James Burke - Light of the World

While Asa Surrette was doing this kind of damage to other people, Love Younger and his family lived in wealth and splendor and dealt with problems like the temperature of their bathwater and the noise the gardener was making with the Weed Eater. I’m aware that all of us reach the same denouement, that we return to dust and our teeth are sown in the field by the farmer’s plow, but that is poor solace when you look into your daughter’s face and try to guess at the fate a man like Asa Surrette might be planning for her.

I fell asleep around four-thirty in the morning and woke at seven. Molly was still asleep. I got dressed and went down to Clete’s cabin and woke him up. “What’s going on?” he said.

“I need Felicity Louviere’s cell phone number.”

“What for?”

“Because I don’t have Love Younger’s number, and I need to talk to him.”

“I’ll call her for you.”

“No, I’ll do it.”

“She doesn’t know you real well. She thinks you don’t like her.”

“I don’t. I think she’s screwing up your life.”

“You remember those fireworks we called devil chasers? They’d ricochet all over the place and go nowhere. We’d stick them up people’s tailpipes on neckers’ row at the drive-in. That’s exactly what you remind me of.”

“Are you going to give me her number or not?”

He was sitting on the side of the bed, the covers pulled across his lap, his face full of sleep. Gretchen’s bedroom door was closed. He threw his cell phone to me. “It’s in my contacts,” he said.

I drove down to the foot of the road to get service, then dialed Felicity Louviere’s number.

“Clete, you shouldn’t call me at home,” she said.

“It’s not Clete. It’s Dave Robicheaux. I’d like to speak with Love Younger, please.”

“About what?”

“About none of your business, Ms. Louviere. Would you mind putting him on?”

“I’ll ask him. You don’t have to get snippy about it.”

“You’ll ask him?” I said it again. “You’ll ask him?”

“My sympathies to your family,” she said.

She must have been gone two minutes. Then I heard her talking and someone else taking the phone from her hand. “Love Younger,” a man’s voice said.

“I need to speak with you, sir, man-to-man, at your home or some other place of your choosing,” I said.

“Regarding what, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“Asa Surrette may have been on Albert Hollister’s property last night.”

“What evidence do you have?”

“We can talk about that in person.”

“One of my employees, Tony Zappa, was murdered. Your friend’s daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, is a suspect in his death. Why should I be speaking with you at all on any subject?”

“Number one, the charge against Gretchen Horowitz is not only fraudulent but unprosecutable and will be dropped, and both the sheriff and the district attorney’s office know it. Second, the man you refer to as your employee was a rapist.”

“Tony had a troubled life. But I’ve yet to see any proof that he committed a crime of any kind while he was in my employ.”

“You ever hear of Jack Abbott? He wrote a book titled In the Belly of the Beast . Norman Mailer was deeply moved by it and helped get Abbott out of the Utah state pen. Abbott paid back the favor by shanking a twenty-one-year-old waiter to death.”

“I never read Norman Mailer and have no interest in him. I think I’m going to terminate this call, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Your granddaughter was probably abducted and killed by Surrette. I don’t want my daughter to suffer the same fate. Surrette has a passionate hatred of her and will probably do worse to her than he did to your granddaughter. Frankly, I suspect you’re a genuine son of a bitch, Mr. Younger. That said, you’re obviously a man who cares about his own and understands the nature of loss. If you won’t agree to meet with me, I’ll come out to your house, and we’ll take it from there.”

There was a silence. “I’m hosting a barbecue on my ranch out on Highway 12 at one o’clock,” he said. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes in private. Then you can leave or stay and eat. I don’t care which. You will not make demands of me again. Do you understand me on this?”

“I look forward to our conversation,” I replied.

He broke the connection. I turned off the cell phone and drove back to the house. When Alafair came down for breakfast, I asked if she wanted to go to a barbecue.

“Whose?” she asked.

“Love Younger’s.”

“He called up and invited you to his barbecue?”

“Not quite.”

“Will Miss Piss Pot of 1981 be there?”

“You’re talking about Felicity Louviere? I didn’t know y’all had met.”

“I haven’t. I saw her downtown. Gretchen pointed her out. She carries her nose in the air, literally. She looks like an actress trying to impersonate a world-class bitch.”

“How about it on the language?”

“Yeah, I’d like to go to the barbecue. Quit protecting Felicity Louviere. She’s an opportunistic bitch, and you know it.”

After Alafair ate, she went back upstairs to revise a scene she had written in the middle of the night. There was a haze on the south pasture, as though it were powdered with green pollen; a fawn and its mother were licking a salt block by the water tank. I went into the backyard and looked for the tracks in the flower bed outside the bathroom window. They were still there, deep and sharply defined, even though the sprinklers were on. In the daylight I could also see where several branches had been broken on the lilac bushes, at a height much greater than that of a wolf or a coyote. How could a large, heavy, four-footed creature leave only two impressions in the bed? And what had broken the lilac branches?

I wished I had dropped the wolf in the north pasture when I had the opportunity, permit or not.

Alafair came back downstairs dressed in jeans, alpine hiking shoes with big lugs, and a blue denim shirt with white piping and, embroidered on the back, a huge silver American eagle clutching a clawful of arrows. “Are you sure you want to go out there, Dave?”

“It’s Saturday. God is in His heaven, and all is right with the world,” I said.

“I’m sorry I called the Louviere woman names,” she said.

“Maybe she deserves them,” I replied. “Come on. What can go wrong at a barbecue on a fine day like this?”

Love Younger’s ranch was located twenty miles west on the two-lane highway that gradually ascended over Lolo Pass into the Idaho wilderness. The countryside was riparian and lush and green from the spring rains, the leaves of the cottonwoods along Lolo Creek flickering in the breeze, the lilacs and wild roses blooming, the wheel lines filling the air with an iridescent mist. There were Angus and longhorns and Holsteins belly-deep in the grass down by the creek, and horse farms with Morgans and Thoroughbreds and Appaloosas and Foxtrotters outside breeding barns you expect to see in Kentucky but not in the West. It was one of those rare places that commercialization and urban sprawl had skipped over, and I wondered how many of Younger’s guests — who drove modest vehicles, the bumpers glued with patriotic stickers — believed that they could ever own a ranch in a setting like this; or did they concede that they would always be visitors? I wondered if this was their notion of the American Dream. Or were they like the many who wanted only to touch the hem of a powerful man’s garment, to not only be healed but to elude mortality?

Their cars and trucks were lined up at the entrance for a half mile, all with their turn signals blinking in unison. The arch over the drive was made of historical branding irons and great links of iron chain welded together, all of it supported by two columns of white stones. There was no admission price for the barbecue, no proof of invitation required, except an indication that everyone entering the ranch was of one mind and believed the hallowed spirit of the minutemen dwelled in their midst. The guests of Love Younger came in large numbers, trusting and glad of heart, their children riding in the beds of pickup trucks, all of them filled with joy and expectation as they entered an environment that seemed an extension of a magical kingdom.