Light of the World

Chapter 21

Love Younger’s ranch was located twenty miles west on the two-lane highway that gradually ascended over Lolo Pass into the Idaho wilderness. The countryside was riparian and lush and green from the spring rains, the leaves of the cottonwoods along Lolo Creek flickering in the breeze, the lilacs and wild roses blooming, the wheel lines filling the air with an iridescent mist. There were Angus and longhorns and Holsteins belly-deep in the grass down by the creek, and horse farms with Morgans and Thoroughbreds and Appaloosas and Foxtrotters outside breeding barns you expect to see in Kentucky but not in the West. It was one of those rare places that commercialization and urban sprawl had skipped over, and I wondered how many of Younger’s guests — who drove modest vehicles, the bumpers glued with patriotic stickers — believed that they could ever own a ranch in a setting like this; or did they concede that they would always be visitors? I wondered if this was their notion of the American Dream. Or were they like the many who wanted only to touch the hem of a powerful man’s garment, to not only be healed but to elude mortality?

Their cars and trucks were lined up at the entrance for a half mile, all with their turn signals blinking in unison. The arch over the drive was made of historical branding irons and great links of iron chain welded together, all of it supported by two columns of white stones. There was no admission price for the barbecue, no proof of invitation required, except an indication that everyone entering the ranch was of one mind and believed the hallowed spirit of the minutemen dwelled in their midst. The guests of Love Younger came in large numbers, trusting and glad of heart, their children riding in the beds of pickup trucks, all of them filled with joy and expectation as they entered an environment that seemed an extension of a magical kingdom.

Large-bodied men wearing western clothes and Stetsons and sunglasses and boots looked in each car entering the property, but only to welcome the drivers and passengers and point out the best parking spots. There was no need for a martial or police presence on Love Younger’s ranch. A country band was playing on a stage carpentered out of newly milled pine; children rocketed into the air inside the bouncy houses; the smell of drawn beer and barbecued chicken and sliced sirloin and roasted pig was mouthwatering. Could any event be grander or more American than a visit to the ranch of an egalitarian billionaire, a patriarch who was of them and for them and who, with a wave of his hand, could wipe away their doubts and fears?

Pennants and flags of every kind flew from tent poles all over a pasture that had been cleaned of animal droppings. The ambience could be compared with the celebratory nature of a medieval fair. It needed only jugglers and flutists and jesters in sock caps and bells and pointy shoes. The elements in the Everyman plays and the caricatures in the tarot deck were everywhere. Death had lost its sting and been driven from the field, and virtue and good deeds and courage and folk wisdom had triumphed over evil. Unfortunately, the medieval morality play required a villain. Who or what might fit the role?

“Check out the art on the T-shirts some of these guys are wearing,” Alafair said. “I think they’re ramping up for a firefight in the mall.”

“Lower your voice,” I said.

“They think we’re admiring them.”

“I mean it, Alf. Don’t get things started.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Look out there on the road.”

Thirty-five years ago Clete Purcel had assigned himself the role of my guardian angel, and he wasn’t about to resign the job now. His hand-waxed vintage Caddy, the top down, was in the line of vehicles working its way under the arch.

“This is one Clete needs to stay out of,” I said.

“Don’t take your anxieties out on me, Dave.”

“How did he know we’d be here?”

“He called up to the house and asked what we were doing today. What should I have said?”

“Great. Keep him occupied. I’m going to find Love Younger.”

An oversize pickup truck, with smoked windows and huge cleated tires, pulled into a parking spot not far from where we were standing. “How do you like this guy’s bumper sticker?” Alafair said.

“Don’t say anything. It’s their turf. They have the right to do whatever they want here.”

“So do the patients in a mental asylum.”

The sticker read DA BRO GOTTA GO.

“There’s Younger coming out of the house,” Alafair said. “Who’s the guy with him?”

“Take a guess.”

“The son who poured Coke all over Clete’s head?”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Then we’re leaving.”

