Swan Peak
Page 24
But how did the killer acquire Barbara’s security code? The electronic gate had been installed only six days before the night of the homicides. She would have had no motivation to give the code to her estranged husband. The cops pulled in an ex-convict whose wife ran a bar on Jensen Drive. His words were “A rich guy put out an open whack for fifteen grand on the Wellstone bitch and her daughter. I wouldn’t touch it with a pole, man.”
“Why is that?” a cop asked.
“Those oil-and-gas fuckers don’t pay their bills,” the ex-convict replied.
But the ex-convict was also known as a pathological liar, and he later tried to sell his story to a detective magazine.
Houston PD and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office questioned two men Barbara Wellstone had carried on affairs with. They also questioned an Australian porn actor the daughter had informed on after she had been pinched with a brick of his marijuana. That the shooter had sought her out first may have indicated she was the target rather than the mother.
But nobody was sure. Neither Barbara Wellstone nor her daughter was a sympathetic victim, and many people had motive to murder either or both of them. After a couple of years, media interest waned, the homicide detectives assigned to the investigation gradually moved on, and Barbara and her daughter became interesting mounds in a treeless cemetery outside Dalhart, Texas.
The only remaining problem for the killers was the homicide detective who had continued to work on the case long after everyone else had given up. Was his death a suicide? Or was he getting too close to the wrong people?
I knew those questions would probably never be answered. Not unless someone got the Wellstones into the iron cage where I thought they belonged.
THAT AFTERNOON I drove into the Swan Valley. The day had warmed precipitously, and in the distance I could see a single column of smoke rising from a dark green stand of timber on a mountain slope. June is the wet month in Montana, but this year the rains in the lowlands and the snows in the high country had been less than they should have been. I hoped wildfires would not have their way, as they had in the years 2000 and 2003. I hoped that Montana would remain the fine place that it was, a window into America’s pristine magnificence. But as I looked through the windshield of my truck, the signs of change were everywhere. Maybe that’s just in the nature of things, but who says you have to like it?
Better yet, who says you have to accept the presence of those who would turn the earth into a sludge pit? The minions of the Wellstones were hired cretins, men like Lyle Hobbs and Quince Whitley. Their kind attach themselves to an authority figure, one who pays them not to think, and then they go about hurting other people with the idle detachment of someone clipping his nails. Putting them in penitentiaries provides jobs for correctional officers and makes everyone feel better about our justice system, but in reality, it does little to change the way things work. The enlisted people who were punished for crimes inside the Abu Ghraib prison wouldn’t drop their pants in a latrine without permission. If Hobbs and Whitley were involved in the attack on Clete, they had not acted on their own. But the problem lay in the very fact that they were windups – lacking credibility, fearful of retaliation, ultimately dispensable.
It was time to take a different tack. The convergence of so many disparate elements at Albert’s ranch was too much for coincidence. Clete had trespassed accidentally onto the Wellstone ranch, setting off a reaction by the Wellstone employees and then the Wellstones themselves. A college kid with ties to the Wellstone Ministries had been abducted and murdered on the ridge behind Albert’s house. Later, a drifter with a Texas accent who looked part Indian and called himself J. D. Gribble had shown up at Albert’s secondary pasture, claiming to be a down-and-out rodeo man but with a singing voice like Jimmie Rodgers. In the meantime, a drifter who looked a lot like J. D. Gribble had been hanging around the Swan Lake café and nightclub where Jamie Sue Wellstone often stopped in for a drink. Last, Troyce Nix, also from Texas, had appeared on the scene, looking for a man who had put a shiv in him, a man I thought Albert knew was his newly hired hand, J. D. Gribble.
I had gotten Jamie Sue Wellstone’s cell number from Clete before I drove in to the Swan. I parked in front of the nightclub on the lake and punched her number into my cell, wondering at the levels of unhappiness people could visit upon themselves, usually over things that were only symbols for the things they actually wanted. But the fate and choices of others were not my business. The attack on Clete Purcel was.
After the seventh ring, I got Jamie Sue’s voice mail. I left my name and told her I would like to talk with her, at any time or any place of her choosing. I did not tell her where I was. Nor did I expect her to call me back. I had already placed Jamie Sue Wellstone in a categorical shoe box, that of opportunist and user of other people. However, I was about to relearn an old lesson, namely that our judgments about our fellow human beings are usually wrong.
My cell vibrated while I was eating in the café. I flipped it open and placed it against my ear. “Hello?” I said.
“Mr. Robicheaux?” the voice said.
“Yes?” I replied.
“This is Jamie Sue Wellstone. What is it you want?”
Go right to it, I told myself. “To talk about a guy by the name of J. D. Gribble.”
I could hear her breathing in the silence. “Is he all right?” she asked.
“As far as I know. When can we talk?”
There was a long pause. “Where are you?”
“At the café on Swan Lake.”
“Are you a Christian?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“You’d better not deceive me, Mr. Robicheaux.”
How strange can it get?
