It can happen as quickly as a drunk driver swinging his car across the center stripe of the two-lane, crashing head-on into your grille. It usually comes when you least suspect it, often in the most innocuous of situations. I guess I had accepted all the aforementioned; I just didn’t want to buy it on my knees.
“Listen to me,” I said to Ridley Wellstone. “When Sal is done with us, you’ll be next.”
“Not true, Mr. Robicheaux. He needs me,” Wellstone replied. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “Don’t say any more. Don’t degrade yourself. I tried to reason with you. Fact is, I begged you to stay out of our affairs. You invited this fate into your life, sir. Accept it like a man.”
You arrogant bastard, I thought.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.
“Getting to my feet,” I said. That’s exactly what I was doing, rising from the ground, pushing myself erect, my knees popping, my hands no longer clasped behind my neck.
“Get down on the ground,” the man with the Mac-10 said.
“Sorry, partner. You’re going to have to haul a hundred and ninety pounds of dead meat to that hole if you want me in it,” I said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete rising up beside me. “That makes two of us, asshole,” he said.
“Get up here, Moo-Moo,” Sally Dio shouted down the slope.
Again there was no answer, and Sal knew he had a problem on his hands. The man in the mask began walking toward us from the pit. “Give me the Mac. I’ll have all this cleaned up in two minutes,” he said, his words reverberating inside the plastic hollows of the mask.
“Harold?” said Jamie Sue. “Harold, is that you? My God, what are you doing?”
The man in the mask didn’t reply; instead, he seemed to hang his head slightly.
“Harold, look at me,” she said. “What are you doing? You were my friend. I trusted you. Leslie hired you because of me. I told him what a gentleman you are. You came to our revival. You can’t allow yourself to be part of this.”
“Shut up, Jamie Sue,” Dio said. “This guy has been snuffing Ridley’s enemies for years. How do you think those two Hollywood characters ended up dead? The porn producer had been indicted and was going to give up Ridley to a grand jury. So our friend Harold tuned him up and tuned him out at the rest stop.”
“You got a big mouth,” Harold said, turning his gaze on Dio.
“We’ll work this out later. Right now you get down that hillside and see where Billy is,” Dio said.
“I don’t take orders from you,” Harold said.
A breeze blew through the clearing, showering more pine needles into the electric glow, the air blooming again with a smell that was like lake water and schooled-up fish. Then I saw something I couldn’t believe, an image that was both incongruous and nonsensical: the top half of Jimmy Dale Greenwood rising from the pit, both of his hands gripped on a snub-nose thirty-eight revolver, strips of duct tape still hanging from his wrists. It took a moment for me to realize what had happened: The three men who had been machine-pistoled into the pit had been armed. Somehow Jimmy Dale had gotten loose and had taken a weapon off one of their bodies. He aimed the revolver straight out in front of him. I saw him close one eye and pull the trigger.
The report sounded like that of a starter gun at a track meet. The shot went wide and disappeared with a pinging sound down in the trees. Jimmy Dale pulled the trigger twice more, and Sally Dio’s left leg buckled under him, just like someone had kicked him behind the knee. Billy tried to swing his Mac-10 clear of Dio for a shot, but Clete Purcel was all over him, pinning his arms at his sides, picking him up and slamming him to the ground, kicking the gun from his hand, stomping the side of his head, picking him up again and driving his fist into his face.
I got Sally Dio’s nine-millimeter from his hand and aimed it at the man in the mask. Dio tried to fight with me, but his best blows were like those of a dried-out crustacean — weightless and empty, like Sal himself, a shell of a man whose strength existed only to the degree that he could inculcate fear in others. Oddly, the man in the mask showed no reaction that I could see, as though he was merely a witness to all the events taking place around him.
Clete was still hitting Billy, holding him down with one knee in his chest, hitting him so hard he had started to beg.
“Cletus, ease up,” I said.
“You’re right,” he said, getting to his feet, the Mac-10 in his right hand, his attention focused on the man in the mask, his finger curling inside the trigger guard.
“Don’t do it,” I said.
