Swan Peak (12 page)

During all of it, he had never showed his pain and had never complained. The Big Sleazy was God’s gift to those who could not find peace in either the world or rejection of it. How could one refuse life inside a Petrarchan sonnet, particularly when it was offered to you without reservation or conditions by a divine hand?

But the chink in Clete’s armor remained right below his heart, and the same knife went through it every time.

It’s fair to say most of his girlfriends were nude dancers, grifters, drunks, or relatives of mobsters. Most of them wore tattoos, and some had tracks on their arms or thighs. But the similarity in Clete’s lovers didn’t lie in their occupations or addictions. Almost all of them were incurable neurotics who went through romantic relationships like boxes of Kleenex. The more outrageous their behavior, the more Clete believed he had found kindred spirits.

Ironically, it wasn’t the hookers and strippers and addicts who did him the most damage. It was usually a woman with a degree of normalcy and education in her background who wrapped him in knots. I suspect a psychologist would say Clete didn’t believe he was worthy of being loved. As a consequence, he would allow himself to be used and wounded by people whose own lack of self-knowledge didn’t allow them to see the depth of injury they inflicted upon him. Regardless, it was the quasi-normal ones who hung him out to dry.

TWO DAYS AFTER
our interview of Jamie Sue Wellstone, Clete began acting strange. “I’d better cancel out on our fishing trip today,” he said on our front porch after knocking at seven A.M.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“Just some doodah I need to take care of in town,” he replied. He looked up at the sunlight breaking on the mountain, his cheeks bright with aftershave. His hair was freshly combed and clipped, his shoes buffed. He wore a pair of pressed slacks and a crisp new sport shirt.

“How about some coffee?” I said.

“I’d better run. Check with you later.”

“What are you up to, Clete?”

“Why do I always feel like you’re trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?”

“When will you be back?” I asked.

“Does anyone at your meetings ever say you have a control problem?”

By three that afternoon, he had not returned. I tried his cell but got no answer. I drove three miles down the highway to the little service town of Lolo and saw his convertible parked outside the town’s only saloon. He was at the far end of the bar, hunched over his drink, perhaps twenty feet away from a table full of bikers who were half in the bag. The bikers were talking loudly, obviously getting Clete’s attention, although they were unaware of it.

I sat down next to him and ordered a glass of ice and carbonated water. “What are you drinking?” I said.

“A gin gimlet,” he replied. “It’s summertime, so I’m having a gin gimlet.”

“You look like you’re shitfaced.”

“I had the top down. It’s windburn. Dave, will you get off my back?”

“It’s the Wellstone woman, isn’t it?” I said.

“She called me on my cell. She wanted to retain me.”

“For what?”

“To find an old boyfriend. It’s not an unusual situation.” My eyes were boring into the side of his face. He took a sip from his drink and balled up a napkin. He looked over his shoulder at the bikers. “Can you guys hold down the noise?” he said.

The bikers turned and stared at us. They were stone-faced and head-shaved, unsure which of us had spoken, their eyes taking our inventory.

“We’re just having a drink here. How you guys doin’?” I said.

They went back to their conversation, the tenor of their voices unchanged.

“Has this got something to do with the man who was watching her in the saloon?” I said.

“Jamie Sue used to—”

“Jamie Sue?”

“That’s what I said. Jamie Sue used to sing with a guy who went to prison. He tried to stop a pimp beating up a hooker outside a nightclub. He ended up putting a shiv in the guy,” Clete said. “She thinks he’s out now and maybe hanging around. She’s afraid her husband’s security people might bust him up.”

“You believe that crap?”

“Come on, Dave.”

“You stop jerking me around. You tell me what happened today.”

“I met her for an early lunch at this joint on Flathead Lake. We had a couple of drinks and took a boat ride. The water was blue as far as you could see, you know, like you’re out on the Pacific Ocean rather than a lake. Man, she looked fine, too, sitting on the bow of the boat with her gold hair blowing in the wind.”

“Yeah, Jane Powell on a yacht. Get to it, Clete.”