“Clete just headed for the beer tent.”

I had the feeling that not only was our situation starting to unravel but Alafair had decided to go with the flow and enjoy it. I left her standing under a canopy and cut off Love Younger and Caspian between the ranch house and the crowd. “You promised me fifteen minutes,” I said.

His eyes were sky blue, his face flushed and soft-looking as a baby’s, loose strands of his white hair moving in the breeze. “Step inside the house with me,” he said.

“Get rid of him, Daddy,” Caspian said. “He’s here to cause trouble. It’s written all over him. He’s a drunk and a cooze hound.”

“Go find your wife,” his father said.

“She’s just over there someplace. She’s fine.”

“Did you hear me?” the older man said.

I saw Caspian’s scalp constrict visibly. He looked like a child who had been struck in the face by a trusted parent.

“I don’t think you need me here. I think I’ll take a drive into town,” he said.

“Goddammit, son, for once just do what I ask. It’s time to act like the husband of your wife and the father of your dead child,” Younger said. His face softened. He squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Come on, boy. Buck up and get us a table. I’ll be along directly.”

As Caspian walked away, a flatbed truck turned off the highway and drove under the arch. Several people began pointing, then a ripple of laughter spread through the crowd that quickly turned into collective joy. On the back of the truck, boomed down with chains, were two portable toilets with the name of our current president and the words WHITE HOUSE spray-painted on them. Both toilets had been shot full of holes.

Love Younger’s gaze remained on his son. Then he turned back to me. “You coming?” he said.

The ranch house was constructed of teardown lumber that was probably a century old, the rusted impressions of iron bolts and steel spikes and bits of chain deliberately left in the wood. The exterior of the house was cosmetic and had nothing to do with the interior. The lighting was turned on and off by voice command; the faucets and sinks in the kitchen were gold-plated. The living room had a fireplace the size of a Volkswagen; there was an elevator in the hallway that evidently accessed a parking garage under the house.

Through the kitchen window, I could see people lining up at the serving tables. “That’s my daughter in front of the cold-drink tent,” I said. “I pulled her out of a submerged plane when she was five years old.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t plan on losing her to Asa Surrette.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He rolled up his sleeves in front of the sink and turned on the water and began soaping his hands and forearms, scrubbing them as a surgeon might. He squeezed a disinfectant on his hands and ran cold water up and down his arms, then dried them with paper towels and stuffed the towels in a waste can under the sink.

“So you don’t plan on losing your daughter?” he said. “What should I make of a statement like that, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“I think you’re one of those who have ears that don’t hear and eyes that don’t see.”

“I see. That’s your mission here? Carrying your spiritual wisdom to the halt and the lame?”

“Your employee, the rapist, was killed with three forty-four-caliber balls. Why would somebody use a nineteenth-century firearm to commit a murder?”

“I’ve talked to the sheriff about that. He says Dixon is still under the microscope on that.”

“Dixon is not your man. I think the forty-four was used to point suspicion at him and perhaps you.”

“I don’t mean this offensively, but I would gladly pay double my taxes if people like you and Albert Hollister could be paid not to think.”

“I want to tell you something else about my daughter. She survived a massacre in her village in El Salvador. She was kidnapped at age eight by an evil man who thought he could terrify her. She bit the hell out of him. I saw her kidnapper eat six soft-nosed rounds from a three-fifty-seven. The wounds looked like flowers bursting from his shirt. The last round virtually eviscerated him. I enjoyed watching him blown apart. I wished I had done it instead of someone else. What does that suggest to you?”

“That you’re an obsessed and sick man.”

“Here’s the point. Booze probably burned up fifteen or twenty years of my longevity. That means I don’t have a lot to lose. I think you’ve been getting a free pass with the sheriff’s department. You’re either in total denial about your situation, or you’re aiding and abetting a killer.”

“How dare you.”

“You have resources that even the federal government doesn’t have. Why aren’t your people looking for the man who killed your granddaughter?”