“He’s going to skate. The sicker they are, the easier they get off on an insanity plea,” he replied.
“That’s just the way it is. We’re not executioners, podna. Lower the piece.”
“No, I’m going to walk him into the woods. Call it Q-and-A time. Who knows how it might work out?” His green eyes were charged with adrenaline, his face slick with sweat, his cheeks as red as apples.
“We don’t give them power. We don’t become like them. Waxman will rot in a cage, and he’ll take Ridley Wellstone down with him. We’ll take two guys off the board instead of one. You want to do their time?”
“Good try,” Clete said.
“You always said it, the Bobbsey Twins are forever. Who am I going to drink Dr Pepper with?”
I saw hesitation in his movements, like an elephant in must suddenly becoming pacified, his size actually deflating, a suppressed grin on his mouth. “You can really rain on a parade, Dave.”
He made Harold Waxman take off his mask and lie down on the ground, then pulled Candace Sweeney and Jimmy Dale Greenwood out of the pit, brushing off their clothes for them as he did, maybe reassuring them in his clumsy fashion that the world was a better place than they had thought.
But in truth, I cannot tell you with any exactitude what happened inside that clearing during a midsummer electric storm west of Swan Lake, Montana. I know that the rain falls and the sun rises on evil men as well as on the good and just. I know that on that particular night we were spared a terrible fate. At the same time, men a theologian would probably term wicked were put out of business. Perhaps we even made a dent in the venal enterprises they represent.
But if there is a greater lesson in what occurred inside that clearing, it’s probably the simple fact that the real gladiators of the world are so humble in their origins and unremarkable in appearance that when we stand next to them in a grocery-store line, we never guess how brightly their souls can burn in the dark.
Or at least that’s the way it seems to me.
EPILOGUE
TROYCE NIX HAD never thought of himself as a liar, or at least not a very good liar. However, he discovered he was far more adept at it than he had thought, particularly after being interviewed by both the Missoula County and Lake County sheriffs and then a team of FBI agents.
The latter group questioned him on the shore of Swan Lake, directly below the clearing where the mass shooting had gone down, asking him to describe again, in detail, how Jimmy Dale Greenwood had drowned.
“It’s like I said. I chased him through the trees, but he just kept on hauling ass. He hit the water running and swum out about forty yards and then started fighting in the water and went down like a brick shithouse.”
“It was pitch dark. How could you see anything?” one agent asked.
“There was lightning flashing up in the clouds. I think he probably had a cramp or them goons busted him up inside. I seen his arms flailing around for just a minute, then he sunk under a bunch of bubbles. Throw some grappling hooks out there. He probably ain’t floated very far.”
“That lake has mountain peaks under it. The drop-offs go straight down a hundred and thirty feet,” the same agent said.
“Really? I guess that’s how come all them big pike are in there,” Troyce said.
“Did you try to go after him?” a female agent asked. She was the same Amerasian woman he had seen the night Quince Whitley tr
ied to throw acid in Candace’s face.
“The last time I got close to Jimmy Dale, he cut me up and left me to bleed to death. If you ask me, he was a mean little piss-pot and worthless half-breed and deserved worse than what he got. I wish he hadn’t drowned. I wish I could have had the opportunity to stick him in that wood chipper by the log house.”
The Amerasian woman looked at Troyce for a long time. “Do you know it’s a felony to lie to a federal agent who is conducting a criminal investigation?”
“If I got a reason to cover up for that nasty little turd, it’s lost on me. Y’all keep up the good work,” Troyce said. “Say, y’all think I might have a chance of becoming a FBI agent?”
Two weeks later, I placed flowers on the graves of both Seymour Bell and Cindy Kershaw. I didn’t try to contact or console their families, because I believe absolutely without reservation that the worst thing that can happen to human beings is to lose one’s child, and the words we offer by way of solace become salt inside the wound. Instead, I said a prayer over their graves and told them that I hoped they were all right, and I also asked them to watch over me and my family and to keep all of us safe from those who Jesus said should fasten millstones around their necks and cast themselves into the sea.
