Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “At the revival I showed you a photograph of a man I’m looking for. You said you’d never seen him. But that’s not the truth, is it?”

  Quince brushed at his nose and huffed air out of one nostril. Then he surprised Troyce Nix. “Maybe it’s the truth, maybe not.”

  “How am I supposed to read that?” Troyce asked.

  “What’s in it for me?” Quince asked.

  Troyce looked around and seemed to think about it. The breeze was blowing through the pine trees. His face looked cool and untroubled inside the shade. “I don’t like talking out here. Go in the restroom and wait for me.”

  “You hold your negotiations in the shitter?” When Troyce didn’t reply, Quince said, “I’ll move my car.”

  Quince went inside the convenience store, looking once over his shoulder.

  “Troyce, don’t get in trouble. Not because of me,” Candace said.

  “Ain’t gonna be no trouble, darlin’,” he replied.

  “Troyce, I don’t want to lose you.” She said this without emotion, as a fact, in the way women know facts that men do not, and he knew he had entered a new stage in his life. “You’re a good man. You just don’t know how good you are.”

  He looked at her for a moment, as though seeing her more clearly than he had ever seen her before. Then he winked and went inside the restroom. Quince was relieving himself in a urinal.

  “You seen the man in the photograph?” Troyce asked.

  “What kind of finder’s fee we talking about?”

  “Finder’s fee?”

  “Yes sir,” Quince said, zipping his pants. He began touching at his face in the mirror, feeling the stubble, without washing his hands.

  “How about you don’t get charged with aiding and abetting a fugitive?” Troyce said.

  “You aren’t a cop.”

  “No, I’m not. But can I tell you a secret?”

  Someone tried to open the door. “I got a sick man in here. You’ll have to wait,” Troyce said, squeezing the door shut again, shooting the bolt.

  Quince stopped touching at his face and looked at the locked door.

  “You know why you don’t get a finder’s fee?” Troyce said. “It’s ’cause you’re for sale. A man who’s for sale suffers the sin of arrogance. What he don’t understand is that nothing he’s got is worth the spit on the sidewalk. You remind me of the tramps down at the blood bank. The blood you sell has disease in it, but you pass it on to other people to put wine in your stomach. You ain’t no different from a whore, except your skinny ass ain’t worth the time it’d take to kick it around the block… Where you think you’re going?”

  “I’m finished talking with you,” Quince said.

  “What’d you say to my lady friend out yonder?”

  “You don’t listen, do you, boy? That woman was staring at me like her shit don’t stink. Your size don’t bother me, either. Mess with me, I’ll get you down the road. Take that to the bank, motherfucker.”

  Quince tried to brush past Troyce and unbolt the door. Troyce ripped his elbow into the side of Quince’s face, knocking him into the condom machine. Then Troyce hit Quince with his elbow again, this time in the temple, splaying him cross-eyed to the floor. He grabbed the back of Quince’s neck and drove his face down on the toilet bowl, smashing it again and again on the rim. Blood and pieces of a dental bridge slid in rivulets down the porcelain into the water.

  When Troyce straightened up, the pain that went through his chest felt like tendons were pulling loose from the bone. For a moment he was sure he was going to pass out. He forced himself to breathe slowly, his face draining in the mirror, his eyes out of focus.

  Quince was on his knees, bent over the toilet, his hands cupped to his mouth, strings of blood and saliva hanging from his fingers.

  Troyce pulled a half-dozen paper towels from the dispenser and wadded them up and stuck them in Quince’s hand. “You dealt it, bubba. Don’t come around for seconds,” he said.

  He slid the bolt and went outside, the racks of snack food bright and colorful under the fluorescent lighting, the glass doors on the cold boxes smoky with refrigeration, the cashier ringing up a purchase for a sunburned woman in a swimming suit, the world of normality back in place.

  “Is that sick man still in there?” the cashier asked.

  “He’s cleaning up. He’s gonna be fine,” Troyce said. “Thanks for the use of your facilities.”

  “Anytime,” the cashier said.

