Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  An attorney friend of Doc's filed a pro hac vice petition on my behalf, which would empower me to represent Doc on a one-case basis without passing the Montana bar exam. On Tuesday afternoon Doc was released from the county jail on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bond.

  When we walked outside the sun was shining on the hills and the air smelled of freshly mowed grass and raindrops striking on warm cement.

  "How about I buy you a dinner?" I said.

  "Where's Maisey?"

  "At the house."

  "She didn't want to come with you?"

  "I don't know much about these things, Doc, but I think rape is like theft of the soul. You've got to give her some time."

  "Sure," he said, his eyes averted, his face empty. "Let's get some dinner."

  THAT EVENING, at a university gathering, Xavier Girard gave a reading from his newest novel, one that some believed might win him his third Edgar Award. Students and faculty and local writers filled the room. Sitting in the middle of the audience was a man in skintight jeans and cowboy boots and a long-sleeve polka dot shirt buttoned at the wrists. He wore women's purple garters on his upper arms. He did not remove his wide-brim hat, even though the people behind him kept clearing their throats and leaning to the side to see around him.

  He had arrived early, with an effeminate, longhaired youth whose smirk at his surroundings and flaccid muscle tone and lack of posture were in exact contrast to the hatted man's obvious physical power and lantern-jawed concentration.

  The audience loved Xavier Girard. He was generous in spirit and irreverent toward stuffiness and convention. He was egalitarian and humble and acutely aware of propriety and language in the presence of women. He wore his own success and fame like a loose garment, and at signings charged books on his own account when a student or clergy person could not afford one. If he drank too much from the thermos of cold vodka by his elbow, his sin was a forgivable one, the alcoholic flush on his face a mask for the pain that only a poet felt.

  His mouth was slightly bruised, his lip still puffed from his fight with Lamar Ellison, but his voice resonated through the room. He read the dialogue of his characters in peckerwood and Cajun accents; his eyes seemed to look directly at every one of his listeners, the iambic cadence of his descriptive passages like lines from a sonnet.

  But when his eyes fell on Wyatt Dixon's, they held there, narrowing, the way a hunter's might when he sees an unexpected presence in a woods and realizes the nature of the game has just changed.

  During the question and answer period that followed the reading, Wyatt Dixon's square, callus-edged hand floated into the air.

  "Yes, sir?" Xavier said.

  Dixon stood and removed his hat. "You, sir, are obviously a great writer and believer in the land of the free and home of the brave," he said. "In that spirit, can you tell me what is wrong with Americans running a gold mine on the Blackfoot River and providing jobs for other Americans?"

  The room was silent. A couple of people turned and looked in Dixon's direction, then glanced away.

  "We don't need cyanide in the river. Does that answer your question?" Xavier said.

  "It surely does. I'm glad that's been explained to me. Thank you very much, sir," Dixon said. "Sir, could I ask you-"

  A woman librarian picked up the microphone from the podium and, her lips brushing against the mike's surface, hurriedly said, "Mr. Girard will be signing books at the table in the back. In the meantime, everyone can help himself to the punch."

  After the line had thinned out at the refreshment table, Wyatt Dixon and his young friend filled their cups. Except Dixon did not drink his. He smelled it, inhaling the strawberry bouquet and seltzer water approvingly. Then he removed his hat and dipped his pocket comb into the bowl and combed his hair in a wall mirror.

  While people stared at him openmouthed, he fitted his hat back on and got in the line for a signed book.

  "Just make it out to my friend Carl Hinkel, a Virginia gentleman and patriot," Dixon said.

  "I can't do that," Xavier said.

  "I can see you are a man of your convictions. Just sign your name and I will treasure it always. Sir, I'd also like to shake your hand."

  Xavier rose and placed his hand inside Dixon's.

  "It was good of you to be here. But you shouldn't try to jerk people around," he said, then his mouth stiffened involuntarily when Dixon began to squeeze.