“Why do you think I’m not looking for him?”

“Because you seem uninformed. Surrette did it. The question is why and how. She was in a saloon full of outlaw bikers. Then, puff, she was gone.”

“I’m not convinced this man exists.”

“He tortured and killed people in his hometown for two decades, under the noses of the FBI. You don’t think he could escape a wrecked jail van and be killing people in this area? How about the waitress who disappeared up by Lookout Pass?”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“Which means none of your investigators bothered to look into it. Or they didn’t tell you about it.”

His gaze went away from mine. When he looked at me again, the confidence was not in his face. “What happened to the waitress?”

“She didn’t show up for work. Her house was locked and dead-bolted from the inside. Her bracelet was placed on a rock in the middle of the St. Regis River. It’s all part of Surrette’s pattern. He feeds on attention and the confusion and angst he instills in others.”

“What does the sheriff in Mineral County say?”

“The sheriff will do everything he can. If Surrette is the abductor, that won’t be enough. Does it strike you as ironic that I have to explain these things to you, sir?”

He didn’t answer. He kept staring at me inquisitively, the way a clinician might.

“Do you want to ask me something?” I said.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re after.”

I couldn’t believe his statement. “I told you. I’m afraid it didn’t do much good.”

“Earlier you called me a son of a bitch. I don’t hold that against you, because you were speaking honestly about your feelings. But I think you have an agenda. You resent others for their wealth. Everywhere you look, you see plots and conspiracies at work, corporations destroying the planet, robbing the poor, that sort of thing, and you never realize these things you think you see are a reflection of your own failure.”

“Mr. Younger, if I harbor resentment toward anyone, it’s toward myself. I couldn’t prevent my daughter from interviewing Surrette in prison and writing articles about him that exposed him to a capital conviction. He won’t rest until he kills her.”

“You told her not to do it?”

“That’s correct.”

“Then it’s on her.”

I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a home governed by the value system of Love Younger.

I heard someone knock tentatively on the kitchen door. Through the glass, I saw a blond man in shades. Caspian was standing behind him, raising up on his toes to see inside the house. Love Younger opened the door. “What do you want, Kyle?” he said.

“Caspian thought I ought to see if you needed any help.”

“I don’t.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be right outside.”

Younger shut the door but continued to look through the glass at his son’s back. “I never get over it,” he said.

“Sir?” I said.

“When I look at Caspian, I always see the little boy, not the man. I don’t know if you’ve had that experience. He was always a little-bitty chap tagging along after the others. He’d have his elbows poked out, like a rooster that wants to fight. When he was about nine or ten, I took him to visit the hollow where I grew up. The kids there went barefoot in the snow and were meaner than spit on a church wall. Caspian wanted to pretend he was as tough as these poor little ragamuffins. He’d say ‘ain’t’ and ‘he don’t’ and talk about putting on his ‘britches’ in the morning. He loved to say ‘britches.’ ”

The content of our conversation had flown away, along with any apparent awareness on his part of who I was. He continued to stare through the glass, his hands on his hips. Then he shook his head and turned to me as though addressing an old friend. “Smart at figures and dumb as a turnip about everything else. Where did I go wrong with that poor boy?” he said.

“When I look at Alafair, all I see is the little girl. I guess that’s what I came out here to tell you,” I said.

There are moments when our common humanity allows us to see into the souls of our worst adversaries. I wanted to believe this was one of them. It wasn’t.

“Well, I guess I started this saccharine introspection,” he said. “Now that you’ve accomplished your objective, Mr. Robicheaux, you can be on your way.”

Any illusions I had about Love Younger were gone. I realized that I had the same importance to him as any number of servicepeople who swam in and out of his ken every day.

