Light of the World (40 page)

“Great. Keep him occupied. I’m going to find Love Younger.”

An oversize pickup truck, with smoked windows and huge cleated tires, pulled into a parking spot not far from where we were standing. “How do you like this guy’s bumper sticker?” Alafair said.

“Don’t say anything. It’s their turf. They have the right to do whatever they want here.”

“So do the patients in a mental asylum.”

The sticker read
DA BRO GOTTA GO
.

“There’s Younger coming out of the house,” Alafair said. “Who’s the guy with him?”

“Take a guess.”

“The son who poured Coke all over Clete’s head?”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Then we’re leaving.”

“Clete just headed for the beer tent.”

I had the feeling that not only was our situation starting to unravel but Alafair had decided to go with the flow and enjoy it. I left her standing under a canopy and cut off Love Younger and Caspian between the ranch house and the crowd. “You promised me fifteen minutes,” I said.

His eyes were sky blue, his face flushed and soft-looking as a baby’s, loose strands of his white hair moving in the breeze. “Step inside the house with me,” he said.

“Get rid of him, Daddy,” Caspian said. “He’s here to cause trouble. It’s written all over him. He’s a drunk and a cooze hound.”

“Go find your wife,” his father said.

“She’s just over there someplace. She’s fine.”

“Did you hear me?” the older man said.

I saw Caspian’s scalp constrict visibly. He looked like a child who had been struck in the face by a trusted parent.

“I don’t think you need me here. I think I’ll take a drive into town,” he said.

“Goddammit, son, for once just do what I ask. It’s time to act like the husband of your wife and the father of your dead child,” Younger said. His face softened. He squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Come on, boy. Buck up and get us a table. I’ll be along directly.”

As Caspian walked away, a flatbed truck turned off the highway and drove under the arch. Several people began pointing, then a ripple of laughter spread through the crowd that quickly turned into collective joy. On the back of the truck, boomed down with chains, were two portable toilets with the name of our current president and the words
WHITE HOUSE
spray-painted on them. Both toilets had been shot full of holes.

Love Younger’s gaze remained on his son. Then he turned back to me. “You coming?” he said.

The ranch house was constructed of teardown lumber that was probably a century old, the rusted impressions of iron bolts and steel spikes and bits of chain deliberately left in the wood. The exterior of the house was cosmetic and had nothing to do with the interior. The lighting was turned on and off by voice command; the faucets and sinks in the kitchen were gold-plated. The living room had a fireplace the size of a Volkswagen; there was an elevator in the hallway that evidently accessed a parking garage under the house.

Through the kitchen window, I could see people lining up at the serving tables. “That’s my daughter in front of the cold-drink tent,” I said. “I pulled her out of a submerged plane when she was five years old.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t plan on losing her to Asa Surrette.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He rolled up his sleeves in front of the sink and turned on the water and began soaping his hands and forearms, scrubbing them as a surgeon might. He squeezed a disinfectant on his hands and ran cold water up and down his arms, then dried them with paper towels and stuffed the towels in a waste can under the sink.

“So you don’t plan on losing your daughter?” he said. “What should I make of a statement like that, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“I think you’re one of those who have ears that don’t hear and eyes that don’t see.”

“I see. That’s your mission here? Carrying your spiritual wisdom to the halt and the lame?”

“Your employee, the rapist, was killed with three forty-four-caliber balls. Why would somebody use a nineteenth-century firearm to commit a murder?”

“I’ve talked to the sheriff about that. He says Dixon is still under the microscope on that.”

“Dixon is not your man. I think the forty-four was used to point suspicion at him and perhaps you.”

“I don’t mean this offensively, but I would gladly pay double my taxes if people like you and Albert Hollister could be paid not to think.”

“I want to tell you something else about my daughter. She survived a massacre in her village in El Salvador. She was kidnapped at age eight by an evil man who thought he could terrify her. She bit the hell out of him. I saw her kidnapper eat six soft-nosed rounds from a three-fifty-seven. The wounds looked like flowers bursting from his shirt. The last round virtually eviscerated him. I enjoyed watching him blown apart. I wished I had done it instead of someone else. What does that suggest to you?”

