DR17 - Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
Troyce’s hands rested on the bottom of the steering wheel. All she could see was the side of his face, but in his right eye was an intensity that she could compare only with a bee trapped inside a glass. “I had certain kinds of sexual problems for a long time, least till I met you. When I try to sort them out in my head, I always think back on Cujo and the towel we wrapped around his face and the water we poured from a bucket into his nose and mouth. There was gasoline in the water, and when I think of Cujo and the towel and the water breaking across his face, I can smell gasoline, just like I could smell it on them men that raped me when I was little.
“Out in the desert, after we killed him and everybody was drinking beer and smoking dope, I could hear these vultures up in the sky. Their sounds was just like the gurgling sounds Cujo made before he died. Other people might hear mockingbirds in the morning, but I hear them vultures.”
She stared out the passenger window at the lake. An elderly man was showing a little boy, probably his grandson, how to spin-cast off the end of the dock. The water looked blue and deep and cold, and in his concentration, the little boy seemed about to fall in, until the elderly man steadied him and pulled him back by the hand.
“You hurt Jimmy Dale Greenwood because of your own guilt, Troyce. Till you own up on that, it’s gonna keep eating on you, just like a tumor growing inside your chest. It’ll squeeze everything good out of you till one day none of the good man I know will be left.”
She went inside the cottage with her suitcase and began unpacking in the bedroom, throwing her things onto shelves, not bothering to pick them up when they fell on the floor.
“Maybe I got another reason for being up here,” Troyce said from the doorway. “Maybe you don’t know the whole story about everything.”
“I’m not the one hurting all our plans just so he can get even for something he caused to happen.”
“When we went up to talk to the Wellstones? When I left my shades inside and had to go back inside for them?” he said.
“What about it?”
“The door was still partly open, so I went in the living room and got my shades without knocking. Leslie Wellstone was telling the Spanish woman to wipe down everything you touched in the bathroom and to put all the tissues and cleaning towels in a bag along with the cleaning gloves and burn them in the incinerator. He’s a cripple man, or I would have twisted that ugly head of his off the stem and stuck it on a pike.”
Candace thought she would not be vulnerable to Troyce’s recreation of Leslie Wellstone’s insult, but the images Troyce’s words conjured up in her imagination caused the blood to drain from her cheeks and her eyes to water. She jerked open a dresser drawer, dumped the rest of her clothes on the bedspread, and began sorting out her underthings, unsure exactly what she was doing.
“Who cares what Leslie Wellstone said?” she said impotently. “Besides, what does that have to do with Jimmy Dale Greenwood?”
“Maybe that fellow Quince Whitley wasn’t after you with a bottle of acid just ’cause I give him a beating in a convenience-store restroom. Maybe he had permission from Leslie Wellstone to do that. Or Leslie Wellstone’s wife, the one who’s telling you to leave Jimmy Dale alone. A guy like Whitley don’t use the toilet less’n somebody gives him permission.”
“I think that’s crap,” she replied.
“Maybe it is. But that Wellstone woman ain’t no good. She dumped Jimmy Dale when he went to jail, and now she’s using him to escape that freak she married. Bet you as soon as they’re in Canada, she’ll get shut of Jimmy Dale again and find another hard-up rich guy who cain’t keep his big-boy in his britches.”
Candace shoved the rest of her garments in a dresser drawer and now had no other place to put her hands except the back pockets of her jeans.
“Are you trying to say something?” Troyce asked.
“Yeah, I guess I am. I just didn’t think I could.”
“What are you trying to tell me, little darlin’?”
“That if you hurt that guy, that Indian, Jimmy Dale Greenwood, I swear to God I won’t be around anymore,” she replied.
CLETE PURCEL DROVE his Caddy down to our cabin and got out and looked at its maroon finish reflectively. He removed a soft cloth from the glove box and wiped dust off one fender, wetting a finger and touching a spot on the chrome molding around the headlight. But his attention did not seem concentrated on his vehicle.
