Light of the World

Chapter 8

The phone rang at six-fifteen Saturday morning. Everyone else was still asleep. I picked up the receiver and went out on the balcony and closed the door behind me. In the east, the light behind the mountains was cold and weak, hardly more than a flicker touching the bottom of the clouds. Gretchen’s hot rod was parked by the creek bed, the top white with frost. The Caddy was gone. “Hello,” I said.

“This is Sheriff Bisbee, Detective Robicheaux. I need to confirm some information. You know a man named Clete Purcel?”

“I’ve known him for forty years. He’s staying with us at Albert Hollister’s place.”

“Right now he’s staying in a jail cell in Big Fork. Do you know any reason why he’d be in the Swan Lake area?”

“Maybe he went fishing. He didn’t tell me. What’s he charged with?”

“He got stopped at a roadblock at twelve-fifteen this morning.”

“That’s not what I asked. Why are you calling me about a traffic stop in Lake County?”

“I didn’t say anything about a traffic stop. He was carrying a cut-down pump in his car. He also had burglar tools in his possession, along with latex gloves, a throw-down, a blackjack, plastic ligatures, brass knuckles, and a boxful of buckshot. I almost forgot. He had some nylon fishing line with a hoop tied on the end. The kind of rig home invaders stick through a window to turn the latch.”

“He’s a private investigator, and he runs down bail skips for a couple of bondsmen in New Orleans.”

“He told me that. Otherwise, I might have thought he was planning to break into someone’s residence. He wouldn’t do that, would he?”

“No.”

“Glad we got that out of the way. What’s the worst homicide you ever investigated?”

“I never got around to ranking them.”

“You must have been a busy man. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Bill Pepper had his problems, but nothing that would warrant the mess I saw in his cottage this morning. Do you read me?”

“I’m trying to be helpful. To my knowledge, Clete never met Detective Pepper.”

“Then I wonder why he was at Pepper’s cottage. Just passing by, I guess. Maybe you should come up here. Pepper died with a plastic bag over his head. With luck, he died of asphyxiation. The blood loss is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Are you starting to get the picture?”

“No, not at all,” I said.

“When it’s this bad, it’s usually sexual. Does your friend have problems along those lines?”

“Pepper was mutilated?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“You’re looking at the wrong guy.”

“Somebody called in a 911 and reported a maroon Cadillac convertible with a Louisiana tag leaving the crime scene.”

“Who was the caller?”

“The issue is your friend, not the caller. He seems to have an extraordinary capacity for getting into trouble.”

“He’s the best guy I’ve ever known.”

“Pepper was dead when Purcel left the cottage. Why didn’t he report it?”

I didn’t have an answer. “Ask him.”

“Oh, I will.”

“What did the killer do to Pepper?”

“Probably several things. I’ll have to wait on the coroner’s report to know for sure. His penis and testicles were in the sink. You believe in an afterlife?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I suspect Bill Pepper found his hell right here on earth,” the sheriff said.

Clete had fallen asleep sitting on a bench in a holding can somewhere on the north end of Flathead Lake. In his dream, he was a little boy and had gone with his father and mother and sisters to Pontchartrain Park for July the Fourth. It was dusk in the dream, and the sky was printed with the fireworks exploding over the lake, and he could hear the popping of rifles in the shooting gallery and the music from the carousel. His father and mother were smiling at him, and his sisters were holding hands and skipping down the boardwalk, the wind smelling of salt and caramel popcorn and candied apples.

When he woke from the dream, he looked through the window and saw the pink glow in the sky and thought the neon-striped Kamikaze packed with screaming kids was teetering against the sunset, about to rip like a scythe through the air and plummet toward the ground, then rise again into the gloaming of the day. He closed and opened his eyes and looked at the peeling yellow paint on the walls, the names burned into the ceiling with cigarette lighters, the toilet where someone’s vomit had dried on the rim.

The sheriff of Missoula County pulled up a chair to the barred door and sat down. He placed a yellow legal pad on his knee and studied it. “Other people will be talking to you, Mr. Purcel. But since it was a member of my department who was killed, I want the first crack at you,” he said.

“Y’all towed my Caddy?”

“I think that’s the least of your worries.”

“Where’s it parked?”

