"Swan Peak" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 5

FROM WHERE SHE sat at the bar, Jamie Sue could see out the back window of the saloon onto Swan Lake. The lake was vast and steel-colored in the twilight, ringed with alpine mountains, the white cap of Swan Peak razored against the sky on the south end. Down the shore was a group of guest cottages among birch trees, and when the wind gusted off the water, the riffling leaves of the birches made Jamie Sue think of green lace.

A man and a woman Jamie Sue didn’t like were drinking next to her. They said they were from Malibu and driving to Spokane to catch a flight back to California. The woman’s hair hung to her shoulders and was dyed black, and she had a habit of touching it on the ends, as though it had just been clipped. She had an ascetic face and gray teeth and wore dark clothes and purple lipstick. She seemed to have no awareness of her surroundings or the fact that the subject of her conversation would be considered bizarre and distasteful by normal people.

“After about a year I got tired of working for Heidi,” she said. “Most nights I’d sit and watch while an eye surgeon freebased himself into the fourth dimension. I’d rather make five hundred a night having dinner and intellectual conversation, and maybe messing around later, than fifteen hundred watching a married guy freebase and pretend he’s head of FOX, know what I mean?”

Jamie Sue tried to focus on what the woman was saying, but she was on her third whiskey sour, and her attention kept wandering across the empty dance floor to a face she thought she had seen behind the bead curtain that gave onto the café attached to the saloon.

“So you’re in the entertainment business, too?” the man from Malibu said. He was deeply tanned, soft around the edges, his blond hair chemically sprayed so it dangled in wavy strands on his forehead. He wore black leather pants and a maroon shirt unbuttoned to his midsternum. His face was warm with alcohol, his elbow poised on the bar while he waited for Jamie Sue to answer his question.

“I used to sing professionally, but I don’t do that anymore,” she said.

“Is that really Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill in the picture?” the woman in purple lipstick asked the bartender.

The bartender glanced at the glass-framed color photograph mounted on the wall behind the bar. In it a couple were building a snowman on the edge of the lake. The woman in the photo wore a fluffy pink sweater and knee-high brown suede boots stitched with Christmas designs. Her hair was the color of a flamingo’s wing.

“My boss says they used to stay up in those cottages there,” the bartender said. He appeared to be a practical man who made a marginal living mixing cocktails in a rural area, and he was not interested in the visitors from California or their questions about gangsters from another era. His concern was with Jamie Sue Wellstone. She was probably one of the richest women in Montana, and she was now living year-round less than fifteen miles from the saloon. Jamie Sue Wellstone was watching the bead curtain at the entrance to the café. It was obvious to the bartender that she had seen someone or something that had disturbed her.

“You want another whiskey sour, Ms. Wellstone?” he asked.

“Yes, if you please, Harold.”

Harold bent to his task, lifting his eyes once toward the entrance to the café. He was a powerful man who wore crinkling white shirts and black trousers and combed the few strands of his black hair straight across his scalp. “Somebody out there get out of line, Ms. Wellstone?”

“I thought I recognized a man. But I was probably mistaken,” she replied.

“A guy who’s maybe part Indian?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“I saw him looking at you. In fact, I saw him around here a couple of days ago. Want me to check him out?”

“No, don’t bother him. He did no harm.”

“You just tell me whatever you need, Ms. Wellstone,” the bartender said, wrapping a paper napkin around the bottom of her drink.

The man in black leather pants with the chemically sprayed hair had come in the saloon wearing a western straw hat, and had placed it crown-down on the bar. Stamped inside the rayon liner was the image of George Strait. The man noticed a greasy smear on the brim. He frowned at the bartender. “Give me some paper napkins,” he said.

Without looking up, the bartender put a stack of at least ten napkins on the bar.

“Give everybody a round, including yourself. You might get the fucking grease off the bar while you’re at it,” the man in leather pants said. He went into the restroom and shot the bolt behind him.

“You okay on your drinks?” Harold said to the women at the bar.

