The Royal Wulff Murders (35 page)

“Tell me,” Stranahan said. He thought:
Get him talking
.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” Ventura said.

Stranahan noticed that he was holding an Adams dry fly. It seemed absurd. Mechanically, he completed tying it to the leader tippet.

Ventura’s voice, coming out of near darkness, had a different tone. The authoritative, chesty resonance was back.

“Fishing’s over, Sean. Place your rod on the bottom of the boat. Now put your hands on the gunwales, one on each side. That’s right. If you move a hand for any reason, even if it’s to itch your nose, I will shoot you. Do you understand? I’m just going to ask this once. What were you doing at that pond?”

Stranahan’s mind raced. How much did Ventura actually know about him, other than that Richard Summersby had hired him to paint pictures and that he was the person McNair had attacked? Ventura couldn’t know that Stranahan was onto the hatchery scheme
or that he had guessed his tie to McNair. Still, he had to give him something.

“Your neighbor tried to kill my friend, Sam Meslik. He’s the fishing guide who was shot on Henry’s Lake. I thought McNair was gone and I was going to try to find a rifle at his house, so there would be evidence.”

Ventura nodded his head thoughtfully at the part-truth, and for a moment Stranahan allowed himself the luxury of hope that this evening could still be put behind him.

Then Ventura shot him in the chest.

Stranahan felt a hot flash, a concentrated burning sensation like the blast of a blowtorch. Instinctively, he clamped both his hands over his ribcage. He could not draw breath. A scent, like phosphorous burning when a match is struck, invaded his nostrils. The burning in his chest drew to a point of pain and Stranahan felt his lungs expand, the point of pain draw sharper, then the gasping exhalation of his breath.

Ventura’s voice rose from the blackness.

“Do I have your attention now?”

Stranahan was looking at his palms. Why wasn’t there blood?

“You shot me,” he said.

“Yes, but look at it this way. You’re not dead. I pulled the bullet out of the cartridge case.”

“Then…” Stranahan concentrated on his breathing.

“I shot you with ten grains of pistol powder behind a charge of sea salt. I thought there might be occasion to clear the bullshit out of the air.”

“Salt?” Stranahan barely got the word out.

“From Brittany. It’s expensive salt. The next cartridge is loaded with a Winchester SXT. Enough powder to blow it out your back.”

He allowed himself a chuckle. “Must burn like hell, having your chest seasoned like that. Make you more tasty, huh?” Ventura waded
up alongside the boat until he was standing by the stern. “Let me see your hands. Are you bleeding?”

“Maybe under my shirt.”

“We can’t have it on the boat, Sean. So take your hands—no, don’t wipe them—put them back on the gunwales right where they were.”

Stranahan did as he was told.

Ventura’s voice was patient. “Now I’ll ask you again—what were you doing at the pond? Tell me the truth and you get a story while we wait. I have a surprise for you. But lie to me…” Ventura let the words hang.

Stranahan felt the muscles in his chest shudder. Deliberately, he amplified the reaction, feigning convulsion. He had to buy time.

“Come come, Sean. Think about what I did for a living. I know theatrics. Answer me.”

Stranahan knew that Ventura intended to kill him, truth told or not. His only chance was to convince Ventura that it was in his best interests to let him live.

“Diseased trout,” he heard himself say. “McNair put trout in the pond that have whirling disease. He’s planting them around the state. I was collecting evidence.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No,” Stranahan said. “It’s the truth. He works for a hatchery, Missouri River Pisces. He planted fish in the Big Blackfoot River. I followed his truck.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He’s working for someone who’s hoping property will go for a song if the trout disappear.”

“Someone?”

“I don’t know who.”

“This scheme, how would that work?”

Stranahan explained that the state would stock fish if the disease
became epidemic and ruined the fishing. It would kick-start property values. Someone who bought low could sell high.

“I don’t think you know what you are talking about,” Ventura said.

“Maybe I don’t. But the sheriff knows what I know?

“The sheriff?”

“Yes. Martha Ettinger.”

“You’re working with the sheriff’s department?”

“She knows I went fishing with you tonight. She knows where we are. If I don’t call her, she’ll be at your house by midnight. She’ll investigate you for my murder.”

Ventura’s laughter was a harsh bark. “I don’t believe you.”

