Lizardskin (31 page)

When he mentioned Maureen’s name, the old man’s face changed. Then he grinned and slapped his hands together.

“Well! May I offer you something? It’s too early for liquor, but I have Evian—terrible stuff—and coffee?”

They agreed on coffee. Dr. Hogeland served it himself, the delicate porcelain cups like eggshells in his big hard hands. He settled them all down on a battered old leather couch and chair grouping beside the window, Hogeland in the big chair, Ballard and Beau with their backs to the window, facing him. He raised the cup to his lips, sipping carefully, watching them over the rim as they tasted the brew.

“Good? Excellent. Had it in from Coeur d’Alene, special mail order. Montana’s a fine country, but so God-cursed dull about food and drink, it might as well be Connecticut.”

They set their cups down on the table. “So, Beau. How’s that leg? I had Malawala up here in an absolute snit.”

“It’s fine. Hurts a bit. I’ll live.”

“Dangerous work, I hear. A tragedy, however you look at it. So many lives cut off.”

“Yes. I wish it had—I wish there could have been some way to avoid it.”

“I know you do, Beau. Back on duty already?”

Ballard cut in. “Well, we have the shooting board tonight.
He can’t be back on active until the board sits on it. Which brings us to the point—”

Dr. Hogeland raised his hand, palm out, his long supple fingers spread in a fan.

“In a moment, my dear. While I have you and Beau here, I want to clear up a small matter that I find … troubling.”

Ballard and Beau looked at each other.

Ballard shrugged. “Certainly, if we can discuss it. It doesn’t have any evidentiary connection with the … incident?”

Dr. Hogeland’s face softened as he watched her talk. He took a clear aesthetic delight in observing such a beautiful creature living and breathing in his presence.

“You may wish to judge this for yourself. I merely wish to apprise you of certain … oh, damn! My son’s here, in the next office! He’s got something to say, and I wanted him to say it in front of—to say it to Beau’s face.”

Beau tensed visibly. He cleared his throat and let out a long breath. “Dwight is here?”

“Yes, Beau. I have no other son.”

He seemed to wait in quietude, without expectations, as complete inside himself as a carved totem, beyond the passions and anxieties of younger lives. Ballard was literally squirming.

“I’m not sure I’m ready to discuss this case with him, Doc. He’s taken a brief with the ACLU for these Indian rights people. There’ll very likely be—we’re sort of in opposition, Doc.”

“I’m fully aware. This is another matter, and I’d like you to hear Dwight on the issue personally. I believe that listening to Dwight now will … will help, rather than render a complex situation even more convoluted.”

Ballard looked at Beau, shrugged. Dr. Hogeland saw the signal and smiled at them. “Thank you. I take it as a personal favor.”

He reached out and touched a fingertip to a brass plate next to the chair. In a brief moment, Mrs. Miles floated through the door and hovered at his shoulder.

“Ask my son to step in here, would you, Mrs. Miles?”

•  •  •

Gabriel felt a pain in his chest and realized that he had been holding his breath. A pulse thumped at his carotid, and his hands were sweating. That was what happened to you when you dragged out all the old miseries and fingered them over and over. Living in the past had killed his friends.

Mysticism and fanatical belief.

This landscape seemed to hypnotize a man. Too much light and space. There was a kind of narcotic here. So this thing that had come to watch him here, to stand beside him as he looked down at Joe Bell, was just what it appeared to be. Only a wind in the dry grass, and perhaps something of a dream or a wish or a need for company, and partly a trick of the light. Or of the shadow. Something that breathed itself out of the ground when Gabriel walked across its grave. A curved place in Gabriel’s mind where life had worn his thoughts away and the nothingness showed through the way a mirror wears away and you see the clear glass of which it is made.

Still, he wished it would go away, because it distracted him. He tried hard to think in such a way that his mind would not present him with these distractions. He spent a long time trying to do this, as the sun began to ride down the blue slope of the sky and the living things in the hills around him became used to his presence. The crows went back to hunting, and the hawks went back to the sky, and the snakes moved the dry grasses again. And the thing would not go away. It came no closer and did not try to speak. It would not be seen direct but stayed just at the edges of Gabriel’s vision. So after a long time he accepted that it was here, a product of fatigue and stress, maybe the drugs Dr. Sifton had given him, and of thinking about the past too much, about history and dreams and the ability of a people to delude themselves to death.

