Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"Why'd you mention Temple?"

"Dixon almost tore out your son's package. What do you think he'd do to a woman?"

"How do you know all this stuff, Nicki?"

"Ah, my first name again. It's my business to know."

"Good. Stay out of mine," I said, and turned to leave.

He caught up with me and placed two fingers on my arm. They were moist with perspiration. He looked at my face and took his hand away.

"It's not my purpose to be enemies with you," he said. "We got a, what do you call it, a symbiotic relationship. You see that big guy out by second base? He works for me. He's incontinent and blows gas in crowded elevators and thinks Nostradamus is a college football team. But he's got a talent. Know what it is?"

"He kills people?"

"He's a great second baseman. We were on the same team at TI. In a playoff game nobody could figure out how I was wetting down the ball. I didn't touch my face or hat or belt, but my curve was jumping out of the catcher's mitt. Know how I did it?"

"No."

"We'd whip the ball around the infield. Frank out there had a hole cut in the pocket of his glove and a sponge inside it. He'd be the last infielder to handle the ball. When it came back to me it looked like it'd been through a car wash." Nicki smiled, his dark eyes dancing on my face.

"What's the point?"

"Everybody has a function. You put the right people and the right functions together, everybody wins. Help me out, man. I don't want to sell Cleo's debt."

"Sell it?"

He gave me a look. "You're sure you were with the G? Yeah, sell it. Discount it, twenty cents on the dollar. But the guys who buy the debt are not like me. They recover all the principal and all the back vig, plus interest on the vig. You want me to draw you a picture? Think about guys who carry tin snips in their glove compartments."

I left him standing there and got back into my truck. The baseball field was green, the base paths blown with dust, the outfield bordered by the cotton-woods and aspens that fringed the river. High above it all sat Xavier and Holly Girard, artists whose interests were wedded to those of an ex-convict war veteran who played baseball in the middle of a Norman Rockwell setting and probably helped Hmong tribesmen grow opium in Laos.

What had the sheriff said, something to the effect that most people's public roles were pure bullshit? I wondered if he should not be given an endowed chair at the local university.

I BOUGHT French bread and cheese and sliced meat at a delicatessen and picked up Temple Carrol at the health club in Hellgate Canyon where she had started working out on a daily basis. We drove to a picnic ground in a grove of cedar trees by the river, and I fixed lunch for us at a plank table in the shade while she leafed through her notebooks and file folders and went over the edited transcriptions of her interviews with anyone she thought to be connected to the death of Lamar Ellison.

"I interviewed Sue Lynn Big Medicine," she said.

"Yes?"

"She was in the saloon up the Blackfoot with Lamar Ellison just before he was killed. She's hiding something." Temple had not changed from her workout. She wore pink shorts rolled up high on her legs and a gray workout halter and she kept lifting her hair off the back of her neck and pushing it on top of her head with one hand while she flipped through her notes.

"Hiding what?" I said.

"This is what she told me: 'Lamar would have blackouts when he mixed alcohol and reefer. Don't ask me what he talked about. He didn't make sense when he was stoned.'

"So then I asked her why she even bothered to mention the fact that Lamar'd had a blackout. She goes, 'Because you wanted to know what he was talking about the last time I saw him. I'm trying to tell you I don't know what he was talking about. What do you expect from a guy who had shit for brains even when he was sober?'"

"Could I see the folder you have on her?" I said. As an investigator and researcher, Temple had no peer. If at all possible, her interviews got on tape. Then she would transcribe the tape onto the printed page and go through the person's rambling statements and attempts at obfuscation and highlight sentences and phrases that were part of patterns.

She never asked a question that required only a yes or no response, which forced the subject, if he was dishonest, to search in his mind for ideational associations that would mislead the interviewer. Usually in that moment the subject's eyes went askance. However, if the subject was a pathological liar, his eyelids stayed stitched to his forehead and he leaned forward aggressively, an angry tone of self-righteousness thre

aded through his answer.

Temple maintained that the first response out of the subject's mouth was always the most revealing, even if the person was lying. She said nouns went to the heart of the matter and adverbs showed manipulation. Honest people erred on the side of self-accusation and took responsibility for the evil deeds others had visited upon them. Sociopaths, when they had nothing at risk, told stories about themselves that made the mind reel and the stomach constrict, then a moment later tried to conceal the fact they had been raised in an alley by a single mother. One way or another, Temple's highlighter found it all.

The transcription of her interview with Sue Lynn Big Medicine was two pages long.

"She uses the words 'blackout' and 'stoned' six separate times," Temple said. "The impression I get is that Ellison went outside the bar, smoked a lot of reefer with some other bikers, then came back in and told her something that made her skin crawl. You got any idea what it might be?"