Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

He turned around in the chair, his eyes on mine. “You’re not putting me on?”

“The feds aren’t pissed at you for taking out Sally Dio. They’re still pissed because you capped that guy Starkweather in ’85. The way they see it, you punched the ticket on two guys the government probably worked years to flip.”

“So that’s why Whitley doesn’t have a sheet,” he said. He fiddled with his hands, cracking his knuckles, rubbing his palms together with a sound that was like sandpaper. “You think the feds are investigating Wellstone Ministries?”

“Maybe.”

“Then they put a guy like Whitley on the payroll, and he turns out to be a serial killer?”

“You think he’s the guy?”

“Not sure. Whitley wasn’t that smart. He was the kind of guy other people use. But any way you cut it, the feds have a pile of shit on their hands. They flipped him, and now they have to deal with the fact that he had a mask in his truck like the geek who almost did me.”

“But Alicia Rosecrans didn’t bother to tell you any of this?”

He made a face, going into his old pattern of defending the indefensible whenever women hurt him. “She can’t give up the identity of an informant to someone outside the Bureau,” he said.

“But she can call you deceitful because you didn’t throw Gribble or Greenwood or whatever to the wolves — a guy who saved you from being burned to death?”

Clete got up and took off his hat and combed his hair. He watched the turkeys feeding in the grass. They were fanned out in a straight line, working their way up a slope, their feathers puffing in the wind. I knew he was reconstructing his defense system and was not going to give up his relationship with Alicia Rosecrans, no matter how much it hurt him.

“When Alicia first questioned me about the guy in the mask, she kept asking if I thought he could be Whitley,” he said. “She must have had her suspicions about him from the jump. Maybe she was trying to tell me something.”

“Lose the sentiment. The feds are covering their butt.”

He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. I removed it and flipped it out into the dirt.

“Why’d you do that?” he said.

“Because you don’t know how to take care of yourself. Because you’re unteachable.”

“You’ll never change.”

“I won’t change?”

“You’ve got an anvil for a head, Dave. Everybody knows that except you. If it weren’t for me, your life would be a mess. I have to screw up for both of us. It’s a big job.”

Try to argue with a mind-set like that.

KNOW WHY THE FBI write down car tag numbers at Mafia funerals? Because all the players are there, including the ones who put the deceased in the box.

On Monday a funeral notice for Quince Whitley was printed in the Missoulian. The service was to be held the next day in a small Protestant church just south of Swan Lake. On Tuesday afternoon Clete and I drove in my pickup to the church and parked about three hundred feet away, in a grove of cottonwood trees where a family of Indians was selling cherries out of a flatbed truck.

Clete and I stood back in the shade and used my Russian military binoculars to watch one of the strangest assemblages of contradiction I have ever witnessed. The setting and the mourners were a study in juxtaposition. Jamie Sue and the Wellstone brothers arrived at the clapboard building in their white limo, chauffeured by Lyle Hobbs. Jamie Sue wore a white suit and dark glasses and a gray mantilla. The mixed message her choice of clothing sent could have been deliberate or even hostile. Or possibly it meant nothing at all. The Reverend Sonny Click had on yellow-tinted aviator glasses and was wearing a blue polyester suit that, in the sunlight, seemed to have lubricant on it. The faces of Hobbs, Jamie Sue, Sonny Click, and the Wellstone brothers were as opaque as glazed ceramic. The faces of Quince Whitley’s family, who arrived in a rental car, were another matter.

The Whitley family not only resembled one another, they looked as though they had all descended from the same impaired seed. Their skin was the color of dust. Their expressions seemed incapable of showing either joy or grief. Briefly, one of the women looked at Jamie Sue with indignation, as though Jamie Sue were perhaps the cause of Quince’s death. Their ages gave no clue to their relationship with the deceased. An unkind observer might have said they possessed all the characteristics of livestock milling around in a feeder lot, waiting for their roles in the world to be imposed upon them.

The hearse from the funeral home arrived late, and Lyle Hobbs and the Whitley men lifted up the coffin and carried it inside. Five minutes later, we could hear the voice of Sonny Click booming from the church’s interior. In the slanting rays of the sun on the pines and the dilapidated shingle roof of the building, the scene was like a photograph taken in an earlier time, perhaps during World War II, when death came much more violently and prematurely to us than it does today, and disparate elements of the country were drawn together in humble surroundings to mourn the loss of a much admired man or woman. But the scene Clete and I were watching was quite different. Quince Whitley had probably been a misogynist, if not a misanthrope, and his mourners represented elements in our culture whose existence we either deny or whose origins we have difficulty explaining. But maybe what appeared to be myriad contradictions in the mourning ritual we witnessed that afternoon had more to do with the presence or absence of money in our lives than it did anything else.

For Whitley’s people, life and hardship and struggle were interchangeable concepts. Man was born in sin and corruption and delivered bloody and terrified from the womb. The devil was more real than God, and the flames of perdition roared right under the plank floor of the church house. The man with the power to shut down a mill or evict a tenant farmer’s family lived in a white house on the hill. But the enemy was the black man who came ragged and hungry into the poor whites’ domain and asked for part of what the white man had been told was his by birth. When people talk about class war, they’re dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people in the house on the hill watched it from afar when they watched it at all.

Or at least that’s the way things were in the South during the era when I grew up.

After the service, the hearse drove to a cemetery four miles away, with the limo and the Whitley rental cars in tow. The grave had already been dug, the dirt piled on one side, a rolled mat of artificial grass dropped nonchalantly on top of it. The sun sliced through the pines and maples. In the spangled light, motes of dust and pieces of desiccated leaves floated like gilded insects. Clete had said few words in the last hour, and I wondered if he was reliving the moments before he had sighted on the side of Quince Whitley’s head and pulled the trigger.

“We haven’t learned a lot here. You want to wrap it up?” I said.

“Let’