“That you’re an obsessed and sick man.”

“Here’s the point. Booze probably burned up fifteen or twenty years of my longevity. That means I don’t have a lot to lose. I think you’ve been getting a free pass with the sheriff’s department. You’re either in total denial about your situation, or you’re aiding and abetting a killer.”

“How dare you.”

“You have resources that even the federal government doesn’t have. Why aren’t your people looking for the man who killed your granddaughter?”

“Why do you think I’m not looking for him?”

“Because you seem uninformed. Surrette did it. The question is
why and how. She was in a saloon full of outlaw bikers. Then, puff, she was gone.”

“I’m not convinced this man exists.”

“He tortured and killed people in his hometown for two decades, under the noses of the FBI. You don’t think he could escape a wrecked jail van and be killing people in this area? How about the waitress who disappeared up by Lookout Pass?”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“Which means none of your investigators bothered to look into it. Or they didn’t tell you about it.”

His gaze went away from mine. When he looked at me again, the confidence was not in his face. “What happened to the waitress?”

“She didn’t show up for work. Her house was locked and dead-bolted from the inside. Her bracelet was placed on a rock in the middle of the St. Regis River. It’s all part of Surrette’s pattern. He feeds on attention and the confusion and angst he instills in others.”

“What does the sheriff in Mineral County say?”

“The sheriff will do everything he can. If Surrette is the abductor, that won’t be enough. Does it strike you as ironic that I have to explain these things to you, sir?”

He didn’t answer. He kept staring at me inquisitively, the way a clinician might.

“Do you want to ask me something?” I said.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re after.”

I couldn’t believe his statement. “I told you. I’m afraid it didn’t do much good.”

“Earlier you called me a son of a bitch. I don’t hold that against you, because you were speaking honestly about your feelings. But I think you have an agenda. You resent others for their wealth. Everywhere you look, you see plots and conspiracies at work, corporations destroying the planet, robbing the poor, that sort of thing, and you never realize these things you think you see are a reflection of your own failure.”

“Mr. Younger, if I harbor resentment toward anyone, it’s toward myself. I couldn’t prevent my daughter from interviewing Surrette in
prison and writing articles about him that exposed him to a capital conviction. He won’t rest until he kills her.”

“You told her not to do it?”

“That’s correct.”

“Then it’s on her.”

I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a home governed by the value system of Love Younger.

I heard someone knock tentatively on the kitchen door. Through the glass, I saw a blond man in shades. Caspian was standing behind him, raising up on his toes to see inside the house. Love Younger opened the door. “What do you want, Kyle?” he said.

“Caspian thought I ought to see if you needed any help.”

“I don’t.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be right outside.”

Younger shut the door but continued to look through the glass at his son’s back. “I never get over it,” he said.

“Sir?” I said.

“When I look at Caspian, I always see the little boy, not the man. I don’t know if you’ve had that experience. He was always a little-bitty chap tagging along after the others. He’d have his elbows poked out, like a rooster that wants to fight. When he was about nine or ten, I took him to visit the hollow where I grew up. The kids there went barefoot in the snow and were meaner than spit on a church wall. Caspian wanted to pretend he was as tough as these poor little ragamuffins. He’d say ‘ain’t’ and ‘he don’t’ and talk about putting on his ‘britches’ in the morning. He loved to say ‘britches.’ ”

The content of our conversation had flown away, along with any apparent awareness on his part of who I was. He continued to stare through the glass, his hands on his hips. Then he shook his head and turned to me as though addressing an old friend. “Smart at figures and dumb as a turnip about everything else. Where did I go wrong with that poor boy?” he said.

“When I look at Alafair, all I see is the little girl. I guess that’s what I came out here to tell you,” I said.

There are moments when our common humanity allows us to see
into the souls of our worst adversaries. I wanted to believe this was one of them. It wasn’t.

“Well, I guess I started this saccharine introspection,” he said. “Now that you’ve accomplished your objective, Mr. Robicheaux, you can be on your way.”

