James Burke - Light of the World

“He’s dead?” I said.

“He was when we found his body up Rattlesnake Creek this morning.”

“She was with me last night,” Clete said.

“Where?” the sheriff said.

“Here, at the cabin,” Clete replied.

“It’s funny you say that,” the sheriff said. “Detective Boyd came out here when we first got the report on the motel incident. Except your Cadillac was gone, and so was her pickup. Where were you, Mr. Purcel?” Clete started to speak. The sheriff raised his hand. “You lie to me again, you’re going downtown, too,” he said.

The deputies were putting Gretchen behind the wire-mesh screen in a cruiser, her wrists cuffed behind her.

“You’re charging her with homicide?” I said. I saw his eyes waver, his confidence slip. “What are you not telling us?” I asked.

“What makes you think we need to tell you anything?” Jack Boyd said.

“I’m asking you for the same information you give out to the news media,” I said.

“You’re not the news media,” he replied.

I looked at the sheriff and waited.

“Take her in,” he said to Boyd.

“Yes, sir,” Boyd said. “Sheriff, I made a joke to Bill Pepper. I didn’t mean for the girl to hear it. I was wrong. I hope that clears up the matter once and for all.”

“All right, Jack. I’ll see you back at the department.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Miss Gretchen is not a ‘girl,’ buddy,” I said. “That’s a term you guys can’t seem to lose. I also think you guys have a way of keeping your distance from Love Younger. Don’t feel bad. I grew up in the same kind of environment. People with money got a free pass on just about everything, sometimes including homicide.”

“It doesn’t work that way here,” the detective said. His black hair was shiny, his eyes liquid and iniquitous, his sideburns flaring like grease pencil on his cheeks. Inside his narrow-cut suit coat, he wore a white snap-button shirt with silver stripes in it. I could hear the wind channeling in the trees and the horses nickering by the barn. There was something wrong with the procedure, the way Bisbee and the detective were going about it, the circuitous nature of their conversation. And the sheriff knew that I knew.

“What was the weapon?” I said.

“That’s not your business,” the detective said.

I looked at the sheriff again.

“You heard Detective Boyd,” he said.

“You don’t have a warrant for the cabin, do you?” I said.

His eyes were empty, the white tips of his mustache lifting in the breeze.

“What was the weapon?” I repeated. Clete was staring at me now.

“Did you hear what the sheriff said? Butt out,” the detective said.

I waited for the sheriff to speak. He put a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. “Put her in the interview room when you get back to the department,” he said to the detective. “I’ll wrap up things here.”

“If any of your people hurt my daughter, you’re going to wish your mother used a better diaphragm,” Clete said.

“You’re about to find yourself under arrest, Mr. Purcel,” the sheriff said.

“Try it. See what happens if one of these guys puts his hands on me.”

The detective and one of the uniformed deputies drove away, Gretchen leaning forward on the backseat, her wrists cuffed behind her. When she twisted her head and looked through the rear window, I thought of a balloon snipped loose from its string, floating away in the wind stream.

“The judge wouldn’t give you a warrant for the cabin, would he?” I said to the sheriff.

“We’re still in the early stages of the investigation,” he said. “You made a remark about the integrity of my department. I want you to take that back.”

“I think the problem is yours, sir, not mine.”

He lit his cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully, the smoke drifting from under the brim of his hat, his pale blue eyes fixed on the horses. “Did you know Albert Hollister did time on a Florida chain gang?”

I didn’t know what he was getting at, but it wasn’t good. “Albert makes no secret about his jail time. He was a kid. He wasn’t a criminal, either.”

“So how’d he end up on a chain gang?”

I didn’t want to pursue it. “How did Zappa die?” I asked.

“He was shot to death. Two in the head, one in the mouth. Sound like the signature of anyone you know?”

“What caliber?” I said.

“Approximately forty-four.”

“Approximately?” I said.

“The ballistics on this one will probably remain uncertain.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

“There are no striations in the ball,” he said.

“The ball ?” I said.

“All three projectiles were fired from a weapon with no rifling in the barrel.”

“Like a cap-and-ball pistol or a smoothbore musket?”

“Like one that Albert Hollister might have in his gun cabinet,” he replied. “One he might have given to Gretchen Horowitz.”

“Or like one that Love Younger might own?” I said. “It’s funny how his name keeps getting pushed out of the conversation.”

“Use your common sense, Mr. Robicheaux. Do you believe Love Younger is a killer?”

It was pointless to argue with Bisbee’s mind-set or his frame of reference. Would historians call John D. Rockefeller a murderer because his goons killed women and children at the Ludlow Massacre? Did the Du Pont family have blood splatter on their shoes? Was dropping a five-hundred-pound bomb marked “occupant” a questionable act? What greater authority is there than ignorance?

“I’ve got to ask you one more question, Sheriff,” I said. “Why would you promote a man like Boyd to detective grade?”

“He passed the test. He claims to be Indian, so I have to deal with affirmative action. Also, I didn’t have anybody else, and it’s a temporary appointment. Anything else?”

“Yeah, you’ve got the wrong person in custody, and I think you know it,” I replied.

“I’ll hate myself later for saying this,” he said. “I know I will. It will eat my lunch. But I have to do it, so please accept my apology in advance. I can’t stomach you two guys. I look at you and get mad. I wish you’d go back home and drown in the mosquitoes or whatever it is you grow down there. I don’t know why I have these feelings. There’s just something about you that really pisses me off.”

Bail was to be set for Gretchen early Tuesday morning. Clete and I drove to town and ate breakfast in a café across from the courthouse and waited on a bondsman Clete knew. Clete had lied when he told Elvis Bisbee he was with Gretchen the night Anthony Zappa was shot to death. I had not been able to bring myself to ask him where he actually was. The waitress set down our order and refilled our coffee cups and went away. Clete dipped a biscuit in a bowl of milk gravy and bit into it. So far all he’d told me was that Gretchen and Dixon had gone after Zappa because he was one of the men who’d attacked Dixon and his girlfriend on the Blackfoot River.

“Where’d you go Sunday night?” I asked.

He kept chewing, his gaze fixed on a group of homeless people sitting under the trees on the courthouse lawn. “I think some of those homeless guys are Rainbows,” he said. “They used to follow the Grateful Dead around. When I came back from Vietnam, I got stoned in Oakland with the Merry Pranksters. At least the girl I woke up with said she was a Merry Prankster. She introduced me to Hunter Thompson. I ever tell you that?”

Clete had gone into his old mode of slipping the punch and talking about every subject on earth except the one at hand. “You were with Felicity Louviere Sunday night?”

“What do you want me to say? I’m getting it on with a married woman? I can’t keep it in my pants?”