Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"Then quit worrying," I said.

We drove into Missoula through Hellgate Canyon and met Cleo Lonnigan at an ice cream parlor on the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. She was outside, at a table by the water, the cottonwoods blowing in the wind behind her. She wore a black dress and pearls and looked absolutely beautiful.

"I called your house. I thought maybe I was late. Maisey said you'd already left," she said.

A network of lines crisscrossed Doc's forehead.

"How long ago did you call?" he asked.

"Just a minute ago," Cleo answered.

"Why is she still at home?" Doc said, then went to the pay phone inside the ice cream parlor before either Cleo or I could speak.

"He's a little wired," I said.

"I think Doc and his daughter should get a divorce," she said.

I saw him replace the receiver on the hook, then walk down the steps toward us.

"Nobody home. They probably took off," he said.

"Sure," I said, glad the conversation was about to change.

He glanced at his wristwatch, his eyes busy with thought. "I'll call from Girard's place," he said.

Xavier Girard and his wife Holly lived in a big log house on a bluff above the Clark Fork. The sun was only a spark between two ridges in the western part of the valley now, but the afterglow rose high into the vault of blue sky overhead, and looking to the north you could see snowcapped mountains in the Rattlesnake Wilderness and, toward Missoula, the maple trees in residential neighborhoods riffling in the breeze and the lights of downtown reflecting on the river's surface.

"Whose money bought this place?" I said as we walked up the drive toward the sundeck of the Girards' house.

"Not Xavier's. He has the reverse King Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to garbage. He went back to Louisiana and built a million-dollar home on the bayou, you know, boy from Shitsville makes good, except he built it in a sinkhole and the foundation caved in and the whole thing slid into the bayou," Doc said.

The guests on the deck and in the living room were writers and university people, artists, biologists and conservationists, photographers, liberal arts students from the East, an editor from Doubleday, a journalist from Time, a movie producer from A amp;E, smoke jumpers, and Xavier Girard's entourage of barroom fans.

An actor from north-central Texas, who wore a suit with no tie, his dress shirt open at the collar, was holding forth at a glass-topped table, his mouth downturned at the corners like a drill instructor's.

He was talking about a casting lunch of years ago.

"See, Dennis is a right good boy and all, but he don't have no understanding of Southerners whatsoever. We was waiting on the food to come out and he started lecturing at me and using profane language and carrying on and getting in my face like he growed up in a vacant lot. So I reached across the table and grabbed him by the necktie and dragged him through the Caesar salad and cut off his tie with a steak knife and slammed him back down in the chair and told him to start acting like a white person for a change. I didn't have no trouble with him after that, but damned if the part didn't go to…"

Down below the deck we could hear Xavier Girard, stripped to the waist, pounding a speed bag with his bare fists while his barroom pals looked on admiringly.

It was Girard's wife who was the surprise. I expected her to possess at least some of her husband's eccentricities. Instead, she was either an extraordinary actress or she must have been blind-drunk the night she married him. She seemed to gaze into your eyes with total interest, regardless of the subject of conversation. Her skin was pale, her mouth irregularly shaped, as though her expression and smile were unpracticed, perhaps a bit vulnerable. She wore her dark blond hair in tresses and stood close to the person she was talking to, either man or woman, in a way that seemed sexually intimate yet defenseless.

"You were an Assistant United States Attorney?" she said.

"For a while. In Phoenix," I replied.

"Why'd you quit?" she said.

"I probably wasn't that good at it."

Her eyes probed mine, as though my sentence contained meaning that the two of us should examine together. Then she fitted her thumb and forefinger around my wrist and said, "Will you let me share something with you?"

We walked to the edge of the deck, into the shadows and a layer of cold air that rose from the river. The pines farther up the hill were black against the stars. She wore a purple evening dress and there was a shine on the tops of her breasts. Through the sliding glass doors I could see Doc punching in numbers repeatedly on a telephone while Cleo stood behind him, an exasperated expression on her face.

"I'm concerned for Doc. He's obsessed about t

his gold mine up the Blackfoot," Holly Girard said.