Light of the World

Chapter 6

The phone rang at 7:14 the next morning; the caller ID was blocked. I picked up the receiver and looked out the window. The temperature had dropped during the night, and the tops of the fir trees up the slope were stiff and white with frost and bending in the wind. “Hello?” I said.

“If I give you the address, can you come up to my house now?” a voice said.

“Mr. Younger?”

“I could come out to your place, but I suspect I won’t be welcomed by Albert Hollister.”

“Give me your number. I’ll call you back,” I said.

“You’ll call me back? In case you’ve forgotten, you approached me, Mr. Robicheaux. Do you want to talk or not?”

“I want to bring somebody with me. He’s the best investigator I’ve ever known. His name is Clete Purcel,” I said.

“I don’t care who you bring with you. If you’ve got information about my granddaughter’s death, I want to hear it. Otherwise, let’s stop this piffle.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

I put on a pair of khakis and a heavy long-sleeved shirt and brushed my teeth and shaved and went downstairs. Albert was putting a coffeepot and cups on the breakfast table. “Who was that on the phone?” he said.

“I picked up because I thought it might be Gretchen.”

“She’s back home. I saw her pickup by the cabin. Who were you talking to?”

“Love Younger.”

His face showed no reaction.

“I’m going out to his place,” I said. “I think the murder of his granddaughter might be connected to the guy who shot at Alafair.”

“You watch out for Love Younger,” he said, the cup in his hand rattling when he set it on a saucer. “He’s a son of a bitch from his hairline to the soles of his feet.”

“He donated three million dollars to a scholarship fund at the University of Louisiana.”

“The devil doesn’t charge his tenants for central heating, either.”

“You’re a closet Puritan, Albert.”

“Let me start the day in peace, would you, please?” he said.

I walked down to Clete’s cabin at the far end of the north pasture. Gretchen’s hot rod was parked in the cottonwoods by the creek; in the east there was a blush on the underside of the clouds. Two white-tailed deer bounced through the grass and bounded over a fence railing into a stand of untended apple trees that Albert never picked, so food would always be available for the herbivores on his property. I tapped lightly on the cabin door. Clete stepped out on the gallery and eased the screen shut behind him. “Gretchen came in about three this morning,” he whispered.

“Is everything okay?”

“She spent a lot of time in the shower, then went to bed with a piece under her pillow. It’s an Airweight .38.”

“Did she say where she’d been?”

“She told me to mind my business.”

“Take a ride with me to Love Younger’s home.”

I could tell he didn’t want me to change the subject, but I didn’t believe that Clete or I or anyone else could resolve the problems of Gretchen Horowitz.

“I don’t like the way that guy operates,” Clete said.

“Who likes any of the people we deal with?”

“There’s a difference. He hires other people to do his dirty work.”

The story was political in nature and well known and, like most political stories, had already slipped into history and wasn’t considered of importance by most Americans. A United States senator got in Love Younger’s way and discovered that his citations in the brown-water navy were somehow manufactured. Like many of my fellow voters, I had lost interest in taking up other people’s causes. Someone had almost killed my daughter with a razor-edged hunting arrow, and I was determined to find out who it was.

“You coming or not?” I said.

“Let me check on Gretchen,” Clete replied.

Younger’s summer home was a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion located west of Missoula on a pinnacle high above the Clark Fork. It was beige-colored and Tudor in design, the tall windows and breezy front porch trimmed with purple rock, the lawn planted with sugar maples and blue spruce and ornamental crab apple trees that took on a sheen like melted red candy in the sunlight. There was a circular gravel driveway in front, a porte cochere on the side, and a restored Lincoln Continental parked in back. When I lifted the door knocker, electronic chimes echoed through the interior. Clete had lit a cigarette when we got out of his Caddy. “Will you get rid of that?” I said.

“No problem,” he replied. He took two more puffs and flicked the butt over the porch wall onto the lawn just as a woman answered the door. Her skin was so pale it looked bloodless, to the degree that the moles on her shoulders and the one by her mouth seemed to be individually pasted on her body. Her hair had a dark luster with brown streaks, and her eyes possessed a liquescence I normally would associate with hostility or an invasive curiosity about others that bordered on disdain. I had to remind myself of the loss the Younger family had just suffered.

I introduced myself and Clete and offered our condolences, thinking that she was about to invite us in. Instead, she looked behind her, then back at us. “Who did you say you were?” she asked.

“I spoke earlier with Love Younger. He asked me to come here,” I said. “This is his house, isn’t it?”

“Tell them to come in, Felicity,” a voice called from the hallway.