“I’m feeling just right, but thanks for asking,” the woman in purple lipstick said.

“When your friend comes back, maybe tell him this is Montana,” Harold said.

“What’s that mean?” the woman said.

“That this is Montana,” Harold replied.

“That’s your limo out front?” the woman in purple lipstick asked Jamie Sue.

“No, it’s my husband’s,” Jamie Sue said.

“Are you talking about Ridley Wellstone? He must own half of Texas.”

Jamie Sue’s chin rested on her palm. Through the window she could see a boy in a red canoe spin-casting along the bank, the water’s surface shimmering like pewter whenever the wind gusted. She could feel the rush of the whiskey sour taking hold in her nervous system, warming every corner of her heart, deadening memory, preempting expectations she knew would never be fulfilled. “I used to live in Texas, but I don’t anymore,” she said.

“I wasn’t probing, honey. I grew up in a shithole in the San Joaquin. The biggest event of the year was the Garlic Festival,” the woman said. “I would have screwed the whole Russian army to get out.”

She removed a piece of mucus from the corner of her eye, then opened her purse to get a cigarette. Three joints were tucked neatly in a silk side pocket. While she lit her cigarette with a tiny gold lighter, she watched an unshaved man in corduroy pants and a work shirt and lace-up boots enter the bar and try the handle on the men’s room door. When he discovered the door was locked, he shook the handle. A moment later, he returned and shook the handle harder, rattling the door against the bolt.

The unshaved man went to the bar and ordered a beer, drinking it from the bottle, scowling at the restroom door. Then he hit on the door with the flat of his fist. “You paying rent in there?” he said.

The man inside unlocked the bolt and pushed open the door with one foot. He was still cleaning his hat with the napkins the bartender had given him, the water running from the faucet. “I’ll be done in a minute,” he said.

The woman in purple lipstick watched the scene idly; then her gaze seemed to shift sideways and sharpen slightly. She took a drag off her cigarette, held the smoke in her lungs a long time, and released it slowly, blowing it at an upward angle. “That one isn’t bad-looking, if you don’t mind them a little gamey,” she said.

“That’s Quince, my driver,” Jamie Sue said.

“I’m talking about the Native American cutie-pie who was peeking at you from the café. You must grow them shy out here.”

The bead curtain was still rustling when Jamie Sue turned on the bar stool. She walked across the dance floor, her footsteps echoing inside the emptiness of the saloon, the row of video poker machines winking at her in the shadows. Inside the café, two workingmen were drinking coffee at the counter, and a family was eating at one of the booths. A log truck was pulling onto the state highway, a dark-skinned man in a soft gray hat riding in the passenger seat, his arm propped on the window.

“Who was that who just left?” Jamie Sue asked.

The waitress wiped the counter and looked out at the highway. “A guy hitching a ride,” she replied. She picked up a coin from the counter and dropped it in her apron pocket. “Not many drifters leave a four-bit tip.”

Jamie Sue returned to the bar and sat down. “What did the Indian man look like?” she asked the woman from Malibu.

“The kind who used to make my nipples pop,” the woman said, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “I traded up, but I still think about the guy who was my first. Seventeen and a gyrene. I think he’s the reason I see a sex therapist. You ever think back on those years? I’d like to go back and maybe do things different, stay married and that kind of crap, but Maury there in the can isn’t such a bad guy, I mean, it could be worse, right? Like, I could be one of the women in his films. Jesus Christ, if you think they’re bad on the screen, you ought to see what some of them do in their downtime.”

The restroom door opened again, and the man in black leather pants walked past Quince, blotting drops of water off his hat. “Ready to get out of here?” he said.

“It’s been nice, everybody. Oops, who just tilted the floor?” the woman in purple lipstick replied.

