Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  I interviewed Terry Witberspoon in the Ravalli County Jail after Nicki Molinari's goons dumped him in front of your ranch. Here are a couple of observations I would like to share with you.

  It appears Terry has made up a story about my trying to shoot you in the back with a pistol. I don't know if you believe his account or not, but you might ask yourself why an ex-Texas Ranger would try to pop you with a handgun, on your own property, when a man with a scoped.30-06 rifle could punch out your brisket from a mile away.

  Terry told me and several others at the jail that you did not have the guts to take on Nicki Molinari because he was Mobbed-up and in Quentin you were a punk for two greaseballs and had run scared of them ever since. He said Molinari already made you look like an ignorant peckerwood in a cafe someplace but you were too stupid to know you had been made a fool of. I'm not sure what he was talking about. He just said Molinari told him rodeo clowns risk their lives for chump change, and that's why only bozos from backwater Southern shit-holes are hired for the job.

  In closing I'm obligated to inform you of the following as a matter of social conscience. My associate has accessed Terry's welfare and police and medical records back in North Carolina. It looks like Terry has AIDS. Has he been going for medical treatment here? If I were you, I'd get tested. There are ninety-nine strains of the virus. I suspect Terry has most of them. By the way, conclusive test results take four months.

  To be honest, I have a hard time believing anyone who did time in Huntsville and Quentin could be reamed this bad by a box boy whose biggest score was rolling fudge packers. Maybe my perceptions are incorrect. If so, please forgive me.

  Have a nice day, Billy Bob Holland

  I went back into Missoula and had the letter delivered to the Hinkel compound by a florist, along with a cluster of pink and blue balloons.

  Chapter 29

  The next day Temple and I walked inside the Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge and waited for a turnkey to escort a trusty gardener by the name of Alton Dobbs to an interview room. He had salt-and-pepper hair that was cropped short, workingman's hands with clean nails, square shoulders, and direct eye contact you do not normally associate with a pedophile. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and state blues, but the pants were creased, as though they had been pressed under a mattress, and his shirt was buttoned at the throat and the wrists.

  He sat down across from us, his right hand resting in the center of the wood table. When I did not offer to shake hands with him, he removed his hand and put it in his lap. His eyes narrowed once at the insult, then they became totally devoid of expression.

  "Your sheet says you've been down four times on the same count, Mr. Dobbs," I said.

  He inched a chrome-plated wristwatch out from under his shirt cuff and looked at it.

  "You're a lawyer for who?" he asked.

  "Dr. Tobin Voss. He's charged with killing a biker by the name of Lamar Ellison. Does that last name mean anything to you?" I said.

  "Never heard of him."

  Temple looked at the first page on the clipboard she carried.

  "How about the name of Billy Shuster?" she said.

  "The kid in Sioux Falls? I was three hundred miles away when that happened. I was working in a bakery."

  Temple's eyes shifted on mine. It was the use of his vague reference to the event, the lack of a noun or verb that would call up a visual image, that gave us our first hint of the manipulator behind the hornrimmed glasses.

  "He was thirteen. Pretty bad crime, don't you think?" I said.

  "I wouldn't know. Like I say, I wasn't around," Dobbs said.

  "Anyway, that's past history. But I think you got a bum beef on this Montana deal," I said.

  "Run that by me again."

  "You got nailed in Carl Hinkel's front yard five years ago. Carl told everybody he didn't know you and was glad the authorities had you in custody. I don't think you ever got to tell your side of the story."

  "You see Carl Hinkel?" he said.

  "With some regularity," Temple said. Dobbs nodded and looked at a spot between me and Temple. "I never met him. I never had a chance to. So I'm not much help to you," he said.

  "I hear you're quite a computer whiz. You've cataloged everything in the prison library," Temple said.

  "It's a job," he said.

  "It's funny you don't know the name of Lamar Ellison. He was in Deer Lodge when you took your last fall," I said.

  "Could be," he replied.