But sometimes neither prayer nor visiting the graves of homicide victims expunges the images associated with the manner in which they died, and I knew I had to go to the source of their suffering and look him in the face, in the same way a child has to open a closet door and confront the darkness inside in order to be free of it.
Harold Waxman was being held in the Lake County jail, the first of a series of lockups in which he would reside until both state and federal authorities agreed to let him be prosecuted in the jurisdiction where the greatest amount of damage could be done to him by the legal system. The chances that he would be gassed, electrocuted, or injected were minimal. Unlike Ted Bundy, who deliberately committed heinous crimes in Florida — including the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl — knowing he would fry if he were caught and prosecuted there, Harold Waxman seemed to have no death wish and killed people for only one reason: He enjoyed it. Consequently, he was more clever than Bundy, less compulsive, and not given to the thespian temptations of televised trials.
I have known police officers and soldiers who I believed to be sociopaths. I have also interviewed sociopaths in death houses in the Huntsville pen, Raiford, Angola, and Parchman. They have one commonality that never varies from individual to individual, replicated in such exact detail that you feel they all know one another and have rehearsed their statements and are taking you over the hurdles. They not only lack remorse for the deeds they have committed; they are bemused when you indicate they should.
I was surprised Waxman consented to the interview, since I had no legal jurisdiction in the state of Montana. For the interview, he was moved from a lockdown unit to a holding cell, one with a barred rather than a solid door. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and waist and ankle chains, his wrists cuffed close to his hips, his whole body tinkling with steel as he shuffled into the cell. He had been interrupted during his lunch and had brought a sandwich wrapped in foil with him, clenching it with his fingers, although there was no way he could raise it to his mouth. The turnkey locked him in the holding cell and brought me a chair so I could sit outside the bars and not inside the cell.
Waxman’s expression was as flat as a skillet. He’d had a jailhouse haircut, one that had mowed off his sideburns and left a pale rim of skin around his ears and the back of his neck. He was sitting on a steel bunk suspended from wall chains and seemed to have no interest in my presence; if he recognized me, he gave no indication.
“I went out to the graves of Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell,” I said.
“Who?” he said.
“The kids you murdered.”
“Oh, you’re talking about those college students. I didn’t kill them. It was Quince Whitley.”
I believed Whitley had been his partner, but to what degree and in the commission of which crimes were open questions that would probably never be resolved. What I did not question was that Waxman was a pathological liar and enjoyed the power his lies gave him and the injury and confusion they caused.
“Tell me, sir, do you think at all about the suffering those kids’ parents have to go through for the rest of their lives?”
“I don’t know their parents. I didn’t know the kids. I won’t say it again.” He kept leaning forward on the bunk, trying to see past me down the corridor.
“Expecting someone?” I said.
“Why are you here?” he replied, ignoring my question. “I mean your real reason, and don’t tell me it’s those kids.”
“When Jamie Sue Wellstone recognized you in the clearing, I saw you hang your head for a minute. Why did you do that, Mr. Waxman? Were you ashamed you sold her down the drain?”
“Yeah, I remember that. I bought a guitar. I paid three grand for it through Musician’s Friend, out in Portland. She was going to show me some chords and runs she used in her songs. So I knew that was out. I wouldn’t have put up three grand for a Martin guitar if I’d known how things were going to work out.”
“Purcel wanted to smoke you. I stopped him,” I said.
“Yeah?” he said, still focused on something behind me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Enjoy your life in the gray-bar hotel chain. I’d ask for lockup and eat out of cans, though. The inmates in the kitchen don’t like psychopaths in main pop.”
“What?”
“Most cons aren’t that much different from the rest of us. They don’t like guys like you,” I said, wondering why I was explaining myself to him.
I walked back down the corridor and wasn’t sure whether he had heard me or not, or even if he cared about the implications of my statement regarding his future. The turnkey was walking toward me, grinning good-naturedly.
“He’s all yours, Cap,” I said.
“He give you what you want?” the turnkey asked.
“More or less,” I lied.
