James Burke - Bitterroot

"Sell it?"

He gave me a look. "You're sure you were with the G? Yeah, sell it. Discount it, twenty cents on the dollar. But the guys who buy the debt are not like me. They recover all the principal and all the back vig, plus interest on the vig. You want me to draw you a picture? Think about guys who carry tin snips in their glove compartments."

I left him standing there and got back into my truck. The baseball field was green, the base paths blown with dust, the outfield bordered by the cotton-woods and aspens that fringed the river. High above it all sat Xavier and Holly Girard, artists whose interests were wedded to those of an ex-convict war veteran who played baseball in the middle of a Norman Rockwell setting and probably helped Hmong tribesmen grow opium in Laos.

What had the sheriff said, something to the effect that most people's public roles were pure bullshit? I wondered if he should not be given an endowed chair at the local university.

I BOUGHT French bread and cheese and sliced meat at a delicatessen and picked up Temple Carrol at the health club in Hellgate Canyon where she had started working out on a daily basis. We drove to a picnic ground in a grove of cedar trees by the river, and I fixed lunch for us at a plank table in the shade while she leafed through her notebooks and file folders and went over the edited transcriptions of her interviews with anyone she thought to be connected to the death of Lamar Ellison.

"I interviewed Sue Lynn Big Medicine," she said.

"Yes?"

"She was in the saloon up the Blackfoot with Lamar Ellison just before he was killed. She's hiding something." Temple had not changed from her workout. She wore pink shorts rolled up high on her legs and a gray workout halter and she kept lifting her hair off the back of her neck and pushing it on top of her head with one hand while she flipped through her notes.

"Hiding what?" I said.

"This is what she told me: 'Lamar would have blackouts when he mixed alcohol and reefer. Don't ask me what he talked about. He didn't make sense when he was stoned.'

"So then I asked her why she even bothered to mention the fact that Lamar'd had a blackout. She goes, 'Because you wanted to know what he was talking about the last time I saw him. I'm trying to tell you I don't know what he was talking about. What do you expect from a guy who had shit for brains even when he was sober?'"

"Could I see the folder you have on her?" I said. As an investigator and researcher, Temple had no peer. If at all possible, her interviews got on tape. Then she would transcribe the tape onto the printed page and go through the person's rambling statements and attempts at obfuscation and highlight sentences and phrases that were part of patterns.

She never asked a question that required only a yes or no response, which forced the subject, if he was dishonest, to search in his mind for ideational associations that would mislead the interviewer. Usually in that moment the subject's eyes went askance. However, if the subject was a pathological liar, his eyelids stayed stitched to his forehead and he leaned forward aggressively, an angry tone of self-righteousness threaded through his answer.

Temple maintained that the first response out of the subject's mouth was always the most revealing, even if the person was lying. She said nouns went to the heart of the matter and adverbs showed manipulation. Honest people erred on the side of self-accusation and took responsibility for the evil deeds others had visited upon them. Sociopaths, when they had nothing at risk, told stories about themselves that made the mind reel and the stomach constrict, then a moment later tried to conceal the fact they had been raised in an alley by a single mother. One way or another, Temple's highlighter found it all.

The transcription of her interview with Sue Lynn Big Medicine was two pages long.

"She uses the words 'blackout' and 'stoned' six separate times," Temple said. "The impression I get is that Ellison went outside the bar, smoked a lot of reefer with some other bikers, then came back in and told her something that made her skin crawl. You got any idea what it might be?"

"No," I replied.

"Why would she want to hide it from us?"

"She's working for the G. She wants to be careful about what she says. What else do you have on her?" I asked.

"She was arrested on the edge of the Crow Reservation for armed robbery of the mails."

"What?"

"She went into a general store with three or four other Indians. One of them pulled out a gun and robbed the owner of fifty dollars and a quart of whiskey. But the general store was also a post office. The Indians were charged with robbery of the mails, which is a federal offense. Sue Lynn's case is still pending."

"So that's the hold the Treasury agents have on her."

"Here's the rest of it. One of the guys she was arrested with was Lamar Ellison's cell mate in Deer Lodge."

"They had the perfect person to plant inside the militia."

"There's one other detail, but I don't know if it has any bearing on the fact she's a government informant. Two years ago her little brother disappeared from a Little League ball game in Hardin, Montana. A month later his body was found in a garbage dump outside Baltimore."

"How old was he?"

"Ten," Temple said. "This is a pissed-off young woman."

"She's seems to be a mixed bag, all right," I said, spinning my hat on my finger. "Her little brother was found dead in Baltimore?"

"He'd been strangled. No clues, no leads." When I didn't speak, Temple said, "Your boy's in the sack with her?"

"Celibacy isn't a high priority with most kids today."

"I wonder who their role models were," she said.

She got up from the table and gazed through the cedar trees at the river. Downstream, college kids were riding bicycles back and forth across an old railroad bridge that had been converted for pedestrian use.

"Why do you act like that, Temple?" I said.

"Because sometimes I feel like it. Because maybe I just get depressed digging up grief and misery in people's lives."

"Then warn me in advance." Her lips started to shape a word, but no sound came out of her throat. Her eyes were fixed on mine now, an expression in them that was somewhere between anger and pain and the love that teenage girls sometimes carry inside them as brightly as a flame. I put my hands on her shoulders and when she raised her face, unsure of what was happening, I kissed her on the mouth. I felt the surprise go through her body as tangibly as an electric shock.

She stepped back from me, her eyes wide, her cheeks coloring.

"Go ahead and hit me," I said. Instead, she averted her eyes so I could not read whatever emotion was in them and packed all her notebooks and file folders in her nylon backpack and walked toward my truck, the backs of her thighs wrinkled from the picnic bench.

And once again I was left alone with the beating of my own heart and my confused thoughts about Temple Carrol and the certainty that I had succeeded once more in making a fool of myself.

Later, I had the oil changed in my truck, then called the sheriff at his office.

"Do you know a hood named Nicki Molinari?" I asked.

"He and a bunch of other greasers own a dude ranch down by Stevens vine," he replied.

"It doesn't bother you to have these guys on your turf?"

"We've had gangsters here for years. They'd like to get casino gambling legalized and turn Flathead Lake into Tahoe," he said.

"I saw Molinari with Xavier and Holly Girard this morning," I said.

"That's supposed to be skin off my ass?"

"You pointed me at the Girards when I first met you. It was for a reason."

"So go figure it out and stop bothering me," he said, and hung up.

I drove out to the Girards' home on the Clark Fork. My visit was to become another reminder that it's presumptuous to assume a common moral belief governs us all.