Swan Peak (11 page)

“Is your husband home, Ms. Wellstone?” I asked.

“He’s taking a nap. This is about the people who were at the saloon on the lake before they were killed?” she said.

“Yeah, the bartender said a guy who was maybe a Latino or part Indian was paying undue attention to either you or the homicide victims,” I said.

“I don’t remember that, really. I didn’t see anything unusual there that day,” she said.

The sky was still sealed by rain clouds, and it was cold sitting at the table. The garden itself seemed like an intrinsically cold place, dotted with stone benches and tarnished bronze sundials, shut off from the vistas surrounding the ranch. Clete poured himself a full glass of vodka and dropped three olives in it. “Bombs away,” he said, and tanked it down.

“Would you like a beer or a Scotch, Mr. Robicheaux?” Jamie Sue Wellstone asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s odd you have no memory of a Mexican or Indian watching you at the saloon, because the bartender made a point about his being there.”

“Maybe an Indian or Mexican
was
there. It’s just not the way I remember it. I’m not saying the bartender is wrong,” she said.

Know what the false close is in the ethos of a door-to-door salesman? The salesman backs off, concedes that the customer’s reluctance is understandable, and seemingly gives up. It’s a hot day. The salesman is tired and asks for a glass of water. A moment later, he’s the customer’s friend, a victim himself, a family man with a wife and kids depending on him. The customer gets sandbagged without ever knowing what hit him.

“I see,” I said, nodding, studying my notebook. “Did the California couple indicate they’d had trouble with anyone? You think maybe they were mixed up with criminals?”

“The woman sounded like she’d lived a checkered life,” Jamie Sue said.

“As a prostitute?” I said.

“I can’t say that with authority.”

“On an unrelated subject, why would y’all hire a man like Lyle Hobbs to work security for you?” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Hobbs has served time for child molestation. He also worked for a Mafia pimp by the name of Sally Dio,” I said.

“My husband and brother-in-law try to help ex-felons. They also believe in forgiveness. You don’t believe in forgiveness, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“I think the best place for child molesters is the graveyard. But I’m not a theologian,” I said.

She took a drink from her vodka and let her eyes rest on mine. She was pretty; her voice and accent were lovely. It would have been easier to dismiss her as deceptive and cunning, even villainous. But I had the feeling she was much more complex than that and would not fit easily into a categorical envelope.

“I saw you once,” Clete said to her out of nowhere.

“Oh?”

“In a joint in Uvalde, Texas. A big live-oak tree grew up through the floor. I was chasing down a bail skip over there. You sang ‘I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know.’ You reminded me of Skeeter Davis.”

“I knew Skeeter. She influenced me a lot.”

His green eyes lingered on hers. The moment was one that made me think of a red light flashing at a train crossing. “You ought to stay clear of Lyle Hobbs. Also that racist from Mississippi who works with him,” he said.

“I wish I could oblige, but I don’t decide who works here,” she said.

“Can you describe the man who was watching you at the saloon?” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember anyone watching me. How many times do I have to say that to you, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“That’s perplexing. The waitress in the café remembered him. She also remembered you coming in and asking about him,” I said.

“Maybe I did. I’d had more to drink than I probably should have,” she replied, then turned her attention back to Clete. “When were you in Uvalde?”

The French doors on the back of the house opened, and Leslie Wellstone walked out on the flagstone patio, dressed in gray slacks, a print sport shirt, and a blue blazer. “
Comment va la vie, Monsieur Robicheaux? Et votre ami aussi
?” he said.

“
Ça roule
,” I replied.

“I heard your remarks about the quality of our personnel. You don’t think Mr. Hobbs quite fulfills the requirements of the reborn?” he said.

“I’m sure he’s a special kind of guy. Most ex-cons with a short-eyes jacket are,” I said.

He let the reference pass and inserted a cigarette into a holder. “Did you know in 2004 we were responsible for getting the anti–gay marriage initiative on the ballot in your home state?”

“Yeah, you got the fundamentalists into the voting booth, and once there, they pulled the lever to put your boy back in the White House,” I said.

“Smart man. You should come work for us,” he said.

