DR17 - Swan Peak Read online

  Joe Bim was smoking a hand-roll, its tip wet with saliva. He asked if I had seen any activity on the hill behind Albert’s house two nights previous.

  “I didn’t see anything. Maybe I heard a vehicle,” I said.

  “What time?”

  “After midnight. I didn’t pay it much mind,” I said.

  “Know what kind of vehicle?” he asked.

  “A car.”

  He wrote on a notepad. “You didn’t think that was unusual?” he said, not looking up.

  “Some loggers from the Plum Creek Company have been working up there,” I said.

  “After midnight?” he said. He glanced at my face.

  “I told you I didn’t give it much thought. I had no reason to.”

  “I know you’re a police officer, Mr. Robicheaux, but I don’t like loading dead college kids into the back of an ambulance. This is the second one in two days. The coroner says this one has been dead at least thirty-six hours. Your wife hear anything?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s ask her,” he said.

  “She’s not dressed,” I replied.

  “How about we eat some breakfast and work on this afterward?” Albert said.

  Joe Bim Higgins studied the hillside, his chest rising and falling. He folded his notebook and put it in his pocket, then buttoned the flap on the pocket. His face was fatigued, his breath sour. “You worked a lot of homicides?” he said.

  “A few.”

  “Thursday evening a girl by the name of Cindy Kershaw went hiking with her boyfriend up Mount Sentinel, behind the university. She ended up at the bottom of the canyon with a broken skull. We couldn’t find her boyfriend and thought maybe he was involved. Late last night a man called in a tip from a pay phone and told us where to look. He told us the kid was alive and tied to a tree, but we’d better get our asses up there soon. You ever get tips like that?”

  “Yeah, from people who were jerking us around.”

  “The boyfriend’s name was Seymour Bell. He was twenty years old. He wasn’t tied up. He was shot four times at close range, all in the face. According to the coroner, he was shot on the hill, not moved there from somewheres else. From the looks of his britches, he died on his knees. The shooter took his brass with him. You didn’t hear any shots?”

  “No sir.”

  “You were in Vietnam?”

  “A few months, before it got real hot.”

  “Maybe this prick used a suppressor. Why you figure he’d kill the girl in one place and her boyfriend in another?”

  “Was the girl raped?”

  “She’d had recent intercourse. It could be called rough sex. But that doesn’t go with what people knew about either her or her boyfriend.” Then he told me what the perpetrator had done to her.

  “My guess is the girl was the target. The perp separated them so he could take his time with the girl,” I said. “Maybe he locked the boy in the car trunk. Can cars get up the mountain behind the university?”

  “There’s a fire road for pump trucks along the face of the mountain.”

  When I didn’t reply, he looked up at the hill again. The morning was blue with shadow, the wind channeling through the wildflowers and bunch grass. Farther down the valley, wood smoke was drifting off a stone chimney that was still dusted with frost. “If I owned Albert’s place, I’d hang up my badge and mess with my horses and trout-fish in the evening,” he said. “I wouldn’t do this kind of work anymore.”

  THAT AFTERNOON I helped Albert dig knapweed and leafy spurge out of his pasture. Knapweed is a nuisance in the American West. Leafy spurge is a plague. The root system can go twenty feet into the ground and form a network that, once established, cannot be eradicated with chemicals or even excavation by giant machines. A shopping center can be constructed on top of it, and its root system will continue to reproduce and grow laterally until its stems find sunlight. That’s not a metaphor.

  Albert was sweating heavily, chopping at the ground with a mattock, his gloves streaked with the thick milky-white substance that a broken spurge stem produces. He hadn’t spoken for almost a half hour.

  “Something bothering you besides noxious weeds?” I said.

  “That fellow Wellstone owes me for a punctured gas tank.”

  But I doubted that his mood had its origins in a minor car accident. The light had died in his eyes, and I had a feeling that Albert had gone to a private place inside himself that he shared with few people.

  “Molly said you remembered hearing this guy’s name.”

