Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Who’s this?” a man’s voice said.

  “If you called for Gretchen Horowitz, she’s not available.”

  “So I’ll talk to you. What’s your name?”

  “Felicity Louviere.”

  There was a pause. “Caspian Younger’s wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is a surprise.”

  “You’re Asa Surrette?”

  “Surrette is dead. Burned up in a big puff of smoke. That’s what the state police in Kansas say.”

  “You were photographing me.”

  “I’m casting a movie. You might be in it. Where’s Gretchen?”

  “Gone away.”

  “To a bar mitzvah?”

  “I don’t know where she went.”

  “The weather has taken quite a turn. The snow is falling on the creek while the sun is shining. It looks like cotton floating on the water, doesn’t it? Maybe the devil is beating his wife.”

  She turned in a circle, her heart pounding. She saw no one. On the far side of the creek, an SUV was parked by a picnic shelter. No one seemed to be inside it. The SUV was either painted with primer or it was black and powdered with white dust. “Is the girl alive?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The waitress.”

  “Could be. I can check. Want me to do that and call you back?”

  “I want to take her place.”

  “You’re a bag of tricks, aren’t you?”

  “I can see you,” she lied.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “If we get together, I might have to wash out your mouth with soap.”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  “Of you? How silly.”

  “You murdered my daughter. Are you afraid to look me in the face and admit that? Are you the frightened little man the authorities say you are?”

  “The authorities? What are the authorities? Stupid and uneducated people who would be on welfare if they didn’t have uniforms. Maybe you should watch what you say.”

  Her knees felt weak. She sat down behind the steering wheel, the door open, the wind like a cold burn on her brow. She could hear herself breathing inside the confines of the car. “Is the girl hurt badly? What have you done to her?”

  “Maybe I’m a kinder man than you think. Maybe I have a side that others don’t know about. You think you’re going to set me up?”

  “I don’t want to live,” she said.

  “Say that again.”

  “You’ll be doing me a favor if you take my life. But you’re not up to it. You’re what they say you are.”

  “What do they say?”

  “You were in a foster home. There was a room where someone was kept locked up. Or where the children were forced to go when they were bad. What happened in that room? Were you sodomized? Did you have to kneel all night on grains of rice? Were you told you were unclean and unacceptable in the eyes of God? My mother was declared insane. Maybe I can understand what happened to you as a child.”

  “Somebody put that on the Internet. It’s a lie. Those things never happened,” he said.

  “Then why are you so afraid of me? Did you plan to kill me from afar?”

  “Who says I was planning any such thing?”

  “I think my husband paid you to kill my daughter. That means I was next.”

  “Your husband does what I tell him. Don’t provoke me.” His voice sharpened. “Believe me, you do not want to provoke me, you little bitch.”

  “I saw the pictures of the people you suffocated.”

  “You want that for yourself? I can arrange it. I would love to do that for you.”

  “I think you’re all talk. I think you’re scum. Call me back when you can speak in an intelligent manner.”

  He was starting to shout when she closed the phone.

  A moment later, she saw someone enter the SUV through the passenger side and drive away, scouring divots of grass out of the lawn, the exhaust trailing off like pieces of dirty string.

  AN HOUR LATER, at the Younger compound on the promontory above the Clark Fork, the cell phone Felicity had taken from Gretchen’s purse vibrated on top of her dresser. She picked it up and placed it to her ear. The French doors on the balcony were open, and she could see the pink and blue blooms on the hydrangeas by the carriage house. She thought of New Orleans and the Garden District and the way the tenderest of flowers opened in the shade, as though defying the coming of the night or the passing of the season. “Did you mean what you said?” the voice asked.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Wait on my instructions. Tell no one about our conversation. If you do, I’ll put Rhonda’s tit in a wringer and let you listen. You’ll never get those sounds out of your head. You still there?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We’ll see if you’re up to this. Have a nice day.”

  After he hung up, Felicity sat down slowly in a chair, as though afraid that something inside her would break. Then she began to weep. When she looked up, her husband was standing in the doorway, blocking out the sunlight, his face veiled with shadow. He was eating a bowl of ice cream mixed with pineapple syrup and appeared to be savoring the cold before he swallowed each spoonful. “PMS time again?” he said. “That stands for ‘piss, moan, and snivel.’ ”

  “You did it, didn’t you?”

  “Did what?”

  “Paid Surrette to kill Angel.”

  “Your mother was crazy. So are you.”

  “Why did you do it, Caspian?”

  “I didn’t pay anybody to do anything. I’ve been trafficking in cocaine. Large amounts of it.”

  “What?”

  “I quit going to G.A. and put my toe back in the water. I dropped a half mil in Vegas alone. The vig was two points a week. I hooked up with some guys in Mexico City. They stiffed me on the deal.”

  “So you had Angel murdered?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What are you telling me? You make no sense.”