I walked outside onto the lawn, into the breeze and the popping of flags and pennants atop the canvas tents and canopies. The guests of Love Younger were not bad people. They worked hard and loved their country and were fiercely self-reliant. They didn’t apologize for their values or their belief systems, and their physical courage was unquestionable. My quarrel was with the illusion into which I felt they had been lured. I had thought earlier that the gathering at the Younger ranch was akin to a medieval festival. It was no such thing. Love Younger was not an ideologue. Politics had nothing to do with the energies that drove him. His invitation to his ranch was a charade, a mask for the design of a willful and imperious man who had spent a lifetime controlling and destroying the people he loved most.

Why my lack of charity? Because the security man named Kyle, who did the bidding of his master, was staring at me from behind his sunglasses with far more interest than casual curiosity. His khakis were belted high up on his hips, his long-sleeved shirt snap-buttoned at the wrists. His body English did not serve him well: His arms were folded, an unconscious mechanism that often indicates repressed hostility or retention of information the individual takes pride in not sharing. It was his boots that caught my attention. They were cordovan, and from the stiffness in his trouser legs, I guessed they were stovepipes. Perhaps Tony Lamas.

I walked toward him. Caspian stood at his side, inserting a pinch of Copenhagen inside his cheek. “I was admiring your footwear,” I said.

“I bet one day you’ll have a pair of your own,” Kyle said.

“Are they Lamas?”

“Justins.”

“I’d like to have a look at them. Would you mind?” I said.

He laughed to himself and turned his face into the breeze. His hair was long, over his collar, stiff with gel. He looked back at me. There was something wrong with his eyes. He seemed to gaze at two objects simultaneously, or to be thinking about something that had nothing to do with the subject at hand. “Can I help you find a table?”

In the background I could see Alafair and Clete watching us from under a canopy. Clete held a foaming beer cup in one hand and a huge barbecue beef sandwich in the other. “No, thanks. My daughter and a friend are with me,” I said. “I’d still like to have a look at your boots, though.”

Kyle smiled at nothing and lifted the toe of one boot off the ground, the heel anchored on the grass. “They’re first-class. I recommend them,” he said. “Anything else?”

“You look like you’ve got a nasty cut under that bandage on your neck.”

“You got that right. My girlfriend is a biter. She’s a screamer, too. But what are you gonna do?”

“I bet your Justins are hand-tooled. Can you let me see the tops?”

Kyle looked at Caspian Younger, grinning. “Buddy, you’re a case,” he said.

“A lot of people tell me that. You know what a short-eyes is?”

He looked thoughtfully into space. “A pygmy?”

“That’s a guy who’s gone down for molestation of a child. A guy with a short-eyes in his jacket has a hard time inside. My suspicion is that most child molesters are capable of gang rape as well. What’s your opinion on that? Did you know any gang rapists inside?”

“Kyle answers to me,” Caspian said. “If you have a beef with him, talk to me about it.”

A beef? I wondered which movie he had learned the term from. “You and your father give jobs to former felons. I thought Kyle might know something about rapists and child molesters.”

“Why’d you come here? Was it because of what I did to your friend over there?” Caspian said.

“Clete? No. He did tell me about your throwing a cupful of Coca-Cola in his face, but I think he’s written it off.”

“That’s because he knows he’s out of his depth,” Caspian said.

“Do you have any idea how fortunate you are, Mr. Younger?” I asked.

“Before you give me a speech about how dangerous your pal is, let me explain something to you. I gave him a warning the first time he messed with my wife. I told him it wasn’t his fault. I also told him not to do it again.”

He had a point. Clete was sleeping with another man’s wife, a situation that gives the philanderer little claim to the high ground. I guess I should have walked away. Except I could not forget a detail from Wyatt Dixon’s account about the assault on him and his girlfriend by three masked men on the Blackfoot River.

“I have compulsions, Kyle,” I said. “I get something in my head, and it just won’t let go. With me, it’s your boots. I’d also like to know more about your history. You see, I know you’ve been up the road. You don’t like cops, you’re a wiseass, and you think you’re smarter than other people. That’s a profile of about ninety-eight percent of the people inside the system. My guess is you don’t like women, and the reason for that is they don’t like you.”