She and her companion started to leave just as a man in a Mercedes pulled into the parking lot and entered the saloon. The scar tissue that constituted his face, and the eyes that seemed to laugh inside the burned shell of his head, made the woman in purple lipstick involuntarily clench her companion’s arm. In fact, she seemed suddenly drunk, unprepared to deal with unpleasant realities that her rhetoric had kept at bay.

“My husband was a legionnaire. He was in a tank. In the French Sudan,” Jamie Sue said.

“What? What did you say?” the woman in purple lipstick said, unable to look away from the handicapped man.

“His tank burned. He was trapped inside it. That’s why he looks that way. Don’t stare at him. What’s the matter with you?” Jamie Sue said.

Leslie Wellstone grinned broadly. “Don’t run off. Would you like to have another drink? Or maybe a dance or two?”

The couple from Malibu were out the front door like a shot.

“Why do you have to act like that?” Jamie Sue said, her eyes wet.

“They probably got a kick out of it,” her husband replied, fitting his arm around her shoulders. “Harold, what do you have that’s good and cold?”

EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING, one day later, the sheriff of Missoula County, Joe Bim Higgins, called me at the cabin. The caller ID indicated he was using a cell phone. “Can you and Mr. Purcel come down to my office?”

“What’s up?” I replied without enthusiasm.

“It’s in regard to the college kids who were killed and to the little wood cross Mr. Purcel found on the ridge behind Albert’s house.”

“I don’t see how we can help you, Sheriff.”

“It also has to do with another double homicide. This one happened two nights ago at a rest stop west of town.”

“Same answer,” I said.

“I’m about seven miles from you right now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes or so. Thanks in advance for your time.”

I walked down the road to Albert’s house and knocked on the downstairs door. Clete was still in his skivvies, cooking breakfast in the small kitchen that was part of the accommodations Albert had given him. I told him about the call from Joe Bim Higgins.

“You’re pissed off at me because I found evidence at a crime scene and reported it to Higgins?” he said.

“No.”

“Then get that look off your face.”

“You go out of your way to get us into it, Clete.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, you do. No matter what the situation is, you can’t wait to put our tallywhackers in the hay baler.”

His back was turned to me as he flipped a pork chop inside a skillet. I could see the color climbing up the back of his neck. But when he turned around, his face was empty, his green eyes on mine. “You want to eat?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. He sat down at the table and ate out of the skillet, pumping ketchup all over his meat and eggs. He stared at a documentary on the History Channel, then got up and shut off the TV set with the heel of his hand. “A kid got smoked on his knees up on that hill. Two of the Wellstones’ gumballs rousted me because I strayed onto a posted stream. The same two dudes came here and made threats. I found a cross at the crime scene that was probably torn from the victim’s throat. Can you explain how I caused any of those things to happen?”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“Yeah, but that’s the signal you send. Now, how about we give it a rest?”

He was right. I had wanted to believe that somehow our journey into the northern Rockies, what some people call “the last good place,” would take us back into a simpler, more innocent time. But trying to re-create the America of my youth through a geographical change was at best foolish, if not self-destructive.

“You have any coffee?” I said.

“In the pot, big mon,” Clete said.

Ten minutes later, Joe Bim Higgins’s cruiser pulled into the driveway. While hawks floated over the pasture and the sun broke across the mountain crest on fir and pine trees limned with frost, Joe Bim told us of the double homicide in a rest stop on Interstate 90.

“A trucker saw the smoke coming out of the women’s side of the building and thought somebody had set fire to a trash barrel. He said by the time he got his extinguisher out of the rig, he smelled the odor and knew what it was. He kicked open the stall door and sprayed her with the extinguisher, but she was already gone.

“We found the man out in the trees. A dead joint was lying in the grass. The entry wound was right behind the ear, muzzle burns all over the skin and the hair. From the blood pattern on the ground, the coroner thinks the vic was forced to lie on his face before he was shot.

“There was one bullet hole in the door to the stall where the female died. With luck, she got it before her killer soaked her in gasoline.”

“Who were the victims?” I asked.

