Bitterroot (12 page)

“Because he was in Vietnam doesn’t make him a murderer. What’s the matter with you?”

“Did I mention that a bone-handled skinning knife with the doctor’s fingerprints on it was found at the crime scene?” the sheriff asked.

I wanted to speak, to say something that would refute his words, but my throat was suddenly dry, my palms damp and stiff and hard to close.

“Shut the door after you leave,” the sheriff said.

“Ellison was in Doc’s house. He took the knife then. Were his prints on the knife?” I said.

“No.”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to think.

“Look, Maisey said at least one of the men who raped her had gloves on. That was Ellison,” I said.

“Good. Dr. Voss’s defense attorney can say all that in court.”

“Ellison was a snitch. His own people wanted him dead. Talk to the ATE,” I said.

“I classify most of those federal boys as A.A. Which means I leave them alone,” he replied.

I looked at him incredulously. “You’re saying the feds are drunks?”

“Arrogant Asswipes. Now go piddle around on the trout stream or visit your friend up in the holding tank or whittle some shavings outside under a tree. To tell you the truth, son, my estimation of the Texas Rangers has plummeted.”

I went out of his office, my ears ringing. But I couldn’t let go of his remarks. I opened his door again and went back inside.

“I’m representing Dr. Voss. He’s not to be questioned unless I’m present. I’m going to hang this case around your neck,” I said.

“Damn, I wish you would. I hate this job,” he said, and picked up his newspaper again.

IT WAS SATURDAY and Doc’s bail would not be set until his arraignment Tuesday afternoon. I rode the elevator up to the jail section of the courthouse with a deputy sheriff and waited in a small interview room until the deputy brought Doc down the corridor in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit.

“How about it on the cuffs?” I said to the deputy.

“They stay on,” he answered, and closed the door on us.

“I’ll get you out Tuesday, Doc,” I said. Doc stood at the window, looking down on the maple trees along the streets. “How bad is this going to be?” he asked.

“You know that knife I gave you?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t find it the other day.”

“It was in Ellison’s cabin. With your prints on it.”

That’s not good, is it?” He lifted his manacled wrists and propped them on the windowsill. The hills north of the train depot were green and domed against the sky and clumps of whitetail were grazing on the slopes.

“Take good care of Maisey, will you?”

“Doc, you didn’t do it, did you?”

He started to answer, then stared out the window silently. His ill-fitting, orange jumpsuit looked like a clown’s costume on his body.

BY MONDAY AFTERNOON I had read the homicide investigators’ reports on Lamar Ellison’s murder and had retraced Ellison’s movements of Friday evening back to the tavern on the Blackfoot. I had also managed to interview a bartender at the tavern, Holly and Xavier Girard, and a biker who’d been at the table with Sue Lynn and Ellison.

The biker’s name was Clell Miller and he ran a welding business in a tin shed on the west side of Missoula. He was shirtless and wore black goggles up on his forehead, and sweat ran down his torso into the underwear that was bunched out over the top of his jeans.

“What were Lamar and Sue Lynn talking about?” I said.

“It didn’t make no sense. Lamar was stoned. Something about kids,” he said. “Look, man, I don’t want to speak bad of the dead. The Mexican Mafia had a hit on the guy. He ratted out some people inside. So maybe they cooked him. That’s their style. They’ll Molotov a guy in his cell.”

“You think Wyatt Dixon might have lit up his life?” I said.

He shut down the valves on the acetylene torch he had been using. He wiped the sweat and soot off his face with a rag.

“I ain’t said nothing about Wyatt Dixon. I ain’t even told you he was there.”

“That’s right. You haven’t said a word about him. Where’d you get the Confederate flag on your wall?” I said.

“At the Indian powwow in Arlee. What do you care?” he said, irritably.

“Is Wyatt a bad dude?”

“I know what you’re trying to do, man. This all started ‘cause your friend’s daughter pulled a train. The way I heard it, she invited them guys over and couldn’t get enough. Flush it any way you want, chief, you either beat feet or I’m gonna fry up some Texas toast.”

He popped his welding torch alight.

WHEN I GOT BACK to Doc’s place I saw an old sedan parked in the trees, down by the river. Its windshield and headlights had been removed, the body sprayed with gray primer, and two large numerals were painted in orange on the driver’s door.

   The back door of the house was open. I walked inside and saw Maisey in her bedroom, lying on her side, her back to me. The Indian girl named Sue Lynn sat on the mattress beside her, stroking Maisey’s hair. The plank floor creaked under my foot, and Sue Lynn’s face jerked toward me.

“What are you doing in here?” I said through the doorway.

“I came to see about the doctor. Is he going to be all right?” she said, standing up now.

“He’s in the county jail, charged with murder. Does that sound all right?” I said.

“Don’t talk to her like that, Billy Bob. She came here to help,” Maisey said.

“She’s buds with Ellison’s motorcycle pals, Maisey,” I said.

“What do you know?” Sue Lynn said.

“I think you’re here for self-serving reasons,” I said.

“Then sit on this,” she replied, and raised her middle finger at me.

She tried to stare me down, then her eyes broke. She hurried out the far bedroom door into the living room and kept going, through the front screen and down the slope toward the riverbank. I went after her.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I used to be a lawman. I think the G put you inside the Berdoo Jesters. You know who set fire to Ellison, don’t you?”

She was standing in the shade of the trees, and her dark skin was freckled with the sunlight that shone through the canopy.

“You should have kept the doctor away from Lamar in the bar up at Lincoln. You wouldn’t listen to me. This is all on you,” she said.

“What’s your last name?”

“Big Medicine.”

“You’re a Crow?” I said.

“How did you know that?” she said.

“One of the scouts for Custer at the Little Big Horn was a Crow Indian named Big Medicine. The scouts wanted to sing their death song before they rode into Sitting Bull’s village. Custer accused them of cowardice and fired them. They were the only survivors of the massacre.”

She began backing toward her automobile, her eyes fixed uncertainly on mine, as though I possessed omniscience or some form of magic. Even though the air was cool in the shade, there was a bright chain of sweat around her throat.

“The car belongs to a stock-car driver. It doesn’t have lights. I have to get it back to the junkyard before sunset,” she said.

“Wyatt Dixon is a dangerous man. Don’t let those federal guys use you.”

She felt behind her for the handle on the car door, then a moment of resolve, perhaps even cautious trust, seemed to form in her face.

“Say I do know some government fucks? Why would they be asking me if Lamar and the others have been in Kingman, Arizona?” she said.

“The men who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City hung around there at one time or another,” I said.

Her lips moved silently, as though she were repeating the words to herself, as though the enormity of their connotation would not come into focus behind her eyes.

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.