  “When I was eighteen, I was in a parish can on the Texas-Louisiana line. The electric chair traveled from parish to parish in those days. I was there when it was brought in on a flatbed truck, the generators all tarped down so people wouldn’t see their tax dollars at work. They electrocuted this poor devil thirty feet from the lockdown unit I was in. The next morning I got in the face of a hack who had been a gunbull at Angola.”

  I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t speak.

  “He cuffed and leg-chained me and frog-walked me down to an isolation cell. It was almost fifty years before I told anybody what he did to me. I saw him in a feed store in Beaumont once, when I was about twenty-one. He was a foreman on a cattle ranch. He had no idea who I was, the man who was to give me bad dreams for a half-century. He asked me why I was staring at him. When I didn’t answer, he told me it was rude to stare at people and I had better stop.

  “I was buying a weed sickle. It had an edge on it that could shave hair off your arm. I wouldn’t let go of his eyes. He laughed because he couldn’t stop what was happening. He said, ‘Boy, whatever it is you’re thinking, you’d best take it somewheres else.’

  “I stepped close to him and touched his hip with the point of the sickle. I said, ‘I was thinking about killing you. If I see you again, I expect I’ll do it.’”

  I looked at the side of Albert’s face. It reminded me of a dead fire after all the heat has gone out of the ash and stone. “You ever see him again?” I asked.

  “At the Wellstone ranch outside Beaumont, when I went there looking for work. They were oil-and-natural-gas people and ranched on the side. They were also mixed up with tent-religion groups that were just starting to expand into television.”

  “I’d let Wellstone and the past go,” I said.

  “I did, a long time ago. But Wellstone gashed a hole in my fuel tank. I called his house about it last night. A woman hung up on me. I think it was the gold-haired one who was sitting in the back of his limo.”

  Albert arched his back, squinting slightly. He stared up at the hill behind his house. “Did you know Chief Joseph and the whole Nez Perce tribe came right down that draw? They were trying to outrun the U.S. Army. They got slaughtered down on the Big Hole — women and children and the old people, too. The soldiers mutilated the dead and later robbed the graves.”

  “Yeah?” I said, not making the connection.

  “This place looks peaceful. But it’s not. The degenerate who murdered that college boy up there is the canker in the rose. It doesn’t matter where you go. The same fellow is always there. Just like that jailhouse I was in when I was eighteen.”

  THAT AFTERNOON CLETE came down to our cabin and asked me to take a walk with him.

  “Where we going?”

  He lifted his eyes up to the hill behind Albert’s house.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “The sheriff, what’s-his-name, Higgins, thinks it’s just coincidence that kid was killed behind Albert’s place.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Higgins says Albert called the Shrubster a draft-dodging fraternity pissant in the local newspaper. The paper actually ran the letter. He helped run a PCB incinerator out of town. He got into it with some outlaw bikers over a barmaid. He has a general reputation for causing trouble wherever he goes.”

  “Why would somebody execute a kid on his knees because he’s got it in for Albert?”

  “Somebody called in a 911 on the loc
ation. The caller also said the kid was alive. He wanted as many people as possible to suffer as much as possible. I don’t think Higgins knows what he’s dealing with. I don’t believe Albert does, either.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “To use your own words, why do the shitbags do anything? Because they enjoy it, that’s why. Trust me, Streak, the guy who did this has got a beef with Albert.”

  I followed him up a switchback trail to the top of the ridge, Clete wheezing and sweating all the way. Then we walked up a gradual slope through pine and fir trees to a level place where yellow crime-scene tape had been strung through the tree trunks. The tape had been broken in several places, probably by deer or elk, and the dirt road that led off the hillside was rutted by tire tracks. At the higher altitude, the air had become cold, flecked with rain, filled with the sound of wind sweeping across the enormous breadth of landscape below us.

  I believed our climb up to the crime scene was a morbid waste of time. Even though the tape was broken, we had no right to go inside what was obviously a proscribed evidentiary area. Second, the ground was soft and already crisscrossed with the footprints of investigative personnel. In all probability, any forensic evidence there had already been removed, disturbed, tainted, or destroyed.

