Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“What happened?”

“I heard they didn’t come home one night. But maybe they just went off somewhere. It happens. Talk to the sheriff’s office in Teton. Talk to Clayton’s mother. She lives just off the reservation. Here, I’ll draw you directions.”

A half hour later I was back off the reservation and driving down a narrow gray dirt road by the edge of a stream. Cottonwoods grew along the banks, then the ground sloped upward into thick stands of lodgepole pine. Ahead I could see the plains literally dead-end into the mountains. They rose abruptly, like an enormous fault, sheer-faced and jagged against the sky. The cliff walls were pink and streaked with shadow, and the ponderosa was so thick through the saddles that I doubted a bear could work his way through the trunks.

I found the home the tribal chairman had directed me to. It was built of logs and odd-sized pieces of lumber, up on a knoll, with a shingled roof and sagging gallery. Plastic sheets were nailed over the windows for insulation, and coffee cans filled with petunias were set along the gallery railing and the edges of the steps. The woman who lived there looked very old. Her hair was white, with dark streaks in it, and her leathery skin was deeply lined and webbed around the eyes and mouth.

I sat with her in her living room and tried to explain who I was, that I wanted to find out what happened to her son, Clayton Desmarteau, and his cousin. But her face was remote, uncertain, her eyes averted whenever I looked directly at them. On a table by the tiny fireplace was a framed photograph of a young Indian soldier. In front of the picture were two open felt boxes containing a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.

“The tribal chairman said maybe your son simply left the area for a while,” I said. “Maybe he went looking for other work.”

This time she looked at me.

“Clayton didn’t go off nowhere,” she said. “He had a job in the filling station in town. He came home every night. They found his car in the ditch, two miles from here. He wouldn’t go off and leave his car in the ditch. They did something to him.”

“Who?”

“People that want to hurt his organization.”

“AIM?”

“He was beat up one time. They were always trying to hurt him.”

“Who beat him up?”

“People that’s no good.”

“Mrs. Desmarteau, I want to help you find out what happened to Clayton. Did he ever mention someone’s name, somebody who gave him trouble?”

“The FBI. They came around the filling station and called up people on the phone about him.”

“How about Harry Mapes or Dalton Vidrine? Do you remember his using those names?”

She didn’t answer. She simply looked out into space, took a pinch of snuff out of a Copenhagen can, and put it between her lip and gum. Motes of dust spun in the light through the windows. I thanked her for her time and drove back down the road toward the county seat, the shadows of the cottonwoods clicking across my windshield.

The sheriff was out of town, and the deputy I spoke to at the courthouse soon made me feel that I was a well-meaning, obtuse outsider who had as much understanding of rural Montana and reservation life as a seasonal tourist.

“We investigated that case about four months ago,” he said. He was a big, lean man in his khaki uniform, and he seemed to concentrate more on the smoking of his cigarette than on his conversation with me. His desk was littered with papers and manila folders. “His mother and sister filed a missing-persons report. We found his car with a broken axle in the ditch. The keys were gone, the spare tire was gone, the radio was gone, somebody even tore the clock out of the dashboard. What’s that tell you?”

“Somebody stripped it.”

“Yeah, Clayton Desmarteau did. It was going to be repossessed. Him and his cousin were in the bar three miles up the road, they got juiced, they ran off the road. That’s the way we see it.”

“And he just didn’t bother to come home after that?”

“Where are you from again?”

“New Iberia, Louisiana.”

He blew smoke out into a shaft of sunlight shining through the window. His hair was thin across his pate.

“Believe it or not, that’s not uncommon here,” he said. Then his voice changed and assumed a resigned and tired note. “We’re talking about two guys in AIM. One of them, Clayton’s cousin, was in the pen in South Dakota. There’s also a warrant out on him for nonsupport. Clayton’s had his share of trouble, too.”

“What kind?”

“Fights, carrying a concealed weapon, bullshit like that.”

“Has he ever just disappeared from his home and job before?”