  He walked to the French doors and gazed out at the lawn and the potted citrus and bottlebrush trees on the terrace and the roll of the mountains in the distance. “When I first saw you at the art theater, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. What happened to us, Felicity?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “People don’t change. They grow into what they always were.”

  AT SIX THAT evening, Clete came up to Albert’s house and knocked on the front door with the flat of his fist. Albert got up from the dining table and opened the door. “Is this a raid?” he asked.

  Clete’s face was flushed, as though he had been out in the sun or drinking all afternoon. “Where’s Dave?”

  “Eating,” Albert replied.

  “Can I come in?”

  “You’re not going to start a fistfight, are you?” Albert said.

  “What are you talking about?” Clete said.

  “You look like somebody put a burr under your blanket,” Albert said. “You want a plate?”

  “Felicity doesn’t pick up her phone,” Clete said to me, ignoring Albert. “I think Surrette has her.”

  Molly and Alafair had stopped eating. “Clete, I don’t want to hear about that woman,” Molly said.

  “You want to take a ride?” Clete said, his eyes on me.

  “Where?” I said.

  “To Love Younger’s,” Clete said.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Molly said. “I mean it, Clete. Don’t bring that woman’s troubles into our lives.”

  “Five minutes ago this was my home,” Albert said. “Do you people carry a fight with you every place you go?”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked out into the yard with Clete. The sun had dipped behind the ridge, and in the shadows, I could feel the temperature dropping, the dampness rising from the grass and flower beds. “I know you’re worried, but think about what you just said,” I told him. “Felicity Louviere is a
n intelligent woman. She’s not going to deliberately put herself in the hands of a depraved man.”

  “You don’t know her,” he said. “Maybe she wants to suffer. Maybe she wants to cancel his ticket. But she always leaves her cell phone on for me. Now I go directly to voice mail.”

  “Then let her live with her own choices.”

  “That’s a chickenshit thing to say.”

  “I meant let her pop him if she can. What she may be doing is not any crazier than what Gretchen has been doing.”

  “You want to nail Surrette or not?”

  “He tried to kill Alafair, Clete. What do you think?”

  “You’re not hearing me. My point is, we’re smarter than this guy. Money is involved, but it’s not the issue. It’s personal, and it’s coming out of the Younger family. It also involves Wyatt Dixon. And I’ve got another suspicion.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe it’s off-the-wall.”

  “Say it.”

  “I wonder if Albert has something to do with it. He has a way of bringing people out of the woodwork.”

  “I’ve thought the same thing.”

  We looked at each other. I walked up on the porch and opened the door slightly. “Albert, could you step out here, please?” I said.

  He came outside and closed the door behind him. He was wearing a heavy cotton shirt and corduroy trousers with a wide leather belt outside the loops and sandals with rope soles, the way a Spanish peasant might. He was smiling, his small blue eyes buried inside his face.

  “Is there any reason Asa Surrette would want to do you harm?” I said.

  “Maybe he doesn’t like my books.”

  “Any other reason?” I said.

  “Maybe he didn’t like my film adaptations. No one did.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Clete said.

  “That’s what the producers said when they lost their shirts.”

  “Think,” I said. “Did you ever have contact with this guy? Or anyone who could have been him?”

  “I don’t think he’d be someone I’d forget. I spent four weeks in Wichita and loved the people there. I didn’t have a negative experience with anyone. They’re the best people I’ve ever met. What I’ve never understood is why they live in Kansas.”

  “You were in Wichita?” I said.

  “I was writer-in-residence in their MFA program. I taught a three-hour seminar one night a week for a month. They were all nice young people. You’re barking up the wrong stump, Dave.”

  “What year?” I said.

  “The winter term of 1979.”

  “Surrette was a student at Wichita State University then.”

  “Not in my class, he wasn’t.”

  “How do you know?” Clete asked.

  “I still have my grade sheets. I checked them. He’s not on there.”

  “Was anyone auditing the class, sitting in without formally enrolling?” I said.

  “Two or three people came and went. I never checked roll.”

  “Surrette told Alafair he had a creative writing professor who claimed to be a friend of Leicester Hemingway.”

  Albert’s eyes had been fixed on the north pasture and the horses drinking at the tank. They came back on mine. “He did?”

  “Surrette accused this creative professor of name-dropping,” I said. “He seemed to bear him great resentment.”

  “I knew Les many years,” Albert said. “I fished with him in the Keys and visited his home in Bimini. He always said he was going to start up his own country on an island off Bimini. It was going to be a republic made up of writers and artists and jai-alai players and musicians. He even had a flag.”

  “Surrette said this professor wouldn’t read his short story to the class,” I said. “Do you remember anything like that?”

  Albert’s gaze roved around the yard, as though he saw realities in the shadows that no one else did. He was breathing hard through his nose, his mouth pinched. “I don’t recall the exact content of the story, but I thought it was an assault on the sensibilities rather than an attempt at fiction. It was genuinely offensive. He was older than the others. I think I told him it was too mature a story for some of the younger people in the seminar. He seemed to take it well enough, at least as I recall. Maybe we’re talking about a different fellow.”

