Bitterroot (37 page)

“This valley used to be a nice place. Now we got half the riffraff in the United States moving here,” he said.

Just before 11 P.M. that night, at the end of what had probably been the longest day of Terry Witherspoon’s life, he was stopped by a Ravalli County sheriff’s deputy only two hundred yards from the entrance to Carl Hinkel’s compound. The moon was high and yellow over the mountains, the upside-down American flag popping on the metal pole in Carl’s yard.

Terry was almost home free. Don’t wise off, he told himself. Turn into an ice cube. Tell him you fell off a truck. Let Wyatt deal with Molinari.

In minutes Terry had forgotten all his resolutions and was cuffed and in the backseat of the cruiser and on his way to the county jail.

Chapter

28

THE NEXT DAY was Saturday. A turnkey walked me down to the holding cell where Terry Wither-spoon had spent the night.

“Have you been spit on lately?” he asked. “Can’t say that I have,” I replied. “Don’t stand too close to the bars.” The turnkey walked back down the corridor and sat at a small table and picked up a newspaper.

The cell was splattered with food from a serving tray that Terry had thrown against the wall. He stood under a barred window, wrinkling his nose under his glasses.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“The sheriff in Missoula told me you were in the slams. I thought I’d drop by for a chat,” I said.

“I should be in a hospital. They put me in jail.”

“You stuck your finger in a deputy sheriff’s eye?”

“It was an accident. He grabbed my arm. It hurt.”

Then I watched a phenomenon to which I had never seen the exception in dealing with sociopathic behavior. Terry threw a temper tantrum, his voice hissing with spleen. He was the victim, not others. It was he who had been wronged by the world, the fates, the cosmos, maybe even by his own genes. It was my obligation to be an attentive and sympathetic listener. Never mind the fact he had buried a friend of mine alive. Nothing was of consequence to him except his own pain and the unfairness with which he had been treated by a pair of greaseball humps like Molinari and Frank and now a bunch of Montana hillbillies with badges they probably got out of cereal boxes.

“I might watch what I said to these guys, Terry.”

“Why?” he asked. “They don’t like you.”

Then, as though I were supposed to fix the situation for him, he said, “Wyatt and Carl aren’t home. I got a five-hundred bond. Somebody’s got to go a bond for me.”

“You think Wyatt Dixon gives a shit what happens to you?” I asked.

He pushed up his glasses and looked at me, uncomprehending.

“He might get around to going your bond but he’s not going to take on Nicki Molinari. Nicki’s a made guy, Terry, a genuine Sicilian badass. You think Wyatt wants to get into it with the Mob because you got hit with some baseballs?”

“Wyatt’s my friend.”

“Could be,” I said, and leaned on one arm against the cell door and looked down the corridor at the turnkey, who was reading the paper.

“Somebody needs to take the weight for those dead ATF agents. The real shooter is probably up in Canada now. Think about it, Terry. Who’s the most likely candidate in your bunch? Somebody who wanted to do Sue Lynn and didn’t know the agents were sitting in her car? Somebody who never had a job except as a box boy?”

Then he did something I didn’t expect. He walked toward the cell door and gripped the bars loosely with his palms, his weight on one foot, his hip cocked at an angle. He pursed his lips, as though he had reached a conclusion that would affect both of us. His eyes were strangely serene, the way dark water is, devoid of all light and moral conflict and perhaps, at least in that moment, any fear of mortality.

When he spoke his voice was suddenly feminine. A smile played around his mouth.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m at the point I don’t have any more to lose. Say hello to Maisey for me. You can do that for me, can’t you?” he said. His breath touched my skin like vapor off dry ice.

THAT EVENING I took Temple to an Italian restaurant on Higgins called Zimorino’s Red Pies Over Montana. The tables and bar were crowded with tourists and people from the university. In the back of the room, wearing a suit and tie, I saw Amos Rackley eating by himself.

“You feel sorry for him?” Temple said.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“If Lamar Ellison was a snitch and the feds knew he killed Cleo Lonnigan’s child, our man there deserves whatever pangs of conscience he has.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe about it,” Temple said.

I started to say something else, but let it go.

