The man in the suit fitted his hand under the cowboy’s arm and began to muscle him up the slope past the rock where Gretchen was sitting. The cowboy had a profile like an Indian’s and a dimple in his chin and eyes that looked prosthetic rather than real. He slipped in the mud and slid down the incline, trying to stop himself with his bare feet, his clothes slathering with mud and fine gravel and pine needles.
“Get up!” said the man in the suit, grabbing him by the back of the shirt, twisting the cloth in his fingers. “Did you hear me, boy?”
The cowboy tried to get up and fell again. The man in the suit ripped the straw hat off the cowboy’s head and began whipping him with it, striking him across the ears and eyes and the crown of his skull, again and again. “You want to get tased? I’ll do it.”
“I think you might have what they call anger-management issues,” the cowboy said, squinting up from the ground. “I heered you ran into your ex at the Union Club and asked if her new boyfriend wasn’t disappointed by her poor old wore-out vag, and she said, ‘Soon as he got past the wore-out part, he liked it just fine, Bill.’ Is that true, Detective Pepper?”
The detective dropped the boots he had been carrying and picked up the cowboy by the shirtfront and sent him crashing through the pine saplings and into a tree stump. All of this was taking place thirty feet from where Gretchen Horowitz was sitting with her Styrofoam container balanced on her knees. She pushed the tines of her plastic fork through a small piece of sausage and a bit of egg and placed them in her mouth, chewing slowly, her eyes lowered. She heard the cowboy fall again, this time grunting. When she raised her head, the cowboy was sitting with his back against a boulder, sucking wind, his mouth hanging open, his face draining as though he had been kicked in the ribs or stomach. The detective removed a Taser from his coat pocket and activated it and leaned down and touched it to the back of the cowboy’s neck. The cowboy’s head jerked as though he had been dropped from the end of a rope, his face contorting. The detective stepped back and turned off the Taser and glanced down the slope at Gretchen. “What are you looking at?” he said.
Gretchen closed the top of the Styrofoam container and set it on the rock and got up and walked up the incline toward the detective. The trees were wet and motionless in the shadows, strips of thick white cloud hanging on the crest of the ridge. “What am I looking at? Let me think. A guy in cuffs getting the shit kicked out of him?”
“You better mind your business.”
“I am. I’m a guest here. I was eating breakfast. What’s your name?”
“What’s my name?”
“That’s what I said.”
He stared at her without answering.
“My name is Gretchen Horowitz. You don’t give your name out while you’re on the job?”
“Horowitz?”
“It’s Jewish.” She picked up her gold chain and religious medal from her throat and held them in her fingers for him to see. “This is Jewish, too. It’s called the Star of David.”
“You’re interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty.”
“Say my name again?”
“What?”
“I want to hear you pronounce my name. You accented the first syllable. You think that’s funny?”
“No. You sound like you’re from New York.”
“Try Miami. That’s in Florida. New York is north of Florida. Why not let the cowboy put on his boots?”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“You don’t want to find out, bacon. Where’s your boss?”
I had gone into Missoula with Albert early that morning to buy a fishing license, and until we pulled into the driveway, I didn’t realize the forensic team was up on the hill.
“Waste of tax money,” Albert said.
“What is?” I asked.
“Messing around on that ridge. Homeless people wander off the highway all the time. They camp in the woods because they don’t have any other place to go. They don’t kidnap girls out of biker saloons or shoot at people with hunters’ bows.”
“Some of them are deranged and dangerous, Albert.”
“There’s nothing like fearing a man with a hole in his shoe.”
I didn’t feel like arguing with Albert’s proletarian views. “I’m going to walk up on the ridge. I’ll see you inside.”
“Tell that bunch I’d better not find their nasty cigarette butts on the property,” he replied.
As I worked my way up the slope, I could hear people talking on the far side of the trees. Then I saw a deputy in uniform, a second man in a baggy brown suit, a man in a checkered shirt I figured for a crime scene technician, and Wyatt Dixon, who was barefoot and hatless and sitting against the hillside, wrists manacled behind his back, clothes mud-streaked and sticking wetly to his skin. Gretchen Horowitz had just started back down the slope, her face as hot as a woodstove.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Don’t ask,” she said. She went past me as though I were a wood post.
I gained the road and looked down at Dixon. His teeth were red when he grinned. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.
“You all right, Mr. Dixon?”
The mud in his hair and the drip from the trees were running into his eyes, and he had to squint to look up at me. “Do not misinterpret the situation of this poor rodeo cowboy. I am honored to once again find myself surrounded by such noble men as yourselves. God bless America and the ground that men such as yourselves walk on.”
“Where are your boots?”
He studied the bloodied tops of his feet as though seeing them for the first time. “The detective stomped my toes proper and told me I wouldn’t need no foot covering for a while.”
“What do you want here?” the man in the baggy suit said.
I opened my badge holder. “I’m Dave Robicheaux. I’m a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. What did y’all do to this fellow?”
“Nothing. He slipped down the slope,” the man in the suit said.
“He must have slid a long way. Did you say something to Miss Gretchen?”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“The woman who just left here. She was angry about something.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Right. What’s your name?”
“Detective Bill Pepper. I told the woman not to contaminate a possible crime scene. If she got her nose bent out of shape, that’s her problem.”
The crime scene technician was standing in the background. “Come on up to the cave with me. I want to show you a couple of things,” he said.
I grabbed hold of a pine sapling and pulled myself up on a footpath and followed the crime scene tech to the entrance of the cave. He was a rotund man with a florid face and the small ears and scar tissue of someone who might have been in the ring. He had put rubber bands around the cuffs of his cargo pants. “How you doin’?” he said.
“Better than that cowboy.”
“Here’s what we’ve got going on. The rain didn’t do us any favors. There was supposed to be a bunch of scat here, but I can’t find it. Same with the fingernail clippings. The boot prints are wiped out, too. Maybe somebody got here before we did.”
“Is Dixon lying about getting his feet stomped?”
“Detective Pepper said he wanted Dixon’s boots to be clean when he tried to match them with the tracks of the guy who was holed up in the cave. Sometimes Bill’s way of doing things is a problem for the rest of us.”
“Why is Dixon in cuffs? I thought he was coming in on his own.”
“He didn’t know the Indian girl’s purse was found last night behind a hay bale in the barn where she was killed. There was a receipt in it for a bracelet she bought from Dixon. The bracelet wasn’t on her body. The date on the receipt was the same day she disappeared.”