For a vice detective with some loose time on his hands, after-hours New Orleans may not have been the Baths of Caracalla, but it was a pretty good surrogate.
In Clete’s opinion, the nation was still Puritan, at least when it came to the victimization of women. The temptress brought about her own downfall. The victim was the noun, the perpetrator an adverb. The moment Gretchen testified, she would be portrayed as a contract killer from Miami who had gone willingly to Bill Pepper’s home and entered into a tryst that ended in a lurid and inconsequential denouement on the Blackfoot River. She’d be lucky if she wasn’t charged with perjury.
Clete could see the curve of her hip and the tautness of her thighs and rump against the fabric of her jeans and her back rising and falling as she slept. She had begun a spartan health regimen in California and had lost twenty pounds by dieting and working out with weights and running four miles every morning on the beach in Santa Monica. The combination of her chestnut hair and violet-colored eyes and statuesque carriage made men turn and stare as she walked by. Even more intriguing, she seemed to take no notice of the attention they paid her, as though she were a polite but temporary visitor in their midst.
It was hard for Clete to separate the daughter he was looking at now from the woman who had been called Caruso in Little Havana. Blood splatter and the curse of Cain did not rinse easily from the hands or the soul. Anyone who believed otherwise knew nothing about the makeup of human beings, he thought. Aside from psychopaths, every person who killed another human being took on a burden he carried for the rest of his life. The daylight hours allowed you to concentrate on making money and buying food and clothes and worrying about your bald automobile tires. The nocturnal hours were a little different. The gargoyles that lived in the unconscious had their own agenda and were not interested in the ebb and flow of your daily life. When you were in bed by yourself at four A.M., you could hear them slip their tethers and begin production of a horror movie in which you were the star, except you had no control of the events that were about to take place. How did you deal with it? You could try reds, four fingers of Jack, or even Nytol. Except you usually mortgaged the next day for a few hours of drugged sleep. There was another way: You could drop a solitary round in the cylinder of your .38 and pull back the hammer and, with one soft squeeze of the trigger, put the problem out of your mind forever.
Somehow Gretchen had escaped the life she had fallen into. But after she had shown mercy and trust to a rogue cop who had ridiculed her in front of other men, he had repaid the favor by drugging and binding her and torturing her with his genitalia. How did you address a situation like that? Did you hand your girl over to the system and hope she wasn’t degraded again? Did you allow her to return to the criminal life she had freed herself from? Did you allow others to wad up her life like a piece of used Kleenex and throw it away?
What conclusion would any reasonable person come to?
Clete wrote a note on the back of an envelope and propped the envelope against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. Then he pulled a duffel bag from the closet and checked its contents: a cut-down twelve-gauge Remington pump, a box of double-aught bucks and pumpkin balls that he had hand-loaded, a .25-caliber semi-auto with acid-burned serial numbers, a push-button stiletto, latex gloves, plastic ligatures, a lead-weighted blackjack that could break a two-by-four in half, handcuffs, a set of lock picks, brass knuckles, a bottle of bleach, a slim jim, nylon fishing line, and duct tape.
Restraint, reason, working within the system?
Fuck that.
He carried the duffel bag outside and put it in the trunk of the Caddy and drove away.
The note on the table read:
Don’t worry about anything, kid. I’ll be back before morning. All this will be behind us.
Love,
Your pop,
Cletus
ONE HOUR LATER, Gretchen woke and did not know where she was; nor, for the moment, did she remember the events that had occurred in the home of Bill Pepper or on the banks of the Blackfoot River. Then she realized the sleep was an illusion and the reality was the assault on her person committed by Bill Pepper. The touch of his hands and his genitalia seemed to cling to her skin like wet cobweb, and the more she rubbed her hands on herself, the more she seemed to re-create what he had done to her, as though she had become a surrogate for the man who assaulted her.
She walked to the kitchen table and read the note Clete had left. She set it down and stood for a long time under the lightbulb that hung directly over her head, trying to think of answers to her situation and his. Through the window, she saw a cinnamon cub come out of the trees on the hillside and work his way through the fence in the moonlight. Albert had sent a chain e-mail through the valley telling others that the cub had been separated from his mother and to be careful while driving down the dirt road. The cub pulled his hind foot loose from the fence, the smooth wire twanging on the posts, then disappeared into the tall grass, creating a path like a submarine gliding just below the surface of the ocean. When Gretchen stepped out on the gallery, the cub bounded across the creek and through the cottonwoods, his rump bouncing up and down in the moonlight.
Gretchen felt a tear in her eye as she watched the cub scramble under the rail fence on the far side of the pasture and head up the hill over rocks and snags into the darkness, the slag from an old geological slide rattling down the incline.
Bill Pepper had lied to her about everything except one item. He’d told the truth when he said he had thrown her tote bag in a tree by the side of the dirt road. What he had not told her was his motivation, which was probably to show his contempt for her possessions and to create a situation where he would continue to control her when she was forced to climb naked into a tree to recover what he had taken from her.