“The female had two arrests for solicitation in Los Angeles. The man was an independent film producer of some kind. LAPD says he may have been hooked up with some porn vendors. They were traveling on his credit card. From the charges, it looks like they were bar-hopping their way from the Swan Valley back to Spokane.”

“I don’t see how we figure in to this, Sheriff,” I said.

“They were in a saloon in Swan Lake. According to the bartender, they were drinking with Jamie Sue Wellstone, the sister-in-law of Ridley Wellstone.”

“I still don’t get the tie-in,” I said.

“Maybe there isn’t one. But when Mr. Purcel called in about the little wood cross he found up on the hill, he mentioned two thugs who work for the Wellstone family, guys he had trouble with. Maybe that’s all coincidence. What’s your opinion?”

“We don’t have one,” I replied.

“Let me be honest here,” Joe Bim said. “Sometimes I like to believe that the victims of violent crime invite their fate. Maybe this porn dealer and his hooker girlfriend were killed by their own kind. But the thought of what happened to those two college kids doesn’t give me any rest. They were taking a stroll on a beautiful summer evening behind the school they attended, and a degenerate sodomized and raped the girl and snuffed out her life and made her boyfriend beg or commit oral sex on him before the perp blew his head off.

“We lifted Seymour Bell’s thumbprint off the wood cross. There were no other prints on it, so the cross probably belonged to the boy. Why would somebody rip it from his throat? Why deny a kid about to be murdered a symbol of his religion? It’s thoughts of that kind that make me want to blow somebody out of his socks. Did you guys ever feel like that? Did you ever want to blow the living shit out of certain people and drink a beer while you did it?”

Clete and I looked at each other and didn’t reply.

JOE BIM HIGGINS was not an inept lawman or administrator and probably didn’t need my help in his investigation. But an execution-style murder had been committed within sight of the cabin where Molly and I were living, and to pretend an act that evil had no relationship to our own lives, to wait for the authorities, with their limited resources, to assure us that our environment was safe, is the kind of behavior one associates with someone who relies on the weatherman to protect him from asteroids.

Clete and I drove to Missoula and went into the big stone courthouse where the sheriff kept his office. We explained that we wanted to ask questions of some people who had known the two murdered college students, that we did not intend to impose ourselves on his investigation, that we would report any meaningful discoveries immediately to him, that, in effect, we would not become an unwelcome presence in his life.

He was sitting in a swivel chair with one booted foot on the wastebasket. He chewed on a hangnail and stared out the window at the trees on the courthouse lawn. “How would you describe your relationship with the FBI?” he said.

“We don’t have one,” I replied.

“That’s what you think,” he said.

“Sir?” I said.

“An FBI woman was in here an hour ago asking questions about Mr. Purcel. You worked for a greaseball up at Flathead Lake?” he said.

Clete was standing in front of the sheriff’s desk, looking into dead space, his face impassive. “His name was Sally Dio. His private plane nose-dived into the side of a mountain.”

“Really?” Joe Bim said.

“Yeah, I heard ole Sal looked like marmalade hanging in one of the trees. All the whores in Vegas and Tahoe were really broke up about it,” Clete said.

“This FBI agent thinks maybe you had something to do with it,” Higgins said.

“Funny none of them told me that,” Clete said.

The room was quiet. Joe Bim let his eyes linger on Clete’s face. “I got a shitload of open files in that metal cabinet. Don’t make me regret what I do here today,” he said.

“You won’t, Sheriff,” I said, trying to preempt any more of Clete’s remarks.

Joe Bim removed his foot from the wastebasket. “I think the homicide of the two college kids is a random act. If that’s true, we’ve probably got a serial killer operating on the game reserve. A connection with the double homicide at the rest stop is anybody’s guess. The FBI says the male, the porn producer, was Mobbed up, so maybe it was a contract hit, an object lesson of some kind that has nothing to do with the college kids.