In the middle of our dinner a shout went up from the bar. On the screen of the TV attached high up on the wall was the face of Xavier Girard.

“That guy’s on CNN?” Temple said.

  “Looks like it,” I said, and continued to eat.

But Temple’s attention remained fixed on the TV screen, where Xavier was promoting his new book and being interviewed by the best-known talk-show host in the industry.

“Girard’s talking about Nicki Molinari,” Temple said.

I got up from the table and walked to the bar. Xavier had set aside a copy of his new book and was now expounding on his work in progress.

“Nicki is right out of Elizabethan theater,” he said. “He volunteered for the Army and Vietnam to get away from his father. But he ended up in a godforsaken outpost in Laos, surrounded by oceans of poppy fields. He escaped out of a Pathet Lao prison camp by shoving his best friend off a helicopter skid at five hundred feet. He’s a tormented human being, Larry. I like him, so does my wife, a little too much, to tell you the truth, but I’ve never underestimated his potential for violence.”

The talk-show host propped his chin on his thumb and smiled slightly.

“You sure you want to be saying all this?” he asked.

“Oh, Nicki’s become one of the family, so to speak. He put up a big chunk of money for my wife’s new picture.”

“I hear you’re separating,” the host said.

“Yeah, who’d believe it?” Xavier said, and laughed and looked knowingly at the camera.

I went back to the table and sat down.

“I wonder if Molinari watches much television,” I said.

Later, we went to a movie in the refurbished vaudeville theater by the river. When we came out the sun had gone down and the moon had risen like a yellow planet over the Bitterroots. We walked down an outside flight of iron stairs to a parking area under the Higgins Street Bridge. There was a supper club below the movie theater, and the wide glass doors were open and an orchestra was playing dance music.

“You want to go inside?” Temple said.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because right here is good enough.”

I put one arm around her waist and lifted her right hand in mine, but she dropped my hand and put both arms around my neck and we danced in the parking lot, under the great dome of heaven itself, surrounded by mountains that had changed little since the Earth was new, in a breeze that smelled of the river and all the trees and flowers that grew along it, to music that had been composed sixty years ago by Benny Goodman. An audience of college kids watched us from the bridge overhead and applauded when the song ended.

Maybe the Earth is better or more beautiful and life more wonderful in another place than it was at that moment. But I seriously doubt it.

LUCAS DID NOT RETURN that night from his job at the Milltown Bar. Just before dawn I heard a car out in the field and I looked out the back door and saw Lucas get out of the car and walk around the side of the house toward his tent. I slipped on my jeans and boots and a nylon vest and put on my hat and walked down in the grayness of the morning to the riverbank.

“Can I come in?” I said, pulling back the flap to his tent.

“Hope you didn’t worry about where I was at,” he said,

“Just because you’re out all night? Not in the least. Who dropped you off?”

“An Indian guy.”

“That clears it up. Do I smell perfume?”

“Lay off it, Billy Bob.” He was sitting up on his sleeping bag, pulling off his boots.

“Where’s Sue Lynn?” I asked.

“What are you gonna do if I tell you?”

“She’s wanted for questioning in a double homicide. Use your brains, Lucas.”

He threw one of his boots against the wall of the tent. “I knew you was gonna get on my case,” he said.

“You want the ATF to find her first?” I said.

His face was fatigued, his hair in his eyes. He folded his arms around his knees and glowered into space.

“She says Carl Hinkel’s people are looking for her. They think she knows stuff she don’t,” he said.

I didn’t reply. I went out the flap and took his frying pan and coffeepot out of his grub box and built a fire and started breakfast. It was still cold and misty and the fire felt warm against my face. I heard Lucas behind me.

“Midway up Swan Lake,” he said.

I DROVE  UP the Blackfoot, through lake country and meadowland and ghost ranches and humped, green foothills, then caught the two-lane highway on the east front of the Mission Mountains and entered the Swan Valley. John Steinbeck once said Montana is a love affair. If a person was going to make his troth with any particular place on earth, I don’t think he could find a better one than the stretch of road I was now on. Every bridge crossed a postcard stream, every mountain tumbled into one higher and a deeper green than itself.

