James Burke - Light of the World

He put on his white suit an uncle had bought him for his confirmation and went to the woman’s house one block from Audubon Park. When he knocked at the front door, a black butler answered and told him to go around to the rear. Clete walked along the flagstone path through the side yard and under a latticework arch hung with orange trumpet vine. The backyard was crowded with black children from the other side of Magazine. The woman who had stroked his hair was not there, nor did she ever show up.

That night he returned with a box of rocks and broke all the glass in her greenhouse and destroyed the flowers in her gardens.

At some point in your life, you have to give up anger or it will destroy your spirit the way cancer destroys living tissue. At least that is what I told myself, even though I was not very good at taking my own advice. I hated to see Clete suffer because of the injustice done to him by his alcoholic father. He didn’t like the Love Youngers of the world, and neither did I. But why suffer because of them? I never knew one of them who didn’t write his own denouement, so why not leave them to their own fate?

There was no lack of public information about Mr. Younger. He became a millionaire by buying wheat futures in the Midwest with money he borrowed from a church, when few people outside government knew the Nixon administration was about to open up new markets in Russia. Later, in a poker game, he won a 30 percent interest in an independent drilling company, one teetering on bankruptcy. He redrilled old oil fields that others had given up on, going down to a record twenty-five thousand feet, and punched into one of the biggest geological domes in Louisiana’s history. Love Younger had a green thumb. Whatever he touched turned to money, huge amounts of it, millions that became billions, the kind of wealth that could buy governments or the geographic entirety of a third-world country.

The rest of his story was another matter. One son, an aviator, went down in a desert while dropping supplies to French mercenaries and died a hellish death from thirst and exposure. Another son plowed his Porsche into the side of a train in Katy, Texas. A daughter who suffered delusions and agitated depression underwent an experimental operation at a clinic in Brazil that her father had chosen for her. As promised, she awoke from the anesthesia totally free of her depression and imaginary fears. She was also a vegetable.

Felicity came back in the living room. “Follow me,” she said.

“We can do that,” Clete said, getting to his feet.

She turned and looked at him. She wore a peasant blouse and a thin ankle-length pleated cotton skirt and white doeskin moccasins, as a flower child from the 1960s might. “I think you’re here for self-serving purposes,” she said.

“My daughter may be in danger,” I said. “She believes a psychopath she interviewed in a Kansas prison is in this area.”

“And you think this psychopath murdered Angel?”

“I’m not sure what to think.”

“You’re telling me that your daughter may be the reason this man is in the area and that he murdered Angel?”

“You can draw your own conclusions, Ms. Younger.”

“I use my maiden name. It’s Felicity Louviere. Do you want to talk to my father-in-law now, or would you prefer to leave?”

She was much smaller than Clete and I, but she looked up into my face with such animus that I almost stepped back. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said.

“We’re going through a bad time right now,” she replied. “You’ll have to forgive me.”

She walked ahead of us, past a sunlit set of French doors, her body in silhouette. “She doesn’t have on any underwear. This place is a nuthouse,” I heard Clete whisper.

“Will you be quiet?” I said.

“What’d I say?” he asked.

The rear windows of Love Younger’s den looked onto the river and a ridge of mountains that were jagged and blue and marbled with new snow on the peaks. Younger was seated at a large worktable scattered with oily rags and bore brushes and the tiny tools of a gunsmith and the clocklike inner workings of early firearms. He looked up at me from his work on an 1851 Colt revolver, one almost unblemished by rust or wear. “Thank you for coming, gentlemen,” he said. “I’m sorry I was short with you this morning, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“It’s all right.”

“You know a sheriff’s detective by the name of Bill Pepper?” he asked.

“I do. I believe he abused a man who was in his custody, a rodeo clown by the name of Wyatt Dixon.”

“Abused him in what way?”

“Worked him over while his wrists were cuffed behind him.”

“I’ve been getting feedback from Pepper, but I didn’t know that about him. He says Dixon may have a partner and the partner might be the man who shot an arrow at your daughter. Pepper interviewed a salesman at a sporting goods store who sold a hunter’s bow to a man wearing a bracelet like the one Dixon sold my granddaughter.”

“Pepper didn’t share that information with me, Mr. Younger.”

“He didn’t?”

“No, sir. This is Clete Purcel. He’s the friend I told you about.”

“How do you do, Mr. Purcel?” Younger said. He rose slightly from his chair and shook Clete’s hand. Neither his son nor his daughter-in-law had uttered a word since we entered the room, and I had the feeling they seldom spoke unless they were spoken to. “My son and daughter-in-law adopted Angel from an orphanage by the Blackfoot Reservation. I did everything I could to keep her from drinking and hanging out with bad people. She was the sweetest little girl I ever knew. Good God, what kind of man would take a teenage girl into a barn and suffocate her?”

There are times in our lives when words are of no value. This was one of them. I have never lost a child, but I know many people who have. I have also had to knock on a family’s door and tell them their child was killed in an accident or by a predator. I have come to believe there is no greater sorrow than experiencing a loss of this kind, particularly when the child’s life was taken to satisfy the self-centered agenda of a degenerate.

“My second wife was killed by some bad men, Mr. Younger,” I said. “I didn’t want people’s sympathies, and I particularly resented people who felt they had to console me. At the time I had only one desire — to smoke the guys who killed my wife.”

He looked up at me, waiting.

“I got my wish. It didn’t give me any rest,” I said.

“How long ago did this happen?”

“Twenty-four years ago.”

“And even now you have no rest?”

“There’re some things you don’t get over.”

The foster parents of the girl were standing behind me. Caspian, the father, stepped between me and Love Younger. His unshaved and unwashed look made me think of a man who had gone into another country, one where a person can be dissolute without penalty, only to return home and find everything he owned in ruins. “I heard you say something to Felicity about a psychopath in Kansas, a man who might be living in this area,” Caspian said.

“My daughter is a writer. She had planned to write a book about a serial killer and sadist named Asa Surrette. She interviewed him two or three times but was so disgusted by the experience that she decided not to write the book. Instead, she wrote a series of articles that she hoped would expose him to the death penalty.”

“Where is he?” Love Younger asked.

“The authorities in Kansas say he died in a collision involving a gasoline truck and a prison van.”

His eyes searched my face. “You don’t believe that?” he asked.

“Earlier this week my daughter was followed by a man in a skinned-up Ford pickup. She thinks it was Asa Surrette.”