“I can prove it,” Stranahan said. “My wallet, it’s in my vest. She gave me her card. Look at the back of it.”

Stranahan heard a mechanical click. For an instant, he was blinded by a beam of light. Blinking his eyes, he saw Ventura, standing in thigh-deep water a few feet away, with a penlight between his front teeth. The light made a gargoyle mask of his face, accentuating the shadows. Ventura snapped the fingers of his left hand. He motioned with the pistol.

Stranahan fished the wallet out and deliberately tossed it high, hoping that Ventura would lunge. If he did, Stranahan would go for the gun. But the flashlight beam barely nodded as Ventura snapped it out of the air.

“Doesn’t mean anything,” he mumbled. The penlight bobbed as he spoke around the barrel. “It’s just a telephone number.”

“What it means is that anyone who calls that number, she’ll tell them to cooperate with me.”

“She doesn’t know who I am. If she does, she has no reason to care.”

The words were distorted, but Stranahan could feel a tension in them, a concentrated effort at delivery. He drew in a breath.
Here goes
, he thought.
Live or die
.

He said, “She knows you’re Apple McNair’s brother.”

What effect the words had on Ventura, Stranahan couldn’t say. The face looked grotesque behind the sunspot of the flashlight beam. He felt his stomach knot, drawing inward at the anticipation of being shot.

He went on quickly, “You can’t talk your way out of your relationship with McNair, but you can distance yourself from him. I don’t know anything that connects you to the people he’s killed. Maybe you have something to do with the hatchery plot, I’m guessing you do, but that’s a crime you can lawyer your way out of. But if I go missing, then you’re a murderer.”

The circle of light glanced off his face and Stranahan heard a click as Ventura snapped off the penlight. In the sudden blackness, he could feel his heart pounding.

“Let you go, just like that.” The voice came out of the ink.

“Just let me step out of the boat. The shore’s right here. I’ll walk back.”

“And tonight never happened?”

“I’ll tell the sheriff that we went fishing, but you knew nothing about McNair.” In the silence, Stranahan could feel the wavelets lapping the hull. He could try to roll the boat and dive under. Either that or go for Ventura. He’d been measuring the steps since the moment Ventura turned with the pistol. But slogging through the water, it would be slow. No, stay calm. Give Ventura time to think about his own best interests.

“You’re a good liar, Sean,” Ventura said at length. “For about a half a minute you had me convinced the sheriff was going to show up on a white horse. But I don’t think she has any idea where you are, and I don’t think she knows who I am, either. I said I’d tell you a story. That is, in return for the truth”—he hesitated—“but then, you learn to admire liars in my profession. It’s what acting is, the so-called Method notwithstanding.”

Stranahan took a chance. He pressed slightly on the gunwale under
his right hand. Immediately, he felt the boat respond. It would roll if he pressed down hard enough.

Ventura spoke. “You are right, Sean. Apple is indeed my brother. He is a child, really, and I was father more than brother to him for a long time. The question is: Am I responsible for his actions? Am I my brother’s keeper? It’s true I own the land upon which he lives, so perhaps I am guilty of omission by not telling the neighbors. But that is not a crime. Apple is not my ward, and nothing he has done can be traced to me.”

“What about the fish?” Stranahan said.

“Do you want to hear my story, or interrupt? Do you want to die without knowing why? I will get to the fish.” Ventura hesitated. “Though in a sense that is where this begins.”

In a reflective voice, he said, “He worships me, you know. There’s no way around the fact that he is mentally ill, but some of the damage is understandable. Our father died when Apple was ten. We had a mother and an aunt who, together, added up to half a mother. One left to drink herself to death. The other was a whore by another name. What saved Apple were fish. We grew up on our father’s boat, helping him commercial-fish sockeye and pink salmon. The silver salmon, when they turn into tidewater, have scales like Tiffany diamonds. Apple said once, I’ll never forget, ‘They’re so shiny they make my eyes water.’ Ask me why, I don’t know, but as long as he fished he was happy. He didn’t need anything else.”

A shadow crossing the white pepper of the stars made Stranahan glance up. It was an owl, beating by on silent wings. Stranahan followed its flight, lifting his left hand where it grasped the gunwale and pressing with his right… and felt the boat tip. Then sway the other way. And thought about it—as good a way to die as another.

Ventura was talking to himself now, lost in his reverie.

