Swan Peak

CHAPTER 20

AT SUNRISE THE next day, Albert Hollister found his truck in his driveway but did not see J. D. Gribble. Nor did he find J.D. at his cabin on the other side of the ridge. At noon, while I was out in the yard, I saw Alicia Rosecrans drive past the arch over Albert’s driveway and turn in to the dirt lane that led to our cabin, north of the barn.

I wasn’t anxious to see her again. She and Clete had created a problematic personal relationship that could cause her to lose her career. Second, Clete knew that Gribble was probably a fugitive from the law and had not yet told her. Who said you should never go to bed with a woman who has more problems than you? Actually, it doesn’t matter who said it, because the admonition was not one I could have passed on to Clete. Why is that? Because I’ve never met a woman who had more problems than he did.

“Have you seen J. D. Gribble?” she said.

“No, I haven’t,” I replied.

“I called Mr. Hollister earlier. He said Gribble left his pickup in the driveway before dawn. He said he thinks Gribble may be in town.”

“Could be.”

“Mr. Robicheaux, I seem to get one of two responses from you. You’re either handing out moral observations, or you’re the laconic Spartan who has trouble putting two words together.”

“I guess that’s the way it flushes sometimes,” I said.

“Clete Purcel’s fingerprints are on the twenty-five auto that was found next to Quince Whitley’s body.”

“Whitley fell on top of his gun. Clete removed it from his hand so it wouldn’t discharge and hit somebody in the parking lot. What difference does it make? There were eyewitnesses. Candace Sweeney was there, and so was Nix.”

“Candace Sweeney has an arrest record for possession of heroin.”

“So what? She saw what happened. Why should she lie about it?”

“I don’t think she’s lying. She says after Whitley threw acid at her, she crouched in front of the SUV. She thinks Gribble knocked Whitley down with his guitar case. When she got up, somebody’s headlights were shining in her eyes. She says she started to run and heard Whitley say something, then the headlights went out of her eyes and she saw Clete aim his weapon with both hands and blow Whitley’s brains out. She was close enough to him that blood splattered on her blouse. But she didn’t see a gun in Whitley’s hand.”

“What did Nix see?”

“He was just coming out of the club when he heard the gunshot. He says he heard the gunshot, but he couldn’t see what was happening on the far side of the SUV.”

“One of the paramedics told me Whitley had a holster strapped on his ankle.”

“That doesn’t put the gun in Whitley’s hand. It also won’t make Clete’s prints go away.”

“You ran the twenty-five?”

“It was boosted in a home invasion in New Orleans six years ago.”

How bad could Clete’s luck be? What were the odds of Whitley ending up with a weapon that had been stolen in Clete’s hometown? “I don’t buy this stuff. Clete probably saved two people’s lives. Everything you’ve told me is based on the worst kind of conjecture. Are some of your colleagues trying to put Clete in the cook pot?”

I saw the beat in her eyes before she spoke. “Clete killed a government witness years ago. A lowlife by the name of Starkweather. Some people might see that as a precedent.”

It took a second before I realized what she was telling me. “Whitley was an informant?” I said.

“We need Gribble as a witness, Mr. Robicheaux, unless you want to see Clete jammed up real bad.”

A time comes in every human situation when you finally decide to stop protecting people from others and themselves. A time comes when you simply have to tell the truth and let the dice create their own arithmetic. But in this case, no matter how you cut it, the fallout for Clete was probably going to be treys, boxcars, and snake-eyes.

“I think Gribble may be an escapee from a contract prison in West Texas,” I said, holding my eyes on her. “I think his real name may be Jimmy Dale Greenwood. I think Troyce Nix came to Montana to find him.”

“How long have you had this information?”

“I’m not sure I know any of this with certitude.”

“Take the marbles out of your mouth, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Call me Dave or call me Detective Robicheaux, but stop patronizing me, please.”

“You and Clete both knew this man was probably an interstate fugitive?”

“I can only speak for myself.”

“Stop lying. Clete knew Gribble’s background but protected him because Gribble saved his life. Is that fair to say? Don’t just stare at me. Answer my question.”

“Sorry, I’m all out of gas.”

“How would you like to go to lockup for aiding and abetting?”

I heard Molly open the screen door and step out on the porch. “How would you like to take yourself to hell and gone down the road?” Molly said.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“No, it’s not all right, Detective Robicheaux. You deceived me, and so did Clete Purcel.” Alicia Rosecrans raised a finger at me, her little glasses wobbling with light. “I won’t forget it, either.”

