James Burke - Swan Peak

When she went into the back to retrieve the medical kit from under the seat, she saw a holstered, strapped-down nine-millimeter and a stitched leather-covered blackjack, the kind shaped like a large squash, the leaded end mounted on a spring and wood handle, one that could break bone and teeth and crush a person’s face into pulp. The points of fir trees extended into the sky all around her. Directly overhead, the constellations were colder and brighter than she had ever seen them. She opened the passenger door and looked blankly into Troyce Nix’s face.

“Do I end here?” she said.

“Little darlin’, the Lord broke the mold when He made you. Ain’t nothing gonna happen to you, at least not while I’m around.”

“Take off your shirt,” she said.

ON MONDAY MORNINGJoe Bim Higgins asked me to come to his office at the Missoula County Courthouse. When I tapped on his partially opened door, he was standing at the window, gazing out on the lawn and the maple trees that shaded the benches by the sidewalk.

“Thanks for coming by, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said, extending his hand. “Early yesterday morning somebody broke into the house in Bonner where Seymour Bell was living. Bell’s roommates were gone for the weekend. Whoever broke in tore the place up pretty bad.”

“You don’t think it was just vandalism?”

“No, the drawers were all pulled out, mattresses peeled back, closets emptied. Somebody was looking for something.”

“Was anything missing?”

“Bell’s roommate says a cheap camera is gone, one of those little throwaway jobs. He said he was sure it was on top of Bell’s bookcase when he left the house on Friday afternoon.” Higgins paused, watching my expression. “What’s your take on it?”

“If the camera was the object of interest and in full view, the intruder wouldn’t have torn up the whole house. He was after something else as well, something more important.”

“I talked with your boss in New Iberia this morning. She said you were a good cop.”

I knew what was coming. “No,” I said. “I came out here to fish. I got involved in your investigation because the homicide took place behind Albert’s house. Clete thought the killer might have been sending Albert a message.”

“That’s one reason I want you working for me. Albert is just like me. He’s old and wants his own way. When he doesn’t get it, he starts throwing horse turds in the punch bowl.”

“Albert is going to have to take care of himself.”

“You don’t get it, Mr. Robicheaux. The West isn’t the same place or culture I grew up in. People like Albert Hollister used to be the rule, not the exception. Albert believes in his country and his fellow man, and he’ll let people kill him before he’ll accept the fact that most of his fellow citizens care more about the price of gasoline than a volunteer soldier getting killed in Afghanistan. I want to deputize you right here, with a gentleman’s understanding that this is a temporary situation confined to the investigation of these recent homicides. I’ve got good people working for me, there’s just not enough of them. What do you say, partner?”

“What about Clete Purcel?”

“Forget it.” He took a badge in a leather holder out of his desk drawer and dropped it on his blotter. “Tell me you don’t want it and we’re done.”

ONE MILE AWAY,Clete had just parked his Caddy under a cluster of maple trees behind the university library when he saw a familiar green Honda pass on the street. He had seen the Honda twice that morning, in traffic, once outside the Express Lube Friday morning, and once later, at the mall.

Clete watched the Honda disappear around a curve at the base of the mountain behind the university. He walked across a knoll, through a grove of trees, and sat on the steps of a classroom building with a view of his Caddy. He sat there for ten minutes, sipping from a silver flask, each hit of Scotch and milk going down like the old friend it used to be, the wind blowing cool through the trees, the damp smell of the steps reminiscent of the Quarter in the early-morning hours. But the green Honda did not reappear, and Clete walked to the library, where he began to research both the life of the woman he had slept with and the life of the husband he had cuckolded.

As he did these things, he felt wrapped in a web of deceit and desire that he could not scrub off his skin.

The reference librarian helped him find articles about the young Jamie Sue Stapleton on the Internet and in music magazines and biographical books dealing with country-and-western personalities. Most of it was fluff, written by hacks who created caricatures of blue-collar people who rose from humble origins to a world stage where their brocaded and sequined western costumes told their audiences that fame and wealth could be theirs, too, if only they believed. The manufactured accents, the nativism and cynical use of religion, the meretricious nature of the enterprise, the cheapness of the disguise were all forgivable sins. It was the poor whites’ answer to the minstrel show. Starshine allowed them to delight in the parody of themselves and to turn the poverty and rejection that characterized their lives into badges of honor.

Unfortunately for the hacks who wrote about her, Jamie Sue’s life and career did not lend themselves to predictability.

She had been born to a blind woman and an oil-field roustabout in Yoakum, Texas, the inception point of the old Chisholm Trail. She left high school at age sixteen and worked as a waitress at a truck stop in San Antonio and as a dancer at a topless club in Houston. According to one interview, she earned an associate of arts degree from a community college when she was nineteen. She also married her English professor and divorced him one year later, after charging him with assault and battery and spousal rape.

With the money from her divorce settlement, she formed her first band.

At a time when Nashville music was transforming itself into a middle-class and popular medium, Jamie Sue used Kitty Wells and Skeeter Davis as her models, and a mandolin and a banjo as her lead instruments, and a Dobro instead of an electric bass. A song that always brought down the house was one written by Larry Redmond titled “Garth Ain’t Playing Here Tonight.”

She hooked up with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, a rodeo drifter some people said had the best voice to hit the Texas hill country since Jimmie Rodgers had lived there. Others said a hymnal duet by Jamie Sue and Jimmy Dale could make the devil join the Baptist Church. But two weeks before they were scheduled to cut their first album in an Austin recording studio, Jimmy Dale put a knife into the nephew of the meanest county judge in Southwest Texas.

Why had she married an older man, one terribly mutilated by fire? Was it simply money? Clete found only a few news articles on Leslie Wellstone: He had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a double major in anthropology and comparative literature, but he had disappeared into the post-psychedelic culture of Haight-Ashbury. He had made underground films and a documentary on migrant farmworkers. He had joined a New Age commune high up in the mountains above Santa Fe. He had also enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and gotten his Spam fried in the Sudan.

Clete had the feeling Leslie Wellstone was a man who had dealt himself almost all the cards in the box and had liked none of them.

Clete left the library and headed toward his Caddy. In a parking lot by the Student Union, he saw the green Honda again. A man was sitting behind the steering wheel, his face obscured by the sun visor. Out on the lawn, in the shade of maples not far from the Caddy, a college-age boy and girl were eating sandwiches on a blanket, the door of their parked vehicle yawning open behind them, their car radio playing softly. Clete looked again at the green Honda. Show-time on the campus , he thought.