Swan Peak (10 page)

“Were she and Seymour intimate?” I said.

“She didn’t talk about it. Why do you keep asking those kinds of questions? What do they have to do with her death?” Her bed was neatly made, the blanket tucked tight on the corners. She was sitting on top of the blanket, her face turned up at mine, her hands opening and closing on her thighs like those of someone who was trapped. “You’re making it sound like it was Cindy’s fault she got killed.”

“Did she know a guy named Lyle Hobbs?” Clete asked.

“I never heard of him. Who is he?” she said.

“A geek and a child molester. He showed up on the surveillance tape at the health club where Cindy worked,” Clete said. “You know a guy by the name of Ridley Wellstone?”

“No, I never heard of him, either.”

“Did Cindy wear a small wood cross, one attached to a leather thong?” I asked.

“No.” Heather glanced sideways. “I saw Seymour with one. Maybe a week ago. His shirt was unbuttoned, and it fell out. Seymour was a Pentecostal. Or at least he used to be. What about it?”

“You know someone who might want to tear it off his throat?” I asked.

“What are you talking about? Cindy was raped and beaten. I heard Seymour was shot through the face,” she said. I saw her eyes go out of focus; she looked like someone who has lost her footing and is not sure she will find it again. “I don’t understand why you’re here. Cindy and Seymour were taking a walk. They climbed up the mountain and never came back. Some sick fuck killed them. Why don’t you assholes go out and do something about it? Why do you keep asking me these sick fucking questions? I identified Cindy at the morgue. Did you see her face? God, I hate you people.”

She started to cry, then beat her fists on her knees.

WE DROVE UP
the Clark Fork River to Bonner to interview the two roommates of Seymour Bell. They lived in a small rented house on a slope close to where the Clark Fork and the Blackfoot rivers formed a bay below a steel-girdered train bridge. The main residential street of the town was lined with willow and birch trees, shading the rows of neat sawmill houses on either side of the street. The yards of the houses were blue-green inside the shade, the flower beds bursting with tulips, the small porches dotted with cans of geraniums and begonias.

It was a fine day, cool and scented with flowers and sawdust from the mill, but Clete had remained morose and had spoken little since we had left the sheriff’s office. At first I thought his mood was due to the nature of our errand. But Clete’s involvement with Sally Dio and the Mob still held a strong claim on his life, and I suspected the furrow in his brow meant he had taken another journey to a bad place in his head and he was sorting through it with a garbage rake.

“I don’t think the sheriff took the FBI too seriously, Clete,” I said.

“No, somebody spit in the soup. They’re going to try and hang a murder beef on me.”

“You think Wellstone stirred up the feds?”

“Of course I do. That’s how his kind operate. They call up Fart, Barf, and Itch or somebody in the attorney general’s office or another bunch of bureaucratic asswipes just like them. They never hit you head-on.”

“I’d shitcan this stuff. Sally Dee was a pus head. He got what he deserved.”

“I got news for you. People who get in the way of Ridley Wellstone and his friends are going to be speed bumps.”

“Yeah?” I said, glancing at Clete.

“Lose the Little Orphan Annie routine, will you?” he replied, his big head hanging down, his expression empty, like that of a stuffed animal.

We sat on the back porch in sun-spangled shade with a tall, lean, bare-chested kid by the name of Ben Hauser. He told us his dead friend Seymour Bell had grown up on a cattle ranch outside Alberton, west of Missoula. He also said Seymour was nothing like his girlfriend, Cindy, that Seymour had one foot in the next world, and no matter what Cindy said or did, Seymour would find a church where the congregants glowed with blue fire or neurosis, depending on how you wanted to define it.

“Seymour was a little eccentric about religion?” I said.

“No, he believed in it, full-tilt. The crazier, the better,” Ben Hauser said. “He joined a Pentecostal group here, but he quit because they didn’t give witness in tongues. Then he started going to revivals hereabouts. That’s when him and Cindy got into it.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Cindy went to church on occasion, but she thought these revival people were hucksters. Sometimes Seymour trusted folks when he shouldn’t. Cindy would get mad as hell at him.”

“Did he wear a small wood cross?” I asked.

