Bitterroot (39 page)

“How are you doing today, sir?” I said.

“Cleaning up for our baptism services tomorrow evening. Back yonder in the creek. We do it the old-time way,” he said.

“It’s the only way to fly,” I said.

“You’re welcome to come,” he said.

“I was baptized in a stream in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma.”

“I knowed it,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“River-baptized people got a mark. They look a person in the eye. Why you hanging around that greaser?”

“My work takes me into strange associations, Preacher.”

“You carry a gun?”

“Sometimes.”

“Stay away from that fellow, son. He’s the devil’s own.”

The old man tapped my window with the flat of his hand and returned to his work.

I parked on the white gravel by the side of Molinari’s house and started toward the front door. From the back I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash and the sound of women laughing. When I came around the corner of the house I smelled meat dripping into a hibachi and the drowsy, thick fragrance of a crack pipe and I saw Molinari swimming toward the shallow end of his pool while three suntanned women in bikinis and shades watched him from reclining chairs.

He walked up the tile steps of the pool, dripping water, his sex etched against his bright yellow trunks. He rubbed his head and face with a fluffy towel, and a woman handed him a glass of iced tea with a sprig of mint in it. He pushed his feet into his flip-flops while he drank and took my measure over his upended glass.

“Where you come from, people don’t call first before they drop by other people’s houses?” he said.

“Has Wyatt Dixon been around?” I asked.

“No. He better not, either.”

“I interviewed a pedophile in Deer Lodge this morning. He was busted in Carl Hinkel’s front yard.”

Molinari wiped water off his brow and pitched his towel over the back of a chair.

“Take a walk with me,” he said, glancing back at the women by poolside. He put his hand on my arm. “Tell me in like three sentences.”

“This guy was nailed in Hinkel’s yard. I think Hinkel is behind the kidnapping and sale of children to child molesters.”

“So I’m glad to know this. But I’m a little tied up right now. A little two-on-one going, get my drift? If you see Cleo or Holly, don’t be mentioning what you saw here. Anyway, come back tomorrow when I have more time.”

“Fuck you.”

“I can’t believe there’s a person like you standing on my property. You want me to remodel this guy, but you tell me in my face to get fucked? You know what I do to people who use that kind of language to me?”

“Tell it to your biographer.”

“I’m glad you raised that subject. Xavier Girard just got the shit kicked out of him. Why is that, you ask. Because he shot off his mouth on a certain TV talk show.”

“What happened to the old man next door?”

“I put a knot on his head.”

“You did what?”

“He was firing a nail gun into his church till six this morning. Bam, bam, bam, all night long. I was in a bad mood. He picked the wrong time to wise off.”

“I made a mistake coming here,” I said.

   When I turned to go he grabbed my forearm again. I felt his nails scrape on the skin.

“Come here,” he said.

“Your kind are always the same, Molinari. On the surface you seem to have a certain degree of elan, but under it all you’re a real bum. Go back to your whores.”

His mouth twitched slightly and the skin under one eye puckered as though my words had cut across a nerve ending in his face.

I DROVE BACK to Missoula and parked downtown and walked under the shade of the maple trees into the courthouse. I met the sheriff on his way out.

“I need to talk,” I said.

“Why don’t you rent an office down the hall from me? Cut down on your gas costs,” he said.

“At what time did Xavier Girard call 911 the night Lamar Ellison was killed?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Let’s find out,” I said.

He sucked his teeth.

“Come inside,” he said.

A minute later, he tossed his hat onto a rack in his office and sat down heavily in his swivel chair and fixed his eyes on me. They were as blue and intense as the flame on a butane burner.

“Get to it, Mr. Holland,” he said.

“Lamar Ellison vandalized Xavier Girard’s vehicle just before he died. Girard and Ellison fought on the side of the road and Holly Girard pointed a gun at Ellison to keep him from stomping her husband into jelly. Then Holly and Xavier went inside a friend’s house and dialed 911. The question is when did they make the call.”

“What are you driving at?” the sheriff said.

“Sue Lynn Big Medicine claims she saw somebody outside Ellison’s place when she fled, someone who could have saved his life.”

“Wait here,” the sheriff said.