“We went back to the joint at the marina and had a couple more drinks. Then she put some money in the juke and asked me to dance. She felt so little inside my arms. Then I felt this wetness on my shirt. She was crying. She denied it, but she was crying.”

I propped my elbow on the bar and pinched my temples. I hated to hear what was coming. In fact, I wished I had not gone looking for Clete and this time had let him take the fall on his own. “You got it on with her?” I said.

“It’s like my libido was on autopilot. Five minutes away, there’s this motel on the point. We had the room on the end, looking over the water. Man, it was like I was twenty-five again.”

“Oh, Clete,” I said, more to myself than to him.

“We agreed afterwards it was a mistake. She was serious when she called about this Indian guy she used to sing with. It’s over between them, but she doesn’t want to see him hurt. I think she’s a good woman, Dave.”

I wanted to punch him off the bar stool.

Just then the bikers began laughing uproariously at a remark one of them had made about the drink waitress.

“How about shutting the fuck up?” I said over my shoulder.

“What’d you say?” one of them asked.

“I said close your mouth. You’re disturbing a conversation here,” I replied, my face tight, my hand opening and closing on the bar.

The entire bar became silent. Out on the highway, I could hear a tractor-trailer rig shifting down for the long haul over Lolo Pass.

“Let it go, man,” one of the bikers said to the others. “They’re cops.”

“The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide, bud, Clete Purcel and Dave Robicheaux, NOPD’s answer for every whore’s wet dream,” Clete said, winking at them. “Something to tell your grandkids about.”

But none of it was funny.

THAT NIGHT IN
bed I told Molly what had happened.

“Has he lost his mind?” she said.

“He wants to be young again. He wants New Orleans to be like it was when we were beat cops. Scarlett O’Hara comes along and stokes him up and lets him think he’s Rhett Butler. She hit him with the perfect combo — beautiful victim protecting her ex-boyfriend needs help from chivalric PI.”

“Stop making excuses for him. Clete went to bed with another man’s wife.”

“That’s the point. It’s eating his lunch,” I said.

I heard her sigh in the darkness. “I’m really sorry to hear this,” she said.

“Maybe we should go back to New Iberia,” I said.

“I think that’s a bad idea. We didn’t do anything wrong. We’re not going to let other people’s deeds or behavior make choices for us. Clete needs to get his goddamn act together.”

“He’ll come around,” I said.

“Who are you kidding? Clete’s at war with himself. It’s the only way he knows how to live.”

She was right. Clete had slept with the wife of a mutilated war veteran, a man who had been burned in a tank. In Vietnam he had witnessed the death by fire of marines who had been trapped inside a burning armored vehicle. In his dreams, almost every third or fourth night of his life, he heard the sounds of ammunition belts popping in the heat and the voices of the men who couldn’t free the hatches on their vehicle. Now he had an extra set of knives turning inside his chest. Jamie Sue Wellstone may have been the succubus who provided the temptation and the opportunity, but the most pernicious agency in Clete’s life always remained the same. He would give up his life before he would willingly harm an animal or a friend or an innocent person, but daily he went about deconstructing himself without ever understanding that the child his father had irreparably injured was still living inside him. Clete had demons not even an exorcist would take on.

Had Jamie Sue Wellstone deliberately played him? I wasn’t sure. As though she had read my thoughts, Molly said, “I think you and Clete got too close to something. I think the Wellstones know exactly what they’re doing. I think you’re next, Dave.”

“Not me. I’ve fought my last war.”

She turned toward the wall and didn’t reply.

THE NEXT MORNING,
Friday, Clete’s troubles took on a different shade, in the form of Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans from the FBI. When she found no one home at Albert’s house, she drove her automobile up the dirt road to our front porch.

She looked Amerasian and was dressed in a blue suit, white blouse, and conservative shoes, her dark hair touching her shoulders, her face narrow. She wore small wire-framed glasses that gave her a studious look, like that of a research librarian or a university professor devoted to an arcane subject that no one cared about. She said she wanted to speak to Clete Purcel. When I told her I didn’t know where he was, her eyes shifted off my face onto the interior of the cabin. She looked into my face again, not blinking, her expression impassive.