  "You were invited to Carl Hinkel's house. Maybe you had an appointment with him. Then you get busted in his yard and he calls you a pervert in print. Does that bother you, Mr. Dobbs?" I said.

  He touched at the corner of his mouth and rubbed the balls of his fingers with his thumb. He straightened his cuffs on his wrists and glanced through the glass window in the door at a guard in the corridor. "What's in it for me?" he asked.

  "The feds have Hinkel under investigation. You could be a big help to them. They can turn keys on state locks."

  His eyes seemed to focus inward on thoughts that in all probability no else could ever guess at.

  "We're finished here," he said.

  "Fair enough," I said, rising from my chair. "I'll tell you what happened, though. You met Carl Hinkel through the Internet. Then you showed up at his house for a meet and got busted. He came off looking great and you're down on a short-eyes. How's it feel? By the way, I'll tell Carl we had a chat."

  Dobbs got to his feet and banged on the steel door.

  "What's the problem?" the guard asked.

  "I want lockup," Dobbs replied.

  After we got back to Missoula I dropped Temple off at her motel and drove down to Stevensville, then headed east toward the Sapphires and Nicki Molinari's ranch. I saw the next-door neighbor, the elderly preacher, raking out dead grass from the rain ditch in front of his church. I pulled my truck to the roadside and waved to him.

  He wore bib overalls without a shirt and a coned-up straw hat. The choleric blazes in his neck and face looked like small tongues of fire on his skin. He leaned down to my window and I saw a raw knot the size of a duck's egg on his forehead.

  "How are you doing today, sir?" I said.

  "Cleaning up for our baptism services tomorrow evening. Back yonder in the creek. We do it the old-time way," he said.

  "It's the only way to fly," I said.

  "You're welcome to come," he said.

  "I was baptized in a stream in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma."

  "I knowed it," he said.

  "How's that?"

  "River-baptized people got a mark. They look a person in the eye. Why you hanging around that greaser?"

  "My work takes me into strange associations, Preacher."

  "You carry a gun?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Stay away from that fellow, son. He's the devil's own."

  The old man tapped my window with the flat of his hand and returned to his work.

  I parked on the white gravel by the side of Molinari's house and started toward the front door. From the back I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash and the sound of women laughing. When I came around the corner of the house I smelled meat dripping into a hibachi and the drowsy, thick fragrance of a crack pipe and I saw Molinari swimming toward the shallow end of his pool while three suntanned women in bikinis and shades watched him from reclining chairs.

  He walked up the tile steps of the pool, dripping water, his sex etched against his bright yellow trunks. He rubbed his head and face with a fluffy towel, and a woman handed him a glass of iced tea with a sprig of mint in it. He pushed his feet into his flip-flops while he drank and took my measure over his upended glass.

  "Where you come from, people don't call first before they drop by other people's houses?" he said.

  "Has Wyatt Dixon been around?" I asked.

  "No. He better not, either."

  "I interviewed a pedophile in Deer Lodge this morning. He was busted in Carl Hinkel's fro
nt yard."

  Molinari wiped water off his brow and pitched his towel over the back of a chair.

  "Take a walk with me," he said, glancing back at the women by poolside. He put his hand on my arm. "Tell me in like three sentences."

  "This guy was nailed in Hinkel's yard. I think Hinkel is behind the kidnapping and sale of children to child molesters."

  "So I'm glad to know this. But I'm a little tied up right now. A little two-on-one going, get my drift? If you see Cleo or Holly, don't be mentioning what you saw here. Anyway, come back tomorrow when I have more time."

  "Fuck you."

  "I can't believe there's a person like you standing on my property. You want me to remodel this guy, but you tell me in my face to get fucked? You know what I do to people who use that kind of language to me?"

  "Tell it to your biographer."

  "I'm glad you raised that subject. Xavier Girard just got the shit kicked out of him. Why is that, you ask. Because he shot off his mouth on a certain TV talk show."

  "What happened to the old man next door?"

  "I put a knot on his head."

  "You did what?"