“The boy who was killed behind Albert’s house was shot with a forty-five. The killer at the rest stop used a nine-millimeter. But there are a lot of similarities just the same. The shooter picked up his brass at both scenes, and he made both males show submission to him before he shot them. He also enjoys hurting women. You ever investigate a torch murder?”

“Both of us have,” Clete replied.

“You saw the vic at the crime scene?” Higgins asked.

“I’ve never stopped seeing the vics,” Clete said.

Joe Bim removed two manila folders from his file drawer and opened them on his desk. The faces of Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell stared up at us from their photos. Two of the photographs had been taken for school yearbooks. Two of them had been taken in the morgue. The disfigurement done to their features by their killer or killers was of a kind you hope no family member will ever be forced to look upon.

“Jesus Christ,” Clete said.

“We have other open homicide cases here in Missoula County, cases that have been total dead ends,” Joe Bim said. “One involves a guy we called the Mad Hatter. Some guy in a stovepipe hat went into a beauty parlor down in the Bitterroot Valley, made three women lie in a circle, then shot and killed all three of them. Then he cut off their heads. We don’t have a clue who he was, where he went, or why he did it.

“Somebody out in Hellgate Canyon killed an eighty-year-old woman in a nursing home with a screwdriver. Maybe it was an inside job, maybe not, we just don’t know. We’ve pulled ten-to twenty-year-old human bones out of campgrounds, but we have no idea who the vics are or how they died. This is supposed to be a place where tourists roast hot dogs on their summer vacations.”

“We’re going to start at Cindy Kershaw’s dormitory, Sheriff. We appreciate what you’ve told us,” I said.

“I pulled a week’s worth of surveillance tape from the health club where the Kershaw girl worked. You want to check it out?”

“What’s in it?” Clete said.

“A kid who could be my granddaughter,” Joe Bim replied.

We went into a separate room where the sheriff plugged an edited and synthesized cassette of the health club’s surveillance tapes into a VCR.

Most cops and newspeople tend to use categorical names for both the victims and the perpetrators of crimes, particularly violent ones that involve depravity and sadism. Why? The answer is simple: It’s easier to believe the perpetrator is a genetic aberration or the product of a subculture that is unconnected to our lives. By the same token, the victim is someone unlike us, perhaps a person who, like a candle moth, chose of his own accord to swim through flame, perhaps someone actually seeking an executioner.

Then you look at a videotape of an eighteen-year-old girl wearing down-in-the-ass jeans, her baby fat exposed, vacuuming a rubber-matted floor with headphones on, the vacuum pack on her back swaying to music that only she heard.

In the background, people in workout dress clanked iron and sweated on the vinyl padding of the Life Fitness and Hammer Strength machines and pounded along on the treadmills as though they were traversing great spans of topography. On the opposite side of a glass window, a man lay on a table while a physical therapist pushed his knee up toward his chest; his mouth opened wide with a muscle spasm.

“Would you back it up a few frames?” Clete said.

“You see something?” Joe Bim asked.

“Yeah, the guy by the watercooler,” Clete replied. He waited a moment. “Hold it right there.” He studied the frozen image of a lean man with uncut hair who wore his shirt outside his slacks. The man was watching Cindy Kershaw, his arm propped on top of the watercooler. His face appeared only in profile on the screen. But there was something wrong with one of his eyes, as though a drinking glass had been cupped over it and pressed deeply into the skin, recessing the entire socket.

Clete tapped a fingernail on the television monitor. “I can’t swear to it, but he looks like a dude by the name of Lyle Hobbs. He was a driver for Sally Dio. He also does security for Ridley Wellstone. He also has a sheet for child molestation in Reno.”

“You’re fairly certain about this?” Joe Bim said.

“I’m not real objective about this guy. Hobbs is a bucket of shit. That guy by the watercooler looks like him. That’s all I can tell you,” Clete said.

“It’s Hobbs,” I said.

Both the sheriff and Clete looked at me. “How do you know?” the sheriff asked.

“That’s Ridley Wellstone on the therapist’s table,” I said.