A slight man walked toward us, a vague smile on his face. He did not offer to shake hands. He was unshaved and wearing slippers and a dress shirt open at the collar. “I’m Caspian,” he said. “You’re a police officer?”

“Not here. In Louisiana,” I said.

“You know something about Angel’s death?” he said.

“Not directly, but I have some information that I feel I should share with you. I think someone tried to kill my daughter. We’ve also had a stalker at the place where we’re staying. Can we sit down?”

“Wait here, please,” he said.

“Like Dave says, we were invited here,” Clete said. “I don’t think that’s getting across somehow.”

“Excuse me?” Caspian said.

“We have no obligation to be here,” Clete said. “We were trying to do you a favor.”

“I see,” said Caspian. “I know my father will be happy to see you.”

The man and the woman went to the rear of the house. Clete and I waited on a leather couch by a huge fireplace filled with ash and crumpled logs that gave no heat. The windows reached almost to the ceiling and were hung with velvet curtains, the walls with oil paintings of individuals in nineteenth-century dress. The carpets were Iranian, the furniture antique, the beams in the cathedral ceiling recovered from a teardown, the wood rust-marked by iron spikes and bolts. In a side hallway, I could see a long glass-covered cabinet lined with flintlock and cap-and-ball rifles.

Clete glanced at his watch. “Do you believe these fucking people?” he said.

“Take it easy.”

“They’re all the same.”

“I know it. You can’t change them. So don’t try.”

I knew that the Younger family and their ingrained rudeness were not the source of Clete’s discontent.

“Gretchen’s never slept with a piece,” he said. “She’s never been afraid of anything. She stayed in the shower so long that she ran all the hot water out of the tank. I saw a bruise on her neck. She said she slipped while she was hiking up the hill behind the house.” He leaned forward, hands cupped on his knees. “I don’t like being here, Dave. These are the same people who used to treat us like their garbage collectors.”

“We’ll leave in a few minutes. I promise.”

“The guy was a guest at the White House. He says he’s into wind energy. Does anybody buy crap like that? I say screw this.”

I believed I understood Clete’s resentment toward the world in which he grew up, and I didn’t want to argue with him. The most telling story about his background was one he told me when he was drunk. As a boy, during the summer, he sometimes went on the milk-delivery route with his father, a brutal and childlike man who loved his children and yet was often cruel to every one of them. One day a wealthy woman in the Garden District saw Clete sitting by himself on the rear bumper of the milk truck, barefoot and wearing jeans split at the knees and eating a peanut-butter sandwich. The woman stroked his head, her eyes filling with the lights of pity and love. “You’re such a beautiful little boy,” she said. “Come back here at one P.M. Saturday and have ice cream and cake with me.”

He put on his white suit an uncle had bought him for his confirmation and went to the woman’s house one block from Audubon Park. When he knocked at the front door, a black butler answered and told him to go around to the rear. Clete walked along the flagstone path through the side yard and under a latticework arch hung with orange trumpet vine. The backyard was crowded with black children from the other side of Magazine. The woman who had stroked his hair was not there, nor did she ever show up.

That night he returned with a box of rocks and broke all the glass in her greenhouse and destroyed the flowers in her gardens.

At some point in your life, you have to give up anger or it will destroy your spirit the way cancer destroys living tissue. At least that is what I told myself, even though I was not very good at taking my own advice. I hated to see Clete suffer because of the injustice done to him by his alcoholic father. He didn’t like the Love Youngers of the world, and neither did I. But why suffer because of them? I never knew one of them who didn’t write his own denouement, so why not leave them to their own fate?

There was no lack of public information about Mr. Younger. He became a millionaire by buying wheat futures in the Midwest with money he borrowed from a church, when few people outside government knew the Nixon administration was about to open up new markets in Russia. Later, in a poker game, he won a 30 percent interest in an independent drilling company, one teetering on bankruptcy. He redrilled old oil fields that others had given up on, going down to a record twenty-five thousand feet, and punched into one of the biggest geological domes in Louisiana’s history. Love Younger had a green thumb. Whatever he touched turned to money, huge amounts of it, millions that became billions, the kind of wealth that could buy governments or the geographic entirety of a third-world country.

The rest of his story was another matter. One son, an aviator, went down in a desert while dropping supplies to French mercenaries and died a hellish death from thirst and exposure. Another son plowed his Porsche into the side of a train in Katy, Texas. A daughter who suffered delusions and agitated depression underwent an experimental operation at a clinic in Brazil that her father had chosen for her. As promised, she awoke from the anesthesia totally free of her depression and imaginary fears. She was also a vegetable.