Fifteen minutes later, she turned out of the late-afternoon shadows on the highway and parked in front of the nightclub. Her little boy was strapped into the child seat in back. She walked into the café holding him against her shoulder, a diaper bag hooked around her waist. She looked through the front window, then studied the vehicles parked in the side lot. I pulled out a chair for her, but she ignored the gesture and asked the waitress for a high chair, then walked through the bead curtain and checked to see who was inside the bar. When she sat down, her expression was circumspect, her frown like a tiny stitch between her eyebrows. She had not spoken a word.
“That’s a handsome little boy you have there,” I said.
Still she didn’t speak. Her eyes were busy with thought, as though she was reconsidering the wisdom of meeting with me.
“What was Gribble down for?” I said.
She didn’t understand.
“He doesn’t deny he’s done time,” I said. “He just doesn’t say what for.”
“He tried to help someone.”
“You’re seeing him?”
“I came here for one reason only, Mr. Robicheaux. Somebody has to help J.D. before he gets hurt. That female FBI agent was out to our house again. She talked about you.”
“FBI agents don’t do that.”
“She said you were an ex-drunk but an honest man. I took her at her word. I’m taking you at yours. A man named Troyce Nix came to our house. He’ll kill J.D. if he catches him.”
“Why don’t you tell J.D. this?”
“J.D. wants both me and his son back. He won’t leave unless we go with him.”
“I think your friend is a fugitive, but I’ll say this anyway. If I were you two, I’d take my little boy and get a lot of gone between me and the Wellstone family.”
“You don’t know them.”
“I don’t want to.”
“They won’t let me go. I know too much. The Wellstone Ministries aren’t a scam about money. They’re not interested in money. They don’t even preach politics. They focus on the family, on family values, all that kind of stuff. They’ve won over millions of people that way. Toward election time, the message goes out: If you believe in the family, vote against gay marriage and abortion. Vote against the people who believe in them. The M
inistries don’t get you to vote for people, they get you to vote against them. All they need is about four percent of the electorate. They’re hooked in with some of the most powerful people in the country.”
“Who cares? Get away from them.”
“They’ll find J.D. No one will know what happened to him. No one will find a body. No one will find a witness. You think I’m making this up?”
No, I didn’t. But I had no solution for her predicament or the sorrow and regret that I suspected characterized her daily life. “Who killed those two college kids?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it,” she replied.
“I doubt their parents do, either.”
Wrong choice.
“You hear me on this, Mr. Robicheaux. I just wanted a good life for my child. I also wanted to get his father out of prison. That’s why I married Leslie. He came to a club where I was playing. He was a gentleman, and he was kind and well mannered. He’s good to little Dale. He treats him like his own son. But I-” She took a butter knife out of her child’s hand and gave him a ring of car keys to play with. “I made a mistake when I married him. Leslie is not to blame, I am.” She hesitated again. “I was attracted by his wealth, too. I have to live with that knowledge about myself, and it’s not pleasant. I don’t know who murdered those kids. Probably the same person who killed that poor couple from California. But I’m not the person to ask.”
“The attack on Clete Purcel was not random,” I said. “The attacker is a sadist whose targets are given to him by someone else. Who has that level of hatred for Clete, Ms. Wellstone? Who has the motivation? You’re a smart woman. Don’t tell me you don’t know the answer to that question.”
“Leslie is too proud and vain.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“He believes in nothing except his own disillusionment with the world. He thinks his war injuries are such that he’s above any pain others can inflict upon him. He thinks of revenge as a mark of mediocrity.”
“You’ve already said he and his brother are capable of having J.D. killed.”
“You weren’t listening. They do nothing in a direct way. When somebody gets in their way, they bring up the problem with their attorneys or a man who runs their computer systems or the head of a security agency in Dallas. Without their ever knowing what happens, somebody’s life becomes a nightmare, or he just disappears.”
“Somebody broke into Seymour Bell’s house. He and his girlfriend, Cindy, had evidence of some kind about the Wellstones. What was it?”
“They were just kids. What could they have that could hurt Leslie and Ridley?”
“That’s the point. They were rural Montana kids. What did they have in their possession that would make someone kill them?”
“It’s not how Ridley and Leslie operate,” she said, more to herself than to me, her eyes searching in space.
I was beginning to lose patience with her introspection and perhaps disingenuousness. “Then how do they operate?” I asked.
“There’s a great darkness in both of them. I don’t know how to describe it. They don’t love evil, but they’re not disturbed by it, either. Evil is a tool. They use it when they need to. Otherwise, they live their lives just like the rest of us.”
Through the window, I could see a second column of smoke rising from the timber across the lake, a helicopter with a giant water bucket slung under its airframe trying to extinguish the fire before it spread. I walked out of the café into the lengthening shadows in the parking lot, into the cooling of the day, the trout dimpling the surface of the lake like raindrops. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain to myself, I remembered a Jewish lady I had once known. She had survived Bergen-Belsen, although her parents and siblings had died there. When asked by a friend of mine whether she still believed in God, she replied that she did. When my friend asked her where God was when her family died, she replied, “Looking down from above, wondering at what His children had done.”
