Swan Peak (16 page)

“You guys followed me and Jamie Sue Wellstone to a motel?” Clete said. He tried to sound incensed, but he felt a knot of shame in his throat.

“No, we followed
her
. You inserted yourself into the situation on your own.”

Inserted?

“Why are y’all interested in my medical history?” he said.

“Because we think you probably suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Because maybe there are people in the Bureau who don’t want to believe you murdered Sally Dio and his men. Maybe some people believe there were complexities involved that others don’t understand.”

She kept her eyes straight ahead as she drove, her hands in the ten-two position on the steering wheel. Her face was free of blemishes, her profile both enigmatic and lovely to look at. Clete continued to stare at her, his frustration growing.

“I never had post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “I drank too much sometimes and smoked a little weed. But any trouble I got into wasn’t because of Vietnam. I dug it over there.”

“Look at the photo taken at the homicide scene on I-90. There’s a man walking toward a compact car. If you look closely, you can make out a rectangular shape in his left hand. We think he’s the killer,” she said.

“Where’d you get this?”

“There was a surveillance camera in the rest stop on the opposite side of the highway. Evidently it had been knocked off-center, and it caught the man in the white shirt in two or three frames. Unfortunately, it didn’t catch the license number on the compact. Does this man look familiar?”

“No, it’s too grainy. He’s just a guy in a white shirt. Why are y’all investigating a local homicide?”

“Because during the last five years, there have been killings on several interstates that bear similarities to the one outside Missoula. The victims were made to kneel or lie on their faces. They were executed at point-blank range. They were sexually abused and sometimes burned or mutilated. Look at the next photo. Do you know that man?”

The eight-by-ten color blowup had been shot with a zoom lens in front of the saloon on Swan Lake. A tall ramrod-straight man wearing a short-brim Stetson hat and western-cut trousers and yellow-tinted aviator shades was looking directly at the lens. He had reddish-blond hair, and the sun on the lake seemed to create a nimbus around his body.

“I’ve never seen him. Who is he?” Clete said.

“We’re not sure. That’s why I asked you,” she said.

“Why does the FBI have Jamie Sue under surveillance?” Clete said.

Alicia Rosecrans turned a corner carefully, her turn indicator on; she glanced in the rearview mirror. “Look at the last photo in the folder,” she said. “Do you recognize that man?”

Clete lifted up the eight-by-ten and studied it. “He’s a nice-looking guy. But I’ve never seen him before.”

“Yes, you have, Mr. Purcel. That’s Leslie Wellstone, Jamie Sue’s husband, before he was burned in the Sudan.”

Alicia Rosecrans didn’t speak the rest of the way to the university.

CHAPTER 9

CLETE HAD NOT
called me from the jail, either out of shame or because he had thought he could elude a pending assault-and-battery beef by claiming he had feared for his life and acted in self-defense. Montana was still Montana, a culture where vegetarianism, gun control, and gay marriage would never flush. Nor would the belief ever die that a fight between two men was just that, a fight between two men.

That afternoon I went down to Albert’s house to talk to Clete. He was already half in the bag, but not because of Lyle Hobbs.

“Why’d that agent show me the photo of Jamie Sue’s husband before he was burned up?” he asked. “She wants to cluster-fuck my head?”

All of his windows were open. The weather had taken a dramatic turn, and the valley was covered with shadow, the air cold and dry-smelling, snow flurries already blowing off the top of the ridge.

“They’re not interested in Jamie Sue Wellstone,” I said. “They’re after her husband or brother-in-law. But I don’t know what for.”

“These murders?”

“Whatever it is, they’re not going to tell us. I don’t think they’re sharing information with Joe Bim Higgins, either.” I told Clete I’d been deputized by Higgins.

“What about me?”

“You weren’t here when he called,” I said.

“Cut it out, Streak.” He was spooning vanilla ice cream into a glass and pouring whiskey on top of it. “And stop giving me that look. Get yourself a Dr Pepper out of the refrigerator and don’t give me that look.”

“I don’t want a Dr Pepper.”

“Of course you don’t. You want a—”

“Say it.”

