Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“You don’t think you deserve a good woman’s love. That’s the real problem, Clete. That has always been the problem.”

“Quit it,” he replied. He tipped one of the shot glasses to his mouth and drank it down, then upended the Bud and swallowed for a long time, until foam ran down the inside of the bottle’s neck into his throat. He set the bottle on the bar, the alcohol glowing in his cheeks. “Somehow Surrette is a player in all this, isn’t he? With Angel Deer Heart, with Caspian Younger, and maybe with the old man.”

“Take it to the bank.”

“Remember Randy’s Record Shop? Randy would come on the air at midnight and say, ‘Hang on, chil’en. We’re coming to you direct from Gatlinburg.’ Then he’d kick off the show with ‘Swanee River Boogie’ by Albert Ammons. It was great back then, wasn’t it?”

“You bet,” I said, avoiding his eyes and the chemically induced glow in his face.

“Maybe it’s still the top of the sixth,” he said. “You think?”

“Why not,” I said, falling into the old lie that both of us told ourselves.

He looked at the two remaining whiskies on the bar, then put on his porkpie hat and his stained sport coat and laid his big arm heavily across my shoulders and walked with me through the front door and out into the sunlight.

“You think she meant that about running off to a ranch in Reno?” he said.

This time I had nothing more to say.

THAT EVENING AFTER supper, Alafair and Albert and I watched the network and the local news. The lead story locally was about a twenty-six-year-old single woman who had failed to show up at the café where she worked as a waitress on Interstate 90, east of Lookout Pass. Her name was Rhonda Fayhee. Her automobile was found parked in front of her small frame house, the keys in the ignition. All the windows and doors in the house were locked and the doors dead-bolted from the inside. Her purse and wallet were on the dining room table. Her three cats were inside the house, their water bowls half full. Dry cat food was scattered on a piece of newspaper someone had spread on the kitchen floor.

On camera, a sheriff’s detective said the pink uniform she had probably worn to work the previous night had been washed in a sink and put on a coat hanger in the bathroom. Anyone with knowledge about her whereabouts was asked to call the Mineral County Sheriff’s Department.

WYATT DIXON WAS sitting in the living room of Bertha Phelps’s apartment, ten floors above the old vaudeville theater called the Wilma, with a magnificent view of the bandstand and the merry-go-round in the park and the river that flowed high and roiling through the city. The light was fading in the sky, and he could see stars high above the pink and lavender afterglow on the rim of the mountains far to the west. Wyatt’s mind was not on the view. When he looked up at Bertha’s silhouette as she watered her window plants, he felt the same conflict of emotions that had always beset him whenever he placed his trust in others.

For most of Wyatt’s life, survival had meant war, and the rules of engagement had remained the same: If you wanted women, you had to fly the flag; if you wanted the respect of men, you never showed fear, and when provoked, you rattled only once.

Bertha Phelps was an ongoing riddle he couldn’t figure out. She was an educated and intelligent countrywoman who seemed to genuinely like him and accept him, and smelled like a floral delivery truck on a hot day. She also had sand. After the attack, she called a women’s crisis hotline and made an appointment with a psychotherapist, as though contracting a pest exterminator to rid her house of termites. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she insisted that she and Wyatt immediately go to bed to prove she wasn’t snakebit. He had the feeling Bertha Phelps had an aggressive side that she herself wasn’t aware of; the kind of woman who’d slap the hat off your head if you didn’t remove it in the house on your own. Any man who said he wasn’t attracted to the Calamity Janes of the world was a damn liar.

Bertha was staring at the television screen. “Listen to this, Wyatt,” she said.

A sheriff’s detective was being interviewed in front of a frame house sheathed with asbestos shingles up by Lookout Pass. The tenant, a woman named Rhonda Fayhee, had gone missing, not unlike a Hutterite woman who had gone for a walk outside St. Regis two months ago and hadn’t been seen since.

In the background, Wyatt could see a parked Mazda and a side yard with wash hanging on a line. A uniformed deputy was crossing the grass with a pet cage in his hand. The local anchorwoman came back on the screen and said that investigators could not account for the fact that the windows were locked and the doors bolted from inside.

“This ain’t the first time he’s done this,” Wyatt said. “He’s what’s called a house creep.”

“Who is?” Bertha said.

“The guy who snatched her. It’s like the ship in the bottle, except the house is the bottle.”

“I’m sure that makes sense to you, but it doesn’t to me.”

“The guy dead-bolted the door, then went out a window and used a rig to slip the latch from the outside. The newslady said the animals was watered and fed. The guy who done this is a stage director. He gives the cops plenty to study on. It makes him feel powerful. In the meantime, the woman is probably going through hell, if she ain’t already dead.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I knew men in Huntsville pen the devil wouldn’t let wash his socks.”

“Do you think it’s him?”

“The guy who killed Angel Deer Heart? Yeah, I do.”

She sat down next to him, the couch sinking under her. “I have to tell you something. Both the city police and the sheriff’s department interviewed me. They wanted to know if you owned any cap-and-ball weapons.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I don’t even know what cap-and-ball means.”