  Troyce got in the SUV and let Candace drive. As they headed up the highway, she glanced sideways at him. “There’s blood coming through your bandages,” she said.

  He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Want to rent a cabin at one of those lakes? Maybe have dinner at the steak house up the road this evening and dance under the stars? Like reg’lar folks, just me and you. What do you say, you little honey bunny?”

  She was sure there were words that would adequately express what she felt, but she didn’t know what they were.

  CHAPTER 12

  AFTER CLETE AND I interviewed Reverend Sonny Click, we stopped by the courthouse to see Joe Bim Higgins. I could tell Joe Bim was not happy to see Clete, but I didn’t care. Clete had found the wood cross that belonged to Seymour Bell, and the wood cross had linked Bell to Wellstone Ministries. If Joe Bim didn’t want to give Clete credit, that was his problem, not ours.

  “You think this preacher might be involved with Bell’s death?” he asked.

  “Who knows? On one level or another, I suspect he’s a predator,” I replied.

  “What do you base that on?”

  “He had a coed at his house. She’s poor and uneducated, and I don’t think she’s there to water his plants.”

  “Did she indicate she was being molested?”

  “How many people willingly admit they’re being sexually exploited, Sheriff?”

  “Sounds like you didn’t have the best morning.”

  “Click’s dirty, Sheriff. He’s hunting on the game reserve. In Louisiana we’d take him off at the neck,” Clete said.

  “I thought Click was from down south. Wonder why nobody got around to punching his ticket,” Joe Bim said.

  I tried to speak, but Clete had gone off cruise control, and I couldn’t shut him up. “Somebody creeped Seymour Bell’s house. I think it was somebody working for the Wellstones,” he said. “I think Bell had something in his possession that the Wellstones don’t want anyone to see. Why not get a warrant on their ranch?”

  “What you say might be true, Mr. Purcel, but there’s no evidence the Wellstones are connected to a crime of any kind.”

  Clete stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He wore a long-sleeve tropical-print shirt and cream-colored slacks, and he had not removed his porkpie hat when he entered the building. With his driving-range tan and sun-bleached hair and behemoth proportions, he looked like a misplaced Miami Beach tourist inside the spartan confines of Joe Bim’s office. “Dave and I are just trying to help out,” Clete said. “I think the person who killed those kids should be chain-dragged down the highway. But it’s your backyard, not ours.”

  I wanted to punch him. I could see a thought growing behind Joe Bim’s eyes, as though he were on the brink of making a decision he had postponed too long. Then he blinked and touched at the side of his mouth, and the moment passed. “I got a call from the Highway Patrol this morning,” he said. “A man who works for the Wellstones got beat up in a convenience-store restroom near Swan Lake. His name is Quince Whitley. He claims he doesn’t know who beat him up or why, but the witnesses say he was talking to the assailant out by the pumps before they got into it. The witnesses say the assailant was about six-four and had a Texas accent. Sound like anybody you know?”

  “He sounds like Troyce Nix, the guy who was showing a photo around at Jamie Sue Wellstone’s revival meeting on the res,” I replied. “I saw Nix and this guy Quince get into an argument outside t
he tent.”

  Joe Bim was sitting behind his desk. He looked at a spot on the far wall. “I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on those kids getting killed,” he said. “To be honest, I think there’s too much information in this case. Furthermore, I think people’s personalities are getting too involved in some of the issues. There’s times when less is more and more is less, get my meaning?” He let his gaze drift back to Clete. “You can’t smoke in here.”

  “Sheriff, there are only one or two probable conclusions we can come to regarding the deaths of Bell and Kershaw,” I said. “They were either killed at random by a psychopath who’s operating in the area, or the Wellstones are involved. All the information we develop somehow leads back to the Wellstones. I don’t think that’s coincidental.”

  “You seem like a reasonable man, Mr. Robicheaux. How in God’s name could a couple of kids from rural Montana be a threat to Ridley and Leslie Wellstone?”