I stepped out on the porch. The sun was shining through the trees on the mountaintop, and Clete had to squint to look at me.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“Alicia told me the feds and the Sheriff’s Department found a box of Halloween masks in Sonny Click’s basement,” he replied. “They all look just like the one they found in Quince Whitley’s truck. They also found a photo in a scrapbook at Click’s place. It shows a bunch of college-age kids wearing the masks at a party two years ago. Alicia said the DNA inside the mask from Whitley’s truck isn’t from Whitley.”
“The feds have a vested interest in Whitley’s role as a CI. I wouldn’t blow him off as a suspect,” I said. “Remember that case in Boston when one of their CIs was doing contract hits?”
Clete shook his head as though a fly were buzzing around his face. “Yeah, I think Whitley is involved on one level or another. The Wellstones didn’t hire him just to shovel horse turds. A guy like that is a weapon you point at other people.”
“You want to have another talk with the Wellstones?”
He chewed at a piece of skin on the ball of his thumb. “Yeah, then we start over. We missed something. It’s real simple, too. Know why we haven’t seen it?”
“No, but tell me.”
He gave me a look. “The main players all have normal roles,” he said. “They’re not skells or grifters or junkies or porn addicts. They don’t have rap sheets. They don’t get picked up in shooting galleries or at cathouses or live-sex shows. They don’t give us the edge.”
“But sooner or later, they all go down, Cletus, edge or no edge.”
“That’s why neither one of us ever developed drinking problems,” he replied.
When Cletus was at the plate, your best slider usually came back at you like a BB in the forehead.
WE HEADED UP to the Swan Valley in Clete’s Caddy. An hour and a half later, we were rebuffed at the Wellstones’ front gate by none other than Lyle Hobbs. Even though Clete had ripped out Hobbs’s wiring at the park in Missoula, Hobbs was oddly detached and self-possessed. His recessed eye, the one looped by a chain of tiny scars, still looked as dead as a lead ball but no more lacking in expression than his other eye. “The Wellstones aren’t receiving guests right now,” he said. “You can come back tomorrow or the next day.”
Through the electronically locked gate, I could see the fortress-like structure the Wellstones called home at the end of the driveway. Deer were feeding on the lawn, their coats golden in the sunlight, like decorative ornaments. I got out of the Caddy and closed the door behind me, indicating physically that my presence was going to be a problem that wouldn’t disappear easily. “How about calling up to your boss and asking?” I said.
“They’re not to be bothered,” Hobbs replied, his expression flat, his gaze fixed on the mountains.
“Would you tell Ms. Wellstone I’d like to speak with her?” I said.
“She’s not here right now,” he replied.
“Do you know when she’ll return?” I asked.
“No sir, I don’t.”
“Would you know where she is?”
“With the driver and the maid and the little boy. Shopping, maybe. She’s real good at shopping.”
“You think your buddy Quince Whitley got a raw deal?” I asked.
Hobbs’s mouth was pinched, as though he were sucking in his cheeks. His dry, uncombed hair blew in the wind, his untucked short-sleeve shirt loose on his thin frame. “The way I hear it, Quince dealt the play. He wasn’t a bad guy. But he made mistakes in judgment sometimes,??
“You think Reverend Sonny Click offed himself,” I said.
This time his eyes found mine. “That’s what happened, right?” he said.
“I think he was unconscious when somebody strung him up,” I said. “I think somebody thought he was the weak sister in the chain. You’re a smart guy, Lyle. You were Mobbed up and in the life when the Wellstone brothers were getting blow jobs with their daddy’s credit card. What do you think is going to happen to you when you’re no longer useful?”
Clete leaned over to the passenger window. “Hey, Lyle, remember what Sally Dee used to always say: ‘There’re kings and queens, and then there’re worker bees.’ Did you know Sally read Machiavelli and Hitler in jail? Glad you’re not working for him anymore.”