Through the pines I saw an enormous, elongated body of blue water glimmering in the sun and I turned off the highway and drove down a shady driveway into a collection of cabins that had been

built during the Depression in a stand of birch trees. On the far side of the lake the mountains were thickly wooded with ponderosa and larch and fir, and the only boat on the water was a red canoe from which a man was fly-casting along the bank. Out of the north, a gust of wind blew the length of the lake, wrinkling the surface like old skin, carrying your eye with it to the southern shoreline and, in the distance, the Swan Peaks jutting up over nine thousand feet, gray and steel-colored and snow-packed against the sky.

It wasn’t hard to find the Cherokee Jeep Sue Lynn had stolen from the ATF agents. It was parked in a carport attached to the caretaker’s cottage, where her cousin lived and took care of the grounds. I knocked on the front door and waited. When no one answered, I walked around back. Sue Lynn had created another prayer garden by placing a circle of stones around a birch tree, with a cross made from strips of red and black cloth that met at the tree trunk. She was sitting on the back steps, in pink tennis shoes and a sleeveless denim shirt and cutoff jeans rolled up high on her thighs. Her face showed no surprise when she saw me.

“Lucas told you where I was?” she asked.

“You’d rather Amos Rackley get to you first?”

“He’s not all bad.”

“Are you in contact with him?”

“I take whatever help people offer me. I don’t have a lot of choices right now.”

I sat down on the step below her and removed my hat. A family was grilling sausages on the cement porch of the cottage next door and smoke drifted through the tree limbs overhead.

“You going to let Dr. Voss go down for Lamar Ellison’s murder?” I asked.

The surface of the lake shimmered with blades of light.

“Ellison told you something in the tavern the night he died. Something you couldn’t deal with,” I said.

She paused before she spoke, as though she were about to explain someone’s twisted mentality to herself rather than to me. “He said he was sorry about my little brother. His words were, ‘I didn’t know the kid was gonna get snuffed. I thought they’d turn him loose after a while. There’s some real sick guys in the D.C. area, though.’”

I turned around. Her eyes looked like washed coal, bright and hard and filled with injury and an unrelieved anger that would probably never find release. “Ellison kidnapped your little brother?” I said. “He sold him to a deviate. On the East Coast. Him and some others.”

“Who?”

   “I don’t know. Lamar was incoherent. When he finally stopped babbling he didn’t know what he’d said.”

“You followed him home?” I asked. She rose from the steps and squatted down by the prayer circle and began rolling up the strips of red and black cloth that intersected at the trunk of the birch tree.

“I thought I could find an answer. But there’s no answer. I read that book you told me about,
Black Elk Speaks.
You know the ending. For Indians the Tree of Life is dead,” she said.

“You listen to me, Sue Lynn. The right lawyer can get you off. Ellison was a sonofabitch and deserved what he got.”

“I’m not going to say any more.”

“You have to. Doc’s going on trial for what you did.”

“Somebody else was there. You leave me alone.”

“Say again?”

“A guy was in the shadows. Outside Lamar’s house.”

“What guy?”

“I didn’t stop to chat. But he could have saved Lamar’s life and he didn’t. Get that look off your face, Mr. Holland. Who hated Lamar as much as I did? Tell Lucas good-bye for me.”

“Doc?”
I said.

She bundled the strips of black and red cloth under one arm and went inside the cottage and dead-bolted the door behind her.

I USED a pay phone on the highway and called the sheriff at his home.

“Sue Lynn Big Medicine killed Ellison,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I just talked with her. She’s hiding out on Swan Lake.”

“She confessed to you?”

“Not exactly.”

“Here we go again.”

“Pick her up, Sheriff. I’ll give you the directions.”

“It’s Sunday. On Monday I’ll think about it. In the meantime, try to enjoy life. Give the rest of us a break.”

WHEN I GOT BACK to Doc’s, he and Maisey were raking manure out of the barn and shoveling it into a wheelbarrow and hauling it to a compost heap by his vegetable garden. Doc was bare-chested and sweaty and had tied back his long hair with a blue polka dot bandanna.