Specimen Song

by Peter Bowen

  Du Pré walked past the living room a couple of hours later. Maria was on the telephone, practically yelling.

  “I tell you, you deaf bastard,” she said, “you screw this up—I know you, you start to think that you are not good enough for her—I won’t go to college!”

  She slammed the phone down. Du Pré looked at her in awe. He grinned.

  “Bart’s the kind of guy needs a good woman,” said Maria, “so I was just telling him what to do and seeing that he does it.”

  “Oh,” said Du Pré.

  “I read his label pretty well,” said Maria, “all the fine print, too.”

  “Oh,” said Du Pré again.

  Du Pré turned to go.

  “Papa,” said Maria.

  Du Pré halted.

  “I read yours well, too. You are both nice men. I love you.”

  She smiled sunnily.

  Du Pré nodded and walked away without saying anything, but he was feeling very lucky.

  CHAPTER 21

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT it s’posed to mean,” said Lucky. The phone connection was bad, crackling and hissing.

  Du Pré thanked him. He put down the receiver.

  I either got no answer or no for an answer, he thought. The Cree and Chippewa do not allow publication of their religious beliefs. Maybe the Black Robes drove them underground.

  Du Pré sighed and dialed Michelle Leuci’s office number in D.C. She wasn’t in. He left a short message. No fish on the line.

  Du Pré slapped his palms against his thighs, frustrated.

  He took some bourbon out on the porch and sat in the collapsing rocker, staring off across the fields. A red fox came up out of an irrigation ditch, carrying a hen mallard in its mouth.

  Probably one wounded by a hunter, Du Pré thought. He wondered if the duck season was open. Then he thought about the news that in Montana, only one deer out of six was shot legally. A Montanan will obey any law he thinks is a good one, when it’s convenient to do so.

  The telephone rang. Du Pré got up and went inside. It was Michelle.

  “No luck,” she said. “Well, shit. Frustrating. You know, the woman killed at the festival was killed with a stone knife. Found the tip in one of the wounds. Broke off on a rib.”

  “What?” said Du Pré.

  “What what?”

  “What stone knife? What tip?” said Du Pré.

  “Lessee,” said Michelle. Someone coughed near her phone in passing. “Yeah. Recovered a triangular chunk of obsidian thirty millimeters on a side, approximately.”

  “You never found the knife,” said Du Pré.

  “No,” said Michelle. “Obviously, it came from one of the collections, but they have so much stuff. Nothing has turned up missing.”

  “Listen,” said Du Pré, “I have this idea. Now, can you find this piece of obsidian?”

  “ME’s office can, I’m sure.”

  “I want to know if there is—it should be shaped on two sides. One side will have the broken place on it. What I am saying is that the tip of that knife was made to break off. I think it is a bakihon knife, Yankton Sioux.”

  Michelle didn’t answer for a moment. Scribbling her notes.

  “That rawhide the second victim was strangled with?” said Michelle. “Strange stuff. It’s made of eel-skin.”

  “Eel skin.”

  “Could you ask that old man to paint another feather with a few more details in it this time?” said Michelle.

  “Uh,” said Du Pré. “How is that Bart?”

  “Fine,” said Michelle. “Listen, we’ll call you later.”

  She hung up.

  Du Pré went out again to his rocker and his bourbon.

  I am being drawn into this now, Du Pré thought. I feel like I did driving up to Manitoba to get the rest of the story from my Aunty Pauline. Feeling the Red River, down there in the deep gravels. Deep in my blood, too.

  Du Pré drove back out to the log house. He’d put in the windows. He put on his belt and grabbed a four-foot level and took the claws of his hammer and broke the metal banding around the prehung doors. Not much to hanging a door if you built everything right, level and plumb. Don’t do it right, you had your errors chase you through the house. But the place had been well-found.

  Du Pré fiddled with the door’s framing for a moment. He walked the door in its finish frame over to one of the exterior openings and wiggled it in.

