Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “I need Felicity Louviere’s cell phone number.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I don’t have Love Younger’s number, and I need to talk to him.”

  “I’ll call her for you.”

  “No, I’ll do it.”

  “She doesn’t know you real well. She thinks you don’t like her.”

  “I don’t. I think she’s screwing up your life.”

  “You remember those fireworks we called devil chasers? They’d ricochet all over the place and go nowhere. We’d stick them up people’s tailpipes on neckers’ row at the drive-in. That’s exactly what you remind me of.”

  “Are you going to give me her number or not?”

  He was sitting on the side of the bed, the covers pulled across his lap, his face full of sleep. Gretchen’s bedroom door was closed. He threw his cell phone to me. “It’s in my contacts,” he said.

  I drove down to the foot of the road to get service, then dialed Felicity Louviere’s number.

  “Clete, you shouldn’t call me at home,” she said.

  “It’s not Clete. It’s Dave Robicheaux. I’d like to speak with Love Younger, please.”

  “About what?”

  “About none of your business, Ms. Louviere. Would you mind putting him on?”

  “I’ll ask him. You don’t have to get snippy about it.”

  “You’ll ask him?” I said it again. “You’ll ask him?”

  “My sympathies to your family,” she said.

  She must have been gone two minutes. Then I heard her talking and someone else taking the phone from her hand. “Love Younger,” a man’s voice said.

  “I need to speak with you, sir, man-to-man, at your home or some other place of your choosing,” I said.

  “Regarding what, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Asa Surrette may have been on Albert Hollister’s property last night.”

  “What evidence do you have?”

  “We can talk about that in person.”

  “One of my employees, Tony Zappa, was murdered. Your friend’s daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, is a suspect in his death. Why should I be speaking with you at all on any subject?”

  “Number one, the charge against Gretchen Horowitz is not only fraudulent but unprosecutable and will be dropped, and both the sheriff and the district attorney’s office know it. Second, the man you refer to as your employee was a rapist.”

  “Tony had a troubled life. But I’ve yet to see any proof that he committed a crime of any kind while he was in my employ.”

  “You ever hear of Jack Abbott? He wrote a book titled In the Belly of the Beast. Norman Mailer was deeply moved by it and helped get Abbott out of the Utah state pen. Abbott paid back the favor by shanking a twenty-one-year-old waiter to death.”

  “I never read Norman Mailer and have no interest in him. I think I’m going to terminate this call, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Your granddaughter was probably abducted and killed by Surrette. I don’t want my daughter to suffer the same fate. Surrette has a passionate hatred of her and will probably do worse to her than he did to your granddaughter. Frankly, I suspect you’re a genuine son of a bitch, Mr. Younger. That said, you’re obviously a man who cares about his own and understands the nature of loss. If you won’t agree to meet with me, I’ll come out to your house, and we’ll take it from there.”

  There was a silence. “I’m hosting a barbecue on my ranch out on Highway 12 at one o’clock,” he said. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes in private. Then you can leave or stay and eat. I don’t care which. You will not make demands of me again. Do you understand me on this?”

  “I look forward to our conversation,” I replied.

  He broke the connection. I turned off the cell phone and drove back to the house. When Alafair came down for breakfast, I asked if she wanted to go to a barbecue.

  “Whose?” she asked.

  “Love Younger’s.”

  “He called up and invited you to his barbecue?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Will Miss Piss Pot of 1981 be there?”

  “You’re talking about Felicity Louviere? I didn’t know y’all had met.”

  “I haven’t. I saw her downtown. Gretchen pointed her out. She carries her nose in the air, literally. She looks like an actress trying to impersonate a world-class bitch.”

  “How about it on the language?”

  “Yeah, I’d like to go to the barbecue. Quit protecting Felicity Louviere. She’s an opportunistic bitch, and you know it.”

  After Alafair ate, she went back upstairs to revise a scene she had written in the middle of the night. There was a haze on the south pasture, as though it were powdered with green pollen; a fawn and its mother were licking a salt block by the water tank. I went into the backyard and looked for the tracks in the flower bed outside the bathroom window. They were still there, deep and sharply defined, even though the sprinklers were on. In the daylight I could also see where several branches had been broken on the lilac bushes, at a height much greater than that of a wolf or a coyote. How could a large, heavy, four-footed creature leave only two impressions in the bed? And what had broken the lilac branches?

  I wished I had dropped the wolf in the north pasture when I had the opportunity, permit or not.

  Alafair came back downstairs dressed in jeans, alpine hiking shoes with big lugs, and a blue denim shirt with white piping and, embroidered on the back, a huge silver American eagle clutching a clawful of arrows. “Are you sure you want to go out there, Dave?”

  “It’s Saturday. God is in His heaven, and all is right with the world,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I called the Louviere woman names,” she said.

  “Maybe she deserves them,” I replied. “Come on. What can go wrong at a barbecue on a fine day like this?”