  “A heavy-hitter greaseball by the name of Didoni Giacano used to run all the vice in New Orleans,” Clete said. “Frank Costello gave him the whole state as a personal gift. On his deathbed, a priest asked Didi Gee if he had forgiven all his enemies. Didi told the priest, ‘I don’t have any enemies, Father. I killed them all.’”

  “This isn’t Louisiana,” Joe Bim said, the expression going out of his eyes. “I’d like to talk with Mr. Robicheaux a minute.”

  “Yes sir,” Clete said. He had already put away his unlit cigarette and had nothing to do with his hands. So he took off his porkpie hat and fiddled with it, as though wondering how he could revise all the mistakes he had just made. He started to speak, then gave it up and left the room.

  “The bad judgment is on me, not on you or Mr. Purcel,” Joe Bim said. “I deputized you because I thought that was the best way to keep my old friend Albert Hollister from getting hurt. To be straight out, it hasn’t worked worth a damn. I’ll need your shield back. Some paperwork will be coming your way, and you’ll receive some reimbursement for your expenses. It’s been good knowing you.”

  He rose from his desk to shake hands. The scarred side of his face looked lined and creased, like old paper that had faded in the sun.

  “It’s the Wellstones, Sheriff. They’re up to their bottom lips in pig shit, or they wouldn’t have killed those kids. Don’t let them blind-side you,” I said.

  “Have a good one,” he replied.

  CLETE DID NOT try to apologize, nor did I want him to. Clete was Clete. You don’t invite bulls into clock shops and act surprised at the results. Besides, crimes committed in the state of Montana were not our business. Perhaps it was time to accept that fact and leave other people to their own destiny.

  At least that was what I told myself.

  The next afternoon Clete borrowed Albert’s pickup truck, in case the two FBI agents he called Heckle and Jeckle were still surveilling him. He showered and put on his sports clothes and told me he was going to listen to some music at a club down in the Bitterroots. I’m sure that was his intention. I’m sure that, like me, he was willing to go with the season and to let others do whatever it was they wished to do. But that was not the way it would work out.

  IN THE NEXT drainage, J. D. Gribble was walking along the dirt road in the dusk, his twenty-two Remington pump gripped in one hand. He shielded his eyes from the late sun as Albert Hollister’s truck approached him, stepping to the side of the road, pointing the rifle away from the vehicle. Then he realized Albert was not behind the wheel.

  “Sorry to blow dust all over you,” Clete said. “Are you the new fellow who works for Albert?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Have you seen him around? His wallet fell out on the seat.”

  “Not since this morning,” Gribble said. He saw Clete taking note of the rifle in his hand. “A fox was in Mr. Hollister’s brooder house. I think I hit him, but he went on up the hill.”

  “If you see Albert, tell him I left his wallet at the house.” Clete had propped a long-neck beer between his thighs. Ten more longnecks were stuck down in a bucket of crushed ice on the passenger seat. He lifted the open bottle and drank from it. The bottle was still beaded with cold, and the late sunlight sparkled inside it. “Want one of these brews?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  Clete pulled a bottle out of the ice and twisted off the cap. When he handed the bottle to Gribble, he noticed that Gribble was shaved and had on fresh clothes and that his hair had been wet-combed and had not had time to dry. He also remembered Albert saying that his new man didn’t own a vehicle and walked everywhere and did not hitchhike under any circumstances, for whatever reason.

  “I’m going down the road to listen to some music. Care to join me?” Clete said.

  The club was thirty miles south in the Bitterroot Valley. The sun had gone behind the mountains on the west side of the valley, and the air was cool and smelled of the river and irrigated alfalfa in the fields. The sunset was one of the most extraordinary Clete had ever seen. A long stream of clouds, like curds of lavender smoke, flowed for miles and miles over the Sapphire Mountains in the east, pink-tinted on the edges, right next to an expanse of sky that was robin’s-egg blue. Clete stood in front of the nightclub, his beer bottle in his hand, gazing at the vastness of the valley around him as though he had personally discovered and laid claim on it for the rest of mankind. “Do you believe this place?” he said to Gribble. “Good Lord in heaven, do you believe this place?”

