Swan Peak

CHAPTER 8

ON MONDAY MORNING Joe Bim Higgins asked me to come to his office at the Missoula County Courthouse. When I tapped on his partially opened door, he was standing at the window, gazing out on the lawn and the maple trees that shaded the benches by the sidewalk.

“Thanks for coming by, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said, extending his hand. “Early yesterday morning somebody broke into the house in Bonner where Seymour Bell was living. Bell’s roommates were gone for the weekend. Whoever broke in tore the place up pretty bad.”

“You don’t think it was just vandalism?”

“No, the drawers were all pulled out, mattresses peeled back, closets emptied. Somebody was looking for something.”

“Was anything missing?”

“Bell’s roommate says a cheap camera is gone, one of those little throwaway jobs. He said he was sure it was on top of Bell’s bookcase when he left the house on Friday afternoon.” Higgins paused, watching my expression. “What’s your take on it?”

“If the camera was the object of interest and in full view, the intruder wouldn’t have torn up the whole house. He was after something else as well, something more important.”

“I talked with your boss in New Iberia this morning. She said you were a good cop.”

I knew what was coming. “No,” I said. “I came out here to fish. I got involved in your investigation because the homicide took place behind Albert’s house. Clete thought the killer might have been sending Albert a message.”

“That’s one reason I want you working for me. Albert is just like me. He’s old and wants his own way. When he doesn’t get it, he starts throwing horse turds in the punch bowl.”

“Albert is going to have to take care of himself.”

“You don’t get it, Mr. Robicheaux. The West isn’t the same place or culture I grew up in. People like Albert Hollister used to be the rule, not the exception. Albert believes in his country and his fellow man, and he’ll let people kill him before he’ll accept the fact that most of his fellow citizens care more about the price of gasoline than a volunteer soldier getting killed in Afghanistan. I want to deputize you right here, with a gentleman’s understanding that this is a temporary situation confined to the investigation of these recent homicides. I’ve got good people working for me, there’s just not enough of them. What do you say, partner?”

“What about Clete Purcel?”

“Forget it.” He took a badge in a leather holder out of his desk drawer and dropped it on his blotter. “Tell me you don’t want it and we’re done.”

ONE MILE AWAY, Clete had just parked his Caddy under a cluster of maple trees behind the university library when he saw a familiar green Honda pass on the street. He had seen the Honda twice that morning, in traffic, once outside the Express Lube Friday morning, and once later, at the mall.

Clete watched the Honda disappear around a curve at the base of the mountain behind the university. He walked across a knoll, through a grove of trees, and sat on the steps of a classroom building with a view of his Caddy. He sat there for ten minutes, sipping from a silver flask, each hit of Scotch and milk going down like the old friend it used to be, the wind blowing cool through the trees, the damp smell of the steps reminiscent of the Quarter in the early-morning hours. But the green Honda did not reappear, and Clete walked to the library, where he began to research both the life of the woman he had slept with and the life of the husband he had cuckolded.

As he did these things, he felt wrapped in a web of deceit and desire that he could not scrub off his skin.

The reference librarian helped him find articles about the young Jamie Sue Stapleton on the Internet and in music magazines and biographical books dealing with country-and-western personalities. Most of it was fluff, written by hacks who created caricatures of blue-collar people who rose from humble origins to a world stage where their brocaded and sequined western costumes told their audiences that fame and wealth could be theirs, too, if only they believed. The manufactured accents, the nativism and cynical use of religion, the meretricious nature of the enterprise, the cheapness of the disguise were all forgivable sins. It was the poor whites’ answer to the minstrel show. Starshine allowed them to delight in the parody of themselves and to turn the poverty and rejection that characterized their lives into badges of honor.

Unfortunately for the hacks who wrote about her, Jamie Sue’s life and career did not lend themselves to predictability.