  LOVE YOUNGER’S RANCH was located twenty miles west on the two-lane highway that gradually ascended over Lolo Pass into the Idaho wilderness. The countryside was riparian and lush and green from the spring rains, the leaves of the cottonwoods along Lolo Creek flickering in the breeze, the lilacs and wild roses blooming, the wheel lines filling the air with an iridescent mist. There were Angus and longhorns and Holsteins belly-deep in the grass down by the creek, and horse farms with Morgans and Thoroughbreds and Appaloosas and Foxtrotters outside breeding barns you expect to see in Kentucky but not in the West. It was one of those rare places that commercialization and urban sprawl had skipped over, and I wondered how many of Younger’s guests—who drove modest vehicles, the bumpers glued with patriotic stickers—believed that they could ever own a ranch in a setting like this; or did they concede that they would always be visitors? I wondered if this was their notion of the American Dream. Or were they like the many who wanted only to touch the hem of a powerful man’s garment, to not only be healed but to elude mortality?

  Their cars and trucks were lined up at the entrance for a half mile, all with their turn signals blinking in unison. The arch over the drive was made of historical branding irons and great links of iron chain welded together, all of it supported by two columns of white stones. There was no admission price for the barbecue, no proof of invitation required, except an indication that everyone entering the ranch was of one mind and believed the hallowed spirit of the minutemen dwelled in their midst. The guests of Love Younger came in large numbers, trusting and glad of heart, their children riding in the beds of pickup trucks, all of them filled with joy and expectation as they entered an environment that seemed an extension of a magical kingdom.

  Large-bodied men wearing western clothes and Stetsons and sunglasses and boots looked in each car entering the property, but only to welcome the drivers and passengers and point out the best parking spots. There was no need for a martial or police presence on Love Younger’s ranch. A country band was playing on a stage carpentered out of newly milled pine; children rocketed into the air inside the bouncy houses; the smell of drawn beer and barbecued chicken and sliced sirloin and roaste
d pig was mouthwatering. Could any event be grander or more American than a visit to the ranch of an egalitarian billionaire, a patriarch who was of them and for them and who, with a wave of his hand, could wipe away their doubts and fears?

  Pennants and flags of every kind flew from tent poles all over a pasture that had been cleaned of animal droppings. The ambience could be compared with the celebratory nature of a medieval fair. It needed only jugglers and flutists and jesters in sock caps and bells and pointy shoes. The elements in the Everyman plays and the caricatures in the tarot deck were everywhere. Death had lost its sting and been driven from the field, and virtue and good deeds and courage and folk wisdom had triumphed over evil. Unfortunately, the medieval morality play required a villain. Who or what might fit the role?

  “Check out the art on the T-shirts some of these guys are wearing,” Alafair said. “I think they’re ramping up for a firefight in the mall.”

  “Lower your voice,” I said.

  “They think we’re admiring them.”

  “I mean it, Alf. Don’t get things started.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Look out there on the road.”

  Thirty-five years ago Clete Purcel had assigned himself the role of my guardian angel, and he wasn’t about to resign the job now. His hand-waxed vintage Caddy, the top down, was in the line of vehicles working its way under the arch.

  “This is one Clete needs to stay out of,” I said.

  “Don’t take your anxieties out on me, Dave.”

  “How did he know we’d be here?”

  “He called up to the house and asked what we were doing today. What should I have said?”

  “Great. Keep him occupied. I’m going to find Love Younger.”

  An oversize pickup truck, with smoked windows and huge cleated tires, pulled into a parking spot not far from where we were standing. “How do you like this guy’s bumper sticker?” Alafair said.

  “Don’t say anything. It’s their turf. They have the right to do whatever they want here.”

  “So do the patients in a mental asylum.”

  The sticker read DA BRO GOTTA GO.

  “There’s Younger coming out of the house,” Alafair said. “Who’s the guy with him?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “The son who poured Coke all over Clete’s head?”

  “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Then we’re leaving.”

  “Clete just headed for the beer tent.”

  I had the feeling that not only was our situation starting to unravel but Alafair had decided to go with the flow and enjoy it. I left her standing under a canopy and cut off Love Younger and Caspian between the ranch house and the crowd. “You promised me fifteen minutes,” I said.

  His eyes were sky blue, his face flushed and soft-looking as a baby’s, loose strands of his white hair moving in the breeze. “Step inside the house with me,” he said.

  “Get rid of him, Daddy,” Caspian said. “He’s here to cause trouble. It’s written all over him. He’s a drunk and a cooze hound.”

  “Go find your wife,” his father said.

  “She’s just over there someplace. She’s fine.”

  “Did you hear me?” the older man said.

  I saw Caspian’s scalp constrict visibly. He looked like a child who had been struck in the face by a trusted parent.

  “I don’t think you need me here. I think I’ll take a drive into town,” he said.

  “Goddammit, son, for once just do what I ask. It’s time to act like the husband of your wife and the father of your dead child,” Younger said. His face softened. He squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Come on, boy. Buck up and get us a table. I’ll be along directly.”

  As Caspian walked away, a flatbed truck turned off the highway and drove under the arch. Several people began pointing, then a ripple of laughter spread through the crowd that quickly turned into collective joy. On the back of the truck, boomed down with chains, were two portable toilets with the name of our current president and the words WHITE HOUSE spray-painted on them. Both toilets had been shot full of holes.

