Leslie Wellstone was wearing a red smoking jacket and slacks and Roman sandals, one leg crossed on his knee, one hand clenched on his ankle. He took a sip from his julep. The coldness of the ice and bourbon and water turned his lips a darker purple. “You seem to be a man of great social insight. But why is it I don’t believe anything you’re telling us?” he said. “Why is it I think you’re a duplicitous man, Mr. Nix?”
Troyce’s gaze drifted to Jamie Sue and remained there for a beat. “I’m a founding company officer in a corporation that builds contract prisons. Right now I’m on medical leave from my job. But that don’t mean I’m necessarily off the clock,” he said. “I think we’ve got what some call commonalities of interest.”
“I think I’ve had all of this I can stand,” Jamie Sue said. She set down her drink and walked out of the room.
La-de-da, Miss Poopah, Candace said to herself.
Ridley Wellstone lifted himself up on his braces and looked at his brother. “You clean this up,” he said, and clanked down a hallway toward a study filled with shelves of books.
Now only Candace, Troyce, Sonny Click, and Leslie Wellstone remained in the room. “Sonny, would you wait outside?” Leslie said.
“Beg pardon?” Click said.
“Outside,” Leslie repeated. “There’s a rainbow up in the hills. See, right up there where it’s green from the rain. Why don’t you go into the yard and enjoy the view?”
“The man said he was hooked up with a lot of money down in Texas. What was I supposed to say? ‘Wipe your horse’s ass with it’?” Sonny Click said.
“You did exactly the right thing. You run along now, and don’t worry about a thing.”
Click got up from his chair, shame-faced, the top of his forehead shiny with hair oil. He opened the French doors and stepped onto the patio, trying to appear composed and natural.
Leslie Wellstone took a peppermint from a glass container on the coffee table and stuck it in his mouth. He did not offer one to Candace or Troyce. He cracked the mint on his molars. “Care to tell me the true nature of your errand?”
Troyce lifted one finger toward the French doors. “That fellow driving the mower across your lawn? It was me what busted up his face on the rim of a toilet bowl,” he said.
“My,” Leslie said.
“I done that ’cause he was disrespectful to Miss Candace. He also told me he might take me down in pieces. He don’t strike me as overly religious in nature.”
“What’s the purpose of your visit, sir?”
Troyce removed the booking-room photo of Jimmy Dale Greenwood from his shirt pocket and handed it to Leslie Wellstone. “You know this old boy?”
“Oh, yes,” Leslie said.
“He’s around here somewhere, ain’t he?”
“Possibly,” Leslie said, returning the photo to Troyce.
“Either he is or he ain’t.”
“What do you plan to do with him?” Leslie asked.
Troyce kept his eyes locked on Wellstone’s and didn’t answer.
“You’re that serious about him?” Leslie said.
“We got us a mutual interest, is the way I see it.”
“I don’t believe that’s the case at all. What do you think, Ms. Sweeney? You seem like a nice young woman. Do you understand what Mr. Nix is suggesting?”
“No,” she said.
“You don’t?” he said.
“It’s not my business.”
His eyes roved over her face, her mouth and throat, dropping briefly to her breasts. “Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting you all. Perhaps you can come back another time. We’re having friends over for a late lunch.”
“I was looking at your painting,” she said.
“Yes?”
“It reminds me of a billboard on the highway just south of Portland. Did the guy who painted this ever do billboards?”
Leslie Wellstone looked at her for a long time. Candace did not believe she had ever seen eyes like his. They seemed to exist like a separate and disconnected entity behind the burned shell that constituted his face.
“A billboard south of Portland?” Wellstone replied. “I’ll have to check that out and let you know.”
“Can I use your bathroom?” she asked.
He paused, then gestured with an open palm toward the hallway.
A few minutes later, she came back out of the bathroom. Troyce was alone in the living room.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
“I think they’d rather we let ourselves out,” he said. “They’ll probably count the ashtrays when we’re gone.”
