“You are? I bet Click is, too.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’re still waiting on the coroner. Come inside and tell me what you think.” He handed me a pad and a pencil. “Jot down every place you’ve been this afternoon, Mr. Robicheaux, and the names of people who saw you there. How about your friend Purcel? Know where he’s been? Seems like when one of you tracks pig flop on the rug, the other one is right behind. You don’t have mad cow disease in Louisiana, do you? That’s what we’re afraid of in Montana. At least until you guys arrived. I’ve never been to Louisiana. Me and the old woman got to visit there someday.”

I followed him inside the house. Two plainclothes cops were in the bedroom. They wore polyethylene gloves and were taking everything out of Click’s dresser drawers. A straw-bottom chair lay on its side in front of an open closet.

“The wind knocked down a tree on the power line. A lineman looked through the side window and saw Click. He was still warm when we got here. That’s the only reason you’re not in handcuffs.”

Click had been suspended from horse reins that were looped over a rafter at the top of the closet. They had been wrapped around his throat and were knotted tightly under the carotid artery. His loafers had fallen from his feet. The purple discoloration had not left his face, and he wore the strange, lidded, downcast expression of a man who has accepted that he has gone permanently into deep shade. His neck did not look broken, and I suspected he had strangled to death.

When the coroner arrived, he and a deputy cut Click down with a pocketknife. I walked outside and stood in the wind. Afternoon fishermen were headed up Rock Creek Road and soon would be casting flies on sunlit riffles. I could see mountain goats high up on one side of the canyon, and down below, penned horses inside the afternoon shadows and a man splitting wood and stacking it inside a pole shed. I saw all these normal and beautiful things while I waited for Joe Bim Higgins to come out of the house.

“The coroner thinks Click bailed off the chair. He also says somebody put some serious hurt on him,” Higgins said. “You got any problem of conscience about that?”

“Guys like Click don’t kill themselves because of guys like me,” I said.

“You’re saying this is a homicide?”

“I think he was unconscious when he was dropped from the rafter.”

“Why’s that?”

“His hands were free. He was an able-bodied man. He could have pulled himself up.”

“Yeah, if he wanted to. But suicide victims don’t want to save themselves. That’s why they commit suicide.”

“You want me to come down to the department and make a statement?” I asked.

“No, what I would really like is for you and your friend to get off the planet,” he replied.

CHAPTER 23

THE BEST RESTAURANT in Missoula was called the Pearl Café. The walls were salmon-colored and hung with pastel paintings inside gnarled wood frames. The tablecloths and silver and crystal settings glowed with clarity and light; the waitstaff was dressed as formally as waiters and waitresses and bartenders in fine New York restaurants, and they had the same degree of manners and professionalism. Alicia Rosecrans had selected the Pearl, not Clete Purcel, who normally ate in saloons or working-class cafés where the food was deep-fried in grease that could lubricate locomotive wheels. Clete’s objection was not the ambience but his belief that Alicia Rosecrans’s career would be compromised by her being seen in public with him.

Nonetheless, he had consented to go there with her and had put on a new powder-blue sport coat and gray slacks, shined loafers, and a soft gray fedora that he had recently purchased at a fashion store in Spokane. He had ordered iced tea rather than wine with his dinner, and hadn’t broached the subject of what they might do or where they might go later in the evening or, for that matter, tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that. The truth was, Clete didn’t even know where Alicia lived. When she was in Missoula, she stayed in a motel. That day she had been in both Billings and Great Falls, and she was vague about where she would be the following day.

“You’re pretty tired?” he said.

“I think in the next two months I might be transferred to San Diego,” she replied.

“Yeah?” he said.

“You’ve been there?”

“When I was at Pendleton. It’s a nice city, the ocean and all.”

The waitress set a loaf of hot sourdough bread wrapped in a napkin on the table and went away. Alicia removed her glasses and put them in a case and snapped the case shut. For some reason, the indentations where the glasses fitted on the bridge of her nose made her look disarmed and vulnerable, as if she had chosen to look that way.

“You like West Coast living? Starbucks and jogging on the beach and surf fishing with old guys, that kind of stuff?” she said.

“Yeah, I can dig that. Any place where it’s warm and there’s water and a few palm trees. I spend most of my time now in New Iberia, where Dave lives.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Because New Orleans isn’t New Orleans anymore.”

“It’s being rebuilt, isn’t it?”

“They won’t rebuild the place I grew up in. They don’t know how to. They weren’t there. Back then every day was a party. I don’t mean horns blowing and people getting drunk on their balconies. It was the way you woke up in the morning. Everything was green and gold, and the oaks were full of birds. Every afternoon it rained at three o’clock, and the whole sky would turn pink and purple and you could smell the salt in the wind. No matter where you went, you’d hear music – from radios and cafés and dance orchestras on the rooftops downtown. You could have all of it for the price of the ride on the St. Charles streetcar.”

“You’re going back there, aren’t you?”

“No, I like the idea of the West Coast,” he said. “See, I remember the way New Orleans used to be. If I didn’t remember the way it used to be, I could go back and live there. Sometimes good memories mess you up. What I mean is I dig the coast. A guy like me can always adjust.”

She looked at him a long time, as though staring at a man through a pane of thick glass she would never be able to penetrate. When their food was served, she barely spoke. If prescience was a gift, it did not show as such on her face.

Later that night, after he left her motel room, he thought he smelled flowers and the smell of salt spray on the wind. Then he realized it was her perfume and the smell of her skin and not a night-blooming garden in the neighborhood where he had grown up, or waves crashing on a beach in a place where he might live in the future, and he felt more alone and lost than he had ever felt in his life.

TWO HOURS LATER, while Clete was trying to go to sleep, his cell phone vibrated under his pillow. The caller ID was blocked. “Clete?” a woman’s voice said.

It was not a voice he wanted to hear. “What’s the haps, Jamie Sue?” he said.

“We’ve got to get a message to this man Troyce Nix,” she said.

We?

He sat up in bed and adjusted the cell phone to his ear, wondering at the lack of judgment that seemed to characterize everything he did. “Why don’t you call Nix up? I’ll give you the name of his motel,” Clete said.

“I don’t have credibility with him. Neither does Jimmy Dale.”

“Jimmy Dale doesn’t have credibility with me, either. He hauled ass and left me to explain why I parked a round in Quince Whitley’s head. I may end up on a homicide beef because of Jimmy Dale, or J.D., or whatever his name is.”

“You’ve got it wrong, Clete. Jimmy Dale called the sheriff yesterday and told him what happened at the nightclub. He told the sheriff you saved the girl’s life and probably his own, too.”