  "Lamar Ellison and me shared the same house inside Quentin," Dixon said. He continued to grin, his vacuous eyes staring into Xavier's. "On the West Coast, people inside call a cell a 'house.' You don't know that, 'cause you ain't never been inside. So that ain't to be held against you. But you might brush up on the details for your next book."

  "Let go of my hand," Xavier said, his words spaced out, as he tried to retain any dignity the situation would allow him.

  "You didn't set fire to my bunkie, did you, Mr. Girard? Just 'cause he busted out a window in your car and laid open your lip? You can't do that to a Berdoo Jester, sir," Dixon said, his hand catching fresh purchase.

  The blood had drained out of Xavier's face. He felt with his other hand for a weapon, for the thermos on the book table, but Dixon pulled him forward, off balance.

  "I don't mean to mock you, sir, but for a man who has just warmed up all these women's secret parts, your eloquent vocabulary has flown like a flock of shit birds off a manure wagon," Dixon said.

  Xavier's knees were buckling now, tears running without shame down his cheeks.

  Suddenly Dixon released him.

  "Somebody get a mop. This man has done wet hisself," he said.

  He picked up his cup of punch, and, with one gartered arm across his young friend's shoulders, walked out of the room.

  The next morning I heard the story from the owner of a local bookstore who had come out to see Doc and Maisey. At noon I drove to the sheriff's office and was told where I could find him.

  I parked my truck in the leafy shade of cotton-woods on the Clark Fork, only three blocks from the courthouse, and walked down the embankment to the water's edge. The sheriff was casting a Mepps spinner in a high arc out into the middle of the river, letting it swing taut in the riffle before he began retrieving it. In the sunlight the scars on the backs of his hands looked like thin white snakes.

  I went through the account about Wyatt Dixon's behavior at the university reading. He waited for me to finish, reeling in his line, casting it out again, then said, "I know all about it."

  "Why's a guy like Dixon care about this gold mine up on the Blackfoot River?" I asked.

  "Carl Hinkel uses these morons to run various kinds of scams on the government."

  "What kinds of scams?"

  "Hinkel finds old mining laws on the books that allow him to file mineral claims for next to nothing. Then he starts bulldozing the mountain away and washing the rock with cyanide. The tree huggers go apeshit and hammer their tallywhackers on their congressman's desk till the government buys out the claim and makes a millionaire out of a pissant who wouldn't recognize gold if you pulled it out of his teeth and stuck it up his nose."

  "I think Dixon wants to put suspicion for Ellison's death on Xavier Girard," I said. "He knows Doc didn't do it, and he figures eventually you're going to be looking at him for the murder."

  "In other words, just about anybody in Missoula County could have killed Lamar Ellison except your friend?"

  I hesitated before I spoke again. His physical size was huge, his level of tolerance unpredictable.

  "You told me you'd like to pinch Ellison's head off with a chain. You drove a log truck. Whoever killed Ellison knew how to use a boomer chain," I said.

  "Son, there's three categories of stupid. 'Stupid,' 'stupider,' and 'stupidest.' But I think you're establishing new standards. Did the doctor have to use forceps on your head to get you out of the womb?"

  "You'd love Texas, Sheriff."

  "That's not a compliment, is it?"

  "Search me," I said, and walked ba
ck to my truck.

  Behind me, I heard his nylon line zing off the reel, his metal lure rattling through the shining air.

  An hour later I answered the phone at Doc's house.

  "I ain't ever seen a place this beautiful, Billy Bob. I cain't wait to hit the stream," the voice on the other end said.

  "Lucas?"

  "Yeah. We're at Rock Creek. We need directions out to Doc's place."

  "We?"

  "Temple and me. My drilling rig shut down. You said to come out if I could get some time off."

  I tried to remember the conversation but could not. My innocent, wonderful, talented, and vulnerable son, why did you have to come here now?

  "Temple's with you?" I said.

  "Yeah, what's wrong?"

  Temple Carrol was the private investigator I relied on in my law practice. But she was a lot more than that, and our relationship was one that neither of us had ever been able to define.

  "I didn't tell her to come up here," I said.