JAMIE SUE WELLSTONE’S favorite time of day had become the hour between false dawn and the first glow of blue light on the walled garden behind the main house. Even when the garden was still cold and speckled with night damp, she would take the morning newspaper from the cylinder out front and read it and drink coffee at the mosaic-tile table just inside the garden’s back gate, which allowed her a view of the sun when it first broke above the mountaintop and lit the hillsides on the far end of the valley.

This morning the lead story in the paper was about a shooting death in East Missoula. She started to skip over the story, then saw names inside the type that seemed as sharp in relief as lettering on a headstone. Quince Whitley was dead, killed instantly by a visiting private investigator from New Orleans, Louisiana. According to the story, Whitley had tried to throw acid in the face of a woman by the name of Candace Sweeney. A man named J. D. Gribble had thrown his guitar case in front of the woman when she was attacked by Whitley. Then Gribble had disappeared. The shooting was under investigation, and by press time no one had been charged or taken into custody. In the last paragraph, the article stated that Whitley was thought to be an employee of the Wellstone ranch in the Swan Lake area.

The sun had just broken above the mountaintop, shining through the trees on the crest. A shadow fell across the front page of the newspaper as Jamie Sue was reading it.

“The sheriff’s office called late last night,” Leslie said, standing behind her in a purple robe and slippers and a warm scarf wrapped around his throat. “The phone didn’t wake you, sleepyhead?”

“No, it didn’t,” she replied.

“I explained that we had to fire Quince yesterday. Poor fellow, it must have sent him over the edge.”

“Fire him?”

“I thought I told you. He’d become so ill tempered and disrespectful, I decided it was time we let him go. Are you coming upstairs?”

“I was going to have some dry toast.”

“Cook can bring it up. Would you like an egg-white omelet?”

“I really don’t feel well.”

“That’s too bad. Must be the weather. Fire season upon us again and all that. Looks like your fellow Mr. Purcel earned himself some ink this morning.”

She rested her forehead on her fingers. The print on the newspaper was swimming before her eyes.

“That’s quite a story, isn’t it? Wonder why this Gribble fellow ran away. You think he’d want to hang around and receive some gratitude for his good deed,” Leslie said. He stared at the back of her head. He waited a long time for her to reply, but she didn’t. “Nix came to Montana to catch up on old times with Jimmy Dale Greenwood. You think this J. D. Gribble fellow might be Jimmy Dale?”

“I don’t know, Leslie.”

“Sure you wouldn’t like to come upstairs?”

“It’s my stomach. The veal we had last night tasted strange,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“You think the pitcher of martinis might have had something to do with it?” he said. He waited. “No? I’m sure it was the veal, then. Maybe you haven’t quite developed a taste for it. Did you and Jimmy Dale eat very much of it?”

When she looked up at the burned mask that was Leslie’s face, his eyes seemed filled with concern, perhaps even pity. Then he patted her on the shoulder and went back into the house. Was he trying to drive her mad?

She sat for a long time inside a rectangle of cold sunlight, the sound of her own blood whirring in her ears. When she shut her eyes, she remembered a field of bluebonnets in Yoakum, Texas, and saw the wind denting the grass and the flowers, spinning the blades of a windmill while well water gushed out of an iron pipe into an aluminum tank. She wondered how the paintless house in the background, where her blind mother was hanging wash, could have become the most heartbreaking symbol of loss she could imagine.

She went upstairs and showered in her bathroom, locking the door before she undressed. After she dried off, she wrapped herself in the towel and went into her bedroom, keeping her eye on the door that opened into Leslie’s bedroom. She went into her walk-in closet and dressed in a pair of old jeans and a flannel shirt and suede boots lined with sheep’s wool. She sat on the side of her bed and looked at the heavy black guitar case propped against her desk. Inside it was the HD-28 Martin guitar Jimmy Dale Greenwood had given her. She started to open the case, then hesitated. Through the door she could hear Leslie moving around in his bedroom. He had disabled the lock when she had first moved into the house, claiming that she should have more than one exit in case of fire. But in one fashion or another, he always let her know that her privacy was subject to his consent.

She took a gold-leaf book from the shelf above her desk and opened the French doors onto the balcony and sat on a scrolled-iron chair that stayed there year-round, even when the balcony was banked with snow, so that the cushion on the seat had become dry and bleached of color and she could feel the hard frame of the chair against her buttocks. She opened the book on her lap and began to read. The temperature had dipped into the high thirties during the night, and the sunlight still had not penetrated the shade on the west side of the house. Down by the barn, there was frost on the spigot above the horse tank and steam was rising off the coats of the horses. It was hard to believe that fires were breaking out in the hills, started by either dry lightning or a bottle thrown on the ground by a careless hiker. How had this beautiful piece of countryside become harsh and cold and fouled by the smell of fire all at the same time, as though the season were out of sync with itself?