“Good,” the turnkey said. “He didn’t want to talk to you, but I told him I’d find some seasoning for him.”
“Pardon?”
“They aren’t allowed condiments in lockdown. So I told him to bring his sandwich down to the holding cell and I’d find something for him in the coffee room. We got our own little items tucked away. See?” The turnkey held up a bottle of Evangeline hot sauce to illustrate his point.
Down in the pit that had almost become their grave, Candace Sweeney had gotten Jimmy Dale Greenwood loose from the duct tape that had bound his wrists. But Jimmy Dale had effected an escape of another kind without any help from anyone. He had broken out of the prison of fear in which he had lived most of his life. Jimmy Dale had not tried to run and was ready to take his fall and go back to prison. Except it was Troyce Nix who proved to be the surprise in the Cracker Jack box, when his aborted desire for revenge went through a strange transformation. Nix and Candace Sweeney and Jimmy Dale had walked into the trees together, then Nix and Candace had come back without him, and I never saw Jimmy Dale again.
Nix stuck by his story and continued to maintain that Jimmy Dale had drowned in Swan Lake. One month after the shooting, Jamie Sue and her son disappeared from Montana, and I heard nothing about or from her until four months later, when I received a letter postmarked in Upper Hat Creek, British Columbia. It read as follows:
Dear Mr. Roboshow,
We got us an Airstream and seventy acres of alfalfa in a place that doesn’t need mentioning. We raise buffalo and red angus and provide rough stock for rodeos that probably come to your town. The point is I wanted to thank you and Mr. Purcel for all you done. Jamie Sue and me sing duets sometimes in saloons, but mostly we write songs and one or two has been recorded, although our names are not necessarily on them.
Tell Mr. Hollister I appreciate the trust he put in me and I’m sorry for causing him any trouble. I hope things have wo
rked out for Miss Candace, too. If you don’t mind, burn this letter. Jamie Sue says hi and says she apologizes for being rude to you, but sometimes you were a pain in the neck.
She didn’t really say that.
You ever seen the Royal Canadian Rockies? I’m writing a song about them. Everything Woody Guthrie wrote about is still up here. Every morning when I wake up, all them big blue mountains fall right through my window. Don’t let nobody tell you Woody’s music isn’t still on the wind.
Your bud in E-major
The letter was unsigned.
Ridley Wellstone and Sally Dio? Their families had been in business together for decades, in the same kind of symbiotic alliance that had existed in the nineteenth century between the street gangs of New York and Boston and the blue-blood families whose names have been polished clean by success and the passage of time. Sally was under indictment when his plane crashed into the mountainside on the res, and he needed a new identity, one that would allow him access to all the resources he had amassed through his partnership with the Wellstones. Ridley, on the other hand, needed Sal’s connections to the hotel and casino industry in Nevada after Ridley had lost a fortune during the collapse of the oil market in the early 1980s.
The last I heard, both of them were going down for at least twenty-five years. But who cares? As players in the building and the deconstruction of empires, they’re merely ciphers. Jefferson in his letters to John Adams foretold their advent long ago. Perhaps the greater problem is their constituency. A confidence man chooses only one kind of person as his victim — someone who, of his own volition, invites deception into his life. Eventually we catch on to charlatans and manipulators and ostracize or lock them away. But unlike the fifth act of an Elizabethan tragedy, order is seldom reimposed on the world. The faces of the actors may change, but the story is ongoing, and neither religion nor government has ever rid the world of sin or snake oil.
Clete joined Alicia Rosecrans in San Diego, then she left the FBI and went back to the Big Sleazy with him. Molly and I went back home, too, but I couldn’t rest and I still don’t and I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s the times. Maybe I cannot rid myself of images of towers burning against a blue sky, the smoke an ugly scorch at forty-five degrees, the tree-shrouded neighborhoods of New Jersey just across the Hudson River. Maybe, just as in Clete’s dreams, I see us all inside a maelstrom, past and present and future, the living and the dead and the unborn, all part of one era that is so intense and fierce in its inception and denouement that it can only be seen correctly inside the mind of a deity.