The Royal Wulff Murders (6 page)

Martha blew out a breath and waited.

“So my point is, you’re in luck. There’s not another ME in the state who would check out the flecks of debris in this fellow’s throat as thoroughly as I did, or who, if he did, would know what he was looking at.”

“Which is?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Martha bent her head to the eyepiece. A mosaic of dots and green oblongs filled the lens.

“What do you see?”

“Pointillism,” she said. “Seurat’s
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
.”

“I’m impressed with your art history, but it’s blue-green algae,” the medical examiner said.

Martha waited for the explanation. But Doc Hanson, having contained his excitement for several hours, would not be rushed. A coroner didn’t get many cases that carried the romance of murder in Hyalite County.

“Now I’m going to have you look at another slide,” he said. “This is a water sample, taken from the lungs. Man was a nonsmoker, by the way.” He turned the microscope to a higher power, readjusted the focus, and stepped aside.

“Christ,” Ettinger said. “They look like the face in
The Scream
. Worse.”

“Nasty devils, aren’t they? The benign ones that look like haystacks are copepods. The ones with the wicked mouths are cladocerans. They’re aquatic invertebrates, eaten by carnivorous insect larvae and baby fish.”

“We drink these monsters?”

“We do if we drink lake water,” Hanson said.

He held her eyes, waiting for the shoe to drop.

“But he was drowned in the river, Doc. Right?”

“Was he?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
tranahan looked up from his easel. There was something about the cadence of the footsteps in the hall that pricked his brain.

The steps stopped in front of the door.

“Come in,” he said, not waiting for a knock.

The shadow in the frosted glass seemed to freeze. It was the same person whose silhouette he had seen the day before, he was certain of it. He held a breath, waiting. Then the shadow vanished, and he could hear the footsteps receding.

He swirled the hairs of his brush in mandarin orange and dabbed distractedly at the canvas. In his painting, a fisherman contemplated twilight with a pull at his pipe, the river parting at his waders in ripples that caught the last blush from the horizon.

The tapping of hard soles on travertine floor tiles returned. This time there was no hesitation. The doorknob turned and he was looking into the face of Velvet Lafayette. Mustering his composure, Stranahan managed to turn his attention back to his painting for a second—an old habit to establish authority—then raised his eyes querulously. She was wearing jeans that accentuated the length of her legs and a stiffly ironed white shirt with a red ribbon under the collar. Her lips were an off-color red. Her hair gleamed. She shut the door behind her without taking her eyes from him and stood silently, assessing him from a distance of ten feet. The corners of the room grew very still.

“So it’s you,” she said at length. “I thought I recognized your voice.”

“A man has to do something besides drive in circles and drink beer at the inn,” he said.

“I didn’t know that you were a private detective.”

“I’m more of a painter these days.”

“But you do, ah…‌detect?”

“That depends.”

“Oh?”

“I was going to say it depends on what you want. I don’t do divorce work. Or repossessions.” Divorce and repossessions amounted to 90 percent of the inquiries his Boston office had received.

“It isn’t anything like that.”

“Then please, have a seat. Let me clean this brush and we’ll listen to your problem and see if there’s something I can do.”

“You’re a good artist,” the woman said, letting her eyes travel around the room.

“Thank you, but most of what you see is commercial work. Unfortunately, I have to eat.”

“No, you really are good, Mr. Stranahan. That’s an Irish name, Stranahan.” She experimented saying the word, drawing it out with softened vowels in a pronounced Gulf Coast accent. “Stran…‌a…‌han.”

“Call me Sean.”

“I’d prefer to keep this strictly professional, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course.”

Stranahan dipped his brush in a Mason jar of water, wiped his hands on a handkerchief, and smiled encouragingly.

“Miss Lafayette, what can I do for you?”

She parted her lips to speak, then her expression changed and she seemed lost in some private reverie. She was silent for so long that Stranahan began to wonder if she had forgotten his presence. He caught himself looking at her mouth, trying to place the color on his palette.

Presently her lips moved, she exhaled audibly, and he snapped to attention.

“I’m a very private person, Mr. Stranahan. What I have to tell you I have kept inside for a long time. I have to be certain that anything I tell you will be held in the strictest confidence. Can I trust you?”

“As long as you’re not confessing to a felony, or divulging details of a crime that is under investigation, then, certainly, I will keep your confidence.”

“Thank you.”

He waited.

“Why don’t you start by telling me about yourself? Your name, for instance.” He raised his eyebrows. “You must admit it’s unusual.”

“No. Yes, I mean, of course you’re right. That’s not my real name. I got that listening to a radio show in Biloxi. KDAD. Kay-Dad. They played blues, Bourbon Street jazz; I used to sing along. I was just starting to make a little money in a couple of the bars down in Natchez and a friend—no, not a friend, friendly would be more like it, some guy who was hitting on me….”

She paused a moment.

“Anyway, he said he could get me a spot on one of the big Mississippi gambling boats, but that I’d need a name, you know, showy. Something that said ‘grits, gravy, and glitter.’ So one day I was listening to Kay-Dad and the deejay says you take the name of the street you grew up on and the name of the dog that chased the mailman down that street and you put them together, that’ll be the name you use if you ever want to check into a motel for illicit purposes. E-li-cit purposes, that’s just exactly what he said.”

Stranahan nodded noncommittally.

“Well, I grew up on Lafayette Avenue. That’s in Red Lick. But the dog that chased the mailman was a schnauzer whose name was Brutus, so of course that wouldn’t do. But our Siamese cat was named Velvet and I liked the way it rolled off the tongue: Velvet Lafayette,
yeah, I liked that.” She made an amused sound in her throat, like a cat purring.

“And?”

