Light of the World (9 page)

I
T WAS DUST
in downtown Missoula when Detective Bill Pepper entered a workingman’s saloon called the Union Club and ordered his first shot and beer of the evening. He knocked back the shot and drank from his mug of draft and wiped the foam off his mouth with a paper napkin, then tapped his fingernail on the lip of the shot glass for another. He was not aware that across the street, in the gloaming of the day, a young woman with a scarf wrapped around her hair had watched him enter the saloon and was now waiting for him to leave.

At eight
P.M.
, just as the sun was setting, he emerged on the street and began walking toward the brick cottage where he lived on the opposite side of the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. In minutes he reached North Higgins and walked past the steamed windows of a Mexican restaurant filled with college kids and family people, then past an old vaudeville theater and over a long bridge, the roar of the water and its cold, heavy smell rising from far below, the sun descending in a red melt where the river fanned out and disappeared between the mountains.

On the far end of the bridge, he turned right and descended a set of steps that led down past an old train station and onto the maple-shadowed sidewalk that reminded him of the neighborhood in Mobile where he had lived as a child. He lit an unfiltered cigarette
and removed a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb and tilted the flask to his mouth, closing his eyes while a warm burn radiated through his viscera.

Down the street, a chopped-down pickup with Hollywood mufflers eased to a stop under a maple tree that blocked the light from the streetlamp. The woman in the scarf behind the wheel fitted on a pair of dark glasses and layered her mouth with lipstick, then got out and looped a tote bag over her arm. She began walking on the opposite side of the street toward a small brick bungalow set close to the river. Baskets of petunias hung from the eaves of the porch. There was a swing set in the yard and a basketball hoop nailed above the porte cochere.

She stopped under a tree directly across from the bungalow. The lights were on in the front, and she could see Bill Pepper pacing up and down in his living room while he talked on his cell phone. She removed her dark glasses and took a tiny pair of binoculars from her tote bag and adjusted the lenses on his face. There was a coarseness in his skin that reminded her of the skin around a turtle’s eyes. His hands were big and knuckled, his shoulders as thick as a piano mover’s. He was the kind of man who drank whiskey as casually as someone flinging an accelerant on a fire. He had probably been a brig chaser in the Corps or with CID in the army or an administrative sergeant in the air force or a land-based pencil pusher in the navy; but he was someone who knew how to make use of the system and milk it for all it was worth while staying off the firing line.

She had sworn she was through with her former life. She had seen a counselor in West Hollywood, attended Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings in the Palisades, and worked as a volunteer at a shelter in East Los Angeles to get her mind off her own problems. Unfortunately, the latter was not as therapeutic as the former. She saw women who had been raped, sodomized, burned, and beaten until they were unrecognizable. She was daily witness to the terror that never left their eyes, because each of them knew she would have to return to a home where any night a man whose children she had borne, whose problems she had shared, whose body had settled between her thighs, would rip the door out of the jamb and perhaps
tear her apart. Nor could Gretchen forget their haunted look when they asked how they could change their lives, where they could work, where they could hide. She never answered their questions. If she told them what
she
would do, they would probably flee her presence.

She remembered the early lessons in the trade that she had learned from a retired button man in Hialeah whom everyone referred to as Louie, no last name. Louie had grown up in Brooklyn with Joey Gallo and claimed to be the character in
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
who walked Joey’s pet lion down to the neighborhood car wash and clipped his leash to the chain that moved all the vehicles through the water jets and revolving brushes. “Don’t let your feelings get mixed up in it,” Louie said. “The target broke the rules or he wouldn’t be the target. He made the choice, you didn’t. Don’t use anything bigger than a .25. You want the round to bounce around inside. One in the ear, one between the lamps. If he’s a rat, the third round goes in the mouth.”