Felicity came back in the living room. “Follow me,” she said.

“We can do that,” Clete said, getting to his feet.

She turned and looked at him. She wore a peasant blouse and a thin ankle-length pleated cotton skirt and white doeskin moccasins, as a flower child from the 1960s might. “I think you’re here for self-serving purposes,” she said.

“My daughter may be in danger,” I said. “She believes a psychopath she interviewed in a Kansas prison is in this area.”

“And you think this psychopath murdered Angel?”

“I’m not sure what to think.”

“You’re telling me that your daughter may be the reason this man is in the area and that he murdered Angel?”

“You can draw your own conclusions, Ms. Younger.”

“I use my maiden name. It’s Felicity Louviere. Do you want to talk to my father-in-law now, or would you prefer to leave?”

She was much smaller than Clete and I, but she looked up into my face with such animus that I almost stepped back. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said.

“We’re going through a bad time right now,” she replied. “You’ll have to forgive me.”

She walked ahead of us, past a sunlit set of French doors, her body in silhouette. “She doesn’t have on any underwear. This place is a nuthouse,” I heard Clete whisper.

“Will you be quiet?” I said.

“What’d I say?” he asked.

The rear windows of Love Younger’s den looked onto the river and a ridge of mountains that were jagged and blue and marbled with new snow on the peaks. Younger was seated at a large worktable scattered with oily rags and bore brushes and the tiny tools of a gunsmith and the clocklike inner workings of early firearms. He looked up at me from his work on an 1851 Colt revolver, one almost unblemished by rust or wear. “Thank you for coming, gentlemen,” he said. “I’m sorry I was short with you this morning, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“It’s all right.”

“You know a sheriff’s detective by the name of Bill Pepper?” he asked.

“I do. I believe he abused a man who was in his custody, a rodeo clown by the name of Wyatt Dixon.”

“Abused him in what way?”

“Worked him over while his wrists were cuffed behind him.”

“I’ve been getting feedback from Pepper, but I didn’t know that about him. He says Dixon may have a partner and the partner might be the man who shot an arrow at your daughter. Pepper interviewed a salesman at a sporting goods store who sold a hunter’s bow to a man wearing a bracelet like the one Dixon sold my granddaughter.”

“Pepper didn’t share that information with me, Mr. Younger.”

“He didn’t?”

“No, sir. This is Clete Purcel. He’s the friend I told you about.”

“How do you do, Mr. Purcel?” Younger said. He rose slightly from his chair and shook Clete’s hand. Neither his son nor his daughter-in-law had uttered a word since we entered the room, and I had the feeling they seldom spoke unless they were spoken to. “My son and daughter-in-law adopted Angel from an orphanage by the Blackfoot Reservation. I did everything I could to keep her from drinking and hanging out with bad people. She was the sweetest little girl I ever knew. Good God, what kind of man would take a teenage girl into a barn and suffocate her?”

There are times in our lives when words are of no value. This was one of them. I have never lost a child, but I know many people who have. I have also had to knock on a family’s door and tell them their child was killed in an accident or by a predator. I have come to believe there is no greater sorrow than experiencing a loss of this kind, particularly when the child’s life was taken to satisfy the self-centered agenda of a degenerate.

“My second wife was killed by some bad men, Mr. Younger,” I said. “I didn’t want people’s sympathies, and I particularly resented people who felt they had to console me. At the time I had only one desire — to smoke the guys who killed my wife.”

He looked up at me, waiting.

“I got my wish. It didn’t give me any rest,” I said.

“How long ago did this happen?”

“Twenty-four years ago.”

“And even now you have no rest?”

“There’re some things you don’t get over.”

The foster parents of the girl were standing behind me. Caspian, the father, stepped between me and Love Younger. His unshaved and unwashed look made me think of a man who had gone into another country, one where a person can be dissolute without penalty, only to return home and find everything he owned in ruins. “I heard you say something to Felicity about a psychopath in Kansas, a man who might be living in this area,” Caspian said.

“My daughter is a writer. She had planned to write a book about a serial killer and sadist named Asa Surrette. She interviewed him two or three times but was so disgusted by the experience that she decided not to write the book. Instead, she wrote a series of articles that she hoped would expose him to the death penalty.”

“Where is he?” Love Younger asked.

“The authorities in Kansas say he died in a collision involving a gasoline truck and a prison van.”

His eyes searched my face. “You don’t believe that?” he asked.

“Earlier this week my daughter was followed by a man in a skinned-up Ford pickup. She thinks it was Asa Surrette.”