Ben Hauser looked into space. “Yeah, come to think of it, he did. Or at least I think I saw him wearing one. Why?”

“Would someone want to tear it off him for any reason?” I said.

“No, people respected Seymour. He was a good guy. I don’t understand how something like this happened.”

Ben Hauser’s hair was buzz-cut and already receding above the temples, giving him a look beyond his years. Down below us was the Blackfoot River, and a group of kids were diving off the railroad bridge into the water, shouting each time one went off the side. Ben Hauser seemed to stare at them, his face wan, his eyes unfocused.

“You okay?” I said.

“Sure,” he replied.

“You don’t know anybody who had it in for Seymour?” Clete asked.

“No,” Ben answered. “I tell you one thing, though. Seymour was smart in school. He had a three-point-eight GPA. He was tough, too. The bastard who did him in had a fight on his hands.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Seymour might have been churchgoing, but he rode bulls in 4-H. I told the cops the fuckhead who kidnapped him must have used handcuffs. You get Seymour mad, he’d take on three or four guys with fists and feet and anything else they wanted. He did it one night in front of the Oxford when some guys made a remark about Cindy. I bet there were handcuff burns on his wrists, weren’t there?”

He stared up at me, waiting for my answer.

I LET CLETE
drive and used my cell phone to call Joe Bim Higgins. “We just interviewed Ben Hauser,” I said. “He told us Seymour Bell wouldn’t have gone down without a fight. He says if Bell was kidnapped, the perp probably used handcuffs.”

“That’s a possibility,” Joe Bim said.

“Say again?”

“There were abrasions on Bell’s wrists. They didn’t look like they came from rope or wire. I thought I mentioned that.”

He had not, but what do you say under the circumstances? “I was just double-checking, Sheriff,” I said.

“Anytime,” he said.

I closed my cell and looked at the highway rushing at us.

“Where to?” Clete asked.

“Let’s see what we can find out about the California couple who got killed at the rest stop. Let’s start at the saloon where they were drinking with Jamie Sue Wellstone.”

“You got it, big mon,” Clete said, putting an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

We drove up through the Blackfoot Valley, through meadowland and across streams and sky-blue lakes that eventually feed into the Swan Drainage. The weather had just started to blow when we pulled into the saloon, and the lake was chained with rain rings, the mountains gray-green and misty on the far side, like images in an Oriental painting. Some fishermen were drinking in a booth, but otherwise, the saloon was empty. A heavyset bartender in black trousers and a white shirt was looking out the back window at the rain falling on the lake. He turned around when he heard us sit down at the bar. “What are you having, fellows?” he said.

I opened my badge holder. “I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux. My friend here is Clete Purcel. We’re helping out in the investigation of the double homicide that happened in a rest stop west of Missoula Monday night. It’s our understanding that the two victims were drinking here earlier the same day.”

The bartender leaned on his arms. His cuffs were rolled, and his forearms looked thick and sun-browned in the gloom, wrapped with soft black hair. “You want to show me that shield again?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Because it doesn’t look local. I’m wrong on that?” he said.

“No, you’re right. But you can call Joe Bim Higgins on my cell if you think we’re pulling on your crank,” Clete said.

“It was just a question. What do you guys want to know?”

I opened my notebook on the bar. The bartender told us his name was Harold Waxman and that he worked part-time at the saloon and sometimes drove 18-wheelers after Labor Day, when the tourist season shut down. “Lot of the mills have closed. There’s not that much log hauling anymore,” he said.

“Did the California people have trouble with anybody here? Exchange words, something like that?” I said.

“Not exactly,” the bartender said.

“How do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” I asked.

“The guy was a negative kind of person, that’s all. He wasn’t a likable guy.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

“Said the place was dirty or something to that effect. Look, there was a half-breed or a Mexican-looking guy hanging around. He was watching Ms. Wellstone or the California woman from the doorway over there. Maybe he’s a cherry picker. It’s not the season yet, but they’ll be showing up at Flathead Lake for the harvest pretty soon.”

“You told this to the sheriff?” I said.

“Yeah, or to the detectives he sent out here. You want a drink? It’s on the house.”

