Bitterroot (34 page)

“That guy looked like a fed,” she said.

“He is. Two of his agents were killed on the Flathead Reservation last night.”

“The ones who rousted you?”

“Yeah, one of them, anyway.”

“Who did it?”

“Probably one of Carl Hinkel’s people. Sue Lynn took the agents’ vehicle and left them stranded with her uncle’s stock car. The shooter probably thought she was inside.”

Temple threw her backpack onto a chair and went into the house and came back out with a cup of coffee in her hand.

“Where’s Sue Lynn?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I checked out the background of Xavier and Holly Girard,” she said.

“What for?”

“He’s a writer and she’s an actress, but they keep showing up where they don’t have any business. Each time they have some innocuous explanation. Read this,” she said, and handed me a manila folder filled with fax sheets from a private investigator in Phoenix, Arizona.

“By the way, Holly Girard didn’t meet Nicki Molinari out here. Their families both belonged to the same country club in Scottsdale,” she said.

I sat down and read through the sheets in the folder.

“Her mother’s maiden name was Carruthers?” I said.

“You got it.”

“Why is it I feel I’ve been had?” I said.

“I couldn’t guess,” Temple said.

WE DROVE to the Girards’ house above the Clark Fork but no one was home. Then, because I was unconvinced of Xavier’s sobriety, we tried the downtown bars. We found him playing pinochle in the back of a workingman’s place on Front Street called Stockman’s, a bottle of ginger ale by his elbow. He gave me a tired look. “What is it now?” he asked.

“Not much, a discussion of assets, family names, mining interests, that sort of thing,” I said.

He grinned at the other players and shrugged his shoulders, as though saying “What can I do?” We went out the back door into the sunshine. A carousel was revolving on the riverbank, the hand-carved wooden horses filled with children.

“Your wife is a member of the family that owns the Phillips-Carruthers Corporation, the same guys who want to destroy the Blackfoot River?” I said.

“You’re talking about Holly’s mother, not Holly. Holly doesn’t own anything,” he replied, leaning against an iron rail, looking off at the river.

“That’s a little bit disingenuous, don’t you think?” I said.

“Hey, get out of our lives, Mr. Holland.” “You misled me. I think you’ve misled this community, too.”

“About
what?”
he said.

“Your wife has a vested interest in seeing Doc hurt. By extension, so do you. That brings us right back to the rape of Maisey Voss and the murder of Lamar Ellison,” I said. “You’re full of shit.”

But he looked like a wounded animal, the hot glare in his eyes focusing on nothing, as if nothing in his range of vision would connect with the confused thoughts in his head. He had managed to combine the roles of cuckold, novelist, flamboyant drunk, Hollywood iconoclast, friend of the environment, confidant of gangsters, and object of pity all in one persona. I wondered when the day would come when he stuck a pistol into his mouth.

Temple and I started to walk away.

“If it’s any of your business, Holly and I are busting up,” he said at my back.

“Why?” I said.

“She’s getting it on with Molinari again. I’ve had it,” he replied.

But if he intended to elicit sympathy, he failed with Temple. She walked to within a foot of his face.

“You’re going on the stand, baby cakes. Get used to it,” she said.

LATER, Maisey got into Doc’s truck with a shopping list and headed down the dirt road toward the main highway and the small, independent grocery store in Bonner. As she approached the log bridge over the Blackfoot she saw a low-slung red car in her rearview mirror. The bridge trembled under her as she rumbled across the wood planks and a dust cloud blew out on the water and disappeared in the current. When she swung out onto the highway she looked back briefly and saw the red car again and this time she recognized Terry Witherspoon behind the wheel.

He followed her all the way into Bonner, through the quiet stretch of tree-shaded, company-owned houses, past the sawmill and the piles of green lumber stacked next to waiting train cars, past the normal world that most people lived in, then around a bend in the road to the grocery store parking lot. She got out of the truck and started inside, then went back and locked the door, even though she left the window open.

Terry Witherspoon pulled in close to the store entrance and was now waving at her, as though the only problem between them was her failure to recognize who he was.

