Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“You coming or not?” I said.

“Let me check on Gretchen,” Clete replied.

YOUNGER’S SUMMER HOME was a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion located west of Missoula on a pinnacle high above the Clark Fork. It was beige-colored and Tudor in design, the tall windows and breezy front porch trimmed with purple rock, the lawn planted with sugar maples and blue spruce and ornamental crab apple trees that took on a sheen like melted red candy in the sunlight. There was a circular gravel driveway in front, a porte cochere on the side, and a restored Lincoln Continental parked in back. When I lifted the door knocker, electronic chimes echoed through the interior. Clete had lit a cigarette when we got out of his Caddy. “Will you get rid of that?” I said.

“No problem,” he replied. He took two more puffs and flicked the butt over the porch wall onto the lawn just as a woman answered the door. Her skin was so pale it looked bloodless, to the degree that the moles on her shoulders and the one by her mouth seemed to be individually pasted on her body. Her hair had a dark luster with brown streaks, and her eyes possessed a liquescence I normally would associate with hostility or an invasive curiosity about others that bordered on disdain. I had to remind myself of the loss the Younger family had just suffered.

I introduced myself and Clete and offered our condolences, thinking that she was about to invite us in. Instead, she looked behind her, then back at us. “Who did you say you were?” she asked.

“I spoke earlier with Love Younger. He asked me to come here,” I said. “This is his house, isn’t it?”

“Tell them to come in, Felicity,” a voice called from the hallway.

A slight man walked toward us, a vague smile on his face. He did not offer to shake hands. He was unshaved and wearing slippers and a dress shirt open at the collar. “I’m Caspian,” he said. “You’re a police officer?”

“Not here. In Louisiana,” I said.

“You know something about Angel’s death?” he said.

“Not directly, but I have some information that I feel I should share with you. I think someone tried to kill my daughter. We’ve also had a stalker at the place where we’re staying. Can we sit down?”

“Wait here, please,” he said.

“Like Dave says, we were invited here,” Clete said. “I don’t think that’s getting across somehow.”

“Excuse me?” Caspian said.

“We have no obligation to be here,” Clete said. “We were trying to do you a favor.”

“I see,” said Caspian. “I know my father will be happy to see you.”

The man and the woman went to the rear of the house. Clete and I waited on a leather couch by a huge fireplace filled with ash and crumpled logs that gave no heat. The windows reached almost to the ceiling and were hung with velvet curtains, the walls with oil paintings of individuals in nineteenth-century dress. The carpets were Iranian, the furniture antique, the beams in the cathedral ceiling recovered from a teardown, the wood rust-marked by iron spikes and bolts. In a side hallway, I could see a long glass-covered cabinet lined with flintlock and cap-and-ball rifles.

Clete glanced at his watch. “Do you believe these fucking people?” he said.

“Take it easy.”

“They’re all the same.”

“I know it. You can’t change them. So don’t try.”

I knew that the Younger family and their ingrained rudeness were not the source of Clete’s discontent.

“Gretchen’s never slept with a piece,” he said. “She’s never been afraid of anything. She stayed in the shower so long that she ran all the hot water out of the tank. I saw a bruise on her neck. She said she slipped while she was hiking up the hill behind the house.” He leaned forward, hands cupped on his knees. “I don’t like being here, Dave. These are the same people who used to treat us like their garbage collectors.”

“We’ll leave in a few minutes. I promise.”

“The guy was a guest at the White House. He says he’s into wind energy. Does anybody buy crap like that? I say screw this.”

I believed I understood Clete’s resentment toward the world in which he grew up, and I didn’t want to argue with him. The most telling story about his background was one he told me when he was drunk. As a boy, during the summer, he sometimes went on the milk-delivery route with his father, a brutal and childlike man who loved his children and yet was often cruel to every one of them. One day a wealthy woman in the Garden District saw Clete sitting by himself on the rear bumper of the milk truck, barefoot and wearing jeans split at the knees and eating a peanut-butter sandwich. The woman stroked his head, her eyes filling with the lights of pity and love. “You’re such a beautiful little boy,” she said. “Come back here at one P.M. Saturday and have ice cream and cake with me.”

He put on his white suit an uncle had bought him for his confirmation and went to the woman’s house one block from Audubon Park. When he knocked at the front door, a black butler answered and told him to go around to the rear. Clete walked along the flagstone path through the side yard and under a latticework arch hung with orange trumpet vine. The backyard was crowded with black children from the other side of Magazine. The woman who had stroked his hair was not there, nor did she ever show up.

That night he returned with a box of rocks and broke all the glass in her greenhouse and destroyed the flowers in her gardens.

At some point in your life, you have to give up anger or it will destroy your spirit the way cancer destroys living tissue. At least that is what I told myself, even though I was not very good at taking my own advice. I hated to see Clete suffer because of the injustice done to him by his alcoholic father. He didn’t like the Love Youngers of the world, and neither did I. But why suffer because of them? I never knew one of them who didn’t write his own denouement, so why not leave them to their own fate?

There was no lack of public information about Mr. Younger. He became a millionaire by buying wheat futures in the Midwest with money he borrowed from a church, when few people outside government knew the Nixon administration was about to open up new markets in Russia. Later, in a poker game, he won a 30 percent interest in an independent drilling company, one teetering on bankruptcy. He redrilled old oil fields that others had given up on, going down to a record twenty-five thousand feet, and punched into one of the biggest geological domes in Louisiana’s history. Love Younger had a green thumb. Whatever he touched turned to money, huge amounts of it, millions that became billions, the kind of wealth that could buy governments or the geographic entirety of a third-world country.