“Well, I didn’t use it for e-li-cit purposes, Mr. Stranahan, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Now it was his turn to smile.

“I was going to ask your real name.”

She hesitated a second before answering.

“Vareda.”

He waited, but she didn’t volunteer her last name, and as she was just starting to open up, he decided not to press.

“What do your friends call you?”

“I don’t know that I have any, really. That’s a word people use lightly, but a real friend, no, it’s been a while.”

“What should I call you?”

“Miss Lafayette would be fine.”

“You’ve never been married?”

“That’s none of your business.” Her tone was suddenly sharp.

Stranahan looked thoughtfully at her. He was unaccustomed to Southern women and wondered whether all of them could vacillate so easily between demeanors. One moment she was wide-eyed, running on nervously about this and that, then she was flirting with him, or playing with words to amuse herself, and the next her eyes flashed at him in anger, with the accent drained from her voice.

“Miss Lafayette,” he said gently, “why don’t you sit down and tell me what it is you want me to do?”

He watched her lips open. Blood, he thought. They are the color of blood. Not quite fresh.

“Fish.”

“Fish? Fish as in fish, or as in ‘to fish’?”

“I want you to fish.”

Stranahan rocked back in his chair. He’d heard a few odd requests, but no one had ever asked him to go fishing.

“For trout, I assume,” he said.

“Yes, with one of those fancy fly casting rods, like the ones in your pictures. Like the one I saw you carrying to your truck yesterday. There
was
a rod in that case, wasn’t there?”

“Yes….”

“Mr. Stranahan, if you can promise me that you are a good fisherman, I will pay you handsomely to fish for trout in the Madison River.”

Stranahan watched her parted lips, watched the corners turn up triumphantly.

“Do you think you might be interested in doing some trout fishing for me, Mr. Stranahan?”

Blood, he thought, and not quite dried.

H
er story, Stranahan thought, seemed plausible, if not believable. Vareda, aka Velvet Lafayette, had buried her father, Jackson, the summer before. Or at least a part of him. The rest she had in a coffee can on the passenger seat of her Honda Civic. Her father had died of a heart attack while fishing on the Madison River and Vareda had booked work in Montana to pay for gas to drive up, with the intention of scattering the last of his ashes over his favorite riffle on his favorite trout stream in the world. It was a request Jackson had made in casual conversation over the dinner table, but she had remembered. She wanted Stranahan to find that riffle.

And how do I do that, he had wanted to know.

“Old Papa left his mark on everything he touched in his ever-loving life,” she said, in such a way that Stranahan intuited immediately that it could have included her. “When he went fishing, he cut a notch in the adipose fin. He said it didn’t hurt a fish to cut it there.”

Stranahan backed her up. What was a cotton farmer in Mississippi—she
had told him she grew up on a farm—doing fly fishing in the Madison River?

“It’s a long story, Mr. Stranahan, and I really can’t see how it matters.”

Let me be the judge of that, he had told her.

“I’m not asking you to think,” she’d said sharply. “I’m asking you to fish. If you don’t want the job, I’ll find someone else.”

Stranahan had tried a different tack.

“What makes you think I would be able to catch the same fish, or know it if I did? Fins grow back. And even if I did catch some trout with clipped fins, they could have migrated from someplace else in the river.” That wasn’t quite true, but he wanted to see how much she’d thought this story through.

“He fished here in July, the third week. Today is July eighteenth. Trout return to the same parts of the river after spawning. A fisheries biologist told me most of them go right back to hiding behind the same rock. The very same rock, Mr. Stranahan.” She gave him a “so there” look. Then she sighed and her face fell. She seemed on the verge of tears.

Stranahan reached across his desk—she had finally accepted the chair he’d offered—and took her hand. Instead of jerking it away as he half expected, she squeezed it with surprising strength. The gold ring he had noticed on her right hand the first time he saw her had a Celtic design. It bit into his skin. On the back of his hand he could feel the rough pads of her fingers, calloused from piano playing. Her red nails were chipped.

He said, “I want to help you, Miss Lafayette. But you have to understand, the odds….” He shook his head. “Your father might have fished any number of places. He could have left trout with clipped fins from Quake Lake to Ennis, and that’s just the upper Madison. If you could narrow it down, then maybe, but it would be an awful big maybe.”

“I have something that might help.” She took her hand from his and brought out a postcard from her purse. “Go ahead. Read it.”

The card showed the rustic interior of the Grizzly Bar, the snarling head of a grizzly bear presiding from the wall. It was a fisherman’s watering hole, located about a half mile above the West Fork bridge. Stranahan had sat at that bar only a week before, drinking Moose Drool and watching the Yankees and the Indians go into extra innings. He turned the card over. The printing was small, to cram in as many words as possible.

The postmark was Bridger, Montana, July 20—the previous summer.

“He died the next day,” Vareda said.

Stranahan handed the card back. He felt ashamed for jumping to conclusions, for thinking that her father possibly had molested her. For immediately conjuring a Southern stereotype.

“Do you think that narrows it down enough?”

“Well, it still leaves twenty or thirty miles of the upper river, assuming
he did his fishing not too far from the bar. Part of that stretch, you know, from Lyons Bridge on down, you’re allowed to fish it from a boat. One of the guides would have a lot better chance finding a marked fish than I would.”

“I hired one last summer,” she said, surprising him. “He wasn’t much help.”

“You came here last summer?”

She shook her head. “I got his name from a fishing store on the Internet. I called him. He seemed like a rude man. He said I was crazy, but told me he’d keep his eyes open. He wouldn’t take any money.”

“What happened?”

“I called him back at the end of the summer and he said he might be able to help me, or he might not. He wanted me to come up and talk to him about it in person. I knew exactly what he meant. The son of a bitch. I wouldn’t trust anything he had to say.”