Then he got out of his car, smiling at her above the top of the door.

“Didn’t you see me back there?” he said.

“Right,” she said.

He was dressed in khaki slacks and shined loafers and a gold and burgundy University of Montana sweater.

“I was coming up to your house when you zoomed on past me,” he said.

“You were hiding on the side road.”

“I wasn’t,” he said, crinkling his nose under his glasses, waiting to see if she would refute the lie. When she didn’t she could see the vindication grow in his face. “Your father attacked me in front of all those people at the concert. I took you home that night when the football players were going to hurt you. I got in a lot of trouble with Wyatt over that.”

“You buried a woman alive. You’re disgusting. Get out of here,” she said.

“You don’t know what you’re saying. That Indian bitch caused all this.”

“Caused
what?”
Maisey said, then realized she had stepped into the trap of arguing with a person who had probably never told the truth about anything in his life.

“She got those federal agents killed. They’re gonna blame Wyatt or me. Everything’s coming apart. I had a lot of plans,” he said. Then he seemed to grow more passionate, more unjustly injured, his eyes magnifying behind his glasses. “I bought a camera. I want to take pictures of you. Down on the river.”

The fact that he was speaking intimately to her, as though she were part of his world, made her stomach turn. She rushed inside the store and got a basket and pushed it down the aisle, trying to concentrate on the list in her hand.

Out in the parking lot Terry Witherspoon stood by Doc’s truck, chewing on a hangnail, glaring at the traffic.

“Is everything all right, miss?” the butcher said. He was an Indian, wrapped around the middle with a red-stained apron.

“Yes. Fine,” she replied.

“You know that fellow out there?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“He was in here once before. That’s why he’s not in here now. You let me know if he bothers you,” the butcher said.

Fifteen minutes later she wheeled her basket loaded with sacked groceries back into the parking lot. Terry Witherspoon was waiting for her, tossing his head to clear a strand of hair from his glasses.

“When I saw you through the window, in the shower that night, you were as beautiful as a movie star,” he said. When she didn’t answer he started to lift one of the sacks from the basket.

“Don’t touch that,” she said. “I want to help you.”

“Don’t put your hands on our food. Get away from my basket.”

The wind blew his hair across his glasses. He continued to stare at her as though he could not assimilate what he was being told. Then he said, “Shit on you.”

She loaded her groceries into the  bed of the pickup, trying to ignore the closeness of his body and the smell of deodorant that rose from his clothes. She got into the truck and started the engine,  but Witherspoon remained standing by her window.

“I can’t see the street,” she said.

“I should have let Wyatt bust you. You’re just a little whore. That’s why you were hanging out in that bar. You wanted more of what Lamar and the others gave you. Lamar said you gave good head.”

She ground the transmission and tried to swing out on the street, but the guards were up at the train crossing and traffic had backed up across the entrance to the parking lot.

Witherspoon got behind her and began blowing his horn and smashing his bumper against hers, much harder than she thought a low-centered car would be able to do. Then she realized pieces of pipe were overwelded, like gridwork or a battering ram, on the front of his car. Witherspoon snugged the bumper against the rear of the truck and slowly accelerated and starting pushing her into the street. His back tires burned black strips on the asphalt and spun circles of smoke under the fenders, but the truck was wobbling on the frame now, the back wheels losing purchase, Maisey’s foot slipping on the brake. All the while Witherspoon kept his palm clamped down on his horn button.

Even if she made it out into the traffic without being hit she knew he would follow her all the way home, tailgating and cutting her off, trying to force her into the path of oncoming traffic.

  Go inside and get the butcher, she thought.

Like hell.

She pulled into the street, glancing once in her rearview mirror. Witherspoon was looking right and left, waiting for an opportunity to floor the accelerator after her. He never realized the seriousness of his presumption until it was too late.

Maisey hit the brakes, shifted into reverse, and mashed on the gas pedal. The trailer hitch on the truck speared through the pipework on Wither-spoon’s grille, gashing the radiator open, tearing the fan so metal screamed against metal. She straightened the truck, then floorboarded into him again, this time crumpling a fender down on a tire, shattering the headlights, knocking his forehead into the windshield.

