James Burke - Light of the World

“You did it, didn’t you?”

“Did what?”

“Paid Surrette to kill Angel.”

“Your mother was crazy. So are you.”

“Why did you do it, Caspian?”

“I didn’t pay anybody to do anything. I’ve been trafficking in cocaine. Large amounts of it.”

“What?”

“I quit going to G.A. and put my toe back in the water. I dropped a half mil in Vegas alone. The vig was two points a week. I hooked up with some guys in Mexico City. They stiffed me on the deal.”

“So you had Angel murdered?”

“I didn’t.”

“What are you telling me? You make no sense.”

He walked to the French doors and gazed out at the lawn and the potted citrus and bottlebrush trees on the terrace and the roll of the mountains in the distance. “When I first saw you at the art theater, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. What happened to us, Felicity?”

“Nothing,” she replied. “People don’t change. They grow into what they always were.”

At six that evening, Clete came up to Albert’s house and knocked on the front door with the flat of his fist. Albert got up from the dining table and opened the door. “Is this a raid?” he asked.

Clete’s face was flushed, as though he had been out in the sun or drinking all afternoon. “Where’s Dave?”

“Eating,” Albert replied.

“Can I come in?”

“You’re not going to start a fistfight, are you?” Albert said.

“What are you talking about?” Clete said.

“You look like somebody put a burr under your blanket,” Albert said. “You want a plate?”

“Felicity doesn’t pick up her phone,” Clete said to me, ignoring Albert. “I think Surrette has her.”

Molly and Alafair had stopped eating. “Clete, I don’t want to hear about that woman,” Molly said.

“You want to take a ride?” Clete said, his eyes on me.

“Where?” I said.

“To Love Younger’s,” Clete said.

“No, he doesn’t,” Molly said. “I mean it, Clete. Don’t bring that woman’s troubles into our lives.”

“Five minutes ago this was my home,” Albert said. “Do you people carry a fight with you every place you go?”

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked out into the yard with Clete. The sun had dipped behind the ridge, and in the shadows, I could feel the temperature dropping, the dampness rising from the grass and flower beds. “I know you’re worried, but think about what you just said,” I told him. “Felicity Louviere is an intelligent woman. She’s not going to deliberately put herself in the hands of a depraved man.”

“You don’t know her,” he said. “Maybe she wants to suffer. Maybe she wants to cancel his ticket. But she always leaves her cell phone on for me. Now I go directly to voice mail.”

“Then let her live with her own choices.”

“That’s a chickenshit thing to say.”

“I meant let her pop him if she can. What she may be doing is not any crazier than what Gretchen has been doing.”

“You want to nail Surrette or not?”

“He tried to kill Alafair, Clete. What do you think?”

“You’re not hearing me. My point is, we’re smarter than this guy. Money is involved, but it’s not the issue. It’s personal, and it’s coming out of the Younger family. It also involves Wyatt Dixon. And I’ve got another suspicion.”

“What?”

“Maybe it’s off-the-wall.”

“Say it.”

“I wonder if Albert has something to do with it. He has a way of bringing people out of the woodwork.”

“I’ve thought the same thing.”

We looked at each other. I walked up on the porch and opened the door slightly. “Albert, could you step out here, please?” I said.

He came outside and closed the door behind him. He was wearing a heavy cotton shirt and corduroy trousers with a wide leather belt outside the loops and sandals with rope soles, the way a Spanish peasant might. He was smiling, his small blue eyes buried inside his face.

“Is there any reason Asa Surrette would want to do you harm?” I said.

“Maybe he doesn’t like my books.”

“Any other reason?” I said.

“Maybe he didn’t like my film adaptations. No one did.”

“This isn’t funny,” Clete said.

“That’s what the producers said when they lost their shirts.”

“Think,” I said. “Did you ever have contact with this guy? Or anyone who could have been him?”

“I don’t think he’d be someone I’d forget. I spent four weeks in Wichita and loved the people there. I didn’t have a negative experience with anyone. They’re the best people I’ve ever met. What I’ve never understood is why they live in Kansas.”

“You were in Wichita?” I said.

“I was writer-in-residence in their MFA program. I taught a three-hour seminar one night a week for a month. They were all nice young people. You’re barking up the wrong stump, Dave.”

“What year?” I said.

“The winter term of 1979.”

“Surrette was a student at Wichita State University then.”

“Not in my class, he wasn’t.”

“How do you know?” Clete asked.

“I still have my grade sheets. I checked them. He’s not on there.”

“Was anyone auditing the class, sitting in without formally enrolling?” I said.

“Two or three people came and went. I never checked roll.”

“Surrette told Alafair he had a creative writing professor who claimed to be a friend of Leicester Hemingway.”

Albert’s eyes had been fixed on the north pasture and the horses drinking at the tank. They came back on mine. “He did?”

“Surrette accused this creative professor of name-dropping,” I said. “He seemed to bear him great resentment.”

“I knew Les many years,” Albert said. “I fished with him in the Keys and visited his home in Bimini. He always said he was going to start up his own country on an island off Bimini. It was going to be a republic made up of writers and artists and jai-alai players and musicians. He even had a flag.”

“Surrette said this professor wouldn’t read his short story to the class,” I said. “Do you remember anything like that?”

Albert’s gaze roved around the yard, as though he saw realities in the shadows that no one else did. He was breathing hard through his nose, his mouth pinched. “I don’t recall the exact content of the story, but I thought it was an assault on the sensibilities rather than an attempt at fiction. It was genuinely offensive. He was older than the others. I think I told him it was too mature a story for some of the younger people in the seminar. He seemed to take it well enough, at least as I recall. Maybe we’re talking about a different fellow.”

“Surrette also said he wrote a note on the evaluation, something to the effect that he understood your objection to a story about boys chewing on each other’s weenies.”

I saw the color drain from Albert’s face. He started to speak, then looked up at the hillside and the dark conical shapes of the trees that hid the cave where Asa Surrette had camped. “I’ll be,” he said.

“It was Surrette?” I said.

“How does the expression go? There’s no fool like an old fool?” he said.

On Saturday, Wyatt Dixon emerged from his Airstream trailer at the fairgrounds and flexed his shoulders in appreciation of the summer evening and the salmon-colored sky and the neon ambience of the amusement rides and game booths and concession stands that had defined his youth and were, in his opinion, as much a stained-glass work of art as any fashioned from stone by medieval guildsmen. He had put on his puff-sleeved sky-blue shirt with red stars on the shoulders, his championship buckle, and his soft lavender red-fringed butterfly chaps and a Stetson that fit tightly on his head, down low on the brow, one that didn’t fly off with the first bounce out of the bucking chute. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though it had no other place to go, the breeze balmy and redolent of meat fires. What finer place was there?