  He pulled shims through to back where he would drive the heavy, small-headed casing nails. He tapped them in till they grabbed a bit of the heavy, rough framing, checked everything for plumb, took a shim, and lifted the latch side of the finish door frame up so there was an even clearance all the way round. He banged the nails home: He set the heads in an eighth of an inch.

  Pretty damn good, Du Pré thought. He had a swallow of bourbon and a smoke. It was getting dark. He fired up the motley of photographer’s spots on their chrome stands that Bart was using for construction light.

  The knife, the knife, the garrote. Obsidian and eel-skin.

  The notch-beaked bird. Old Benetsee with his bullroarer, trying to fend off evil in the east.

  The second exterior door took longer, little things, and Du Pré left a dent in the casing. He cursed for a moment, then reflected that the humiliating black dent would fit under the doorstops when he placed the finish mouldings on. Whew.

  “Working pretty damn hard for a Sunday evening,” said Booger Tom, walking on the booming plywood subfloor in his high-topped boots, custom-made by Wilson’s in Livingston.

  “Christ,” said Du Pré. He’d lost track of the days. So Michelle was working today, and usually he took Madelaine out for some pink wine she liked.

  One more door to go.

  “Well,” said Booger Tom, “just wondered if the lights got left on. I believe I’ll go watch a movie and have some drinks.”

  The old cowboy went out.

  The wind rose up like it usually did in the evening. The doors that Du Pré had put up began to rattle and bang. He nailed them shut good and tight, that wind could get maybe eighty miles an hour here real quick, blow the hair off the dogs and the bark off the trees.

  One more door to go.

  The damn thing was possessed by evil spirits. First Du Pré had to shave a bad spot the planer had missed in the mill where the framing lumber had been sawn. He got the door in finally, but the rough framing was a little off and he had to pull it back out and beat the heavy two-by stock back with a sledge. That fixed that. He set the door.

  The wind rattled the door.

  Du Pré nailed it shut.

  He turned out the lights everywhere but the room where the tools were stored and the table saw sat. He put his belt down on the floor, rolled a smoke, had a pull of bourbon, put on his hat, shrugged into his jacket, and walked toward the front of the log house.

  I hope Madelaine isn’t too hurt or angry, Du Pré thought.

  He pushed on the door. It didn’t move.

  Du Pré stood back.

  Jesus Christ, he thought, I have nailed myself in. All of the doors are nailed shut and all the windows have stops in them to keep them from being left open and then jammed when the house shifts.

  Du Pré snorted. He went back to the tool room and got a hacksaw blade. He sawed slowly through the nails, which were hard to reach. The blade kept jamming.

  Finally he wore through the last one. He put his fingers in the hole where the doorknob would go and pulled, and it swung open.

  He went back and got three nails and a hammer and dragged a bag of concrete over and set it where it would catch the door if it blew open, so the hinges wouldn’t get sprung.

  Du Pré nailed the front door shut from the outside. He took the hammer with him to the old cruiser. He got in and rolled down the window and spat out on to the yellow earth..

  He fumbled for his keys.

  A great horned owl hooted from a branch that seemed to be right overhead.

  They hoot that close, somebody’s gonn
a die, Catfoot used to say.

  Who? Who who who?

  CHAPTER 22

  DU PRÉ BANGED AWAY ON Bart’s house for three days, putting down thick pine flooring with long, tempered screws in deep countersunk holes. Later he would tap birch dowels in and cut them off flush. The pine was pitchy and yellow. Bart had had it custom-milled down in Georgia. Du Pré looked at the bill and smiled. The flooring cost more than Du Pré had paid—was still paying—on his house and land.

  But it would be pretty.

  The thick scent of pine in the house was almost cloying. Du Pré unpinned the windows and propped them open. Add a lot of cedar and you wouldn’t need a refrigerator; nothing would ever rot.

  From time to time, Du Pré wondered about Michelle and Bart and the big, quiet detective Rollie and the murders and when the next one would be. Where it would be. Who it would be. There would be one, for sure. He had called and warned Michelle, who agreed, frustration rasping the edges of her speech.