When she shifted back into first gear, the low-slung red car that belonged to Wyatt Dixon was bleeding green pools of antifreeze onto the asphalt, spokes of steam whistling from under the hood. An elderly woman with Coke-bottle glasses pulled in behind Witherspoon and began blowing her horn for him to get out of the way.

THE   NEXT   MORNING   the sheriff called and asked me to drop by his office.

“The two ATF agents were killed by .223 rounds, all fired from the same rifle, probably an M-16. The spent casings were all clean,” he said.

The sheriff was sitting behind his desk, his Stetson pushed up on the back of his head, his suit coat on, fiddling with his hands as he talked, as though he were concentrating more on his own thoughts than on his listener.

“Amos Rackley told you this?” I asked.

“The Flathead Reservation has patches of privately owned land on it. The ridge where the shooter was? It’s owned by a white man. The government can’t keep me out of this one,” the sheriff said.

“I don’t understand why you called me.”

“The shooter dropped one of his ear plugs. He left a thumbprint on it. You know a guy named Clayton Stark?”

“No,” I said.

“He don’t have a record here, but three years ago he was picked up for questioning in a child abduction case in Pocatello. Does that ring any bells for you?”

“A pedophile was arrested in Carl Hinkel’s yard five years ago,” I replied.

“That’s right. Your son’s girlfriend, this gal Sue Lynn Big Medicine? Her little brother was abducted and killed, wasn’t he?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I get paid to do my damn homework, son. You see a pattern here on this pedophilia stuff?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Neither do I,” the sheriff said. He got up from his desk and began fumbling around in a closet.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“There’s a bull trout under the Higgins Street Bridge that daily gives me a lesson in humility,” he said, lifting a rod and reel from behind a raincoat. “Take a walk with me. I want to tell you a story.”

THE PREVIOUS DAY the sheriff had been visiting a cemetery on the north side, a lovely, tree-shaded area on a knoll where the town’s oldest families were buried. He saw Cleo Lonnigan sitting on a bench by her son’s grave, leaning over, setting stem roses in a row by the headstone. She was talking to herself and did not hear the sheriff when he walked up behind her.

“You want company?” he asked.

“It’s his birthday,” she said.

“Oh,” he said, nodding.

“On his birthday I make a wish for each year of his life that he would have had, then put roses on his grave,” she said.

The sheriff sat beside her on the bench. It was made of stone and felt cold and hard under his legs. “I worry about you, Cleo.”

“Why is that, J.T?”

He looked down the slope, through the trees, at a maroon Cadillac convertible that was parked in the drive with the top up. The Cadillac had been waxed and hand-buffed with soft rags and the reflection of the leaves overhead seemed trapped inside the paint.

“You’re here with Nicki Molinari?” the sheriff asked.

“We’ve let bygones be bygones.” “I have a hard time accepting a statement like that.”

She rose from the bench. It was cool in the shade and she wore a silk scarf tied under her chin.

“I don’t ask you to, J.T.,” she replied, and walked down the slope toward Nicki Molinari’s car. The wind blew the roses into crossed patterns on top of her son’s grave.

“SHE’S ONE I can’t read, Sheriff,” I said.

“It’s not hard. Her husband’s crooked money got her little boy killed. Cleo says she didn’t know where that money come from. When people got more than they’re supposed to have, they
always
know where it comes from. So she’s got to get up every morning, denying to herself that little boy’s death is not on her. How’d you like to carry a burden like that?”

We were in the shadow of the Higgins Bridge now, and the sheriff had managed to fling his lure into a willow tree.

“Why’d you tell me about Cleo and Molinari?” I asked.

“It’s just a warning. She’d like to see you hung from a meat hook.”

“You can sure put it in a memorable way, sir,” I said, and started to leave. “By the way, how is it you’re so close to Cleo?”

“My son’s in that same cemetery. He was killed in Desert Storm. That was rich men fighting over oil, Mr. Holland. My boy was too young to enlist on his own. So I signed the papers for him.”