“I haven’t seen you read your Bible in a while,” Leslie said behind her.

She turned in her chair, and her mouth parted slightly. “What are you doing with that gun?” she said.

“This? It’s a single-action Ruger Buntline. It has interchangeable cylinders. One for twenty-two long-rifles, one for twenty-two Magnums. The Magnums will make you deaf. So I don’t use them a lot. Here, hold it in your hand.”

“No.”

“It’s a beautiful piece. It penetrates cleanly, but with a hollow-point, it can do some very effective damage.” He opened the loading gate and slowly rotated the cylinder, clicking each loaded chamber past the opened gate. “I can break a beer bottle at ninety yards with it, although I have to prop my arm across a tree limb when I do. I bet you’d be a fine shot with a little training. A Texas ranch girl and all that sort of stuff.”

He looked out across the yard and down the slope at a sugar maple whose leaves were so dark they were almost purple. A robin had built its nest in the fork of the tree, and a shaft of sunlight shone directly on the nest and the bird sitting atop its eggs.

“You reading from Psalms?” he said.

“I just flipped open the pages. I wasn’t-”

“You seem quite concentrated. What did you find that’s so revelatory in nature?”

“‘I’m the alpha and the omega. I am the beginning and the end. I am he who makes all things new.’”

“My father used to say, ‘When you see a man run for his Bible, he’s usually in the situation of a track crew trying to build a trestle over a canyon after the locomotive has gone over the cliff.’ I don’t think you would have liked my father. He wasn’t a likable man. There was a story that he beat a man to death with his fists. But I never believed it. Yes, that’s quite a quotation. But when I was having my face rebuilt, it didn’t strike me as altogether convincing.”

She heard Leslie pull back the hammer on the pistol. She breathed through her mouth and looked straight ahead, trying to concentrate on the symmetry of the countryside, the snow high up on Swan Peak, the normalcy of the world beyond the Wellstone compound. She could feel a tic begin to form in the skin under her left eye. “What are you doing?” she said.

“Setting the hammer on an empty chamber. That’s the safest way to carry a revolver. If I should drop it, there’s no way it can fire. See, a revolver doesn’t have a safety. I always set the hammer on an empty chamber so I don’t have to worry. Worry is like guilt – it can drain a person, can’t it, Jamie Sue?”

“Please don’t stand behind me with that gun.”

“A revolver is a pistol, not a gun.”

He stepped within her line of vision and propped one hand on the balcony’s rail. Something had frightened the robin. It flew to the barn roof, perched briefly on the apex, and seconds later, returned to the nest. “Would you like to fire a round?” Leslie said.

“It’ll frighten the animals.”

“I doubt it. They’re hardy fellows. Besides, I don’t have the Magnum cylinder in the frame. The twenty-two long-rifle doesn’t make much noise. Just a little pop. Give it a try.”

“I don’t want to.”

He studied the sugar maple, then lifted the revolver and pointed it out in front of him, closing one eye as he aimed. “Either you take a shot or I do,” he said.

“Don’t do this, Leslie.”

“Just one shot. I don’t miss. But you just might. Give it a try. You might like it. Women do it once and sometimes fall in love with it. I think it’s a guilty pleasure with them.”

“Why are you so cruel?”

He notched back the hammer to full cock with his thumb. “Last chance. If I can bust a beer bottle at ninety yards, I should be able to pot a robin.”

“You’re sickening and hateful. You make everyone over in your image. You’re like a virus that spreads from one person to the next,” she said, closing the Bible, getting up from her chair, her blood draining into her stomach.

The corner of Leslie’s mouth flexed in a smile, exposing a canine tooth. He lowered the pistol and reset the hammer on half-cock, then rotated the cylinder to an empty chamber again. He eased the hammer softly onto the firing pin, locking the cylinder back into place, effectively disarming the pistol. “I just wanted you to say it. Your husband both sickens and inspires loathing in you. But tell me, Jamie Sue, do you think you might be guilty of marrying up and screwing down? I think that’s the term for it. Is it possible the blight is on your soul and not just on the face of your disfigured spouse?”

