James Burke - Light of the World

Large-bodied men wearing western clothes and Stetsons and sunglasses and boots looked in each car entering the property, but only to welcome the drivers and passengers and point out the best parking spots. There was no need for a martial or police presence on Love Younger’s ranch. A country band was playing on a stage carpentered out of newly milled pine; children rocketed into the air inside the bouncy houses; the smell of drawn beer and barbecued chicken and sliced sirloin and roasted pig was mouthwatering. Could any event be grander or more American than a visit to the ranch of an egalitarian billionaire, a patriarch who was of them and for them and who, with a wave of his hand, could wipe away their doubts and fears?

Pennants and flags of every kind flew from tent poles all over a pasture that had been cleaned of animal droppings. The ambience could be compared with the celebratory nature of a medieval fair. It needed only jugglers and flutists and jesters in sock caps and bells and pointy shoes. The elements in the Everyman plays and the caricatures in the tarot deck were everywhere. Death had lost its sting and been driven from the field, and virtue and good deeds and courage and folk wisdom had triumphed over evil. Unfortunately, the medieval morality play required a villain. Who or what might fit the role?

“Check out the art on the T-shirts some of these guys are wearing,” Alafair said. “I think they’re ramping up for a firefight in the mall.”

“Lower your voice,” I said.

“They think we’re admiring them.”

“I mean it, Alf. Don’t get things started.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Look out there on the road.”

Thirty-five years ago Clete Purcel had assigned himself the role of my guardian angel, and he wasn’t about to resign the job now. His hand-waxed vintage Caddy, the top down, was in the line of vehicles working its way under the arch.

“This is one Clete needs to stay out of,” I said.

“Don’t take your anxieties out on me, Dave.”

“How did he know we’d be here?”

“He called up to the house and asked what we were doing today. What should I have said?”

“Great. Keep him occupied. I’m going to find Love Younger.”

An oversize pickup truck, with smoked windows and huge cleated tires, pulled into a parking spot not far from where we were standing. “How do you like this guy’s bumper sticker?” Alafair said.

“Don’t say anything. It’s their turf. They have the right to do whatever they want here.”

“So do the patients in a mental asylum.”

The sticker read DA BRO GOTTA GO.

“There’s Younger coming out of the house,” Alafair said. “Who’s the guy with him?”

“Take a guess.”

“The son who poured Coke all over Clete’s head?”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Then we’re leaving.”

“Clete just headed for the beer tent.”

I had the feeling that not only was our situation starting to unravel but Alafair had decided to go with the flow and enjoy it. I left her standing under a canopy and cut off Love Younger and Caspian between the ranch house and the crowd. “You promised me fifteen minutes,” I said.

His eyes were sky blue, his face flushed and soft-looking as a baby’s, loose strands of his white hair moving in the breeze. “Step inside the house with me,” he said.

“Get rid of him, Daddy,” Caspian said. “He’s here to cause trouble. It’s written all over him. He’s a drunk and a cooze hound.”

“Go find your wife,” his father said.

“She’s just over there someplace. She’s fine.”

“Did you hear me?” the older man said.

I saw Caspian’s scalp constrict visibly. He looked like a child who had been struck in the face by a trusted parent.

“I don’t think you need me here. I think I’ll take a drive into town,” he said.

“Goddammit, son, for once just do what I ask. It’s time to act like the husband of your wife and the father of your dead child,” Younger said. His face softened. He squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Come on, boy. Buck up and get us a table. I’ll be along directly.”

As Caspian walked away, a flatbed truck turned off the highway and drove under the arch. Several people began pointing, then a ripple of laughter spread through the crowd that quickly turned into collective joy. On the back of the truck, boomed down with chains, were two portable toilets with the name of our current president and the words WHITE HOUSE spray-painted on them. Both toilets had been shot full of holes.

Love Younger’s gaze remained on his son. Then he turned back to me. “You coming?” he said.

The ranch house was constructed of teardown lumber that was probably a century old, the rusted impressions of iron bolts and steel spikes and bits of chain deliberately left in the wood. The exterior of the house was cosmetic and had nothing to do with the interior. The lighting was turned on and off by voice command; the faucets and sinks in the kitchen were gold-plated. The living room had a fireplace the size of a Volkswagen; there was an elevator in the hallway that evidently accessed a parking garage under the house.

Through the kitchen window, I could see people lining up at the serving tables. “That’s my daughter in front of the cold-drink tent,” I said. “I pulled her out of a submerged plane when she was five years old.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t plan on losing her to Asa Surrette.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He rolled up his sleeves in front of the sink and turned on the water and began soaping his hands and forearms, scrubbing them as a surgeon might. He squeezed a disinfectant on his hands and ran cold water up and down his arms, then dried them with paper towels and stuffed the towels in a waste can under the sink.

“So you don’t plan on losing your daughter?” he said. “What should I make of a statement like that, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“I think you’re one of those who have ears that don’t hear and eyes that don’t see.”

“I see. That’s your mission here? Carrying your spiritual wisdom to the halt and the lame?”

“Your employee, the rapist, was killed with three forty-four-caliber balls. Why would somebody use a nineteenth-century firearm to commit a murder?”

“I’ve talked to the sheriff about that. He says Dixon is still under the microscope on that.”

“Dixon is not your man. I think the forty-four was used to point suspicion at him and perhaps you.”

“I don’t mean this offensively, but I would gladly pay double my taxes if people like you and Albert Hollister could be paid not to think.”

“I want to tell you something else about my daughter. She survived a massacre in her village in El Salvador. She was kidnapped at age eight by an evil man who thought he could terrify her. She bit the hell out of him. I saw her kidnapper eat six soft-nosed rounds from a three-fifty-seven. The wounds looked like flowers bursting from his shirt. The last round virtually eviscerated him. I enjoyed watching him blown apart. I wished I had done it instead of someone else. What does that suggest to you?”

“That you’re an obsessed and sick man.”

“Here’s the point. Booze probably burned up fifteen or twenty years of my longevity. That means I don’t have a lot to lose. I think you’ve been getting a free pass with the sheriff’s department. You’re either in total denial about your situation, or you’re aiding and abetting a killer.”

“How dare you.”

“You have resources that even the federal government doesn’t have. Why aren’t your people looking for the man who killed your granddaughter?”

“Why do you think I’m not looking for him?”

“Because you seem uninformed. Surrette did it. The question is why and how. She was in a saloon full of outlaw bikers. Then, puff, she was gone.”