“I asked if you believe he’s dead,” Younger said.

“Somebody scratched a message on a cave wall on the hillside above Albert Hollister’s house. It contained biblical allusions that indicate the message writer is megalomaniacal. Could Surrette have written a message of that kind? It’s possible.”

“Why would Angel go off with a guy like that?” Caspian said. His chin was tilted upward, his throat coated with whiskers that looked like steel filings, a hazy smile in his eyes.

“I don’t know, sir,” I replied.

“Be quiet, Caspian,” Love Younger said.

“There’s something we skipped over here, Mr. Younger,” Clete said. “You mentioned this guy Pepper. Evidently, he’s been reporting to you, but he didn’t report the same information to Dave, whose daughter is at risk. He also told you Dixon might have a partner. For me that doesn’t flush. From what I understand, Dixon’s a loner, a rodeo man bikers don’t mess with. A guy like that doesn’t have to rely on backup. Plus, his jacket has been clean since he got out of Deer Lodge.”

“His what?” Younger said.

“His record. The guy probably has Kryptonite for a brain, but count on it, he’s not our guy,” Clete said.

“You’re saying that Pepper is trying to earn his way into my good graces by manufacturing information?” Younger said.

“It crossed my mind,” Clete said.

Younger gazed out the window at the long floodplain of the Clark Fork and the great geological gorge the river flowed into. “How do we find out if Surrette is dead or alive?”

“You don’t,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“When is the last time any state of its own volition admitted it was wrong about anything?” I said.

Younger picked up the 1851 Colt and rubbed an oily rag across its blue-black surfaces, cocking back the hammer, locking the cylinder into place. “I made this like new,” he said. “It took me six weeks, but I did it. It’s like traveling back in time and somehow defying mortality. Supposedly, Wild Bill Hickok was carrying this when he got pushed into a corner by John Wesley Hardin.”

I waited for him to go on, not understanding his point.

“It didn’t help Hickok,” he said. “Wes Hardin backed him down. It was the only time Wild Bill ever cut bait. Past or present, our best-laid plans seem to go astray, don’t they?”

He set the revolver down heavily on an oilcloth, his face wan and older somehow, his hands as small as a child’s.

Clete and I were both silent as we drove down the hill to catch the interstate back to Missoula. The sun was bright through the fir and pine and spruce trees lining the road, the light almost blinding when it splintered on the wet needles. The Younger enclave, with its grand vistas, seemed to validate all the basic tenets of the American Dream. Love Younger had risen from the most humble of origins and created a fortune out of virtually nothing. He had also beaten the descendants of the robber barons at their own game. I thought I understood why people were fascinated with him. If such good fortune could happen to him, it could happen to any of us, right? There were those who probably wished to touch the hem of his cloak so they could be made over in his image. But as Clete’s Caddy coasted down the hillside through shadows that looked like saber points falling across the road, I felt only pity for Love Younger and his family.

“How do you read all that back there?” Clete asked.

“I don’t. I’ve never understood the rich.”

“What’s to understand? They get a more expensive plot in the boneyard than the rest of us.”

“Pepper is bad news. He’s using the investigation for his own purposes,” I said.

“So we’ll have a talk with him. Did you catch the broad’s accent?”

“No,” I lied.

“She’s from New Orleans or somewhere nearby.” Clete looked sideways at me.

“Good. Now watch the road.”

“I was just saying.”

“I know what you were saying. You also mentioned she wasn’t wearing any undergarments.”

“I’m not supposed to notice something like that?”

“We’re not getting personally involved with these people. You got it?”

“You know what the essential difference is between the two of us, noble mon?”

“One of us falls in love with every injured woman he sees. Then he finds out he’s in the sack with the Antichrist. Sound like anyone you know?”

“No, I recognize the presence of my flopper in my life. It has X-ray vision and goes on autopilot whenever it wants. Sometimes it does the thinking for both of us. I’ve accepted that. I think that’s a big breakthrough. You might try a little humility sometime, Streak.”

“I’m not going to listen to this. I know what’s coming. You can’t wait to get in trouble again. I’ve never seen anything like it. Why don’t you grow up?”

“You grow up, you grow old. Who wants to do that? Relax. Think cool thoughts and don’t eat fried foods. You know who said that? Satchel Paige. Everything is very copacetic. You got my word on that.”