“You want to explain what you were doing at Bill Pepper’s cottage?”

“I already did. To anyone who’d listen. I went there to talk with him. The back door was open. He was lying in the hallway. I didn’t touch anything other than the outside doorknob. I left the inside as I’d found it. I tried to call in the 911, but I didn’t have cell service. I got stopped at the roadblock five miles from Big Fork. Where’d you put my Caddy?”

“Why were you carrying burglar tools and ligatures and all those weapons in a duffel bag?”

“I’m sentimental about memorabilia.”

“That’s pretty amusing. You think cutting off a man’s penis and testicles is amusing?”

“The guy was a dirty cop, and somebody caught up with him. But it wasn’t me.”

“How do you know he was a dirty cop?”

“He was compromising the investigation into the death of Angel Deer Heart in order to earn favor with her grandfather.”

“So you went up to his cottage on Swan Lake to talk to him about that?”

“That and a couple of other things.”

“What might the ‘other things’ be?”

“He and another idiot in your department made sexual remarks about my daughter in front of her and others. This was right after your man kicked the shit out of Wyatt Dixon.”

“When were these remarks made?”

“Why don’t you ask your crime scene investigator? He was there.”

“You were just looking out for your daughter’s interests?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

The sheriff stared at his legal pad. “Detective Pepper left a note behind. Did you know that?” he said.

“No.”

“He said some people thought he had a relationship with the ‘Horowitz girl.’ Would that be your daughter?”

“Horowitz is my daughter’s last name. Your man didn’t have any ‘relationship’ with her.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Yeah, I do. We don’t invite cockroaches into our environment.”

“In the note, Detective Pepper indicated that he did something to your daughter. What would he be referring to?”

“I guess the remarks he made.”

“You’re telling me a man who’s coming apart, who’s drunk out of his mind, who’s telling the world ‘fuck it,’ is doing all this because of some sexist remarks he made to a young woman?”

“You’d know the answer to that better than me. I never met the man.”

“How did you know where his cottage was?”

“I called up a PI I know in Missoula.”

The sheriff nodded, his face composed, the long white tips of his mustache hanging below his jawbone. “That’s right, you were here many years ago, weren’t you? You did security for Sally Dio and some other mobsters.”

“That’s correct.”

“That was right before his plane crashed into the side of a mountain, wasn’t it?”

Clete looked thoughtfully out the window. “Yeah, I think I was still around here when that happened. It was a big loss. I think a pizza parlor in Palermo shut down for fifteen minutes.”

“We pulled your sheet at the NCIC, Mr. Purcel. You have a longer record than most felons. You killed a federal informant and dropped a Teamster official from a hotel window into a dry swimming pool. You and your friend Detective Robicheaux left a bunch of people dead on the bank of a bayou in Louisiana not once but twice.”

“That’s why we’re here — to rest up.”

“There’s only one reason you’re not being arrested. There’s no trace of blood on you or your clothing or shoes or in your vehicle. That leaves me in a quandary. If you’re an innocent man, why are you lying?”

“I’m not. And the reason I’m not under arrest is so you can question me without giving me my rights.”

The sheriff’s face was tired, his eyes without heat or anger or any emotion that Clete could see. “This is all about your daughter, isn’t it? What is it you’re not telling me, Mr. Purcel? What did Bill Pepper do to your little girl?”

Wyatt Dixon was unloading three tons of sixty-pound hay bales off a flatbed at his place on the Blackfoot River when he saw the two cruisers coming up the dirt road, their tires splashing through the puddles. He was shirtless and wearing a straw hat and Wranglers tucked inside his boots, a bandana knotted around his neck. He fitted his fingers under the twine on a bale and lifted it out in front of him, his chest and arms blooming with green veins. He walked to the edge of the bed and dropped the bale into space, his gaze never leaving the cruisers. His shoulders were pink with fresh sunburn, and his back was crosshatched with scar tissue that looked like it had been laid there with a whip. A scar as thick as an earthworm ran from under his armpit and disappeared inside his leather belt. The deputies parked in the shade of the cottonwoods and approached him as a group of four, studying his half-crushed house, his barn, the trees, the bluebirds, the Appaloosas in the corral, the riffle in the middle of the stream, anything that kept them from having to look directly at Wyatt Dixon.

