and I saw Holly Girard bend over a framed mirror that lay horizontally on a marble-topped counter. Her evening dress was backless, and I could see the delicate bones under her skin as she inhaled a chopped white line deeply into her lungs through a rolled dollar bill. She wiped the mirror's surface with her index finger and rubbed her finger inside her gums.

  She straightened her shoulders, turned and opened the door, and looked blankly into my face.

  "Oh hello, again," she said. "The maid must have misplaced my toothbrush. I had to brush my teeth with my finger. Can you imagine?"

  "Right. Can I get out through that far door?" I said, pointing toward the end of the hallway.

  "Are you offended in some way?" she asked.

  "No, I'm not."

  "Then stay," she said, and reached out and encircled my wrist as she had earlier.

  "You asked me why I quit the Justice Department," I said. "It's because a Texas Ranger named L.Q. Navarro and I killed a bunch of cocaine and tar mules down in Old Mexico. I hate the son-sofbitches who sell that stuff, and if I had it to do all over, I'd kill those men again. So I guess it'd be a little hypocritical of me if I prosecuted homicide cases.

  The group by the oil painting stared at me with the opaqueness of people caught in a strobe light.

  "Don't be that way," Holly said to me, her expression suddenly tender.

  I walked down the hall and out the door into the night, the back of my neck flaming with embarrassment.

  Doc AND I dropped Cleo at her car by the ice cream parlor, then drove up the Blackfoot River toward his house. We turned off the highway north of Potomac, rumbled across the log-and-cable bridge onto the dirt road, and drove along the edge of a dry creek bed that was white and dusty and webbed with algae under the moon.

  Doc kept squinting his eyes through the front window.

  "That looks like a fire," he said.

  "Where?"

  "Through the trees. You see it?" he said.

  "No," I said, irritably, and used the electric buttons on the door to roll down all the windows in the truck. "You smell any smoke?"

  "None," he said.

  "Then for God's sakes, shut up. I don't want to hear any more doom and gloom. If just for five minutes. Okay, Doc?"

  We went across a cattle guard and drove down the two-track lane through the meadow behind his house. I had been right. There was no fire in the vicinity. Instead, Doc's yard was filled with emergency vehicles whose flashers lit the front porch of the house and the trees and the pebbled bank of the river and the current that flowed through the boulders with the dull red glow of a smithy's forge.

  Chapter 6

  A FEW MINUTES LATER I watched the paramedics carry Maisey on a gurney to the back of an ambulance and place her inside. The night air was cold and a paramedic had pulled a blanket to her chin. Her face was turned from me, but I could see a marbled discoloration on her neck, like the shape of a hand. A sheriff's deputy wearing latex gloves came out of the house carrying a vinyl garbage bag that contained Maisey's jeans and torn blouse and undergarments.

  Doc climbed into the back of the ambulance with her and looked back at me, his face like I'd never seen it before.

  "I'll follow y'all to the hospital," I said.

  He didn't answer. A paramedic closed the door and the ambulance turned around in the yard and drove back through the meadow toward the gate and the dirt road. The engine made no sound, and I could hear the grass that grew along the two-track lane brushing against the ambulance's undercarriage.

  "Your friend is having a bad night, so I don't hold his rudeness against him," the sheriff said. "But I'm gonna tell you what I told him, and you can repeat it to him in the morning. There were three bikers."

  He held up three fingers in front of me.

  "One way or another we'll nail them. That means your friend takes care of his daughter and I take care of the law. You hearing me on this?" the sheriff said.

  "Yeah, I am, Sheriff. What bothers me is it's the same bullshit I ran on crime victims when I knew the perps would probably skate," I said.

  "I don't care for your manner, Mr. Holland, but I'm gonna let that go… We talked to the boy she was with earlier. The kids told Dr. Voss they were going to a movie. But that wasn't the real plan. After you and the doctor left, they thought they'd have a little private time together. Except they had a fight at some point and the boy went home. I say 'at some point,' do you follow me?"

  "They were in the sack?" I asked.

  "Neither one is willing to say that, but that'd be my guess."

  "So even if you nail the bikers, their attorney will put it on Maisey's friend?"

  "You're a defense lawyer. Do you know an easier client to get off than a sex predator?"

  "I couldn't tell you. I don't take them."

  "You damn shysters take anybody with a checkbook," he said.

  Then he shook his head as though taking himself to task. "Look, back in the 1860s the Montana Vigilance Committee lynched twenty-two murderers and highwaymen," he said. "They bounced them off cottonwood trees and barn rafters all over the state. I guess it could make a man yearn for the good old days. But this ain't them. You tell that to Dr. Voss for me."

  Try telling him yourself, bud, I thought as he walked away from me, the thickness of his sidearm showing against the flap of his coat.

  I stayed with Doc in the waiting room at St. Patrick's in Missoula while he paced and hammered one fist on top of the other.

  "Slow it down, Tobin," I said.

  He stopped pacing, but not because of me. He was listening to a conversation outside the door. Two uniformed deputies were enjoying a joke of some kind, one with coarse edges, a reference to sodomy, a laugh at the expense of a woman.

  Doc stepped out into the hall.

  "You guys have something else to do?" he said.

  "What?" one of them said.

  "We're all right here," I said, stepping into the deputy's line of vision.

  One deputy touched the other on the arm, and the two of them walked back toward the hospital entrance.

  "I'll buy you a cup of coffee across the street," I said to Doc.

  "I'm going back to the emergency room," he said.

  "They told you to stay out. Why don't you let them do their job?"

  "You lecture me one more time, Billy Bob, and I'm going to knock you down," he replied.

  I couldn't blame him for his anger. He was a good man who loved
his daughter, and the two of them had just stepped into the middle of an unending, degrading, and callous process that treats victims and family members as ciphers in an investigative file, rips away all vestiges of their privacy, and often inculcates in them the conclusion that somehow they are deserving of their fate.

  I left Doc alone and went outside into the darkness. The maple trees were in full leaf, the night air crisp and tinged with smoke from a grass fire on a hill. Children were riding bikes on a sidewalk and the sounds of a baseball game broadcast from the West Coast came through the open window of an old brick rooming house. It was a scene from the brush of Norman Rockwell. But inside the hospital Maisey Voss was plugged into a morphine-laced IV, her body strung with purple and yellow bruises that went into the bone, the fetid breath of her attackers still wrapped around her face like cobweb.

  A few feet away I saw L.Q. Navarro leaning with his back against the trunk of a maple tree, rolling a cigarette, his down-tilted Stetson and black suit silhouetted against the lighted entrance of the emergency room.

  "You don't have anything to say?" I asked.

  "I'd head for the barn on this one," he said.

  "That wasn't ever your style, L.Q.," I replied.

  "Doc fired them bikers up because he cain't let go of his wife's death."

  "You don't walk out on your buds," I said.

  "He says he didn't like Vietnam? Maybe dying has messed up my ability to remember things. I thought SEALs was volunteers."

  I never could win an argument with L.Q. He twisted the ends of his cigarette and put it in his mouth and struck a kitchen match on the butt of his holstered revolver. His skin and mustache flared in the cupped flame of the match.

  "This one ain't just about bikers. Why do you think the sheriff pointed you at that alcoholic crime writer and his wife, the actress, what's that gal's name, the one who snorts up coke like an anteater?" L.Q. said.

  "I stubbed my toe on that one, too."

  "You gonna keep us here?"

  "I'll let you know," I said.

  He drew in on his cigarette and breathed the smoke across the tops of his fingers. His eyes were filled with a black luminescence, the ascetic, lean features of his face even more handsome in death. I thought I saw him grin at the corner of his mouth.