He went out into the hall and returned five minutes later and sat down in his chair and studied two computer printouts in his hands. He laid them down on his desk blotter and balled and unballed his fist on top of them.

“Holly Girard made the call. At ten-o-nine P.M.,” he said.

“What time was the fire at Ellison’s reported?” I asked..

“Nine forty-one.”

“So they waited at least a half hour to report their vehicle being vandalized?” I said.

“That’s what it looks like. You’re saying the guy Sue Lynn saw was Xavier?”

“Ellison had smashed out the windows in Xavier’s Cherokee and sliced the seats and cut his tires and humiliated him in front of his wife and friends. Maybe he took his wife’s gun and decided to square things with Ellison, but Sue Lynn beat him to it.”

“Maybe the guy Sue Lynn saw was the same fellow who reported the fire. You think of that?”

“The 911 on the fire was called in by a trucker on his CB,” I said.

The sheriff rubbed his forehead and widened his eyes.

“I’ll question Xavier Girard. But there’s no evidence to put him at the crime scene, so I don’t think this is going anywhere,” he said. “By the way, I had the sheriff in Flathead County check out that resort on Swan Lake where Sue Lynn was hiding. Her cousin says Sue Lynn has bagged out for parts unknown.”

I DIDN’T WAIT for the sheriff to pick up Xavier Girard or ask him to come in. I drove directly to the Girards’ house out on the bluff above the Clark Fork. A moving van was backed into the driveway and a half dozen men were trundling furniture up the loading ramp. I walked through the open front door of the house, into a bare living room with a cathedral ceiling that echoed with the sounds of the movers’ work shoes. The sanded and lacquered pinewood interior of the room glowed with light, and Holly Girard stood in the middle of it all, dressed in oversize khakis and tennis shoes and a paint-splotched pink T-shirt, a baseball cap on her head, swearing, scolding the movers, but never quite crossing the line into direct insult.

She turned and studied me as she would a bird bouncing against a window glass. Then she walked toward me, her face tilted upward, touched with light, bemused, a bit vulnerable. She stood inside my shadow, the confidence in her sexual appeal undiminished by her appearance, the color in her eyes deepening.

“I hope Xavier hasn’t hired you to sue me,” she said.

Before I could reply she turned on a workman walking down the staircase and said, “You break that lamp and I’ll own your salary for the rest of your life. That’s a promise, Ed.”

“Where’s your husband, Ms. Girard?” I asked.

“Try detox or AA or any bar on Higgins. Or maybe he’s in the sack with one of his twenty-year-old groupies. Each of them thinks she’ll be the girl who changed his life and career. Oh, boring, boring, boring.
Here,”
she said.

She wrote out the address of a townhouse on the river, then turned her attention back to the movers.

“You posed as Doc Voss’s friend,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Y’all let him go down for a murder you knew he didn’t commit.”

“I’m sure what you’re saying will make sense to Xavier. But it doesn’t to me. Now, good-bye, good luck, God speed, God bless, ta-ta, all that kind of thing.”

“Y’all could have cleared Doc. Instead, you kept quiet and let him twist in the wind.”

 She had started to walk away. But she turned demurely and stepped close into me again, one of her small feet touching mine. She took off her cap and shook out her hair and gave me a long, deliberate stare. There were two white crystals on the rim of her left nostril.

“Contact my business agent at Creative Artists. He’d love to help you. Really he would,” she said, and jiggled her fingers in good-bye.

“Watch yourself with Molinari, Ms. Girard. If you’re tight with Cleo Lonnigan, you might share the admonition,” I said, and went out the door.

When I started my truck she was standing in the yard, staring at me, her face disjointed with the wounded pride of a child.

WHEN I RANG the bell at Xavier Girard’s town-house, he yelled from the back room, “The door’s open. Fix yourself a drink in the kitchen and don’t bother me till I come out. If you don’t drink or if you’re a friend of my wife, get the fuck out of my life.”

I walked to his office door and looked inside. He was hunched over his computer, framed like a bear against the window and the broad sweep of the river and the spires and rooftops of the town and the green hills beyond.

His eyes were washed out, pale blue, the pupils like burnt match heads, his face manic and tight against the bone and ridged with bruises along the jaw. An odor like unwashed hair and beer sweat filled the room.