  "Since when do you have to tell her anything?"

  My head was throbbing.

  "Lucas-" I began.

  "Maisey called her. So did Doc. He said Maisey's real messed up in the head. Who are these guys who raped her?"

  "You stay out of this stuff, Lucas."

  "I'm gonna put Temple on the phone. Thanks for the welcome to Montana," he said.

  Chapter 11

  Temple stood in the dusk by the side of the Ford Explorer she drove, her face obviously fatigued by the long drive from Deaf Smith and now my inept-ness in her presence. Temple had been a gunbull in Angola Prison in Louisiana, a patrolwoman in Dallas, and a sheriff's deputy in Fort Bend County in Southeast Texas. She had chestnut hair and dressed like a tomboy and had never lost the baby fat on her hips and arms. Her level of loyalty was ferocious. But so was her demand on the loyalty of others.

  Lucas had already unloaded his things and was pegging up a tent among the trees by the river.

  "Maisey and Doc didn't tell you I was coming up with Lucas?" she asked.

  "No. But I'm glad you did," I said.

  "I'm going to check into a motel in Missoula."

  "There's room inside."

  She shook her head. "Where's a good place to eat?"

  "There's a truck stop in Bonner. I'll go with you. Then we'll come back here and you can stay the night."

  She thought about it and yawned, then said, "You involved with somebody here?"

  "Why do you think that?" I said, my eyes slipping off her face.

  "Just a wild guess."

  Early the next morning I smelled wood smoke and bacon frying outside, and I looked through the window and saw Lucas squatting by a fire ring he had made of stones next to the river's edge. He dipped a coffeepot into a creek that flowed into the river and sprinkled coffee grinds into the water and set the pot to boil on the edge of his fire. I walked down to the bank and squatted next to him.

  "That creek water's got deer scat in it," I said.

  "The animals drink it. It don't bother them," he said. He grinned and wedged the blade of his pock-etknife into a can of condensed milk.

  He was as tall as I, with the same hair and wide, narrow shoulders. But he had his mother's hands, those of a musician, and her gentle looks.

  "It's good to have you here, bud," I said.

  "How could anybody figure Doc for a murderer? What kind of law they got up here, anyway?"

  "Doc's a complicated man."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "He killed a lot of people in the war, Lucas."

  I could feel his eyes on the side of my face.

  "You saying maybe he done it?" he asked.

  "I try not to study on it. The way I figure it, the guy who died had it coming."

  I heard him clear his throat, as though a moth had flown into it. He lifted the bacon in his skillet with a fork and turned it over in the grease, his eyes watering in the smoke.

  "Sometimes things come out of you that scare me, Billy Bob," he said.

  I PICKED UP Temple at her motel in Missoula and we drove to the courthouse and walked down the corridor to the sheriff's office.

  "Let me talk to him alone," she said.

  "Why?"

  "Woman's touch, that sort of thing."

  "You think I already tracked pig flop on the rug?"

  "You? Not a chance."

  She left his door partly open, and I could see inside and hear them talking. I soon had the feeling the sheriff wished he had gone to lunch early.

  "How does anybody lose a bag full of bloody and semen-stained sheets and clothing? You drop it off at the Goodwill by mistake?" she said.

  "We think the night janitor picked up the bag and threw it in the incinerator," the sheriff said.

  "So then you conclude there's no physical evidence to prove Ellison stole Doc's knife. Which allows you to arrest Doc for Ellison's murder. What kind of brain-twisted logic is that?"

  "Now listen-"

  "You pulled in two other suspects for Maisey's rape. Their fingerprints were at the crime scene. But you didn't charge them."

  "One guy was a part-time carpenter. He worked on that house before Dr. Voss bought it. The other man was at a party there. A couple of witnesses back up his story."

  "You know they did it."

  "Help me prove that and I'll lock them up. Look, you're mad because your friend is not easy to defend. The knife puts him inside Ellison's cabin. He stopped at a filling station a mile down the road and filled his tank with gas a half hour before the fire started. He had motivation and no alibi. When we picked him up and told him somebody had burned Ellison to death, he said, 'I should give a shit?' You were a police officer. Who would you have in custody?"