  “Surrette also said he wrote a note on the evaluation, something to the effect that he understood your objection to a story about boys chewing on each other’s weenies.”

  I saw the color drain from Albert’s face. He started to speak, then looked up at the hillside and the dark conical shapes of the trees that hid the cave where Asa Surrette had camped. “I’ll be,” he said.

  “It was Surrette?” I said.

  “How does the expression go? There’s no fool like an old fool?” he said.

  ON SATURDAY, WYATT Dixon emerged from his Airstream trailer at the fairgrounds and flexed his shoulders in appreciation of the summer evening and the salmon-colored sky and the neon ambience of the amusement rides and game booths and concession stands that had defined his youth and were, in his opinion, as much a stained-glass work of art as any fashioned from stone by medieval guildsmen. He had put on his puff-sleeved sky-blue shirt with red stars on the shoulders, his championship buckle, and his soft lavender red-fringed butterfly chaps and a Stetson that fit tightly on his head, down low on the brow, one that didn’t fly off with the first bounce out of the bucking chute. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though it had no other place to go, the breeze balmy and redolent of meat fires. What finer place was there?

  If only Bertha would close her mouth for a little while. “You’re too old for it,” she said, following him out the door onto the apron of grass where they had dropped the trailer. “Do you want to be a quadriplegic? Do you want to wear a drip bag under your clothes for the rest of your life?”

  “I rode Bodacious to the buzzer, woman,” he replied. “There ain’t many can say that. We used to call him the widow-maker. I rode him into a tube steak. What do you think of that?”

  “Call me ‘woman’ again, and I’m going to slap you cross-eyed.”

  “Bertha, I’m not exaggerating, blood is leaking out of my ears.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get a brain transplant.”

  “Please, Wyatt.”

  “I got the message. Even though I am near deaf, by God, I got the message.”

  “You won’t ride?”

  “I don’t think I said that. You want some cotton candy or a tater pig?”

  “No, I do not. I want you to act like a reasonable human being.”

  “There ain’t no fun in that.”

  She threw a slipper at his head.

  Oh, well, he’d known worse, he consoled himself. When he was seventeen, he’d married a Mexican woman who used to blow flaming kerosene out of her mouth in a carnival. Or at least he thought he’d married her. The two of them had eaten enough peyote buttons to start a cactus farm and had woken up on top of a bus loaded with stoned hippies on their way to San Luis Potosi. He remembered a ceremony conducted by an Indian shaman dressed in feathers; he was almost sure of that. But maybe the ceremony was a funeral, because somebody had dropped a wooden casket off a mountainside, and Wyatt had seen it bounce and break apart on the rocks. Or maybe the fire-eater was in the casket. Or maybe that was her mother. It was somebody, for sure.

  He had decided long ago that memory and reliving the good times weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Anyway, Bertha Phelps was a good woman. The problem was, she was too good. She worried about him day and night and made love like it was about to be outlawed, sometimes leaving him worn out in the morning and afraid she would corner him in the bedroom by midafternoon.

  He bought her a tater pig whether she wanted it or not, and a great big fluffy cone of cotton candy for himself. He heard the announcer on the loudspeaker in the box above the bucking chutes tell the crowd to stand up for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Th
rough an aisle lined with game booths, he saw a familiar figure walking toward him, followed by three men wearing suits and shades.

  Wyatt was not up for another session with a billionaire oilman who just wouldn’t let it alone, whatever “it” was. Wyatt had never given much thought to rich people; he’d always assumed they had the same vices and compulsions as everyone else but were a whole lot smarter about hiding them. He didn’t care what they were, as long as they tended to their own business, which was buying politicians and making sure the toilets flushed and the cops got paid off, and nobody told him what he could and couldn’t do.

  Too late.

  “I just want a couple of minutes,” Love Younger said.

  “Not a good idea,” Wyatt said.

  “Come on, sit down, son. Let me have my say, and I’ll be gone.”

  They were standing on a grassy spot under a birch tree by the bingo concession, the grandstand not far away, buzzing with noise. “Is that Jack Shit with you?”

  “That’s Jack Boyd.”

  “What happened to him?” Wyatt asked.

  “Excuse me, I have to rest a minute,” Younger said, easing himself down at one of the plank tables. “Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you’re not aware of your loss until it’s irreversible.”

  Wyatt could hear the announcer in the grandstands trading jokes with one of the rodeo clowns. “Tell me what you’re after and be done with it,” he said, and sat down at the table.

  “My granddaughter is dead,” Younger said. “My daughter-in-law has disappeared, and my son is dissolute and perhaps in a dangerous state of mind.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” Wyatt asked.

  “Be patient. I’m trying to set some things straight without causing unnecessary harm to anyone. Have you seen my son?”