She had been born to a blind woman and an oil-field roustabout in Yoakum, Texas, the inception point of the old Chisholm Trail. She left high school at age sixteen and worked as a waitress at a truck stop in San Antonio and as a dancer at a topless club in Houston. According to one interview, she earned an associate of arts degree from a community college when she was nineteen. She also married her English professor and divorced him one year later, after charging him with assault and battery and spousal rape.

With the money from her divorce settlement, she formed her first band.

At a time when Nashville music was transforming itself into a middle-class and popular medium, Jamie Sue used Kitty Wells and Skeeter Davis as her models, and a mandolin and a banjo as her lead instruments, and a Dobro instead of an electric bass. A song that always brought down the house was one written by Larry Redmond titled “Garth Ain’t Playing Here Tonight.”

She hooked up with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, a rodeo drifter some people said had the best voice to hit the Texas hill country since Jimmie Rodgers had lived there. Others said a hymnal duet by Jamie Sue and Jimmy Dale could make the devil join the Baptist Church. But two weeks before they were scheduled to cut their first album in an Austin recording studio, Jimmy Dale put a knife into the nephew of the meanest county judge in Southwest Texas.

Why had she married an older man, one terribly mutilated by fire? Was it simply money? Clete found only a few news articles on Leslie Wellstone: He had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a double major in anthropology and comparative literature, but he had disappeared into the post-psychedelic culture of Haight-Ashbury. He had made underground films and a documentary on migrant farmworkers. He had joined a New Age commune high up in the mountains above Santa Fe. He had also enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and gotten his Spam fried in the Sudan.

Clete had the feeling Leslie Wellstone was a man who had dealt himself almost all the cards in the box and had liked none of them.

Clete left the library and headed toward his Caddy. In a parking lot by the Student Union, he saw the green Honda again. A man was sitting behind the steering wheel, his face obscured by the sun visor. Out on the lawn, in the shade of maples not far from the Caddy, a college-age boy and girl were eating sandwiches on a blanket, the door of their parked vehicle yawning open behind them, their car radio playing softly. Clete looked again at the green Honda. Show-time on the campus, he thought.

He walked over to the college boy and his girl. The air in the shade was cool and smelled of clover. The two young people looked up at Clete uncertainly. He squatted down on his haunches, eye level with them, and opened his badge holder on his knee.

“My name is Clete Purcel. I’m a private investigator from New Orleans,” he said. “See that guy parked in the green shitbox over there?”

They nodded but kept their eyes on his face and did not look directly at the parking lot.

“That dude has been following me, and I want to turn it around on him,” Clete said. “The problem is, he’s made my maroon Caddy over there. In the next couple of minutes, I’m going to flush him out of the parking lot. I’ve got about thirty-seven bucks in my wallet. It’s yours if you’ll follow him in your car and let me sit in the backseat.”

“He’ll know who we are,” the boy said.

“No, he can’t see your car from where he is. He’s not interested in y’all. He’ll be looking for me and my Caddy.”

“What’s he done besides follow you?” the girl asked.

“He’s a child molester,” Clete replied.

“What do you plan to do to him?” the boy asked.

Take a chance, Clete thought. “Maybe nothing. Maybe break all his wheels,” he said. “Anytime you want me out of the car, I’ll get out.”

The boy and girl looked at each other and shrugged.

Clete walked across the grass to Lyle Hobbs’s vehicle and propped one arm on the roof above the driver’s window. Hobbs had a box of Wheat Thins open on his lap and was feeding them one at a time into his mouth, chewing them on his back teeth. His recessed right eye, the one looped with stitch marks, glittered wetly, as though it had been irritated by the wind. Clete suppressed a yawn, his gaze wandering up the slope of the mountain behind the university. Then he watched a U.S. Forest Service plane, one filled with fire retardant, flying low across the sky, its engines laboring with its massive load. “Nice day, isn’t it?” he said.

Lyle Hobbs turned on his radio and tuned the station to a baseball game in progress. “You gonna let it get personal, Mr. Purcel?”