  "I'd start with Wyatt Dixon. Why do you allow a psychopath like that in your town, anyway?" "Say again?" he said.

  "Back home our sheriff is a one-lung cretin who couldn't go to the bathroom without a diagram. But he'd have Wyatt Dixon pepper-Maced and in waist chains five minutes after he hit town."

  "Yeah, I heard about the way you do things down there. We sent a bunch of our convicts from Deer Lodge to one of your rental prisons. We're still paying off the lawsuits. Now, look, Missy-"

  "Say that again?"

  "Sorry. I mean Ms. Carrol. You and Mr. Holland aren't married, are you? You two seem to make a fine match," the sheriff said.

  "I'll be back later."

  "Oh I know. Yes, ma'am, I surely know," he said, two fingers pressed against one eyebrow.

  Temple and I walked outside into the sunshine. The maples on the courthouse lawn were puffing in the wind, and a long procession of bicyclists in brightly colored Spandex outfits was threading in and out of the traffic.

  "Who was the kid with Dixon? The one at the literary reading you told me about?" Temple said.

  "You got me. Why?"

  "We need to find a weak link. What's the deal on this Indian gal?" she said.

  "Her name is Sue Lynn Big Medicine. I think she's working for the ATE"

  "What's their interest?"

  "Guns, maybe. Or the Alfred P. Murrah Building."

  "The Oklahoma City bombing?"

  "Sue Lynn asked me why the feds would want information on people who have been in Kingman, Arizona."

  Temple widened her eyes.

  "That puts a new perspective on things," she said.

  "I don't buy it," I said. "This trouble is local, and it has to do with money."

  "It always has to do with money. Or sex and power," she said. "Who's this woman you're involved with?"

  It WASN'T HARD to get the name of the kid who had accompanied Wyatt Dixon to Xavier Girard's literary reading. The reading had been intended as a library fund-raiser, and everyone attending had been required to sign the guest book and give his mailing address at the door.

  The name above Wyatt Dixon's was a woman's. The name below was Terry Witherspoon.

  Temple used her cell phone to call a friend in the sheriff's
department in San Antonio. He ran the name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., and called us back. Temple listened, then thanked him and clicked off her phone.

  "If it's the same kid, he was in a juvenile facility in North Carolina," she said. "What for?" "His records are sealed."

  Terry Witherspoon lived in a knocked-together shack on a dirt road notched out of a hillside high above the Clark Fork River.

  I parked in a clearing among the pines and waited for the dust to blow away before we got out of the truck. Out in the trees we could see a great, rust-streaked, ventilated iron cylinder set up on a rubber-tired trailer. A huge gray hunk of raw meat was hung inside the front of the cylinder, crawling with flies, stinking of putrefaction.

  "What's that?'' Temple said. "A bear barrel. Fish and Game uses them to trap black bears when people complain about them."

  "Billy Bob, there's something in there," she said. A cinnamon bear, one weighing perhaps two hundred and fifty or three hundred pounds, had climbed into the back of the barrel, lured by the odor of meat, and an iron gate had slammed down behind it, trapping it so it could not turn around or go either forward or backward.

  In a railed dirt lot behind the shack a lean, bare-chested kid, with ribs etched against his skin, was throwing a long, single-bladed pocketknife into a fence post. His brown hair grew over his ears, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a mocking smile at the corner of his mouth.

  "You Terry Witherspoon?" I asked. His glasses were full of reflected light when he looked at us.

  The smile never left his mouth. "Who wants to know?" he said.

  "We're investigating the death of Lamar Ellison," Temple said. She opened her private investigator's badge holder, then closed it.

  "Yeah?" he said, almost enthusiastically. The knife's blade hung from the tips of his fingers. Hardly glancing at his target, he whipped the knife sideways, flinging it end over end into the fence post, where it embedded solidly into the wood and trembled like a dinner fork.