Chapter 17

After Terry Witherspoon had dropped Maisey off and she had told Doc of the events of the evening, I thought he was going to go after either Witherspoon or Wyatt Dixon or the three football players at the nightclub.

Or at least lecture Maisey on her recklessness.

"Wyatt Dixon went into the rest room with a handful of change? That's when this kid Witherspoon decided to bag it down the road?" Doc said.

"Yes. Was the older man going to buy-" Maisey began.

"Come on into the kitchen," Doc said.

"What is it?" she said.

"You didn't eat supper," he said, and removed two steaks from the freezer and unwrapped them from butcher paper at the sink and began thawing them with hot water. "Why don't you help me slice a few potatoes and we'll cook some hash browns?"

Maisey looked at him curiously.

"You're not mad?" she asked.

"Not at you, Maisey. Never at you," he replied.

She placed a chopping board on the counter top near the sink and began peeling an Idaho potato, pausing to glance at her father's profile, as though seeing him for the first time.

Nicki Molinari didn't give up easily. I saw him in downtown Missoula the next morning, coming out of a sporting goods store. He carried a tennis shoe box under his arm.

"You saved me a trip out to your place. Come out to the ball field with me. It's right down by the river," he said.

"No, thanks," I replied.

"You want this guy Wyatt Dixon out of your hair? Or maybe you'd like him climbing your investigator, what's the lady's name, Temple something? Give it some thought, Mr. Holland."

He got into his convertible and drove away.

I tried to ignore what he had said, but he had planted the hook. I drove my truck down to the ball diamond by the Clark Fork and parked behind the stands and walked toward the third-base line. Nicki Molinari was hitting grounders to three other men out on the diamond, splintering the ball low and hard across the grass.

Two people were sitting on the top row of the otherwise empty stands. The man lifted his hand in recognition, but the woman with him kept her gaze fixed on the field, her face as hard-planed as refrigerated wax.

Nicki Molinari tossed his bat to another player and walked toward me.

"What are Xavier and Holly Girard doing here?" I asked, nodding toward the top of the stands.

"He's writing a book about me. I got stock in her new movie. It's being shot on the Blackfoot. Why, that bother you?" Nicki said.

"You said something about my investigator, Temple Carrol."

"Yeah, I want my seven hundred large back from the skank. That's Cleo Lonnigan to you. You're not interested in a finder's fee, I can shake and bake Wyatt Dixon for you or anybody else who might be giving you a hard time."

"Why'd you mention Temple?"

"Dixon almost tore out your son's package. What do you think he'd do to a woman?"

"How do you know all this stuff, Nicki?"

"Ah, my first name again. It's my business to know."

"Good. Stay out of mine," I said, and turned to leave.

He caught up with me and placed two fingers on my arm. They were moist with perspiration. He looked at my face and took his hand away.

"It's not my purpose to be enemies with you," he said. "We got a, what do you call it, a symbiotic relationship. You see that big guy out by second base? He works for me. He's incontinent and blows gas in crowded elevators and thinks Nostradamus is a college football team. But he's got a talent. Know what it is?"

"He kills people?"

"He's a great second baseman. We were on the same team at TI. In a playoff game nobody could figure out how I was wetting down the ball. I didn't touch my face or hat or belt, but my curve was jumping out of the catcher's mitt. Know how I did it?"

"No."

"We'd whip the ball around the infield. Frank out there had a hole cut in the pocket of his glove and a sponge inside it. He'd be the last infielder to handle the ball. When it came back to me it looked like it'd been through a car wash." Nicki smiled, his dark eyes dancing on my face.

"What's the point?"

"Everybody has a function. You put the right people and the right functions together, everybody wins. Help me out, man. I don't want to sell Cleo's debt."

"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.