When she tried to speak, her voice box felt stuffed with cotton.
“My daddy used to take my little sister and me fishing for speckled trout south of Mobile Bay,” he said. “When the rain would first dimple the water, they’d start to school up. You could smell them, just like when they’re spawning.”
He rolled down his window halfway and flicked his cigarette into the darkness. A balloon of yellow electricity flared and raced through the clouds overhead and disappeared without sound beyond the hills on the far side of the Blackfoot. “You brought this on your own self. You know that, don’t you?” he said.
“My father is—” she began.
“Yeah, I know. Your father is going to punch my ticket. So why didn’t you send him after me instead of coming to my door with Mace and an ASP in your bag?”
“Clete Purcel is my father.”
“It doesn’t matter who he is. It’s just you and me now. You came to my house to do me harm. If you do me injury, you do injury to my grandchildren, and I won’t put up with that.”
He got out of the van and walked to the back and opened the doors, the rain spotting his hat and leather jacket. He stepped on the back bumper and climbed inside and closed the doors behind him. He reached in his pocket and removed a small flashlight and turned it on and set it on the floor. “A vice cop in Broward County told me you pulled a train for the Florida Outlaws.”
“He lied to you.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Because he knew it was what you wanted to hear.”
“You look like a biker girl. Except I think you have a high IQ.”
His weight shifted, and she heard him remove something from his pocket. Then she heard the snap of a metallic mechanism locking into place. He fitted his left hand on her upper arm. “This same vice cop said maybe you did a couple of hits for the Mob. Was he lying then?”
“Anything I ever did was because I wanted to.”
He moved his hand up the nape of her neck and slipped his fingers into her hair. “Do you think those things I did to you back there were bad? Or did you enjoy them a little?”
She craned her head and, in the corner of her eye, saw the dull-colored blade of the clasp knife and the long sliver of brightness along the bottom edge where it had been honed on a whetstone.
She straightened her arms and shoulders and closed and opened her eyes as a doll might, a pain growing in her right shoulder, her nerve endings coming alive.
“Opposites attract sometimes,” he said. “I can be good to a woman and love her like a father or a husband.”
She stared at the side paneling of the van and, in her mind, went to a private place where long ago she had learned to shut down her sensory system and remove herself from hands that reached down out of the dark and touched her in ways that no human being should ever be touched.
“You’re an attractive girl,” he said. “I may go to work for a very wealthy man. I could take care of you. Are you listening?”
“My father will get you. If he doesn’t, I will.”
“I wouldn’t be talking like that. This could be your last night on earth.”
“I’ll get you anyway. I’ll come back. I’d rather die than have your hands on me.”
She saw his thumb slip higher on the handle of the knife, establishing a firmer grip.
“You stink and have dandruff in your hair. You’re everything a woman loathes,” she said. “Even whores don’t want to fuck a man like you.”
“You’re starting to make me angry, Gretchen.”
She felt his callused fingertips go inside her shirt and move along her collarbone and settle on her carotid. He teased his thumbnail under her jaw and around her ear and spread his hand in the center of her back, pressing the heel into the muscles. “I could have been a lot harder on you,” he said.
“Kill me.”
“You really mean that?”
“Fuck you, asshole,” she said, her hatred and level of helplessness so intense she could hardly say the words.
She heard him snapping on a pair of latex gloves; then he ran the blade of his knife down the back of her shirt and through her bra strap and through the back of her jeans and her panties. He tore the clothes off her body, even pulling off her suede boots and her socks. He opened a bottle of bleach and soaked a wad of paper towels and scrubbed her hair and skin with it, then climbed out of the van and fitted his hands under her arms and dragged her over the bumper onto the ground.
She lay in the mud, the rain falling in her face, while he went to the front of the van and removed a paper sack from behind the seat. He took out a half pint of whiskey and a Ziploc bag of weed and splashed the whiskey in her mouth and on her face and bare breasts and over her hair, then forced weed past her lips and teeth and rubbed it into her hands and forearms and ears and nose, his chest laboring from the exertion.
He gathered up her clothes and boots and stuck them in the sack, then inserted the knife under the ligatures and sliced them loose from her wrists. “I threw your tote bag in the trees about three miles back. Write this off as a learning experience. For me it’s over, in case you ever want to let bygones be bygones. Nobody is gonna believe you, Gretchen. People like me. I’m a good guy. You’re shit on a stick.”
He got in the van and started the engine and drove past her with the window down, lighting another cigarette, the rain slashing across the taillights.
She walked a mile and a half up the road, her skin prickling with cold, her hair matted and dripping with water and dirt and twigs. A Jeep passed her and turned in to the trees at the peak of a hill. A boy and a girl got out and stared at her. A red nylon tent with a lantern hissing inside it stood in a grove of cedar trees. Below the hill, Gretchen could see the riffle on the river gliding between giant boulders, like a long streak of black oil shining in the moonlight.
“Jesus Christ, lady, are you okay?” the boy said.
She tried to cover her breasts with her arms and discovered that nothing she could do or say would explain or change her situation or undo the damage that had been done to her, not now, not ever. The greatest injury of all was the knowledge that her own merciful tendencies had allowed this to happen.