Wyatt removed his hat and unknotted his bandana and wiped his face and gazed at the Indian paintbrush and wild roses that grew in the grass along the riverbank. The river was deep and wide from the runoff and contained a coppery green light where the sun shone directly upon it. Wyatt put his hat back on and fingered the long red welt that ran down his side. For just a second he thought about the bull that had impaled him at the Calgary Stampede, shaking him on its horns like a piñata and goring him again on the ground, the crowd rising, the women holding their hands to their mouths.

“Howdy-doody, boys,” he said.

The lead deputy had to squint into the sun to look up at Wyatt. “Know why we’re here?”

“To pester people?”

“Somebody killed Bill Pepper up at Swan Lake.”

“I’m totally broke up,” Wyatt said.

“We’d like to have you come down to the department.”

“I already been there. I didn’t enjoy it too much.”

“The sheriff probably wants to exclude you.”

“I’ll save y’all the time. Just consider me excluded.”

“It’s important, Wyatt.”

“Not to me it ain’t.”

“We’re just doing our job. How about hooking yourself up? It’s not personal.”

“Speaking of job performance, I’d rate y’all’s somewhere between mediocre to piss-poor.”

“Is it true you can speak dead languages?”

Wyatt blew his breath up into his face and looked at the sunlight wobbling inside the riffle on the river, then jumped down from the flatbed into the middle of the deputies. All of them stepped backward before they could check themselves. He began picking pieces of hay off his arms and chest, dropping each one into the wind. “How’d Pepper go out?” he asked.

“Hard,” the lead deputy said.

“How hard?”

“Hard as it gets.”

“It happened this morning?”

The deputy shook his head noncommittally. Wyatt lifted his T-shirt off the outside mirror on the driver’s side of the flatbed truck. He studied his reflection in the mirror, touching at a razor nick on his jaw, then worked his shirt over his arms and head and neck. The T-shirt fitted him so tightly, it looked like latex on his skin. His eyes were empty when he looked at the deputy. “Did Pepper go out with a bag over his head?”

“I don’t know all the details,” the deputy said. “I can’t discuss them with you, anyway.”

“Did you know Angel Deer Heart?”

“Afraid not,” the deputy said.

“Did you ever wonder why rich people would adopt a raggedy-ass little girl from the rez?”

“Put on the cuffs, Wyatt.”

“Half of them come out of the womb with alcohol on the brain. The other half are crack babies.”

“You could ask the lead investigator about all this, except he’s dead.”

“You ever hear Southerners talk about the ‘dumbest white person’ they ever met?”

“Nope.”

“Most people think that’s an insult to people of color. What that really means is the dumbest person on earth is a stupid white man. You can teach a horse, a dog, or even a tree frog to tap-dance before you can teach toilet training to a white man who is willfully ignorant. All colored people know that.”

The deputy cupped his hand around Wyatt’s upper arm. “You’re a puzzle, buddy.”

“Did you know y’all are living in the middle of biblical events?”

“Biblical?”

“That’s what I said.”

The deputy walked with him to the cruiser. “I love your accent, Wyatt. Watch your head getting in,” he said.

At one-thirty P.M. on Saturday, the sheriff called me again. “You want to come down here and talk to this crazy bastard?” he said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Most of the DIs I knew in the service were from the South. I always thought someone had pissed inside their brains when they were infants. Now I’m sure of it. I just spent twenty minutes listening to Wyatt Dixon talk about the history of the earth and the coming of the Antichrist. Did you know the world is sixty-four hundred years old?”

“He’s probably psychotic. Why pay any attention to anything he says?”

“Because he had motivation to kill Detective Pepper. He’s also one of the last people to see Angel Deer Heart alive.”

I didn’t want to remind the sheriff that he had spoken favorably of Dixon after Alafair and I had trouble with him. “Does he have an alibi for last night?”

“His neighbors across the river say there was a light on in his barn and they thought they saw him shoeing horses until after midnight.”

“So he’s not your guy?”

“Probably not. But he has information about the Deer Heart girl that he’s not sharing.”

“What kind of information?”

“He thinks she was adopted for reasons other than humanitarian ones.”

“What reasons?”

“He’s a little vague on that.”