“I’m working now. There’s vodka in the icebox. There’re magazines by the toilet,” he said.

“You came out to Doc’s and complained to me that your wife wouldn’t help with a fund-raiser for Doc’s defense,” I said.

“Man, you just don’t fucking listen. That’s yesterday’s chewing gum, Jack,” he said.

“You saw Ellison burn to death. You also saw an Indian woman flee the scene. All this time you could have cut Doc loose.”

He pushed the “save” button on his keyboard.

“Here it is, straight up. I don’t know who did what at that scene. I had no way of knowing Doc wasn’t there first. But if I understand you correctly, you think I should have put it on a Native American woman who’s probably been dumped on all her life?”

“I see. You were protecting Sue Lynn Big Medicine. Did you go there armed?”

“None of your business.”

“Accept my word on this, Mr. Girard. I’m going to do everything in my power to see you charged with obstruction and depraved indifference.”

“Indifferent? You’re calling me indifferent?”

I looked at the bruises along his jawline. “I’m not calling you anything, sir. How’s your book going?”

“Which book?”

“Your biography of Nicki Molinari.”

“Guess,” he replied.

As I left I heard what sounded like a metal trash basket tumbling end over end across a bare floor.

THE NEXT MORNING was white with fog that boiled off the Blackfoot River and hung wetly in the trees and gathered like damp cotton on the hillsides. I walked down to Lucas’s tent and watched him fix a fire and start cracking eggs and laying out ham strips in the oversize skillet he cooked in.

Minutes later I picked up the spatula and started to shovel some food onto my plate. Lucas gently removed the spatula from my hand and went to his tent and picked up a plastic dog bowl. He began shredding pieces of white bread into the bowl while his dog, now named Dogus, watched.

“Remember what you told me Great-Grandpa Sam wrote in his journal? ‘Always feed your animals before you feed yourself,’” Lucas said, and scooped a fried egg out of the skillet and chopped it up in the bread.

Later, we ate in silence. The trees along the river were dark and wet and black-green inside the fog, and I could hear a hoofed animal clopping on the rocks on the far side of the water.

“I know what you want to ask me,” Lucas said.

“My head’s totally blank,” I said.

“Sue Lynn didn’t call. I don’t blame her. She tried to tell me all along she was in over her head. It don’t seem right, though.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s on the run and all them other people—that fellow Wyatt Dixon and Witherspoon and the people who killed her little brother—these guys just go on hurting folks and nobody does anything about it.”

“Eventually they’ll go down,” I said. “It sure does take a long time,” he replied. He got up from the rock he was sitting on and rinsed his tin plate and cup and fork and meat knife in the river, then scrubbed them with sand and rinsed them clean again and put them into his grub box. He poured the coffeepot on the fire and refilled it with water and doused the fire a second time while steam boiled off the stones in the fire ring.

Both our fly rods were propped against his tent, the dry flies snugged into the cork handles, the tapered leaders tight inside the guides. He picked both rods up and handed me mine.

“Come on, there’s a fat rainbow up yonder that wants to add your flies to his underwater collection,” he said.

“You’re growing up on me, bud,” I said.

He looked back over his shoulder at me, not quite sure what to make of the remark.

WHEN THE LETTER for Wyatt Dixon arrived at the compound, delivered by a nervous florist gripping a handful of pink and blue balloons, Wyatt was out in the equipment lot, barefoot and bare-chested, his jeans on so tight they looked like they’d split, working on Carl Hinkel’s tractor engine. Wyatt paused a wrench on a nut and stared over his shoulder at the florist, then walked to the fence and took the letter and clutch of balloons from the florist’s hands.

“Sir, you look like you’re fixing to piss your pants,” Wyatt said.

“No, sir. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Good. Get out of here,” Wyatt said.

He thumbed open the envelope and read the letter inside, the wind blowing the paper, the tethered ribbons on the balloons tugging in his hand.

Terry watched Wyatt’s face. Wyatt had only two expressions. One was the idiot’s grin off a jack-o’-lantern. The other was a nonexpression, a total absence of any feeling or thought or content whatsoever, at least not any that could be seen. It made Terry think of a clay mask that a sculptor might have molded on an exhumed skull, with prosthetic eyes stuffed into the sockets.