DR17 - Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
Of course that’s what I want, you idiot, or I wouldn’t have ordered it, she caught herself thinking.
“Sorry?” he said.
“You seem like a man of the world. Would you ever indicate to a woman she was your hired slut?”
The bartender’s mouth opened.
“The question isn’t meant to startle or to offend. Would you say something like that to a woman, any woman? Do you know any man who would?”
“No, Ms. Wellstone, I wouldn’t do that. I don’t associate with men who talk like that, either.”
“I didn’t think so. That’s why I asked. The gangster in the photograph with his girlfriend? Why would they come to Swan Lake? Didn’t they live in Beverly Hills? Why would anyone come here in the winter and build a snowman on the edge of a frozen lake? Didn’t she commit suicide? Didn’t she take an overdose of sleeping pills in Austria and lie down in a snowbank and go to sleep and wake up dead?”
“Ms. Wellstone, you’re really worrying me,” the bartender said.
“There’s nothing wrong with me, Harold. I wish you would not indicate there is. I wish that lake was full of gin. It looks like gin when the sun goes behind the mountains and the light fades, doesn’t it?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Would you like to call up my husband and talk with him? Were you in a war, Harold? My father was. A Japanese soldier stuck a bayonet in his chest and destroyed his lung. My father pulled out the bayonet and killed the Japanese soldier with it. My husband wasn’t interested in the story.”
Harold finished making the gimlet but didn’t place it on the bar. He picked up a bar rag and wiped his hands with it, clearly caught between his desire to please and his fear that he was about to pour gasoline on a flame.
She propped her elbows on the bar and pressed her fingertips against her temples. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well,” she said. “Please excuse my behavior.”
“Everybody has those kinds of days. This morning a guy was tailgating me. When we got to the red light, I walked back to his truck and—” Harold stopped, his attention riveted on the doorway that led into the café.
“What is it?” Jamie Sue said. Then she heard her little boy, Dale, screaming his head off.
Quince had just walked through the bead curtain, carrying Dale in his arms, the beads trailing off Dale’s head. “I’m sorry, Miss Jamie. I got up from the table to get him some ice cream and he fell out of the high chair.”
She got off the bar stool, the blood draining from her head into her stomach. She lifted Dale from Quince’s arms and held him against her breast. He had stopped crying, but he was hiccuping uncontrollably, and his cheeks were slick with tears. Quince got a chair for her, and they sat down at one of the tables by the small dance floor. “Miss Jamie, I don’t talk out of school, but I know what’s going on. It’s that guy from New Orleans, Clete Purcel, isn’t it? He’s been nothing but trouble since we caught him trespassing on the ranch. He put Lyle in the hospital and went out of his way to cause disruption in y’all’s home life. I’m not a blind man. I got my feelings. Excuse me for being direct.”
She had her hands full with Dale, and she couldn’t concentrate on what Quince was saying. The saloon was empty except for her and her little boy and Quince and the bartender, and every sound seemed to resonate off the polished wood surfaces and echo against the ceiling.
“Lyle just got out of the hospital last night. The cops aren’t gonna do anything about it, either. I heard your brother-in-law talking to the sheriff. The sheriff must have said something about ‘fair fight,’ because Mr. Wellstone really got mad and said, ‘Why don’t you people grow up? This isn’t a Wild West movie.’”
“Did he hit his head?” Jamie Sue asked.
“Who? You mean Dale? No ma’am. I mean I don’t know. He did a flip right over the eating board and crashed on the floor. His little face just bashed right into it. I bet it damn near rattled his brains loose. The waitress come running around the counter and spilled a tray all over a guy’s suit.”
Jamie Sue thought she was going to be sick. “Bring the car around,” she said.
“I was fixing to do that.”
“Then go do it.”
“Ma’am?”
“Shut up and go do it. But just shut up.”