“What’s gonna make you happy?” Kyle said. “You want to get thrown out or beat up? There’s something about me that gives you a hard-on? You’re too old for it, man.”

It was none of the above. I was not sure what I felt toward Caspian and Love Younger and the employee named Kyle. They may have been the catalyst for the strange physiological and emotional change taking place inside me, but they were not the source. The change always started with a twitch under one eye, as though I were losing control of my facial muscles. Then I would experience a popping sound in my ears, one that was so severe I could not hear what others around me were saying. I would see their mouths opening and closing, but none of their words would be audible. I guess a therapist could call the syndrome a chemical assault on the brain, the same kind that supposedly occurs when a suicide goes off a roof or paints the ceiling by placing a shotgun under his chin. In my case, the inside of my head would fill with a whirring noise that arrived in advance of a red-black rush of color and heat that I can compare only to gasoline and oil igniting inside a confined space.

When those things happened in the sequence I described, I became someone else. I did not simply want to punish my adversary, I wanted to kill him. It gets worse. I did not want to kill him with a weapon, I wanted to do it with my bare hands. I wanted to break the bones in his face with my fists, to knock his teeth down his throat, crush his thorax, and leave him gasping for breath as I rose splattered with blood from the damage I had inflicted upon him.

When I told others these things, I saw a level of sadness and pity and fear in their eyes that made me vow to never again discuss the succubus that has lived inside me most of my life.

Over Kyle’s shoulder, I saw Clete and Alafair walking toward us, Clete pausing only long enough to place his sandwich and beer cup on a picnic table. He had polished his shoes and put on a suit for the occasion. His eyes were clear, the gin roses gone from his complexion, his porkpie hat at a jaunty angle. When Clete was off the dirty boogie, he looked almost as youthful and handsome as when he and I walked a beat in the Quarter.

“How’s your corn dog hanging, Casp?” he said, swinging his arm through the air, slapping Caspian Younger between the shoulder blades with such force that he almost knocked him down.

“It’s under control here, Clete,” I said.

“I grok what you’re saying,” he replied, easing himself between me and Kyle, his eyes sweeping the crowd, not looking at any of us. “I grok this whole place. I grok the food. I grok the people.”

“You do what?” Kyle said.

Clete’s gaze was still on the crowd. “Is Dave right, Caspian? Is everybody copacetic here?” he said.

“If you’re looking for her, she’s inside,” Caspian replied, arching his back from the blow Clete had delivered. “Why don’t you go talk to her, then get the fuck out of here?”

“Who’s inside?” Clete said.

“You know who. She’s going to stay inside, too,” Caspian said.

“You got a trophy room in there, heads on the walls, stuffed cougars crouched on the beams, that kind of thing?” Clete said. “I get the feeling I’m standing in the middle of an ammo dump.”

Clete was like the baseball manager who comes out of the dugout, his hands stuffed in his back pockets, and starts yelling harmlessly at the umpire to take the heat off one of his players. In this instance, he had intervened in a situation on my behalf and perhaps saved me from getting hurt. But now he was testing the edges of the envelope.

“Go ahead,” Caspian said.

“Go ahead, what?” Clete said.

“Do what you’re thinking about and see what happens. I think you’re a lard ass and you’ve got a Vienna sausage for a penis. At least that’s what Felicity says. Yeah, you got it, she made her big confession. All sins are forgiven. I called a couple of guys in Tahoe. They say Sally Ducks kept you around for laughs and let you polish his car or clean his toilet, I don’t remember which. They say when Sally Dee met you, you were one cut above queer bait on the Strip.”

“Here’s the rest of the story: Sally Ducks got french-fried in his own grease, along with everybody else on his airplane,” Clete said.

Kyle removed a two-way phone from his pants pocket.