“Not at gunpoint, Mr. Wellstone,” I said.

“Time to dee-dee,” Clete said.

“You must be a veteran of our Indo-Chinese experience,” Leslie Wellstone said.

“Thanks for your hospitality,” Clete said. He turned toward Wellstone’s wife. “By the way, you didn’t just remind me of Skeeter Davis. You were better than her.”

Maybe the disfigurement in Wellstone’s face or the somber atmosphere surrounding the garden colored my perception. But when he looked at Clete, I would have sworn there was an iniquitous presence in his eyes, like the liquidity you associate with an infection.

Minutes later, as we drove off the Wellstone property, I waited for Clete to explain his behavior. Instead, he gazed at the snow clouds up on Swan Peak and the cottonwood trees flashing past the window. He reached down and adjusted himself. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“Yeah, stop having the thoughts you’re having about that woman,” I replied.

“What’s to think about? She was lying about the guy watching her at the saloon. She’s protecting him for some reason. That doesn’t mean she’s dirty.”

“Who are you kidding?”

“Did you check out that pair of ta-tas? My flopper was flipping around in my slacks like a garden hose.”

We didn’t need this kind of trouble.

OVER THE MOUNTAIN
from his residence, Albert Hollister owned two hundred acres up a drainage that was dry most of the summer and fall. Years ago, he had bought the acreage cheap as rough land from a timber company, then had immediately set about stacking and burning the snags and splintered logs that covered the property. He drilled two water wells and scarified the soil and reseeded it with a mixture of upland grasses, fenced the bottom land with smooth wire, and built a cabin with electricity and plumbing and an eight-stall barn strung with heat lamps so it could also serve as a brooder house for his poultry.

He kept sheep and Foxtrotters and saddlebreds and Morgans, and in a few years the grass that he watered constantly from his wells was a deep blue-green, not unlike the pastureland of central Kentucky and Tennessee.

The waddies and drifters who worked for him were the kind of men who were out of sync with both history and themselves, pushed further and further by technology and convention into remote corners where the nineteenth century was still visible in the glimmer of a high-ceilinged saloon or an elevated sidewalk that had tethering rings inset in the concrete or an all-night café that served steaks and spuds to railroad workers in the lee of a mountain bigger than the sky.

Most of them were honest men. When they got into trouble, it was usually minor and involved alcohol or women or both. They didn’t file tax returns or waste money on dentists. Many of them didn’t have last names, or at least last names they always spelled the same way. Some had only initials, and even friends who had known them on the drift for years never knew what the initials stood for. If they weren’t paid to be wranglers and ranch workers, most of them would do the work for free. If they couldn’t do it for free, most of them would pay to do it. When one of them called himself a rodeo bum, he wasn’t being humble.

Their enemies were predictability, politics, geographical permanence, formal religion, and any conversation at all about the harmful effects of vice on one’s health. The average waddie woke in the morning with a cigarette cough from hell and considered the Big C an occupational hazard, on the same level as clap and cirrhosis and getting bull-hooked or stirrup-drug or flung like a rag doll into the boards. It was just part of the ride. Anybody who could stay on a sunfishing bolt of lightning eight seconds to the buzzer had already dispensed with questions about mortality.

The man who walked up the dirt road had come in from the highway that traversed Lolo Pass into Idaho. He was dressed in khakis and a denim jacket and a shapeless gray felt hat that was sweat-stained at the base of the crown. His boots were pointed, cracked at the seams, the color leached from the leather; the chain on his wallet was clipped on his belt, the links clinking against his hip. When he spied Albert in the pasture, he set down his duffel bag and his guitar case and leaned one arm on a steel fence stake. He removed his hat and wiped his forehead on his jacket sleeve. A truck passed, driving too fast for the road, covering him with dust. The man chewed on a blade of grass and seemed to look at the truck a long time before he turned his attention back to Albert.

“Climb through the fence if you want to talk to me,” Albert said.

“I understand you might need a wrangler or a guy to handle rough stock,” the man said.

“Where’d you hear that?” Albert said.

“At the casino in Lolo.”

“You a rodeo man?”