They walked down the flagstone steps to the SUV, where Sonny Click was waiting for them. Troyce was touching at his pockets.
“You forget your Cool Hand Luke shades?” Candace said.
“Yep.”
“Know why you’re always forgetting your glasses? It’s ’cause you don’t need them. It’s ’cause you use them to hide the real person you are.”
“Stay away from them self-help books, Candace,” he said.
Troyce returned to the doorway. He started to push the bell, then noticed that the lock had not clicked back into place. He eased the door open and stepped inside. Leslie Wellstone was standing by the hallway that led to the bathroom Candace had used. He was talking to the Hispanic maid.
“Spray every surface with Lysol and hand-wipe it with paper towels and clean rags,” he said. “Be especially attentive to the lavatory, the handles on the faucets, the toilet bowl and the rim and the toilet seat, everything she might have touched. When you’re done, put the rags and soiled paper towels and your cleaning gloves in a paper bag and burn them in the incinerator.”
“Yes sir,” the maid said, her eyes focusing on Troyce.
Wellstone turned around.
“I forgot my sunglasses,” Troyce said, picking them up from the coffee table.
“I see. So now you have them.”
Troyce slipped his shades into his shirt pocket and chewed on the corner of his lip. “You asked me what I aimed to do to Jimmy Dale Greenwood if I got hold of him,” he said. “The real question here is what I should do to a cripple man what just insulted the best person who probably ever come in his house. I feel like slapping your brains out, Mr. Wellstone. But I don’t think I could bring myself to touch you. It’s not your disfigurement, either. It’s what you are. I’ve knowed your kind since I was a boy. You’re in a category that ain’t got no name. Stay clear of us, partner. Next time around, I’ll forget my Christian upbringing.”
With that, he went outside and got into the SUV, Sonny Click in back, Candace behind the wheel. Troyce looked at the rainbow up in the hills, his hands relaxed between his legs, and waited for Candace to start the engine. His face contained the benign expression it always took on when he went to a private place in his mind that he didn’t allow others to enter.
“Something go wrong in there?” Candace said.
“Not a thing. Let’s drop off the reverend.”
“Then what are we gonna do?” she asked.
“Go up to the res and buy you the prettiest Indian jewelry in West Montana,” he replied. “Then have a couple of them buffalo burgers and huckleberry milk shakes.”
He put his big hand on the nape of her neck and brushed the stiffness of her hair against her scalp, like he was stroking the clipped mane on a pony.
CLETE PURCEL HAD given up on sleep, at least since he had been sapped with a blackjack, wrist-cuffed to the base of a pine tree, and forced to listen to a machine scrape his grave out of a hillside. He kept his night-light on and his piece under his pillow and slept in fitful increments. The trick was not to set the bar too high. If you thought of sleep in terms of minutes rather than hours, you could always keep ahead of the game. In a tropical country years ago, Bed-Check Charlie had arched blooker rounds through the canopy at odd intervals during the night, blowing geysers of dirt and foliage into the air, ensuring that Clete’s squad would be exhausted at sunrise when they res
umed humping sixty-pound packs in heat and humidity that felt like damp wool wrapped on the skin. Then Clete would hear the throbbing sound of a Cobra coming in low over the canopy and a Gatling gun rattling inside the downdraft of the helicopter blades, and in the silence that followed, he would rest one meaty arm across his eyes and tell himself that Bed-Check Charlie had been put out of business, that all he had to do was sleep for the next twenty minutes and not think about tomorrow. The fact that Sir Charles was down in a spider hole waiting to set up again was irrelevant. You copped twenty minutes of Z’s and trusted the angels until you woke again.
But the images from the hillside in the Bitterroot Valley were worse than those from the war. As soon as Clete dropped off to sleep, he was powerless over the man with the sloshing gas can in his hand. He could hear the man whistling a tune behind his mask, gathering sticks and leaves, raining them on Clete’s head, dusting off his palms, taking an immense pleasure in the systematic deconstruction of someone’s soul.