“Go to a meeting. I’ve got my own problems. I feel like I’ve got broken glass in my head. I porked the wife of a guy who had his face burned off. What kind of bastard would do something like that?”

“You’re the best guy I ever knew, Cletus.”

“Save the douche water for somebody else.”

He drank the mixture of Beam and ice cream down to the bottom of the glass, his brow furrowed, his green eyes as hard as marbles.

TROYCE NIX HAD
no trouble finding the location of Jamie Sue Wellstone’s home in the Swan River country. The problem was access to it. An even greater problem was access to Jamie Sue.

He sat in the café that adjoined the saloon on Swan Lake and ate a steak and a load of french fries and drank a cup of coffee while he looked at the snow drifting over the trees and descending like ash on the lake.

“It always snows here in June?” he said to the waitress.

“Sometimes in July,” she replied. “You the fellow who was asking about Ms. Wellstone?”

“I used to be a fan of her music. I heard she lived here’bouts. That’s the only reason I was asking.”

The waitress was a big, red-headed, pink-complected woman who wore oceanic amounts of perfume. “People around here like her. She’s rich, but she don’t act it. Harold said if you wanted information about her to ask him.”

“Who’s Harold?”

“The daytime bartender. He was gone when you were here before.”

Troyce’s eyes seemed to lose interest in the subject. He dropped coins in the jukebox, had another cup of coffee, and used the restroom. When he sat back down on the stool, he felt the bandages on his chest bind against his wounds. He removed a black-and-white booking-room photo from his shirt pocket and laid it on the counter. He pushed it toward her with one finger. “You ever see this guy around here?”

She leaned over and looked at the photo without picking it up, idly touching the hair on the back of her head. “Not really.”

“What’s ‘not really’ mean?” Troyce asked.

The waitress took a barrette out of her pocket and worked it into the back of her hair. “You a Texas Ranger?”

“Why you think I’m from Texas?”

“You know, the accent and all. Besides, it’s printed on the bottom of this guy’s picture.”

“You’re pretty smart,” Troyce said.

“I’d remember him if he’d been in here.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because he’s almost as good-looking as you.”

Troyce slipped the photo back in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap. “What time you get off?”

“Late,” she said. “I got night blindness, too. That’s how come Harold drives me home. And if he don’t, my husband does.”

Troyce left her a three-dollar tip and took his coffee cup and saucer into the saloon and sat at the bar. Through the back windows, he could see the surface of the lake wrinkling in the wind and the steel-gray enormity of Swan Peak disappearing inside the snow. “Ms. Wellstone been in?” he said.

The bartender picked up a pencil and pad and set it in front of him. “You want to leave a message, I’ll make sure she gets it.”

“You’re Harold?”

“What’s your business here, pal?”

“This guy.” Troyce put the mug shot of Jimmy Dale Greenwood in front of him.

“You have some ID?”

Troyce took out his wallet. It had been made by a convict, rawhide-threaded along the edges, the initials T.N. cut deep inside a big star. Troyce removed a celluloid-encased photo ID and set it on the bar.

“This says you’re a prison guard,” the bartender said.

“I’m that, among other things.”

“This doesn’t give you jurisdiction in Montana. Maybe not a whole lot in Texas, either.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“I used to be a cop.”

“I think your waitress friend in there has seen this fellow. I’m wondering if you have, too.”

The bartender picked up the photo and tapped its edge on the bar, taking Troyce’s measure. The bartender’s pate was shiny with the oil he used on his few remaining strands of black hair, his shoulders almost too big for the immaculate oversize dress shirt he wore. His physicality was of a kind that sends other men definite signals, a quiet reminder that manners can be illusory and the rules of the cave still hold great sway in our lives.

“A drifter was in here a couple of times. He was asking about Ms. Wellstone. He looked like this guy,” the bartender said.

“You know where he is now?”

“No.”

“Does your waitress?”

“She’s not my waitress.”

Troyce smiled before he spoke. “I do something to put you out of joint?”

“Yeah, you tried to let on you’re a cop. We’re done here.”