CHAPTER 17
ONCE, IN SEATTLE’S Pioneer Square, Candace Sweeney had passed by a blind preacher ranting at a bunch of drunks by the homeless mission. The preacher’s eyes had no pupils and were the color of peeled hard-boiled eggs that have turned blue inside a refrigerator. His voice and words were cacophonous, threaded with rage at either his audience or his own misspent life. In the middle of his incoherence, he said something Candace never forgot: “Hell is a black box that’s got locks all over it. Kick the door and you’ll hear them rattle, but it won’t do you no good. You don’t die to get to hell. You’re already there.”
She had come to wonder if the preacher had been talking about Troyce.
During the night, she could feel his great weight turning on the mattress and hear his breath coming hard in his chest, as though he were inside a capsule that was sucking the oxygen from his lungs. He wore only his skivvies, and when she touched his bare skin, she could feel it twitch under her fingers. She stroked his hair, and for just a moment he was quiet. Then he cried out and his head jerked up from the pillow, his eyes wide, his face limned by the pink glow from the neon sign outside the motel.
“What is it, baby?” she asked.
“Nothing. A dream,” he replied.
He sat on the side of the bed, his shoulders rounded, looking into the shadows, listening for sounds that were not there. When she placed her palm on his back, his muscles were as hard as iron.
“You called out somebody’s name. You said, ‘Don’t do that.’ Then you said the name.”
Troyce turned around. His eyes were a washed-out blue, and in the semidarkness, they looked as though they had been snipped out of paper and glued on his face. “I did?”
“Other nights you’ve said this same name. Is this somebody you knew in Iraq?”
He shook his head, cupping his big hands on his knees, rocking on his buttocks.
“What’d you do, Troyce? What bothers you?”
“This wasn’t in Abu Ghraib. But we done things at this other place that got out of control, just like at the prison outside Baghdad. Some contract intelligence personnel wanted this one guy prepped. That’s what they called it. Like softened up, before they interrogated him. The guy was a hard case. We called him Cujo ’cause he had jaws like a big dog. He’d been tortured in Egypt and showed off his scars like they was badges of honor. He told us we couldn’t hurt him ’cause he wasn’t like us, that he didn’t eat God in a Communion wafer, that he lived inside Allah just like those Bedouins live inside the desert. He said Allah was as big as the desert, and once you were in Allah’s belly, you became part of him and nobody could touch you, not even death. He told all this to guys who was going to cuff him to a bed frame and wrap a wet towel around his face and keep pouring water into his nose and mouth till he near drowned.”
Candace had propped herself on her knees behind Troyce, one hand resting on his shoulder. His skin was as cold as stone. She could see both her reflection and Troyce’s in the wall mirror, and she tried to keep her face empty of the sick feeling his words were creating inside her.
“I told him, ‘Don’t do it, Cujo. Don’t try to be stand-up. Give these assholes what they want.’ I liked Cujo, but maybe not in a good way, get my meaning?” Troyce said. He turned and looked into her face to see if she understood. There was a dry click in his throat when he swallowed. “When Cujo told them to go fuck themselves, he said ‘Go fouk yourself,’ that’s the way he said it, I felt myself getting madder and madder at him, like he was better than me, like he was braver, like no matter what they done to him, he would always be the same man and I wasn’t as good as him, I was small somehow. And I thought about what my uncle and his friends done to me when I was a boy and how maybe I let it happen, how maybe I could have stopped it if I’d fought back, maybe it was my fault after all and I’d brought it on myself somehow, and I hated Cujo for being better than me and for the way maybe secretly I had feelings for him an American man don’t have for an Arab terrorist.”
“I joined in with the intel guys. For just a second the towel slipped, and Cujo looked straight into my face with one eye. He couldn’t talk ’cause he was strangling, but he was looking at me, not at nobody else. He didn’t care about the contract intel guys. I was the Judas. I saw it in his eye. He died right then. He made sure I knew that he knew, and he died.”
Candace took a deep, almost ragged breath and rested her forehead on top of Troyce’s head, her knees tucked against his buttocks. He continued to look straight ahead, unsure what his revelation had done to Candace’s perception of him.
“That’s behind you now, honey,” she said. “You’re sorry for what you did. That’s all a person can do sometimes, just say he’s sorry. I think people can forgive us from the grave. We’ve just got to ask them. Cujo knows you’re sorry, doesn’t he? Why don’t you give him credit?”
“One of those contract intel guys had three cases of hot beer in his truck. We drove out in the desert and drank it. We smoked some dope and got drunk. These guys was talking about trout fishing in South Dakota. I kept pretending I was listening, but I knowed even then I wasn’t ever gonna be the same.”
She rearranged herself and sat next to him on the side of the bed. “Give it up, baby.”
“Words don’t bring back dead people. When people are in the grave, their mouths and their ears are full of dirt. They don’t talk and they don’t hear. I had a dream, that’s all it was. I shouldn’t have told you about it.”
She got up from the mattress and worked her nightshirt off her shoulders and head, then spread herself across his thighs, something she had never done before. “You tell me to stop and I will,” she said.
She held his head between her breasts, then picked up his phallus and placed it inside her. She felt her own eyes close and a quickening in her heart and a surge in her loins, then his hands were on her back and he was rising from the bed so he could lay her down on the mattress while he remained on top of her.