“Why’d you call me?” I asked.

“Because I don’t know what the hell I’m dealing with. What makes it worse is that Wyatt Dixon has almost convinced me.”

“Of what?”

“That there’s an evil presence in our midst. That the cave behind Albert Hollister’s house is the source of something that I hate to even think about.”

“Don’t let this guy get to you,” I said.

“Come down here and tell me that after you look at Bill Pepper’s face in the crime scene photos. One of his eyes looked like an eight ball. The coroner says he was alive when he was castrated. Where’s the Horowitz girl?”

I looked out the window. Gretchen’s pickup was parked by the guest cabin. “She didn’t do this,” I said.

“We talked to a homicide investigator at Miami-Dade. She was known in the trade as Caruso. You want to vouch for Caruso, Mr. Robicheaux?”

After Clete was released from the holding jail in Big Fork, he did not ask Gretchen if she’d had anything to do with the death of Bill Pepper. At the cabin, she kept waiting for him to stop talking and look directly in her face and ask the question, but he didn’t. She fixed bacon and scrambled eggs and set his plate on the table and sat down across from him and waited some more. He started eating, buttering a biscuit, drinking his coffee, spearing his fork through the eggs, but he didn’t ask the question.

“I went looking for you,” she said.

“I figured you would,” he replied.

“You didn’t find Pepper, did you?”

“Not alive, I didn’t.”

“You think I did him?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“If he’d drawn down on you or tried to attack you again, you would have blown him out of his socks. Maybe you would have broken a couple of his spokes. But you didn’t have anything to do with what happened inside that cottage. Neither did I. Anyone who thinks different doesn’t know anything about either of us.”

“I told you what I wanted to do to him. I told you how I wanted him to suffer.”

“You’re like most brave people, Gretchen: too brave to know you’re supposed to be afraid, and too good to understand you’re incapable of doing bad.”

She thought she was going to cry.

He stopped eating. “Dave and I did a lot of stuff at NOPD that we don’t like to remember. We called it operating under a black flag. That’s when the Contras and the Colombians were filling our cities with cocaine. But we never did anything beyond what we had to. That’s the only rule there is. You do what you have to, and you never hurt people unnecessarily.” He started eating again.

She got up from the table and went into the bathroom and washed her face and dried it. When she came back out, he was looking at the FedEx mailer she had left on the coffee table. “What’s that?” he said.

“Some Sierra Club guys got ahold of a core sample from an exploratory well drilled on the Canadian side of the frontier. I sent it to a geological lab in Austin. This stuff has the same kind of sulfurous content that’s coming out of the shale-oil operation up in Alberta. Supposedly, it heats up the planet a lot faster than ordinary crude.”

“Pepper left a note. Evidently, some guys scared the hell out of him. They thought maybe you were his girlfriend and you had some information that was harmful to their interests.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I thought the sheriff had his ass on upside down. You think this has something to do with the documentary you’re making?”

“I just got out of film school. Why should anyone be afraid of me?”

“I can’t imagine,” he replied.

That afternoon she took her nine-millimeter Beretta and her Airweight .38 up to the gun range behind Albert’s house. The sun had already gone behind the ridge, and the trees were full of shadows and clattering with robins. Up the arroyo by the abandoned log road, she saw a flock of wild turkeys that had been down to the creek to drink before going to bed. She set up a row of coffee cans on a wood plank suspended between two rocks and clamped on her ear protectors and, from twenty yards away, aimed the Beretta with both arms extended and let off all fourteen rounds in the magazine, blowing the cans into the air and hitting them again as they rolled down the hillside, birds rising from the trees all around her.

She saw the man on horseback out of the corner of her eye but showed no recognition of his presence. She set down the Beretta on Albert’s shooting table and removed the ear protectors and shook out her hair. She picked up the five-shot Airweight and flipped out the cylinder from the frame and picked the rounds one at a time from the ammunition box and plopped them into the chambers, then closed the cylinder, never glancing at the man on horseback. “What do you think you’re doing here?” she said, as though speaking to herself.

“I rent pasture on the other side of the ridge. You shot the doo-doo out of them cans.”

