Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"Maybe the guy Sue Lynn saw was the same fellow who reported the fire. You think of that?"

"The 911 on the fire was called in by a trucker on his CB," I said.

The sheriff rubbed his forehead and widened his eyes.

"I'll question Xavier Girard. But there's no evidence to put him at the crime scene, so I don't think this is going anywhere," he said. "By the way, I had the sheriff in Flathead County check out that resort on Swan Lake where Sue Lynn was hiding. Her cousin says Sue Lynn has bagged out for parts unknown."

I didn't wait for the sheriff to pick up Xavier Girard or ask him to come in. I drove directly to the Girards' house out on the bluff above the Clark Fork. A moving van was backed into the driveway and a half dozen men were trundling furniture up the loading ramp. I walked through the open front door of the house, into a bare living room with a cathedral ceiling that echoed with the sounds of the movers' work shoes. The sanded and lacquered pinewood interior of the room glowed with light, and Holly Girard stood in the middle of it all, dressed in oversize khakis and tennis shoes and a paint-splotched pink T-shirt, a baseball cap on her head, swearing, scolding the movers, but never quite crossing the line into direct insult.

She turned and studied me as she would a bird bouncing against a window glass. Then she walked toward me, her face tilted upward, touched with light, bemused, a bit vulnerable. She stood inside my shadow, the confidence in her sexual appeal undiminished by her appearance, the color in her eyes deepening.

"I hope Xavier hasn't hired you to sue me," she said.

Before I could reply she turned on a workman walking down the staircase and said, "You break that lamp and I'll own your salary for the rest of your life. That's a promise, Ed."

"Where's your husband, Ms. Girard?" I asked.

"Try detox or AA or any bar on Higgins. Or maybe he's in the sack with one of his twenty-year-old groupies. Each of them thinks she'll be the girl who changed his life and career. Oh, boring, boring, boring. Here," she said.

She wrote out the address of a townhouse on the river, then turned her attention back to the movers.

"You posed as Doc Voss's friend," I said.

"Excuse me?"

"Y'all let him go down for a murder you knew he didn't commit."

"I'm sure what you're saying will make sense to Xavier. But it doesn't to me. Now, good-bye, good luck, God speed, God bless, ta-ta, all that kind of thing."

"Y'all could have cleared Doc. Instead, you kept quiet and let him twist in the wind."

She had started to walk away. But she turned demurely and stepped close into me again, one of her small feet touching mine. She took off her cap and shook out her hair and gave me a long, deliberate stare. There were two white crystals on the rim of her left nostril.

"Contact my business agent at Creative Artists. He'd love to help you. Really he would," she said, and jiggled her fingers in good-bye.

"Watch yourself with Molinari, Ms. Girard. If you're tight with Cleo Lonnigan, you might share the admonition," I said, and went out the door.

When I started my truck she was standing in the yard, staring at me, her face disjointed with the wounded pride of a child.

WHEN I RANG the bell at Xavier Girard's town-house, he yelled from the back room, "The door's open. Fix yourself a drink in the kitchen and don't bother me till I come out. If you don't drink or if you're a friend of my wife, get the fuck out of my life."

I walked to his office door and looked inside. He was hunched over his computer, framed like a bear against the window and the broad sweep of the river and the spires and rooftops of the town and the green hills beyond.

His eyes were washed out, pale blue, the pupils like burnt match heads, his face manic and tight against the bone and ridged with bruises along the jaw. An odor like unwashed hair and beer sweat filled the room.

"I'm working now. There's vodka in the icebox. There're magazines by the toilet," he said.

"You came out to Doc's and complained to me that your wife wouldn't help with a fund-raiser for Doc's defense," I said.

"Man, you just don't fucking listen. That's yesterday's chewing gu

m, Jack," he said.

"You saw Ellison burn to death. You also saw an Indian woman flee the scene. All this time you could have cut Doc loose."

He pushed the "save" button on his keyboard.

"Here it is, straight up. I don't know who did what at that scene. I had no way of knowing Doc wasn't there first. But if I understand you correctly, you think I should have put it on a Native American woman who's probably been dumped on all her life?"