When Quince got to his feet, his belt buckle and flat-plated stomach and starched work shirt were so close to her face, she could smell his odor. For just a moment she saw a look in his eyes that went way back into her early life in the South — the kind of feral anger you normally associate with abused animals that have been pushed into a corner with a stick. Except the form of resentment she saw in Quince’s face was far more dangerous than its manifestation in animals. It was hardwired into an entire class of poor-white southern males, like genetic clap they passed down from one generation to the next. They had perhaps the lowest self-esteem of any group of human beings in the Western Hemisphere and blamed Jews, Yankees, women, and black people for their problems, anyone besides themselves. They stoked their anger incrementally every morning of their lives; they fed on violence and exuded it through their pores. The mean-spirited glint in their eyes always seemed to be in search of a trigger — a word, a gesture, an allusion — that would allow them to vent their rage on an innocent individual. Blacks feared them. Their fellow whites avoided them. But no reasonable person deliberately incited them.
“Did you hear me, Quince? I’ve got more than I can handle right now,” Jamie Sue said. “Where’s my cell phone?”
“On the table.”
“Don’t just stand there. Go get it and bring it to me. Then get the car. You can bring the cell phone and bring the car around without my saying anything else, can’t you?”
“I’ll do just that. Yes ma’am, I’ll get cracking on that son of a bitch right now,” Quince said.
Moments later, Jamie Sue emerged from the saloon with Dale in her arms. His diaper was wet. Blinded by the brilliance of the sunshine, he looked about him as though seeing the world he lived in for the first time. Quince had backed up the Mercedes and was coming hard toward the entrance of the saloon, gravel pinging under the fenders. Jamie Sue held Dale tightly against her chest and turned her back, shielding her son from the dust Quince had scoured out of the parking lot. She could feel Dale’s little heart beating against her own, his frightened mouth wet on her cheek.
As the dust drifted in an acrid-smelling cloud over both of them, she knew why the gangster’s girlfriend in the photograph had come to Swan Lake in the wintertime. It was because of the cold. The cold numbed all feeling. It drove other people from the cottages and the saloon and the café and the highways. It sculpted the birch trees into bone and flanged the lake with ice and made the countryside white and sterile and pure. It left the girl in the photo free, because now she had nothing else to lose, and there were no comparisons in her ken to remind her of how much she had lost.
CHAPTER 11
I WENT EARLY FRIDAY morning with Clete to the health club on the Bitterroot highway, south of Missoula, and watched him work out on the heavy bag. He wore a purple-and-gold Mike the Tiger sweatshirt, the sleeves sawed off at the armpits, and a pair of shiny red rayon boxing trunks that hung to his knees. He was smacking the gloves hard into the bag, up on the balls of his feet, his weight forward, throwing his shoulders into it, vibrating the bag on its chain, whap, whap, whap. I could smell beer in his sweat.
I stood up from the chair I was sitting on and steadied the bag. I could feel the power of his blows thudding through the bag’s thickness into my hands. He reminded me in his style of Two-Ton Tony Galento. He swung his left and his right with equal murderous effect, full-out, in sweeping roundhouse hooks, his face deadpan, his brow furrowed. And like Galento in either the ring or a broken-glass back-alley brawl, Clete was as indifferent to his own pain as a bull is when it advances toward a matador.
He had been in a funk for days, and I didn’t know what it would take to get him out of
But I knew my chances were remote. I also knew the thoughts that were going on behind that furrowed brow. “That Wellstone woman isn’t worth it, Cletus.”
“Who said she was? What does it take to get you off my case, Streak?”