She began picking up the cans and replacing them on the plank. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. You already done it,” he said. He stood up in the stirrups and grabbed the limb of a ponderosa and lifted himself free of the horse, his biceps swelling to the size of softballs. He was wearing a maniacal grin when he dropped to the ground, his shoulders hunched like an ape’s. He caught the reins of the Appaloosa and flipped them around the lower branch of a fir tree. “You’ve got a fourteen-round pre-assault-weapons-ban magazine in that Beretta. That’s right impressive.”

“I think you’re probably a pretty good guy, cowboy. But you’re off your turf,” she said.

“You got a mouth on you. Ain’t many that speaks their mind like that.”

“Does Mr. Hollister mind you riding up here?”

“He never mentioned it.”

“You know who he is?”

He seemed to think about the question. “A famous writer.”

“Have you tried any of his books?”

He looked into space. “I don’t recall. My brain ain’t always in the best of shape,” he said. He was wearing a candy-striped shirt with a rolled white collar. His shirt was pressed and his needle-nosed boots spit-shined, as bright as mirrors even in the shade. “You like rodeos?”

“Sometimes.”

“I furnish rough stock to a mess of them. You like bluegrass music?”

“ ‘Sex, drugs, Flatt and Scruggs.’ ”

“There’s a concert tonight at Three Mile.”

“Maybe another time.”

He sat on a boulder and removed his straw hat. There was a pale band of skin at the top of his forehead. When he looked at her, all she could see were his pupils. The rest of his eyes seemed made of glass. “I ain’t here to bother you. You stood up for me, missy. I owe you,” he said.

“You don’t owe me anything. Let’s be clear on that.”

“If you hadn’t been there, Bill Pepper would have put out my light with that Taser. I thought he was gonna dump in his britches when you called him ‘bacon.’ ”

“You want to shoot my Airweight?”

“I’m an ex-felon. Ex-felons ain’t supposed to mess with handguns.”

“It’s Wyatt, isn’t it?”

“That’s me. From Calgary to Cheyenne to Prescott to the Big Dance in Vegas and every state fair in between. I’m a rodeo man.”

“I’m glad you came by, Wyatt. But I’m tied up today.”

“They’re gonna hang Pepper’s killing on you,” he said.

“Repeat that?”

“They wanted to stick me with it, but I got an alibi. They know Pepper insulted you up by that cave. Maybe they know he done even worse.”

“You need to be a little more explicit.”

“Bill Pepper was meaner than a radiator full of goat piss. He was mean to females in particular. You’re from Florida, right?”

“What about it?”

“In my former life, I heard about you. Or at least about somebody down in Miami who sure fits your description.”

“You heard what?”

“You worked for the Cubans and them New York Italians. You’re flat heck on wheels, woman. If I can put it together, them sheriff’s deputies can, too.”

“I’ll keep all this in mind.”

He took a penknife from his watch pocket and pared one of his fingernails. “You don’t hang out with rodeo people?” She winked at him and didn’t reply. He gazed at the sunlight breaking on the tops of the trees. “Whatever you do, stay away from that cave up yonder.”

“It’s just a cave,” she said.

“Something is loose here’bouts, something that ain’t supposed to be here. I can smell it. That Indian girl that got killed?”

“I heard about it.”

“Her death was over something the cops ain’t figured out yet. She was from the Blackfeet rez, up somewhere east of Marias Pass. I called her Little Britches, ’cause she was such a little-bitty slip of a thing.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“You know the Younger family?”

“Not personally.”

“It’s got to do with them. And with that thing in the cave. I just ain’t ciphered it out yet. I’m working on it.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause of what got done to that little girl.”

Gretchen flipped open the cylinder of her pistol and dumped the cartridges in her palm and put the cartridges and both guns and the ear protectors back in her canvas shooting bag. “Take care of yourself,” she said.

“If you ever want to mess around with an older man, I’m available,” he said.

“I’m not worth it. Keep your powder dry for the right girl,” she replied.

He laughed under his breath. She walked down the hillside to the cabin, her gun bag looped over one shoulder, the wind scattering her chestnut hair on her cheeks and forehead. Wyatt Dixon stared after her, bareheaded, his features as chiseled as a Roman soldier’s. Then he stared up at the cave, his good humor gone, his eyes containing thoughts that no rational person would ever be able to read or understand.