CINDY KERSHAW’S ROOMMATE at the university had graduated with Cindy from a high school on the other side of the Sapphire Mountains. Cindy’s father had died in a logging accident when she was five, and she had been raised by her mother, who cooked in a café and ran a small feed business with a man she sometimes lived with. The roommate’s name was Heather Miles. On her shelf were a half-dozen stuffed animals and three trophies she had won as a barrel racer. Her eyes were ice blue, her features Nordic, the anger in her face like a cool burn.

“No, she didn’t have other boyfriends. She didn’t sleep around, either, because that’s what you’re talking about, right?” she said.

“No, not at all,” I replied. “But when a woman is attacked in a ferocious manner, as Cindy was, the driving engine is almost always sexual rage. So if we exclude the people who knew her – old boyfriends, maybe somebody who felt rejected by her – we can start looking at what we call a random perpetrator. He’s a hard guy to catch, because usually he has little or no connection to the victim.”

“Seymour Bell was her only boyfriend. Everybody liked her. It was the same in high school,” Heather Miles said.

“Were she and Seymour intimate?” I said.

“She didn’t talk about it. Why do you keep asking those kinds of questions? What do they have to do with her death?” Her bed was neatly made, the blanket tucked tight on the corners. She was sitting on top of the blanket, her face turned up at mine, her hands opening and closing on her thighs like those of someone who was trapped. “You’re making it sound like it was Cindy’s fault she got killed.”

“Did she know a guy named Lyle Hobbs?” Clete asked.

“I never heard of him. Who is he?” she said.

“A geek and a child molester. He showed up on the surveillance tape at the health club where Cindy worked,” Clete said. “You know a guy by the name of Ridley Wellstone?”

“No, I never heard of him, either.”

“Did Cindy wear a small wood cross, one attached to a leather thong?” I asked.

“No.” Heather glanced sideways. “I saw Seymour with one. Maybe a week ago. His shirt was unbuttoned, and it fell out. Seymour was a Pentecostal. Or at least he used to be. What about it?”

“You know someone who might want to tear it off his throat?” I asked.

“What are you talking about? Cindy was raped and beaten. I heard Seymour was shot through the face,” she said. I saw her eyes go out of focus; she looked like someone who has lost her footing and is not sure she will find it again. “I don’t understand why you’re here. Cindy and Seymour were taking a walk. They climbed up the mountain and never came back. Some sick fuck killed them. Why don’t you assholes go out and do something about it? Why do you keep asking me these sick fucking questions? I identified Cindy at the morgue. Did you see her face? God, I hate you people.”

She started to cry, then beat her fists on her knees.

WE DROVE UP the Clark Fork River to Bonner to interview the two roommates of Seymour Bell. They lived in a small rented house on a slope close to where the Clark Fork and the Blackfoot rivers formed a bay below a steel-girdered train bridge. The main residential street of the town was lined with willow and birch trees, shading the rows of neat sawmill houses on either side of the street. The yards of the houses were blue-green inside the shade, the flower beds bursting with tulips, the small porches dotted with cans of geraniums and begonias.

It was a fine day, cool and scented with flowers and sawdust from the mill, but Clete had remained morose and had spoken little since we had left the sheriff’s office. At first I thought his mood was due to the nature of our errand. But Clete’s involvement with Sally Dio and the Mob still held a strong claim on his life, and I suspected the furrow in his brow meant he had taken another journey to a bad place in his head and he was sorting through it with a garbage rake.

“I don’t think the sheriff took the FBI too seriously, Clete,” I said.

“No, somebody spit in the soup. They’re going to try and hang a murder beef on me.”

“You think Wellstone stirred up the feds?”

“Of course I do. That’s how his kind operate. They call up Fart, Barf, and Itch or somebody in the attorney general’s office or another bunch of bureaucratic asswipes just like them. They never hit you head-on.”

“I’d shitcan this stuff. Sally Dee was a pus head. He got what he deserved.”