  “These guys, these serial killers,” she said, “it tears you up because they are crafty, and until he makes a mistake, we haven’t got much of a chance of connecting. So I wait here or at home for a call telling me another woman has been murdered. And I wonder how many calls like that I am going to get before I find anything. He’s right here, in this city, and someone’s going to die, and I can’t do one fucking thing.”

  The best they could do was keep a close watch on Paul Chase. But they couldn’t get an agent on Chase’s turf. The staff had been there a long time. Once Chase went into the building, their only hope was to watch all the exits, but they couldn’t. There were too many and some were tunnels underground.

  They didn’t even have enough on the man to demand a look at his medical records. A call to his shrink was received frostily.

  “I don’t think that it is Chase,” Du Pré had said. “I don’t think he got the balls for it.”

  “It doesn’t take balls,” said Michelle, “and it’s always someone so damned unlikely, no one can believe it when they’re caught.”

  So Du Pré pounded nails and felt like an idiot. He was almost used to it, but sometimes it bothered him, like now.

  If I was any dumber, all I’d need would be regular watering and a little shit once in a while, Du Pré thought.

  He spent a full day leveling and sanding the high spots on the floor. He vacuumed up the sawdust, covered a dust mop with tack cloths, and made a final pass. He stapled plastic over all the windows and vent holes and went home.

  The next morning, he mopped off the last of the dust and rollered the whole floor with expensive epoxy resin. The ventilation was bad and by the time he was through, he was light-headed. He knocked off for the day. At home, he drank one beer, staggered to the kitchen sink, and threw up. He drank as much water as he could stand and spent the rest of the day either guzzling or pissing. By early evening, he felt better.

  Oh my God, Du Pré thought, if Bart had done that …it might have set him off. I got to talk to him about that.

  Bart had gone a long time without going on a tear and he was trying his damnedest. If he does go on one, I will watch over him and not nag, either, Du Pré thought. But I hope that he don’t.

  He took a long shower, but his skin still reeked of epoxy. So it was in his system. He took Madelaine to the Toussaint bar for her pink wine and some dancing to the jukebox, but he stuck to water. He felt better with each passing moment.

  The bar had a lot of people in it; the full moon was up and that seemed to bring people out, brighten them. There were dances and time to time a fight out front in the dusty street, drunks throwing haymakers and falling over.

  They went home under the moon in a clear sky. Far from the cities, the air was clear and the sky a velvet blue-black. Some stars burned in bright colors, looked very, very close. They sat on the front porch at Madelaine’s for a moment. Suddenly all the coyotes began to sing, arching warbling howls, a language that Du Pré was sure Benetsee spoke as well as he spoke any other.

  The howls fell off.

  The telephone rang.

  Madelaine got up.

  Du Pré grabbed her hand.

  “That is for me,” he said.

  “You expecting a call this late?” said Madelaine, smiling.

  “Yes,” said Du Pré, his stomach clenching, “I guess I am.”

  “Du Pré,” he said as soon as he had the telephone up to his mouth.

  “Another,” said Michelle. “This time, a secretary who had been working late. She talked a moment with the security guard in the parking structure. He went to the John. He came back. Her car didn’t come out, so he went to look. She was lying beside it, with her keys in her hand.”

  Christ, thought Du Pré. If it was here, I would just shoot this Paul Chase and see if the murders stopped. Even if the murders kept on, we can spare Paul Chase.

  “Massive skull fracture, literally popped her eyes out of her head. Left the weapon—a war club, I guess you’d call it.”

  “You see it?”

  “Yeah. ME’s got it. It was a round rock like you’d find in a riverbed. Had a handle of something wrapped in rawhide, with a loop at the butt for your wrist. Not your wrist, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah,” said Du Pré. “I think that’s called a watunk.”

  “You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” said Du Pré.

  “We still have a full tail on Chase, but not only can he slip out of his office, he lives over in Virginia on an estate, complete with wrought-iron fence and rottweilers and electronic security. So I think that’s a waste of time and a lot of manpower.”

  “This secretary wasn’t Indian?”

  “No,” said Michelle. There was a pause. “Right,” she said, “I don’t know.”