Any illusions I had about Love Younger were gone. I realized that I had the same importance to him as any number of servicepeople who swam in and out of his ken every day.

I walked outside onto the lawn, into the breeze and the popping of flags and pennants atop the canvas tents and canopies. The guests of Love Younger were not bad people. They worked hard and loved their country and were fiercely self-reliant. They didn’t apologize for their values or their belief systems, and their physical courage was unquestionable. My quarrel was with the illusion into which I felt they had been lured. I had thought earlier that the gathering at the Younger ranch was akin to a medieval festival. It was no such thing. Love Younger was not an ideologue. Politics had nothing to do with the energies that drove him. His invitation to his ranch was a charade, a mask for the design of a willful and imperious man who had spent a lifetime controlling and destroying the people he loved most.

Why my lack of charity? Because the security man named Kyle, who did the bidding of his master, was staring at me from behind his sunglasses with far more interest than casual curiosity. His khakis were belted high up on his hips, his long-sleeved shirt snap-buttoned at the wrists. His body English did not serve him well: His arms were folded, an unconscious mechanism that often indicates repressed hostility or retention of information the individual takes pride in not sharing. It was his boots that caught my attention. They were cordovan, and from the stiffness in his trouser legs, I guessed they were stovepipes. Perhaps Tony Lamas.

I walked toward him. Caspian stood at his side, inserting a pinch of Copenhagen inside his cheek. “I was admiring your footwear,” I said.

“I bet one day you’ll have a pair of your own,” Kyle said.

“Are they Lamas?”

“Justins.”

“I’d like to have a look at them. Would you mind?” I said.

He laughed to himself and turned his face into the breeze. His hair was long, over his collar, stiff with gel. He looked back at me. There was something wrong with his eyes. He seemed to gaze at two objects simultaneously, or to be thinking about something that had nothing to do with the subject at hand. “Can I help you find a table?”

In the background I could see Alafair and Clete watching us from under a canopy. Clete held a foaming beer cup in one hand and a huge barbecue beef sandwich in the other. “No, thanks. My daughter and a friend are with me,” I said. “I’d still like to have a look at your boots, though.”

Kyle smiled at nothing and lifted the toe of one boot off the ground, the heel anchored on the grass. “They’re first-class. I recommend them,” he said. “Anything else?”

“You look like you’ve got a nasty cut under that bandage on your neck.”

“You got that right. My girlfriend is a biter. She’s a screamer, too. But what are you gonna do?”

“I bet your Justins are hand-tooled. Can you let me see the tops?”

Kyle looked at Caspian Younger, grinning. “Buddy, you’re a case,” he said.

“A lot of people tell me that. You know what a short-eyes is?”

He looked thoughtfully into space. “A pygmy?”

“That’s a guy who’s gone down for molestation of a child. A guy with a short-eyes in his jacket has a hard time inside. My suspicion is that most child molesters are capable of gang rape as well. What’s your opinion on that? Did you know any gang rapists inside?”

“Kyle answers to me,” Caspian said. “If you have a beef with him, talk to me about it.”

A
beef
? I wondered which movie he had learned the term from. “You and your father give jobs to former felons. I thought Kyle might know something about rapists and child molesters.”

“Why’d you come here? Was it because of what I did to your friend over there?” Caspian said.

“Clete? No. He did tell me about your throwing a cupful of Coca-Cola in his face, but I think he’s written it off.”

“That’s because he knows he’s out of his depth,” Caspian said.

“Do you have any idea how fortunate you are, Mr. Younger?” I asked.

“Before you give me a speech about how dangerous your pal is, let me explain something to you. I gave him a warning the first time he messed with my wife. I told him it wasn’t his fault. I also told him not to do it again.”

He had a point. Clete was sleeping with another man’s wife, a situation that gives the philanderer little claim to the high ground. I guess I should have walked away. Except I could not forget a detail from Wyatt Dixon’s account about the assault on him and his girlfriend by three masked men on the Blackfoot River.