A nest of small blue veins was pulsing in Clete’s temple. “When I was with NOPD, I’d do just that, Lyle. Get personal, I mean. Know why that was? Because my pay was the same whether I was eating doughnuts or mopping up the sidewalk with a degenerate. Now I’m a PI. When it becomes personal, I get in trouble and lose my source of income.”

“I noticed that about you when you were working for Sally Dee. A real pro. I was impressed. You always seemed to fit right in,” Hobbs replied, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Does it ever get personal for you, Lyle? Ever know a guy with a short-eyes jacket who wasn’t afraid – I mean, deep down inside, scared shitless? It’s what makes them cruel, isn’t it? That’s why they always choose their victims carefully. You ever get a real bone-on and go apeshit on somebody, Lyle?”

“You’re a real philosopher, Mr. Purcel,” Hobbs said, suddenly looking up at Clete, just like the lead-weighted eyelids of a doll clicking open. He dropped his empty Wheat Thins box out the window. It bounced off the pavement, powdering Clete’s shoes with crumbs.

Clete went into the alcove of the classroom building across from the library and waited. He unscrewed the cap on his flask and took a hit of Scotch and milk, then another one. After five minutes, he heard Lyle Hobbs start his car. He waited until he could see Hobbs’s car heading toward the road that separated the campus from the mountain behind it. Then he walked quickly down the steps to the young couple sitting under the trees. “Let’s rock,” he said.

The three of them followed Hobbs across town to a park in the middle of the residential district. All of the adjoining streets were lined with maple trees, the park spangled with sunshine, children playing on a baseball diamond and in a wading pool with a fountain geysering out of the center. In the midst of it all, Lyle Hobbs stood under a tree, watching a group of young teenage girls practicing somersaults in the grass.

Clete took all the bills out of his wallet and handed them to the driver. “Thanks for the lift. You guys take care of yourself,” he said.

“That guy’s really a molester?” the boy said.

“From the jump,” Clete said.

“Keep the money,” the boy said. He was burr-headed and wore a T-shirt and a ball cap pulled down on his brow. “You might actually bust that guy up?”

“I exaggerate sometimes.”

“You have booze on your breath,” the girl said, trying to smile. “We don’t want to see you get in trouble. You seem like a nice man.” She patted Clete on the wrist.

After the college kids drove away, Clete walked into the park. Then his eyes focused on a picnic bench on the far side of the recreation building. Jamie Sue was sitting next to her brother-in-law, Ridley Wellstone. She was also sitting next to a stroller, watching a diapered little boy play in the grass. She set the boy on her lap and combed his hair with her fingernails.

Clete tried to assimilate what he was looking at. The Scotch he had drunk wasn’t helping his thought processes. The light seemed to splinter into needles inside the trees; he opened his mouth to clear a popping sound in his ears. Then he realized both Wellstone and Jamie Sue were staring at him as though he were an aberration rather than the other way around.

“What are you doing here?” Wellstone said. His aluminum crutches were propped beside him.

“Following the asshole you put on my tail,” Clete said. He looked at Jamie Sue and the little boy. “You have a kid?”

“Yes, I do. Why do you ask?”

“Why do I ask?”

“You don’t look well,” she said. “Do you want to sit down?”

“That’s not a good idea,” Ridley Wellstone said.

The popping sound in Clete’s ears seemed to be gaining in intensity, like the thropping of helicopter blades. How dumb can one guy be? he asked himself.

“We made restitution for your fishing gear. Now get out of here,” Wellstone said.

People at the other picnic tables were staring, and Clete’s face felt tight and small in the wind. Again he thought he heard mechanical sounds from a distant war and smelled an odor like moldy clothes on his body and diesel fuel and mosquito repellent and mud that stank of stagnant water. For just a second he thought he felt the squish of trench foot inside his boot and saw the flicker of conical straw hats moving through elephant grass.