How do you tell your best friend that his problem is not the women in his life but himself? Maybe it had not been Jamie Sue Wellstone’s intention, but she had driven the barb deep, twisted it, and broken it off inside Clete’s elephantine hulk. In fact, she had done what is perhaps the worst thing one human being can do to another. She had made Clete feel that he had been used and used badly, led into a tryst and discarded like yesterday’s bubble gum. Even worse, she had left him with uncertainty about her motivation. She had fixed it so he couldn’t simply close the door on what had happened and mark off the whole episode as bad judgment, the kind of mistake that men over forty line up to commit again and again. Instead, he would repeatedly sort through each sordid detail with tweezers, wondering if he was being too severe in his judgment of her or if he wasn’t simply an over-the-hill fool.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
He smacked the bag hard, flinging sweat out of his hair. “Like it’s me who’s always got that problem. Like it’s me who doesn’t see the world as it is.”
“I never said that.”
He threw a left into the bag, then hit it with a right hook that was so hard the blow pushed me back, even though my feet were set and I was holding the bag with both hands.
“You didn’t make Heckle and Jeckle over there?” he said.
At the other end of the building, two men in their thirties were shooting baskets, concentrating on their game, their backs to us.
“No, I didn’t make them for anything except two guys playing with a basketball,” I replied.
“How many guys have haircuts like that and look like jocks on crystal meth?”
“The FBI has other things to do besides follow guys like us around.”
“Watch this,” Clete said, cupping his hands by his mouth. “Hey, ladies, I got to grab a shower, then Dave and I are going to motor downtown for some eats. Join us if you like.”
The two men stopped their game and looked at us blankly. I felt my face shrink with embarrassment.
“We’ll see you at Stockman’s,” Clete shouted. “They make pork-and-beef sandwiches that’ll rev up your dorks for a week.”
“I’ll see you out front,” I said.
“Nobody believed Hemingway when he said the feds were bird-dogging him. After he blew his head off, somebody got hold of his FBI file and found over two hundred pages of surveillance on him. You’re always quoting Hemingway. You think Hemingway was just blowing gas?”
“Why should the feds have this huge interest in you? Why don’t you try a little humility for a change?”
“Maybe they’re looking at me for Sally Dee’s death. Maybe they’re humps for the Wellstone family. How do I know what they’re after? I camped on the Wellstone ranch by mistake and got in the Wellstones’ crosshairs. Why should they care about a PI with a jacket like mine? I don’t think it’s about oil and methane, either. What’s crazy is I think we’re probably looking right at it, but we don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“I don’t know. It’s not just money. These cocksuckers moved past that a long time ago. They can punch wells all over the planet and send the bill to the taxpayers. Look at those two guys bouncing the ball off the rim. You don’t think they have Quantico written all over them?”
I didn’t want to hear any more of his obsession. I drank coffee in the lobby, then went outside and sat in his Caddy and waited some more. The two men who had been shooting baskets emerged from the health club, still wearing their sweats, looking back over their shoulders. They walked to the far end of the parking lot and got in a four-door black car with a fresh wax job and drove off. They got as far as a half-block from the club when one of them picked up a handheld and put it to his ear.
Clete and I drove to Stockman’s and ate at the counter. Outside, the street was still cool and covered with shadow. The black four-door sedan was parked halfway down the block. The crew-cut, unshowered jocks from the health club were sitting in the front seat. I had a hard time concentrating on my food.
Clete followed my line of vision to the sedan. “Feel like voyeurs are looking through your bathroom window?”
“Order me a glass of milk,” I said.
“Where you going?” he said.
I went out the door and down the street. I tapped on the passenger window of the sedan. The man rolled down the window. Neither he nor the driver spoke.
“Mind if I get in and have a word with you?” I said.
The driver hit the lock release on the back doors. Both men remained silent. I sat down inside and closed the door behind me. The car’s interior smelled new and clean. I pulled out the badge holder Joe Bim Higgins had given me and opened it. “We’re on the same side, right?” I said.
The driver peeled off the foil on a yogurt cup and began eating it with a tiny plastic spoon. The scalps of both men were shiny inside their crew cuts, the backs of their necks and heads somehow reminiscent of shoe spoons. “Why don’t you guys share information, maybe cooperate a little bit with the locals?” I said.
No response.