  Except for one element that was still in plain view: blood splatter on a rock the size and shape of a blacksmith’s anvil that protruded from the softness of the ground. The blood looked like it had been slung from the tip of an artist’s brush.

  Clete put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and peered down through the trees at the roof of Albert’s house. He removed his porkpie hat and messed with it idly, then replaced it on his head, the brim slanted down. Then he removed it again and twirled it on his finger.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “The guy who drove the kid up here beat the shit out of his own car. Why would he want to risk busting an axle or tie rod when he could have driven into the national forest just as easily? The kid died on his knees. The shooter probably made him beg or do worse. The shooter did all this right above Albert’s house. He could see Albert’s house, but nobody in Albert’s house could see him. He chose this spot deliberately, and he knew who lived down below. This fuckhead is a classic psychopath. He stays high on control and inflicting pain while he’s within sight of people who have no idea what he’s doing.”

  “That doesn’t mean he knows Albert.”

  “Maybe,” Clete said. But his attention had already shifted to something down the slope.

  “What is it?” I said.

  Clete worked his way about five feet down the incline, holding on to pine trunks for balance. He took his ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and tried to pick up a leather cord and a small wood cross that lay at the base of a lichen-encrusted rock. The cord was broken, and it slipped off his pen.

  “Don’t taint the scene, Clete,” I said.

  “If we hadn’t found this, no one would have ever known it was here,” he said. But he didn’t touch the cord with his hand; instead, he lifted up the end with his pen. “Look, the break is dry and there’s no discoloration. The kid tore it off the shooter, or the shooter tore it off the vic.”

  “A logger might have dropped it, too.”

  “No, something weird happened out here. This isn’t a random abduction and killing. I’ll call the evidence in to Higgins,” he said.

  “Okay, partner, but I think you’re overreading the information,” I said.

  Clete pulled himself up the incline and stepped back on level ground. His face was blotched from exertion and the high altitude. He looked at me a long time.

  “Say it,” I said.

  “What’d the guy do to the girl before she died?”

  “Everything he could without leaving his DNA,” I replied.

  “We’re going to hear more from this guy. You know it, Dave. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

  The mist was white blowing through the trees. The rock that was stippled with the dead boy’s blood glistened in the weak light. I picked up a pinecone and flung it into space.

  DURING THE WEEK we heard a lot more about Ridley Wellstone and his family, in the same way you hear a word or name for the first time and then hear it every hour for the next month.

  The Wellstones had arrived in Montana with checkbook in hand, not unlike the Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley millionaires who had come in the 1990s, believing that the beauty of the state was simply one more gift that a just and wise capitalistic deity had bestowed upon them for their personal use.

  I must make a confession here. After telling Clete to ignore the destruction of his fishing gear by the Wellstone security personnel, and after telling Albert to forget the past and write off Ridley Wellstone’s arrogance, I had made calls to friends in the oil business in both Lafayette and Dallas. The information I gathered about the Wellstones may seem from another era. It isn’t. To a southerner, the story of the Wellstone family is a familiar one. The coarseness and privation of their background, the occasional ruthlessness of their methods, and the exploitation of their fellow man are rites of passage that are forgotten within a generation, if not sooner. The battle-fatigued knight returning to his castle, dragging his bloodied sword across stone, does not have to give an accounting for his deeds. Why dwell on the sight of burning huts in a peasant village when you can thrill to the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux?

  Ridley and his brother, Leslie, were the children of a Texas wildcatter by the name of Oliver Wellstone who, at age ten, had carried water by the bucket to drilling crews in the original Spindletop Field outside Beaumont. At age twenty-three, during the Depression, he borrowed one hundred dollars from a Bible salesman and talked a black farmer into accepting a promissory note for the lease on a two-acre cypress bog. The rig was constructed of salvaged railroad ties; the drill was powered by a twelve-cylinder motor removed from a junked Packard automobile. Three weeks after drilling commenced, the bit punched into a geological dome that sprayed salt water and a stench like rotten eggs high above the swamp. When the air cleared, Oliver Wellstone was convinced his dreams of wealth had come to naught. Then the ground under his feet rumbled and shook, and a geyser of sweet black crude exploded out of the wellhead and showered down on his head like a gift from a divine hand. He peered up at the heavens, his mouth open, his arms extended, his face running with oil. If there was such a thing as secular baptism, Oliver Wellstone had just experienced it.