Beau and Ballard made careful small talk with Doc Hogeland for a few minutes. Then Hogeland’s secretary returned, Dwight Hogeland following as a tender trails a sloop.

Dwight was in full Wall Street today, an Ermenegildo Zegna double-breasted blue pinstripe, shirt as white as the Ku Klux Klan, and an acid-green power tie with little blue ducks all over it, Dwight’s concession to zaniness. He seemed scalded and avoided looking directly at either Beau or Vanessa.

“Dwight! Thank you for waiting. I know this is a busy day for you. We’ll make this as brief as possible.”

“Thank you, Dad.”

Dwight sat down in a bone and leather chair, setting his briefcase at his toes. He leaned back, overbalanced, and caught himself with a hand on the chair arm. They all pretended not to notice it.

“Well, Dwight,” said his father, his face a mask and his voice free of paternal inflection. “Perhaps you should begin this.”

“Certainly, Dad.”

He collected himself with a clear effort and now made direct eye contact with Vanessa Ballard. Beau realized with a shock that Dwight’s eyes were gray again. He must have taken the contacts out. It unnerved him, and he missed Dwight’s first few phrases. Gradually, Dwight’s message developed through the murk of his circumlocution like a black-and-white photograph in a tray. A crime scene shot.

“… and in this climate of heightened awareness of abuse, it is vital to retain reservations. Nevertheless, we all must, in a sense we are compelled to … exercise personal vigilance … of wrongdoing. Of course I am mindful of the implications and the immediate judicial consequences of such an allegation. However it is not
safe
simply to disregard them if they are brought to our attention—”

Ballard set her cup down hard. “Christ, Dwight! Spit it out! Disregard
what
?”

Dwight straightened at her tone, sitting upright in his chair.

“This is an informal meeting. I am under no compulsion to provide this information to you! I think you should be—”

“Son, if you can’t say it in ten words, go lie down till you can.”

Dwight looked at his father, his face a pool of varied emotional
currents. He looked back at Ballard, his face an aggressive jut of chin bone and frowns.

“I spoke—I had a long consultation with Beau’s ex-wife on Sunday night. She has—detected signs of—there’s been some blood spotting, and Maureen is a nurse, and she’s convinced that—Maureen McAllister intends to have Bobby Lee examined by a specialist to determine whether Bobby Lee has been the victim of some kind of sexual assault!”

The air in the room crackled with unspoken rage.

“Does my ex-wife have a theory about who might be doing this to Bobby Lee?”

Dwight turned and looked directly at Beau, his face white and tight. It came to Beau in a burst of pale cold light that he was looking at a man who, for some reason beyond Beau’s understanding, hated him intensely. And he knew in that same terrible moment that Dwight was going to name
him
. He tasted his own vomit at the back of his throat.

Beau put his cup aside delicately, stood up, stepped across to Dwight, gathered the front of his shirt and his Ermenegildo Zegna suit into his left fist, dragged the man to his feet, and cuffed him hard with a flat right hand sideways over his left ear. Dwight let out a sound between a bleat and a yelp.

Bracing as Dwight stumbled, Beau supported him and straightened him back up again, and held him steady long enough to hit him again, backhand, across the right cheek. His Highway Patrol ring drew blood on Dwight’s cheek, raking the skin open under Dwight’s right eye. A ribbon of shiny scarlet began to descend from Dwight’s nose. Beau watched it swelling with a certain kind of scientific detachment while Dwight struck at him, twisting, trying to bring a knee up into Beau’s belly, but Beau was in too close and it was happening too suddenly; you could see the shock—the
disbelief
—that there would be physical consequences to a legal assault. Dwight’s world was cracking open—Beau could see these emotions flickering over Dwight’s face.

As an afterthought, he drew his right fist back—now he could hear Vanessa shouting at him, but it was a long way away—and he turned his fist vertically and thumped Dwight
twice—very, very hard—right on the bridge of his nose. He watched with a feeling of clinical satisfaction as Dwight’s eyes reddened with pain and his mouth opened and shut like a gaffed trout. Someone was pulling on his upper arm now, and he let go of Dwight’s suit jacket, and Dwight dropped back into the chair. Now the nose was blossoming like a spring rose, and red veins stood out on his cheeks.

Explain
that
on your next television appearance, kid.

Beau found himself unable to look at Vanessa, although he could feel the heat of her stare sizzling on his right cheek.