LATER ON SATURDAY, Clete walked up to our cabin but did not knock. Instead, he sat down heavily in a wood chair, propped his hands on his knees, and watched a flock of wild turkeys pecking in the grass across the dirt road. I opened the front door and looked at the back of his head. “Want to come in?” I said.

“Not particularly,” he said. His porkpie hat was slanted on his forehead, his shoulders rounded like the back on a whale. The truck was gone, so he knew Molly was not at home. “You dimed me with Alicia?”

“You mean did I tell her you and I both thought Gribble was using an alias and that he was a fugitive? Yeah, I did.”

“You want to explain why you took that upon yourself?”

“The guy is a material witness in a homicide, specifically a homicide you committed. In case you haven’t heard, the person whose life you saved, Candace Sweeney, didn’t see a gun on Whitley. We need Gribble or Greenwood or whatever his name is to clear you.”

“I know all about that, Dave. You should have let me talk to Alicia.”

“You seem to be taking your time in getting around to it.”

“She accused me of being a sexual Benedict Arnold. She said I’d deceived and made a fool out of her. She said she might have to tell her supervisor she’s been getting it on with me. Her career might be flushed.”

“Did she bother to tell you Whitley was an FBI informant?”

He turned around in the chair, his eyes on mine. “You’re not putting me on?”

“The feds aren’t pissed at you for taking out Sally Dio. They’re still pissed because you capped that guy Starkweather in ’85. The way they see it, you punched the ticket on two guys the government probably worked years to flip.”

“So that’s why Whitley doesn’t have a sheet,” he said. He fiddled with his hands, cracking his knuckles, rubbing his palms together with a sound that was like sandpaper. “You think the feds are investigating Wellstone Ministries?”

“Maybe.”

“Then they put a guy like Whitley on the payroll, and he turns out to be a serial killer?”

“You think he’s the guy?”

“Not sure. Whitley wasn’t that smart. He was the kind of guy other people use. But any way you cut it, the feds have a pile of shit on their hands. They flipped him, and now they have to deal with the fact that he had a mask in his truck like the geek who almost did me.”

“But Alicia Rosecrans didn’t bother to tell you any of this?”

He made a face, going into his old pattern of defending the indefensible whenever women hurt him. “She can’t give up the identity of an informant to someone outside the Bureau,” he said.

“But she can call you deceitful because you didn’t throw Gribble or Greenwood or whatever to the wolves – a guy who saved you from being burned to death?”

Clete got up and took off his hat and combed his hair. He watched the turkeys feeding in the grass. They were fanned out in a straight line, working their way up a slope, their feathers puffing in the wind. I knew he was reconstructing his defense system and was not going to give up his relationship with Alicia Rosecrans, no matter how much it hurt him.

“When Alicia first questioned me about the guy in the mask, she kept asking if I thought he could be Whitley,” he said. “She must have had her suspicions about him from the jump. Maybe she was trying to tell me something.”

“Lose the sentiment. The feds are covering their butt.”

He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. I removed it and flipped it out into the dirt.

“Why’d you do that?” he said.

“Because you don’t know how to take care of yourself. Because you’re unteachable.”

“You’ll never change.”

“I won’t change?”

“You’ve got an anvil for a head, Dave. Everybody knows that except you. If it weren’t for me, your life would be a mess. I have to screw up for both of us. It’s a big job.”

Try to argue with a mind-set like that.

KNOW WHY THE FBI write down car tag numbers at Mafia funerals? Because all the players are there, including the ones who put the deceased in the box.

On Monday a funeral notice for Quince Whitley was printed in the Missoulian. The service was to be held the next day in a small Protestant church just south of Swan Lake. On Tuesday afternoon Clete and I drove in my pickup to the church and parked about three hundred feet away, in a grove of cottonwood trees where a family of Indians was selling cherries out of a flatbed truck.

Clete and I stood back in the shade and used my Russian military binoculars to watch one of the strangest assemblages of contradiction I have ever witnessed. The setting and the mourners were a study in juxtaposition. Jamie Sue and the Wellstone brothers arrived at the clapboard building in their white limo, chauffeured by Lyle Hobbs. Jamie Sue wore a white suit and dark glasses and a gray mantilla. The mixed message her choice of clothing sent could have been deliberate or even hostile. Or possibly it meant nothing at all. The Reverend Sonny Click had on yellow-tinted aviator glasses and was wearing a blue polyester suit that, in the sunlight, seemed to have lubricant on it. The faces of Hobbs, Jamie Sue, Sonny Click, and the Wellstone brothers were as opaque as glazed ceramic. The faces of Quince Whitley’s family, who arrived in a rental car, were another matter.