  "He was firing a nail gun into his church till six this morning. Bam, bam, bam, all night long. I was in a bad mood. He picked the wrong time to wise off."

  "I made a mistake coming here," I said.

  When I turned to go he grabbed my forearm again. I felt his nails scrape on the skin.

  "Come here," he said.

  "Your kind are always the same, Molinari. On the surface you seem to have a certain degree of elan, but under it all you're a real bum. Go back to your whores."

  His mouth twitched slightly and the skin under one eye puckered as though my words had cut across a nerve ending in his face.

  I drove back to Missoula and parked downtown and walked under the shade of the maple trees into the courthouse. I met the sheriff on his way out.

  "I need to talk," I said.

  "Why don't you rent an office down the hall from me? Cut down on your gas costs," he said.

  "At what time did Xavier Girard call 911 the night Lamar Ellison was killed?"

  "I don't remember."

  "Let's find out," I said.

  He sucked his teeth.

  "Come inside," he said.

  A minute later, he tossed his hat onto a rack in his office and sat down heavily in his swivel chair and fixed his eyes on me. They were as blue and intense as the flame on a butane burner.

  "Get to it, Mr. Holland," he said.

  "Lamar Ellison vandalized Xavier Girard's vehicle just before he died. Girard and Ellison fought on the side of the road and Holly Girard pointed a gun at Ellison to keep him from stomping her husband into jelly. Then Holly and Xavier went inside a friend's house and dialed 911. The question is when did they make the call."

  "What are you driving at?" the sheriff said.

  "Sue Lynn Big Medicine claims she saw somebody outside Ellison's place when she fled, someone who could have saved his life."

  "Wait here," the sheriff said.

  He went out into the hall and returned five minutes later and sat down in his chair and studied two computer printouts in his hands. He laid them down on his desk blotter and balled and unballed his fist on top of them.

  "Holly Girard made the call. At ten-o-nine P.M.," he said.

  "What time was the fire at Ellison's reported?" I asked…

  "Nine forty-one."

  "So they waited at least a half hour to report their vehicle being vandalized?" I said.

  "That's what it looks like. You're saying the guy Sue Lynn saw was Xavier?"

  "Ellison had smashed out the windows in Xavier's Cherokee and sliced the seats and cut his tires and humiliated him in front of his wife and friends. Maybe he took his wife's gun and decided to square things with Ellison, but Sue Lynn beat him to it."

  "Maybe the guy Sue Lynn saw was the same fellow who reported the fire. You think of that?"

  "The 911 on the fire was called in by a trucker on his CB," I said.

  The sheriff rubbed his forehead and widened his eyes.

  "I'll question Xavier Girard. But there's no evidence to put him at the crime scene, so I don't think this is going anywhere," he said. "By the way, I had the sheriff in Flathead County check out that resort on Swan Lake where Sue Lynn was hiding. Her cousin says Sue Lynn has bagged out for parts unknown."

  I didn't wait for the sheriff to pick up Xavier Girard or ask him to come in. I drove directly to the Girards' house out on the bluff above the Clark Fork. A moving van was backed into the driveway and a half dozen men were trundling furniture up the loading ramp. I walked through the open front door of the house, into a bare living room with a cathedral ceiling that echoed with the sounds of the movers' work shoes. The sanded and lacquered pinewood interior of the room glowed with light, and Holly Girard stood in the middle of it all, dressed in oversize khakis and tennis shoes and a paint-splotched pink T-shirt, a baseball cap on her head, swearing, scolding the movers, but never quite crossing the line into direct insult.

  She turned and studied me as she would a bird bouncing against a window glass. Then she walked toward me, her face tilted upward, touched with light, bemused, a bit vulnerable. She stood inside my shadow, the confidence in her sexual appeal undiminished by her appearance, the color in her eyes deepening.

  "I hope Xavier hasn't hired you to sue me," she said.

  Before I could reply she turned on a workman walking down the staircase and said, "You break that lamp and I'll own your salary for the rest of your life. That's a promise, Ed."

  "Where's your husband, Ms. Girard?" I asked.