ANYONE WHO HAS
spent serious time in the gray-bar hotel chain is left with certain kinds of signatures on his person. Many hours of clanking iron on the yard produce flat-plated chests and swollen deltoids and rock-hard lats. Arms blanketed with one-color tats, called “sleeves,” indicate an inmate has been in the system a long time and is not to be messed with. Blue teardrops at the corner of the eye mean he is a member of the AB and has performed serious deeds for his Aryan brothers, sometimes including murder.

Wolves, sissies, biker badasses, and punks on the stroll all have their own body language. So do the head-shaved psychopaths to whom everyone gives a wide berth. Like Orientals, each inmate creates his own space, avoids eye contact, and stacks his own time. Even an act as simple as traversing the yard can become iconic. What is sometimes called the “con walk” is a stylized way of walking across a crowded enclosure. The signals are contradictory, but they indicate a mind-set that probably goes back to Western civilization’s earliest jails. The shoulders are rounded, the arms held almost straight down (to avoid touching another inmate’s person), the eyes looking up from under the brow, an expression psychologists call “baboon hostility.” The step is exaggerated, the knees splayed slightly and coming up higher than they should, the booted feet consuming territory in almost surreptitious fashion.

Every inmate in the institution is marked indelibly by it, and the mark is as instantly recognizable as were the numbers tattooed on the left forearms of the inmates in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The difference is one of degree and intention. Time in the system prints itself on every aspect of an inmate’s behavior and manner.

On Wednesday evening the weather was still cold, the air gray with rain, and at Albert’s ranch we could hear thunder inside the snow clouds that were piled along the crests of the Bitterroot Mountains. Albert asked me to take a ride with him to check on the new man he had hired to care for his horses in the next valley. He said the man’s name was J. D. Gribble.

Gribble’s cabin was little more than one-room in size, heated by a woodstove that he also cooked on. He was unshaved and wore jeans without knees and only a T-shirt under his denim jacket. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and kept his cigarette papers and tobacco and a folder of matches in a pouch on the same table where he ate his food. In his ashtray were paper matches he had split with his thumbnail so he could get two lights out of one match.

Albert and I drank coffee and condensed milk with the new man, then Albert went out to the barn to check on his horses. Through the window I could see lightning tremble on the sides of the hills, burning away the shadows from the brush and trees. The cabin windows were dotted with water, the interior snug and warm, still smelling of the venison the new man had cooked for his supper. In the corner was a twenty-two Remington pump, the bluing worn away, the stock badly nicked. He followed my eyes to the rifle.

“I bought that off a guy in a hobo jungle for ten dollars,” he said.

“Where you from, podna?” I asked.

“Anyplace between my mother’s womb and where I’m at now,” he replied.

“What were you down for?” I said.

“Who says I was down for anything?”

“I do,” I replied, my eyes on his.

“It was a bad beef. But everybody in there has got the same complaint. So I don’t talk about it.”

“Albert is a friend of mine,” I said.

He was sitting right across the plank table from me. He picked up his coffee cup and drank from it, his hand fitted around the entirety of the cup. “I already told Mr. Hollister I ain’t necessarily proud of certain periods in my life. I had the impression he accepted my word and didn’t hold a man’s past against him.”

“Is that your guitar?”

He rubbed the calluses on his palms together, his eyes empty. He stared out the window into the darkness as though he had found no good words to use. “There ain’t nobody else living here. So I guess that makes it mine.”

“It was just a question.”

“I’ve had a lifetime supply of questions like that. They always come from the same people.”

“Which people is that?” I asked.

“The ones who want authority and power over others.The kind that ain’t got no lives of their own. The kind that cain’t leave other folks alone.”

“That’s hard to argue with,” I said. “But here’s the problem, J.D. When a guy is still splitting matches, he hasn’t been out long. When a guy is on the drift from another state, he either went out max time or he jumped his parole. If he went out max time, he’s probably a hard case or a guy who was in for a violent crime. If he’s wanted on a parole violation, that’s another matter, one that’s not too cool, either.”

“I got news for you, mister. I ain’t a criminal. And I ain’t interested in nobody’s jailhouse wisdom, either.”