The Whitley family not only resembled one another, they looked as though they had all descended from the same impaired seed. Their skin was the color of dust. Their expressions seemed incapable of showing either joy or grief. Briefly, one of the women looked at Jamie Sue with indignation, as though Jamie Sue were perhaps the cause of Quince’s death. Their ages gave no clue to their relationship with the deceased. An unkind observer might have said they possessed all the characteristics of livestock milling around in a feeder lot, waiting for their roles in the world to be imposed upon them.

The hearse from the funeral home arrived late, and Lyle Hobbs and the Whitley men lifted up the coffin and carried it inside. Five minutes later, we could hear the voice of Sonny Click booming from the church’s interior. In the slanting rays of the sun on the pines and the dilapidated shingle roof of the building, the scene was like a photograph taken in an earlier time, perhaps during World War II, when death came much more violently and prematurely to us than it does today, and disparate elements of the country were drawn together in humble surroundings to mourn the loss of a much admired man or woman. But the scene Clete and I were watching was quite different. Quince Whitley had probably been a misogynist, if not a misanthrope, and his mourners represented elements in our culture whose existence we either deny or whose origins we have difficulty explaining. But maybe what appeared to be myriad contradictions in the mourning ritual we witnessed that afternoon had more to do with the presence or absence of money in our lives than it did anything else.

For Whitley’s people, life and hardship and struggle were interchangeable concepts. Man was born in sin and corruption and delivered bloody and terrified from the womb. The devil was more real than God, and the flames of perdition roared right under the plank floor of the church house. The man with the power to shut down a mill or evict a tenant farmer’s family lived in a white house on the hill. But the enemy was the black man who came ragged and hungry into the poor whites’ domain and asked for part of what the white man had been told was his by birth. When people talk about class war, they’re dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people in the house on the hill watched it from afar when they watched it at all.

Or at least that’s the way things were in the South during the era when I grew up.

After the service, the hearse drove to a cemetery four miles away, with the limo and the Whitley rental cars in tow. The grave had already been dug, the dirt piled on one side, a rolled mat of artificial grass dropped nonchalantly on top of it. The sun sliced through the pines and maples. In the spangled light, motes of dust and pieces of desiccated leaves floated like gilded insects. Clete had said few words in the last hour, and I wondered if he was reliving the moments before he had sighted on the side of Quince Whitley’s head and pulled the trigger.

“We haven’t learned a lot here. You want to wrap it up?” I said.

“Let’s see it through,” he said.

We had parked the truck not over fifty yards up the road from the cemetery, but so far the mourners had either not taken notice of us or didn’t care whether we were there or not. Regardless, I didn’t want to see Clete forced to confront Whitley’s family. Sonny Click read from a Bible over the coffin, then the mourners held hands and lowered their heads while Click led them in prayer. Through the binoculars, I saw Leslie Wellstone fight to keep from yawning.

Then the mourners got into their vehicles and began leaving, while the funeral attendants waited to lower the casket into the grave.

“I’ll buy you supper,” I said.

“Hold on,” Clete said, pointing down the road with his chin.

A dark SUV had approached the cemetery from the other end and parked in the trees. When the last of the mourners had left, a big man got out of the SUV and walked to the grave site. A long-necked bottle of beer protruded from his right pants pocket.

“It’s what’s-his-name, the bartender from the club on the lake,” I said.

“Harold Waxman, the blue-collar suck-up guy.”

“Wait here,” I said.

“What for?”

I walked away without offering an explanation. The afternoon sun was waning, which meant Clete’s need for alcohol and the irritability that went with it were growing by the minute. As I entered the cemetery, the funeral attendants were lowering the casket on the motor-operated pulley. Harold Waxman said something to them, then twisted off the cap on his beer bottle and poured the beer on top of the coffin.

“Buying Whitley a last round?” I said.

He looked at me indifferently. “I’m taking over his job. I figured he deserved one for the road,” he replied.

“You’ll be working for the Wellstones?”

“Just for Ms. Wellstone. She doesn’t have a personal driver right now.” He looked past me at Clete, who was standing in the shade by my truck. “Your friend up there is the one who capped him?”

“No, my friend is the one who stopped Whitley from shooting an unarmed woman.”

“Some kill. Whitley couldn’t hit the ground with his hat.” Harold Waxman tossed the beer bottle into the grave. It clanked and rolled off the rounded top of the casket and landed with a thud in the dirt.