  Love Younger’s gaze remained on his son. Then he turned back to me. “You coming?” he said.

  The ranch house was constructed of teardown lumber that was probably a century old, the rusted impressions of iron bolts and steel spikes and bits of chain deliberately left in the wood. The exterior of the house was cosmetic and had nothing to do with the interior. The lighting was turned on and off by voice command; the faucets and sinks in the kitchen were gold-plated. The living room had a fireplace the size of a Volkswagen; there was an elevator in the hallway that evidently accessed a parking garage under the house.

  Through the kitchen window, I could see people lining up at the serving tables. “That’s my daughter in front of the cold-drink tent,” I said. “I pulled her out of a submerged plane when she was five years old.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t plan on losing her to Asa Surrette.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He rolled up his sleeves in front of the sink and turned on the water and began soaping his hands and forearms, scrubbing them as a surgeon might. He squeezed a disinfectant on his hands and ran cold water up and down his arms, then dried them with paper towels and stuffed the towels in a waste can under the sink.

  “So you don’t plan on losing your daughter?” he said. “What should I make of a statement like that, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “I think you’re one of those who have ears that don’t hear and eyes that don’t see.”

  “I see. That’s your mission here? Carrying your spiritual wisdom to the halt and the lame?”

  “Your employee, the rapist, was killed with three forty-four-caliber balls. Why would somebody use a nineteenth-century firearm to commit a murder?”

  “I’ve talked to the sheriff about that. He says Dixon is still under the microscope on that.”

  “Dixon is not your man. I think the forty-four was used to point suspicion at him and perhaps you.”

  “I don’t mean this offensively, but I would gladly pay double my taxes if people like you and Albert Hollister could be paid not to think.”

  “I want to tell you something else about my daughter. She survived a massacre in her village in El Salvador. She was kidnapped at age eight by an evil man who thought he could terrify her. She bit the hell out of him. I saw her kidnapper eat six soft-nosed rounds from a three-fifty-seven. The wounds looked like flowers bursting from his shirt. The last round virtually eviscerated him. I enjoyed watching him blown apart. I wished I had done it instead of someone else. What does that suggest to you?”

  “That you’re an obsessed and sick man.”

  “Here’s the point. Booze probably burned up fifteen or twenty years of my longevity. That means I don’t have a lot to lose. I think you’ve been getting a free pass with the sheriff’s department. You’re either in total denial about your situation, or you’re aiding and abetting a killer.”

  “How dare you.”

  “You have resources that even the federal government doesn’t have. Why aren’t your people looking for the man who killed your granddaughter?”

  “Why do you think I’m not looking for him?”

  “Because you seem uninformed. Surrette did it. The question is why and how. She was in a saloon full of outlaw bikers. Then, puff, she was gone.”

  “I’m not convinced this man exists.”

  “He tortured and killed people in his hometown for two decades, under the noses of the FBI. You don’t think he could escape a wrecked jail van and be killing people in this area? How about the waitress who disappeared up by Lookout Pass?”

  “I didn’t hear about that.”

  “Which means none of your investigators bothered to look into it. Or they didn’t tell you about it.”

  His gaze went away from mine. When he looked at me again, the confidence was not in his face. “What happened to the waitress?”

  “She didn’t show up for
work. Her house was locked and dead-bolted from the inside. Her bracelet was placed on a rock in the middle of the St. Regis River. It’s all part of Surrette’s pattern. He feeds on attention and the confusion and angst he instills in others.”

  “What does the sheriff in Mineral County say?”

  “The sheriff will do everything he can. If Surrette is the abductor, that won’t be enough. Does it strike you as ironic that I have to explain these things to you, sir?”

  He didn’t answer. He kept staring at me inquisitively, the way a clinician might.

  “Do you want to ask me something?” I said.

  “I’m trying to figure out what you’re after.”

  I couldn’t believe his statement. “I told you. I’m afraid it didn’t do much good.”

  “Earlier you called me a son of a bitch. I don’t hold that against you, because you were speaking honestly about your feelings. But I think you have an agenda. You resent others for their wealth. Everywhere you look, you see plots and conspiracies at work, corporations destroying the planet, robbing the poor, that sort of thing, and you never realize these things you think you see are a reflection of your own failure.”

  “Mr. Younger, if I harbor resentment toward anyone, it’s toward myself. I couldn’t prevent my daughter from interviewing Surrette in prison and writing articles about him that exposed him to a capital conviction. He won’t rest until he kills her.”

  “You told her not to do it?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then it’s on her.”

  I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a home governed by the value system of Love Younger.

  I heard someone knock tentatively on the kitchen door. Through the glass, I saw a blond man in shades. Caspian was standing behind him, raising up on his toes to see inside the house. Love Younger opened the door. “What do you want, Kyle?” he said.

  “Caspian thought I ought to see if you needed any help.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be right outside.”

  Younger shut the door but continued to look through the glass at his son’s back. “I never get over it,” he said.