After her last interview with Asa Surrette, Alafair published three articles about his crimes, their heinous nature, and the compulsive pattern that characterized his behavior from childhood until the day he was arrested. The thesis in each article was clinical in nature and ultimately not up for argument: A serial killer does not turn his compulsions on and off, as you do a noisy faucet. Surrette and his attorney maintained he had committed no crimes after the reinstatement of capital punishment in Kansas in 1994. Alafair believed otherwise.

The articles used direct quotations from the interview, and their arrangement created a damning portrayal of a man to whom cruelty, sexual conquest, bloodlust, and a pathological lack of remorse were a way of life.

At the time I asked if she had not become too emotionally involved in the subject.

“I have the quotes on tape. I didn’t make them up. He’s evil. The real question is, how could a man like this kill people in the same city for twenty years?” she said.

That was my kid.

When I returned from Love Younger’s home, Alafair asked me to come upstairs. An envelope and a piece of typewriter paper with a letter written on it in blue ink rested on her desk, next to her computer. “I never showed you this, Dave. Surrette wrote it to me after the articles were published,” she said.

“Why didn’t you want me to see it?”

“Because I thought it would make you mad. Read it.”

A strange thing happened. I didn’t want to touch a sheet of paper that Surrette had handled. I’ve known every kind of man in the world, and even held the hand of a man on the way to his electrocution in the Red Hat House at Angola. But I did not want to place my fingers on the paper that Asa Surrette had touched. I walked to her desk and looked down at his writing. His penmanship, if it could be called that, was bizarre. The paper was unlined, but every sentence, every word, every letter, was as uniform and neat and straight as the print created by a Linotype machine. Round letters were flattened and reduced to geometric slash marks, as though the penman believed forming a circle violated a principle. The greater oddity was the absence of punctuation. Surrette’s sentences and phrases were set apart by dashes rather than by periods and commas, as though he could not disconnect from his own stream of consciousness, or perhaps because he believed his own thought processes had neither a beginning nor an end. This is what he wrote in his prison cell and mailed through the censor to my daughter:

“Why’d you dig out the letter now?” I said.

“You know why.”

“The line about being here before the primal dust of the world?”

“I looked it up. He lifted two or three lines from the Book of Psalms. It sounds like the stuff written on the wall in the cave.”

“I’m going to make some calls to Kansas.”

“You don’t think I’ve already done that? The paramedics removed the carbonized remains of four individuals from the gas truck and the prison van. I called the Eagle in Wichita and talked to a reporter who told me an interesting story: An autistic boy may have witnessed the collision. The boy told his mother that a man walking along the edge of the highway stepped in front of the gas truck and caused the accident. If that’s true, there should have been five bodies in the wreckage rather than four.”

I continued to stare at Surrette’s letter and wondered how I had allowed a man like this to come into our lives. “What did the cops say?”

“Forget the cops,” she said. “The reporter interviewed the little boy, who said the truck didn’t explode until after the collision. He said he could hear pieces of the van and truck rolling down the highway. Then he saw a great light in the sky.”

“Surrette climbed out of the van and lit the spilled fuel?”

“It’s the kind of thing he would do. Have you seen Gretchen?”

“What about her?”

“She’s acting strange. Maybe she’s still angry about those remarks the cops made up on the hillside.”

“Maybe it’s time we have a talk with Pepper. He told the grandfather of the murdered Indian girl that he’d found the store where a guy wearing the girl’s bracelet bought a hunter’s bow. Except Pepper didn’t tell us that.”

“You said ‘we,’ ” she replied.

I got Bill Pepper’s address from the phone book and at four-thirty P.M., we headed down the dirt road toward the two-lane. Half a mile south of Albert’s ranch, we saw a bright orange pickup coming toward us, a man in a white straw cowboy hat behind the wheel. He stopped and rolled down the window. A bouquet of cut flowers wrapped in green tissue paper rested on the dashboard. “Howdy-doody. I come to see Miss Gretchen,” he said.

“To my knowledge, she’s not home, Mr. Dixon,” I said.

“Then I’ll have to talk to y’all.” He shut off his engine and stepped out on the road. The sun was shining in his eyes, but he seemed to take no heed. “I heard those cops talking about the message on that cave wall.”

“What about it?”

“I know what it means. I don’t want to get drug into it. Not unless that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Drug into what? You’re not making a lot of sense, partner,” I said.

“The Indians on the rez have been talking about it a long time. The Bible says he’ll come from the sea, and you’ll know him by the numbers in his name. All this countryside was under the ocean at one time. I think he’s here. That was him or one of his acolytes up there in that cave.”

Alafair leaned across the seat. “Who’s here?” she said.

“Him,” Dixon said. “Him, the one the world’s been waiting on.”