“The change came when we moved to Kuskok Bay. Apple stealing wood, burning Mrs. Wilson’s mail because she had looked at him a
certain way. Petty crimes. Later, in high school, the”—he searched for a word—“deviations in his behavior became more pronounced. A woman in the Indian village woke up to find that a hank of her hair had been cut off. She told the newspaper she’d seen a devil with black eyes; she wasn’t far from right. Another woman caught Apple sticking the hook of a trout fly into her pierced ear when she was in bed. Strange thing to do, climb through windows and touch people while they sleep. It’s like counting coup.”

Stranahan thought of the trout fly in Jerry Beaudreux’s lip, felt the lump on his own lower lip with his tongue. He heard Ventura sigh.

“I could have turned him in,” he said, “but I didn’t want the trouble. By then I was left wing on the hockey team, the class president, got my hands on the perfect breasts of the prom queen. You would think Apple would be jealous, but he wasn’t, not of me. He did get jealous of people close to me—girls, especially. And in oblique ways, he made sure I knew what he was doing. He’d leave muddy shoes in the hall, ones I hadn’t seen before, so I would be the one who threw the evidence out. He’d take a locket of hair he’d cut off someone’s sleeping head and tuck it into my shirt pocket. You understand what I’m saying, Sean?”

“I think so. He made you complicit. It gave him something on you that would make it harder to leave.”

“That’s it exactly,” Ventura said. “Behind those black eyes there is calculation. There is resentment directed at happiness, at contentment, things he can’t have. There is a violence of the heart.

“Do you know what the mistake of my life was? It was telling Apple I was running away with Valerie Morris after graduation. We were going to water-thumb our way to Washington, go to college—big plans for kids from nowhere.”

Ventura fell quiet. Stranahan could feel a change in the night—the mosquito drone lower-pitched, the air turned damp warm. No stars now. He looked up and felt the first drops of rain.

“The
sheriff told me that your girlfriend drowned.”

Ventura didn’t immediately answer. When he spoke, his voice had lost its reflective quality and sounded defeated.

“She was found in a lake where bush pilots tie up their float planes. It was on the eve of our graduation. Valerie worked there, hauling gear, fueling up the Beavers with additives—all the old De Havilland’s ran on leaded fuel—odd jobs. Her body was trapped under a dock. There was a bruise on her forehead, so it was presumed that she had fallen when she stepped from the dock to the float of the plane tethered there, that she slipped on the float and hit her head on it. She drowned in three feet of water.”

“You think Apple killed her, don’t you?”

“I know he did… now. I wasn’t sure at the time. The accident was plausible.”

“The sheriff told me about a girlfriend you left Alaska with. Was that because you were afraid Apple might hurt her, too?”

“No. That was later. Apple had given up on me by then. I think killing Valerie was an act of desperation, and when it didn’t work, when I left anyway, he dropped out of school. Dropped out of life, really. No, I left Alaska with Barbara looking forward, not backward. But how do you know this? I’m curious.”

“The sheriff’s department did a background check on Apple. People remember you.”

“You still want me to believe you know the sheriff? Maybe you do at that. It doesn’t matter now. What I was asking was how did you know I was Apple’s brother?”

Stranahan had to think. He couldn’t tell the truth, that it had been barely half an hour since he recognized him from the yearbook photo. Ventura would know then that the sheriff had no idea who he was. It would remove the only reason the man had for letting him live.

He said, “Your old girlfriend’s parents.”

“Barbara’s?”

“They live in Bellingham. They knew you’d gone to California, knew who you’d become there. The sheriff called them.” It wasn’t true. As far as he knew, Ettinger hadn’t spoken with Barbara Rouse or her parents.

Once again there was silence as Ventura let this sink in.

“I don’t know,” he said at length. “I changed my name. I changed my appearance. I did everything I could to put that life behind me.”

“She knew,” Stranahan said. “I think Apple must have known where to find you, too. Or did you contact him?”

“No, that is the last thing I would have done. But my second wife was an actress. B-minus, but even B-minus actresses are someone in Hollywood. Apple read about her in a magazine. It had a photo of the two of us, our place here. It named the valley. He knocked on my door two years ago August. He said someone had dredged up Valerie’s name. Said he had seen them together down by the lake on the evening Valerie drowned. The man wanted money to erase his memory.