“Not no more. Got busted up in Reno about four years back. I can still green-break them. I ain’t a bad trainer, either. I been a farrier, too.”

“I’ll meet you up at the cabin in a few minutes,” Albert said. “The elk popped a few clips on my back fence.”

“Got an extra pair of pliers?” the man asked.

A half hour later, Albert drank a glass of iced tea on the porch of the cabin with the man in the denim jacket, both of them seated in wood rocking chairs. It was shady and cool on the porch, and the man in the denim jacket looked tired, filmed with road dust, not quite able to concentrate on the conversation. He asked if he could wash inside. When he came back out on the porch, his hair was wet and combed out on his neck, his shirtsleeves rolled up high on his arms.

“What’s your name again?” Albert asked.

“J. D. Gribble.”

“You never got tattooed, J.D.?”

“I guess I never saw the advantage in it.”

“Ever spend time in jail?”

“Some.”

“Care to say what for?”

“Not using my head, mostly.”

“There’s a lot of that going around these days. Let’s see your guitar,” Albert said.

J. D. Gribble unsnapped the lid on his case and lifted the guitar from the felt liner and rested it across his lap. “It was my grandfather’s. Gibson stopped making this model about sixty years ago,” he said.

Albert put on his glasses and leaned forward to read the names that had been signed on the box. “Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Lucinda Williams, Jerry Jeff Walker,” he said. “You know these people?”

“I’ve sat in with them.”

“When that truck threw dust all over you, what were you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“Not a thing?”

“Except some folks don’t have no business driving on dirt roads, throwing dust and rocks all over people.”

“How about a hundred and fifty a week and rent and utilities?”

J.D. shifted the guitar on his lap and smiled. “That’s pert’ near the exact figure I had in mind.”

“On the subject of jail?”

“Yes sir?”

“I was on the hard road when I was eighteen. I was in several other cans, too. I wasn’t a criminal, but I could have turned out to be one.”

J.D. waited, unsure of what he was being told. “Yes sir, I’m listening.”

“That’s all. You have a voice and an accent that are reminiscent of Jimmie Rodgers. That’s quite unusual,” Albert replied. “I hope you like it here.”

CLETE PURCEL WAS
the bane of his enemies and feared in New Orleans by pimps, drug dealers, cops on a pad, jackrollers, scam artists who victimized old people, and sexual predators of all stripes. Paradoxically, his closest friends included whiskey priests, strippers, stand-up cons, hookers on the spike, badass biker girls, button men, Shylocks, and mind-blown street people who claimed they had seen UFOs emerging from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

His reputation for chaos and mayhem was legendary. In the men’s room of the New Orleans bus depot, he forced a contract killer to swallow a full dispenser of liquid soap. In the casino at the bottom of Canal, he blew a degenerate into a urinal with a firehose, then escaped the building by creating a bomb scare on the casino floor. He dropped a Teamster steward off a hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool. He filled a gangster’s hundred-thousand-dollar convertible with concrete. He hijacked an earth-grader from a construction site and drove it through the front of a palatial mansion owned by a member of the Giacano crime family. No, that is not an adequate description. He drove an earthmover through the entirety of the house, punching through the walls, grinding the furniture and tile and hardwood floors into rubble under the steel tracks. Not satisfied, he burst through the back of the house and destroyed the garages and parked cars and all the grounds, uprooting the hedges and trees, pushing the statuary and flagstone terrace into the swimming pool, finally exiting the property by exploding a brick wall onto the avenue.

I could go on, but what’s the point? For Clete, life was a carnival, a theme park full of harlequins and unicorns, a reverse detox unit for people who took themselves seriously or thought too much about death. In an ambience of palm trees and pink sunrises on live-oak trees, of rainwater ticking onto the philodendron inside a lichen-stained courtyard, inside the smell of beignets and coffee and night-blooming flowers two blocks from the Café du Monde, he had lived the ethos of the libertine and the happy hedonist, pumping iron to control his weight, eating amounts of cholesterol-loaded food that would clog a sewer main, convincing himself that a vodka Collins had little more influence on his hypertension than lemonade.