Chapter 27

Thursday morning I drove down to Stevens-ville, then east of town toward the Sapphires and Nicki Molinari's ranch. It was raining in the south and dust was blowing out of the valley, and in the distance there were veins of lightning inside the dust and rain. When I turned into Molinari's drive his man Frank was trying to catch up a horse that was eating the petunias in the flower bed.

He ran at the horse with a rope, then threw dirt clods at it. He tried to whip it across the flanks with a fishing rod and instead tripped over the garden hose and was almost kicked in the face.

Nicki Molinari came out of the barn, waving his hands.

"Frank, Frank, wrong way to go about it," he said.

"He ate all your flowers," Frank said.

"We'll get some new ones. Look, give him these molasses balls. See, let him eat them out of your palm so he don't bite your fingers," Molinari said.

"He went to the bathroom all over the walk," Frank said.

"I'll hose it off. I'm gonna talk to my guest now. You did fine, Frank," Molinari said.

He watched Frank walk into the barn with the horse following behind him.

"You want a job in personnel management?" he asked.

"I hear you got over your objections to Cleo Lonnigan."

"What, you think she's working my joint or something?"

"It occurred to me," I said.

"Well, you thought right. It would be the smart move. Cleo gives me my money, I remodel your bone structure. Except the truth is I like you. Don't ask me why."

"What's the angle with Cleo?"

"Horizontal. It's the nature of the world, Counselor."

I looked away at his neighbor's property. There was a small white church by the road, and the neighbor was up on the roof, hammering down shingles. I looked back at Molinari. For some reason his face seemed different, the eyes sunken, the skeletal outline of his skull just below the skin.

"What are you staring at?" he asked.

"I think you're going to come to a bad end."

"You're a fortune-teller or something?" he said, and tried to grin. "Hey, Counselor, you need to get that look off your face."

"It's the way you use people. I think it's about to come back on you."

"I'm in a good mood here. But you're using up my patience."

"You're a victim, Nicki. You just don't know it."

"I'm a victim?"

"She's a physician. You're a graduate of Terminal Island. Who do you think is going to win all the marbles?"

"Frank, get out here!" he yelled at the barn.

I DROVE BACK to Missoula and parked at Temple's motel, and we took a walk down by the river and she put her hand in mine. The current in the river looked fast and green and coppery in the late-afternoon sunlight, and rafters were floating under the walk bridge that led to the university, splashing foam into the air with their oars. I told Temple about my visit with Nicki Molinari and felt her release my hand.

"Cleo Lonnigan again. What's this guy got that she wants?" she said.

"I'm not sure."

"Why'd you call Molinari a victim?"

I looked out at the rafters rolling and spinning through the riffle and wished I had not gotten into the subject.

"I smelled an odor I'd almost forgotten. At first I thought it was on the wind. Soldiers talk about it," I said.

"I don't know if I want to hear this," Temple said.

"I stuck playing cards in the mouths of dead people, Temple. I couldn't wash their smell off my hand. Like they'd breathed something on my skin. I smelled it on Molinari. I didn't imagine it."

"I'm not going to listen to this. No, no, not today. See you in the ice cream store," she said, walking ahead of me, shaking her hands in the air, smiling giddily at people passing in the opposite direction.

The next morning the phone rang in Doc's living room. Maisey answered it, then handed the receiver to me.

"That little puke Terry Witherspoon just left the department. He's filing a hit-and-run charge against Maisey Voss," the sheriff said.

"What are you going to do?"

"She deliberately smashed in the front of Wyatt Dixon's car."

"Witherspoon started it. She should have run over him," I said.

"I can't believe you're an attorney."

I waited in the silence. Then I said, "Did you call here for another reason?"

I heard him exhale against the phone receiver. "I drove out to Cleo Lonnigan's yesterday. She told me this ATF agent, this guy Rackley, was out to see her last week. Rackley says her son and husband were probably killed by outlaw bikers."

"How do you know he actually said this?"

"I called him up. He says Lamar Ellison may have been mixed up in it."

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

"Because maybe Cleo was right all along and I was saying otherwise. Because maybe other individuals had reason to set Lamar Ellison on fire."

"Did you tell that to the district attorney?"

"None of your business," he said.

"You're a good man, Sheriff."

"Tell my old woman that. Have you seen Sue Lynn Big Medicine?"

"No, sir."

"Where's your son?"

After a beat, I said, "I couldn't say right offhand."

"That's what I thought," the sheriff said. The line went dead.

I walked into the kitchen, where Doc was washing out three gutted rainbows in the sink and rinsing the rubber liner of his creel.

"Why would Nicki Molinari insist West Coast wiseguys killed Cleo's husband and son if somebody else did it?" I asked.

"People are scared of the Mob. He wants to hold a threat over her head without seeming to be involved."

The clarity of Doc's reply made me wonder about the depth and adequacy of my own thought processes.

Terry Witherspoon did not have memories, not in the ordinary sense. The high school he attended had been a place he went in the morning and left in the afternoon, neither better nor worse for the experience. He learned that reticence ensured he would not be bothered by others; in fact, reticence in school was a way to purchase virtual invisibility. If pressed in a difficult situation, he just grinned at the corner of his mouth and flipped his hair out of his face and let others wonder what was on his mind.

Teachers pretended to believe in the importance of what they taught, art and history, save the Earth, respect your fellowman, but they shopped at Wal-Mart like everybody else, while their neighbors' businesses went under. His classmates sang in church on Sundays and Wednesday nights but somehow the girls got pregnant anyway. He wondered why they all spent so much time convincing themselves they were somebody else.

When he was a junior in high school his father, who fixed bicycles and sharpened lawn mowers, was seventy-two and his mother sixty. The three of them lived in a small house at the end of an alley, behind a loan agency, and did not own a car. Across the street was an empty lot where black people planted gardens in the spring. Terry's mother often cleaned houses with black people and made friends with them and worked alongside them in their gardens. When she came home at night, sometimes with a paper bag full of vegetables, she smelled of sweat and the dirt in her clothes. In fact, she smelled just like the black people she worked with.

A little girl broke her tooth on a BB that was inside a watermelon picked from the field. Terry was caught on the loan agency's rooftop a week later, air rifle in hand.

Aside from his two-beer visit to the VFW hall every Saturday afternoon, Terry's father spent most of his waking hours in his shed, which was hung with bicycle frames and wheels and narrow tires. He seldom wore his false teeth and his cheeks were collapsed inward on his jawbones so that his expression was wizened and severe, although in reality he appeared to have no emotions at all.