Louie did not go out in a blaze of glory. He died in a lawn chair while watching a shuffleboard game at the retirement center where he lived. At his funeral, a woman in the viewing line leaned over the coffin and spat in his face. Many thought she was the widow of a victim. As it turned out, she was his landlady, and Louie had stiffed her on a winning lottery ticket they had purchased together. In death, Louie was no more dignified or intriguing than he had been in life, and all his lessons were no more than the self-serving rationale of a psychopath. The problem was that Gretchen hadn’t gotten into the life for money. What she learned from Louie was a means to another end—namely, to get even for the burns that had been inflicted on an infant and for the day a man named Golightly had forever robbed her of her innocence.

Don’t let your feelings get involved in it? What a laugh,
she thought.

She put her dark glasses back on and dipped her hand in her tote bag and felt the can of Mace and the foamed butt of the telescopic baton she carried. She waited until a car passed, then crossed the street and stepped up on Bill Pepper’s darkened porch. The bulb
above the door made a loud squeak when she unscrewed it. Beyond the house, she could see the moon shining on a church steeple and hear the river humming through the willows and rocks along the riverbank.

Go home. There’s still time. He’s a cop. Don’t throw everything away over an insult,
a voice said.

Another voice replied,
Don’t let anyone get over on you ever again.

She tapped on the door with her left hand, her breath coming hard in her chest as she stared through the glass at the detective’s face approaching hers.

When he opened the door, she could smell the whiskey and cigarettes through the screen. He worked the light switch up and down, his expression puzzled. “Must have burned out a bulb,” he said. “Who’s that?”

Her scarf was tied down tightly on her head, the lenses in her glasses as dark as a welder’s goggles. She tightened her hand around the can of Mace. On the living room wall was a framed photograph of the detective holding a little girl in a pinafore on his hip, both of them smiling. Another photograph showed him with a little boy. “You the lady from the church?” he said.

“Pardon?” she said.

“The one who called about Sarah going to Bible camp? Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

“I’m Gretchen Horowitz, and I need to talk to you about a comment you made.”

His eyes went away from her. Then he smiled with recognition. “Oh yeah, I got it. Come in,” he said, pushing open the screen. “I need to explain some things.”

Don’t do it,
the voice said.

“I heard what you and your deputy said.”

“I’m sorry about that. I’m expecting a phone call,” he said, stepping back, motioning her in. “My granddaughter is gonna be visiting in June. I’m supposed to enroll her in Bible camp. That’s why I thought—” The phone rang on a hallway table. He made a face and picked it up, leaving her in the doorway, gesturing at her to come in while he talked.

She could hear only part of the conversation, but it was obvious he was agitated and conflicted, trying to suppress his irritation and at the same time please the party on the other end of the line. “No, sir, Dixon may be a partner in the crime, but not necessarily,” he said. “We have the arrow somebody shot at the Robicheaux girl. I found a salesman at Bob Ward’s sporting goods who remembers a guy buying a bow and arrows of the same kind three days ago. He remembers the guy wearing a bracelet woven from metal wire . . . No, sir, the guy paid cash, so all we have on him is the salesman’s description. Trust me on this, sir. I’m gonna nail the man who did this to your granddaughter.”

She was standing inside the doorway when he hung up. He seemed to look at her without seeing her.

“Was that the grandfather of the Indian girl who was killed?” she asked.

“I was just doing a little outreach,” he said. “Where were we? My treatment of Wyatt Dixon this morning? He’s got people around here fooled, but I knew him when he was a member of a white-power group down in the Bitterroot Valley, the same bunch at Hayden Lake over in Idaho. I saw what somebody did to that Indian girl, and this morning I went a little crazy. I lost it. I wish I hadn’t.”

She had taken off her glasses and placed them in her tote bag. She continued to stare at him, not speaking.

“You want a drink?” he said.

When she didn’t answer, he sat down on a couch with a cheap flower-print cover. He pulled the cork from a whiskey bottle and poured into a teacup. “Let me catch my breath. Sit down, will you, please? Okay, this is what it is: I went up there on the logging road, and the deputy made a wiseacre sexist remark, and I thought I’d say something smart back. I shot off my mouth. I’m sorry I did that. Look, this doesn’t excuse my behavior, but I’ve got a couple of problems myself, one with my prostate, the other with my daughter, who can’t get her life on track.”