  Ten years later, he owned six producing fields in Louisiana and Texas, three ranches, a string of canneries, and an Austin radio station.

  He bought a home in Houston’s River Oaks, a metropolitan oasis of trees and high-banked green lawns and palatial estates where success was a given and the problems of the poor and the disenfranchised were the manufactured concerns of political leftists. Unfortunately for Oliver and his family, financial equality in River Oaks did not necessarily translate into social acceptance.

  Wildcatters like H. L. Hunt and Glenn McCarthy and Bob Smith may have respected him, but his peckerwood accent and fifth-grade education trailed with him like cultural odium wherever he went. The fact that his wife’s face could make a train turn onto a dirt road didn’t help matters, either. At formal dinners Oliver stuffed his napkin inside his collar and sawed his steak like a man cutting up a rubber tire, then ate it with his fork in his left hand, dunking each bite in obscene amounts of ketchup. A columnist in the Houston Post said his head looked like a grinning alabaster bowling ball. He had a phobia about catching communicable diseases, washed his hands constantly, and on cold days wore two flannel shirts under his suit coat and refused to take off his hat indoors. Every day of his life he ate a Vienna-sausage-and-mayonnaise sandwich for lunch and walked eight blocks to his office rather than put money in a parking meter. At any café he frequented, he loaded up on free toothpicks at the cashier’s counter. When Oliver and his wife applied for membership in one of Houston’s most exclusive country
clubs, their application was denied.

  That was when Oliver returned to his holy-roller roots, in the same way a man returns to a homely girlfriend whose arms are open and whose heart makes no judgments. Pentecostals speaking in tongues and writhing in the spirit or dipping their arms in boxes of snakes might seem bizarre to some, but tent crowds all across Texas recognized Oliver as one of their own. When Oliver gave witness, there was rapture and sweetness in their faces. No one there was overly concerned about stories of Oliver’s involvement with slant drilling or stolen seismograph reports or, in one instance, pouring lye in the eyes of a competitor. If he was challenged by a fellow believer about the contradiction between his philanthropy and the sources of his wealth, Oliver’s response was simple: “There is nothing the devil hates worse than seeing his own money used against him. Let the church roll on!”

  But Oliver’s sons turned out to be nothing like him. What they were is much more difficult to describe than what they were not.

  ONE WEEK HAD come and gone since Molly had backed Albert’s pickup into the Wellstone limo. Then another week passed, and I heard nothing more about either the accident or the murder of the two university students. Perhaps in part that was because I avoided watching the news, hoping I could slip back into the loveliness of the season, the mist in the trees at sunrise, the smell of horses and wood smoke on the wind, the summer light hanging in the sky until ten P.M.

  Fond and foolish thoughts.

  Saturday night a downpour drenched the valley and knocked trees over on power lines and washed streams of gravel down the hillsides. During the storm, for reasons I can’t explain, I dreamed of the Louisiana of my youth. I saw the slatted light that glowed at dawn through the shutters on my bedroom windows. I saw the pecan and oak trees in our yard, the fog off the bayou like cotton candy in the branches. I heard my mother gathering eggs for our breakfast in the barn, and I heard my father loading his crab traps and hoop nets in the back of his stake truck. I could smell the humus back in the swamp and the fecund odor of fish spawning and the night-blooming flowers my mother had planted in her garden. Not far from our home, vast expanses of green sugarcane were swirling in the wind, as though beaten by the downdraft of helicopter blades, backdropped by a sky that was piled with blue-black thunderheads.