Dwight stayed in his chair, looking up at Beau, breathing hard, blood on his cheek and running from his nose. His nose looked like a brake light.

Ballard walked over and stood in front of Dwight, facing Beau.

“You touch him again and you go to jail.”

Beau was silent. He nodded once at her, and walked away toward the window. He looked out at the skyline of Billings and tried to imagine how he was going to survive without a paycheck. His meager savings would not cover his alimony and Bobby Lee’s maintenance and pay the mortgage on the double-wide. Well, the Harley was going, and probably the land on the Yellowstone.

It had been nice being a cop.

Maybe he could go back with Steiger?

He felt the back of his neck burning.

Nice move, you unbelievable asshole.

Doc Hogeland was sitting back in his leather chair and sipping his coffee. Dwight’s hair hung in his face and blood pulsed from his swollen nose. His eye was blackening as he watched it.

He caught his breath, coughed, and tried to say something vicious that came out as “Yer godda be id jail id ad our, you fugging cogsugger!”

His father looked up, his face darkening. “Dwight! Shut up!”

“You sday oud of dis, you old fool!”

Hogeland Senior stood up and seemed to cast a shadow over everyone in the room.

“
Dwight!
You have a streak of coarseness in you I find absolutely repellent. Since it is obvious that you are unwilling to defend yourself physically, it seems the better part of valor to shut the hell up and put something on your nose.”

He leaned over and tapped the brass plate again.

Mrs. Miles was suddenly among them, impassively observant. She glanced once at Dwight’s condition.

“Shall I bring the bowl, sir?”

“If you would, Mrs. Miles.”

She was back in less than thirty seconds with a wide aluminum bowl, some swabs, and a packet of sterile bandages.

Hogeland knelt before Dwight and wiped the blood off his son’s face, talking softly to him, making concerned and paternal noises. Beau and Ballard waited, standing, until the doctor saw them.

“Please, Vanessa, Beau. Please sit down.”

Ballard was shaking with controlled temper. Beau, although far from calm, decided to accept the fact that he had done it and could not take it back. He was at peace with himself. He’d do it again, and again. He’d kill the guy if it went that far. Then go bowling. He could always find work.

He’d have to find it in Billings or Bozeman. He wasn’t going to move very far from Bobby Lee.

The doctor worked expertly at his son’s face for a few minutes. He felt the bridge of his nose, eyes down.

“Not broken, Dwight.”

He slapped his son on the right knee and sat back. Dwight’s face was now half-hidden by a broad bandage across the nose. The bleeding had stopped. His eyes were red, and his suit jacket was covered with blood.

Beau looked as if he had just stepped down out of a group photo, starched and unmarked.

Ballard was only slightly less furious than Dwight, but she had by now gathered that something more was happening here than was immediately obvious. She struggled to remain still and attentive, her hands folded in her lap, her left leg crossed
beneath her right, her ankles entwined gracefully, her mind racing.

“Now,” said Hogeland, reclining luxuriously into the chair after his exertions. “That was very stimulating. Perhaps now we can begin to make some sense of all of this.”

Dwight squirmed upright. He spat blood into the bowl and coughed twice. When he spoke, his voice was thick, and he could not quite achieve his consonants.

He coughed and tried again. “There’s liddle to dizcuzz. I wad the bolice called. I wad—I want—this ban id jail.”

“Son, hear me out, please, because I’m only going to tell you once. You two listen as well. This young fool here is clearly thinking with his pecker again, as seems to be a habit of his. Now Dwight, I can see that this is all a bit much for you, but you better just sit there and listen. And Vanessa—please try to relax child, you look like a leg-hold trap—Vanessa, first, this business about child molestation.”

There was a sudden exhalation of air, almost a snort. No one looked at Beau, and Hogeland went on as if nothing had happened.

“I’ve been an old country doc for fifty years, and this sort of thing gets brought up now and then. Did even back in the old days, before we had all the magazines and TV to get everybody stirred up. Nowadays, when there’s a nasty divorce going on, and you get a young lawyer with his brains in his pants there—just hold your fire, Dwight, I won’t tell you again—like my son here, I’d be damned surprised if sooner or later the wife, sometimes one of her family, wasn’t gonna go and run that sorry old signal up the lodgepole. What’d happen, Vanessa, if Maureen went to the—I guess it’d be the Big Horn County office?”