“It sends a bad signal,” I said. “We always get the sense we’re the dildos and you guys are the serious dicks. Not cool, right?”
“Know what he’s talking about?” the passenger asked the driver.
“Search me,” the driver said.
“That’s clever, coming from two guys who got made five minutes into their surveillance,” I said.
“I’m a rep for a feminine hygiene spray. He’s with Orkin Pest Control,” the driver said, spooning yogurt into his mouth, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “Who’d you say you worked for?”
“Here’s what it is,” I said. “The death of those two college kids is somehow hooked in to the Wellstones. Your guys are firing into the well when you spend time chasing Purcel around. The Wellstones are the target, not Purcel and not me. The murder of the two kids and perhaps the tourists on the interstate is the issue. Those aren’t hard concepts to work with. If you want to follow us around, be our guests. Just try not to be so obvious. It’s embarrassing to watch.”
I got out of the car and closed the door behind me. The passenger rolled down his window again. “Your friend has a dirty jacket, and so do you, Mr. Robicheaux. Neither one of you has the right to lecture anybody. Your fat friend may have deliberately caused a plane crash that resulted in a mass murder. You think the two of you can come up here and fish and simply say ‘fuck you’ to the United States government?”
I leaned down to the window, right in his face. “Clete and I were fighting for this country about the same time your mother’s diaphragm slipped. Stay away from us, you arrogant pissant.”
I went back into Stockman’s and started eating, my face hot and bright in the bar mirror, my food now as tasteless as cardboard.
“You lose your Kool-Aid out there?” Clete said.
“I wouldn’t necessarily call it that.”
He clasped his big hand on the back of my neck, his face suffused with a grin. “You’re an awful liar, Streak.”
“We need to do something about this crap.”
&n
“You’re my kind of situational philosopher, Cletus,” I replied.
“Give us fresh coffee and another plate of spuds and a bowl of gravy on the side, will you?” Clete said to the bartender.
REVEREND SONNY CLICK wasn’t hard to find. He was listed in the Missoula phone directory in the Yellow Pages under the heading “Church” and the subheading “Charismatic Churches.” His particular church was called the Wings of the Dove. Where was its location? Nowhere. He operated out of a farmhouse east of Rock Creek, and his church consisted of a sleek red twin-engine plane that he kept in a tin shed in a meadow bordered by the Clark Fork River on one side and a rock-sheer mountain on the other.
“You’re sure this is the same guy who was at the revival on the res?” Clete said, getting out of the Caddy.
“Wait till you see him.”
“What’s different about this guy?”
“It’s not what’s different, it’s what’s the same. Every one of these guys looks like an actor playing a charlatan. I’ve never understood how anyone can look at their faces on a television screen and send them money.”
“Check out the audience on the wrestling channel,” Clete said, not really listening. “Is that the guy?”
A man had emerged from the front door of the farmhouse, his features dark with shadow under the porch roof. As soon as he reached the sunlight, he was wearing a smile that had not been there seconds earlier. His stylized beard made me think of lines of black ants running from under his earlobes, down his lower jawbone, and up to the corners of his mouth. He wore no coat but had on a white dress shirt and a silver tie tucked inside a sequined vest. There were rings on his fingers and two fine chains, one gold and one silver, looped around his neck.
When we introduced ourselves, his handshake was square and firm, his eyes direct and respectful, as though he was eager to help out with a criminal investigation. Everything about him reeked of disingenuousness and manipulation.
“You’ve been with Wellstone Ministries for quite a while, have you?” I said.
“Actually, I don’t work for them. I work with them on occasion. There are several ministries I help out with. This afternoon I’ll be in East Oregon and tomorrow up in the high country in Nevada. Tuesday I’m back here, and Wednesday I’ll be in Winnemucca again. That little plane has carried the Word to many a remote community.” He pulled back his shirt cuff to check the time on his watch. “I need to be in the air pretty soon. What’s this case you’re working on again?”