Chapter 6
The phone rang at 7:14 the next morning; the caller ID was blocked. I picked up the receiver and looked out the window. The temperature had dropped during the night, and the tops of the fir trees up the slope were stiff and white with frost and bending in the wind. “Hello?” I said.
“If I give you the address, can you come up to my house now?” a voice said.
“Mr. Younger?”
“I could come out to your place, but I suspect I won’t be welcomed by Albert Hollister.”
“Give me your number. I’ll call you back,” I said.
“You’ll call me back? In case you’ve forgotten, you approached me, Mr. Robicheaux. Do you want to talk or not?”
“I want to bring somebody with me. He’s the best investigator I’ve ever known. His name is Clete Purcel,” I said.
“I don’t care who you bring with you. If you’ve got information about my granddaughter’s death, I want to hear it. Otherwise, let’s stop this piffle.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I put on a pair of khakis and a heavy long-sleeved shirt and brushed my teeth and shaved and went downstairs. Albert was putting a coffeepot and cups on the breakfast table. “Who was that on the phone?” he said.
“I picked up because I thought it might be Gretchen.”
“She’s back home. I saw her pickup by the cabin. Who were you talking to?”
“Love Younger.”
His face showed no reaction.
“I’m going out to his place,” I said. “I think the murder of his granddaughter might be connected to the guy who shot at Alafair.”
“You watch out for Love Younger,” he said, the cup in his hand rattling when he set it on a saucer. “He’s a son of a bitch from his hairline to the soles of his feet.”<
br />
“He donated three million dollars to a scholarship fund at the University of Louisiana.”
“The devil doesn’t charge his tenants for central heating, either.”
“You’re a closet Puritan, Albert.”
“Let me start the day in peace, would you, please?” he said.
I walked down to Clete’s cabin at the far end of the north pasture. Gretchen’s hot rod was parked in the cottonwoods by the creek; in the east there was a blush on the underside of the clouds. Two white-tailed deer bounced through the grass and bounded over a fence railing into a stand of untended apple trees that Albert never picked, so food would always be available for the herbivores on his property. I tapped lightly on the cabin door. Clete stepped out on the gallery and eased the screen shut behind him. “Gretchen came in about three this morning,” he whispered.
“Is everything okay?”
“She spent a lot of time in the shower, then went to bed with a piece under her pillow. It’s an Airweight .38.”
“Did she say where she’d been?”
“She told me to mind my business.”
“Take a ride with me to Love Younger’s home.”
I could tell he didn’t want me to change the subject, but I didn’t believe that Clete or I or anyone else could resolve the problems of Gretchen Horowitz.
“I don’t like the way that guy operates,” Clete said.
“Who likes any of the people we deal with?”
“There’s a difference. He hires other people to do his dirty work.”
The story was political in nature and well known and, like most political stories, had already slipped into history and wasn’t considered of importance by most Americans. A United States senator got in Love Younger’s way and discovered that his citations in the brown-water navy were somehow manufactured. Like many of my fellow voters, I had lost interest in taking up other people’s causes. Someone had almost killed my daughter with a razor-edged hunting arrow, and I was determined to find out who it was.
“You coming or not?” I said.
“Let me check on Gretchen,” Clete replied.
* * *
Younger’s summer home was a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion located west of Missoula on a pinnacle high above the Clark Fork. It was beige-colored and Tudor in design, the tall windows and breezy front porch trimmed with purple rock, the lawn planted with sugar maples and blue spruce and ornamental crab apple trees that took on a sheen like melted red candy in the sunlight. There was a circular gravel driveway in front, a porte cochere on the side, and a restored Lincoln Continental parked in back. When I lifted the door knocker, electronic chimes echoed through the interior. Clete had lit a cigarette when we got out of his Caddy. “Will you get rid of that?” I said.
“No problem,” he replied. He took two more puffs and flicked the butt over the porch wall onto the lawn just as a woman answered the door. Her skin was so pale it looked bloodless, to the degree that the moles on her shoulders and the one by her mouth seemed to be individually pasted on her body. Her hair had a dark luster with brown streaks, and her eyes possessed a liquescence I normally would associate with hostility or an invasive curiosity about others that bordered on disdain. I had to remind myself of the loss the Younger family had just suffered.
I introduced myself and Clete and offered our condolences, thinking that she was about to invite us in. Instead, she looked behind her, then back at us. “Who did you say you were?” she asked.
“I spoke earlier with Love Younger. He asked me to come here,” I said. “This is his house, isn’t it?”
“Tell them to come in, Felicity,” a voice called from the hallway.
A slight man walked toward us, a vague smile on his face. He did not offer to shake hands. He was unshaved and wearing slippers and a dress shirt open at the collar. “I’m Caspian,” he said. “You’re a police officer?”
“Not here. In Louisiana,” I said.
“You know something about Angel’s death?” he said.
“Not directly, but I have some information that I feel I should share with you. I think someone tried to kill my daughter. We’ve also had a stalker at the place where we’re staying. Can we sit down?”