She removed her Airweight .38 from under her pillow and placed it in the bag, alongside the expandable baton and can of Mace, which were still in the bag when she plucked it out of the tree. Then she put on her scarf and her red nylon jacket, the same kind James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. As she drove slowly under the arch onto the road in her chopped-down pickup, the subdued power of the Merc engine vibrating through the floor stick into her palm, she thought she saw the cub moving through the trees and wondered if he would find safe harbor for the night.
BILL PEPPER TURNED his van off the two-lane highway and descended a gravel road through a grove of birch trees to the edge of Swan Lake. The moon was above the mountains, turning the lake into an oxidized mirror filled with pools of both shadow and light, the dark green sweep of the weeds as thick and undulating as wheat below the surface. He got out of his van and glanced once over his shoulder at the highway, then entered the shingled cottage at the bottom of the incline and locked the door behind him.
Bill Pepper loved his cottage. It was snug and warm during the hunting season, and in summer it was a retreat from the city and the tourists who flocked to western Montana and clogged the highways with their campers and mobile homes. This night was different; the lake and the c
ottage provided little comfort for the problems that had beset him. A heart-pounding fear had followed him all the way from Missoula, fouling his blood and his thoughts and his vision and any hope of restoring his self-respect. For the first time in his life, Bill Pepper wondered if he was a coward.
Couldn’t he take the heat? He’d been a patrolman in South Central and Compton and what the Hispanics called East Los, and he’d taken sniper fire through his windshield on the Harbor Freeway. Pimps and dealers got off the streets when they saw him coming. Black hookers did lap dances for him in his cruiser. An unpopular Crip who had spent two years in isolation in Pelican Bay made fun of his accent and kept calling him Goober and “Bell Pepper wit’ the big belly” when Pepper tried to question him about an armed robbery. Bill smiled tolerantly and looked once over his shoulder and then smiled again just before he pinned the Crip’s head against a brick wall with a baton and spat in his face and broke his windpipe. The irony was that the street people and even members of the Eighth Street Crips started yelling at his cruiser from the sidewalks, “Hey, Mr. Bill, you de motherfuckin’ man!”
He set his Glock on the coffee table in the small living room and looked out at the vastness of the lake and the Swan Peaks rising like jagged tin in the south, and directly across from the cottage, a thickly wooded mountain that was black against a sky twinkling with stars. Just one week ago opportunities had been opening up for him right and left: He had money in the bank, a new van, and was reporting to one of the richest men in the United States. Then it all went south because of a girl named Gretchen Horowitz. An idle remark about her being butch, that’s all it was, and he got a shitload of grief dropped on his head. How about the uniformed deputy who wised off first? Why didn’t the girl go after him?
He had not turned on the lights in the cottage. He got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen and took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator, then sat back down and uncapped a pint of brandy and mixed it with milk in a jelly glass and drank it in the dark. The leafy canopy of the birch trees was swaying in the moonlight, the shadows sliding back and forth on his lawn and porch. If Bill Pepper had learned any lesson in life, it was that terrible events always had small beginnings. His father had befriended a Negro vagabond and lost his life. The Watts riot had begun not because of police beating an innocent person but because a crowd had gathered when a patrolman arrested a black taxi driver who was DWI. Within days National Guardsmen were firing .30-caliber machine guns into apartment buildings and eighty-one people were dead and flames were rising from a quarter of the city.
He could have squared the situation with the girl even after molesting her. But he’d found out today his troubles over her were just beginning. She was important to people for reasons he didn’t understand. Who was she, anyway? Why were these other people coming down on him? They acted like he knew everything about her. The truth was, he knew nothing about her. If he’d known anything about her, he would have left her alone.
How had he let her get under his skin? How could he explain that to others when he couldn’t explain it to himself? She was attractive, certainly. No, that wasn’t the right word. She was beautiful. Her eyes were mysterious and alluring and a little dangerous and at the same time vulnerable. She was a young girl buried inside a body that was every man’s wet dream. He knew his thoughts were sick, but he couldn’t help desiring her. No man could. He was only human. Maybe his feelings were even fatherly, he told himself.
She’s getting to you again, he thought. You know the real reason for your fascination with her. She’s not afraid. Not of you, not of anyone, not of anything, not even death at the hands of a man inserting a knife blade between her neck and collar, inches from her carotid.
He emptied his glass and filled it again, this time not bothering to stir it, drinking the brandy as fast as he could get it down. He thought he heard a tree limb break and fall into the yard. Or was that the deer coming down to drink from the lake? He had told that cop and his daughter from Louisiana that he wanted to go back to Mobile. That was still a possibility, wasn’t it? His fellow white officers at the LAPD had never understood Bill Pepper’s attitude toward people of color. He had no resentment toward them; he felt comfortable in their midst and didn’t blame them because a deranged colored vagabond had killed his father. The group he couldn’t abide was white trash like Wyatt Dixon, the kind of man who visited his odium on other Southerners, the kind of man who reminded Bill Pepper of the alleyway he lived on in Macon.