I shook my head. “Give me three fingers of Jack straight up,” Clete said. “Give me a beer back on that, too.”

“The woman and the guy with her?” the bartender said, fixing Clete’s drink. “The way they talked, I think maybe they were in the life, know what I mean?”

“What did they say?” Clete asked.

“She said she’d been a high-priced hooker. She was talking about it to Ms. Wellstone like it was nothing. It was embarrassing to listen to. If you ask me, California is a big commode overflowing on the rest of the country.”

He set down a deep shot glass brimming with whiskey on a paper napkin, then drew a draft beer and set it on a separate napkin. The foam swelled up over the lip of the beer glass and pooled onto the napkin. Unconsciously, I touched at my mouth with my knuckle, then looked out at the rain dancing on the lake. The mist on the water’s surface made me think of Lake Pontchartrain years ago, long before Katrina, long before I had blown out my doors with Jim Beam straight up and a beer back.

“Did Ms. Wellstone seem to know these people?” I asked.

“No, not at all. I don’t think she liked them, either. Ms. Wellstone is highly thought of hereabouts. She could be a Nashville star if she wanted to. She gave up her career to sing gospel. That pair from California were low-rent. To be frank, anybody who thinks Ms. Wellstone would be mixed up with people like that has got his head up his ass.”

Clete knocked back his Jack and sipped the foam from his beer. I could see the color bloom in his cheeks and his eyes take on a warm shine. “I hear Jamie Sue Wellstone married a guy who was fried in a tank,” he said.

“Mr. Wellstone was wounded in a war. But I don’t know how. Maybe you ought to ask him about it,” the bartender said.

“You know what I can’t figure, Harold?” Clete said. “You’re knocking people in the life, but you’ve got a photograph of Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill on your wall there.”

The bartender looked at him silently.

“What I also can’t figure out is why young, beautiful women never marry mutilated poor guys or even old poor guys,” Clete said. “It’s a mystery.”

“You guys want anything else?” the bartender asked.

Clete looked at me and back at the bartender. “Not a thing,” he said, and slipped a folded five-dollar bill under his empty shot glass.

We talked to the waitress in the café about the man who had been looking through the bead curtain at the murder victims and Jamie Sue Wellstone. Then we walked out to my truck.

“What was that stuff with the bartender?” I said.

“I don’t like blue-collar guys who suck up to rich people,” Clete replied. “The Wellstone place isn’t far from here. Let’s check out the broad.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I replied.

“What are they going to do? Dime me with the feds? Lighten up, big mon. Everything is copacetic.”

CHAPTER 6

THE WELLSTONE RANCH
was only a half hour from the Swan River, up on a plateau of emerald-green meadowland bordered by sheer mountains that were still capped with snow. The house was Tudor, huge, more a fortress than a home. The barns and sheds were red with white trim, the pastures separated by the same hand-stacked rock fences that you see in the Upper South. At least a hundred head of bison grazed on one slope; Texas longhorns grazed on another. The Wellstones, at least ostensibly, had created a bucolic paradise. The fact that they wanted to dig test wells on it, or anywhere else in the Swan Drainage, was beyond comprehension.

The security man at the gate called up to the main house, and we were waved in and told to meet Ms. Wellstone at the entrance to the garden. She wore a bloodred dress with a white ribbon that was threaded through the eyelets at the top of the bodice. She carried a martini glass with two olives in the bottom. I thought perhaps alcohol explained the casual access she had given us to her home. But I quickly began to feel that Jamie Sue Wellstone was one of those rare individuals who could use booze selectively, perhaps to deaden the senses if need be, and not become hostage to it.

The garden was dissected by gravel pathways and surrounded by a gray stone wall that was stippled with lichen in the shade. The flower beds were planted with pansies, English roses that were as big as grapefruit, forget-me-nots, violets, clematis vine, and bottlebrush trees. I wondered if the eclectic nature of the ornamentals in the garden said something about the undefined and perhaps deceptive nature of the Wellstones and their ability to acquire an entire culture as easily as writing a check.

“Would you like a drink?” Jamie Sue said, indicating a redwood table where a bottle of vodka sat in an ice bucket.

“
I
would,” Clete said.