“You’re a sheriff’s detective in Louisiana?” she said.

“That’s correct.”

“You don’t know where Mr. Purcel is?” she said, repeating her question.

“That’s what I said.”

“You were here in Montana when Sally Dio’s plane crashed into a mountainside on the res? You were here with Mr. Purcel?”

“I wasn’t ‘with’ him. But yes, I was here in Montana when Sally caught the bus. It was a heartrending moment for everyone.”

“The Bureau considers his death a homicide. I understand Dio’s men smashed your friend’s hand in a car door.”

“Tell you what — a guy who can give you firsthand information on this works at the Wellstone ranch up in the Swan. His name is Lyle Hobbs. He did scut jobs for Sally when he wasn’t molesting children. You know the Wellstones, don’t you?”

Her eyes took on a sharper intensity at the implication in my question. “I know who they are,” she said. “You think my visit here has some connection to them?”

“I have no idea why you’re here. But I don’t believe it’s about Sally Dio. The feds didn’t care about him nineteen years ago. I don’t think they care about him now.”

Molly opened the front door. “Would you like to come in for coffee?” she asked.

Wrong time for southern protocol.

“That would be nice,” Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans said.

Inside the kitchen area of the cabin, Molly began setting pastry and cups and saucers on our breakfast table, which was spread with a red-and-white-checkerboard cloth. Alicia Rosecrans sat down and opened a notebook on the table. “You and Clete Purcel are now helping Sheriff Higgins in the investigation of the homicide that took place behind Albert Hollister’s house?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I reinterviewed some of the same people you and Purcel interviewed. You’re walking on the edges of meddling in a federal investigation, Mr. Robicheaux.”

Molly had been moving pots and pans around on the stove, but she stopped and turned off the propane on the burner. The only sound in the room was the wind blowing in the cottonwoods that shaded the cabin.

“I’m a police officer,” I said. “Any interviews I conducted were done with the consent of the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department. I think the question we’re not dealing with here is your involvement in the investigation of a local homicide. Why are the feds interested in the deaths of two college kids?”

“One of them was kidnapped.”

I wasn’t buying her answer. Since 9/11, the FBI had shifted its emphasis not only to the vast and attendant connotations of the word “terrorism” but to following thousands of Mideastern college students all over the United States. I doubted they had time or resources to worry about what appeared to be the random murder of two college students in Missoula, Montana.

“Dave, I completely forgot. I promised we’d take Albert’s cat to the vet’s office this morning,” Molly said.

Alicia Rosecrans closed her notebook and returned it to her purse. She folded her hands and stared out the window at the cottonwoods swelling with wind. Her features were as immobile as those in an oil painting, her eyes full of private thoughts.

“Ma’am?” I said, wondering if indeed she had accepted Molly’s invitation to leave.

“I think your friend is with the Wellstone woman this morning,” she said.

“Can you say that again?”

“I believe he’s about to get himself in a lot of trouble,” she said. “Thank you for your time. Thank you for preparing the coffee, too, Ms. Robicheaux.”

Then Alicia Rosecrans went out to her car and drove away. But I had a feeling we would be seeing a lot more of her.

“What was that?” Molly said.

“The feds have Jamie Sue Wellstone under surveillance. The question is why.”

CHAPTER 7

TROYCE NIX’S HOSPITAL
window gave onto a terrace planted with mimosa and palm trees, bougainvillea, yellow bugle vine, crown of thorns, and Spanish daggers. In the early-morning hours and at sunset, the automatic sprinklers clicked on and misted the plants and created miniature rainbows above the terrace wall. But Troyce Nix was not interested in the beauty of a tropical garden or the baked hills across the river in Old Mexico or the millions of lights that seemed to come on at night along the dry floodplains of the Rio Grande. His favorite time of day was high noon, right after lunch, when the nurse turned on his morphine drip and the sky turned a blinding white and he found himself inside a vast desert somewhere west of the Pecos where neither God nor civilized man bothered to lay claim, where a solitary figure waited for him, both Troyce’s and the figure’s tracks finally braiding together amid sand dunes that were as tall as mountains.