Lyle Hobbs stared blankly at both of us. Nobody knew the skells better than Clete Purcel, and nobody was better at pressing thumbtacks into their heads.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON Candace Sweeney and Troyce Nix were eating in the café that adjoined the nightclub on the lake when a long white limo pulled in and the daytime bartender, Harold, got out and went inside. He placed a take-out order for hamburgers and fries at the counter, then went into the nightclub and began fixing a drink with a blender behind the bar. The curtains were partially closed on the café’s front window in order to keep out the glare, but through a crack, Candace could see the extravagant full length of the limo and its charcoal-tinted windows, its bulk and mass and power a visible rejection of all those who set limitations on their own lives. The engine was running, the air-conditioning units on, the charcoal windows damp from the coldness inside.
“Why would people with money like that want to eat in a greasy skillet like this?” Candace asked.
“So they can pretend they’re like the rest of us,” Troyce replied.
“Why do they want to pretend to be like us?”
“So they can make us feel bad about ourselves. So they can tell us they made it but we didn’t.” Then he grinned at her in his old way, at the corner of the mouth, like the Duke. “Or maybe there just ain’t another place here’bouts to get good food.”
Candace felt like a clock was running faster and faster inside her, its wheels and cogs starting to shear, its hands spinning in a blur. “There’s still gold up in the Cascades, places where nobody ever found the mother lode,” she said. “My father swore it was there, up in the high country, up in the snow line. All those years it was washing down into the creeks, telling the panners down below where it was, but nobody was interested. Think of it, Troyce, maybe a vein three inches thick running through the face of a cliff you just have to sweep the snow off of.”
Troyce looked at her peculiarly. “Bet you and me could find it,” he said.
She waited for him to finish.
“Soon as we tie up things here,” he said.
He forked down the last of his chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and peas and took a final sip from his coffee. “I need to talk to that old boy in the saloon a minute.”
Candace realized who was in the white limo. “Leave them alone, Troyce.”
“Don’t worry. It’s them what better look out for us,” he said.
WHEN TROYCE ENTERED the nightclub, Harold Waxman was pouring a daiquiri into a stemmed glass, wrapping a towel around the bottom to catch the overflow.
“Remember me?” Troyce said.
Harold lifted his eyes from his work. “I’m on my own time right now. If you want a drink, order from the other bartender,” he said.
“I’m a businessman. I don’t drink during the day,” Troyce said.
Harold Waxman wore black slacks and a black leather belt and a long-sleeve dress shirt that was so white it had a blue tint. Every hair on his head was combed neatly into place, with no attempt to disguise his growing baldness or advancing age. A toothpick protruded from the corner of his mouth. “The state of Texas hires businessmen as prison guards?” he said.
“I’m empowered to offer a reward for this escaped felon Jimmy Dale Greenwood,” Troyce said. “The reward pays upon custody rather than conviction. I’m talking about five thousand dollars.”
Harold Waxman propped his hands on the bar and stared at the video poker machines lined up against the far wall. “Number one, I don’t know any escaped felons. Number two, if I did, I’d call the Sheriff’s Department. Number three, this is the second time you’ve come in here pestering people. I’m hoping it’s the last.”
He looked at the young woman who had entered the saloon and was standing behind Troyce. “You want a drink, miss, you need to order from the man down the bar. I’m off the clock,” he said.
“I’m with him,” Candace said, nodding toward Troyce.
“My offer still stands,” Troyce said to Harold.
Harold let his eyes go flat and rolled his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. He poured the rest of the daiquiri from its pitcher into a large thermos. He did not look up again until Troyce and Candace were gone.
While Troyce paid the check in the café, the limo drove away with the bartender behind the wheel, the charcoal windows still closed to the heat outside.
“Why were you talking to that guy?” Candace asked.
“’Cause he’s hinky. ’Cause he’s working for the Wellstones now.”
“Hinky?” she said. “He’s a cop.”
“Maybe he used to be, but not now.”