“Wait here, please,” he said.
“Like Dave says, we were invited here,” Clete said. “I don’t think that’s getting across somehow.”
“Excuse me?” Caspian said.
“We have no obligation to be here,” Clete said. “We were trying to do you a favor.”
“I see,” said Caspian. “I know my father will be happy to see you.”
The man and the woman went to the rear of the house. Clete and I waited on a leather couch by a huge fireplace filled with ash and crumpled logs that gave no heat. The windows reached almost to the ceiling and were hung with velvet curtains, the walls with oil paintings of individuals in nineteenth-century dress. The carpets were Iranian, the furniture antique, the beams in the cathedral ceiling recovered from a teardown, the wood rust-marked by iron spikes and bolts. In a side hallway, I could see a long glass-covered cabinet lined with flintlock and cap-and-ball rifles.
Clete glanced at his watch. “Do you believe these fucking people?” he said.
“Take it easy.”
“They’re all the same.”
“I know it. You can’t change them. So don’t try.”
I knew that the Younger family and their ingrained rudeness were not the source of Clete’s discontent.
“Gretchen’s never slept with a piece,” he said. “She’s never been afraid of anything. She stayed in the shower so long that she ran all the hot water out of the tank. I saw a bruise on her neck. She said she slipped while she was hiking up the hill behind the house.” He leaned forward, hands cupped on his knees. “I don’t like being here, Dave. These are the same people who used to treat us like their garbage collectors.”
“We’ll leave in a few minutes. I promise.”
“The guy was a guest at the White House. He says he’s into wind energy. Does anybody buy crap like that? I say screw this.”
I believed I understood Clete’s resentment toward the world in which he grew up, and I didn’t want to argue with him. The most telling story about his background was one he told me when he was drunk. As a boy, during the summer, he sometimes went on the milk-delivery route with his father, a brutal and childlike man who loved his children and yet was often cruel to every one of them. One day a wealthy woman in the Garden District saw Clete sitting by himself on the rear bumper of the milk truck, barefoot and wearing jeans split at the knees and eating a peanut-butter sandwich. The woman stroked his head, her eyes filling with the lights of pity and love. “You’re such a beautiful little boy,” she said. “Come back here at one P.M. Saturday and have ice cream and cake with me.”
He put on his white suit an uncle had bought him for his confirmation and went to the woman’s house one block from Audubon Park. When he knocked at the front door, a black butler answered and told him to go around to the rear. Clete walked along the flagstone path through the side yard and under a latticework arch hung with orange trumpet vine. The backyard was crowded with black children from the other side of Magazine. The woman who had stroked his hair was not there, nor did she ever show up.
That night he returned with a box of rocks and broke all the glass in her greenhouse and destroyed the flowers in her gardens.
At some point in your life, you have to give up anger or it will destroy your spirit the way cancer destroys living tissue. At least that is what I told myself, even though I was not very good at taking my own advice. I hated to see Clete suffer because of the injustice done to him by his alcoholic father. He didn’t like the Love Youngers of the world, and neither did I. But why suffer because of them? I never knew one of them who didn’t write his own denouement, so why not leave them to their own fate?
There was no lack of public information about Mr. Younger. He became a millionaire by buying wheat futures in the Mid
west with money he borrowed from a church, when few people outside government knew the Nixon administration was about to open up new markets in Russia. Later, in a poker game, he won a 30 percent interest in an independent drilling company, one teetering on bankruptcy. He redrilled old oil fields that others had given up on, going down to a record twenty-five thousand feet, and punched into one of the biggest geological domes in Louisiana’s history. Love Younger had a green thumb. Whatever he touched turned to money, huge amounts of it, millions that became billions, the kind of wealth that could buy governments or the geographic entirety of a third-world country.
The rest of his story was another matter. One son, an aviator, went down in a desert while dropping supplies to French mercenaries and died a hellish death from thirst and exposure. Another son plowed his Porsche into the side of a train in Katy, Texas. A daughter who suffered delusions and agitated depression underwent an experimental operation at a clinic in Brazil that her father had chosen for her. As promised, she awoke from the anesthesia totally free of her depression and imaginary fears. She was also a vegetable.
Felicity came back in the living room. “Follow me,” she said.
“We can do that,” Clete said, getting to his feet.
She turned and looked at him. She wore a peasant blouse and a thin ankle-length pleated cotton skirt and white doeskin moccasins, as a flower child from the 1960s might. “I think you’re here for self-serving purposes,” she said.
“My daughter may be in danger,” I said. “She believes a psychopath she interviewed in a Kansas prison is in this area.”
“And you think this psychopath murdered Angel?”
“I’m not sure what to think.”
“You’re telling me that your daughter may be the reason this man is in the area and that he murdered Angel?”
“You can draw your own conclusions, Ms. Younger.”
“I use my maiden name. It’s Felicity Louviere. Do you want to talk to my father-in-law now, or would you prefer to leave?”
She was much smaller than Clete and I, but she looked up into my face with such animus that I almost stepped back. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said.
Light of the World dr-20 Page 8