“Put it away,” Clete said. “Alafair and Dave and I are going back to our table. After I finish my beer and sandwich, we’ll motivate on down the road.”

“You’re gonna do what?” Caspian said.

“Motivate. It’s from Chuck Berry, asshole,” Alafair said. She pushed past Clete and pointed in Caspian’s face. “Say one more word like that to Clete, and I’m going to rip you apart, you little twerp.”

How do you pull the plug on a situation like this?

“I came here to speak with Mr. Younger, and I did,” I said. “That’s it. We’re gone.”

I started walking as though our departure were a done deal. Alafair and Clete hesitated, then caught up with me.

“You’re just going to walk away?” Clete said.

“I appreciate what you did back there,” I replied. “Now we’re going home.”

“What was all that about, anyway?” Alafair asked.

“One of the men who attacked Wyatt Dixon and his girlfriend stole his Tony Lama boots. He said they were cordovan, just like the ones this guy Kyle is wearing.”

“He’s wearing Lamas?” Clete asked.

“He said they were Justins. He wouldn’t show them to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Clete said. “Hang loose.”

He turned around and headed straight for a tent where Kyle was standing by himself, lighting a cigarette, both hands cupped around the burning match. His eyes lifted above the flame as Clete came toward him. He flicked away the match and removed the cigarette from his lips and blew a stream of smoke into the air.

“Hey, I forgot to tell you something,” Clete said.

“I can’t wait to find out what that is.”

“You know what the Eleventh Commandment in New Orleans is?”

“Tell me, blimpo.”

“Don’t try to put the slide on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.”

“The who?”

“I knew you’d say that. Take off your boots.”

“Tell you what, I’ll let you shine them,” Kyle said. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and took a puff. “While you’re down there, you can cop my stick.”

Clete stared at his reflection in Kyle’s sunglasses. The image was anatomically distorted, the head small, the body elephantine, the skin amber-tinted, like those of a miniaturized man trapped inside a beer bottle. “The sign out there says For Staff Only,” he said. “You want to pollute the place reserved for your fellow employees?” Clete pulled the cigarette from Kyle’s mouth and flipped it out on the grass. Then he dropped the flap on the front of the tent.

“Buddy, you just don’t learn,” Kyle said.

“Pull up your pants leg.”

“Enough with the boots. They’re boots. What the fuck is with you?”

“There’s no chance you and your buds tore the clothes off a woman up the Blackfoot and poured dirt in her mouth, is there? Right before two of you held her down and the third guy climbed on top of her?”

“You and your friend got a serious thinking disorder.” Kyle started out of the tent, but Clete stepped in his way.

“I want your boots.”

“If you haven’t noticed, there’s maybe five hundred people out there. A lot of them are my friends.”

“You’re right,” Clete said. “Forget everything I said, and let’s see if we can’t find another way.”

Clete cupped his left hand behind Kyle’s neck, almost as if consoling him, then drove his right fist into the man’s stomach, the blow sinking so deep that Kyle’s upper body jacked forward and his mouth formed into a cone, as though he wanted to speak but couldn’t, the blood draining from his cheeks.

Clete pushed him onto the ground, stepped on one of his ankles, and twisted the boot off his other foot. He looked at the label inside. “That’s what I call really low-rent. You steal the boots off a guy like Wyatt Dixon? He’s probably got hoof-and-mouth disease. Did you get his socks, too?”

He stuck the boot under his coat and walked out of the tent onto the fairway. Kyle stumbled after him, thrashing his way through the tent flap. He slipped on the grass and fell down again, gasping for air.

“The guy’s having a seizure!” Clete shouted, his face dilated with feigned alarm. “Get an ambulance!” He pushed his way through the crowd, not looking back.

“What happened?” I said.

“I’ve got one of his boots. It’s a Tony Lama,” he said.

“What did you do?” Alafair said.

“I think the guy fell down and got the wind knocked out of him. Don’t run. Everything is copacetic.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I take that back. Haul ass!”