James Burke - Light of the World

“He’s a private investigator, and he runs down bail skips for a couple of bondsmen in New Orleans.”

“He told me that. Otherwise, I might have thought he was planning to break into someone’s residence. He wouldn’t do that, would he?”

“No.”

“Glad we got that out of the way. What’s the worst homicide you ever investigated?”

“I never got around to ranking them.”

“You must have been a busy man. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Bill Pepper had his problems, but nothing that would warrant the mess I saw in his cottage this morning. Do you read me?”

“I’m trying to be helpful. To my knowledge, Clete never met Detective Pepper.”

“Then I wonder why he was at Pepper’s cottage. Just passing by, I guess. Maybe you should come up here. Pepper died with a plastic bag over his head. With luck, he died of asphyxiation. The blood loss is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Are you starting to get the picture?”

“No, not at all,” I said.

“When it’s this bad, it’s usually sexual. Does your friend have problems along those lines?”

“Pepper was mutilated?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“You’re looking at the wrong guy.”

“Somebody called in a 911 and reported a maroon Cadillac convertible with a Louisiana tag leaving the crime scene.”

“Who was the caller?”

“The issue is your friend, not the caller. He seems to have an extraordinary capacity for getting into trouble.”

“He’s the best guy I’ve ever known.”

“Pepper was dead when Purcel left the cottage. Why didn’t he report it?”

I didn’t have an answer. “Ask him.”

“Oh, I will.”

“What did the killer do to Pepper?”

“Probably several things. I’ll have to wait on the coroner’s report to know for sure. His penis and testicles were in the sink. You believe in an afterlife?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I suspect Bill Pepper found his hell right here on earth,” the sheriff said.

Clete had fallen asleep sitting on a bench in a holding can somewhere on the north end of Flathead Lake. In his dream, he was a little boy and had gone with his father and mother and sisters to Pontchartrain Park for July the Fourth. It was dusk in the dream, and the sky was printed with the fireworks exploding over the lake, and he could hear the popping of rifles in the shooting gallery and the music from the carousel. His father and mother were smiling at him, and his sisters were holding hands and skipping down the boardwalk, the wind smelling of salt and caramel popcorn and candied apples.

When he woke from the dream, he looked through the window and saw the pink glow in the sky and thought the neon-striped Kamikaze packed with screaming kids was teetering against the sunset, about to rip like a scythe through the air and plummet toward the ground, then rise again into the gloaming of the day. He closed and opened his eyes and looked at the peeling yellow paint on the walls, the names burned into the ceiling with cigarette lighters, the toilet where someone’s vomit had dried on the rim.

The sheriff of Missoula County pulled up a chair to the barred door and sat down. He placed a yellow legal pad on his knee and studied it. “Other people will be talking to you, Mr. Purcel. But since it was a member of my department who was killed, I want the first crack at you,” he said.

“Y’all towed my Caddy?”

“I think that’s the least of your worries.”

“Where’s it parked?”

“You want to explain what you were doing at Bill Pepper’s cottage?”

“I already did. To anyone who’d listen. I went there to talk with him. The back door was open. He was lying in the hallway. I didn’t touch anything other than the outside doorknob. I left the inside as I’d found it. I tried to call in the 911, but I didn’t have cell service. I got stopped at the roadblock five miles from Big Fork. Where’d you put my Caddy?”

“Why were you carrying burglar tools and ligatures and all those weapons in a duffel bag?”

“I’m sentimental about memorabilia.”

“That’s pretty amusing. You think cutting off a man’s penis and testicles is amusing?”

“The guy was a dirty cop, and somebody caught up with him. But it wasn’t me.”

“How do you know he was a dirty cop?”

“He was compromising the investigation into the death of Angel Deer Heart in order to earn favor with her grandfather.”

“So you went up to his cottage on Swan Lake to talk to him about that?”

“That and a couple of other things.”

“What might the ‘other things’ be?”

“He and another idiot in your department made sexual remarks about my daughter in front of her and others. This was right after your man kicked the shit out of Wyatt Dixon.”

“When were these remarks made?”

“Why don’t you ask your crime scene investigator? He was there.”

“You were just looking out for your daughter’s interests?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

The sheriff stared at his legal pad. “Detective Pepper left a note behind. Did you know that?” he said.

“No.”

“He said some people thought he had a relationship with the ‘Horowitz girl.’ Would that be your daughter?”

“Horowitz is my daughter’s last name. Your man didn’t have any ‘relationship’ with her.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Yeah, I do. We don’t invite cockroaches into our environment.”

“In the note, Detective Pepper indicated that he did something to your daughter. What would he be referring to?”

“I guess the remarks he made.”

“You’re telling me a man who’s coming apart, who’s drunk out of his mind, who’s telling the world ‘fuck it,’ is doing all this because of some sexist remarks he made to a young woman?”

“You’d know the answer to that better than me. I never met the man.”

“How did you know where his cottage was?”

“I called up a PI I know in Missoula.”

The sheriff nodded, his face composed, the long white tips of his mustache hanging below his jawbone. “That’s right, you were here many years ago, weren’t you? You did security for Sally Dio and some other mobsters.”

“That’s correct.”

“That was right before his plane crashed into the side of a mountain, wasn’t it?”

Clete looked thoughtfully out the window. “Yeah, I think I was still around here when that happened. It was a big loss. I think a pizza parlor in Palermo shut down for fifteen minutes.”

“We pulled your sheet at the NCIC, Mr. Purcel. You have a longer record than most felons. You killed a federal informant and dropped a Teamster official from a hotel window into a dry swimming pool. You and your friend Detective Robicheaux left a bunch of people dead on the bank of a bayou in Louisiana not once but twice.”

“That’s why we’re here — to rest up.”

“There’s only one reason you’re not being arrested. There’s no trace of blood on you or your clothing or shoes or in your vehicle. That leaves me in a quandary. If you’re an innocent man, why are you lying?”

“I’m not. And the reason I’m not under arrest is so you can question me without giving me my rights.”

The sheriff’s face was tired, his eyes without heat or anger or any emotion that Clete could see. “This is all about your daughter, isn’t it? What is it you’re not telling me, Mr. Purcel? What did Bill Pepper do to your little girl?”

Wyatt Dixon was unloading three tons of sixty-pound hay bales off a flatbed at his place on the Blackfoot River when he saw the two cruisers coming up the dirt road, their tires splashing through the puddles. He was shirtless and wearing a straw hat and Wranglers tucked inside his boots, a bandana knotted around his neck. He fitted his fingers under the twine on a bale and lifted it out in front of him, his chest and arms blooming with green veins. He walked to the edge of the bed and dropped the bale into space, his gaze never leaving the cruisers. His shoulders were pink with fresh sunburn, and his back was crosshatched with scar tissue that looked like it had been laid there with a whip. A scar as thick as an earthworm ran from under his armpit and disappeared inside his leather belt. The deputies parked in the shade of the cottonwoods and approached him as a group of four, studying his half-crushed house, his barn, the trees, the bluebirds, the Appaloosas in the corral, the riffle in the middle of the stream, anything that kept them from having to look directly at Wyatt Dixon.