“I got news for you. People who get in the way of Ridley Wellstone and his friends are going to be speed bumps.”

“Yeah?” I said, glancing at Clete.

“Lose the Little Orphan Annie routine, will you?” he replied, his big head hanging down, his expression empty, like that of a stuffed animal.

We sat on the back porch in sun-spangled shade with a tall, lean, bare-chested kid by the name of Ben Hauser. He told us his dead friend Seymour Bell had grown up on a cattle ranch outside Alberton, west of Missoula. He also said Seymour was nothing like his girlfriend, Cindy, that Seymour had one foot in the next world, and no matter what Cindy said or did, Seymour would find a church where the congregants glowed with blue fire or neurosis, depending on how you wanted to define it.

“Seymour was a little eccentric about religion?” I said.

“No, he believed in it, full-tilt. The crazier, the better,” Ben Hauser said. “He joined a Pentecostal group here, but he quit because they didn’t give witness in tongues. Then he started going to revivals hereabouts. That’s when him and Cindy got into it.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Cindy went to church on occasion, but she thought these revival people were hucksters. Sometimes Seymour trusted folks when he shouldn’t. Cindy would get mad as hell at him.”

“Did he wear a small wood cross?” I asked.

Ben Hauser looked into space. “Yeah, come to think of it, he did. Or at least I think I saw him wearing one. Why?”

“Would someone want to tear it off him for any reason?” I said.

“No, people respected Seymour. He was a good guy. I don’t understand how something like this happened.”

Ben Hauser’s hair was buzz-cut and already receding above the temples, giving him a look beyond his years. Down below us was the Blackfoot River, and a group of kids were diving off the railroad bridge into the water, shouting each time one went off the side. Ben Hauser seemed to stare at them, his face wan, his eyes unfocused.

“You okay?” I said.

“Sure,” he replied.

“You don’t know anybody who had it in for Seymour?” Clete asked.

“No,” Ben answered. “I tell you one thing, though. Seymour was smart in school. He had a three-point-eight GPA. He was tough, too. The bastard who did him in had a fight on his hands.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Seymour might have been churchgoing, but he rode bulls in 4-H. I told the cops the fuckhead who kidnapped him must have used handcuffs. You get Seymour mad, he’d take on three or four guys with fists and feet and anything else they wanted. He did it one night in front of the Oxford when some guys made a remark about Cindy. I bet there were handcuff burns on his wrists, weren’t there?”

He stared up at me, waiting for my answer.

I LET CLETE drive and used my cell phone to call Joe Bim Higgins. “We just interviewed Ben Hauser,” I said. “He told us Seymour Bell wouldn’t have gone down without a fight. He says if Bell was kidnapped, the perp probably used handcuffs.”

“That’s a possibility,” Joe Bim said.

“Say again?”

“There were abrasions on Bell’s wrists. They didn’t look like they came from rope or wire. I thought I mentioned that.”

He had not, but what do you say under the circumstances? “I was just double-checking, Sheriff,” I said.

“Anytime,” he said.

I closed my cell and looked at the highway rushing at us.

“Where to?” Clete asked.

“Let’s see what we can find out about the California couple who got killed at the rest stop. Let’s start at the saloon where they were drinking with Jamie Sue Wellstone.”

“You got it, big mon,” Clete said, putting an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

We drove up through the Blackfoot Valley, through meadowland and across streams and sky-blue lakes that eventually feed into the Swan Drainage. The weather had just started to blow when we pulled into the saloon, and the lake was chained with rain rings, the mountains gray-green and misty on the far side, like images in an Oriental painting. Some fishermen were drinking in a booth, but otherwise, the saloon was empty. A heavyset bartender in black trousers and a white shirt was looking out the back window at the rain falling on the lake. He turned around when he heard us sit down at the bar. “What are you having, fellows?” he said.

I opened my badge holder. “I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux. My friend here is Clete Purcel. We’re helping out in the investigation of the double homicide that happened in a rest stop west of Missoula Monday night. It’s our understanding that the two victims were drinking here earlier the same day.”