He looked down at his teacup, then picked it up and drank it empty. “I got the Big C. I might beat it, I might not. If I had my way, I’d be down in Muscle Shoals, crabbing with my grandchildren.
Except I need the income for my daughter and her kids, and I can’t retire. Maybe you can help me with something here.”

“I doubt it.”

“Your friend the Robicheaux girl? She’s sure she didn’t see who shot that arrow at her?”

“Ask her.”

“Like I was saying on the phone, we got the arrow from her, but the only prints on it were hers. That means the guy who shot it wiped it down. Which means he was operating in a premeditated fashion to commit a homicide. Wyatt Dixon had no reason to target the Robicheaux girl.”

“Then who was it?”

He rubbed his palms up and down on his thighs, a spark of static electricity jumping off the heel of his hand. “I got a theory. Close the door and sit down. You want a glass of wine or a Pepsi? My guess is you’d rather have a Pepsi.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because you’re all business, lady. You don’t mess around. I doubt you ever take guff off a man, either.”

He went to the small kitchen just off the living room and opened the refrigerator and placed the ice tray and a tall glass on the counter and ripped the tab on a soda can and filled the glass, all the while talking about his grandchildren with his back to her. She was standing in the same spot when he came back into the living room. “Mind if I close this? I think it’s fixing to rain again,” he said, pushing the front door shut. “Dixon may not have shot at your friend, but that doesn’t mean he’s an innocent man. He stays viable through deception. He loved what I did to him this morning because he was center stage. I’ve known his kind all my life, ignorant peckerwoods always spouting from the Bible. They say they’re born-again, but they’ll cut your throat for a quarter and lick the cut clean for an extra dime.”

“You seem to really hate him.”

“What I hate is deceit. I’ll tell you something I don’t tell many people. My father was a brakeman on the old L and N line. He took pity on a black vagabond and fed him and let him sleep in a boxcar parked on a siding. When the guy woke up, he killed my father with
a pocketknife and took his billfold and left his body on the tracks. We moved to a place on an alley in Macon, and I grew up shining shoes, and my mother and little sister did housecleaning. You learn a lot about the world looking up from a shoeshine box. How do you think that Indian girl got killed? Somebody deceived her. We know she knew Dixon because she bought a bracelet from him. Maybe her killer was Dixon’s friend, maybe a partner of some kind.”

She sat down in a chair across from him. “Run that by me again.”

He went into a circuitous history about Dixon’s background, the crimes of which he was suspected but never charged, the fact that Dixon had been a member of a separatist group in Texas and on the edge of the same circles as Timothy McVeigh. She sipped from her glass, the fatigue of the day starting to catch up with her, her concentration starting to stray. She noticed the tidy drabness of the room, the frayed carpets, the nicked furniture, like a re-creation of an impoverished working-class home from many years ago. He seemed to become frustrated with her inattention, his hands moving more rapidly, his chest swelling. He loosened his collar. “Are you listening?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To talk.”

“Then why don’t you talk? Maybe you came here for something else.”

“I think we’ve straightened it out.”

“What were you going to do if that didn’t happen?”

Her mouth was dry, the muscles in her chest not working right.

“Why don’t you answer the question?” he said.

“What did you just say?”

“I was talking about deception. Haven’t you been listening? You look a little woozy.”

She set her glass on the coffee table and looked at it. She had drunk half the glass, and the ice had melted and seemed as thin as frost-coated dimes floating on top of the Pepsi. Her skin felt rubbery and dead to the touch, and her tongue was thick and her words slurred when she tried to speak.

“It’s kind of like being in a slow-motion film, isn’t it?” he said. “I got you, girlie.”

Rohypnol,
she thought.

He picked up her tote bag from the floor and pulled it open against the drawstring and lifted out the can of Mace and the expandable baton known as an ASP. “I checked you out today. Miami-Dade PD says you may have been a female badass for the Mob. This is Montana, girl. You don’t do a beatdown on a Missoula County sheriff’s detective. You seriously fucked yourself tonight.” He got up from the couch and turned off the light in the kitchen and the table lamps in the living room. “My van is in back. But just so you know there’re no hard feelings—”