“A cop’s a cop. I can always tell one. That guy’s a cop, Troyce,” she said.
“If he is, he’s for sale. I know a dishonest man when I see one.”
ONE HOUR’S CROOKED drive to the north, up by the Canadian line, Jimmy Dale Greenwood entered a phone booth by a filling station at a crossroads, where a single traffic light hung suspended from cables over the intersection. He began feeding pocket change into the coin slot. Through the scratched plastic panels in the booth, he could see the wind blowing clouds of dust out of a wheat field, hills that had started to go brown in the summer heat, a windmill ginning on the horizon, a dead Angus bull swollen under a willow tree whose canopy looked like an enormous stack of green hay. A gas-guzzler loaded with Indian teenagers went through the red light and disappeared down the asphalt, a beer can bouncing end over end in its wake.
No answer. Jimmy Dale hung up the receiver and checked the heel of his hand where he had written Jamie Sue’s cell phone number. He dialed the number a second time.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hey, hon,” he replied.
“Where are you?”
“Up on the Blackfeet res. I can see Canada from here. Where are you?”
“In the garden. Leslie is looking down at me from the window. I’ll call you back in five minutes.” She clicked off.
He left his duffel and rolled sleeping bag by the phone booth and went inside the filling station and bought a soft drink. He drank it outside by the booth, the wind blowing hot across the fields. To the west, past the undulating golden plains that had once been carpeted by buffalo, he could see the translucent smoky-blue outline of the northern Rockies and the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park. The phone rang inside the booth. His heart was beating when he picked up the receiver. “Hello,” he said.
“I’m on the other side of the stable. Leslie can’t see me. But I can’t talk long,” she said.
He told her where he was and described how she could get there, how to skirt the southeast corner of Glacier and to cross the Continental Divide at Marias Pass and to keep going through Blackfeet country all the way to the Milk River. He felt as though his words were actually creating her and Dale’s journey, drawing them closer as he spoke.
But she wasn’t hearing him. “Listen to me, Jimmy Dale!” she said. “I can’t drive up there. I don’t have a car. Leslie watches me all the time. There’s another way.”
“No, just get out of there.”
“You know how you ended up in jail? You
He felt his hand squeeze tight on the receiver. He had left the door to the phone booth open, and he could hear the wind blowing through the ocean of dry grass that surrounded him. He cleared his throat.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he replied. “I’m definitely way-to-hell-and-gone up here.”
She ignored the implication. “A man is going to help us. I’m buying a used Toyota. He’ll drop it in Arlee with the keys under the fender. There’ll be money and a cell phone in the dash compartment. The car should be ready tomorrow.”
“I don’t want Leslie Wellstone’s car, and I don’t want his money, either.”
“It’s not Leslie’s. I’m buying it with my money. You get rid of that stubborn attitude, Jimmy Dale.”
He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and realized he was rubbing her cell number off his skin.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Everything. I thought you and me and little Dale was gonna be together today. I thought we’d be highballing up into Alberta. I know people who can take us across on a dirt road with no customs check. I thought we’d go plumb to Calgary.”
“We will. We just got to do it right. You don’t know what Leslie and Ridley are like. They own people. They suck the life out of them.”
He took the ballpoint from his shirt pocket and, pressing the phone receiver against his ear with his shoulder, tore a piece of paper loose from the phone directory and wrote out her cell number on it. Then he thumbed the piece of paper into his watch pocket. “I keep thinking we’re gonna get blown away in the wind, like leaves that go bouncing across a field. It’s the feeling I had in prison. That no matter what I tried to do, I was gonna be buried alive and wouldn’t ever see y’all again. You never come to visit me, Jamie Sue.”
“I couldn’t. But I’m going to make up for that,” she said.
He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe her real bad. In the silence, a cluster of newspaper scudded across the concrete and broke apart in the air. He watched the pages lift above an irrigation ditch and float like broken wings inside a dust devil. “How’s little Dale?” he asked.