Clete sat up in bed at two A.M., his eyes wide, his throat thick with phlegm. Three deer had just walked through Albert’s yard and knocked over the water sprinkler. Clete got up and removed a carton of milk from the icebox and drank it in a deep chair that looked out on the valley. He could see the outcroppings of rock and the silhouette of the trees on the hilltops, the wind bending the trees against the starlight. But the windswept loveliness of the night sky and the alpine topography were of no help to him. He put his face in his hands, and when he drew in his breath, it sounded as ragged as a fish bone in his throat.
When he woke in the morning, he was wired to the eyes, a pressure band tightening across one side of his head. The clinical term for the syndrome is “psychoneurotic anxiety.” It’s almost untreatable, because its causes are armor-plated and deep-seated down in the bottom of the id. The level of tension is not unlike what you feel at the exact moment you realize you have stepped on a pressure-activated antipersonnel mine. Or if you have to open the door on an abandoned refrigerator in a vacant lot five days after a child has disappeared from the neighborhood. Or if your job requires you to climb out on a fourteenth-story ledge in order to dissuade a jumper who is determined to take her infant child with her. The analogies are not exaggerated. The tension is such that at one time patients who suffered from it were lobotomized with their full consent.
But Clete already knew all these things, and he also knew, waking at nine A.M., that understanding the mechanisms of fear and buried memories did nothing to get rid of the problem. VA dope didn’t help, either, or vodka and orange juice for breakfast and weed and downers for lunch. He had already mortgaged too many tomorrows to get through the present day. Eventually there would be no more tomorrows to mortgage, and the day would come when he would find himself drawing an X through the last empty square on his calendar.
What he needed to do was find the dude with the gas can and look into his face, he thought. What all predators hated most was to be made accountable. It wasn’t death that they feared. Death was what they sought, onstage, with the attention of the world focused upon them. But when you took away their weapons and their instruments of bondage and torture, when you pulled the gloves off their hands and the masks off their face, every one of them was a pathetic child. They were terrified of their mother and became sycophantic around uniformed men. The fact they were reviled by other felons and that cops would not touch them without wearing polyethylene gloves was not lost on them.
But how do you get your hands on a guy who has probably been killing people for years, in several states, leaving no viable clues, threading his way in and out of normal society? How do you find a sadist who probably looks and acts just like your next-door neighbor?
Clete fried up a ham-and-egg sandwich for breakfast and ate it in his skivvies and tried to keep his mind free of memories from the hillside. Through the window he saw a four-door silver Dodge come up the dirt road and turn under the arch over Albert’s driveway, an Amerasian woman behind the wheel.
SPECIAL AGENT ALICIA Rosecrans was not an easy woman to read. Clete figured she was a dutiful federal agent and inflexible on most issues of principle, but he also suspected she was a private person with her own code and one day would be in trouble because of it. For Clete, bureaucracy and mediocrity were synonymous. Alicia Rosecrans probably wouldn’t hit a glass ceiling. It would get dropped on her.
She was good to look at, the way she wore her jeans loosely on her hips, her shirt hanging over her firearm. She had just had her hair cut, and the freshly clipped ends lay in a curve under her cheekbones. But it was the self-contained look of intelligence in her face that intrigued Clete most. How many female cops did you meet who were so confident that they didn’t need to compete with their male colleagues? Answer: somewhere between not many and none.
Clete had put on his slacks when he saw her coming up the walk and was combing his hair in the mirror over the lavatory when she knocked on the door. He washed his face and wiped it off with a towel, buttoning his shirt at the same time, wondering at his own preoccupation with his appearance because a federal agent was knocking on his door.