  Inside at the bar, Clete remained effusive, ordering double shots of Jack with a beer back, calling requests up to the bandleader, his voice louder than it should have been. He drank without sitting down, knocking back Jack and sipping from his beer, touching the foam off his lip with a folded paper napkin. His maroon shirt and beige slacks and shined oxblood loafers gave him a fresh and relaxed appearance that did not match the transformation Gribble saw taking place in him. The back of Clete’s neck was oily and red. His green eyes were lit with a dangerous shine. His pumped forearms and the great breadth of his shoulders seemed to grow in size with his increased intake, like the boiler plate on a furnace expanding with its own heat.

  “You can flat tank it down,” Gribble said.

  But Clete didn’t hear him. He was talking to a blond woman who had serpentine tats on her arms and looked like she was about to burst out of her Clorox-white jeans and black Harley T-shirt. The woman seemed fascinated by Clete and the libidinal energies he radiated. But her friends at a far table were not impressed.

  “Mr. Purcel, those bikers over yonder look pretty proprietary,” Gribble said.

  Clete responded by buying the woman a drink and raising his own in a toast to the bikers.

  “I avoid trouble, sir. I hope you’re the same kind of man,” Gribble said.

  “Drink up,” Clete said, hitting him on the back. “It’s Friday night. You ever hear of Sam Butera and Louie Prima? Every Friday night back in the seventies, I’d watch them blow out the walls in a joint on Bourbon Street.” Clete turned toward the bikers at the far table. “Hey, you guys ever hear of Louie Prima?”

  “Mr. Purcel, I’m getting a real bad feeling here,” Gribble said.

  “Lighten up. If those guys had anything going, they wouldn’t dress in clothes somebody scrubbed out a grease trap with,” Clete said. He signaled the bartender. “Give my friend here a draft with a depth charge. Give a round to the waxheads at the table while you’re at it.”

  “You sure about that?” the bartender said.

  “I look like I don’t know what I’m doing, here?” Clete said.

  “Three or four beers is about it for me, Mr. Purcel,” Gribble said.

  “Screw that,” Clete replied.

  The band was country-and-western. A cook was serving Mexican dinners from a pass-through window in the kitchen, and the crowd was happy and growing louder, and the dancers on the floor had reached that stage of cautionary abandon where they were bumping into tables and one another, with no sense of either ill will or danger. C
lete asked the band’s vocalist if she could sing “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know.”

  “That’s Skeeter Davis’s song,” Gribble said.

  “I knew a woman who could sing it just like Skeeter Davis.”

  “No kidding?” Gribble said, lowering his beer bottle, his expression mildly curious.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you got a voice like Lefty Frizzell?”

  “Not really. Where’d you know this lady at?”

  “I heard her sing in a beer joint in Texas once.”

  Gribble looked straight ahead, his face empty, his beer bottle tilted forward in both hands, the heels of his boots hooked on the rungs of the bar stool. “There’s not many can sing like Skeeter could. What was this lady’s name?”

  “Jamie Sue Wellstone.”

  Gribble wiped his mouth with a napkin, hiding his expression.

  The woman in the Harley T-shirt grew tired of being ignored by Clete and rejoined her friends at the table. Clete stared at the woman’s back, trying to remember why he had talked to her in the first place. He thought he could hear kettle drums beating in his head or tropical birds lifting from a jungle canopy, their wings flapping loudly against the sky.

  “You ought not to keep looking at them men,” Gribble said.

  “You ever sleep with another man’s wife?” Clete asked.

  “Sir?”

  “I hadn’t ever done that, at least not knowingly. Ever sleep with the wife of a man who was burned up in a tank?”

  “Mr. Purcel, I ain’t up to this.”

  “Were you in the service?”

  “No sir.”

  “See, when you watch other guys pay really hard dues, you accord them a certain kind of respect. That means you don’t screw their wives or even their girlfriends, particularly when it’s not an even field any longer. The guy who does that doesn’t deserve to wear the uniform. He doesn’t deserve to tell people he ever wore it, either.”

  “You slept with this woman you was talking about?”