He walked away from Jamie Sue’s picnic table, slightly off balance, his mouth dry, his forehead breaking a sweat. He passed Lyle Hobbs, who was still watching the teenage girls turning somersaults in the shade. Clete went into the restroom and washed his face for a long time. He dried his skin with a paper towel and looked in the metal reflector that served as a mirror. His face made him think of a pumpkin beaded with drops of water. Outside, he heard the music from an ice-cream truck. He thought of children playing in Audubon Park when he was a child in New Orleans. For a moment his heart was a kettle drum.

Lyle Hobbs walked into the restroom and relieved himself in a urinal. He was wearing shades, breathing through his mouth as he urinated, shaking himself off with one hand. He zipped his fly, then wet his comb under the lavatory faucet and began combing his hair. He never glanced at Clete.

“I catch you tailing me again, it’s going to play out a whole lot different,” Clete said.

Hobbs flicked the water off his comb and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Mr. Wellstone came to town for his therapy. Nobody is tailing you, nobody is interested in you, Mr. Purcel. I cain’t abide a self-righteous man, particularly one that didn’t have a problem of conscience with putting his dick in another man’s wife. You’d better count your blessings you’re dealing with me and not Quince. Quince is mightily attached to the Wellstone family. Believe me when I say Quince is not a man you want mad at you.”

“I saw you watching those young girls, you piece of shit.”

Hobbs leaned toward the metal reflector, tilting up his nose, sucking in his lips. He plucked a hair from one nostril and dropped it in the basin. “Stay out of trouble,” he said.

Hobbs walked out into the sunlight, his hair wet on his collar. Clete followed him, remaining in the shade, his heart still hammering. Hobbs was watching the teenage girls, who were now sitting on the grass under the maple trees, their knees pulled up in front of them. He bought a Popsicle from the ice-cream truck, opened his car door, and stood behind it, eating the Popsicle while he watched a girl not over fourteen climbing up on the jungle gym, her shirt sliding up on her hips.

Clete could see the outline of Hobbs’s phallus against his trousers.

Walk away, Clete told himself. You can’t change what’s happening here.

Screw that, another voice said.

“You need to take your johnson somewhere else, Lyle,” he said.

Hobbs turned, the Popsicle half in his mouth. He bit into it, clearly savoring the melt in the back of his jaws, his eyes lighting with a thought. “Sally Dee said you blew your career and marriage with booze and weed and ten-dollar street cooze. He said he felt sorry for you, Mr. Purcel. He said your wife was a muff diver, and that’s why you were a gash hound and your colleagues at NOPD gave you a bad rap. That’s why he gave you a job at his casino.”

Hobbs’s eyes remained fixed on the girl playing on the jungle gym, but Clete saw the indentation, the tug of a suppressed grin, at the corner of his mouth.

“I have a feeling there’s paper on you somewhere,” Clete said.

Hobbs dropped the empty Popsicle stick over the top of the car door into the gutter. He tilted his head inquisitively.

“Defective guys like you have outstanding warrants – a skipped bond, failed court appearances, a PV of a kind that only idiots commit,” Clete said. “But what that means is I’m going to take you in and split the skip fee with whoever is looking for you. Lean against the vehicle and assume the position.”

“Go blow yourself, Mr. Purcel,” Hobbs said.

“I can’t tell you how happy that makes me, Lyle.”

Clete clenched one hand on the back of Hobbs’s neck and slammed him against the side of the Honda. When Hobbs began to struggle, Clete swung him in a circle, flopping like a fish, and crashed him against the roof and against the hood. Hobbs’s shades shattered on the asphalt, and blood leaked from his nose. Then he tried to run. He got as far as the grille of the Honda before Clete grabbed him again and threw him against the far side of the hood, kicking his ankles apart, shoving his face down on the hot metal.

The back of Hobbs’s neck felt oily and warm in Clete’s hand. The stench of deodorant layered over dry sweat rose from Hobbs’s armpits. His head reared from the metal, his buttocks striking Clete in the loins.