As soon as she was inside, the first thing out of his mouth was an apology for the messy state of his living room and kitchenette. Why was he acting like this? He was probably thirty years older than she was and looked it, from his girth to his fire-hydrant neck and the hypertension flush in his cheeks. She sat down on the stuffed couch backed against a bank of windows and unzipped a folder on her lap. When she looked up at him, he noticed how little lipstick she used and the fact that its absence made her look even more attractive and confident.
“We’ve interviewed the people we thought might bear you a grudge,” she said. “Because you almost beat Lyle Hobbs to death, we started with him. He says he was shopping at Costco in Missoula Saturday night. He has an AmEx receipt that shows he was there. Except Costco closes at six. So in effect, he doesn’t have an alibi. You think Hobbs could be our guy?”
Her choice of language contained implications that were hard to track and tie together, and Clete could not tell if his confusion was because of his sleepless night and the booze in his system or because Alicia Rosecrans just wanted to put thumbtacks in his head. At first she had mentioned his almost killing Lyle Hobbs, as though incriminating Clete, then she had talked about “our” guy, indicating that the two of them were on the same side. He sat down at the breakfast table, three feet from her, and paused before he spoke.
“In my view, Hobbs is capable of anything,” he said. “But let’s straighten out something here. If I’d wanted to beat him to death, he wouldn’t be walking around. Second of all, Hobbs is a child molester and should have had his wiring ripped out long ago.”
“Right,” she said, looking down at the papers in her lap. “We also interviewed Quince Whitley. He says he was in a motel outside Superior on Saturday night. He says he picked up a woman in a bar there, and she was in the motel with him. He says he paid cash for the room because the motel doesn’t take credit cards. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t remember the woman’s last name or know where she lives.”
“Does he have a receipt for the room?”
“No, but the owner remembers him because of the damage someone had done to his face.”
“Yeah, this guy Troyce Nix worked him over in a convenience store or something?”
“Here’s the short version. Quince Whitley rented the motel room, and maybe he even took a woman there. But there’s no proof he was in the room at the time you were abducted. He has a pronounced southern accent. You heard the abductor’s voice. Could it be Whitley’s?”
“The guy who sapped me was whispering. According to Gribble, he was wearing a mask. That probably explains why I could hardly hear his words. Look, this is what I don’t get. My eyes were taped, my wrists cuffed behind the trunk of a tree. Why would he need to wear a mask?”
“The perpetrator loses his own identity and takes on the self-manufactured image of a terrifying
figure that can reduce his enemies to trembling bowls of pudding,” she said. “Also, if he decides to take the tape off his victim’s eyes, the impersonality of the abuse increases the humiliation and emotional pain of the victim. The perpetrator retains his option of ratcheting up the victim’s suffering and stays high on several different levels. It’s all about control.”
“You learned this at Quantico?”
“In Sociology 102 at Imperial Valley College.”
“I think you’re looking at the wrong guys. Hobbs and Whitley are hired help. Whatever they do, they do for money. Their kind seldom if ever act on their own.”
“Maybe they had permission. There must have been two guys on that hillside – one to drive Albert Hollister’s truck with you in it, and one to drive the getaway car.”
“I was with the perp on a very personal level. He blew his cigarette smoke on my skin. When he said he burned people for fun, he meant it.”
She studied Clete’s face, her eyes unblinking behind her small glasses. “Who do you think we should be looking at?”
“A guy who wants other people to suffer as bad as he has. Maybe a guy who’s been burned up in a French tank. I wouldn’t exclude the sheriff.”
“You’re serious? Joe Bim Higgins?”
“Half his face got fried with a phosphorous shell. I think I’m not one of his favorite people, either. Listen, the person who will kill you is the one who’ll be at your throat before you ever know what hits you.”
“You don’t think much of us, do you?”
“The feds? They treat other cops like they’re from Dogpatch. The problem’s not mine, it’s theirs. Maybe you’re different. You said you’re gay. You thought I was putting moves on you? Why am I the guy under the magnifying glass? That’s what arrogance is. The feds always think the other guys have the problem.”
Swan Peak Page 21
