"Did you bother to check out this kid Terry Witherspoon?" I asked.
"The voyeur? Yeah, I did. He says he never looked in Maisey Voss's window and was never on her property."
"What did you expect him to say? Did you lift any prints off that gas can?"
"Lab work on peeping Tom complaints? Yeah, we got time for that. When we ain't busting up crack labs and trying to keep them goddamn Crips out of here."
"I really don't like being your straight man, Sheriff."
"Son, you were born for it. Lord God, I wish you people would move to Los Angeles," he said, and hung up.
Temple Carrol picked me up at Doc's house the next morning, and we drove into Missoula for breakfast. She wore khakis and scuffed boots and a yellow pullover, and because of her short height she steered with her chin tilted slightly upward. She was one of those women whose contradictions made both her admirers and her adversaries misjudge her potential.
Her eyes were a milky green that changed color when she was angry, as though dark smoke swam inside them, and she had a distracting habit of chewing gum or piling her hair on top of her head while I talked to her, as though she were not listening. Then I would discover days later she could repeat a conversation back to me, word for word, and accurately correct my own memory of it.
She kick-boxed on a heavy bag every day at a gym in Deaf Smith and could touch the floor with the flats of her hands. She was often dirty from work in her garden, the seat of her shorts grass-stained, her hair full of leaves, her body glowing with sweat and the smell of crushed flowers. She cared nothing for other people's opinions, thought politics were foolish, kept guns all over her house, and fed every stray animal on the west side of the county. Anyone who mistook her eccentricities for weakness and crossed a line with her did so only once.
As I looked at the pinkness of her skin, the baby fat on her arms, the way a strand of her chestnut hair kept blowing in her eye, I wanted to touch her, to place the back of my hand on the heat of her cheek, to rest my arm across her shoulders. As she drove along the river, through the blueness of the morning, her profile and the angle of her mouth contained all the innocence and loveliness of a high school girl waiting to be kissed, and I felt ashamed of my own impulses and all the times I had been cavalier about her loyalty and friendship.
But try as I might, I always did or said the wrong thing with Temple Carrol.
"You have a reason for staring at me?" she said.
"Sorry," I said.
"I get the feeling you're in a confessional mood about something," she said.
"Excuse me?"
"I was jogging by the campus yesterday. I happened to see you on the roof of a house with another man."
"Really?" I said.
"The postman told me that's the home of a Catholic priest. Are we using the clergy again to rinse out our latest affair?"
"How about some slack, Temple?"
"I'd like to break your damn neck," she replied, and gave me a look. "I interviewed your Dr. Pisspot yesterday. You can really pick them."
"You did what?"
"I went out to Cleo Lonnigan's house. God's gift to the Red Man. She seems to think she glows with blue fire."
"You shouldn't have done that."
"She thinks those bikers killed her child. That makes her a viable murder suspect. By the way, I wouldn't waste my energies being protective of her. She seems to put you on a level with the Antichrist."
"I shouldn't have gotten involved with her. It was my fault. She's not a bad person."
"I don't think you're chivalric, Billy Bob. You're just real dumb sometimes," she said. When she looked at me the milky green color of her eyes had darkened but not with anger. The depth of injury in them, like a stone bruise down in the soul, made me swallow with shame.
ve minutes after I returned to Doc's the phone rang in the living room.
"Hello?" I said.
"Where have you been?" Cleo Lonnigan's voice said.
"Out."