Clete whirled him around and drove his fist into Hobbs’s face. The force of the blow lifted Hobbs into the air and dropped him between his shoulder blades on the point of the hood ornament. It should have stopped there, but the red lights flashing and the bells ringing at a train guard deep inside Clete’s head were of no value now. He realized what the popping sound in his ears had been. The stitches that held Clete Purcel together were coming loose one by one, and in the next thirty seconds he did things that were like pieces of liquid color breaking apart behind his eyes, dissolving and re-forming without sound or meaning. He thought he heard people screaming and a car horn blowing and the music from the megaphone on top of the ice-cream truck clotting with static. But none of these things deterred him. He felt his fists smashing into sinew and bone, the flat of his shoe coming down on the side of someone’s head and face. He saw an old man pleading with him to stop, to grant mercy to the figure on the asphalt.

Then he was standing alone, as though under a glass bell, Hobbs at his feet, the children on the playground terrified by what they had just seen, the wind swelling the trees against a blue summer sky.

Think, he told himself.

He dropped to one knee, a handkerchief in his hand, and pulled a stiletto from a scabbard that was Velcro-strapped to his right ankle. He rubbed the surfaces of the handle clean, clicked open the blade, and wiped it clean, too. Then he pressed the handle into Hobbs’s palm and folded his fingers on it.

In the background, he could hear sirens pealing down the street.

ONE HOUR LATER, Clete was sitting on a bench by himself in a holding cell that contained no plumbing and smelled of disinfectant and stone. Down the corridor, someone was yelling without stop in a voice that reflected neither coherence nor meaning, as though the person were yelling simply to deliver an auditory message to himself about his state of affairs. When Clete closed his eyes, he kept seeing the faces of the children in the park, their disbelief at the level of savagery taking place before their eyes. Clete wondered if it was he who was the ogre and not Lyle Hobbs.

The undersheriff who had cuffed Clete stood at the cell door, one hand behind his back. He was a pleasant-looking man, a bit overweight, more administrator than policeman, his face windburned, pale around the eyes where his sunglasses had been. “Hobbs is at St. Pat’s. Did you use his head for a paddleball?”

“Sorry to hear that,” Clete said.

“You told him you made him for a bail skip?”

“Yeah.”

“And he came at you with a switchblade?”

“I guess that sums it up.”

“Where was he carrying the switchblade?”

Clete glanced again at the undersheriff. The undersheriff’s left hand was still concealed behind his hip. “It’s my fault. I got sloppy on the shakedown,” Clete said.

The undersheriff held up a Ziploc bag with a black polybraid scabbard inside. “My deputy found this under Hobbs’s car. It’s the kind of rig some plainclothes cops or PIs use.”

“Wonder what Lyle would be doing with that,” Clete said.

“You’re lucky, Mr. Purcel. Hobbs has a couple of bench warrants on him. It’s minor-league stuff, but as a bond agent, you probably have a degree of legality on your side. Anyway, there’s a lady waiting for you by the front entrance.”

“I’m sprung?”

“For now,” the deputy said. “Be careful what you pray for.”

Clete gave him a look.

A few minutes later, Clete emerged from the courthouse and saw an Asian-American woman on the sidewalk, a black purse hanging from a leather strap on her shoulder, her expression almost clinical, her wire-framed glasses perched neatly on her nose. “I’m Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans, Mr. Purcel,” she said. “I’ll drive you to your car.”

“You’re with Fart, Barf, and Itch?” he said.

“I think you’re an intelligent man, regardless of what most people say about you. You can cooperate with us, or you can choose not to. You can also deal with the assault charge on your own. Do you want me to take you to your car?”

Clete saw a four-door silver Dodge Stratus with a government plate on it parked by the curb. Alicia Rosecrans waited for him to reply, then started toward her car. “I appreciate the offer,” Clete said to her back. “I’ve always appreciated what you guys do.”

But on his way to the university, he began to have second thoughts about accepting favors from Alicia Rosecrans. She made him think of a lab technician taking apart an insect with tweezers. She told him to open a manila folder on the seat. In it were a stack of photos, a copy of his discharge from the United States Marine Corps, and his medical records from the Veterans Administration.

“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.