  “Listen,” said Du Pré, “I think maybe I will go and look for Benetsee and talk with him. Last murder, he was here and made me drive him to a medicine place,” and he was waving a bullroarer just before the last woman was killed.”

  “What’s a bullroarer?” said Michelle.

  “A piece of wood shaped like a narrow shingle, on a thong. You whirl it around and it makes a big noise.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Maybe Benetsee saw something in his dreams,” said Du Pré.

  “I wish he would just tell us,” said Michelle. “People are getting killed here, you know.”

  “I don’t think he can,” said Du Pré. “I think maybe he sees the riddle but not the answer. The answer’s always there when you look back. But I don’t think he is not telling us. I think he is telling us all he knows.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Michelle, “I’m just frustrated.”

  “Me, too,” said Du Pré. “How is Bart?”

  “Fine,” said Bart.

  He’s with Michelle, he’s fine, Du Pré thought.

  “I will go try to find Benetsee,” said Du Pré.

  “Bring him here,” said Michelle.

  “He wouldn’t go,” said Du Pré.

  “I thought not,” said Michelle.

  Du Pré hung up. Madelaine had come in. She was yawning and looking at Du Pré with her eyes half-closed.

  “I got to go find Benetsee,” he said.

  “You got to find me right now,” she said, taking his hand. “You can go look for that old goat later.”

  CHAPTER 23

  DU PRÉ DROVE TOWARD BENETSEE’S shack. The moon washed things white or black. The landscape was ghostly and unmoving.

  The old man wasn’t there. Du Pré went in, moving gently through the four old dogs, who wheezed in his way. They got his scent and went back to bed. Du Pré felt the stove. It was cold.

  That damn old man, Du Pré thought, he always knows when I am coming and plays these games with me.

  There is always a point to the games.

  So. Where is the old bastard?

  The moon is washing him.

  The coyotes. Du Pré went to his old cruiser and dug his fiddle out of the
trunk and tuned up. The sudden cold skew-jawed the strings. He tuned three times before the strings quit warping off.

  Du Pré played his coyote song. He played howls on his fiddle and then he would stop-time and howl. It was a song from the Red River cart days, when the Métis came down from Canada to hunt the buffalo, driving the carts with their big wheels. Drive them buffalo into long, blind corrals and kill them with spears to save the gunpowder for them Sioux. Flesh out the buffalo, hang the sheets of meat on racks made of willow, dry them with fires made of red alder. Fold up the dried meat in rawhide parfleches, go north again, ready for winter…

  Du Pré finished and waited.

  The coyotes burst into chorus, crescendoed, stopped.

  One howl kept going. It came from a cliff a mile or so away, a low one, perhaps fifty feet high. It wavered and sank.

  The coyotes sang again, softer this time.

  The lone coyote on the cliff howled.

  Du Pré walked toward the cliff where Benetsee was. He stopped. Shit. He had forgotten to bring wine. Well, the old man would have to make do with water. Then Du Pré remembered he had a bottle of bourbon in the trunk. He went back and got it. Fiddle in one hand and whiskey in the other. Tobacco. Questions.

  The land was stark, the trail a ribbon of pale gold across the white. Sagebrush stood gray, bark white and silver. The grass was dead and it waited for the winter.

  Coyotes.

  A jackrabbit, coat already going patchy white, dashed in front of Du Pré, a coyote twenty feet behind.

  Another coyote be waiting ahead, spell the first one, and that damn rabbit run in a circle till he drop and get eaten, Du Pré thought. He remembered the first time he had seen that story in tracks in the snow.

  The trail went to the right of the cliff, up through jumbled slabs of stone. The rattlesnakes would be chilled and sleeping, in huge balls of hundreds in the caves.

  Du Pré’s head rose above the cliff top. He looked over and saw a bush near the edge of the cliff. The bush stood up.

  Du Pré walked toward the old man.

  “Ho,” said Benetsee. “Long way for a polite young man to come bring an old man some whiskey,” he said.

  Du Pré shook his head.