“Wouldn’t you?”
The sheriff stared at his legal pad. “Detective Pepper left a note behind. Did you know that?” he said.
“No.”
“He said some people thought he had a relationship with the ‘Horowitz girl.’ Would that be your daughter?”
“Horowitz is my daughter’s last name. Your man didn’t have any ‘relationship’ with her.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“Yeah, I do. We don’t invite cockroaches into our environment.”
“In the note, Detective Pepper indicated that he did something to your daughter. What would he be referring to?”
“I guess the remarks he made.”
“You’re telling me a man who’s coming apart, who’s drunk out of his mind, who’s telling the world ‘fuck it,’ is doing all this because of some sexist remarks he made to a young woman?”
“You’d know the answer to that better than me. I never met the man.”
“How did you know where his cottage was?”
“I called up a PI I know in Missoula.”
The sheriff nodded, his face composed, the long white tips of his mustache hanging below his jawbone. “That’s right, you were here many years ago, weren’t you? You did security for Sally Dio and some other mobsters.”
“That’s correct.”
“That was right before his plane crashed into the side of a mountain, wasn’t it?”
Clete looked thoughtfully out the window. “Yeah, I think I was still around here when that happened. It was a big loss. I think a pizza parlor in Palermo shut down for fifteen minutes.”
“We pulled your sheet at the NCIC, Mr. Purcel. You have a longer record than most felons. You killed a federal informant and dropped a Teamster official from a hotel window into a dry swimming pool. You and your friend Detective Robicheaux left a bunch of people dead on the bank of a bayou in Louisiana not once but twice.”
“That’s why we’re here — to rest up.”
“There’s only one reason you’re not being arrested. There’s no trace of blood on you or your clothing or shoes or in your vehicle. That leaves me in a quandary. If you’re an innocent man, why are you lying?”
“I’m not. And the reason I’m not under arrest is so you can question me without giving me my rights.”
The sheriff’s face was tired, his eyes without heat or anger or any emotion that Clete could see. “This is all about your daughter, isn’t it? What is it you’re not telling me, Mr. Purcel? What did Bill Pepper do to your little girl?”
Wyatt Dixon was unloading three tons of sixty-pound hay bales off a flatbed at his place on the Blackfoot River when he saw the two cruisers coming up the dirt road, their tires splashing through the puddles. He was shirtless and wearing a straw hat and Wranglers tucked inside his boots, a bandana knotted around his neck. He fitted his fingers under the twine on a bale and lifted it out in front of him, his chest and arms blooming with green veins. He walked to the edge of the bed and dropped the bale into space, his gaze never leaving the cruisers. His shoulders were pink with fresh sunburn, and his back was crosshatched with scar tissue that looked like it had been laid there with a whip. A scar as thick as an earthworm ran from under his armpit and disappeared inside his leather belt. The deputies parked in the shade of the cottonwoods and approached him as a group of four, studying his half-crushed house, his barn, the trees, the bluebirds, the Appaloosas in the corral, the riffle in the middle of the stream, anything that kept them from having to look directly at Wyatt Dixon.
Wyatt removed his hat and unknotted his bandana and wiped his face and gazed at the Indian paintbrush and wild roses that grew in the grass along the riverbank. The river was deep and wide from the runoff and contained a coppery green light where the sun shone directly upon it. Wyatt put his hat back on and fingered the long red welt that ran down his side. For just a second he thought about the bull that had impaled him at the Calgary Stampede, shaking him on its horns like a piñata and goring him again on the ground, the crowd rising, the women holding their hands to their mouths.
“Howdy-doody, boys,” he said.
The lead deputy had to squint into the sun to look up at Wyatt. “Know why we’re here?”
“To pester people?”
“Somebody killed Bill Pepper up at Swan Lake.”
“I’m totally broke up,” Wyatt said.
“We’d like to have you come down to the department.”
“I already been there. I didn’t enjoy it too much.”
“The sheriff probably wants to exclude you.”
“I’ll save y’all the time. Just consider me excluded.”
“It’s important, Wyatt.”
“Not to me it ain’t.”
“We’re just doing our job. How about hooking yourself up? It’s not personal.”
“Speaking of job performance, I’d rate y’all’s somewhere between mediocre to piss-poor.”
“Is it true you can speak dead languages?”
Wyatt blew his breath up into his face and looked at the sunlight wobbling inside the riffle on the river, then jumped down from the flatbed into the middle of the deputies. All of them stepped backward before they could check themselves. He began picking pieces of hay off his arms and chest, dropping each one into the wind. “How’d Pepper go out?” he asked.
“Hard,” the lead deputy said.
“How hard?”
“Hard as it gets.”
“It happened this morning?”
The deputy shook his head noncommittally. Wyatt lifted his T-shirt off the outside mirror on the driver’s side of the flatbed truck. He studied his reflection in the mirror, touching at a razor nick on his jaw, then worked his shirt over his arms and head and neck. The T-shirt fitted him so tightly, it looked like latex on his skin. His eyes were empty when he looked at the deputy. “Did Pepper go out with a bag over his head?”
“I don’t know all the details,” the deputy said. “I can’t discuss them with you, anyway.”
“Did you know Angel Deer Heart?”
“Afraid not,” the deputy said.
“Did you ever wonder why rich people would adopt a raggedy-ass little girl from the rez?”
“Put on the cuffs, Wyatt.”
“Half of them come out of the womb with alcohol on the brain. The other half are crack babies.”
“You could ask the lead investigator about all this, except he’s dead.”
“You ever hear Southerners talk about the ‘dumbest white person’ they ever met?”
“Nope.”
“Most people think that’s an insult to people of color. What that really means is the dumbest person on earth is a stupid white man. You can teach a horse, a dog, or even a tree frog to tap-dance before you can teach toilet training to a white man who is willfully ignorant. All colored people know that.”
The deputy cupped his hand around Wyatt’s upper arm. “You’re a puzzle, buddy.”
“Did you know y’all are living in the middle of biblical events?”
“Biblical?”
“That’s what I said.”
The deputy walked with him to the cruiser. “I love your accent, Wyatt. Watch your head getting in,” he said.
At one-thirty P.M. on Saturday, the sheriff called me again. “You want to come down here and talk to this crazy bastard?” he said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Most of the DIs I knew in the service were from the South. I always thought someone had pissed inside their brains when they were infants. Now I’m sure of it. I just spent twenty minutes listening to Wyatt Dixon talk about the history of the earth and the coming of the Antichrist. Did you know the world is sixty-four hundred years old?”
“He’s probably psychotic. Why pay any attention to anything he says?”
“Because he had motivation to kill Detective Pepper. He’s also one of the last people to see Angel Deer Heart alive.”