  "Try detox or AA or any bar on Higgins. Or maybe he's in the sack with one of his twenty-year-old groupies. Each of them thinks she'll be the girl who changed his life and career. Oh, boring, boring, boring. Here," she said.

  She wrote out the address of a townhouse on the river, then turned her attention back to the movers.

  "You posed as Doc Voss's friend," I said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Y'all let him go down for a murder you knew he didn't commit."

  "I'm sure what you're saying will make sense to Xavier. But it doesn't to me. Now, good-bye, good luck, God speed, God bless, ta-ta, all that kind of thing."

  "Y'all could have cleared Doc. Instead, you kept quiet and let him twist in the wind."

  She had started to walk away. But she turned demurely and stepped close into me again, one of her small feet touching mine. She took off her cap and shook out her hair and gave me a long, deliberate stare. There were two white crystals on the rim of her left nostril.

  "Contact my business agent at Creative Artists. He'd love to help you. Really he would," she said, and jiggled her fingers in good-bye.

  "Watch yourself with Molinari, Ms. Girard. If you're tight with Cleo Lonnigan, you might share the admonition," I said, and went out the door.

  When I started my truck she was standing in the yard, staring at me, her face disjointed with the wounded pride of a child.

  WHEN I RANG the bell at Xavier Girard's town-house, he yelled from the back room, "The door's open. Fix yourself a drink in the kitchen and don't bother me till I come out. If you don't drink or if you're a friend of my wife, get the fuck out of my life."

  I walked to his office door and looked inside. He was hunched over his computer, framed like a bear against the window and the broad sweep of the river and the spires and rooftops of the town and the green hills beyond.

  His eyes were washed out, pale blue, the pupils like burnt match heads, his face manic and tight against the bone and ridged with bruises along the jaw. An odor like unwashed hair and beer sweat filled the room.

  "I'm working now. There's vodka in the icebox. There're magazines by the toilet," he said.

  "You came out to Doc's and complained to me that your wife wouldn't help with a fund-raiser for Doc's defense," I said.

  "Man, you just don't fucking listen. That's yesterday's chewing gu
m, Jack," he said.

  "You saw Ellison burn to death. You also saw an Indian woman flee the scene. All this time you could have cut Doc loose."

  He pushed the "save" button on his keyboard.

  "Here it is, straight up. I don't know who did what at that scene. I had no way of knowing Doc wasn't there first. But if I understand you correctly, you think I should have put it on a Native American woman who's probably been dumped on all her life?"

  "I see. You were protecting Sue Lynn Big Medicine. Did you go there armed?"

  "None of your business."

  "Accept my word on this, Mr. Girard. I'm going to do everything in my power to see you charged with obstruction and depraved indifference."

  "Indifferent? You're calling me indifferent?"

  I looked at the bruises along his jawline. "I'm not calling you anything, sir. How's your book going?"

  "Which book?"

  "Your biography of Nicki Molinari."

  "Guess," he replied.

  As I left I heard what sounded like a metal trash basket tumbling end over end across a bare floor.

  The next morning was white with fog that boiled off the Blackfoot River and hung wetly in the trees and gathered like damp cotton on the hillsides. I walked down to Lucas's tent and watched him fix a fire and start cracking eggs and laying out ham strips in the oversize skillet he cooked in.

  Minutes later I picked up the spatula and started to shovel some food onto my plate. Lucas gently removed the spatula from my hand and went to his tent and picked up a plastic dog bowl. He began shredding pieces of white bread into the bowl while his dog, now named Dogus, watched.

  "Remember what you told me Great-Grandpa Sam wrote in his journal? 'Always feed your animals before you feed yourself,'" Lucas said, and scooped a fried egg out of the skillet and chopped it up in the bread.

  Later, we ate in silence. The trees along the river were dark and wet and black-green inside the fog, and I could hear a hoofed animal clopping on the rocks on the far side of the water.

  "I know what you want to ask me," Lucas said.

  "My head's totally blank," I said.