The bartender leaned on his arms. His cuffs were rolled, and his forearms looked thick and sun-browned in the gloom, wrapped with soft black hair. “You want to show me that shield again?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Because it doesn’t look local. I’m wrong on that?” he said.

“No, you’re right. But you can call Joe Bim Higgins on my cell if you think we’re pulling on your crank,” Clete said.

“It was just a question. What do you guys want to know?”

I opened my notebook on the bar. The bartender told us his name was Harold Waxman and that he worked part-time at the saloon and sometimes drove 18-wheelers after Labor Day, when the tourist season shut down. “Lot of the mills have closed. There’s not that much log hauling anymore,” he said.

“Did the California people have trouble with anybody here? Exchange words, something like that?” I said.

“Not exactly,” the bartender said.

“How do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” I asked.

“The guy was a negative kind of person, that’s all. He wasn’t a likable guy.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

“Said the place was dirty or something to that effect. Look, there was a half-breed or a Mexican-looking guy hanging around. He was watching Ms. Wellstone or the California woman from the doorway over there. Maybe he’s a cherry picker. It’s not the season yet, but they’ll be showing up at Flathead Lake for the harvest pretty soon.”

“You told this to the sheriff?” I said.

“Yeah, or to the detectives he sent out here. You want a drink? It’s on the house.”

I shook my head. “Give me three fingers of Jack straight up,” Clete said. “Give me a beer back on that, too.”

“The woman and the guy with her?” the bartender said, fixing Clete’s drink. “The way they talked, I think maybe they were in the life, know what I mean?”

“What did they say?” Clete asked.

“She said she’d been a high-priced hooker. She was talking about it to Ms. Wellstone like it was nothing. It was embarrassing to listen to. If you ask me, California is a big commode overflowing on the rest of the country.”

He set down a deep shot glass brimming with whiskey on a paper napkin, then drew a draft beer and set it on a separate napkin. The foam swelled up over the lip of the beer glass and pooled onto the napkin. Unconsciously, I touched at my mouth with my knuckle, then looked out at the rain dancing on the lake. The mist on the water’s surface made me think of Lake Pontchartrain years ago, long before Katrina, long before I had blown out my doors with Jim Beam straight up and a beer back.

“Did Ms. Wellstone seem to know these people?” I asked.

“No, not at all. I don’t think she liked them, either. Ms. Wellstone is highly thought of hereabouts. She could be a Nashville star if she wanted to. She gave up her career to sing gospel. That pair from California were low-rent. To be frank, anybody who thinks Ms. Wellstone would be mixed up with people like that has got his head up his ass.”

Clete knocked back his Jack and sipped the foam from his beer. I could see the color bloom in his cheeks and his eyes take on a warm shine. “I hear Jamie Sue Wellstone married a guy who was fried in a tank,” he said.

“Mr. Wellstone was wounded in a war. But I don’t know how. Maybe you ought to ask him about it,” the bartender said.

“You know what I can’t figure, Harold?” Clete said. “You’re knocking people in the life, but you’ve got a photograph of Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill on your wall there.”

The bartender looked at him silently.

“What I also can’t figure out is why young, beautiful women never marry mutilated poor guys or even old poor guys,” Clete said. “It’s a mystery.”

“You guys want anything else?” the bartender asked.

Clete looked at me and back at the bartender. “Not a thing,” he said, and slipped a folded five-dollar bill under his empty shot glass.

We talked to the waitress in the café about the man who had been looking through the bead curtain at the murder victims and Jamie Sue Wellstone. Then we walked out to my truck.

“What was that stuff with the bartender?” I said.

“I don’t like blue-collar guys who suck up to rich people,” Clete replied. “The Wellstone place isn’t far from here. Let’s check out the broad.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I replied.

“What are they going to do? Dime me with the feds? Lighten up, big mon. Everything is copacetic.”